Subscription ROM Services are Dumb

 

Yesterday I caught some news that Sony is joining Nintendo in giant game companies providing ROMS via a subscription service and it's pretty darn stupid to say the least.

On the surface it sounds like it could be a good idea.  The idea is that you pay a every month to get access to a collection of back-catalogue games from the companies previous systems to play as much as you want, good deal right?  Well no.  The initial problem with all this stuff is that you're only getting a very small amount of the back catalogue and usually only the best sellers.  This means that any hidden gems or good games that were less popular just get ignored and fall to the wayside which means that despite these services if there's an obscure game you really love you'll probably never get to play it on your modern hardware no matter how much of your hard earned money you give them.  If Shadow Hearts, for example ever turns up on PSN premium I will literally eat an entire shoe store

Money is the other problem because these companies are essentially ripping you off at every turn.  Nintendo released the expansion to Switch Online where you have to pay fifty bucks a month for a smattering of N64 games.  What's worse is that a lot of these games aren't very well presented with the Switch version of Ocarina of Time being somewhat famous for how shit it was compared to regular emulation on PC.  I've heard it has since become a bit better but the fact it was released in the condition that it was in for that price point AT ALL is really stupid.  Sony are even worse wanting $120 per year just for the ability to play some of the PS1/2/3s best sellers which is INSANE to me.  Maybe if it was a one time payment of 120 to play all those games forever, sort of like a giant greatest hits collection, then I wouldn't be moaning but these payments have to be constant.  If you stop playing for Switch online, no more SNES for you.  Stop paying for PSN Premium? Kiss your games goodbye until you cough up more cash.

All of this, when emulation exists which can be done for free and usually at a higher quality than anything Sony or Nintendo will give you.  Now I'm not going to argue the legality of emulation.  If you download some SNES ROMS or some PS2 ISOs and Nintendo or Sony come after you, they are well within their legal rights to do so but just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.  

Let's think about Emulation for a second, who is it hurting?  For this example let's take someone downloading an ISO of Shadow Hearts on the PS2.  You could argue that they should be paying money to play it to support Sony or the developer, Sacnoth.  Well that argument doesn't stand because 1) Sacnoth ain't around no more, 2) The game isn't being sold anywhere no more and 3) The game isn't avaliable on the back catalogue subscription service.  "So go and buy a disc copy instead of pirating then!" I hear you cry through a wave of drool.  

Shadow Hearts on disc is about $130-300 depending on where you buy it.  Now let's say you go this route, where does that money go?  Does it go to Sony to support their production of future games?  No it doesn't.  Does it go to Sacnoth or their parent company Aruze to maybe fund another Shadow Hearts game?  No it doesn't.  So where does the money go then?  It goes to some fat, middle aged neckbeard who hasn't showered in 2 weeks so he can go scoop up more retro games from garage sales and used book stores to over price in online marketplaces.  I know it feels "morally correct" to buy a disc version of a retro game but you're supporting an absolutely disgusting marketplace that's really bad for players.

So tell these subscriptions to go fuck themselves and go fire yourself up and emulator.  I'm sure the multi-billion dollar corporations won't go under because you decided to fire up Yakiniku Bugyou on ePSXe, you don't need to worry your damaged little brain about it

Adventure Game Game Overs are Bullshit

 

People these days like to often go on about "objectively bad game design".  Usually this is in reference to some difficulty related thing in a Souls game or used to try and talk smack about a game that a particuar person finds too hard but allow me to lay on you some ACTUAL bad game design and that is the Adventure Game game over.

You may think that when I say "Adventure Game" I'm talking about something like Zelda but I'm not, game overs in those games when you run out of HP or whatever make total and perfect sense.  When I say adventure I'm talking of mainly the point and click variety when referring to western games or alternatively what the Japanese refer to as "adventure games" which is what us filthy gaijin would call "Visual novels", for the most part 

This is the google image result for googling "adventure game" in Japanese, just so you know I'm not talking completely out of my arse.  

The point and click adventure, Monkey Island for example, is a mostly dead genre in 2022 but is an often fondly remembered genre from people who grew up playing PC games on Windows 98 and earlier.  For example a while ago I played Beneath a Steel Sky on Good Old Games and while it was a charming little game that I enjoyed playing overall, you can be hit with a game over screen if you move into the wrong place or click the wrong thing.

Probably implemented to stop the usual point and click strategy of "rub everything on everything" but annoying nonetheless when you haven't saved for a while and your curiosity decides to screw you over.  Usually in these games though you can save whenever you want so its more of a mild annoyance than anything else.

