Developers Aren't Owed Niceties

 

Right before sitting down at my computer to write this post I read an article online about how the lead developer for Starfield went on a bit of a rant because people who don't know anything about game dev criticize games that they play.  More specifically he said that he didn't like that people will speculate on why things were made a certain way within a game when they have no knowledge of the process and yet talk about it like an authority.  Which is fine, it's no a statement I agree with 100% but I get where he's coming from.  But there was a line in that article where the guy said that he doesn't talk ill of other games out of "respect for his fellow developers" and this, to me, seems incredibly daft.

He's not the only one who has said this kind of thing either, there's been a sort of prevailing attitude in a lot of gaming spaces where it has become taboo to overly criticize developers just because the process of making games is hard.  I first ran across this idea when watching Awesome Games Done Quick where occassionally a speedrunner would accuse a developer of being "lazy" and that's why certain tricks within certain games work but then these comments became frowned upon and you aren't really allowed to say that kind of thing anymore.

Obviously game development is an extremely difficult undertaking.  With it being an amalgamation of a number of art forms as well as technical ability it's fairly obvious that the process of creating a game, either by yourself or in a team, is a stressful thing to do.  But the other thing that you have to consider here is that games also cost money.  Once money is put into the equation, any requirement for me or anyone else to be nice to you over the thing you made goes out the window.  I worked for my money and then I chose, based on the developer telling me their game is good and cool and interesting, to give you money in exchange for the thing that you made.  If then, the thing that you made sucks shit then I get to call you a stupid lying, talentless asshole.  

Take my famously well documented distaste for the Outlast games.  I get that making a horror game is hard, you have to code it all together to make sure it's actually playable and then have a bunch of artists, musicians and writers create things that are scary and then all of that has to come together and be marketed and shipped.  That's hard, I get it.  But Outlast also cost me about 20 quid and wasn't very fucking good.  The writing was shit, the music is forgetable, the game isn't scary and the enemies are are not very well coded and behave like shit.  I would go as far to say that the developers are Red Barrels are inept, having completely no idea on what makes a good horror game and instead just slapping together a bunch of imagry that's generally accepted to be "spooky" and calling it a day.  It's lazy, badly made dross and I do not feel even a single pang of guilt for saying that.  You know what else those guys are? fucking liars too.  The original marketing for Outlast made it look like Mirrors Edge Survival Horror Edition and I thought that idea was cool as fuck but then it came out and it's a slow, plodding hiding and sometimes jogging away kind of horror game and it's embarassing that  I was charged money for it.  

If Outlast was made by 2 guys and distributed for free then I wouldn't be so harsh.  I would still give my criticisms of what I didn't like about it but I would assume inexperience over ineptitude or malice. But these were guys who were previously at Ubisoft now telling me to roll up for a brand new horror experience and what I got was a waste of cash.  Outlast IS lazy and poorly made and it costs money so the devs at that company who effectively stole my cash can get fucked. 

Also why not drop the ego?  There's a lot of developers I've interacted with, such as the developers for Crosscode and Benbo Quest who get defensive and insulted when you, even gently, tell them things about their games that kind of sucks.  Criticism is good for artists and creators, it's how you get better.  Back in like, 2014, I wrote a book that I published to Amazon called Noise and I shopped it around a few people I knew for some feedback.  The thing that pissed me off about this whole process is that out of the 10 or so people I gave free copies of the book to for that feedback, only ONE gave me any kind of genuine criticisms of the story.  It fucks me off to no end that everyone just told me it was great when, reading it back now, even I can see glaring flaws with it.  I'm never going to improve as a writer if people don't give me shit when my work is low quality .

I am currently studying and working on a game of my own.  I plan to release it to wherever will take it for a low price, but I'm hoping to maybe get some money for it when it's done.  If you buy it and think that it's a poorly made piece of garbage, I'm fully expecting you to call me out on that.  If you didn't like it and have some constructive things to say, that's even more useful and if you liked it and want to say something nice, that will stroke my ego good and proper, thank you in advance.  But I am not owed niceities and gentle language just because the thing I have decided to try and teach myself is hard.  If you're so fragile that you think that difficult tasks require kid gloves, even when you're taking peoples money as you do that task, then stop.  

If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.  If you can't handle armchair developers calling you a lazy asshole for charging them 20 bucks for your shitty Zelda clone, then stop being a developer.  Just fuck off, the art world is worse with you in it.

Brotato: Fun To Learn, Boring to Master

 

Vampire Survivor clones are generally a genre I stay away from.   Vampire Survivor was a fun little thing to mess around with for a day or two when taking a break from work or whatever but it wasn't exactly some incredible, ground breaking game that changed my life.  It did however, seem to make a metric fuckton of money and therefore has been added to the list of things to copy wholesale by the indie scene and Brotato is a product of that complete lack of creativity from your average indie developer.  The game, however, was gifted to me by a viewer and despite my cynical comments about it, it is pretty good.

The one thing that's interesting about this game, and maybe the whole genre in general is that it's an incredibly fun time for the first handful of runs that you do and then interest dies quickly as you learn what makes the game tick.  When you first fire up Brotato and start a run you are confronted with a ton of shit that you must wrap your head round regarding the characters stats and equipment.  Do you stack HP? Or is it more effective to prioritize dodge and armor?  Is it worth spending your precious level up upgrades on Harvesting and Luck? Or should you be upping your damage instead?  Should you buy that item that ups your speed but tanks your range?  Maybe you should be changing out your weapons for more damage or lifesteal.  It's incredibly fun at first to get your head around this stuff, experiement and work it all out.

But then you do work it out.  What I've found works for me is getting some luck and harvesting early on, then armor, dodge and HP and then focusing on my damage output and doing that has basically guaranteed me a win with every character so far.  I've also found that the Engineering stat along with buy shittons of turrets is an absolutely busted way to play that makes the gameplay trivial even on it's highest setting called Danger 5.  I am, at time of writing, about half way through the large cast of characters and I'm at the point where I'm sort of glazing over as I play.  I'm not thinking anymore and just going through the motions each time.

This doesn't happen with other games though.  Brotato reminds me quite a lot visually of The Binding of Isaac and mastering that games gameplay and RNG didn't result in a boring experience.  I stopped playing Isaac because I had done pretty much everything in it that there was to do and I wasn't on the verge of falling asleep with each run that I did because the better you got and the more you understood about it, the harder it got and more intense challenges were thrown at you.  Brotato doesn't have that kind of scaling and once you learn how to do 20 waves then it's extremely simple to win every time after that.  Maybe you'll lose a run here and there if you don't get good items for the little egg man that you play as but outside of getting buttfucked by randomness the game is extremely easy.  

However, what I'm not saying with any of this is that Brotato is a bad game.  The game has been incredibly useful for me as a new father because it's a perfect game to play when holding a sleeping baby.  I can play it pretty much exclusively with one hand and I can leave it running between ways if I have to run away to do baby stuff.  I'm not going to lose my flow or forget what I'm doing, it's perfect for sqeezing in a quick session in a busy schedule.  I wish it had more music and there was more to the areas than just a square that fills with enemies, maybe some extra levels with obstacles or maybe mazes to have to deal with and navigate would have been a fun addition but for what it is, a shameless Vampire Survivors clone, it's pretty solid.

If you like these kind of games and you need a new one to fiddle with then Brotato is absolutely worth picking up but otherwise your money might be better spent on something a little more involved.

The Dumbest Thing I Ever Did

 

If you play games long enough your bound to have done something stupid at some point.  Some kind of dire mis-play in an online game or some stupid decision in a single player one, it happens to the best of us.  One of my favorite Braindead Gamer Moments can be found on Game Center CX where Shinya Arino, the host, is playing Bonks Adventure.  He enters a bonus stage, jumps off the ledge to the first platform and immediately overshoots it and eats shit, ending the stage and getting nothing for his trouble, hilarious.

