The 2021 Tau Awards

 

At time of writing it has just gone midnight and it has become 2022.  To celebrate the new year lets look at the games I played over the last year and give a bunch of fakey award titles to them.  Only games I beat or games that I am currently playing are eligble for a Tau award and you can see the list of games I beat in 2021 over on Twitter and you can see my now playing list over on Discord

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257

Game of the Year

 

Obviously it's Shin Megami Tensei 5.  Once again mainline SMT delivers a top quality product and despite some bullshitty day 1 DLC, it's pretty much everything I could have hoped for.  I bought the Switch specifically for this game and before it's release, I was sort of regretting my purchase but this thing made it all worth it.  Do yourself a favor and go play it 

Best First Playthrough 2021

LISA may have come out in 2014 but I was extremely late to this one but I can't think of a game that I played this year that stuck with me quite as strongly as LISA did.  It's dark, its funny, its challenging, its got crows that are save points that explode when you use them, what more could you possibly want?  Also the soundtrack fucking SLAPS.  The game is like, 7 pounds on Steam so go buy it 

Biggest Liar

This game was a massive piece of shit with its uninteresting story and completely idiotic lead character but the worst offence this game pulls is telling you that repeated deaths will result in a deleted save game.  Well guess what? That's not true.  The dev team had to lie to you to create a sense of tension because the game is so poorly written and poorly made that it can't do it by itself.  Fuck this game

Biggest Dissapointment 

I was pretty interested in Everhood when I first saw it.  It's very clearly trying to do an Undertale but the rhythm game based combat looked like something that was right up my alley.  Playing it was also pretty promising at first too but it's trying so hard to be deep (like Undertale) and mysteries (like Yume Nikki et al) and instead just comes off as pretentious crap.  The soundtrack was good and there are some really strong moments but overall the game felt like a total slog.  If games that have their heads shoved so far up their own arse that they can use their own skulls as periscopes appeal to you, then maybe you'll like it, but I shall not be doing a repeat playthrough of this one in a hurry 

Pleasantest Surprise

So if you look through the Twitter thread you'll notice that this game isn't on there because I'm stupid and forgot to add it to the list when I beat it.  I guess that makes its title in this article also rather appropriate.

I got this game for free off the Epic Game Store and wasn't expecting a lot from it and granted, it's not really anything special.  It's a sort of generic hairy dad game with the hairy dad replaced with a teenage girl and the voice acting is a bit weird but it' rather pleasing visually and I found myself getting pretty attatched to the characters by the end.  Also the game climaxes with you having an all out rat war with the catholic church and that's pretty cool.  Not a masterpiece by any stretch but I was expecting a pile of stinky poop garbage and got something pretty playable that I kept wanting to go back to until I beat it and I'm genuinely happy its getting a sequel. 

Worst Game

I played through many a stinker.  Benbo Quest, Summer of 58, Slender the Arrival, The Tape and a bunch more but none of them were quite as putrid and as unplayable as Bendy and the Ink Machine.  An uninteresting, unscary, slow, boring and buggy mess of a game that did nothing but waste my time and piss me off to no end.  Don't buy this, dont play it even if you get it for free, it's an absolute disgrace to the horror genre and the people who put this out into the world should be ashamed of themselves for creating something so irredeemably vile

Well that's it, that's all I can be bothered to write about this late at night.  I'm now going to wrap up under my sheets and play GOTY Shin Megami Tensei 5 until I fall asleep.  

Happy New Year everyone!

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

 https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

The Epic Game Store

 

So today I didn't get much gaming done myself.  Mainly just a bit of progress in Shin Megami Tensei 5 in my lunch break and a bit of Persona 2: Innocent Sin on Stream so tonight I just want to take a moment to appriciate how cool the Epic Game Store is.

I'm sure there's a quite a few people who would turn their nose up at something like the Epic Game Store because if we're being brutally honest, it lacks a lot of the features that Steam does.  Hell, I don't even think it has game gifting as a feature which is INCREDIBLY stupid.  It caused a problem once when I had to deliver a grand prize for a game that was, at the time, exclusive to epic and I had made the incorrect assumption that gifting would have just been a thing but I guess Epic Games just assumes its entire userbase has no friends and therefore have not implemented it.  I got the game to the viewer in the end but I had to jump through some hoops to make it happen.