What I'm mainly talking about, and what prompted this post, are game overs in Japanese style adventure games, mainly the one at the top of the article called Twilight Syndrome: Investigations.  In this game you play as a group of 3 school girls investigating various rumors and spooky happenings and for the first 2 chapters its fairly basic stuff.  But when you get to the third chapter, there are a number of points where you can make an incorrect decision and be hit with a big fat game over.  This, at first, seems fine, but then you realize that the game has no dialogue skip, no mid-chapter select, no way to speed anything up.  If you game over you have to start the ENTIRE THING from the start and sometime the bad decision can be made right at the end of a chapter so if you fall upon that you have to watch the WHOLE THING play out again.  

For example, in the third chapter, there is a bit where one of the girls gets possessed by a ghost and you get the decision to run away or try and help her.  If you run away, you game over and if you help her the story continues.  I picked the run away option when I was streaming the game to see what happens and wasn't really surprised when the game punished me for just abandoning members of the main cast.  But later on you are hit with a similar decision after making a phone call but if you fuck up the phone call, a murderous teacher comes along and ends you.  The problem is that there's no real way to know HOW you fucked up the call when you do.  There are multiple, 3 choice questions at multiple points in the conversation and its not obvious which one leads to death and which one leads to the story continuing.  This call is also at the end of the chapter so fucking it up means you have to slowly watch the entire thing play out all over again and its tedious as all fuck.

Its not like this in all adventure games thankfully.  Kamaitachi no Yoru (on PS1 and 2 at least) as a "story branch" thing where you can select specific scenes and text boxes to jump around the game.  So if you picked an option that you think lead to your death, then you can quickly go back to that exact choice and try the other path.  Why Human Entertainment decided that I have to re-read the entire fucking game for a single bad choice is absolutely baffling.

Basically, Twilight Syndrome pissed me off and I wanted to have a cry about it.  Despite these annoyances the Syndrome games, Beneath a Steel Sky and most other games that fall under the umbrella of this genre are actually really good so go play them. 

PS3, PS4 and the Switch Controllers Can Kiss My Ass

 

Somewhere in a cardbox box, probably located in the family home I still have the Sega Mega Drive I got when I was 4 years old.  I can hook that bad boy up and shove a cart inside it and I promise you that the controller will still function.  I will be able to sit down and play a game of Gunstar Heroes or Vectorman on that thing from start to finish with no issues.  This level of durability seems to have gone completely out of the window in semi-recent times and I absolutely can't stand it.

First the PS3 controller.  The PS3 Controller is a pretty good pad that feels nice and is easy to game with, a good piece of essential gear for the system.  However, lurking inside the controller is a small piece of styrofoam that over time, with use, will wear down.  When this sucker wears down it causes your controller to start putting out random inputs.  For example I've been trying to slog my way through Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, an absolutely terrible game that gets even worse when the main character, Gabriel, is just doing whatever the fuck he wants.  Sometimes I would be in combat and despite me not pressing the X button to jump, he would jump.  Even more annoyingly is that killing enemies drops souls that you absorb to charge a magic bar with the L3 button, but pressing L3 would also, for some reason, press L1 which would activate the magic mode and waste whatever energy you just absorbed. The game is already shit and with this extra hurdle it makes me want to not play it at all.  

So I head online and try to find a fix and thankfully I find one.  A simple fix that involves opening the pad, finding the little piece of styrofoam that is apparently the cause of the issue and wrapping some electrical tape around it.  So I did that, great success no problem!  However when I put the pad back together, that plastic that keeps the shoulder buttons in place was so old and shitty that it basically just shattered in my hands.  It's not like I was slamming the controller back together, I was trying to be as careful as possible and the whole thing just fucking fell apart.  But even if I was doing an Incredible Hulk impression with my controller, why the fuck do I even have to do this in the first place?  I have retro controllers that are god knows how many years old and those all work fine so why the shit is the PS3 pad made like this?!

What's even worse, is that I ordered a Hori 3 controller off Amazon to replace it.  I went for this pad because its compatible with the PC and I wanted a pad to replace the shitty PS4 controller.  The reason the PS4 controller is in the title is because while it does work great when being played with the PS4, playing with it hooked up to a PC is a FUCKING. NIGHTMARE.  The micro-USB connection in the top of the pad is looser that your mum and disconnects from the computer constantly.  If you've ever watched a stream where I'm using the pad, you will hear that disconnect/reconnect sound CONSTANTLY and its really fucking annoying when it happens in the heat of game play.  I've never had this issue with any other device that uses micro USB, why is the PS4 pad made like such garbage in this regard?

So the Hori 3 works great on my PC but plugging it into my PS3 turned out to be a complete shit show.  I fire up Castlevania and all the buttons work but for some reason the sticks don't work.  I can do everything except what is possibly the most important function of the character, move.  This would also happen when using the PS4 controller with the PS3.  All these pads are the same fucking thing why do they have to operate so differently between games?!  It's not even consistant either since I had an issue when streaming No More Heroes on PS3 where I couldn't block attacks only to realize that the issue was that in that game, the shoulder buttons weren't working and everything else was just fine.  Playstation hasn't changed its controller layout since the fucking first system they put out, how is this so much hassle? It boggles the mind.