That's just a silly mistake though, my personal dumbest gaming moment I feel is far worse because it was influenced by an advert and entirely self inflicted.  The picture at the top of this post is an advert for Playstation 1 memory cards.  Just in case some zoomer stumbles on this post, the PS1 didn't have an internal memory so if you didn't have a card, you couldn't save your game.  You may notice that at the bottom of the image it says "Try beating Final Fantasy VII without it!".  This of course is because FF7 is a big ass game and the idea of beating it in one go without a card is unthinkable to most.  I however, was quite young and instead of being sold the idea of going out and buying a memory card I instead took it as a challenge.  "Fuck you, reverse side of the manual, I'll fukken show you", I thought. So for years I would play Final Fantasy 7 without ever saving.  I would sit and play and then at the end of a session I would turn off the PS1 and then start from the beginning every time I came back.  What made this even dumber was that I owned 2 fuckin memory cards for my PS1.  It wasn't like I didn't have a card and couldn't just give up the idea of finishing in one go, I was just to stupid to realize how long a 3 disc game was and too stubborn to ever give up and so it took me an embarassingly long time to beat Final Fantasy 7 for the first time.

What made this worse was that this mindset extended into other games.  Another title that took me an embarassingly long time to finish was Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Even though that DID have internal memory I was so pressed by the challenge at the bottom of that FF7 advert that every time I came back to OoT I would delete my file and start over.  I think the furthest I ever got for a long, LONG time was the end of the Forest Temple.

If my memory serves then the tipping point for me breaking this habit was when Final Fantasy 9 came out.  I think that was around the time I wised up and though "yeah you right, I can't beat it without one" and started saving like a normal human being.  I spent an embarassingly long amount of time not beating many games because I refused to save because I wanted to show a marketing team whos boss.

Ironically, in my adult years I have taken up speedrunning and there are now many games I can finish in one sitting.  Hell, even big  RPGs like Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn I am now capable of finishing in a single sitting but that doesn't change the fact that child me refusing to use saves was probably the dumbest gaming releated thing I have ever done

Black Summer: How not to do a Zombie show

 

Since becoming a father I have spent a great deal of time doing laps of my living room while rocking the baby for naps and the like.  During that time, since I can't play games quite as much as I'd like, I've been catching up with my watch list on Netflix and Amazon and I've seen some good shit.  Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders (except season 6 that shit was anus), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Juni Ito: Maniac, all in all it's been a pretty good time.  But then I decided to fire up a zombie series called Black Summer and holy moly, this isn't just the worst thing I've watched while on baby duty, it's maybe one of the worst things I've seen just in general.

First broadcast via Netflix in 2019 and apparently some kind of spinoff of some other crap sounding show called Z Nation, Black Summer follows a bunch of characters as they try to survive their way through a zombie apocolypse in order to get to some kind of sports stadium where apparently it's safe.  I'm currently half way through the first season of the show and it's pissing me off to such a degree that I can't help but come here to complain about it.

The premise is you're average zombie survival affair.  Survivors and zombies and assholes for your standard issue "are you humans the real monsters after all?!" nonsense that comes with most zombie media but that's fine, I was pretty much expecting it to be that way going in.  What I wasn't expecting is for the writing of the show to be THIS fucking horrendous on all fronts.  You could legitimately use this show in a course for aspiring film students on what not to do when making a horror show.

Each episode consists of your standard zombie fare where characters go to a place, get fucked somehow and then try to survive but the problem with Black Summer is that the characters seem to be sometimes just willfully fucking themselves or just opting to be immensely fucking stupid at all times.  For example there's one part where they end up in a school which has been overrun by murderous teenagers.  That setup in itself is kind of stupid but there is a scene where a standoff happens, one guy has a gun train on a group of kids, they have a gun pointed back at them and a hostage.  The hostage in question is deaf so there's a bit of an exchange and they agree to let him go in exchange for their gun.  The leader of the teens passes his gun to a small boy and says "shoot him if he moves" while they make the change but the hostage in question is deaf, so he starts to walk where the small boy just blasts him in the back, killing him.  At this point the boys start to flee and they just let them fucking go.  The characters were going on in the previous episode about how they needed weapons and these kids clearly have weapons and just killed your friend and instead of gunning them down and taking their shit they just let them go.  This is then proceeded by the dumbest zombie chase of all time where characters just opt to leave doors wide open for the rage zombie to chase them through and make the shittest attempts I have ever seen in this type of media to block his path.  These are fast rage zombies by the way and their ability to tank bullets seems to be based on how  "tense" the scene needs to be rather than having any sort of consistent rules. 

Speaking of inconsistent rules, in the same episode there is another character who is running away from a zombie, again in the dumbest way imaginable who has a very clearly fucked up right hand.  It's covered in blood and after escaping the zombie he tries to start a car and has to clumsily reach over to the ignition with his left hand because his right is unusable.  These scene ends with him finding a mostly untouched supermarket after escaping the zombie where it then shows a title card and then he's walking around the store completely fucking healed.  I would have been willing to accept that he found some medical supplies either in a back room or in the asiles of the store and patched himself up off camera but there's no bandage or any evidence of that kind of thing at all.  It's like the entire sequence of him getting injured was written way after the fact OR, and given how stupid the show is I'm assuming this to be the case, they fucking forgot.  The lack of attention to any kind of detail or consistency just makes the entire production feel lazy. 

What's worse is that zombie features are such a well trodden road that the rules are basically written for you and barely any effort has to be put in for this kind of thing.  Hell, even games like Resident Evil were getting this shit right in 1996.  In RE1 the characters split up because they don't know what they are getting into and they are trained soldiers, in RE2 they get split up by unfortunate circumstance and in Black Summer they split up as if that idiot gas from Cabin in the Woods is just part of the air in that region of America.  When you're show can be compared to original Resident Evil and RE comes out on top as being the more intelligently put together piece of media, you have a BIG problem.

It's the exact issue I had with that stupid fucking movie called A Quiet Place.  Where all the "tension" of the show is generated by characters being stupid rather than any kind of clever scenario writing.  Despite pissing me off greatly I'm going to finish both seasons and if it magically gets better I'll come back and write a big apology to it but I imagine that it's only going to get worse from here.  It got cancelled after 2 seasons anyway so the chance of it getting any better is 0%

I Hate What Silent Hill Has Become

 

Silent Hill Ascension released recently to pretty unfavorable reviews which bodes extremely badly for the current batch of upcoming Silent Hill games because if you can't even get the extremly easily impressed gaming press on side, then the fuckups must be pretty colossal .

When I say I hate what Silent Hill has become though I'm not talking about the games themselves.  Silent Hills 1-4 are still extremely good horror classics but anything after that hot trash.  Silent Hill Origins probably being the most forgivable since even though it's a steaming pile of wank you can at least tell its heart was in the right place but once you get past that game it's all downhill from there.  The series hit peak shittiness with Book of Memories that probably still hasn't been outdone even with the recent ascension but the series, even in the current day is still in freefall in terms of quality.  

