Localizers Suck But So Do You

 

I was browsing a certain video game forum when I came across this image complaining about the quality of the translation of the upcoming Vanillaware game Unicorn Overlord.  To me, the image at the top of the post seems fine.  Certainly a great deal more flowery than the original Japanese script but not wrong, you aren't being given a greatly different script to the original Japanese.  However this thread was full of people, who I assume don't speak Japanese, absolutely frothing at the mouth at how the translation was "wrong" and going off on conspiracy theories about how "they" are using video game translations to push agendas or whatever weird terminally online bullshit these people like to go on about.

But to some degree I can sympathize with what they are saying.  Not the conspiracy part, that is absolute lunacy, but there does seem to be a severe lack of skill within the field of media translation that needs to be adressed.  I have played some absolute fucking STINKERS in my time, the chief example which really sticks out in my mind in recent years has been Fire Emblem Three Houses.  Never have I quite had an experience where the Japanese voices that I was listening to compared to the English text boxes I was reading felt so wildly different.  I covered it in a blog post I did previously on the game 

https://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2021/04/fire-emblem-3-houses.html

Fire Emblem seems to be famous for it actually with 2 characters basically having a support conversation stripped from the game entirely

You can basically take any game from recent memory, give it to someone who knows Japanese and I guarantee they will be able to find some pretty bad errors in it.  Hell, even in games with generally good translations like Triangle Strategy there is one mission where the dialogue is basically flipped to have the opposite meaning.  It's only a small scene and doesn't really affect anything but the idea that someone who is supposedly fluent in Japanese who is being paid to put the game into English making such a basically Genki Book 1 level error is embarassing.

You aren't free from these problems though by avoiding official translations because Fan Translations are even worse.  While a few good ones do exist, most of these fan translations are done by hobbyists who probably couldn't pass the JLPT N3 desperately sitting there with a kanji dictionary and google translate cobbling together whatever they can to provide an obscure game to western players.  The only reason I don't rag on these guys harder is because what they are doing is actually pretty cool and fan translations are generally aquired for free.  For example, there's a fan translation of one of my favorite Sega Saturn games, Baroque, and while it's probably awful (just assuming, I've not played the translated version, maybe/I hope I'm wrong) I would rather it exist and allow people who can't read Japanese to discover a great game like that than have it fade into true obscurity on a shelf in a Super Potato.

But on the flip side of all this are the people actually making the complaints.  Most people on social media or in forums who are levelling these criticisms at a games translation do not speak Japanese.  Someone with Google translate or a very surface level understanding of the language will tell them that it's wrong and then treat that as absolute fact when, a lot of the time, the things they are complaining about are daft.  Take that Unicorn Overlord screenshot at the top of the post.  Nothing that the guy is saying in English isn't reflected in the Japanese.  What I imagine happened is that someone on production looked at the setting to that game and said "ok we are going with ye-oldy flowery bullshit for the English" and then made those demands to whoever was actually doing the translating and English script writing.  In the few cases of game translations that I have personally been a part of, stylistic requirements for writing are usually made by a higher up who usually would have a mental break down if they tried to order a plate of spaghetti in a resturant.  I'm not sure if that's how it works in a much larger studio like Vanillaware but someone not related to the work making those stylistic demands is a situation I can easily imagine from my own experience.

That's sort of beside the point though because when you waste your time arguing so passionately about stuff that is generally fine not being 1 to 1 is that people who are within those circles will use idiotic rantings like this to dismiss large swathes of criticism and therefore things will never get any better.  I have known people who worked for Nippon Ichi who can't pass the JLPT N5 working on translations for Disgaea Mobile and another guy who had the creative writing skills of a well weathered rock claiming he worked on Scarlet Nexus and One Piece Odyssey.  The field is FULL of people like this who either suck at writing or suck at Japanese or both but the field is so underpaid that it only attracts these kinds of people.  Anyone who is worth a shit at Japanese language goes into things like Engineering or Computer Sciency type shit, you'd have to be a failiure or a weirdo to have a decent JLPT result and still want to do that.  What the field needs are skilled lingusts calling out the awful translation quality and maybe fighting for some actual decent salaries but that'll never happen so we're just stuck with this bullshit.

The best thing you can do if it bothers you that much is just learn Japanese.  I can promise you that it won't take anymore than about 2 years of study to get to a point where you can start playing most games without much issue and having language skills outside of just your mother tongue is never a bad thing.  

Hit the books, ya fuckin nerd

The Windows Are Gone

 

On my stream I like to do a little segment that I call "free game dumpster diving" which, I know, is a strange thing to call it considering that a lot of the things I do play end up being quite good but I started with that and I'm not about to change it now.  One of the things I played recently on that segment was a little thing called The Windows Are Gone which I found moderately impressive so I want to do a little post about it and shine some light on it.

