You Aren't Deep, You're An Idiot

 

A long ass time ago I bought a huge bundle of games from Itch.io that was to support charity efforts for that thing that happened with George Floyed all those years ago.  It was called the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality which is a good and noble cause to fight for but I'll be honest with you chief, I just wanted the cheap copy of Celeste because the Switch version fucking sucks thanks to Joycons being awful.  Still, if Nintendo making shit controllers put some coins in the pocket of a worthy cause, I suppose thats a net positive to the world at large.  Aside from Celeste though, this pack came with hundreds of other little indie games and I have recently taken it upon myself to beat or at least try all of them.  Not a huge undertaking in actuality because the majority of the games are tiny indie experiences but some of the things in this bundle are so bad that despite getting them for nearly 0 currency I feel ripped off 

KIDS simply describes itself as "a game of crowds" on its Steam page but it's being sneaky there because KIDS isn't a game at all.  It's a weird non-game, and I'm refusing to call it an art piece or an experience either, that seems to be designed purely to inflict boredom on whoevers playing it.  The Itch page is a little more honest with its content referring to it as an "interactive animation" which is certainly more accurate.  It's the kind of thing that you might see playing in a dusty corner of an unpopular art exhibition where people might saunter by, click the mouse on the kiosk once or twice, go "what the fuck is this crap?" and then move on.  

The program involves a bunch of humanoid figures running around, falling into holes and being pushed either up or down the screen by a sphincter along with a few more things but those are the big ones.  The "game" part of this whole thing is that you have to either click or run your mouse along the humanoid figures in order to make the little animations happen.  It runs through these scenes are few times and then it ends.  There's nothing really to get about this title, you just watch the little animation play out for 30 minutes and then leave unsatisfied and wondering why you bothered.  

I'm not completely against the idea of weird art games with very little "game" in them like this one.  An example of one I think is good is The Stanley Parable which isn't much of a game by itself but its still making a funny point about games thats interesting to play through.  I know a lot of people use the term "walking simulator" as a derogatory genre tag for interactive fiction with an almost 100% focus on story and visuals but I don't vibe with the idea of that being a bad thing on base principles.  Kids on the other hand is the worst of the worst in this genre because its visuals are dogwater and its not absolutely nothing to say about anything.  

My first thought when playing was that it was trying to make some kind of point about the harms of blindly following the status quo but as the animation went on and it proceeded to repeat itself numerous times that interpretation melted away and instead I was left with "oh its just low rate shit made by an asshole tricking idiots out of 3.39 GPB"  The kind of game that a pseudo intellectual will tell you is some kind of profound experience but will then struggle to tell you anything about it when pressed.  

If you have played KIDS and you somehow got something out of it other than boredom and frustration I would love to hear from you either in a comment on in my stream chat or something.  I'm fully convinced that there is no way to enjoy this thing unless you're about 15 years old and you think vague blobs that represent children falling into a black hole is saying something valuable about society or something. I hate this thing, I want my time back and I want my nearly 0 dollars for buying it as part of a huge bundle back.  My knowledge of its existance makes my standard of living noticably worse

The Awful Kirby Game

 

I quite like a bit of Kirby from time to time.  I wouldn't call myself a die-hard fan of the franchise or anything but I do tend to have a good time with the little guy when I do fire up a game of his every now and again.  The games are baby-easy, clearly by design and are therefore good for when I just want to kick back and stomp all over something for a few hours.  So when I decided to play Amazing Mirror in my quest to explore the GBA library this year on my to-do list I thought it was going to be a nice easy time and instead I got a deeply frustrating slog that felt like pulling teeth.

The premise of Amazing mirror is simple.  There's a big mirror and bits of it have been scattered to the corners of the world and you have to go reasssemble them so you can hop inside and go suck off the big bad guy until he dies.  For some reason this splitting of the mirror has also resulting in a splitting of the Kirby and so you are joined by 3 AI buddies that will hop around and do basically nothing for the duration of the playthrough.  I think the idea is that you are supposed to link cable up and then you all branch off and explore separately until someone finds something of note and then you use an in game phone item to summon each other to that location.  This is 2026 though, so no one owns the game and even if they did, no one owns a fucking link cable and therefore we're left with some deeply frustrating semi open world exploration that only serves to take the classic, fun Kirby formula and make it deeply frustating as it wastes your time every other room.

Let's make one thing very clear here, Amazing Mirror isn't annoying because of its core gameplay.  It's still the same baby-easy Kirby game full of braindead, haphazardly placed enemies that pose basically no threat and even if you somehow do die to something the game showers with you so many one ups that it's actually impossible for any player over the age of 3 to game over.  What makes this game so annoying is the navigation of its world and levels.  Unlike basically every other Kirby game, Amazing Mirror has a more open world that you can explore.  The hub is this big sprawling zone that connects a number of areas and within those areas there are multiple routes you can take.  The problem with this is that only one of those routes will lead to the boss which will net you a mirror shard.  The other routes will often lead you to a "goal" but purplexingly the "goal" at the end of these routes is not the goal of the game.  The goal just gives you a shitty mini game where you ride a star up a screen and then watch Kirby do his stupid little dance.  Sometimes these screens will give you 7000 one ups, sometimes they just give you health.  Why anyone would give a shit about reaching these goals is beyond me because they seem to serve no purpose whatsoever.  Maybe if this were a real video game with some teeth and one ups were a precious resource that needed to be stocked up on I'd understand but its fucking Kirby.

The unused multiplayer mechanic when doing a solo game actually trivializes any potential challenge entirely because the Kirby clones can be utilized to break every boss over your knee and leave them in a bloody pool on the ground.  Using the shoulder buttons you can use a phone to call the CPU companions to your side in order to help you fight any given enemy but not only that, when they arrive the CPU will just hand you a bunch of free healing as well.  So even if there is a boss in this game that you would somehow struggle with, as soon as things start to look a little grim you just hit the call button and then 3 more of you, probably fully powered up with copy abilities, jump in, heal you to full and then start laying on some extreme DPS.  I like Kirby for being easy but this is just taking the piss.

Maybe if you and some friends have this game and a link cable then I can see the appeal.  A lot of the navigation frustration could potentially be worked around by having 4 of you exploring different paths all at once and playing with friends is often just a nice time even if you're playing trash like this.  For the solo-players and emulation users out there though, just skip Amazing mirror because by yourself its just depressing.  Put this shit in the trash and just play Nightmare in Dreamland instead. 

Shadowman Sucks

 

I managed to knock yet another game off the endless stream request list and it was such a slog to play through that I feel compelled to write a thing about it.  Shadowman was released in 1999 for N64, PS1 and PC with a Dreamcast port also coming out a few months after the initial release.  It's a massive piece of shit that a decent number of people seem to have played but seemingly very few people have actually finished and after finally beating it for myself its extremely easy to understand why.  

The plot of the game is that Jack the Ripper is helping some asshole build a big fuck off castle in the land of the dead and this going to cause an apocolypse so you, playing as Shadowman, have to go and collect "dark souls" and shoot some guys in the face with a gun in order to save the day.  If you thought a game with such a simple plot would be a simple experience then you are quite mistaken.

From some of the footage I had seen prior to playing I had expected the game to be a generic 3rd person action shooter but instead Shadowman turned out to be a weird Metroid-like.  You start the game and make your way into "Deadside" where you are being blocked at almost every turn by soul gates or environmental obstacles that you do not have the skills to get past.  As you slog through you'll collect dark souls to unlock the gates which will unlock more areas which will contain items and skills that allow you to get to more areas to get more dark souls.  Standard stuff.  Part of the issue though is that none of the items or skills you get are interesting at all.  For example, in Metroid when you get the ice beam a number of core things about the game are changed all at once and suddenly you have a lot more options.  The gun is stronger which is satisfying and now you can use enemies to make platforms so your brain might light up as you remember some out of reach areas you might have seen previously.  In Shadowman, I slog through some boring ass beige dungeon to find a knife that lets me use teleporters.  I find about 3 of the fucking things and then the knife sits in my inventory for the rest of the game just as unused and unloved as I imagine Micheal LeRoi to be outside of his time as Shadowman.  The other major things you find, Shadowmans version of finding the Varia Suit, are tattoos that grant you certain abilities such as being able to walk on fire or swim in lava.  Two out of the four of these upgrades, which are a real pain in the ass to get, are only used briefly in very specific sections of the game,  so while in Metroid the varia suit is only useful in a few rooms, at least it has the knock on effect of reducing your incoming damage as well.  The toucher ability in Shadowman, for example, does nothing outside of its stated using and practically speaking it means that you push about 4 cubes and can shimmy across one ledge.  What a fucking waste.  