The new batch doesn't seem any better either.  Ascension is already being shit on, there's some other one called Townfall and I'm not even sure what that is, there's Silent Hill F which seems to be having an identity crisis and looks more like Fatal Frame than anything else and then finally there's that fucking stupid piece of shit remake of Silent Hill 2 being made with the inept and creatively bankrupt folks over at Bloober Team.  I could write an essay on why Silent Hill 2 being developed by Bloober is terrible on its own but thankfully I don't have to because YouTube user Bobsvids did a great job of outlining why they are so terrible, so I'll just let him tell you why that project has absolutely no hope whatsoever 

 

But like I said, I'm not talking about the games themselves, per se but what Silent Hill has become conceptually.  In Silent Hill 1 you aren't going through a spooky town being hunted by manifestations of your own guilt in order to punish you for something, you're going through a town beset by a cult and the nightmare is coming from another person, not really for the sake of punishment but because she is being used to birth a demon which you end up actually fighting if you get one of the games good endings.  Silent Hill 3 continued this plot with the influence of an unborn demon God causing the nightmare to manifest outside of Silent Hill but again, not for the sake of punishment.  Heather Mason is not being punished for anything by the nightmare.  Silent Hill 2 was an offshoot of this occult story as a sort of aftermath tale where the events of the first game have sort of caused the nightmare effect to spread to anyone who enters.  James gets plagued by manifestations of his own guilt but he's the only bloke in the original set  of games cast to go through that experience (side characters not included of course, shut the fuck up)

But after Silent Hill 4, due to the popularity of Silent Hill 2 over 1 and 3, Silent Hill is now ONLY a place where you go to "fight your innner demons" or get punished for some kind of misdeed you performed in the past.  The worst example of this is in Downpour where thanks to a bunch of talentless hacks trying to write a story that's "open to interpretation" you end up with a game where, in the best ending, the main character is being punished by manifestations of his guilt for something he didn't even fucking do.

The problem is that Silent Hill was originally interesting because it was a gripping story about a cult, a demon god and a families struggle against that cult.  2 was an interesting exploration of the effects of that cult on the town as well as a cool story about 1 guy inparticular and 4 expanded the scope of that a bit more.  But in the current day, Silent Hill is now just this weird therepist town you go to when you've done something wrong so twitchy monsters covered in raw bacon can spook you into not feeling so bad about it. So sure, the modern games have fucked Silent Hill on a mechanical level sure, but over time and thanks to the efforts of a bunch of very low skill people who aren't the original Team Silent the CONCEPT of the entire series is completly fucked and ensures that anything that gets pumped out from this point onwards is doomed to be awful garbage that entirely misses the point of what made the first set of games interesting in the first place

At this point I would probably say something like "If you're going to do Silent Hill again, bring back the cult and drop this pseudo-therapy shit" but what really needs to be done is the series needs to be killed.  Stop making them, let it die and find another group of talented people to make a new horror new series with new ideas.

Fuck Silent Hill

Weird Fake Gaming Shorts

 

A couple of years ago there was a video put out by a group(?) going by the name of Badabun.  To my understanding Badabun are a shitty content farm type of channel that produces low grade insipid crap for 6-13 year olds, not the kind of thing worth looking up.  This video consisted of a guy sitting in front of a camera pretending to play Super Mario Bros on the NES while a TAS speedrun video played in a window next to him. He was claiming to have beaten the game in under 5 minutes which is certainly a feat that has been done by a great many people it seems but the fakery of this video was so obvious that it was laughable.  A number of other creators made their own videos clowning on this guy for being a dipshit, we had a good chuckle and we moved on.

Fast forward to current day however, in a new age of short form content and these fake gaming videos have become pretty widespread.  Not only that but the number of people now falling for it seems to have grown a great deal and it's making any faith I might have had in the general audiences in gaming spaces has now been well and truly crushed.  The short that inspired me to make this post was a guy playing a Super Mario World romhack where the footage he was using was so obviously either TAS or spliced that you would think a child would recognize the fakery but the comments section was filled with things like "omg this guy is the greatest mario player ever" with only a couple of comments calling out the obvious fakeness that went mostly ignored.  What made it even worse is that he had included a webcam feed at the bottom of the video showing his hands and the controller to add legitimacy to the video but even just glancing at it you could see it wasn't matching up.  Despite the guy in question putting the fact that it's fake blatently on screen for all to see, I guess most people's mindset is that "oh there's a controller feed there so it must be legit" and then go no further than that.

I've also noticed that this has been a massive problem for short form content regarding rhythm games.  There's a very simple rhythm game called A Dance of Fire and Ice that is just CRAWLING with hundreds of fake videos of people getting all perfects on meme songs like Rush E or really cringeworthy songs about that cocksocket, Mr Beast.  A lot of rhythm games come with autoplay features so you can see and maybe study the chart a while if you are struggling but these guys are taking autoplay footage, slapping on some footage of them mashing the keyboard like a child playing with a word processor for the first time and then uploading.  The fakery here is even more obvious that the Mario videos as well because just listening to the clacks of the keyboard while watching the gameplay clearly shows they aren't hitting those notes and yet at the end of the short they have a no miss all perfect clear AND EVEN THEN the comments are filled with praise by idiots.

The big question I have is just "why?", why go through all that effort to get a couple of thousand views on the most ass type of content that can be made on a platform like YouTube.  Even if you suck at rhythm games, let's say, and then you did a series of videos where you documented yourself practicing to full combo the hardest song in whatever game it was, I think that would be infinitely more appealing to more people.  People love seeing a shitty underdog struggle and train and then do a thing.  Uploading fake videos to get a couple of thousand fews so you can make a few bucks in ad rev is actually fucking pathetic.

I guess the solution is to stop watching YouTube shorts, I dunno why I bother anyway.  For some reason I click that shit every so often and I just end up mad or disappointed.  But either way, my bad habits with shitty short form media aside, fuck these users, put some effort into your fucking hobby

Dead By Daylight Killer is Immensely Frustrating

 

Dead By Daylight is a game I've become somewhat obsessed with in recent months.  Usually I steer away from multiplayer games because I hate having to deal with teams of people either giving me shit when I'm not very good or letting me down constantly as I improve.  Dead by Daylight solves this issue by being a 1v4 game so I can just play the 1 and have a grand old time although in the last few weeks playing that 1 has become an immensely frustrating experience.

Just in case people don't know, Dead by Daylight is a multiplayer game that is basically horror themed freeze tag.  There is one killer and 4 survivors and the idea is that the survivors must repair generators and escape and the killer must well....kill them all, go figure.  Each character in the game has 3 perks which are like skills that you equip that change the game in some way.  For example killers get perks that reveal survivor locations or slows down generator repair and survivors get things that just make the killers life absolutely miserable.

Now granted, I'm not a pro DbD player by any stretch but I don't see myself as shit either.  Given enough time in the month (ranks reset on the 13th) I can get pretty deep into the gold ranks for both survivor and killer and with a bit more practice and a better understanding of builds I think I could start getting that Iridescent rank pretty soon.  I would say that's not bad for someone whos been playing only a handful of games a week for about a year.

There's something though about playing killer in this game that is just IMMENSELY frustrating.  I never really get upset when a survivor game goes poorly, probably because it happens so rarely but it's just not a big deal.  Get hooked, shrug and move on.  There's something about stuck in a killer match where everything is going wrong that just makes me want to break the keyboard over my knee.  There is a pretty big debate in the community about if the game is "killer sided" or "survivor sided" and if you ask me it is ABSOLUTELY survivor sided.

The survivors just have so many tools to just completely ruin your day it's mind boggling.  They can bring flashlights to prevent you from performing sacrifices, toolboxes to rush generators, medkits to completely reverse any progress you made as well as countless palettes to stun the killer with and windows to make quick escapes.  That's not even getting into the immense amount of perks at their disposal to halt your progress too.  There are perks for speeding you up when injured, perks for taking more than the usual 2 hits, perks for instantly picking up downed survivors, perks for unhooking yourself, perks for picking up yourself it's enough to make your head spin.  As killer you have to deal with SIXTEEN of these abilities being used agaisnt you while you only get 4.

