Spider Man, Puddles and Controversey

The new Spider Man game dropped recently and while I've not played it yet it does at least look pretty good.  I'm not one for comic book heroes personally but it does look like a generally pretty fun action game.  Something I'll absolutely grab once the price drops a bit. However I'm not here to talk about the game itself, but about some recent controversy that surrounds it regarding puddles.

The story goes that there's a room in the game that was shown during a trailer at E3 looking a certain way but when the game came out the room looked a bit different.  Now I'm not going to say flat out that the release version looks like shit but it does look worse.  It's hard to make a game look like shit in 2018 but there clearly is more polish on the trailer version than there is in the version players paid money for.

So this prompts a bunch of people on twitter to start asking questions to the developer, Insomniac, about what the hell happened.  Insomniac responded by shrugging their shoulders saying "we didn't do anything" which upset a number of people and then glorious internet drama happened.  Of course, when there's drama news websites flock to it to write about it (kind of like I'm doing lol) and put in their two cents.  To my surprise and horror (not really) there's a great deal of outlets calling the issue stupid and using the whole thing to take a jab at anyone who has THE NERVE to criticize the game.  For example one idiot on Forbes writes his article like gamers are nothing but a pack of hungry wolves just waiting to rip any game dev apart if they do meet their high standards.

It seems like that idiot along with every other idiot who wrote articles like that are missing the point entirely as to why people are upset.  Let's make one thing very clear straight away, the puddle isn't the reason why people are upset, it's the fact that we were lied to by promotional material, AGAIN.  If all the trailers for Spider Man were cutscenes no one would say shit but that was GAMEPLAY so I don't think it's so unreasonable to ask that the gameplay looks the same as your damn trailer.  It's also not the first time it's happened either, just off the top of my head Dark Souls 2 and Silent Hill Downpour are guilty of the same thing and it was JUST as bullshit with those games as it is with this one.  Imagine that you went to a restaurant and there was a picture of a juicy, medium rare, perfectly seasoned absolutely delicious looking steak on a menu, so you order it.  When it arrives at your table though it's well done and just not quite as appealing as it was in the picture.  So you eat it anyway because you love steak and yeah, it's still good, but it's not what you paid money for.  Do you see where I'm coming from here?

The worst part about this whole thing is that if you look up the game on metacritic, despite the controversy it still has an 87 rating.  People are still enjoying the game despite their gripe with the graphics so all these outlets are shitting on gamers for what? Being upset about promotional material lying to us about what the game looks like?  It's understandable that things change over the course of development but don't wave the game in our faces going "LOOK AT HOW GREAT THIS LOOKS" and then make it not look like that.  For some, they are paying money BECAUSE they said it looked that good. 

Sure, it doesn't ruin the game and sure, it's not really THAT much of a big deal.  For me though, seeing the response of the gaming press further cements the idea that gaming media is nothing but a massive collection of gaming shitrags not worth giving the time of day to.

Tau's Top 5 Games of 2014

God damn!  It's finally 2015 and I think we have an exciting year ahead for us.  It's been really hard to put out any content recently since New Year is an extremely busy time.  However, I should have a significant increase to my free time in the 2015 so now is a good time to get started on producing all sorts of stuff! 

So let's kick things off with my top 5 games of 2014!  To clarify, I'm only picking off games featured on the list on the right hand side of the page.  There were a ton of great games this year and I'm aware that there are a lot of fantastic titles I didn't get to play due to restraints of time and money so don't freak out if YOUR favorite game isn't on the list.

5) Transistor

Made by the same dudes who gave us Bastion, Transistor was one of those games I had a lot of excitement for prior to release.  While I felt it wasn't quite as good as Bastion, Transistor was fun, stylish and rather challenging if you wanted it to be.

The gameplay was smooth, the music was awesome and it was just about the right length.  I had a few issues with it and the story didn't really pull me in all that well but I had a damn good time fighting the Process through Cloudbank.

4) Dark Souls 2

I loved Dark Souls 2, it was fucking fantastic.  It only comes in at number 4 since I didn't feel it was QUITE as good as Dark Souls for various reasons but it had me hooked really hard from start to finish nonetheless.

While Dark Souls 2 was extremely fun some of the changes made to the game play stripped away part of the challenge that I loved so much which soured me to it a little.  Also the world and over arching plot didn't feel as epic to me as the first game did.  That could be just me but I felt that DS1 had a lot more character than the sequel.

However, these are only little problems that I have and don't ruin the fun of a generally superb game.

3)  Hatsune Miku Project Diva F2nd

Yeah yeah, roll your eyes and call me a weaboo or whatever but I don't give a fuck because this game is AWESOME!  A great rhythm game with a really good selection of great Hatsune Miku (and others) songs.