Maybe none of this would be an issue if it was fun to explore but that sucks massive shit too.  The levels have 2 themes, beige looking caverns or rust colored interiors.  That is the only thing you'll be looking at for the majority of your playthrough.  This isn't just visually boring to look at but causes an issue because this game is labyrinthine as fuck and doesn't give you a map at any point so the samey looking environments just cause constant confusion.  There was one level near the end of the game where there were 3 rooms in a loop and I didn't know I was looping because every corridor looked like the previous one so it was only when I hit the entrance again after about 30 minutes of exploring did I realize that I had double backed on myself.  This then led to another 30 minutes of scanning the muddy graphics for a hole in a wall that I had missed.  Maybe if any effort at all had gone into the visuals or a map button had been implemented maybe so much of my life wouldn't have been wasted.  

Then there's the combat and like every other aspect of this title, it sucks massive dicks.  Your main weapon is a pistol that shoots blue blobs and is the only thing that can kill monsters in Deadside.  You do get a regular pistol, shotgun and machine gun but I don't think I used them a single time since they can't actually deliver the killing blow.  I THINK the idea is that you equip one "real" gun in one hand and your soul pistol in the other and then weaken then enemy with bullets before killing them with shadow-powers.  That still doesn't make any fucking sense though because you also find shadow weapons in Deadside that can kill monsters in exchange for the use of some MP or some shit.  All of these weapons are hot dogshit and I got some use out of ONE of them against the games singular large enemy type but otherwise, total waste.  The pistol powers up as your soul meter goes up and allows for a charge shot so there's basically no reason to use anything else.  When the weapons aren't out here being ass though, the combat itself, along with the rest of the controls are basically unusable.  Most of the enemies in the game will just stand in place and shoot at you or run at you in a straight line so you don't feel just how bad it is but every so often a boss will turn up that is significantly more mobile than you and things get real miserable real fast.  Shadowman controls a bit like a tank which is fine for the most part.  Like I said, most enemies just stand and shoot so controlling like a S.T.A.R.S. member with broken legs is manageable.  But then you get some enemies that are fucking Dragon Ball Z teleporting around the arena on you and shooting your from all angles and you just have to sit there and impotently watch your life bar decrease as Shadowman takes 4 business days just to turn 180 degrees.  The final boss in particular is flying around a giant arena while shooting homing missles at you from directions that the camera can't see so good fucking luck with that.  Thankfully, if the final boss kills you, instead of returning to a check point you just get a bad ending and after I saw what I was up against I just threw up my hands and let the world end.  

The thing that really killed my enjoyment of the game though, despite all of its awful design, was the bugs and technical issues.  If I had a dollar for every time I got stuck on some level geometry and was unable to move then I could provide the Alzheimer's charity that we are raising money for here a pretty significant research grant.  Then there's certain enemies that look like they should be just minor annoyances but can kill you in seconds because Shadow Man doesn't get any I-Frames on hit.  Tiny fish in bodies of water and dogs, enemies that seem like they are designed to harrass you and deal minor damage while a bigger threat leads a big attack are actually the most dangerous thing in the game as they can drain your HP from full to zero in a matter of frames.  The worst technical problem, though, came in the form of a wall in the final temple en route to the upgrade that lets you swim in lava.  In that temple there is a wall of rotating blades.  The blades move slow and you have to shimmy across a ledge suspended above a death pit to reach the other side.  It's a pathetically easy trap to avoid but due to the gaps in the ledge the game just bugs the fuck out and Shadow Man gets stuck between the two ledges.  Being locked in places means you cant avoid the blade and then the blade knocks you into the death pit.  SOMETIMES the bug doesn't occcur and you can just shimmy through but its basically a dice roll every time and there's a easy but lengthy platforming section you have to restart from EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. the bug kills you.  When the environment isn't killing you then sometimes bosses or enemies might push your shit in because the targetting system just decides to take a day off in the middle of a fight.  It happens mostly with flying enemies  where Shadow Man just gives up on the fight because I guess he has chronic neck pain.  Maybe these complaints aren't true for the Dreamcast and PS1 versions but I'm sure as shit not suffering this crap game again just to find out 

What blows my fucking mind is that this piece of trash got a remaster.  Who the fuck was out there wishing they could replay Shadow Man again with beefed up graphics and a morsel of extra content.  Weirdos, that's who.  If this game ever gets requested on my stream again you can catch my ass taking a voluntary trip to Deadside

The Worst Thing In Japan

My time living in Japan is getting quite long.  At time of writing I’m pushing 15 years and for the most part it’s been incredible.  It’s the very least significantly better than living in my home country of the UK.  For reasons too long to go into here, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to get on a plane back to Manchester or get shot, you would watch me die on the spot. 

That said though, no place is perfect and Japan obviously has its problems, no place in the world could ever be perfect, after all.  For example a pretty serious problem I have here is that as a filthy gaijin, despite having my paychecks drained month to month with all the bullshit taxes and national health insurance, despite having children and owning property, I’m completely disallowed from voting.  Contributing yet having no say in where my tax yennies go is very annoying.  A less serious issue is also Japanse obsession with seasonal or time limited food items.  The day to day stuff is obviously pretty good, Japan is a place known for its cuisine but every so often there will be a thing in a store/restaurant/super market that will be absolutely LIFE CHANGING.  Then you look at the packet or the menu and I see the dreaded 期間限定 and my souls sinks through the floor and into the abyss.  Just make the good shit be forever, there’s no reason why Chocolate Mint Parm is only available some years in summer only, fuck off with that

But the absolute worst thing, by far the biggest bane in my life after living here so long is the company known as Open House, I fucking HATE these guys more than anything in the known universe.  You may think my anger is misplaced, how can I hate a real estate agent? I already own house, surely I don’t have any reason to interact with them? Well you’re right, I don’t, but they are constantly coming to me.  Not just me either, if you’re unlucky enough, native or foreign resident, to be walking down the street and one of their mobile salesmen see you, you’re in for some shit.  When every other salesman in the street sees you they might be like “excuse me, can I have a moment of your time to talk about solar panels?” And you say “no thanks” and they go “ok fine thank you very much”.  But the Open House guys are like, “are you sure?” And then when you say no again they start making small talk while FOLLOWING YOU DOWN THE STREET hoping to steer the conversation back to real estate, the absolute fucking worst.

Here’s an exchange between me and an Open House employee the previous day of writing that inspired this post.  Unless specified with [EN] at the start, the conversation was done in Japanese and while constantly moving down the street

OH: Excise me do you have a moment?

Me [EN]: No thanks (answering in English to hopefully deter the guy from continuing, this has never worked)

OH: Are you interested in purchasing property in this area?

Me: No sorry, I really don’t have the time right now

OH: *shimmying directly into my path, pushing a clipboard into my view and pulling out a pen and offering it to me* So how old is your son? (he was in a carrier on my chest)

Me [EN]: Oh my god can you FUCK OFF?!

OH [EN]: I’m sorry?

Me: Get lost!

OH: It’ll only take a little time!

To which we then reached the supermarket I was walking to and I ignored that last comment and he thankfully didn’t follow me inside.  If I talked to any other salesmen like that I’d feel bad, but with these guys I almost regret not throwing out personal insults or resorting to fists. 