So despite it being barebones as all hell then why do I think its so cool? Well the answer is simple really, it's because they are constantly showering me with free shit.  At time of writing I have 58 games in my Epic Games library and the amount of money I've spent on any of that is ZERO.  Not a single penny since I downloaded the software and yet I have more games than I can shake a stick at.  It's not like they are shit games either; The Texorcist, Control, A Plague Tale, Sonic Mania, Remnant and Nioh are just a few of the standouts from the ever changing free game they just give away every so often

Even now, for Christmas, they are giving away 15 games for Christmas.  Every day I log in and BAM, another game in the library that will surely sit in the backlog for god knows how long.  I've heard its a bit shit but the first game they gave away in this set was goddamn Shenmue 3.  I didn't want to pay money for that but as someone who enjoyed the first two I sure as shit wanted to check it out, and now I can. 

They also seem to have some deal with Square Enix or something because as I was streaming I got an alert that says that Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Intergrade is now avaliable for purchase.  I've heard the FF7 Remake PC version is a steaming pile of dogshit but Intergrade was locked to the still unobtainable PS5 so just having it avaliable to me is nice, it might actually be the first thing I end up spending money on with the platform.  

Steam is still king and GoG Galaxy has way more features but it's hard not to have a soft spot in my heart for Epic when they just give me so much free shit so often.

Iron Tank

 

Last night I finished Iron Tank on stream so I wanna say a few things about it

When I first fired up Iron Tank I was expecting something more akin to Jackal but with a tank instead of a Jeep or whatever that game had.  While not completely off the mark it's a fair bit different in that Jackal is quite fast and arcade-like while Iron Tank is a bit more methodical in its approach.  That's not to say Iron Tank is a slow game by any stretch but careful progression into each encounter is very clearly the best route to success with this one.  

The premise for Iron Tank is simple, you are a tank and you start at the bottom of a long map and you're one and only objective is to get to the top of the map and blow up the big bad at the end 

 

While you trundle along the various paths you can get various power ups for your tank that involve a longer range shot, power powerful shots, exploding shots and rapid fire.  There's also a very rare "?" ability which wipes the entire screen of enemies and even some bosses and there's a reserve health bar that you never really get to use because this game is stingy as hell with HP.

Now I'm willing to cut the game a lot of slack given its age but the controls in this game are awful and until you get used to them they will be the prime reason for you eating one too many bullets and blowing up more often than not.  The standard stuff makes sense like moving with D Pad and shooting regular bullets with A and tank shells with B but things get real fucky when you have to start manipulating the direction of the turret.  To do that you have to hold down A and then move in the directon you want the turret to face.  The problem with this is that you cant move the turret by itself so you get into situations where an enemy is right up in your face and you end up taking collision damage because you ran into him when trying to turn the turret to shoot him.  This then has the knock on effect of the turret then being the wrong way so another enemy can come from the other direction and shove a shell right up your exhaust pipe, which is a little annoying to say the least.

But to be fair to Iron Tank, it's EXTREMELY forgiving with its checkpoints.  You get them constantly and each one even comes with a password so you can continue from that check exactly next time you play.  Even if you game over you get to start from that very same check point so considering how mosts games of this era are, Iron Tank is probably one of the most forgiving I've ever played. 

But this idea of fairness goes totally out of the window in the games final stage.  By itself, if you come prepared with items out the arse and you are ready to throw down, it isn't THAT hard.  But if you use your resources getting to that final boss and then dying on him, God have mercy on your soul because you aren't getting back without a fight.  The power up that makes your shot stronger and go through walls (F) is REQUIRED for that final area but there isn't any pick ups of it to refill.  So in my playthrough I made it to the end, pretty easily I might add when I was geared out, but then died to the final guy because if his hitbox comes even 1 pixel on top of you, you die instantly.  This then led to a good while of me trying and failing to even get to that final boss again because I only had a weak shot and the only powerups that the game was giving to me was rapid fire and some useless AOE thing.

What I COULD have done is used a password for an area or two back so I could make sure I had enough F for when I got to the boss but I was at wits end with this nonsense so I pulled out a game genie and gave myself infinite health.  I'm not proud of it really but even with the cheat the boss could STILL kill me with direct contact and that was about the only part of him that was a problem so I'm taking the win, sue me.

Despite my final area frustrations though, I had a lot of fun with Iron Tank and it has a pretty good set of achievements on Retro Achievements.org so I'm more than willing to git gud and give it another go.  It's hard to suggest because of its janky controls but if you feel like thats something you could get around then give Iron Tank a try, a solid 6/10 NES game

First Impressions of Mistover

 Technically I started this game yesterday but the only thing I did today was stream Iron Tank and SMT V so I'm taking a chance to talk about my first few dungeons in this game I got for free on PSN.

