Gearing up to be a Great Year

 

Coronavirus is still in the back of everyones mind and in the last week or so people in Europe a full on War has broken out and everyone's starting to panic about being nuked to death.  Spend any amount of time on social media and it's enough to make you want to crawl into a sensory deprevation tank and never come out of it.  So instead of doom-scrolling through news websites and Twitter, what you SHOULD be doing is playing video games (or watching me live at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) because BOY-FUCKIN'-HOWDY there is a lot of good-looking shit that's already out and a lot of even better shit on the horizon.  

Truth be told, I've not played a single game released in the current year yet.  Partly due to a busy schedule of work-life-streaming etc. and partly due to my massive backlog that has made me think twice about purchasing new titles.  However I know that eventually I will cave and hoover up all these games so I just want to take a moment to highlight some games that I'm looking forward to playing or looking forward to being released. 

Starting with things that are out but I've not played yet we got 

1) Elden Ring

 Do I really need to explain why I'm excited for this one? It's the next goddamn Dark Souls game.  I'm trying to avoid as much footage/news/discussion about it as possible to go in as blind as possible but I know that the day I do get around to playing it I will probably not be leaving my little hovel for a long time.

2) Pokemon Legends: Arceus

I'm not much of a Pokemon fan, the game looks like shit and it seems to be buggy as all hell but I still want to pick this one up.  The change in gameplay style and the setting have intriguied me enough to want to pick it up.  Plus if I can hide in a bush and yeet a rock into a Pikachu's stupid fucking face then that alone is worth the price of admission

3) Sifu 

When I first saw Sifu I thought "that looks cool, I'll play that one day" and put it away in the back of my mind.  Then the game came out and I saw a clip of a level that was a playable version of the corridor scene from the movie Oldboy and it shot right up the priority list.  It looks cool as hell and apparently it's quite challenging so sign me the hell up.

4) Dying Light 2 

and

5) Horizon Forbidden West

are both games that I will get my hands on, probably this year, but unlike the other 3 I'm not overly desperate to play them.  They look cool, maybe one day when I get through everything else

Now for games that aren't released yet 

6) Soul Hackers 2 

After Shin Megami Tensei 5 last year I thought I was all Mega-Tenned out.  I had decided that this year I would slowly play through basically all the MegaTen games I could fit into my schedule to fill the void that 5 will leave when I reach the ending.  Well turns out I was totally fucking wrong and Soul Hackers 2 not only got announced but also has a release date.  A sequel to a 1997 Sega Saturn game was not something I was expecting but I'm all for it.  

7) Ghostwire Tokyo 

I've seen one trailer, don't really know what the hell its about but it looks exactly like my kind of thing.  First person game doing Onmyo shit to folklore creatures?  Yeah sure, I'm extremely down and ready to have a kuchizake-onna tongue me to death.  

8) A Plague Tale: Requiem 

A Plague Tale: Innocence was a game that I got for free off the Epic Game Store and went in fully expecting it to be a giant pile of garbage that stinks harder than the rats it depicts.  While it wasn't mind blowing by any stretch it turned out to be at least a somewhat decent experience and I was pleasantly surprised to see it getting a sequel.  Nice to see Amica finally got a clue and decided to get a weapon a bit better than just rocks

9) Kirby and the Forgotten Land

10) Stranger of Paradise 

11) The Callisto Protocol 

12) Scorn 

13) Bomb Rush Cyberfunk 

I mean jesus fucking christ I could do this all day.  I'm sure there's games I forgot and games that I have not yet discovered that I will also snap up on release or do a little jig for on annoucement.

So tell all that sad news that you can't do anything about to go FUCK itself, cozy up in front of your TV or PC or even under the covers of your nice soft bed if you're using the Switch and just enjoy all this cool shit instead

Martha is Dead Censorship

A few days ago I came across a news story about some horror game I hadn't heard of until that point called Martha is Dead that was apparently being censored on Playstation and left alone on PC and X Box.  I then made an offhand tweet about some silliness I saw in the discourse surrounding the game only to find it getting flooded with likes, retweets and a couple of absolutely brainrotten comments from people who cannot read.  So I thought I'd take a little bit of time to say a few things on the issue here.

First of all the censorship itself seems stupid but at this point it's something I have come to expect from Sony.  The clip that is circling around social media is a scene of the game where the player is holding a severed head of some woman and the player character proceeds to use a razor to make cuts in the side of the head and then pull off the face (complete with button prompts!) and then they wear it or something. Sure, the scene in question is sort of shocking but it's no worse than anything else that comes out of other titles in the genre and even out of the genre of horror.  Severing limbs and DIY eye surgery in Dead Space, Lara Croft getting brutalized in the reboot games, Fatality animations in Mortal Kombat, no one seems to give a shit when this kind of thing is going on from huge studios but a small indie group make a face-ripping scene and suddenly its all "ooooh this is absolutely disgusting how could anyone possibly make this?!"

