Friday the 13th

God I remember all the buildup for this game.  Every other day on Facebook one of those videos from some weird baity gaming page would post a trailer or some game play footage like "erh muh gerd looks so good" and then the game actually came out and it sort of just vanished from existence.  Anyway thanks to a friend I've finally had a chance to give it a go.

The short version of this post is that if you followed the hype train then you'll probably be disappointing by how the game turned out but for me, I thought it looked a bit shit to begin with so I was actually pleasantly surprised.  Nothing special but a fun little game that you could happily kill a few hours with.

The game itself is pretty simple.  You join an online lobby with a bunch of people and everyone chooses a camp counselor and a Jason.  Which characters are available is dependent on your level which seems a little bullshitty to me since each character does seem to be a little bit different but whatever, you get EXP pretty quickly.  Once the game starts, one player is assigned to be the Jason and everyone else has to run away.  The goal is to escape or survive until the end of the timer for the counselors and to murder everyone for Jason.

On each map there are a number of objectives which involve things like repairing a car or calling the police and doing this will help speed up your escape but the items required for this are placed randomly throughout the map so if you want to get it done, working with other players might be a good idea although I'm playing the game in a busy bar with no voice control so for me that's pretty much impossible.  For Jason it's just a case of kill as many people as you can but you're a slow bulky piece of shit so you have a few powers to help you out like the ability to sense players or teleport around the map.  Once everyone is dead or has escaped the game ends and you're given experience with which you unlock characters and perks and whatnot.  Then you do it all again till the end of time.

I have two major problems with what limited time I've had with the game.  The first being that Jason just isn't fun to play AT ALL.  Maybe it's because I'm bad but he's super unwieldy and just sort of needlessly hard to use.  It's hard to articulate but maybe if you try the game you'll know what I mean but generally the counselors are just a lot more fun to play.  My other problem is that the game is buggy to fuck.  The worst bug I saw was when another friend of mine was playing Jason and I don't quite know what happened but the HUD vanished and he was completely locked out of using his powers and couldn't smash doors and stuff properly.  Eventually he got lucky an someone clocked him in the face with a frying pan and when he came out of the stun all his shit came back.  One other minor annoyance is that if the player controlling Jason drops from the game then the game just instantly fucking ends.  I get why but couldn't thay have maybe just let a bot Jason take over or something?

Either way, while Friday the 13th is nothing special it's at least a bit of mindless fun for a few hours.  I imagine if you get a team of good counselors and a Jason that actually knows what he's doing it could be pretty intense but unfortunately every game I've played/witnessed up to now seems to be populated with dribbling children but that isn't exactly the games fault.  Not something I'd pay full price for but put that shit on a Steam sale and I'll pick up my own copy eventually.

New Glitchy Games are NOT OK!

I've probably said it once on this blog before but I'm going to say it again because it keeps happening and it pisses me off.

Recently Assassin's Creed Unity got released and the first things I see about the game aren't launch trailers or reviews or people hyping up the game.  No, what I see are a number of articles talking about just how fucking buggy the game is.  There's even a video on YouTube I watched on my commute home called "Glitch in the Animus" or something, showing all the buggy shit in action.  Paying customers aren't happy with the current state of the game either with it weighing in at 4.6 on Metacritic.  I know that's not really the best way to judge anything but it's clear to see that people are pissed and apparently for good reason.

What I don't understand is that they've been making these games since fucking 2007 and judging from the ones I've played there isn't too much drastically different from each title.  I'm not a developer and I have no idea about coding, so forgive me if I sound stupid, but one would think that if you keep using the same shit to produce these games that it would get more stable, not less, right?  I know open world games tend to have quite a few bugs with them but judging from what I'm reading on the net, AC: Unity is just taking the piss.

Now I've not played AC: Unity yet and I don't think I will for a long time but what I'm about to say applies to any game really.  If you're going to release a game, especially one that's part of a popular series and you expect people to pay full price, make sure it's fucking finished.  At a very basic level, make sure that the player is able to play and enjoy the game without being dragged out of the experience because they fell through the world or NPCs are spazzing out weirdly all over the map or whatever.  Make sure to release a game that doesn't frustrate people by having a significant amount of slowdown or crashing issues or anything like that because we're paying a lot of money for this shit at launch, it better fucking work.

I hate this fucking attitude of the modern game industry of "release now, fix later" because by the time "later" rolls around I'm already pissed off and have shelved your shitty game.  Almost every game has glitches to some degree, no body's perfect, but they shouldn't be this prevalent from day 1.  Just look at fucking Ocarina of Time, that game is glitch crazy but when I was playing it for the first time back in the day, I didn't notice any of them, the game worked flawlessly.  Now, when I buy a new game, I have to cross my fingers and hope that it isn't so infested with bugs that I have to wait for a patch or whatever.

I'm using AC: Unity as an example because it's the newest one out, but there are plenty of games that I have played and thought to myself "this simply wasn't finished or tested properly".  I don't give a shit that game development is hard, if you want my money, produce a quality product you wankers.

Still sore about Silent Hill: HD Collection.