One example is a match I had the other day against a quite organised group of survivors, maybe they were in a discord call or something because I wanted to pull my own hair out.  I would chase a guy down, bash him and couple of times and grab him.  On the way to the hook, nearly EVERY time one of his teammates would come along and break the hook meaning I was forced to drop him and not make any progress.  Even when I got wise to it and would try and chase the extra guy away, multiple members of the team had the ability to break hooks so in the time in took me to go back and pick the downed guy up, SOMEONE would crawl out of somewhere and fuck me up.  Not to mention that in the time it took me to even get the down in the first place, generators were just being completed left and right.  I still managed to squeeze out a single kill that match but holy fuck it was miserable.

In fairness, balance in a game that is inhererently unbalanced is going to be impossible to do and credit has to be given to BHVR doing a good job but getting destroyed as killer is a uniquely miserable time and it only seems to get ever so slightly worse with every patch.  One thing I have noticed though is that it's a lot easier to rank up as killer.  I've had games where I get 0 kills and a handful of hooks and still gained a point where I've had survivor matches where we repaired all the gens mad quick, avoided the killer at every turn and escaped basically unscathed only to get nothing at the end, it's very strange.

Either way, despite the frustrations DbD is addicting as all hell and I don't plan to stop any time soon.

MDK: Flaws becoming Vibes

 

I just recently finished MDK on PC for the first time.  Despite the game being moderately well known and despite the fact that I played the demo for MDK 2 on Dreamcaste and loved it, it has taken me this long to finally play one of them to completion and I'm glad I did.

The game was released in 1997 by Shiny Entertainment who are the people also responsible for Earthworm Jim and they certainly did have a bit of a talent for making uniquely strange stuff.  The game is about some dude called Kurt who is wearing what is probably the strangest space suit I've ever seen.  A dude with a gun arm and a hand vaccum for a head if there's one thing Shiny were good at it was designing interesting looking main characters.  Kurt must venture into a number of Land Crawlers, giant alien space ships that are destroying parts of the earth and shoot them up until they aren't doing that any more.  There may be more to the plot than that, but I'll address that later.

Gameplay is a pretty basic run and gun type affair.  Run through the level until you see something moving, hold down the mouse until it isn't moving and then move on.  Each stage is basically just a number of arenas that are broken up by corridors with an occasional puzzle haphazardly slapped in there to try and vary things up but the puzzles usually get no more complicated than "shoot the thing wot we hid".  My favorite stage in the game was the one where the monotony gets broken up by surfboarding segments where you drop cows on gun turrets and the soundtrack plays a knock off James Bond theme, it was a lot of fun.   Also the powerup for dropping the cows was an Earthworm Jim head so that was a nice little nod to their previous work. 

I think though, that if I had played MDK around the time it was new I would have become bored with it very quickly.  The game isn't overly long but every level is the same thing of just rooms of enemies connected by corridors.  The visual designs of the rooms are varied and can throw you for a loop sometimes but that doesn't prevent the gameplay from feeling a little stale by the end.  Yet, playing MDK in 2023 I didn't get that sense of boredom I might have done playing it at time of release.  PC gaming of that era has such a vibe to it, a feeling I can't quite articulate properly but you can FEEL it when you play these games.  Unreal Tournament has it, Thief has it, Deus Ex has it and MDK certainly has it.  I think it has something to do with early 3D combined with the way games were designed back then, the only way I can describe it is as "a vibe". 

I did discover after actually finishing the game though that I had been playing kind of a gimped version of the game.  Like with a lot of games from this era there are issues of compatibility and MDK was no different.  When you fire up the game on Steam you are given the choice between the regular version and the "Glide" version.  Instead of looking up what that was I just went ahead and played regular but apparently the regular version is missing cutscenes and things like that.  I realized something was wrong when I killed the final boss and the game just abruptly cut to main menu.  No ending, no credits roll or anything but by that point I was already done and not about to go back.  I have a quad digit backlog over here, if I care that much I'll go watch it on YouTube.

Anyway, nostalgia is one hell of a drug.  Not a drug that usually works on me usually, I've found that my opinion on the N64 has soured dramatically over the years, for example, but it certainly got me real good with MDK.  Worth a play if you haven't already but might be worth just playing the console version if you can't be bothered wrestling with the keyboard bindings like I had to.

The Hatred For Epic Game Store

 

I've had the Epic Game Store on my computer for a good while now.  I downloaded it a while back after hearing they just give shit away for free.  Steam is still the number 1 platform I use for buying PC games but every so often I'll fire up EGS, look at what's free, add it to my library and then maybe tinker with it occasionally when I want to play those games.  For some reason though, whenever I bring up "oh yeah I got <game> for free on EGS" I'm occasinally hit with a lot of vitriol for the platform and I just don't get it really.

I wouldn't call the Epic Game Store a GOOD platform by any stretch.  In my limited time in using it outside of just playing free games it's been pretty dismal.  It lacks a lot of the features that Steam has, shopping with it is a sort of unpleasant experience and worst of all it doesn't have any features for gifting games.  There was one time I gave away a grand prize on my stream for a game that was exclusive to EGS (Maneater, on Steam now but then it was exclusive) and getting the game to this guy was a real ballache.  I didn't even buy the game on Epic in the end, I had to get a code on Humble and then send it to the guy.

I tried to do some Googling on why people hate it so much and there were some things about exclusivity and some things about giving data to Tencent and some things about a crappy refund but complaining about games companies being shitty is like complaining that water is wet.  The entire industry side of gaming sucks shit.  Every company on every service has shitty aspects, hating one over the other makes little sense to me.

I've heard some people argue to me that instead of using Epic Game Store for free stuff I should use the premium service on PS+ OR GamePass on PC.  What the people who make this argument fail to understand is that those are subscription services that cost me money month to month or year to year depending on what plan I pick.  When I downloaded EGS it did not cost me anything and then when I then proceeded to download Control, for free, I was able to play it start to finish completely for free.  The other thing that sounds ass about GamePass inparticular is that I've heard stories of people saying that games have been removed from GamePass.   Thanks to my huge backlog and other obligations sometimes it takes me a long time to finish a game so the idea that I'd be halfway through something when Microsoft decides to just yank it from under me is not a service I'm even remotely willing to pay for.  Even when Steam has removed games from its store they have still been avaliable to me if I already bought it, at least.

At the end of the day though, EGS is giving you free shit every week.  I've played some real bangers off that platform too.  Control, Death Stranding, A Plague Tale, Texorcist and Sonic Mania, just to name a few.  Sure it may be barren of features when compared to Steam and may have a couple of other shitty aspects to it but I have about 180 games on there and I don't even have a credit card registered.  Liking it less than Steam or another service is perfectly understandable but the red hot hate that some people claim to hold for it makes no sense to me at all

Phone Game Ads are Disgusting

 

So I have these two apps in my phone called Torima and Arucoin and the idea behind these apps is that you gain points by walking around and then you can exchange points for amazon gift cards and crap like that.  It sounds stupid but having it chug away passively in my pocket while I commute to work or just generally go about my day has proven pretty useful.  For example when my PS3 controller bit the dust I was able to get a new one on Amazon free of charge using the gift credit I had accumulated.  Also, I've had Astral Chain on the Switch sat in my backlog for a fair while now and that's also a game I got for free via going to work every day.

Within these apps you can watch ads to get bonus points.  My routine usually is that at the end of my day I'll fire up a movie or an episode of some drama on Netflix (it's Peaky Blinders at time of writing) and I'll cycle the ads while I watch for those extra points.  Usually I'm not paying attention but sometimes these ads catch my eye and I just cannot believe how completely evil some of these companies are to try and get you to play their game.

They come in three types.  The first type is pretty harmless and it's just an advert for the game but usually accompanied by some over exaggeration of what the game play actually involves.  These usually take the form of some color matching game that will having you rescuing a character from Saw-esque peril but the actual game is just the color matching with none of the peril.  Fine, whatever, a little deceptive sure but if you get excited for Bejewled clones and you downloaded the app after seeing that type of game, at least you are getting that type of game.