Now you can argue that “they are just doing their jobs, it’s probably their bosses probably telling them to be like that” but I honestly do not fucking care.  Japan is a country where you can literally pay a company like 30 bucks and they will find a selection of jobs FOR YOU, they are choosing to work at a company where their approach to sales is to push as hard as possible and waste as much time as possible.  If the job market was fucked like it is in some other places I’d be more understanding but it’s not, so get fucked.  Encounters like this have happened to me countless times around Nagoya and I’m fucking sick of it.  My example above isn’t even the worst one, I had a woman try to drag me into their offices and sit down for a consultation despite saying no and she DID follow me into a department store up to an escalator.  She got lucky though because at that point I’d only had the Open House harassment like 8 times and the sub 10 count made me less prone to rage

This is the only company in the country to act like this.  It’s happened to me and I’ve seen people being chased around by these guys looking extremely uncomfortable.  Doesn’t matter if you’re in a rush, with kids, bleeding out in the street, the open house guys are coming and they will not rest until they have sold you a property you don’t need at a significantly higher price than other properties in the area.  Even the cell phone plan salesman in AEON malls who can be a bit annoying aren’t this bad.  FUCK OPEN HOUSE, GO BANKRUPT NOW.
 

Hollowbody

 Spoiler alert, I'm going to say some rather unkind things about this game.  However, apparently, it's a game made by a single guy so before I take a big shit on it I want to at least acknowledge that the fact that this game exists at all is worthy of at least some praise.  I'm slowly trying to get into making games myself and even just learning how to make a knock-off ZX Spectrum lookin' ass game is proving to be quite the undertaking so despite Hollowbody's myriad problems, the effort to put it out is worthy of a pat on the head.

Anyway, nice things over, this game fucking sucks shit.

Hollowbody is a classic style survival horror game about a chick going into an abandoned British city in order to look for some other chick.  At time of writing it's been a little over a month since I finished Hollowbody and the plot is so forgetable that it's pretty much all I can remember of its story.  It's poorly presented and completely uninteresting and while I do remember the ending I don't want to go that far into spoiler territory for this post but it's unsatisfying and not worth it.

So if we ignore the plot, what are we left with? A sub-standard Silent Hill 2 clone with muddy graphics and shit level design.  Really it's copying the broad strokes of big titles from the entire genre but I single out Silent Hill 2 specifically because the first major area you go to is an apartment building that basically amounts to a dollar store version of the Ashfield apartments.  Each area you go to is also rife with some of the most boring and easy puzzles I have ever seen in a game of this type where any challenge that arises comes from poor signposting of key elements rather than devious challenge from the developer.  One example of this is when you need to light a trashcan fire to set off a fire alarm but the trash can asset is strewn all over the building that you're in and the existence of the fire alarm isn't obvious because it's a glowing red cube that clips into a wall.  When it's not being annoyingly obtuse in that regard the puzzles are just flat out obnoxious.  A stand out example of this type of puzzle was where you're tasked with trudging around a large graveyard examining sparsely layed out tombstones for a code.  I took one look at the puzzle, one look at the size of the area and immdiately went to the internet for the solution because Hollowbody is not worthy of me trudging through empty environments for clues.

But puzzles aren't the only thing this game has, there's also (sort of) combat.  Almost no strategy needed and no need to worry about the "survival" aspect of this survival horror game because most of the enemies you encounter can be smacked to death with a big stick and will basically put up zero effort to try and kill you thanks to the stunlocking effect of said stick.  By the time the game does start throwing some bigger baddies at you, you're so ammoed up with no risk of ever running out that you can mindlessly just blast anything blocking your way (which the enemies rarely ever do anyway, just run around em') and proceed to the end of the game unharmed and unbothered.

There is also a disgusting lack of polish that plagues the game at every turn.  Character models look weird with animations that are distractingly bad.  Voice acting is stilted in the inept way rather than the SH2 creepy way and I encountered a handful of bugs when playing.  My personal favorite of these bugs was a "puzzle" where you have to run around a sewer collecting still beating hearts to put on this fucking machine.  When you examine the machine, the character is like "there are creepy hands reaching out for something" or some shit but my game looked like this 

Insane indeed.  Here's a pic I clipped from some dudes lets play so you can see what its supposed to look like 

Hollowbody being apparently developed by one guy makes me want to be charitable towards it, if true, that's cool as fuck.  But on the flip side, you charged me 15 quid for a sub standard, derivitive and forgettable product that looks like jank and runs like shit.  So sorry not sorry, Hollowbody can fuck off forever.  One for the acid pit, don't buy it

GoG's "Preservation" of Video Games

 

As someone who sees video games as an art form and not just a toy to kill time with, preservation is an important topic for me.  Not just me either, there are plenty of people online who will be happy to shout from the rooftops about how important the preservation of old media is for a laundry list of different.  Due to the fact it's such an important topic, it really pisses me off when people come into that space with a shitty attitude and shitty intentions, just like the people over at Good Old Games.

Good Old Games was a website I used to have a lot of time for.  They would take ancient PC games that were an absolute bitch to get running on modern systems, get it running and then provide a DRM free installer so that instead of having to mess with things like DOSBox you could just double click an icon and be playing Ultima 7, for example, in seconds.  I do think that charging 10 dollars for a game from 1992 is sort of dogshit but whatever, better than nothing I suppose.

One thing that Good Old Games likes to harp on about is the fact that they are preserving video games.  That they are force for good in the gaming space by making old games accessible for all.  Maybe at one point that was true.  I remember a long time ago they had some kind of legal bother over the Fallout games and their response to being told to take the games off their storefront was to make the games completely free for like a week before they were pulled.  Obviously, to continue their efforts they have to fall in line with this bullshit but they did everything they could to make sure their installers for Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics got on as many computers as possible.  I'm not 100% certain that's exactly what happened but that's how I understood it at the time and that's what drew me to the website in the first place.  "It sucks that this happened, but have it for free and keep it forever"

But fast foward to today and it's a different story.  Warcraft 3 recently got an, apparently, shoddy remake from Blizzard and what I'm assuming is a result of this remake being launched, GoG were told to pull their Battle.net edition of the game from their store.  So did they make it free for as many people to download as possible before it's gone?  No, they made multiple social media posts about how the game is being pulled, how "they care" about preservation and that you can buy the game for 15 bucks, maybe a bit less if you use a discount code from their Facebook post comment section.  "Look at this thing we failed to preserve in any meaningful way, give us money before it's gone though!"

It just rings so hollow to me as soon as they start charging money for it.  Unwilling to do anything about it other than advertise its dwindling avaliability hoping that a few 30-40 year olds will open their wallets in light of the news.  An easy way to prey on people's nostalgia or computer illiteracy as a method to make a quick buck.  I was willing to pay for the convienience prior to this because I was under the impression that when push came to shove they would throw down but instead they shook the silver cup in our face and demanded payment for them not doing their fucking job.

If you want to know where the real preservation efforts lie, it's unfortunately in piracy.  The thankless, sometimes dangerous (in a litigation sense) work of making sure that as many games from the artforms history aren't lost to time and aren't lost to shit-head companies pulling crap like this so they can make a few extra sales of poorly put together or uneeded remakes and remasters.  There are plenty of sites doing it that I will refuse to name here because being underground is what helps keep them alive but THOSE are the people you should be rallying around.  The people making emulators, the people dumping ROMs, the people provding these old games for free and providing instructions for the less tech-savvy to get them running.  That's true preservation

Maybe all this is just overly cynical ranting from someone reading way too far into a shitty piece of news about Warcraft 3.  That said though, as far as I'm concerned, GoG don't care about preservation, they care about exploiting your nostalgia to make a line on a graph go up

Pathetic Imitations

 I've put some real stinkers on this years horror marathon playlist and one of them that really stood out for having a particular odor was FOBIAL: St Dinfna Hotel.  I'm not going to spend this blog post going into the details of just specifically how terrible it was, that's another post for another time, but not only was it a bad game, it was also a pathetic imitation of something much better.