The first and most obvious thing about it is that the moment the game starts you realize that you're just playing Darkest Dungeon again.  The dungeons play out a bit more like a Mystery Dungeon type deal, sure but the overall vibe of the game just screams Darkest Dungeon clone.  I'm not really saying this as a bad thing either since I loved Darkest Dungeon and more of that with a twist is always a good thing.  The game is also anime as hell with a lot of the characters being moe blob anime girls with large lances and stuff like that.

It may look and feel like a Darkest Dungeon clone but it seems to have ripped its plot, however, right out of Demons Souls.  There's a big pillar of fog that's been wreaking havoc, adventureres go in the fog to try and stop it and those that go in don't usually come back out.  A bog standard reason to have an adventure but we're more here for party management and fighting with RNG more than anything else.

You have a town where you manage your team of anime people and kit them out with stuff as well as prepare for your travels into the mist.  There are all sorts of shops and upgrade places that all get thrown at you at once and right now it feels all a bit overwhelming.  It's not so much that the systems are hard to understand, so once you spend a little time with it, it all falls into place but the game just backs up a big dump truck of stuff at you and leaves you to work it out.  I'm almost sure this is intentional to make you feel like an out of place adventurer whos in over your head but from an actual game play perspective its just annoying to have to sit there and sift through all this shit before I can really get going.

Once you're ready, you grab a quest from the anime girl in town and head into a dungeon.  Dungeons are randomly generated affairs filled with monsters, obstacles, traps and loot.  Each of your characters has a unique skill to help traverse the place and while you're exploring you have to manage hunger and your light source.  I think if your characters fall while you're doing these dungeons they are gone for good but I've not lost anyone yet so I'm not entirely sure if the game has perma-death.

The most interesting feature though is the Doomsday Clock.  When you finish a dungeon, depending on how much of it you explored and how well you did finding chests and such, a big old clock will tick up towards midnight.  If you get everything in the dungeon then it doesn't move and if you leave with a bunch of shit undone then it progresses.  If it gets to midnight then the games over and you lose.  I've heard it can also tick backwards if you do REALLY well but I found everything there was to find in a small dungeon and it didn't happen so I guess I have to do the bigger levels for that. 

Either way, I think I'm going to have a good time with Mistover, only time will tell if the RNG makes me rip my hair out or not but for a game I got for free on PSN, so far I'm impressed

The Skill of Games Journalists

 

Games writing the last handful of years has got a bad wrap over the last few years.  Whether it be the shoe-horning in of identity politics in reviews, giving perfect reviews to good or average games, giving bad scores to niche titles they don't understand or weird "gamer bad" opinion pieces, a lot of people on the internet have a certain disdain for gaming news sites and their writers.  One thing that often comes in to question is "Do games journalists actually need to be good at games in order to review them?"

Well to put it simply, yes they do you flipping twit, how on Earth is that even a question?!  But let's go into it a bit more shall we?

The first question that you have to ask yourself is, what even is the purpose of a game review?  What game reviews are SUPPOSED to do is help you make an informed decision as a consumer on whether or not you think a game will be worth buying.  Obviously these can't be written without a little bit of the writers own opinion on the title being peppered in but, as a customer, you would hope that the person writing the review would know what they are talking about.

Well that's where the problem lies with game reviews on these major sites such as IGN and Kotaku.  The writers for these sites aren't just clueless about most of the games they play, they seem to be clueless about the entire medium in general.  The biggest example of that that sits at the forefront of peoples memories was the review of Cuphead.  The person who put that review together struggled SIGNIFICANTLY with the tutorial stage of the game.  Specifically on one of the first jump where the player is expected to perform a jump followed by a dash to reach a high up platform.  Cuphead is considered to be a fairly challenging game but this is something that a 4 year old perform in seconds and yet it ellued this guy for quite a while.  Another example would be The Independant slamming Astral Chain on Switch for "not giving grades after combat encounters".  The only problem is that the game DOES do that, but foregoes the feature if you're playing the game on the casual setting.  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with playing the game on casual but avid fans of that kind of game will want to know how the higher difficulty levels stack up and they will not be able to get that information from a review.

These writers are not fit for purpose.  I'm not saying that every games writer needs to be a top 5 speedrunner of a game in order to write a review on it but to be able to get a good idea of how the game is really like you need to AT LEAST be able to clear it on Normal.  Playing a game on easy may give the writer an idea of basic stuff like the control scheme or maybe they can put down some thoughts on the story, but because they often miss the real meat and potatoes of a games content it is IM-POSSIBLE for them to write a review that will successfully help a person make an informed purchase.