The second is probably the least common but I do see it on occasion although usually on Instagram adverts rather than via Torima but they do occur in both places and that's adverts for games that steal footage from "real" games.  The worst example I caught of this was an ad for some phone strategy game that was based around Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

An example of a real one made by Koei

If you've ever played one of those games like Sangokushi or Nobunaga's Ambition it was essentially the same thing as that but heavily watered down to accomodate for being played on a phone and for the kind of player that plays a lot of phone games.  The advert for the game though used footage, without permission I assume, from one of the later Dynasty Warriors games.  Advertising intense battles with thousands of troops and then the game itself is just menus with PNGs of anime generals.  A deceptive way to pull you in and probably waste your time.

But the absolute worst are the types of game ads that tell you that you can earn money when you absolutely cannot.  The game in the banner of this post, Evertale, is the absolute worst offender of this.  Evertale sort of also falls into the second category where it advertises a sort of creepypasta version of Pokemon which is just completely divorced from what the game is actually like

But I think that strategy of marketing has stopped working because in recent weeks the game advertises that it gives away 10s of 1000s of yen every week to it's players.  I have not downloaded Evertale since it looks like trash but I can GUARAN-FUCKING-TEE you that they aren't paying anybody, I would be surprised if the option is even in any of the menus.  I did a quick google to see if you could earn money via the game and it nothing about it came up, just one YouTube video calling it "the biggest scam nobody is talking about"

But Evertale isn't the only offender here, there are a TON of these ads that advertise shitty tetris clones, color sorting games or Solitare that tell you that you can earn money by playing.  The adverts usually all go the same way where there will be a person trying to buy something at a resturant or store and when they go to pay they don't have enough money.  Upon this realization they will pull out their phone, play one round of Tetris or some shit and then have 100 bucks in their PayPay account.  I will have to admit that one day my curiosity did in fact get the better of me because while I didn't think I'd be getting 100 bucks, some extra change to play Tetris on the train would have been nice.  However upon even just glancing at the menus the options for earning points or payouts aren't even a thing, so of course it was a quick deletion.

For me, someone who's doing pretty well in life looking for extra beer money for doing stupid bullshit, it's whatever.  Glance at it, realize its fake and move on, nothing lost but a few minutes on my commute.  But there are plenty of people who don't have it like me, who are desperate to put anything in their bank accounts to get by who you COULD potentially decieve and convince to download and waste hours on and that just doesn't sit right with me at all.  Even if there were miniscule payments it wouldn't bother me so much but the fact that these people advertise games with cash money only for the features to be completely absent is disgusting and evil.  It boggles my fucking mind that these companies that host these ads for mobile applications don't have some kind of rules on just flat out lying to customers.

Phone ads being awful is something that's pretty well documented online, with this post I'm essentially stating the obvious.  However I feel that the scammier, more deceptive side and it's potentially damaging effects on people who are desperate for any kind of supplemental income are glossed over in favor of "lmao funny gangster game meme ad".  False Advertising is a thing you get sued for, so how these phone game companies aren't being obliterated is beyond me. 

Phone's are pretty powerful nowadays, you could do some potentially pretty good things with them for gaming but while the market is flooded with shit like this they will always be looked down upon as a platform full of low quality titles for brain-dead twats.

The Second Worst Way To Play Mahjong

 

If you know me, even in passing, you may be aware that I am a big fan of playing Japanese Mahjong which is also known as Riichi Mahjong.  I like it so much, in fact, that during my time at university me and 2 other dudes would travel around Europe going to tournaments for it which led to some pretty interesting adventures.  

If you're unsure what Japanese Mahjong is exactly then to cut a long and complicated explination as short as possible it's sort of like Poker.  It's played typically with 4 people and each of these players have to take turns drawing and discarding tiles to create hands and when one player wins points are exchanged.  You do this for about 8 rounds and then a winner is decided by whoever has the most points.  It's a lot more complex than that are there are a lot more hand variations than there are in Poker but that's the basic gist of it. In actuality it's a lot closer in basic play to Gin Rummy, another card game but every time I ask people if they have played that they say no so Poker is probably the easier to understand comparison.  The wikipedia page for Gin Rummy says its one of the most widely played 2 player card games to this day but I'm almost certain that's total bullshit.

Mahjong has a fairly large popularity in Japan so of course companies came long to make video games of it.  Probably the most famous example of Japanese mahjong in video game form can be found in the Yakuza games where people complain at length that they can't get 100% because they just cannot figure out how to play it properly. But if you dig through the fairly large library of retro Mahjong games you'll find that they are all this weird 2 player head to head variant of the game that is just immensely boring to play.  You may look at an early Mahjong game on the Famicom or something like that and think something like "oh well they had to make it 1on1 because of the system limitations" but that's dogshit because 4 player Mahjong for the famicom exists as a separate game

Also there is this weird abundance of pervy Mahjong games that were exclusive to various arcade machines.  It's the same boring 2 man variant of the game but when you win you get to see some titties or something.

Nowadays it's not something you see very often, if at all.  Mahjong games for modern systems are almost always 3-4 players and in the arcade both Mahjong Fight Club and the Sega Mahjong game are 4 players and the cabs are hooked up to the internet so you can play online, the two player type being the norm on consoles and arcades is long gone, I think.  Maybe there are some 2 player Mahjong games on the Switch or something that I've never heard of but no one gives a shit about those as the market for these kind of games is basically dominated by Konami and Sega.

In the title I said that 2 player Mahjong is the second worst way to play the game,  if you're wondering what the first is, it's that stupid tile matching thing that you get on windows PCs and is sometimes offered as shovelware on some portable systems.  A lot of people just know it as "Mahjong" even though it has very little to do with the actual game, some people call it Shanghai and some people know it as Mahjong Solitare but the point is that this form of it is just a complete waste of time and I'd rather have painful dental surgery than waste my time playing it.

Neo-Persona's Insane Game Over Mechanic

 

Persona 3 Reload is on the horizon and I'm sort of torn about it.  On the one hand I am completely fucking sick to death of remakes.  The constant remaking and remasting of various games that were already good is tiring. It feels like a big chunk of the industry at the moment, both AAA and indie, are just constantly re-treading old ground for nostalgiabucks and safe bets rather than pushing anything even remotely creative.  On the other hand though, Persona 3 has a number of glaring issues that probably need fixing and could be fixed in a remake.  For example, the biggest example actually, Tartarus is one of the most boring dungeons ever conceived not only just for Megami Tensei but for JPRGs just in general.  Hundreds of floors of samey bullshit with the most monotonous music ever written, it's actually fucking awful.  Juding from the gameplay trailers we have of Reload so far it looks like that won't get fixed and this whole thing is pointless but we've seen very little so far so let's withold judgement for now.

But what I really want to talk about is a problem that has plagued Persona since the third game and is probably the most annoying aspect of the franchise and that's the instant game over on main character death.  This isn't something that's new to SMT, there are a number of games in non-Persona entries that also have this mechanic.  For example Shin Megami Tensei 5 also has this feature but in that and other games it sort of makes sense.  In the other entries in the series you are a demon summoner of some description, either through some kind of magic or the series mainstay, the COMP, so when you eat shit the control you had over your party of accumulated demons gets broken and they leave you to die.  That's what you get for relying on demons from hell to help you fight God, I suppose.

But in Persona it's a different story.  You aren't negotiating with demons, (mostly, 5 is the exception but even then it's different) you are a group of high school friends, quite close knit ones we are led to believe, going into a shadow world to fight weird Carl Jung bullshit. So when you eat shit in those games the instant game over makes absolutely ZERO sense.  You can be surrounded by characters that are holding actual kilograms of Revival Beads in their pockets and monsters in their brain that can use magic to revive you but instead they leave you for dead, fade to black, game over.