We live in an age where remakes and remasters seem to be all the rage, constantly barraged with updated versions of shit from games past and when those aren't being shoved into our faces by developers and publishers there are constant talks of what "deserves" a remake (whatever that means) and what "needs" a remake.  Pathetic discourse for pathetic people who have buried deep into their comfort zones and built nuclear bunkers so that they don't have to suffer the torment of playing something new or from an unfamiliar IP.

But one thing we don't seem to pay much attention to is the imitators, the weird malformed cousin of the remaster.  Not part of a well established thing but copying the well established thing closely enough that the people will still clap their hands together like seals and fork out the money for it.  It happens a lot in the indie sphere with a great many games cribbing from things like Zelda, Metroid or even just copying whatever big indie game came out in the last six months.  If I had a dollar for every Vampire Survivor clone that exists then I'd probably have enough money to pay off the rest of my mortgage.  Again, a post for another time but I do feel the indie scene does have a bit of a creativity problem going on.  

Not that this ALWAYS results in terrible bullshit.  Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia springs to mind with it being just a straight up, slightly weebier, clone of Shin Megami Tensei 1+2 but clearly done by someone with a lot of love and passion for the older MegaTen games so the imitation feels sincere.  Not a quick way to make a fast dollar off two established franchises with a fan game but someone who clearly likes Touhou a fair bit making a game in a style that we don't get anymore just because they like it so much.  Go check that game out, it's pretty fukken neato.  

I suppose you would call it a tribute, rather than an imitation

But then there's FOBIA: St Dinfna Hotel, a pathetic attempt to make money off the fact that Resident Evil 7 exists by a studio of inept, creatively bankrupt morons.  Everything about that game from the graphics to the UI to the gameplay feels like a cheap knockoff of what RE7 was doing.  The very epitome of the "we have Resident Evil 7" at home meme that you see so often around the internet.  Unlike the Touhou game, it seems to have been made by not only cynical idiots out to make a quick buck from the back of another IP, but also a group of people who have ONLY played RE7 and literally nothing else. I will, for now, refrain from going into massive detail but FOBIA is the exact kind of game to cause veins to pop in heads with just how hollow it is and it's just one of many offenders that have popped up thanks to platforms like Steam and Itch.

Another, slightly less (but only slightly) offensive example is one I'm currently playing at time of writing called Hollowbody.  A game that at first glance looks like it might be doing its own thing and then quickly devolves into a particularly shallow Silent Hill clone that isn't so much bad as it is just painfully boring.  Usually I say that boring games are worse than bad games because at least anger is an emotion and art should be there to illicit emotions but there's something especially grating about a developer that copies another games format so closely only to still make the interactive equivalent of wallpaper paste.  A group of people who played Silent Hill 2 exactly once, followed it up with a single viewing of 28 Weeks Later and then churned out a low effort game because those two things made money, so surely that will too.  It's pathetic to see developers engaging in this trash behaviour and its even more pathetic to see consumers giving it the thumbs up in a steam review.

Being inspired by another person or studios work can lead to some really great things.  Some Lost in Vivos, some Okami's, some fuckin Undertale type shit but making those kind of games requires not only love for the thing you're imitating, but love for the medium itself.  The two games I talked about here are just recent examples of a problem that has existed since the dawn of games, but I'm begging just a few more indie devs to maybe try at least a little harder.  Play a little more widely, go experience some things that aren't games, draw from many things to make something cool instead of just copying the flavor of the month to try and line your pockets.  Steam is already full of shit, stop adding to it

The Game Awards Are Dumb Bullshit

 

It's that time of the year again! The time where everyone gets together to discuss what the best games of the year were.  The time where we celebrate all the cool titles we have played throughout 2024.  The time where shallow hype merchants peddle their crap opinions at you in the hope to generate some dollar for their high profile buddies in the industry.

Maybe I'm cynical but The Game Awards are something I've always had a certain degree of disdain for but I think even this year the lineup of nominees for the hype machine are sort of grim.  For those that can't be bothered to go look what they are I'll list them here.

-Astrobot 

-Bolatro

-Black Myth: Wukong

-Shadow of the Erdtree

-Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth 

-Metaphor: Refantazio 

This is just the GOTY category but I find that no one gives a fuck about the other awards.  All discussion revolves almost entirely around these titles so who gives a fuck about anything else?  That aside though, this lineup is just fucking depressing.  Astrobot is a shite mascot platformer that failed to push PS5s, Bolatro is the token indie entry in a thinly veiled attempt to make it look like the awards aren't just a AAA circle jerk, Black Myth Wukong is just "another souls-like", Erdtree is a fucking DLC for a game from 2022, FF7 is a padded remake that butchers key scenes from the original and Metaphor is about the only thing on the list that skirts the line of being an "original" game, despite at it's core just being fantasy Persona,.

This lineup has even had the effect of turning me into a tin foil hat conspiricy crackpot.  DLCs have won awards in the past in minor categories but this is the first time that one has been in the running for actual GOTY.  My dumb theory is that some money-men have greased the palms of award show organizers for Erdtree to be entered and for it to win so that FromSoft can make extra dollar of a "Elden Ring: GOTY Edition" that includes Erdree.

But if you ignore the specifics of this years show in particular, The Game Awards are just a pile of dumb bullshit as a concept.  90% of the votes for winners are peformed by a jury consisting of people from various games media outlets and I wan't you to think very carefully about that.  Think of the kind of absolute dumbfuck that works for any big gaming website or publication.  An entire enthuisast press made up of easily manipulated morons that barely have the motor function required to operate a control pad or keyboard pumping out the most stock standard gaming opinions day after day so that they can maintain funding for their site and access to developers and publishers.  These idiots are the ones who get to say what the best games of the year are.  I'd be willing to bet money that the games these people have played over the course of the year can be counted with just your fingers.

But even if it was a completely public vote, a vote where dedicated communties of niche weirdos could push for whatever game they love to get some recognition, it wouldn't matter because deciding a game of the year in the current year is just daft by design.  Not one person, nor group of people has had the time to even scratch the surface of things that were released this year.  I'm not saying that in order to make an informed decision on what a potential game of the year is you have to play EVERYTHING that year, but I guarantee that the judges for this show, along with most people (myself included) have barely scratched the surface on things that came out in 2024.  

There is a channel I quite like on YouTube challed YourMovieSucks who does these "best of" videos.  One example of this is his best films of 2015 video which was released in 2018.  He gave the year of 2015 some breathing room while watching as many films as he could from that year both big and small, and then made a list based on that much broader viewing.  I feel like that's what The Game Awards should be doing.  Fuck GOTY 2024, we should be crowning GOTY 2018 around this game thus giving judges and general audiences a bit more time to experience what 2024 had to offer outside of the big budget, heavily marketed titles. 

At the end of the day, none of it really matters, it's all just twats shouting their opinions from the rooftops.  I base my personal GOTY selections on stuff I played that year rather than stuff that was released that year, none of this affects me on a personal level really.  But these are award shows are somewhat important to developers and publishers and their outcome will have an effect on the industry at large in some way and if you ask me, it's making things considerably worse year on year.

Fuck you Geoff

I Do Not See The Appeal Of Silent Hill 2: Remake

 

The Silent Hill 2 Remake is one of those games I've been shitting on since it was announced.  Starting with the annoucement that the gaggle of incompetant hacks, Bloober Team, are making it and then with every shoddy trailer to drop since then I've only had increasingly harsh words to say about it.  But then the launch trailer appeared on YouTube and under it was a sea of positive comments of people hype to play it and I'm just completely baffled.

It really does feel like I'm going insane in some ways.  Like, imagine if you were in a resturant and the waiter serves you literal dogshit on a plate.  You respond by saying "this is dogshit! I'm not eating that" but then all your friends and the other people in the resturant are just shovelling the dogshit into their mouths and just GUSHING about how good it is.  That's what watching the trailer and then looking at the comments section feels like.