The Window Are Gone starts out with a character moving into a new house as a way of getting a fresh start after experiencing some kind of horrible event.  It starts out quite simple with you just having to carry your boxes of stuff into the house but before too long things start to get a little creepy with a next door neighbor coming to say hi and things going bump in the....day.  Things going bump in the day I think is a smidge creepier because the day is when things aren't supposed to go bump.  Bump in the night? no problem, deal with that shit all the time, bump in the day? that's just fuckin wrong.

Anyway the story is extremely short and I want you, the reader, to actually go and play it so without getting into any spoilers things escalate pretty quickly and a decent horror experience ensues.  The story is pretty predictable and you can KIND of guess whats going on as early as the first little text message you get on your phone from another character but what the game lacks in originality it makes up for with absolute SPADES of atmosphere.  Come cool sound design couple with the not-quite PS1 visuals and some funky tricks with timers and triggers was able to actually get a little bit of a spook out of me and when considering that most AAA huge budget large studio bullshit horror games can't get that out of me, that's impressive.  

What Mr or Mrs ScaryCube has managed to show here is restraint, which I feel is a bit of a lost art in the genre in recent memory.  While a lot of horror games want to hit you with dark corridors, lound banging and BOO! CREEPY FUCKIN MONSTER! as quickly as possible The Windows Are Gone knows how to use its short run time to allow itself to build up properly.  Start with something mundane, get comfortable, get a little cozy even and then slowly IV Drip that spooky shit until the climax.  I've always thought that short stories are probably the best delivery method for horror literature and I'm starting to think that short, bite-sized games like this might be a more advantagous method of delivering horror games as well.  A solid 1-4 hour experience is proabably more conducive to making something truly scary rather than an 8 hour gory screamfest that you become desensitized to by hour 3 (Dead Space, you unscary fuck).  

Finally, the game allows you to actually open up the boxes and decorate the house which, in my opinion, was a way more entertaining part of the game than I ever thought something like that could be.  Move over Unpacking, The Windows Are Gone has got your fuckin number.

This post could be longer but I really don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it before and didn't see it on my stream.  It costs literally 0 money and is short as fuck so don't make any excuses, go try it now.

ATLUS Piss Me Off

 

When I got home from work this evening I came face to face with an announcement for Shin Megami Tensei 5 Vengeance.  In fairness, SMT V probably needed a bit of a re-do.  While I didn't hate it on the Switch it felt a little half baked, especially in the story department and it sort of ran like complete garbage with weird frame drops when doing basic stuff like opening the menu so moving it to PC is probably a good idea.

But what pisses me off is that this sort of initial release followed by a "real" release is a thing that ATLUS has been doing that really pisses me off.  A good example is with Persona 3 all the way back on PS2.  Persona 3 comes out in 2006 and then in 2007 they drop an updated version, Persona 3 FES, in 2007 which is basically the same game but better.  Then they do it again with Persona 4 on PS2 and then Persona 4 Golden on Vita where P4G is basically identical to the base game but with just more stuff.  Persona 5 is also guilty of this shitty practice with base P5 and then Persona 5 Royale coming out a year or two later.

You might think that mainline MegaTen is free from this practice since the only thing that seems to come close before this announcement is SMT 4 but 4A is a sequel to 4, its an entirely different game.  But what you may not know is that Nocturne did this shit a couple years prior but it was only in Japan so most players weren't aware.  There was a initial release of Nocturne and then this was followed up with Nocturne Maniax which is the version we got in the west with the True Demon ending and the fiends and all that good shit.  If you were a Japanese player though, you might have got fucked by buying the initial version because its basically the same game just with less shit.  Then they released it AGAIN with a version called Chronicle where its basically the same as Maniax just with Raidou instead of Dante (from Devil May Cry).  

It's not just the double releasing to leech money out of fans that pisses me off though, their DLC policies are horrendous.  When SMT V first dropped it came with a whole bunch of DLC.  Demons, quests, a secret boss fight all locked behind a paywall instead of just being in the game so some scumfuck suits can make a line go up.  Even worse than that you could just pay for levels and money with another set of DLC and what made the whole thing super annoying was that you couldn't just buy the demons and secret boss, it was all or nothing.  It took me way longer than needed for me to get the DLC because I had to painstakingly buy the "good" DLC one by one in order to avoid that pay to win magatama dogshit.  The DLC side of things gets especially shitty with the release of Soul Hackers 2

Fucking iconic demons like Mara and Satan locked behind a 10 pound day 1 DLC.  Absolutely fucking disgusting considering that the game is (still) 50 fucking pounds.  Shoutouts to BOOK OFF for selling me the PS4 version for the yen equivalent of 5 pounds.