What makes this even worse is that this never happened in Persona 1 or 2.  The MC or Maya in those games can eat a big attack and have their HP reduced to zero but their friends are able and more than likely will pick them up before the battle is done.  Imagine if you had the ability to revive people from the dead with a magic spell and while you're walking down the street someone rolls up and shoots one of your parents in the face with a shotgun. You aren't just going to run away, you're gonna wait for the guy to leave and then pick them up and dust them off, right?  Makoto, Yu and Ren all have the worst fucking friends of all time.

What makes this mechanic even worse is that SMT has spells such as Mudo and Hama which, if they connect, insta-kills you.  If it's your first playthrough and you are unaware that demons in whatever dungeon you are in are packing those spells then there is a fairly high chance that you are going to take one right to the chops and lose a bunch of progress.  Obviously there's counterplay to this with you being able to fuse Persona's that have resistances to this stuff or null it outright but if you don't know it's coming then kiss your progress through the dungeon goodbye.

I hope it's a feature that Persona 3 Reload changes.  Hell, I would be OK with the next player turn being forced by the AI to use a revival bead or a recarm spell and you only get a game over if you have no items in your inventory OR you are completely out of MP.  At least then your friends being unable to revive you makes sense for a game over rather than they just run away from your unconcious body as soon as you get knocked out ONE time.

At the end of the day, just get better fucking friends

The Strange Grandstanding of Evo/Wave

 

Every so often on the stream (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) we do a little segment that I have dubbed the Free Game Dive.  It involves going on Steam or websites like Itch, downloading free to play indie games and playing them through.  I've found some real cool little titles over the course of doing this segment so it's generally a lot of fun.

Recently, one of the games I finished as part of this segment was something on Steam called Evo/Wave, a short collectathon platformer in the same vein of something like Banjo Kazooie or similar titles.  The story is about an old AI called MagnaVex (get it?) drestroying some kind of computer core that causes the world to get all screwed up.  You, playing as a little robot dude, have to go into 3 worlds, collect some shit and reverse the damage that MagnaVex has done. 

According to Alexandre Isidorio, the guy who designed the UI, the game was made as a student project for a university course and as far as the game itself goes it's actually pretty good.  Having just finished Yooka Laylee and absolutely hating it playing a game like this which actually seemed to have a bit of thought and effort put into it was nice.  The final stage as well where you fight MagnaVex in a series of platforming challenges was particularly fun and did a good job of testing your skills with the games various power-ups, worth a shot if you have a couple hours to kill one day for sure.

But there's something weird going on with the games story, what little there is of it.  When you collect all the parts in the games three levels and are about to enter the final encounter with MagnaVex, a cutscene plays where he makes a bit of a speech about the current state of the industry, about how games have become unimaginative, constant installs and updates are annoying and companies are nickle and diming using at every turn and it's done in this sort of "old man yells at cloud" tone and yet, is he wrong though?

The constant installs and updates ARE annoying.  It's not something I've ever been too bothered by because I'm more than happy to just play or do something else while it goes on but the fact that the days of being able to just buy a game, slam it in my machine and just play right away are long gone IS annoying.  The fact that every time I fire up Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch and it asks me to do a software update on a game made THIRTEEN fucking years ago is cause for minor irritation.

The nickle and diming of the industry as well is also a well documented and often complained about side of things.  Battle passes, microtransactions and bullshit DLC featuring content that should have just been in the initial purchase are rampant not to mention the constant remaking of safe bet, classic games in a thinly veiled attempt to get you to open your wallet for that nostalgia hit

But it's the criticism of people that feel that the creativity has been largely sucked out of games in exchange for varients of the same thing that really rubs the wrong way.  I'm not one to say that ALL of gaming has become stagnant, I'm far too widely versed in the deepest, most obscure realms to honestly think that but I do feel that generally speaking gaming, at least the mainstream stuff, has sacrified being interesting in exchange for being mostly OK.  What I mean by this is that if you look that the libraries of anything from back in the day, take the PS1 for example, the games are widely varied, even within the same genre.  There's a lot of experimentation going on with style, mechanics and presentation and while it makes the sysem interesting there are quite a lot of just flat out stinkers on that system.  Nowadays I feel that everything is sort of made from a template, usually something that worked well in the past and while that means that truly, honest to goodness fucking AWFUL games aren't really all that common anymore the creativity within the medium has suffered greatly as a result.  

It's been a thing in the AAA scene forever but even the indie scene hasn't avoided falling into this trap.  At time of writing there are two big indie games that I am told are very good.  Lies of P and Sea of Stars.  I have yet to play either of these and people who's opinions I don't immdiately disregard have told me that they are good games and they sure as shit look pretty cool but Lies of P is just Bloodborne and Sea of Stars is just Chrono Triggter (it even has Yasunori Mitsuda doing the music, for fucks sake).  I'm always glad to have more of a good thing, sure, but it doesn't make me a cranky old boomer, like Evo/Wave suggests that I sigh a little at all the safe bets and appeals to nostalgia.

Still, Evo/Wave is an pretty good Free2Play thingie if you have some free time and nothing better to do.  The dev might have his head up his own arse on the state of the industry but this is a game that fucking NO ONE gives a fuck about so collect the shiny objects then turn it off and ignore his crap opinions going forward.

Returning To Cookie Clicker

 

Back in 2013 I caught wind of a little game called Cookie Clicker, a silly little browser game where you click on a cookie to make a number go up.  When you have enough cookies you can buy buildings that make cookies for you and the goal of the game is to make number go up and nothing more.  

Somehow this game became a sort of internet sensation and gave rise of a plethora of imitators thus giving birth to the "idle game".  A genre where you fiddle with a thing for a bit and then you have the game basically play itself and you come back to check on it every so often to buy upgrades to make whatever number you're trying to raise go up faster.  For the most part it's a pretty insipid genre that isn't worth your time at all full of low quality titles made by devs looking to get something quick into their portfolio or worse, to try and get a quick buck out of you for very little effort.

But during a particularly boring work day I got curious and decided to return to the OG after 10 years to see if it was the same old silly distraction and was surprised just to see how much it had expanded.  I didn't think there was a lot you could do with a game that's solely about clicking on a cookie to get buildings to get more cookies but it seems I was mistaken.

The standard cookie clicking, building aquring gameplay is still there but now you can harvest Sugar Lumps once ever 24 hours to upgrade the buildings for greater efficiency but there are a few buildings that, when upgraded have mini games attatched to them now.  For example one of the buildings you can buy is a bank and when upgraded with a sugar lump you get access to a simulation of a stock market where you can buy and sell goods that change value every 15 minutes or so and you can get a quick burst of cookies if you invest wisely.  It comes complete with the ability to upgrade it further with sub-buildings and brokers and it comes with a full on graph that updates in real time and it's not very complicated, sure, but its an interesting addition considering the main game that it's attatched to.

Another feature that is new from when I played it all those years ago is the ascention system.  When you bake a certain number of cookies you can ascend, as in lose everything you currently have, for a permanent buff and a token to spend on a staggeringly large talent tree.  I have no idea what half the upgrades even are as they are hidden behind branching pathways I can't see yet but the most useful one so far has been the one that allows cookies to build up at a reduced rate while the game is closed.

The game has so much stuff going on in it now that there's a dedicated wiki for it and even that's telling me about stuff that I haven't, after about a month of playing, haven't even caught a whiff off yet.  For example there's a thing called the "Grandmapocolypse" which involves making all the grandmas you bought get mad at you for some reason and the game starts spawning "wrinklers" or something and I have no idea what those are.  The art changes to this sort of weird horror-esque mural and it all sounds very strange and I think the mystery of what this feature is exactly has me captivated enough to keep an tab open every day that I fiddle with between other games and housework.