On a gameplay level, the things shown in the launch trailer look OK, I guess.  Maybe the most acceptable part of the whole deal.  This is only because they are using the same 3rd person over the shoulder style that a ton of games in this genre have been using since 2005, it's a hard thing to fuck up at this point.  That said though, Silent Hill: Homecoming and Silent Hill: Downpour were also using this style of game play and managed to fuck it up so even though it looks fine in the trailer I'm very much expecting it to suck ass when I actually get around to playing it.

But the gameplay is not what I'm really purplexed by, it's everything else.  The subtlety seems to have been completely thrown out of the window in the overall presentation.  The game looks like its pulling all the tricks for "scares" that things like Dead Space uses.  Like there's one bit in the trailer where James turns a corner to a TV with static on it and a monster in front of it.  As he gets closer the TV turns off and the monster just shuffles out of view.  I can almost guarantee that the next move after that is if you turn the camera the monster is gone.  One of the oldest and least effective tricks in the book being used in not just any modern horror game but in a SILENT HILL game of all things.  Even in the, admittedly kind of ass, 2001 E3 trailer for the original game they weren't pulling any bullshit like that.  The games creepiness spoke for itself in the few snippits that they showed off between some cutscene bites.  

But the cutscenes are where the remake seems to scandalize me the most of anything.  The new voice acting and character designs look like absolute trash.  The two big offenders so far are Angela, who's had her weird quirky line delivery removed for ham fisted, obvious bullshit and Eddie, who has, quite frankly, become a parody of himself

The trailer shows off a section of his speech near the end of the game where he says "It doesn't matter if you smart, dumb, ugly, pretty! its all the same once you're dead! and a corpse can't laugh" and the presentation and line delivery of the scene are so HORRIBLY bad and miss the point of the original so hard that I physically winced.  Whoever is voicing Eddie in this remake needs a fat slap or a better director.  Preferably both.  This is just two scenes out of the whole game too so how much actual pain I'm going to feel playing through it is sort of daunting.

Now the obvious thing to say here would be "if you hate it so much, just don't play it".  But that doesn't fly because Silent Hill 2 means a lot to me and if I'm going to be in a position to talk at length about how much this remake sucks shit, I have to play it through AT LEAST a couple times.  Plus there's always the astronomically low chance that I'm wrong about all this and it turns out to be great.  I think I have more of a chance of surviving a plane crash and then winning the lottery right after but the chance is a smidge higher than 0%, at least.

But here's my theory on why SH2R is seeing so much positivity.  Most people played, or more likely watched, Silent Hill 2 and didn't really get it.  The looked at some video essays or articles about the game after the fact and parroted that bullshit to seem smart online but they were essentially just pretenders wanting to be in on the popular thing.  Then Bloober comes along and gives you a version of the game that is louder, dumber, less intelligent and easier to digest but has JUST ENOUGH of the original in there to still looks smart with your peers online for enjoying the "art game".  If that's not it then I weep for the standards and tastes of general gaming audiences.  

I knew the bar was low, but this is on a whole new level of trash.  I, of course, will be playing it at some time soon after release and will be coming back to either validate this post or maybe do a complete 180, lets see how it goes.

Doom64 is absolutely horrible

 

I play a lot of games in a lot of genres and as a result of that I also play a lot of complete and utter shite.  Every so often, though, a game comes along thats so rancid in its design and content that it lodges itself in my brain and I can't stop thinking about it for a long time.  It's like seeing a horrible road accident where the images of people being sliced in half by pieces of car metal stick in your minds eye for weeks after the event.  It happened with Outlast 2, it happened with Holy Diver and now it's happening again with Doom64.

Doom64 was released, unsurprisingly, on the Nintendo 64 in 1997 and unlike previous console ports of Doom where it was just Doom 1 or 2 being brough to console, this was a whole new thing.  A unique Doom game for a brand new system, fucking wow, but in terms of the larger conversation of Doom and Boomer Shooters in general, 64 is a bit of a black sheep in the series and the genre.

On it's surface its a pretty competently made Doom game.  It's basically just more of what we got with Doom 1 and 2 with some redesigned monsters and a new gun to play with, what could possibly go wrong? Well fucking everything really.  

The first and most minor problem is the controls.  The N64 controller is already a gigantic piece of garbage made for octopus people (and even they don't like it that much, they told me) and playing an FPS on it feels like pulling teeth.  Running with the stick and walking with D-Pad is irritating but but the absolute worst thing about the controls is weapon switching.  The number of times I fucking died because I got ambushed by a large number of pinkies or imps and either couldn't pull the appropriate gun out fast enough OR accidentally switching to the rocket launcher and blowing my own face off made me want to rip and tear my own throat out.  There's a reason these games were originally made for PC where you could switch guns with a number key.  It's because using the right gun for the right situation is key to gameplay and having that shit hindered by having the guns just be in a list makes for a fucking awful time.  

Then there's the level design just being generally fucking awful.  When I was playing Doom 1 and 2 on stream I'd often complain pretty vocally about how I dislike the majority of levels designed by Sandy Petersen but I feel like I owe him an apology now because the Doom64 levels make even his most diabolical outings look like a walk in the park.  Sudden pits, crushers out of nowhere, pitch black rooms full of enemies, PLATFORMING are all common features in Doom64 maps that are likely to drive you insane.  One of the worst examples of this is a level early on where you are expected to sprint across a number of platforms that change height as you touch them.  I didn't know that's what was going on at first so I had 3 or 4 attempts where I just fell into the black pit of pinkies and ate shit.  The point of the section was so poorly conveyed that I had to look up a fucking YouTube walkthrough just to be able to tell what was even going on.  That's just one example too, go watch the VoDs on my YouTube channel of the playthrough I did recently for many, many hours of similar and equally frustrating bullshit. 

Then there's the thing that really stuck in my brain which is the games penchant for teleport ambushes.  In original Doom, ambush rooms were a common-ish thing.  You would walk into a room where there would be a gun or a key and when you grabbed it the walls would open.  The concept is introduced in E1M3 (I think) where picking up a blue key opens a wall to a few shotgunners and then you know its a thing you're supposed to look out for.  You can walk into a room and maybe predict if the walls are going on open, for a new player its a guessing game that keeps proceedings intense, keeps you on your toes.  Doom64 said fuck that though and just teleports enemies into a level, usually in positions that will completely fuck you with no warning.  The second to last level in the game is a great example of this where killing a Mancubus (at least I think that's the trigger) will spawn in an ARMY of imps, directly in your face.  If you know its coming you can move out of the area as your rocket travels through the air and avoid too much damage but for a new player it's just a shitty rookie trap.  Kill the enemy, OH WHOOPS NOW YOU'RE TRAPPED, dead and restart the level.  Imagine if you were playing something like Dungeons and Dragons and then when you kill a monster the dungeon master suddenly goes "oh by the way, there's 100 goblins in the room with you now".  You'd call him a piece of shit, break his teeth and never invite him to DnD sessions again.  That's what teleporting ambush spawns makes me want to do in Doom64.

The final and most irritating thing in Doom64 though is the final level.  It's a simple stage, a small room with a bunch of guns in it and then an arena.  At one end of the arena are 3 portals that spawn in an absolutely unreasonable amount of demons.  Once you kill them the final boss appears in the middle and starts barraging you with what I can only describe as a Mushihime-sama style bullet hell pattern.  Here's the kicker though, if you were thorough enough in the previous levels to find the secret maps then you may have also found 3 Hell Keys.  The hell keys upgrade one of your guns AND allow you to close the portals early, meaning the number of pre-boss demons you have to fight is significantly more reasonable.  The game makes no mention of this at any point and I don't care if its written in the manual because who the fuck ever kept manuals for N64 games? No one I knew that's for damn sure.  I have seen footage of people beating this stage from a pistol start without the keys because my initial reaction was that it seemed impossible without them but in order to pull it off you actually have to be some kind of Doom God.