If you aren't into poppy Japanese music then maybe this game isn't for you but if you don't mind it then there's a really fun game here.  It was also made considerably harder than the 1st one but I really enjoyed the fact that I'm not just breezing through all the songs on extreme like I did before.

It's the kind of game that I keep coming back to.  If I have a spare few minutes to kill I can just load it up and play a song or two then put it down again.  Would recommend for any Vita owner.

2) Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight was so fucking cool, it took ideas from a bunch of different games and just smashed them together and the result is magical.  There's not really all that much to say about Shovel Knight other than it's fucking good and you should go play it.  Fun, challenging, looks great and has a awesome soundtrack, it's the kind of game that everyone should at least try.

1)  South Park: The Stick of Truth

So here it is, my game of 2014.  While it was simplistic in its RPG elements, it made up for with it's character and humor.  The game is really fun to play and it's not just a weak excuse to re-run old South Park jokes for 8 to 10 hours.

While there are plenty of little nods to the show and its long history, Stick of Truth has so much to offer on its own.  I've not genuinely been this tickled by a video game in a long LOOONG time and some moments in the game had me hitting the pause button.

Even if you aren't familiar with South Park I still think you could get a lot out of it.  It's a really fun game with a ton of shit to do and if you go for 100% you'll be at it for a pretty fair amount of time.

I got it during a Steam sale but it's one of the only games I've experienced in a long time worthy of it's full asking price.

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So that's my top 5 for the year.  There's a lot of games that I didn't get round to playing that may have made the list like This War of Mine and Grimrock 2 but I'm gonna be catching up with them pretty soon.

So while you're waiting for the 2015 releases to get going, go play these 5 games, you'll be more than entertained.

Dark Souls 2: Underwhelmingly Good

There aren't many games that I pay full price for anymore.  We live in an age where steam are just giving people free money if you play their free to play stuff and digital sales are so cheap that it barely seems worth it anymore.  That said I'm totally happy that I paid just about full price for Dark Souls 2!

The game is great and I loved almost every second of it.  It was challenging, engaging, interesting and above all, fun.  But as I sat in front of my PC last night watching the credits go buy I cant help but feel a little "meh" about the whole experience.  I know that sounds really weird and contradictory but I'll try to do the best I can to explain myself.

From a game play perspective, DS2 is fantastic.  It takes elements from the first Dark Souls that weren't all that good or just a bit annoying and makes them better while adding a few things of its own and that's great.  The world is also pretty huge and filled with plenty of lore so from a story standpoint it holds up but, and maybe this is just me, the game did absolutely NOTHING to immerse me in it's world.  At no point did I feel like I was on a grand adventure, I just felt like I was going through the motions.

Demon's Souls tells you straight up that the world is fucked because of some fog and it is up to you as a brave adventurer to go and un-fuck it.  That felt like a grand adventure and the icing on the cake was getting to learn all the radical shit about Boletaria.

Dark Souls did a great job of making me feel like I was on a grand adventure by laying on the insurmountable goals thick and fast.  One minute I'm just some prick with a sword or whatever and I have to ring some bells.  So I pull that off and I'm told that maybe I'm the Chosen Undead or something but probably not but just in case I should go and get a big pot from a castle.  So I undergo all sorts of terrible trials to get this big pot and the fucking thing turns out to be empty so I have to travel the land far and wide finding DEITIES to kill so I can steal their souls and put them in my pot.  Then once I've done THAT I have to go and fight what is essentially the father of all creation or some shit and kill him and once that was all said and done I get to decide the fate of all man.

THAT'S FUCKING RADICAL!

Dark Souls 2 on the other hand didn't really have much of anything and it's core plot felt a bit lazy.  In that game I'm just some cursed dude who's drawn to the land of Drangleic for......reasons.  When I get there some bitch tells me to go see the king but to do that I have to go and get 4 very powerful souls.  ALRITE! SOUNDS GOOD!  But once I've done that what comes next?  Well a lot of fucking nothing really.  I explore a castle, kill some bosses, open some doors and when all is said and done I don't feel like I achieved anything.

The final boss of the game is the most challenging boss in a Souls game to date from a game play perspective but I don't really know what the fuck I was fighting there.  The design of the thing made it look like Gravelord Nito's sister or some shit.  [Spoilers] Then when I killed her all I did was have a sit down in a chair and the game fucking ended [End Spoilers]

My reaction to beating Dark Souls 2 was "is that it?", and that's not the kind of reaction I should be having to a game that is supposedly about grand adventure!  Anyway, that was the biggest letdown with the game but it was full of other problems too.

Dark Souls 2 is way, WAY easier than any other Souls game.  The only parts where the game gets challenging is where poison comes in.  There are so many fucking poison segments in this game that it feels like they just forgot how to design good enemies so instead gave everything a poison attack or just make the floor poison or something to make things harder.