At least for me in Japan, Sony censoring violence is nothing new.  I have talked at length both on the blog and on stream about how parts of Until Dawn were censored so heavily that if affected the story.  Resident Evil is also very heavily censored when it comes to violence even in it's more expensive "Z-Versions".  The story I have heard (Im not sure how true this is, keep in mind) is that in 1997 is that some 14 year old kid abducted and beheaded a couple of Elementary school children and left their severed heads on the school gate for people to see.  The kid was caught and after all was said and done a politician called Shizuka Kamei put the blame squarely on "violent and cruel movies" and so acts of extreme violence in mutilation in films and games have been censored or not really done since then.  

So while the censorship is stupid and shouldn't be done, it at least makes some degree of sense that one of the biggest companies in the entire country wouldn't want to get on the bad side of those rules.  Nintendo, as far as I know, doesn't really have any games in their library that would require that kind of censorship and Microsoft is an American company that doesn't need to give a shit, which is why you probably don't see this kind of thing happening on those platforms.  

But I'll be honest, I stopped giving a shit about Sony censorship a long time ago, thems just the breaks, what my tweet was actually about was the individual user response about the content itself.  Most people responded with outrage at the censorship and that it should be left alone and if that kind of extreme violence in a piece of media makes you uncomfortable to the point of "literally shaking and crying" then just don't play it, something I agree with quite strongly.  What people need to realize is that while "video games are for everyone" is a nice fluffy statement that lets you pretend to be a good person on social media, the truth is that while games are for everyone, not ALL games are for everyone.  If you don't like violent, grotesque acts in your games, don't play horror.  If you don't like difficult gameplay, don't play Dark Souls or Cuphead.  I don't like endless boring life-sim bullshit like Animal Crossing but instead of moaning about it I can very easily accept its just not for me and then not buy it, it's really that easy.

Where I get my back up is when I was scrolling through the tweets and I saw someone describe the developers as "irresponsible" for "releasing the games without trigger warnings".  What this is doing is attempting to villify the creators of Martha is Dead for hiding the nature of the content in the game and acting as if the violence and adult themes are some kind of surprise.  Except that's not true is it?  The game is rated M and has all the relevent warnings and even if it didn't have that, the literal FIRST THING you see when going to the Steam page is this.

It's RIGHT THERE, before you can ever access the game description or the button to buy, you have to accept this warning.  Do not try and pass off your inability to read or lack of attention span on the developers as if it's their fault.  Just because it's not written with the words "TRIGGER WARNING" at the top of the page and is written as a paragraph full of vapid social media buzzwords doesn't mean it's not there.  

Anyway, I had no idea what the game was before this controversy and now I'm excited to pick it up for myself, possibly to play in some kind of October Horror Playlist on stream later this year.  So while the censorship is bad and the controversy stupid, at least I found an interesting game out of it.

Tomb Raider 2013 is Embarrassing

 

I didn't play the Tomb Raider reboot back when it launched because I knew I was going to hate it.  But then I picked it up for less than 5 bucks in a Steam sale and then it was given to me for free (along with its two sequels) on the Epic store so I installed it, fired it up and decided to give it a whirl anyway.

And I was totally right, the game is absolute fucking garbage and I hate it.

If you're an embyro that wasn't aware, Tomb Raider 2013 is a reboot of the long running Tomb Raider series that's been going since 1996 back when Lara Croft had 2 pistols, triangular titties and the game was a sort of Prince of Persia-esque platformer type thing.  So of course for the reboot they stripped all of that away and made it ANOTHER fucking over the shoulder 3rd person cinematic adventure game/fair ground shoot the ducks sideshow attraction.

Putting itself before the events of even the 1996 original, it shows a young Lara on a boat to go and explore an old Japanese island only when she gets there she finds that its full of cultists that want her and her friends dead AND an ancient mysterious power that wont let them leave no matter how many times they call for rescue planes.  The rest of the story is just bad voice acting and Lara getting beaten up by both the baddies and mother nature and that's about all their is to it.  It tries to do some "maybe YOU'RE the bad guy here Lara" at the end but it's such a pathetic attempt at giving the plot some depth that it doesn't so much fall flat as much as it falls right through the Earths crust and disintigrates into the core.

The gameplay is Uncharted.  Not "like Uncharted", it is just Uncharted.  Run from place to place climbing on things and shooting dudes until you get to a big set piece where you'll run away from something thats exploding or crumbling beneath you and there's no actual risk of a game over unless you have a sudden stroke and let go of the W key, or maybe S if its doing the run towards the camera thing.  Slightly different from Uncharted though it adds experience points for you to learn skills and gun upgrades, none of which you ever really need but you have to spend those skill points and salvage on something I guess.  It also adds a TON of optional collectables that aren't fun to look for and aren't actually worth anything except exp for more skill points so thus making the completion percentage on your save slot completely fucking worthless.