Here's the thing though.  The game fucking sucks.  I don't WANT to explore the levels because the levels are ass and full of bullshit, I just want to get through them as fast as possible so I can stop fucking playing Doom64 and move onto a better game like Action52 or Video Cart-8: Magic Numbers for the Fairchild Channel F.  Getting good at something or taking the time to explore something is only worth doing when the game is good and Doom64 is certainly not that.  Therefore, I fucking cheated to see the ending.  Usually I'm extremely anti using codes and stuff to get through a game but when the thought of playing it any longer was actually ruining my mood and the prospect of streaming it further was ruining my entire DAY before going live, I don't give a shit.  Maybe if there was any indication of the existance of those keys, even in the form of a cryptic comment or something, I would have grinned and beared it because then its my fault, but to be blindsided by a sudden key requirement on the final level that would require me to go play the majority of the game over again?  Get fucked.

Doom64 got re-released for PC where you can use mouse and keyboard and they brightened the game a little bit so its not so unplayably dark at all times but even then I can't imagine it being any better.  Maybe my point about the controls being ass would be fixed but the rest of the broken, rancid design of Doom64 still remains.

Fuck this game, send it to hell along with the people who made it

Remnant: From The Ashes

Remnant: From The Ashes is a game from 2019 that I have just finished in 2024 thanks to the Epic Games Store giving it to me for free.  I remember when it came out and it had a bit of a buzz around it for being essentially "Dark Souls with Guns" but while also having a solid multiplayer com.  Well I didn't try the multiplayer component and let me tell you, Remnant: From The Ashes is the worse than bad, it's fucking boring.

The game is set in some kind of post apocolypse where you are tasked with getting to some island that's protected by a big storm in order to stop The Root, tree people that seem to enjoy human murder.  What follows is, a shameless Dark Souls clone with the twist being that the game focuses on ranged combat which, at first, starts out somewhat interesting.  For the first few areas of the game there's some degree of intensity to the gameplay.  The enemies are dangerous and resources are scarce so exploring the environments for healing items and ammo boxes so that you can free up your currency for upgrades is fun.  But then, after a boss or two, things start to go downhill extremely quickly.

As you kill enemies and gain experience you gain "trait points" which you can put into a variety of skills in your menu.  The most obvious thing to do is max out HP and stamina because having more numbers to get hit and dodge with in a game where damage values are so high is pretty valuable.  Once you do this, however, and max those values a lot of things in the game become trivial and when the challenge starts to die in a game like this, it's the beginning of the end.

What then makes things even worse is that after the initial area of levels set on Earth, you are transported to different, alien worlds on your quest to stop the Root and it's when you get to these areas that a lot of shit in Remnant is re-used.  In the desert area known as Rhom I think I went through the same dilapidated set of corridors about 6 times.  Not as backtracking during exploration, I mean that on the foward path, en route to new areas, the same indoor environment had been copy pasted that many times but just with the enemies shifted around slightly.  It was in this world, the second of 4, that I basically vowed to stop exploring anything because having to endure the same area over and over again was just mind numbing.  

Not that the vow I made meant anything in the end because not only is area re-use up the wazoo but after the first area things get extremely linear.  Like, Final Fantasy 13 levels of linear.  By the end of the game I was rushing through every zone just so I could get to the final boss as fast as possible and I STILL managed to find a ton of rings and trinkets that I basically had no use for because there are two very good rings and then a bunch of trash which will just take up space in your inventory.  

What makes the game completely unbearable though is how, after a certain boss in the second world, the game becomes COMPLETELY braindead.  One of the bosses grants you a beam rifle weapon that is so significantly better than every other weapon that you get your hands on that regular enemies won't even have a chance to get near you, let alone hit you with anything.  It also makes bosses a completely joke because you just aim and hold down fire which allows you to dedicate 100% of your brainpower to dodging the incredibly easy to avoid and heavily broadcasted attacks that they do.  By the end of the game, between trait points making everything a joke, overpowered weapons and boss design that felt like the devs just gave up, you're playing Remnant in a sort of mindless haze that fails to engage or entertain in any way at all.

There is a heavily emphasized multiplayer component that I didn't touch because who the fuck is playing Remnant: From the Ashes in 2024, really? but I can't image that having an extra person in my game would make things any more fun.  It would just be a second drone to mindlessly beam down all the enemies with and, if anything, would make procedings even easier.

So in closing, I fucking hate Remnant.  I always say that bad games have value because at least in getting mad about them or finding them funny in some way you are getting something out of it.  But Remnant is boring.  A game that you will play, finish, feel nothing while playing it and then never think about it again after the credits roll and that is way, WAY worse.  A truly miserable game made by truly soulless people to ride an action RPG wave they didn't understand.  Sad and embarassing

One Google Search Is All It Takes

 

We all like to rag on a game journo from time to time.  Despite being members of enthusiast press they often don't seem very enthusiastic about the things they are writing about.  However upon my travels around the internet it seems that it's not only video game press that consists of hack writers that probably failed English in high school and the world of Table Top also seems greatly affected.

Despite how steeped I am in Shin Megami Tensei video games I had no idea that this rule book for a table top game even existed.  To be fair, almost all of my table top gaming experiences to this day have been extremely negative so its something I tend to ignore and turn my back on.  Anyway, the game is called Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Conception and its based on, obviously, SMT 3 Nocturne and was originally released in 2004.  It even has a supplementary book called the Amala Labyrinth or something that adds even more shit to it.  It seems pretty cool and if I could find a table top group that doesn't make me want to fellate the business end of a shotgun then I'd be extremely down to give it a try.

So in swoops Chase Carter of Dicebreaker.com and to his credit, the majority of his article isn't even that bad.  He mentions that there's other SMT table top systems and these things have been around since 1993 which was an interesting fact I didn't know.  Pretty much exactly what I wanted that hack at Gamespot to do when talking about Helldivers (http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2024/03/gamespot-being-embarassing-again.html) although he then does proceed to refer to the game as Tokyo Connection and Tokyo Conception so maybe a lack of reading is how such a fucking awful headline happened.

"Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG based on Persona's video game series" is what it reads and if you know anything about Shin Megami Tensei even just in passing you'll know that what is written here is just WILDLY incorrect.  Just in case I have to spell it out for you, Shin Megami Tensei is the mainline series and Persona is the spinoff.  It's not so much that the information is wrong that gets to me, its that this guy is supposed to be a contributer to this niche interest website and yet can't do even the most basic bit of research to get things correct.  One google search is all it would have taken to know that SMT is the main one, Nocturne is the 3rd game and the Conception is the event that happens at the start of the game which kicks of all of its events.  Its literally on the fucking Wikipedia page and takes about 4 seconds to look up.  Even if you didn't want to look it up you should know that the headline is just wrong because Persona 3 and 4 both had "Shin Megami Tensei" in the fucking title.

If I was willing to be charitable to Mr Carter here I would say that, at best, he's a click harvesting little fuckhead.  Persona is undeniably, at this point, the more well known and more popular arm of SMT so using that in the headline is probably more likely to draw traffic to the rag he's writing.  However I'm not willing to be charitible so I'm just going to assume he's a lazy piece of shit.  You're a niche writer for an enthusiast website.  A website where I imagine its members spend all day pretending to be half-elves while jacking off to pornography of bears or whatever the fuck you weirdos are into.  You aren't so busy that you can see something like this and not look up the absolute basics of what it is and what is is about.

If you're going to take the trouble of writing for a niche topic or in this case, a niche interest within that niche topic, make sure you do it justice.  Instead of just shitting out a crap article to earn a quick couple of bucks why don't you take some time and actually write something helpful to people who may be interested.  But let's be honest, Chase Carter doesn't really give a fuck about what he's doing and gives even less of a fuck about SMT.  Farm clicks, get money and move on

A fucking sad way to exist

Gamespot being embarassing again

 

I don't usually read gaming news websites but every so often an article from one of these rags will come across desk and I was absolutely stunned when I saw the headline of this one inparticular written by one George Yang. 