I fucking love Shin Megami Tensei and I'm of course thrilled to be getting more of it.  I just wish whoever is in charge of the more business side of the franchise would just fuck off forever because I'm sick of being nickle and dimed with one of the only IPs I'm still passionate about.  

Also bring back SMT Imagine, ATLUS, you fucking cowards

Super Mario Kart is Actually Garbage

 

I remember as a child seeing  Super Mario Kart on TV screens around electronic stores and thinking it looked like the coolest shit in the world but for some reason my parents never got it for me.  None of my friends who also owned a SNES at the time had it either so while I enjoyed Mario Kart on the GBA, DS, Gamecube and Wii throughout the years, the original outing had completely passed me by until recently.

Well, I really should thank my parents for never buying me this one because holy shit is this game a piece of fucking garbage.  I'm actually surprised at just how popular Mario Kart is in the modern day because if I had played this one when it was new, I sure as shit wouldn't have been so willing to give the later entries a try.

As far as the core game is concerned its pretty similar to what you might be used to if you too have only played the newer games.  Drive around the track, collect items to pelt at the other racers, try to come first.  The big difference with this game, however, is that it's worse in pretty much every way.  Most notably the handling of the karts is complete ass.  Just steering left and right feels like pulling teeth and the drifting?  fucking forget it.  You jump and do drifts in basically the same way but the drift sends you flying super wide around corners if you try to hold it for anything more than a nanosecond and the AI that is constantly cheating will just take it tight without so much as a jump and just overtake you anyway.

Not only does the AI cheat with its driving but it LOVES to cheat with the items too.  On 50cc its not so noticable but on 100 is when you really start to feel it.  Most tracks only have a single section on them where there is a collection of item boxes.  But the AI racers don't give a fuck about that, if you are in first the second place racer will CONSTANTLY be pelting you with shit to try and make you screw up.  Even if you aren't in first place the AI fucking cheats with the items.  After I managed to pull a win on the 100cc special cup, I decided to check out the 150cc mode because that's usually the most fun in these games.  I was in like, 6th or something and the Luigi in front of me popped a star, ok fine.  But then, right after that star ran out, he just fucking popped another one.  We hadn't crossed the item boxes, his inventory should have been empty, but nope, fuck the rules he's just invincible forever I guess.  Even when you get items sometimes they just wont work.  At one point I had a red shell which I fired at the first place racer who then proceeded to just fucking jump over it.  Not like, the little hop that you do when you press L or R, a big ass fucking jump as if they had the feather item but, once again, there's no way in hell they should have had that shit because earlier in the lap they were pelting me with mushrooms, so what the fuck?!  Playing Super Mario Kart is like playing with a shitty little kid who just starts making stuff up when they start losing.  "Nuh-uh, you can't overtake me because my car suddenly has giant rocket boosters", fuck off kid, how about I boost you into a wood chipper.

Not to mention that a single error can basically cost you an entire race even if that error is made on like, lap 2 of 5.  In the later games the AI also cheats a bit there too but you can outskill them.  You can race so well and be so far ahead in those games that even if you get smashed with back to back blue shells, in most situations a human player will be so far in the lead it won't matter.  In Super Mario Kart you can be in first for a whole race, playing perfectly and then clip the dirt for a nano-second and suddenly you're in 7th holding nothing but a banana peel and a bucket of salty tears.  If the course has bits that you can fall off and you happen to go off track then fucking forget it, just restart because you aren't climbing the positions fast enough for a decent result.

I'm sure there's some massively sweaty bellend who's really good at Mario Kart who can play all the tracks perfectly and get world record times who would disagree with everything I've said about the game but to you, hypothetical person in my mind, I say that you can fuck right off and fellate an exhaust pipe.  Mastering a shit game doesn't change the fact that it's a shit game, go away.

Thankfully, unlike the later entries the game rolls credits at the end of 100cc special cup so after trying 150 and seeing the bullshit dial turned to fucking 15 I put the game down.  No, I refuse to sit here and roll the item dice for hours on end until I get a gold cup, it's not worth it, not even for Retro Achievements.  The later games are fun as fuck but this first game belongs in the pits of hell next to Shaq-Fu and fucking Hong Kong 97.  Piece of actual garbage

The Worst Kind of Horror

 

I am a big fan off the horror genre as you might be able to guess from the fact that I always do giant 31 game challenges of various horror games every October.  It's not just one of my favorite genres for video games but it's also the first genre I go to for books and movies too.  I'm just can't get enough of all that spooky bullshit.

Horror is a pretty broad term as within "Horror" there's all sorts of different types of horror.  Slasher, supernatural, body horror, psychological, sci-fi and found footage are just a few examples of all the different sub-genres within the giant umbrella that is "horror".  But there is one sub-genre within this niche that has consistently just the absolute worst content known to man and that's Mascot Horror.  If you see a game within this sub genre then I suggest you ignore it and not waste your money (or time, if its free to play) because the only thing you are in for with the majority of games within this genre is a bad experience with maybe a couple of jump scares peppered in between.

