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