Let's imagine if we weren't talking about game reviews and instead we were talking about cars.  Let's imagine you aren't much of a gear-head and you have zero idea what kind of car you want to fit your needs.  To maybe educate yourself on the topic a little bit before heading to the dealership maybe you'll go online and check out some reviews of car models that you might think fits your needs.  You find a car review and it says stuff like "the car handles terribly and all the extra features make it confusing to operate".  Only here's the kicker, the guy writing the review can't drive, like at all, and doesn't know a steering wheel from a gear stick.  In fact, the guy writing the review for this car sucks SO BAD at driving, that when he took it for a test spin in order to write his piece, he crashed into a food bank for starving children and everyone in the village went hungry that day.  The confusing features he talked about? He was referring to thinks like the indicator and gear box.  If you found that out about the guy who wrote the piece, you'd be pissed off.  You NEED a good quality of information to make an informed decision on a purchase that big but instead you got a guy who can't drive and a 800 word article about how the back seats are sexist and the colour of the tyres are racist.  

Well that's the kind of enthusiast press we have have with gaming.  Not passionate users who care about making sure you spend your hard earned money on the best games for you but shitters who don't know a face button from a d-pad telling you the bare minimum in the shortest possible time frame in order to farm you for traffic clicks to their shitty websites.

So here's my proposition for how a review SHOULD be conducted

1) Make sure the person doing the review is at least somewhat versed in the genre of the game they are reviewing.  If you have a guy that loves JRPGs but hates fighting games, then for the love of God don't have him review Guilty Gear Strive, his opinion on that particular topic isn't worth shit

2) At least TWO playthroughs of the game in question, preferably the second being on an elevated difficulty or a New Game +.  If you really want to inform people about the easy mode have another writer whos less well versed in whatever genre give it a go for a little bit and just include it as some quick extra thoughts at the end

3) No rushing.  Stop trying to get reviews out either for or just before release day.  Some people "wait for the reviews" before buying, so how about making sure their wait is actually worth it?  If they really care about the game they'll buy it anyway and if they are on the fence an extra few days to make sure they get the information they need wont bloody kill them.

4) Keep your opinion as far away as possible.  Not 100% possible I know but if you think giant anime titties in whatever RPG you're reviewing are "sexist" then save that for a different article.  In the main review you can just include it as something like "a stylised look that might not sit right with everyone", for example. That's really what I mean by this

and I think that's all I'm really asking for.  Modertely skilled players giving me a basic rundown of what a game is like so that I can get a vague idea of if I want to drop 6-8000 yen on it.  It REALLY isn't  that hard, if YouTube boi with 500 subs and a mic from 10 years ago can do it then a salaried "professional" games writer can do it too

Build Woes and Rockman

 

A Monday in the office means a MegaTen-Mega-Day with Shin Megami Tensei 5 in my lunch break followed by Persona 2: Innocent Sin in the evening on stream.  

Persona 2 I'm having fun with but today's session was fairly uneventful.  Summoned some demons, beat up a high schooler with my brain monsters, grinded some levels, you know, the usual stuff.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 however I'm starting to have some serious concerns over.  

Usually when I play these games I go for Strength builds on the main character.  Even in Shin Megami Tensei 4 where magic is OP as all hell, I went for a strength build on my first playthrough.  So when I started SMT 5 I decided to try and mix things up a bit for myself and try out a magic build, pumping almost all my level up points into magic, vitality and agility and letting strength fall to the wayside.  I've not been having a massive amount of trouble with the game so far but I've seen some things on line that have me slightly worried.  There's a group I follow that talks about the Megami Tensei games and a few members of that group have been posting their builds that they used to kill the DLC boss Demifiend.  All but one of them have been strength builds with only 1 guy doing it on magic and talking about how difficult it was.  

I don't mind a challenge, I'm not about to start investing in strength or restart the game to get the build right, I'm locked in now.  However I can't help but feel slightly worried that I've made a whole bunch of the late game challenges a whole bunch harder for myself than they needed to be by trying to get cute with my stat allocations.  At the very least, if I have made it harder for myself it will be so much more satisfying once I eventually pull it off. 