I feel like the big jumping off point for Mascot Horror was Five Nights and Freddies, the game that really put the genre on the map.  Now I don't actually hate FNaF all that much, it's not mind-blowing or anything and its tension is quickly ruined by its eagerness to kill you with a jump scare but its a neat little idea for a game.  However the majority of its sequels and all the copycats it spawned are probably some of the worst things to happen to the horror genre in its entire history. 

Poppy's Playtime, Garten of Banban, Baldi's Basics, Amanda the Adventurer, countless examples of just low effort trash shat onto various online platforms for idiots to waste their money on.  Desperately hoping that the game, like FNaF, will be picked up by enough children that think it's being really clever to develop a following and in turn, make a boatload of cash.  Really though, juxtaposing childrens entertainment with horror elements is just a really lame way of generating fear and it's the kind of thing that only a person under the age of maybe 12 might think is effective.  Movies do this too where horror films like to take a childrens song and have it play slowly over some scene of violence and I have never once in my life met a person who thinks that that kind of thing is effective in any way.

The two worst offenders I can think of within the genre are Bendy and the Ink Machine and CASE: Animatronics.  Both games are janky, poorly made pieces of actual shit that fail both as horror properties and as games.  CASE is far worse being a buggy, low effort mess clearly trying to muscle in on some of that FNaF money but Bendy is just as offensive to the senses as that has somehow manage to build itself a little bit of a following.

You aren't being clever by taking something that's "for children" and making it spooky or worse, covering it in gore for shock value.  Take your Unreal Engine horror game template and fuck off, stop wasting time and money by putting this shit to market.  Go and work on something actually interesting instead.

ROM Sites are Important

 

In the last couple of days well used emulation website CDRomance I assume got contacted by some legal types and were forced to take down all of their download links.  A sad day for users of emulation as CDRomance was probably one of the easiest places to get even some of the most obscure games you could think of and now those users have been scattered to other sites once again as a giant of emulation has fallen.

There are going to be a number of people, mainly Nitendo fans for some reason, who will see this news and think "Good! Another piracy website getting what it deserves" but I wish to point out to these idiots that emulation websites like CDRomance and Emuparadise before it are probably the best thing we have when it comes to the preservation of old games because we all know that developers and publishers sure as shit aren't going to preserve the data themselves.  In fact, companies are going out of their way to erase the past in the form of the hundreds of remakes that you see every year.  One look at Twitter when Resident Evil 4 Remake came out with people saying absolutely insane things like "Resident Evil 4 was always bad and this update was completely needed" and it paints the picture that even so-called "gaming enthusiasts" don't care about preserving the past of the medium.  People are more than happy to have the old thing erased if we can get another version of that old thing that just looks a bit shinier, even if its completely removed from what that original thing was.

There are purists out there who will also argue that emulation is bad because if you wanted to play or preserve the old thing so bad then you should go through the effort of aquiring original discs/carts and hardware.  Well there's two big problems with that.  The first being is that no physical media will last forever.  As much as I enjoy owning discs and carts of my personal faves there will come a day, maybe within my lifetime or maybe after I'm dead, it doesn't matter, that those discs and connectors on the carts will rot and the data will be lost.  You can make all the clone systems you want to play them but that doesn't change the fact those carts and discs will die one day.  Just because it might happen a few generations from now doesn't make it not a problem.  The second issue is that a lot of these games, the ones people want to play and preserve are prohibitably expensive thanks to absolute idiots treating old games like NFTs, not as games to be played or pieces of art to be preserved, but things to speculate on and hopefully get rich off of.

Don't forget, that when you buy an overpriced video game off some sausage fingered unwashed cunt on E-Bay or whatever other service, you aren't supporting that game in any meaningful way.  The money doesn't go to a developer that worked on it or even a grimy publisher that put it on store shelves, it goes right into the pocket of that unwashed cunt so that he can find some other obscure Saturn or N64 game to buy on the cheap and sit on it in the hopes that it'll build in value.  These phsycial copies don't hold any real purpose if they are priced so high that most people who remember them fondly or may want to experience them for the first time can't get hold of them.  

That's why emulation is so important, it makes the entire history of the medium avaliable for everyone to play and who knows how these older games may inspire another users who otherwise may have never gotten to try them.  How many games that have been locked to Japan for years for most people have been made avaliable to wider audiences thanks to emulation and ROM sites.  NO ONE would have known what fucking Racing Lagoon was if not for the efforts of those fan translators and sure, a bunch of people "pirated" the game to play it in English but if you think about it another way, the interest generated from that fan translation should maybe have the cogs going in some Square Enix money-mans brain to do a remake or a sequel.