It has got me wondering if there are similarly fleshed out and feature heavy idle games out there that might be worth a look but unfortunately the genre is full of so much garbage that it will probably forever remain a mystery and I'm more than happy to just sit here and bake cookies for eternity

[Backlog Update] Having My Time Wasted

 

Since I just recently became a father my time for working through my backlog has been fairly limited but I have managed to find a decent chunk of time to put a decent-ish dint into Yooka Laylee and Xenoblade Chronicles.  The theme for both of these games seems to be wasting my time a great deal so let me vent about that a little bit

First Yooka Laylee which I had a rather large accident with about a week ago.  See, I just became a father recently and so in order to help with the child care I have moved my computer to the area of the house where the baby sleeps, it's not an ideal setup but it allows me to get a bunch of stuff done while not leaving the newborn unattended, for a temporary setup its not so bad.  My computers power cable is plugged into one of those power strips that have the little on/off switches on them and then that power strip is next to me on the floor.  As I was playing Yooka Laylee, pretty much the moment I picked up a Pagie (the game's main collectable, for those that haven't played) I accidently hit the off switch on the plug for my PC with my big fat arse and my computer abruptly shut down.  When I resumed, probably because I lost power as the game was saving, my file had been corrupted and I could not load my game.  I had to delete the file and start over again, but I can't be mad about this really because this is a case of me wasting my own time.

What I can be kind of mad about is just how stupidly Yooka Laylee is designed. One of the reasons I was hating it so much my first time round is that I would be exploring a level and be getting blocked every few minutes or so because I would start a level challenge only to find that I didn't have the right ability to actually clear it, a whole bunch of the pages across the first three levels are just completely inaccessible without skills gained from later stages.  This is fine in a lot of other games, Metroidvanias do it all the time but in a well designed game it happens once every so often, a little goody to keep in the back of your mind to come back to when you fill out your move set but in Yooka Laylee its ALL the fucking time and it was pissing me the hell off.  

In this second attempt though I said fuck ALL that and I'm basically blasting through each stage, getting the powers and the bare minimum pagies to unlock the levels and then once I have everything I'll come back and clean up to get the 100 I need to beat the game.  I'm hating the game a lot less now that I know to play it that way but even though I have a bit more momentum going this time the game just generally still feels very bland and soulless.  

Xenoblade on the other hand isn't particularly badly designed, I'd say generally speaking it's a good game when you're moving the plot along and having fights with monters your level but MY GOD does this game love to fuck you about with just the most boring area design and the dumbest side quests I have ever seen in an RPG, I am starting to remember why I gave up on it back when I played it on the Wii.

I got to a town called Aclamoth? Akalamoth? Alakazam? I can't remember but it's full of bird people and this place is fucking HUGE.  It looks like the kind of place that would sit right at home in some massively popular MMO with other players running around shopping, handing in quests and looking for raid groups but Xenoblade isn't an MMO it's a single player game and therefore this area sucks shit.  It's full to bursting with side quests from various NPCs and all of these guys are spread way the hell around so just running from one exclamation mark to the next took fucking ages and then once you've done that the quests you get aren't any fun either

One quest had me going back to an area called Tephra Cave, an area from the start of the game with level 5 monsters (I'm 40-ish) to collect NINE randomly spawning little blue balls.  If that isn't the very definition of a time waste then I don't know what is.  I don't mind quests to kill X number of Y if it's done in the current area and killing those monsters is a nice excuse to get some bonus EXP but half of the quests from this town are like that Tephra Cave shit and I can barely stay awake playing it.

You COULD argue, if you were a stupid twat, that these are optional side quests and if they suck so much I should just skip them but fuck you if you think that because I paid what? somewhere in the realm of 3-5000 yen for this shit.  I didn't pay my hard earn money to NOT engage with its features and content, I'm not a shitty journo that plays only easy mode and then shelves the game for life, miss me with that shit.

Anyway I've finished most of those quests now so hopefully by the time I have another backlog update I'll have something nicer to say as the plot, which admittedly I am quite into, progrresses. 

Making Anime Robot Fights Boring

 I had a series that I did over on YouTube for a while that I called "Battle Against the Backlog" where the idea was that I'd sort of vlog the progress through my insane 1000+ game backlog.  However thanks to an obsession with Dead by Daylight and some life things getting in the way, finding time to write a script and then edit all the footage together, even for videos as simple as that, was proving far too time consuming.  So I thought since the blog has been neglected for a while in favor of Twitch and YouTube, I will move the backlog stuff here so that there's at least a new post once a week and then I'm freed up to either play more games or work on bigger projects I have flying around my big dumb brain 

Anyway, like I said I've mainly been playing Dead By Daylight as opposed to making progress in anything that actually has an ending.  I don't know what it is about that game considering it has exactly 1 mode of play and it's essentially, when you boil it down, just freeze tag but it's a weirdly compelling experience.  You might think that the one mode thing would make it get boring pretty quickly, it does it other games after all but I like to think that Dead by Daylight is the Ichiran Ramen of video games.

In case that reference went over your head let me explain.  Ichiran is a chain of ramen stores here in Japan but unlike every other ramen store that have menus of different kinds of ramen, Ichiran has one thing.  They do that one thing SO WELL that no matter how many times I eat it, I never get bored of it and I quite often get urges to go back. That's what Dead by Daylight did, they picked one thing and have done it so incredibly well that I don't seem to ever get tired of it.  No matter what side I'm playing on I'm just constantly hankering for more.  It's even gotten to the point where I'm looking up DbD content while I'm working and listening to pros talk shop.  Maybe once I get better at the game and I start hitting the higher ranks more consistantly the allure might wear off but for now I'm absolutely HOOKED (haha)

Anyway, onto the actual subject of the blog post because I did finish one thing recently, a big thing, and that was Daemon X Machina.  Daemon X Machina on paper sounds like it should be cool because it's a mech combat game made by some of the same people that previously worked on Armored Core but the game is just awful.  It's fine for the first handful of missions where there's some mystery regarding and apocolypse and you're blowing stuff up but then you quickly come to realize that all the missions are the same.  Every mission involves either blowing stuff to or preventing something from being blown up by blowing stuff up which sounds like all you'd need from a game about giant robots but the enemies barely fight back and every enemy can be killed by just locking on, holding down both mouse buttons with rifles equipped and spamming the Q key to fire extremely powerful homing rockets.  There where even a number of instances where I didn't even have to move to fight bosses and other mech-style enemies, it was an actual joke

The story isn't much better either because the game throws way too many characters at you all at once, none of them are fleshed out and you don't care who anyone is or where their allegiances lie and then near the end of the game it starts killing a few of them off in heartfelt death scenes but instead of having any emotional impact I was sat there saying "who was that again? have we even been in a mission with that guy yet?" 

You can tell as well that the developers just completely ran out of ideas by the end because the final 4 missions all take place on the same stage where you do the same thing.  You fight 4 different characters as boss fights but all the enemies fight in the same way pretty much so it's literally just the old double click spam Q song and dance for half an hour while the AI partners babble on coms and not help with the combat

It should be impossible to make anime mech fights boring and some how this game did it, so hats off to the developers for doing something that I thought was impossible. 

Anyway, that's about all I've done recently.  I've also been playing Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch but I got to this place called Makna Woods and have been bogged down in side quests for many hours now so not a lot to say there really. I'll try to put DbD down for a while so I have something interesting to say next week!