Now I was only going to complain about my Playstation pad woes in this post but any chance to shit on Nintendo I'm going to take.  At least with the Sony controllers they either worked properly for a long time or have annoying things when being used out of their primary intended use.  However the controllers on the Switch don't even get that and the Joycons are quite possibly one of the worst things I've ever had the displeasure of using.  Not only do they feel like shit but they start to drift if you so much as look at them funny.  I was getting Switch drift in less than a year of owning the system and MAYBE I'd understand if I was playing Smash Brothers 10 hours a day but my sticks starting drifting after playing though Fire Emblem of all fucking things.  No real intense stick use, just moving a cursor around a grid and selecting things on a menu was too much for that flimsy sack of garbage.  The only game I played before that was Breath of the Wild which, while a bit more intense on the stick, wasn't too heavy on rapid or strong movements.

But we all know the reason why the Joycons suck so much shit.  It's so that you shell out an additional 6-8000 yen for a Pro Controller.  Do you want to enjoy the games for the system that you already paid money for or do you want to torture your hands and give yourself permanent muscle damage from using the Joycons? Well if its the former better break out your wallet, motherfucker

Fuck you Nintendo, I hate you

DLC was (mostly) a mistake

 DLC or Downloadable Content is something that has been with us for a while now.  When I first heard the idea of DLC back with the PS3 and Xbox 360 were considered new it seemed like a cool idea but over time it has been twisted and exploited by publishers and developers and now I associate most DLC with soulless money grubbing bullshit.

We've always sort of had DLC even way before high speed internet and console that were always online.  Back in the day when you had a PC game a company would occasionally release and expansion pack.  The expansion pack was like an entire box, disc and manual that you would buy from a physical store and you'd have to go home and install it.  I remember pretty vividly buying the conquerors expansion for Age of Empires 2 back in the day which came with a whole bunch of stuff like new campaigns, new civilizations to play as, new tech, new maps, new units, it was brimming with content and it was exciting to take that shit home and spend countless hours with it.

DLC like this still exists to this day, and this is why there's a "mostly" in brackets in the title.  The series that springs to mind is Dark Souls as an example of this.  The DLC for those games usually comes with entire new areas, bosses, weapons etc. and is usually a decent amount of additional content for the money that you pay.  Basically any DLC that is basically the same thing as an old school "expansion pack" is what I would call good DLC.  Although even this comes with a level of bullshit because most games will eventually release a "complete edition" which just comes with everything some time after release.  So you COULD spend $60 on the game, plus anything between $20 to god knows how much depending on how much extra story or missions or modes or whatever gets put out OR you could just wait, and get a complete edition for like $40 later down the line.  Even though old-school style DLC is good, it deters me from buying most new games day 1 because I know I'll get shafted for extras later and just waiting is infinitely more cost efficient.

But then there's the DLC which I class as either cosmetic items or small amounts of content that would have been avaliable in the base game back in the day.  Maybe this is a sign of my age but I remember a time when unlockable or hidden content in games, especially fighting games, was common place.  Beat certain modes or fufill certain conditions and you'd unlock things like music, concept art, costumes, stages or even new characters.  But this has changed, cosmetic touches to a gun or an alternate costume for a character in a fighter are no longer something that you unlock just by playing the game any more, these are things that you have to buy with actual money.  One of the most horrible examples I have had some degree of experience with is Guilty Gear: Strive.  In Japan, if I was to buy the base game it would cost about $80 and then if I want things like extra stages or extra characters I have to spend an additional $30 to, not even get that content, have that content trickled out to me slowly over time.  Then when they decide that the "season 1" content is over, I'll have to spend ANOTHER $30 for the season 2 bullshit.  What's even worse is that if you decide you just want 1 extra guy or the extra colours (not even new costumes, just colours for fucks sake) that'll be $10 for the guy an $10 for the palette swaps thank you very much.  Considering features like this, not all that long ago, were built into the games and you would get it all for a single $40-60 purchase, this new form of DLC is taking monumental amounts of piss.  It wouldn't be so bad if there was a way to unlock it by just playing and people who wanted to speed up the process could pay to get it faster.  That's scummy, but I'll accept it.  But pay-walling features like PALLETE SWAPS is just pathetic.  