Companies need to put the legal threats down and let ROM sites for old games just exist and a "necessary evil" for the sake of the mediums history.  Sure, if you have some sweaty nerds pirating the lastest Switch games to run on Yuzu, sure, take that shit down but if little Timmy wants to download fucking Albert Odyssey (real game btw) and experience it for the first time then fucking let him, I'm sure SEGAs bottom line will be just fine even if 100,000 people did that.

Leave the ROM sites alone
Fuck you Nintendo

Note: I'm aware of the half-truths in this post but I'm not discussing that here, shut up and enjoy your tickets in silence, idiot

I liked the Vita more than the 3DS

 

I feel like today there's not a lot going on in the realms of portable gaming.  Sure, the Switch has a "portable" mode and the Steam Deck exists but both of these systems are wide and unwieldly, not the kind of thing I can just yank out of a pocket on a work commute and play for a short time.  But not that long ago we had the dual choice of either a Nintendo 3DS or the Playstation Vita and while most people preferred the 3DS or never touched a Vita, I was one of these mutants that opted for the Vita significantly more than my 3DS.

Now for the record, I own both systems and I like both of them.  What I am NOT saying with this post is that the 3DS is a shitty system.  I know in most gaming spaces the idea of liking 2 "opposing" things is an impossibility but I don't roll like that.  The 3DS had Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Persona Q for fucks sake, I'm not just going to write it off.  That said though, the Vita feels like a system that was almost made entirely for me and my weird tastes as well as my unusual situation at the time that I got it and therefore got significantly more play time.

The first reason for the preference, the big one, was that the Vita was region free.  I bought my 3DS from a friend while at University in England and with it I got a handful of games which was very cool.  However shortly after making this purchase I moved to Japan where I was basically locked out of buying more software for the thing.  I WANTED to give Nintendo my money for new games and they said "what's that? you're an British expat in Japan? well why don't you go fuck yourself, eh?" and thus no new games were ever bought.  Well almost no new games, I bought a copy of Persona Q and by "I bought" I mean I had my mother buy for me and send to me here in Japan which was unfair to her, making her go to game stores looking for weebshit and was a pain in the ass for me in wait times, potential package theft and subsequent repaying of game price.  I didn't even play Shin Megami Tensei 4 on my own 3DS, I borrowed a friends American 3DS with a copy of the game downloaded to it off the e-shop.  I couldn't use the e-shop because the British e-shop wouldn't accept my Japanese credit card and I didn't own a British one so even the digital path was blocked off to me.  And I know there's some fucking gimp reading this post going "jUsT hAcK iT" to which I say that you can go fuck yourself.  I can't be bothered with that and its not something I should HAVE to do just to play new games.

The Vita on the other hand was more than willing to accomodate my multi-region needs at the time.  Bought for my by my wife in Japan, then taken to Sweden, England and America for various reasons and I bought games in all of these countries and just popped them in and had a grand old time.  Not to mention that my PS+ subscription was giving me 2 Vita games a month for free as well as 2 PS4 so I had quite the collection of games and I didn't even have to spend all that much to get it.

Speaking of the games, that's the other reason I like the Vita so much.  I don't care all that much about the 3DS library.  Bravely Default was pretty good and SMT4 and 4A were fun but I can't recall much that really stands out in my mind.  Even flagship titles like A Link Between Worlds, while not shitty, were unmemorable and not the kind of games I'm ever going to rush back and play.  Hell, as I wrote this post I went to go dig out my little box of 30 or so 3DS carts just to make sure there wasn't something amazing that had slipped my mind but all I got was disappointment.  I had middling amounts of fun with the 3DS when playing it, but nothing that stuck out.

The Vita on the other hand seemed to be made EXACTLY for me.  I bought it with a copy of Project Diva F and anyone who watches my streams knows how much of a sucker I am for my weird vocaloid rhythm games.  At the time, the Vita was also the only way to play Persona 4 Golden so that got a great many hours put into it too.  But most of all, the Vita seems to have a large supply of what I like to call "Windows Screensaver Games".  They are usually known as "first person dungeon crawlers" but "dungeon crawler" has been co-opted by idiots who put things like Diablo and Baldurs Gate in the category as well so I like my name better.  Dungeon Travelers, Wizardry, Zanki Zero, Mary Skelter, Labyrinth of Galleria are just a few of the more obvious ones but my Vita's memory card is full to BURSTING with these fucking things.  Tons of obscure Japan only dungeon crawls for me to satiate my weird niche interest that I can just slide into my jacket pocket and play anywhere I want?  Actual gaming heaven.  Hell, about a week before writing this post I JUST bought Meikyuu Cross Blood off Amazon for the Vita, its fucking 2024 and I'm still discovering new dungeon crawls to enjoy for the bloody thing.  So between the rhythm games and the catering to a niche genre that only I and a few others care for, the Vita got the majority of my love and attention.