I had to do a double take when I first saw it and read it slowly.  Helldivers was a game that came out in 2015 that I didn't play.  It was a twin stick shooter with online co-op about shooting stuff, I didn't give a fuck about it.  The game has a lot of positive reviews on Steam, netting it an overall Very Positive rating and yet I have never met a single person either online or in real life who has played it and until its sequel came out, I think a vast majority of the gaming public didn't know what the fuck it even was.  Then Helldivers 2 comes out and the game explodes in popularity and granted, after looking up some gameplay for this post, it does look kinda cool.  I'm not personally a fan of doing online co-op, I'm not into games that are multiplayer focused but it looks like a good time.  It looks like Earth Defense Force.

The first Earth Defense Force game came out on the PS2 back in 2003 developed by a company called SANDLOT and was released under the SIMPLE series.  The SIMPLE series was a collection of budget games for various systems where the number in the title indicated their cost.  For example EDF1 was released under the name SIMPLE 2000: THE 地球防衛軍 MONSTER ATTACK in Japan, the 2000 in the title meaning that the game cost 2000 yen.  This game actually got a western release under the title Global Defence Force and involved shooting a bunch of bugs in third person.

Now I'm not particularly good at doing maths but Helldivers 2 came out in 2024 and I'm pretty sure that is a long time after 2003.  I'm pretty sure, Mr Yang, that your title is the wrong way round.  The title of the article makes it sound as if EDF 6 is cribbing off Helldivers 2 despite not only the series being much older, but Earth Defence Force 6 coming out TWO FUCKING YEARS PRIOR in Japan.  What makes it even more frustrating is that he knows this fact and gives this half assed little paragraph at the bottom of the article about the original EDF but only talking about how the name changed a couple of times before finally settling on the Earth Defence Force title.

This is frustrating in two ways. The first, is that George Yang is such an insipid, crap writer that he's name dropping Helldivers 2, a hot trending game, to drive clicks.  But whatever, that's not exactly uncommon practice in 2024.  What's more frustrating is that George had an opportunity here to educate some people on some gaming history.  "Earth Defense Force 6, the game that helped inspire Helldivers 2, delayed to summer" could have been the article.  He could have spent more time talking about the simple series, EDF and letting people know about a cool series that might have not known about prior.  And let's be honest here, the kind of people who are reading Gamespot are the kind of people who have the most surface level knowledge of gaming, these are the people who could maybe use a little nudge into something about more lower budget and unknown. 

I had a look through George's article history and inspid unseasoned-chicken style writing seems to be his bread and butter.  You're a fucking writer for an enthusiast press outlet, George, why don't you fucking act like one.

Bellend

Consoles Feel Utterly Pointless

 

Back in 2020 the PS5 relased and with a sort of poor lineup of launch games I told myself that I would wait for there to be a better lineup of games before jumping on, also hoping to capitalize on a price drop as reward for my patience but we are now 4 years in and I'm staring Part 2 of the Final Fantasy 7 remake right in the face and I still can't bring myself to buy one, it just doesn't feel worth it at all.

The big problem is exclusivity of titles, it's just not really a thing anymore.  Any game that I think looks interesting on PS5 will, at some point, end up on PC sooner or later.  The one exception to this might be Demon's Souls Remastered but who gives a fuck about that game, really? I'm not about the drop a couple hundred bucks on new hardware and go through the rigmarol of finding space for it under my TV stand and going through all that setup and updates just to re-play a game that I already played to death back in 2009.  Timed exclusivity isn't going to get me to buy it either, the hype surrounding FF7 Rebirth, at least for me, died forever ago and watching streams of the game now that it's finally come out leaves me thinking that not rushing out to get it was probably a good decision.   The Switch sort of deals with this problem by locking a bunch of its games exclusively to that, forever, but a lot of Switch games run like ass-dick and probably would be better on PC.  I'm quite happy, for example that Shin Megami Tensei 5 is getting a PC release so that all the stupid performance hiccups can be squashed and I can play a version of the game that is distractingly shit in the performance department.  Deadly Premonition 2 is another example of a Switch game that saw vast improvements by coming to PC.  Put that stupid fucking rectangle with its flimsy controllers in the trash and just make games for PC instead.

In current day Consoles, to me at least, feel like shitty toys that are aimed at people who have the tech literacy of a 4 year old or actual 4 year olds.  Redundant pieces of hardware sold almost entirely on brand recognition than actually being useful as an entertainment device.  It never USED to be like this, PC gaming and console gaming felt like two entirely different things that offered entirely different types of games.  Look at the libraries of the PS1 and the PS2, for example, and then the PC games that were also being released at that time, there's a little crossover, sure, but it felt like owning a decent PC AND those consoles was a good idea if you wanted to experience the best of everything.  The other thing to consider was that PC gaming back then certainly felt a bit more cumbersome.  It wasn't like today where you can just download a game off steam, click go and it goes, there was usually some form of troubleshooting involved to get the game working and so consoles shone in that department because being able to just slap in a disc and play was great.  But not only is PC gaming significantly easier now in most cases but you can't even just slap a game in a console and play it anymore.  Mandatory updates and subcriptions to bullshit like PS+ and Switch Online hounding you at every turn make the experience very annoying.  Do you want to play Dead by Daylight on the PS5 where you must also have to pay an additional subscription to PS+ to do anything other that the tutorial?  Or do you wanna play on PC where you can play online as much as you want and there's no additional fee to pay on top of your internet bill?  I know which one I'd pick.

Crap libraries, shitty ancillary services that you are pretty much forced to buy into to get full functionality and the fact that you can have a better experience on a more versitile piece of equipment means that consoles are fucking pointless.  Maybe there will be a Switch 2 or a PS6 in the future but unless the landscape of console gaming changes drastically the whole thing can just fuck off

Donkey Konga: The Worst Rythm Game Ever Made

 

No genre is free from it's trash entries and rhythm games are no different.  If you had asked me what I thought was the worst rhythm game before playing Donkey Konga I might have said Parappa The Rapper.  But despite my extremely low opinion of Parappa as a rhythm game, I can appreciate it as being one of the first and the music absolutely fuckin SLAPS but then Donkey Konga comes along and shows me first hand what a really trash rhythm game looks like.

I'm not the kind of guy to get really hung up on UI.  Unless the UI in a game is particularly unreadable or badly made then its not the kind of thing that will even cause a blip on my critical radar.  But right out the gate, the first thing thats very noticable when you hit the start button is that Donkey Konga's menus feel cheap.  This is a first party Nintendo game, featuring one of the companies biggest mascots that's been around since 198 fucking 1 and it has a menu screen that looks like something you'd find on some shovelware bullshit that you'd find at the bottom of a bargain bin, thrice discounted to a dollar.  Zero effort put into these menus at all.  One of them is even called "DK City" or something, the area where you use coins to buy new music and stuff and I thought it make take me to a fun little jungle island interface but no, just the same shit garbage menu to buy nonsense.

But that's just the menus, in the actual rhythm game itself the UI is also trash.  There are 4 types of notes, a left hit, a right hit, a double hit and a clap.  The notes are an obnoxiously bright shade of red and yellow so when you're playing on the harder modes your eyes start to strain trying to read the chart.  There's also no options for speed mods which makes reading charts a pain in the cock but the only reason this isn't more of a problem is because the game is piss easy and even a newborn that's been dropped could clear the highest settings.  Even worse with the UI is that the feedback for successfully hit notes is fucking bullshit.  In literally every other rhythm game that exists there is some feedback for telling the player they hit a note.  Usually the note will vanish and you'll get a little mark that tells you your accuracy, like in DDR you get Marvellous or Perfect or whatever.  In Donkey Konga, though, when you hit a note you get get feedback mark but the note KEEPS FUCKING SCROLLING past the hit zone.  That's behaviour entirely reserved for missed notes, what the fuck.  Not that getting distracted matters even in the slightest because the game isn't tracking full combos anyway.  There are 3 ways to end a song.  Fail, which I have never seen, pass with a silver crown and pass with a gold crown.  The only difference is if your life bar at the end of the song was full or not.  You could go away from your bongos for 75% of a song, then play the last stretch perfectly and end on a gold crown.  It's like the complete opposite of IIDXs failing with a AA rank, it's fucking bullshit.