Worse than generic, boring gameplay however is the fact that, at least on PC, it's buggy to all hell.  I say without hyperbole that every single death I experienced during my time with the game was due to a bug.  Lara not grabbing things, Lara not shoving her pickaxe into a craggy wall after a jump, Lara's melee attack just going right through enemies thus giving him a chance to fill me full of hot lead, the whole works and every time I would shut the game off and refuse to play it for a few days thus making the playthrough feel PAINFULLY long.

The game ends with "The team worked the hardest they could to bring you the best possible game they could make" and I know it's harsh but if THIS is the best game you could possibly make then you should quit making games because your attempts are sad at best and anger inducing at worst.  Still though, enough idiots bought and enjoyed this pile of crap for it to warrent TWO bloody sequels which the Epic Game Store vomited into my backlog so I'm hoping that the other games are at least slightly better at this one.  I hated 1996 Tomb Raider and I hate this one even more and for all the shit I give old school Tomb Raider at least it had some personality and stood out as an original game.  2013 is just another generic, "cinematic" piece of shit to add to the pile and be forgotten.

Fuck this game

Detention Quick Review

 

Detention is a game I've had my eye on for a long time and now I have finally got around to playing and finishing the game so I want to spend just a little time sharing some of my thoughts on it. 

The game starts out with you playing as a high school student called Wei who, during a storm, finds himself trapped in the school with a girl, Rey.  They interact for a while and then Wei ends up hung upside down in the school assembly hall dead and the story then focuses on Rey as she explores the school to try and escape.  I dont want to go into too much of the story after this point because Detention is very much a one and done kind of game where things are best experienced for yourself.  The story isn't anything incredible but its well executed and interesting enough to hold your attention for its fairly short play time

Gameplay is done entirely on a 2D plane using the mouse.  If your familiar with old point and click adventure type games then that's the kind of style it has.  You walk around the environments finding various odd items for various odd puzzles which you solve for various interpretations of keys for various interpretations of doors.  It's actually quite a good job that the story for Detention is interesting because as a game, it's a bit shit.  The puzzles are insultingly easy at pretty much every stage of the game with usually the thing you need to solve a puzzle being either in the room of the puzzle itself or just every so slightly down a hall with few exceptions.  The only time I got "stuck" in Detention was during a puzzle sequence involving tuning a radio to change rooms and I was only stumped because the shadows of one of the rooms was hiding a door.  I fired up a guide, saw the sentence "exit the door on the right" and then closed the guide and did the rest of the game no problem.  The only other element to the gameplay is the "enemies" that occasionally stalk you in the corridors.  They come in two flavors and both are thwarted by pressing the right mouse button to hold your breath.  If for some reason you are killed by one, the game makes you walk up a mountain path for 15 seconds and then drops you off at a checkpoint.  

While Detention sort of sucks shit in the gameplay department it does much MUCH better with it's horror.  Games that look like they could have been made in FlashMX 2004 usually piss me off but the old Newgrounds-y style art coupled with some decent sound design make for a rather unnerving atmosphere.  There was one moment where I had to pause the game and go do something downstairs and the weird noises coming from my room were enough to make me trot back upstairs and close the door to shut them out because they were sort of making me uneasy.  Also, one thing I cannot praise this game for enough is the TOTAL lack of jumpscares.  Not a single one.  A lot of horror games/movies rely heavily one loud noises coupled with an orchestra sting to force a scare out of you but Detention does not do this EVEN ONCE and for that it must be highly commended.  A lot of the fear in Detention comes from its strange, nightmareish visuals and it does this nice thing of occasionally flashing something weird at you for just a frame or two and then never bringing it up again.

Minor spoiler here so if you dont wanna hear it skip the next paragraph 

One of the puzzles involves finding a box cutter and slitting the throat of the strung up body of Wei in the second chapter.  When you do this and get the item or whatever it was you get for the puzzle, as you click out off the screen, Wei opens his eyes for just a moment as the screen fades to black and fades back into the main game.  If you click him again, his eyes are closed, it never happens again.  It's a fantastic way to unnerve a player and it uses this technique sparingly enough to keep you guessing at every turn.

Spoilers over

It's nice to see a horror game take a more subtle approach to scaring the player than the usual loud noises, monsters made of bacon and chase sequences that we've come to know all to often today.  Sure, Detention isn't particuarly great as a game but it's trying to tell you a nice, creepy little tale with some nice creepy imagry and at that it succeeds very well.  If you dont want to take my word for it then consider that it was good enough at what it did to have a movie made of it, which I will be checking out myself at the first possible opportunity.  It's extremely cheap on Steam so go pick it up and give it ago, you proably won't regret it