Not that it was a perfect system.  The 3DS certainly had better portibility, the Vita's design is sort of similar to the Switch and Steam Deck but JUST small enough to not be a pain in the cock, but only just.  Also the 3DS let you slam any old SD card into it for memory but the Vita had these absurdly expensive Sony memory cards the largers versions of which were as much as 2 or 3 games in terms of price.  Sony can really lick my balls on that one, worst part of its design by a lot.  Also the Vita has this stupid back touch screen which I don't think I've ever used once personally and I only know 1 game off the top of my head that uses it at all.

I can fully understand why the 3DS greatly outlasted the Vita and why it enjoyed significantly more popularity from general audiences.  However, the Vita, for me, seemed so attuned to my weird tastes for grid based weebshit that there's no way Nintendo ever stood a chance in my household.

God bless you, PS Vita, I don't think there will ever be a system with a library quite like yours ever again.

Don't Breathe 2: How One Scene can Ruin a Movie

 

Don't Breathe was a lackluster horror movie released in 2016 about a blind man defending his house from a bunch of criminals trying to rob him.  The blind man, is of course, some kind of ex-army guy and despite his affliction is more the capable of doing some unspeakable things to the assholes invading his home.  The movie climaxed with a really gross twist involving a turkey baster and then ended in a way that my memory didn't retain for the most part but I think there was a jump scare from a dog involved.  The writing was fucking awful but the premise and action was enough to at least carry it into a solid "meh" rating where I came away not loving it but not hating it either.  A middling day at the cinema where I at least got to enjoy some time with a friend.

Well, at time of writing I'm currently suffering from the flu and while laying in bed unable to sleep I decided to start looking through the Netflix listings only to find that Don't Breathe got a sequel released all the way back in 2021.  I had no idea this had even come out and so I immdiately tapped the poster and gave it a watch and while at its core its a sort of average gore-fest action film, there's one scene that happened early on that made me frustrated with the rest of the film

Spoilers from here but do you really give a shit?

The film follows the same blind man from the first film who has now aquired himself a daughter that he is extremely protective of.  Behavior that, if you saw the first film, is at least somewhat understandable.  After some establishing scenes with him and the daughter these 4 guys turn up in an attempt to kidnap her and this is what kicks off the high-action blood and gore.  There's one scene in particular, though, where the entire plot just falls apart and it lodged itself into my brain so hard that it ruined the rest of the movie for me.  The blind man had fashioned a metal container box in his basement for his daughter to use a sort of panic room as he goes around and deals with the bad man.  Early into the fighting he tells her to get in there and she complies.  One of the dudes trying to get her chases her down into the basement and when he realises he can't get her out, he grabs a nearby hose and starts flooding the box through an air-hole at the top, I suppose in an attempt to make her panic and leave.  She doesn't leave and eventually the blind man fights his way down into the basement to take on this dude who then proceeds to pull a bit of electrical wire off the wall and hang into into the box to electrocute the girl inside.  They fight, blind man wins, girl doesn't get electrocuted because the wire is pulled away but nearly drowns and she is let free and the movie continues.

Later you find out that the girl is actually the bioloigical daughter of the guy invading the house, a meth cook who's been in prison for a long stint after his lab blew up and he wants her back.  This twist immediately sent my flu-medicine addled brain into storm of confusion.  Why the fuck would that guy attempt to kill the girl if its the boss of his daughter?!  They all seemed to be in on it, surely it's a fucking awful idea to kill your bosses only child just so you can win a fist fight with a blind man.  It may not seem like a big deal but then the twistier twist is that he doesn't want his daughter back because he's a good father, he wants her back so he can harvest her heart and give it to his dying wife!!!  The previous scene of the girl drowning in a metal box came flooding back into my mind like "wow, you're goon nearly completely fucked you at the 30 minute mark" and I'm baffled as to how no one read that in the script or pre-production and didn't bring up this giant gaping problem with the plot.

I actually think this is a worse twist than the turkey baster because that just seemed like a needlessly written garbage plot point for shock value but this is the foundation of the entire story just being disregarded for a cheap bit of character peril.  

The rest of the movie was fine, I guess.  Another case of not shitty enough to be upset about and not good enough to remember in any capacity after I finish writing this post.  A completely average movie with some, once again, awful writing only worth watching if there's literally nothing else. 