But that's not even the worst kind of DLC, there's a tier of DLC that's so disgusting, so vile that just thinking about it makes me unwell and that's Pay to Win "DLC".  Usually found it games that have level up or upgrade systems that you earn by playing, a game may give you the option to just give you all that stuff or boost the earn rate for those things for a fee.  For example, Shin Megami Tensei 5 comes with a number of DLCs, most of which are for extra quest lines that unlock extra demons to gather and extra bosses to fight.  Sort of skirting the fine line between the good DLC and the bad DLC but whatever, fine.  But then there are the "mitama" DLCs.  Mitama in SMT5 are monsters that look like apostrophes that, when killed give some kind of massive bonus.  Demon level ups, stats, money, main character level ups, glory points for upgrades etc. and with that DLC it boosts the spawn rate of those things to an insane degree.  Basically if you pay for that DLC you cannot die unless you are unapologetically shit at Megami Tensei.  The reason DLC like this pisses me off so hard is that if you are going to pay to just win like that, why the fuck are you even playing video games in the first place? If you want a braindead, easy way to experience a story then go watch a movie or read a book or something.  If it really needs to be interactive because you want to at least pretend to enjoy video games, then go play a walking simulator like Layers of Fear or Dear Esther or some bullshit like that, some low-skill garbage that you can beat by holding a single key for two hours.  Playing an easy mode is one thing because at least you're still sort of trying but just paying to have a game clear handed to you ON TOP OF the price for the game itself is just pathetic, please fucking stop.

 (Just as a side note, the SMT V example is even more annoying because of the way the Nintendo E-Shop is.  You either buy everything at once, extra quests + mitama included, or you have to painstakingly buy each non-mitama DLC one by one.  When I did it the process to just get Demi-Fiend and the other demons without the beyond Safety Mode dogshit took like 10 minutes.  I even know new SMT players that got tricked and thought they were a normal part of the game, fuck Nintendo/ATLUS for real)

So while good DLC does technically exist, its 90% absolute dog-water that you should avoid.  Wanting extra stuff for the games that you love makes sense but just remember that 9 times out of 10 you are supporting shitty business practices that are only going to keep getting worse as time goes on.  

Don't ever forget that Capcom once made you pay for a games ending

 

It's OK just just not play it sometimes

 

Recently two games came out, Sifu and Elden Ring, that dragged the tired and very stupid difficulty debate all over my social media feeds once again and good lord is it tiresome.

First of all, for the people that bought either of these games and are complaining, allow me to point out that your attitude to games fucking sucks shit.  MOST of the people I've seen whining about the difficulty of either of these games have very similar along the lines of "I don't have time to learn how to play", "I don't want to have to put in that much effort to make progress" and it's an attitude I cannot comprehend even a little bit. A lot of people in current year seem to view video games as a "one and done" thing.  Like you buy the game, play the story one and ONLY one time and then move onto the next game.  People who enjoy Naughty Dog games are especially prone to this kind of behavior.  So when a game like Sifu or Elden Ring comes along that actually tries to roadblock you and actually has a decent amount of challenge behind it, they get mad and pissy because they might not finish it before next game du-jour comes out.

But games are expensive and the hardware you need to play it on is even more expensive so why is this your attitude to such an costly purchase?  Some games are a one and done thing, things like Uncharted, A Plague Tale, basically any cinematic first person shooter and the like.  But games like Elden Ring, Sifu, Cuphead and games like it are asking for a bit of a time investment.  They want you to replay them, to explore their nooks and crannies for all their content, to master their mechanics and get a true sense of satisfaction for beating them otherwise what's the point?  

But OK fine, I don't understand the mindset but it's there.  So then maybe you should just admit that these games are not for you instead of complaining about it on Twitter, stomping your feet and demanding easy modes and assist options.

Me personally, I'm a challenge oriented kinda guy, I like these kind of stupidly hard games where I have to bash my head off the wall until I get a win.  I like the kind of games that I can really sink a lot of time into to master the ins and outs of them.  I like games that can then, once "mastered" can then have insane personal challenges attatched to them like deathless or hitless runs and have that really mean something to other people who also enjoy that kind of thing.  What I hate though, are slow paced, challenge-less life-sim type games.  Things like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, The Sims.  Things about farming or decorating houses.  Some people find it relaxing, I think its time wasting dogshit

So do I go on social media and demand that The Sims gets a hard mode where my family have to fend off home invasions?  Do I demand that Animal Crossing insert combat events into the game where NPCs come and kill all my villagers and I have to constantly defend my island from invasion?  No of course I fucking don't, I just don't play those games

One thing you have to remember is that while the whole "video games are for everyone" thing is true, "not ALL games are for everyone" is also true.  If you like Cinematic games with selectable difficulty then go play those, if you like time-wasting-ass life sims that you get all cozy under a blanket with and you can decorate a little house, then fine, I hope you have a nice time.

But if you then go play Elden Ring or Sifu, get your ass kicked and demand that the developer start catering to you specifically just because YOU don't want to put the time in to learn how to do a dodge roll or practice some combos, then go fuck yourself with a cactus.

I know "missing out" is something that people worry about but if a game isn't for you, it just isn't for you, and that's OK