Another thing I've been doing in recent days is trying to get better at speedrunning Megaman 1 for the NES.  Out of all the Megaman games games in the classic series the first one I feel is one of the hardest.  It's got less robot masters than the other games, sure, but it just feels sort of janky and I never really could get fully behind pre-dash (slide) Megaman.  Still though, I'm having a blast running this game.  I managed to learn a few zips that make some of the stages easier but my overall lack of practice is really holding back my time.  The game isn't very long, with my runs now consistantly sitting under the 30 minute mark but one mistake is EXTREMELY costly and it can feel very frustrating when it goes wrong.  Today, for example, I died one time to Elec Man and ended up losing about 30 seconds.  Despite most of my other splits being green or gold I couldn't quite make the time back and ended 17 seconds over my personal best.  In other games I've run obviously mistakes put you in the red but I always feel like there's some area where I can pull the time back or at least be close to a PB by the end, in Megaman 1 however, a single mistake may as well be a reset.  The only reason I don't reset is because I have to practice all the other stages and I'd probably be stuck in the first 3 robot masters if I tried to be that strict with it. 

Still though, I'm pretty motivated to keep practicing and bring that time down.  I'm pretty certain I'm not quite good enough to come close to a world record but if I could get, maybe a top 50-ish time on the leaderboard I'd be pretty happy I think.

How about finish your stupid game?

 

I know I was supposed to be using the blog for a sort of diary type thing nowadays but today I have to spend some time going off on one.

If you do care about what I've been playing today and yesterdays its just making the usual rounds with SMT V mainly; grinding, recruiting, dying, you know, all the good stuff.  I also streamed a whole bunch of Yakuza where the combat in that games just swings wildly between insultingly easy and actually impossible.  There's one guy in particular in the collesium who is just consistantly clapping my cheeks and I just cannot seem to get the better of him.  He's not THAT hard but getting hit like, once, means that a quarter of my health vanishes and unlike fights in the story, I can't spam convini energy drinks.

But what I want to go off about today is a game called Ghostrunner.  I bought Ghostrunner after seeing the trailer because it looked like someone took Mirrors Edge and Hotline Miami and then smashed them together.  The atmosphere of the game and the soundtrack are right up my alley so I snapped it up right away.  At first I was having a good time with it but the more I play it the more janky and buggy it seems to get and it all came to a head yesterday with a certain platforming challenge.  

In one level of the game you have to run through these giant spinning discs that have breaks in them.  At first they are spinning too fast so as you approach them you have to right click them to slow down time on them which allows you to either pass through them or run along them.  Now one thing you have to understand about Ghostrunner is that it's not an easy game.  It presents you with pretty rough challenges that you will probably die on a few times but will also give you pretty frequent checkpoints so you can try over and over nice and quickly until you get it.  

I came to one spinning disc section about half way through the stage where the disc was horizontal and was positioned near a wall.  The idea is that you time slow the disc and run along top of it, jump off and wall run along the wall to the next platform.  I will attempt to crudely draw a diagram of the scene in MSPaint

The black thing is the disc and the red thing is the wall, looking at the part of the level sideways on.  So I slow the disc, jump on the wall and screw up my jump to the ledge and die, no problem I'll just start again.  Only problem, when I hit the restart button the scene had changed.

The disc had like, pivoted and was now clipping through the wall as it spun around.  I tried to press on anyway only to find that the angle of the disc and the spinning meant that it would make the wall run impossible or, if I could get on the wall, I'd get clipped by the edge of the disc and knocked off to my death.  Completion of the room was impossible and my only solution was to quit the game.

Now while each level has a great number of checkpoints that make dying not a problem, the game DOES NOT save progress at those checkpoints.  So I had to do the entire fucking level over and then hope to God that it doesn't happen again.  Well it DID actually happen again, 2 more times on 2 different discs in the stage only I got lucky the other 2 times and the disc pivot was either not a problem or a minor annoyance at best.  

This has really soured my view of the game now.  When I fire up Ghostrunner now I'm constantly worried about what game-breaking bullshit is going to pop up out of nowhere and force me to restart enitre stages thus wasting god knows how much of my life with this crap.  I went onto the Steam discussion page to see if anyone else had experienced it and while I couldn't find anything about it, I was greeted to thread upon thread of people complaining about other, way more serious bugs and glitches.  

I know game-dev is no easy task and obviously its not really realistic to expect a developer or studio to find and fix every bug before release but this is game breaking shit.  Ghostrunner is 25 pounds and apparently developed in part by 3D fucking Realms of all people so having level geometry just randomly break or game crashes or major performance hiccups just is not acceptable.  

How about finish your fucking game and make sure it works before you charge me money for it, eh? Is that really so much to ask?