May Horror Month

 Every october I like to go all in on the halloween spirit and attempt to finish 31 horror games within a month.  This year, however, I have a number of plans already set in my calendar for October so finishing 31 games in a month with that kind of schedule is probably not happening but instead of not doing it at all, I thought we'd instead just move it to May!  So here is the list of games we'll be playing between May 1st and May 31st

1. Spookys jump scare mansion
2. Metro 2033 REDUX
3. Within skerry
4. Pony Island
5. Visage
6. INSIDE
7. Necrovision
8. Nosferatu: wrath of the malachi
9. The Evil Within.
10. Penumbra Black Plague
11. Ring: Terrors Realm
12. Signalis
13. Devil May Cry
14. Resident Evil: Dead Aim
15. Cold Fear
16. House of the Dead 2
17. Sagebrush 18. A girls fabric face
19. Suite 776
20. Snafu
21. Gray Dawn
22. Silent Hill 3
23. Echo Night
24. Enemy Zero
25. Siren
26. F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate
27. Castlevania 2: Simons Quest
28. Outlast
29. Luigi's Mansion
30. The Suffering
31. Traumada

If you watch the stream much you'll know I have a fetish for spinning wheels so this year, instead of deciding the order in advance we'll just slam everything into a wheel and play the games in whatever order that dictates for is.

Come watch it live from May 1st over at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

See ya there

The Legendary Hochu Otsuka

 

Recently I've been playing Triangle Strategy on my Switch and by default the English voices are turned on.  Upon hearing them, I cringed myself inside out at the awful performances and then promptly went to the options menu to change the voice over language to Japanese and not only were the voices across the board MUCH better but I was greeted with a little suprise of a bandit being voiced by this dude in one of the first scenes. 

Born in 1954 and active as a voice actor from 1976 (according to wikipedia) Hochu is one of those big-bad motherfuckers in Japanese voice acting.  He's so prolific that I can almost GUARANTEE that if you're some kind of weeb that watches a lot of anime or the kind of person that enjoys JRPGs to a large degree and plays them with JP voice over like a sane person, you have heard this man at least once or twice in your life.  

I first discovered him when I was quite young, I forget how old exactly but it would have been primary school with his role as Skid Ops Gash in Panzer Dragoon Saga.  He appears shortly after the opening valley section in disc 1 so him, along with Akira Ishida, Masato Ibu and Toru Okawa were some of the first examples of spoken Japanese I ever heard in my life and considering how big of an influence that game was on me wanting to learn Japanese, these guys are kind of a big deal.  

But I'll be honest though, Akira, Masato and Toru, while talented voice actors, are not the kind of people I could pick out of any given production.  For example I googled Akira Ishida and he's been in TONS of shit that I've watched and played but I had no idea it was him at any point.  That's not a weakness of him as an actor, that's more me not paying attention to the credits but I think it says a lot, then, that someone like me who spent a lot of my life not paying attention to credits was able to pick this guy out, Otsuka puts in some really stand out performances.

His performances are all quite similar sounding and for some that can be a really bad thing.  Take Amanda Winn Lee for example, it doesn't matter if she's playing Yukiko Amagi, Jinana (Digital Devil Saga) or Heather Mason, she sounds basically the same every time.  Otsuka on the other hand is a master of injecting a great deal of the characters personality into each individual performance.  Gash, Jiraiya (Naruto) and the Kurata Dealer (Akagi) for example all have the same sounding voice but even just hearing snippits of their dialogue you can tell just how different each character is, he's a dude that really manages to encapsulate a characters personality.

The dude is 68 years old so I was surprised to hear, and this was the inspiration for this post actually, his voice doing some kind of advert in a Family Mart a couple of days ago.  According to wiki the last video game he did was Nioh 2 in 2020 but he's still going in the anime scene with a role in something called A Herbivorous Dragon Get's Unfairly Villainized (? what the fuck) and it warms my dried up little heart to know he's still chugging along.

Next time you're playing or watching something maybe you'll be able to pick him out, it's really not hard to do.  I found out while glancing at the wiki page that he's done dubs of English actors like Jeanne Claude Van Damme and Kurt Russel and that's something I just GOTTA go experience.  What an absolute legend

Morality Systems are Dogshit

 

Recently I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic on Steam and as someone who doesn't really give two flying rat fucks about Star Wars, I'm having a really good time.  The game, however, features a morality system of the player either being a light side or dark side Jedi and what the game decides are light side actions and dark side actions are complete bullshit and this is a problem that has plagued games for a long time so I'm going to rant about it a little bit.

The first instance that got me really hard in Knights was when you get to the Wookie planet with the name I can't remember how to spell.  When you arrive there's some kind of trading company that has set up shop and is kidnapping and selling the native Wookies into slavery.  If you ask me, these are some pretty fucking bad people, but some time into a quest line you are given an option to kill a bunch of them or chase them away.  My attitude is that if you come into someones home turf and start selling them into slavery, you sort of forfeit your right to life on account of being a cunt, so the lightsabers and blasters came out and the party put them down.  Upon concluding the fight I was given Dark Side points.  Dark Side points, for killing invading slavers.  I think it has something to do with Jedi not killing people or something but come the fuck on, you can't just go up to people like that and say "um, excuse me, would you mind NOT enslaving a native race of forest people please?" and just expect them to agree, violence IS the answer here.  But even worse than that there's another quest later on, on a different planet, that involves investigating the murder of some women by some dude.  The way the quest is prestented to you, the situation seems pretty fishy (if you know, ha ha, pun intended) and it looks like the dude that's been arrested has been framed.  On your investigation you go to a hotel where you can question some witnesses and during the dialogue options you can choose to use your force powers to get more details out of a certain NPC.  Using your force powers in this way gets you fucking EVIL points.  Investigating the highly likely framing of an innocent man in a way that guarantees that justice can be served in the correct way is considered to be EVIL by Bioware.  This may be another Jedi thing that I'm unaware of but I remember Obi Wan or whatever in a new hope using the force to manipulate people like that and no one really blinked an eye when HE did it.  Either Bioware have a completely fucked sense of morality or the Jedi are fucking lame, either way it sucks.

But at the very least, in Knight's case, there's a discussion of the morality to be had.  Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to use brain magic to get secrets out of people, sure, fine, whatever, but in a lot of other games morality systems are just tacked on lame bits of shit that aren't engaging in any way.

Now I love Bioshock, it's a cool game but it really does highlight just how poorly thought out these things are.  In Bioshock, upon killing a Big Daddy you are granted a "moral choice" of infanticide or to not do that.  Killing the little girl nets you more points to buy plasmids with and not doing it gives you a bit less and a different ending.  The thing to consider though, is that Bioshock, even on hard mode, is piss easy and you can get everything you need by not killing them which makes the choice feel hollow.  The ONLY reason to kill little sisters in Bioshock is to either be edgy or because you specifically want to see the "bad" ending.  

Another big example of this is Mass Effect, a game that presents you with "moral choices" at various parts of the story but the only real options for each situation is to either be the literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ or to be the biggest ball-bag in the galaxy.  No way to be even a little bit moderate or level headed in any of these games.

Morality on a binary scale like this is a stupid, useless feature that feels like padding.  It's a lazy way for developers to claim their game has replay because you essentially have to play the game twice to see everything.  Really bad offenders in this category include things like Dante's Inferno where the game doesn't really change significantly either way, just do it once where you stomp a dude and once where you play DDR every so often.  

The truth of the matter is simple, it would take far too much work to put this into a game in a way that would actually be interesting or even a little bit realistic.  It would involve a great deal of skill in JUST the writing, let alone all the technical stuff that would then have to come from that to then put it in the game.  There are games that have come kind of close, like New Vegas, but really I can't think of a single game off the top of my head while writing that's had a morality system in it that doesn't just come off as lazy dogshit that only lets you play to extremes.  

Just don't fucking do it