But even then the challenge isn't really a big deal because the Ring of Life Protection is repairable and the cost to repair it is super cheap so once you get just one of these rings then you basically never have to worry about losing souls ever again.  Death means -3000 souls while before dying meant that if you weren't careful you could potentially lose fucking everything.

Also the game makes a big deal of you losing a little bit of health every time you die, which is a big thing at the start of the game but after a while human effigies drop like candy and even if you are the worlds most unlucky person you can just buy them so that whole feature of the game just becomes completely pointless.

Despite all my complaints though I still really like Dark Souls 2, just not as much as the other Souls games.  But that says a lot about the quality of Souls as a series when a bad entry of the series is STILL really fun to play.  So even after reading about feelings of slight disappointment with this game, you should still totally go buy it

Dark Souls 2 First Impressions

I'm a little late to the grand party that is Dark Souls 2 but with a few hours played and a couple of dead bosses behind me I think I just want to spend a moment laying down my thoughts on the first hour or two of the game.

I was having some trouble with the opening cut scene but I think the story so far is a little weak.  From what I can tell you're just some guy who goes to some place for some reason and you have to go visit some king or something.  I'm sure as I get into the meat of the plot it'll end up being a lot better than that but I feel like I lack a sense of direction right now.   Still, with a big open ended adventure like this that kind of works in the games favor.

The game play basically remains unchained from Dark Souls but they added a few mechanics from Demon's Souls back in the mixer which made me really happy.  For example, dying makes you lose a little part of your maximum HP so now death feels like it has some kind of consequence while in the Dark Souls it was a mere annoyance for making a mistake. 

I remember being getting quite worried when a developer or something said that they were going to make it more accessible, and I can see what they mean by that but it doesn't ruin the game or anything.  They've opened the gates a bit wider for the new players without pissing off the core fans which is something I have to applaud them for.

Also I seem to recall everyone having a big old moan about the graphics but I don't really see why.  Maybe I'm just not all that fussy about things like floor textures but to me the game looks rather good.  The environments are interesting, the monsters are cool and it has that same Souls atmosphere that I've come to know and love.

It's not every day that I'm THIS happy with a big popular title like this, so if anyone was on the fence about Dark Souls 2 I suggest they get off it and join the fun.

Stop Lying to Consumers!

Whats the one thing that EVERYBODY absolutely hated when Sim City (the new one, not the one from 1989) came out?  Always online!  People hated that shit and some said it really ruined their experience.  For example Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame had his experience stepped on because he wasn't allowed to call his cities silly things like DogBollock.

But one thing I remember hearing around the time that people were complaining about this was that it's just not possible for Sim City to have an offline mode.  Apparently the game was SO advanced and there was so much shit going on in the game that it absolutely had to be online.  I think anyone with half a working brain knew that was a load of crap but that was their story and they stuck to it.

UNTIL TODAY!

On March 18th 2014, Maxis released a patch for SimCity that allowed the game to be played offline and it stores all your shit locally so you don't have to worry about server wipes of whatever crap was going on around release time.

People are understandably happy about this development, people love the Sim City games and rightly so, they are really good.  But just forget that you get to play your latest instalment of the series offline for a second, why are people not more angry about being lied to?  Why is this an acceptable practice for publishers and developers to just flat out lie to their consumers to get their money!?  Why aren't people marching into EA to punch whoever runs that absolutely shit stain of a video game company in the face?!! 

Now I'm picking on SimCity because it's the most recent example I can find but it's not the only one doing it.  Remember how awesome those Dark Souls 2 gameplay videos looked?

Yeah....not quite how we were told it was going to look, is it?

Not that this reflects on the quality of the game itself, and I'm still hoping that the PC version will look as good as those preview videos, but it's a little bit annoying to be told it's going to look good and then it comes out and it looks no better than anything else.

Like I said about SimCity, I'm only using these examples because they are fairly recent but this trend of just lying to people has been going on for a long LOOONG time and it's really sad and needs to stop.  How about instead of lying to consumers to get their money, how about you just make a quality product that people will want to pay for?! Fucking idiots.

Next Gen Attitudes Are Worrying

We are really close now to the launch dates for the next gen systems and it's an exciting time to be a fan of video games as we get to try out all the cool new hardware coming out.

Microsoft and their Xbox One are basically writing the rulebook on how not to launch a console, PS4 is quietly doing its thing and impressing people but isn't completely devoid of it's own bullshit and the WiiU, the one who got out the gate early, is just chugging away in the background producing a decent game once every couple of months.

So what do I mean when I say that the attitudes are worrying?  Well, think about it, what do you buy a games console for?  Playing video games on, right?  So what's everyone talking about when the topic of next gen comes up? Anything but fucking video games.