Numbered Game Scores are Meaningless

 

Despite what people might say about the people who write for games review sites, review scores are still things that a lot of people pay attention to and for your average consumer of video games I can understand why.  A numbered review score is a nice quick way to see if someone thinks a game is worth your time or not.  If you don't want to risk potential spoilers or you want to go in as blind as possible but still want a recommendation before dropping some cash, a numbered score can be useful.  For example if you wanted to get the general opinion on a game like LISA, a game best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible and wanted to limit the risk of any spoiler talk or having any of its more fun plot beats ruined for you, a quick look at Metacritic or IGN (IGN doens't actually have a review of LISA because they suck shit) will let you know if it's worth picking up.

But, for as long as I can remember reviews being a thing the numbers in these reviews barely mean anything.  For example, a 10/10 is a perfect score so therefore one might assume that a 10/10 review means that the games is perfect, a flawless masterpiece meant to be played by absolutely everyone, a work of art so good in every way that even non-gamers would be able to pick it up as their first entry into the medium and have their mind blown.  Well no, not the case.  IGN gave Breath of the Wild a 10/10 review despite the game being sparse, far too easy, chocked full of filler bullshit in the form of shrines and seeds and having some of the worst combat the series has ever had thanks to shitty damage calculations and breakable weapons.  Despite its laundry list of flaws and annoyances, because it belongs to a long running IP run by a big corporation, these sorry excuses for writers will slap a 10 on it.  So if 10 doesn't mean perfect and instead just means really good, then anything under a 10 becomes equally skewed.  We now live in an era where a game that gets released and is given a 6/10 by a reviewer will be deemed by a lot of people to be "unplayable".  Just look at IGNs review of Starfield, a game that is disliked by many for being sparse, buggy and full of copy-paste jobs still manages to get a 7.  

The numbers have been skewed so hard they don't mean anything anymore.  Do you like the game? give it a 9, did you like it A LOT? then bump it up to a 10.  Did you dislike the game? 7/10, was it really not for you? slap a 6 on that bitch.  I feel like anything below a 6 is reserved for stuff that's flat out broken (or maybe not since Starfield got a 7 hyuk hyuk) or for games that offend the reviewer in some way such as the infamous God Hand review where the guy playing it sucked at the combat and didn't like the humor so he gave it a 3.  Fuck that guy by the way, deserves to be kicked out of the industry if you ask me, twat.

If you ask me, a real 10/10 game doesn't exist.  Nothing is perfect, everything has its problems.  There are certainly some games that skirt the line of perfection like DOOM, Hotline Miami or SMT 3 but even those titles have certain little things in them that pull them from that number.

But despite all that, outside of a quick reference so some punter can know if a game is worth the buy in or not, numbered reviews are generally really fucking stupid.  It is completely daft to expect a person to boil down a complex opinion on a thing, not just games for that matter, into a number.  Like I personally, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to do it, would rate famously shit survival horror game Countdown Vampires and medicore but the still impressive Parasite Eve 2 a 7 out of 10.  Without hearing my thoughts in detail those two identical numbers don't mean anything.  A lot of reviews do come with articles attatched to them but there are also a great many cases where people don't read those and instead either look at just the number or worse, the metacritic which is why the skew is so annoying

Reviews have a lot more problems than just the number at the bottom, the people writing them not knowing what they are doing, chiefly, I'm just bitching about something I find stupid while I'm sick with the flu.  Ideally, you should just ignore reviews entirely.  Look at a little bit of promo material, decide if its your kind of game or not and just fucking try it.  You don't need internet approval to enjoy a game, ignore the general audiences and just play stuff

The Dead By Daylight Lights Out Modifier Kinda Sucks

 

Dead by Daylight introduced a new temporary mode to the game recently called Lights Out and while it's cool to see BHVR try new things with the forumla this is a lackluster addition to the game that only works to generate boredom and frustration instead of the intense scares I think they were aiming for.

The idea behind Lights Out is very simple.  It's the same thing as you're usual Dead By Daylight match but perks, add-ons, items and offerings have been disabled as well as most of the HUD elements.  On top of this survivors don't leave scratch marks when they run around and killers don't have a terror radius.  The cherry on top is that all the maps avaliable in Lights Out mode have been significantly darkened and visibility is extremely poor so ambushing people from the gloom or accidently running into the killer are pretty common occurances.  