But all of this is just set dressing, the most important thing is the music right?  Well guess fuckin what? That sucks too.  Nursery rhymes that would even make its target demographic eye roll, terrible covers of pop songs including the worst versions I have ever heard of Another One Bites the Dust and All the Small Things and weird old shit for grandad.  The only good tracks on the game are the Pokemon Theme Song and the DK Rap.  When you're rhythm game has only 2 good tracks in it that is probably  more than any shitty UI and toddler grade peripheral will ever be.

The most frustrating thing about all this is that the template was done for them already.  Donkey Konga isn't even an original idea, it's a straight rip off of Taiko no Tatsujin just with the Japanese drums replaced with bongos

Taiko is great too, it's good good music, plays great, looks great, there's a reason that it's been around for so long and is a staple of basically every arcade, even the shit ones in shopping malls and sports centers, even to this day.  All Nintendo had to do was make it like that and instead we got this low effort, lazy, poorly thrown together dollar store knockoff.

Donkey Konga is bar far the worst rhythm game ever made.  Even the biggest arcade rhythm flops like Museca don't even come CLOSE to this level of shittiness.  An embarassing title from Nintendo that makes a good case for maybe not all video game preservation being a good thing. Fuck this game and fuck anyone who worked on it. 

Nintendo are Scummy (and quite stupid)

 

Another day, another instance of Nintendo being complete fucking dirt.  Thanks to some nasty lawsuits from Nintendo, Switch emulator Yuzu has been completely taken down.  If you go to their site right now you are sent to a, admiteddly quite funny, message from the developers that reads like a hostage being fed lines from their captor with a gun to their head about how the project is dead and they didn't intend any piracy.  It's not just Yuzu that has been baleeted either, Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra has also been completely removed and is no longer avaliable for download, which in my opinion is considerably more of a problem than the Yuzu takedown.

Now to some degree I get it, the Switch is a current piece of hardware and Yuzu was being used to pirate various games by some users.  Not only this but the Yuzu team had a patreon and were making some decent cash off the emulator which some theorize to be the big reason why the lawyers got involved and why, at least at time of writing, Ryujinx is still alive.  There is also no denying that some people were using the emulator to pirate games, Nintendo are well within their rights to take this stuff down.

But there's a problem.  The first problem is that while I can understand Nintendo taking umbridge with ROM and ISO sites, Emulators aren't JUST for piracy.  For example I have a large collection of PS2 games that I bought back when I used to collect games extensively.  My actual PS2 is being kept in a shoebox in the store room of my house right now so just being able to pop the disc copy of the game into my PC and play it via PCSX2 is an absolute godsend.  Yuzu wasn't a piece of software made for piracy, no emulator is, they are made for convenience and preservation and Nintendo just decided to shit all over that for reasons I cannot comprehend

The other problem is that the Switch is a piece of fucking garbage.  The controllers suck, the pro controllers are overpriced and the system can barely handle its own games.  For example, the last big game I played on my Switch was Shin Megami Tensei 5, a game exclusive to the system AND YET suffered from massive frame drops when entering the fucking menu along with a bunch of other performance and visual hiccups.  My joycons have suffered from drift and the system feels like shit to play in "portable" mode and looks like shit when its displayed on my TV.  People who were using Yuzu to get a better resolution or not have their games run like trash don't deserve to be inconvenienced like this because of couple of fossilized scumfucks in Kyoto are mad they can't win a lawsuit against Palworld so they take it out on some emu devs.

I wrote a post about it previously before I had heard about any of this but emulation of systems and games is the single most important thing we have for preservation.  Nintendo won't fucking do it, if anything they keep closing down stores and services so that tons of games become just flat out unobtainable and unplayable outside of emulation or overpaying for hardware and a used game that they don't make any money off.  You can argue that maybe I'm overreacting a little because some other person will come along eventually and make a different Switch emulator in the future when its less relevant but the fact that a company is so willing to spit in the face of these efforts is just scummy and infuriating.

The funny part, the part that makes Nintendo seem a bit stupid and short sighted though, is that if you do a quick Google search for Yuzu or Citra, you will now find quite a large number of people flocking to uploads of the emulators in order to start using them (and probably pirating some games in the process) now that its ease of avaliability is dissapearing.  I found a certain webpage that had Citra and Yuzu avaliable for downloads and between a bunch of comments saying simply "fuck Nintendo", there were some users saying "I had never heard of Yuzu before but after seeing the news I decided to download it and try it out".  Does this count as the Streisand Effect?

Nintendo can throw their little tantrum and ruin a couple peoples lives, sure, but they aren't ever going to be able to stop the Emulation train.  The more Nintendo do this kind of thing the more people will start to think that its morally acceptable to pirate their shit, and not just their old shit either.  While they are probably a company that's too big to fail and have too many mindless fans that will give them millions of dollars for actual trash I can dream that one day all that good will will run dry and they will be forced to shutter their doors forever

Fuck Nintendo, haven't been good since the SNES

 

I hate Micro USB

 

This is probably going to be a pretty short post but Micro USB has caused me such problems for such a long period of time that I have to write it down here and make my distaste for this cable connection known to the public.

I'm a big fan of the Playstation 4 controller, it's great.  Looks good, feels good in the hand and the triggers are quite nice.  I like the Playstation 4 controller so much that I decided that I wanted to use it with my PC games too which I was able to easily do by just plugging it in with its charging cable.  The thing about the charging cable is, however, that the side that goes into the controller is a Micro USB connector which for some infuriating reason seems to wear down over time and makes the controller next to unusable.  Not usuable in a nice clean way though, it'll still connect and let you play games with it but if you move even a nanometer the thing will fucking disconnect and either pause the game or get you killed.  

The absolute worst thing that I've seen happen with this controller disconnect is where the pad stops responding but it holds the last input you made.  Back when I was doing deathless or hitless runs of Cuphead there was more than one occasion where my pad would stop working but it would keep running to the right and off a ledge or into a bosses attack.  For anything more intense than a turn based RPG, if you're using a controller that works off micro USB then you may as well just not even bother.

It's not just me either, almost everyone I know has this issue with these controllers.  A long time ago I did a classic Mega Man 2 players 1 controller marathon where we used the PS4 controllers that my co-pilot had and even his cables were suffering from the same issue.  We had to wrap a bunch of rubber bands around the connector to hold it in place and even that wasn't a sure fix, we still had to contend with disconnects throughout that events.  PS4 controllers, not even PS5, PS fucking 4 controllers are still 3-6000 yen, I shouldn't have to McGuyver the thing to operate as intended when I'm paying that goddamn much.

What's even worse is that while I'm focusing on the PS4 pad because its the thing that's been pissing me off the most recently, it's not the only piece of tech that uses micro USB that I've had trouble with.  I recently bought a baby monitor where the screen component of it has a micro USB port on it for charging.  I had that baby monitor for about a month before I started having charging issues with the damn thing.  Not because the monitor was fucked in anyway, but because the fucking connector on the cable had worn down and absolutely refused to charge with out A LOT of fiddling to get it in a very specific position.  We had a separate micro USB charger thing that we ended up swapping that busted cable out with and it works for now but it's only a matter of time before this one dies too.

I know there might be sentient cum-bubble that might want to respond with something like "bUt TaU, jUsT uSe It wIrElEsSlY" but 1) I have tried that and for some reason it won't take and 2) Even if it did work, it doesn't change the fact that micro USB is a pile of shit and no company should be making anything that uses it.

I can't believe I'm at a point in my life where I have strong feelings about cable connectors but here we are.  Fuck micro USB