Sure, there is plenty of talk of hardware, resolutions, capabilities, if it needs online or not, the ability to play used games etc. etc. but where is any of the talk of the actual games?  Just thinking about the lineups for the Xbox One and PS4, there isn't anything that has me jumping up and down thinking I just HAVE to buy the new systems at launch to play that one really good game.

I remember back when the Dreamcast came out, people were pretty impressed with how the thing looked compared to stuff like the PS1 but the FOCUS was the fucking games.  I remember getting seeing footage for things like Power Stone and Jet Set Radio and thinking that I had to have a Dreamcast just to play those damn games.

That game focus seems to have been lost a little bit and with it so has the fun in a new console launch.  Back then, it didn't matter what system you were buying because no matter what you bought you were going to have fun with it.  Even the fan boys were happy if their buddies got the other thing, because then they had a chance to play it and despite many an argument being had over which one was "better" at the end of the day it didn't matter because you were still having fun.

That's gone now, and it's been replaced with technological pissing contests between the major companies and which system gets bought basically boils down to which one is fucking over the consumer the least.  Add a bunch of elitist PC pricks in the background screaming about how awesome their stuff is and all it makes for is a very tiring and unexciting start to the next gen.

There isn't a single game for the next gen systems that I have seen thus far that has made me excited, and that's sad.  If this next gen release period has proved anything to me, it's that gaming isn't about fun anymore, it's about which group of fan boys has the best machine.

I'm sure once the dust settles and some decent games get released, both systems will end up being pretty good in the end.  Hell, I'm sure even the WiiU will end up with a decent library a few more years down the line.  But the point is, that all this outcry at business policy and constant crying over things like screen resolution and frames per second has just pissed me off and now I don't give a flying rats ass about "next gen" anymore.

I'll be keeping an eye out for that one game that eventually makes me excited enough to drop money on a system, but until then, I'll be just sat here biding my time until Dark Souls 2.

E3 2013 Microsoft Conference Thoughts!

Microsoft gave it their all on that stage out there today, and to be honest I think they did a good job!  Check out the video to hear my thoughts on what went down

Dark Souls 2 Gameplay Demo!

So today I watched the Dark Souls 2 game play reveal, here is the video for you so you can too!

So basically the video is 12 minutes of a character running around some environments and doing things while a guy talks over it.  I think it is safe to say that Dark Souls 2 is in good hands here folks and it is perfectly safe to go and get all hyped.

Some people have been complaining about the health and stamina gauges being high and enemies not doing all that much damage but do keep in mind that it was a game play trailer to show off the game, so they were probably just playing with a levelled guy so that they aren't getting destroyed while trying to show you the game.

The enemies are doing cooler things now too, like in that scene where he shoots a dude in a cage and he busts out or that guy who uses his curved armour to roll on you if you get behind him.  It'll be great on the first play through when you have no idea just how a certain enemy is going to ruin your shit even when you may think you have the upper hand.  Also deflecting projectiles with your weapon is fucking RAD.

There are a couple of things I would say are a little concerning, like the environments being a little empty, but it's hard to make any kind of solid comment yet because it is just a specially designed game play demo to give us an idea of what it's going to look like.

From Software do good work, I don't think they will let us down.

Regarding Concerns for Dark Souls 2

Well spank my ass and call me Nancy! Just as I'm gushing hard over Dark Souls, a sequel gets announced.  I'm not usually one for jumping on hype, but for this, I have premium seats on the hype express.

Well I didn't watch the VGA, I don't need a bunch of people telling me what the game of the year is (and Walking Dead getting it is BULLSHIT, not because it's bad, but that's another story for another time) because I already know what my personal game of the year is but it's pretty much irrelevant because every ones GOTY is going to be different. 

Getting to the point though, I've seen a number of concerns being raised over this game, people feeling doubtful that it'll be able to capture the same hair pulling yet satisfying magic the first one did, but to be completely honest with you, I'm 90% sure that it won't turn out disappointing.  Of course, until we see some proper game play all we can do is speculate, but given the quality of games that come out of From Software, we can expect something at least half way good even if it doesn't quite stack up to the original.

The big concern that I noticed got some alarm bells ringing comes from a quote from one of the developers that said "Dark Souls 2 will be more understandable and straightforward"

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Dark-Souls-2-More-Understandable-Straightforward-50227.html

But I don't think we really need to worry, "straightforward" and "understandable" does not translate to "easy" and the concerns over the game being made easier I think are people reading too much into something that hasn't been said.  Sure, maybe some of the stuff that was fun for Dark Souls vets to figure out will no longer be as cryptic, which is a shame but the core difficulty will hopefully still be there.

So ride the hype train all the way to release day for this one, and I'm praying that it doesn't derail before we reach that day, because if Dark Souls 2 is shit then I don't think my poor old heart could take it.