I will admit, the first match I had with this modifier I thought it was kind of neat but it failed to hold any interest after that first game.  Things are especially boring after you kill two people and the remaining survivors start to sneak around more to hold the game hostage for significantly longer than usual.  Wandering around the dark gloom for 10s of minutes, unsurprisingly, not all that fun.  Also the lack of variation kills the mode after the first match.  There's a fun game to be played in regular DbD where you are trying to work out who has what perks and how to play around the team to avoid having your efforts thwarted by a nasty Decisive Strike or what have you.  If you catch someone, you are going to kill them, its that easy which sounds like it would be great for killer mains but when its this easy its just boring.  I'll take being teabagged at the exit gates any day over 0 effort victories like this.  Killer in Dbd is satisfying because it's extremely hard and Lights Out removes the difficulty and therefore removes the fun

The one good thing about Lights Out is it does prove to some degree just how stacked the game is towards the survivor side.  Thanks to no perks and no items, survivors don't have their arsenal of bullshit get out of murder free cards to use as crutches when they play badly.  It really does prove that playing regular DbD on survivor side is just playing the game on easy mode.  I'm sure for survivors lights out is even more miserable but I've not tried it so I wouldn't know personally.  A quick Google of the mode seems to support my idea though that this mode just isn't fun for survivor.

I think there's also some techinical fuck-ups going on too where every game I have played has been on the Yamaoka Esate despite there being 4 maps in rotation.  Also every 3rd match of Lights Out just fails to load properly and disconnects which would be a minor annoyance in most cases but queues for this mode are LONG, probably because not many people are playing it so when you're match fails like that its extremely frustrating.

I do commend BHVR for trying something new, I just wish that they had tried a mode that was actually something new and not just "Dead by Daylight but less and darker".  I personally would love to see a mode where the killer has some kind of objective to fulfill and the survivors have to stop it, could be a fun sort of reverse twist on the usual formula although I understand that would require a lot more work that what we got.  Still, I hope the modifiers are a thing that's here to stay but maybe shelf Lights Out and let it rot in the darkness where it belongs

The Silent Hill 2 Remake Gets Worse

 

So without me realizing it some new Silent Hill 2 gameplay footage dropped and while I'm not usually one to watch these kinds of promotional material I just HAD to see what was going on with this absolute trainwreck of a remake.  I knew from the start that SH2R is doomed to be awful in every way but, at least from what I can glean from this trailer, it is way worse than I had ever imagined.  

First thing I have to mention is the graphics, the game LOOKS like complete shit.  Now you could argue that it's early footage or whatever but this game has been in development for a good while already and if this is where we are up to then things look pretty grim.  What's weird is that the visual design of their games is literally the only thing Bloober Team is any good at.  Layers of Fear, for example, is a gigantic piece of steaming garbage but if you go on the store page for it and take a look at some screenshots it looks pretty well put together.  Hell, I imagine a lot of their sales for that game came off the back of tricking people with talented 3D artists to get curious shoppers to buy in.  In particular within that trailer james is fighting some Lying Figures and they look AWFUL.  They sort of look like they've been pulled right from the movie but not the actual 3D model used from that film but an amateurs recreation of that model, horrendous.

Then there's the problem of the combat itself.  It's pretty much stock standard over the shoulder gameplay but there's something about it that looks really bad.  The way it looks gives me weird Homecoming vibes and the abundance of QTE gives me flashhbacks to Silent Hill Origins and that is NOT a good combo at all.  People like to piss and moan about tank controls and shit but that style of gameplay was FINE for a game like this and once you get used to them they don't really feel at that bad at all.  I don't subscribe to the "it makes James feel like he sucks at fighting" thing either, that's fucking stupid bullshit spouted by people who just suck at playing the game since Harry, James and Heather, unlike the highly trained members of S.T.A.R.S can at least have some mobility while aiming.  Not having the camera locked to the right side of James's shoulder though allows the developers to do some things with enviroment design that would probably get missed with a camera so zoomed in.  There's a lot to say for tank over the more modern system but that's another post for another day.

The final thing about the trailer, the thing that stuck out the absolute most out of all the others was some writing on a wall that read "Reap what you sow"

Silent Hill 2 was never this kind of game, never this brand of horror.  It was slow burn, atmospheric, oppressive before lurching into some really scary stuff for a short time and then pulling you back into weird spooky serenity.  Think the part in the hospital, its a great example.  Calm and creepy up till the the bit where Laura locks you in a room with those weird things from the ceiling, then opressive as all fuck and THEN holy shit triangle man is chasing you down a hall and it all ends with James in the hospital defeated, sad and alone while some calm music plays.  I get that this trailer is just supposed to be a short compilation of "the scary bits" but look at Bloobers other games and tell me that you think that they are going to be able to pull off what original Silent Hill 2 was doing.  Of course they fucking aren't, the whole game is going to be always like that all of the time.  Silent Hill 2 via Dead Space and "Reap what you sow" written on a wall in bright text is a perfect signpost as to just how little anyone working on this remake understand what the original was about or trying to do.

Remakes can, in general, suck my ass as in most cases they are a shitty way for some execs to use nostalgia as a method of getting a bigger bonus for the year. But this remake, which is doing that but made by people who clearly lack a lot of talent and probably don't even care about the source material can extra suck my ass through a straw after I have consumed a large amount of spicy food

Fuck SH2R