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.

Game Dev Is Hard

I think anyone who is seriously into video game has had a dream or at least a thought of wanting to make their own game at some point.  With the rise of indie developers making huge numbers of sales on platforms like Steam, why wouldn't you want a piece of that pie, right?  However game development is INCREDIBLY hard.

I've been trying, for a while, just to make my own piece of shit game in RPG Maker.  Now maybe it's a problem with the genre I'm trying to develop for but before you even start doing anything on a computer there's so much that you have to think about.  I feel that if you don't go in with a decent plan then the project is going to, maybe not fall apart, but get pretty confusing pretty quickly.  You have to have all your ideas and how they are going to work together straight before you really begin.

Now you would think that the actual putting together of the game, the coding, would be the hardest part of the process.  While coding is an extremely hard thing to do we now live in an age where there are a number of programs to help you along with this process. For example, I'm making something in RPG Maker and I know next to nothing about coding.  Despite that, I've been able to use the tools provided to at least get SOMETHING working.  A little man walking around an island that gets into random battles doesn't sound like much but when you're starting from the bottom it's a pretty big deal.  I have another friend who is trying to make a point and click adventure game in an engine called AGS and as far as I know he taught himself all the coding side of that by just fucking around with the program and asking on forums for help.  Of course, you're quite limited when you use these kind of tools but when you're just starting out they are a good way to put your big toe into the ocean of game dev, so to speak.

But no, the reason why game development is so hard is just the sheer range of skills you need to be able to pull it off.  There's a reason that very few games are developed just by one guy.  You need to be able to do the coding, compose music, write stories if your game needs it, make artwork and have a good game play idea to make all that shit stick together.  That's A LOT to ask of a single person.  I feel like I have good ideas and if I'm making an RPG or adventure game I'd be pretty good at writing a story but I know NOTHING about composing music and I can't draw for shit.  This is a big roadblock for your average person.

However there are great examples of absolute beasts making great games entirely by themselves.  The one that springs to my mind straight away is Touhou, made by one drunk man who goes by the name of ZUN.

Awesome games, great soundtracks, incredibly challenging and fun to play and yet that artwork is....shall we say mediocre at best.  No one can be perfect though, the amount of skill the guy has in all of those fields surpasses mine by a great deal, I'm truly in awe over how these games even exist.

Still, if you do have an idea for a game and you are slowly working away at it, don't let it die.  If you can't draw, go learn.  If you don't know shit about music? go google some tutorials.  We live in an age where all this information is readily available and if you're willing to put in the hours then anyone could probably pull it off.  Just don't get frustrated when it isn't the walk in the park you were probably hoping it was.

Video Games As Art

This is a question I see a lot, so I'm going to have a small talk about it!

When I was with my buddy a few days ago, we were discussing what games could be considered "art" and why.  It was an interesting discussion but we were finding it extremely difficult to come up with things outside of the obvious titles. 

This isn't because there aren't any others, there are plenty of others, but it's because it's hard to pin down the rules behind why or why not you can regard a game a piece of art.  What makes this even harder is that the rules that govern my opinion on why a game is art will almost certainly be different on why you, the person reading this right now, would consider a game to be art or not.

What adds another layer of difficulty to the whole problem is that, in my opinion, games can be considered art in more than one way.  The music, the visuals, the story, the voice acting, writing, execution of game play elements, all of these things on their own could be considered art.  So just because a game has shit game play doesn't mean that there isn't some degree of artistry in the visuals or music, or even the story telling, but do these factors stop the whole game from being considered art or not? That's really only for you to decide.

Just to give a little example which I hope to expand on in the future, Nier is a game I'd consider to be rather artistic in the sense that the music and story were fucking fantastic.  That said, Nier is a game with repetitive game play and pretty crappy graphics.  Despite that I felt genuinely invested in the characters, plot and lore of that world, and was almost sad to see it end.  It yanked an emotional response from the lump of coal in my chest I call a heart, and that, to me, makes it something you could consider art.

I could probably write a fucking book on video games as an art form, but instead I'm going to butt heads with my friend and potentially make a video series about what games we consider to be art and why.   Keep an eye out for it but it'll probably take a long time to get that sort of project off the ground, but hopefully we'll make something enjoyable to watch.

Crysis 3 is not a Masterpiece

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I have not played Crysis 3, and my experience with Crysis 2 is rather limited.  That said I really did enjoy Crysis 1, I thought it was pretty good and had fun with it.

So, while digging around the internet for stuff I came across this article on Gamespot

http://au.gamespot.com/news/crytek-crysis-3-is-our-masterpiece-6404708

Cevat Yerli, the founder of Crytek says that Crysis 3 is a masterpiece and that of one the main reasons for reviews being "tepid" is because of "gamer fatigue".

First of all, the reviews for Cysis 3 aren't as bad as this guy makes them out to be.  Most places gave the game either an 8 or a 9 and said generally nice things about it.  On Metacritic the thing has a 77 critic score, which I'd say is pretty fuckin' good.

What really bugs me though is how this guy is blaming the consumers for the lukewarm feedback.  You made a fucking first person shooter, in a time when the market is over saturated with first person shooters.  While graphically Crysis 3 is about as good as it gets, at the end of the day it's just another fucking shooter.  Not only is it just another shooter, it's the third in a series of games that would be classified by anyone over 15 as just another shooter.

Crysis 3 is not a masterpiece, it's just one more first person shooter game to add to the ever growing and overly large pile.  Granted, the game looks extremely pretty and I think Crytek are doing good things by showing what PC hardware is really capable of.  But Crysis 3, outside of the graphics is nothing special, nothing that will blow your mind.  It's not the fault of the consumer that you made another shooter when there are already too many, because if you didn't notice that then you must have your head under a goddamn rock.  Try making something truly original and then we can start talking masterpieces.

NOTE: Me saying Crysis 3 isn't a masterpiece doesn't mean I think it's bad.  I've not played it, I don't know if it's good or bad, but you can tell just by looking at it that it's not exactly breaking the mould.

Bullshit #9: The Silent Hill HD Collection

Today we have something SO extremely bullshit, that it's caused free game Friday to be cancelled, so if you were expecting a free game this week, go tell Konami about it!

Now I've talked about some shit on this blog, but this takes the 2012 award for most bullshit thing to happen all year.  Now before we get into it, the bullshit about this game comes on 3 levels.  The first level of bullshit is the "this sucks now but it may be sorted one day" bullshit.  The second level is the "I can't believe you fucking did that" bullshit.  The most bullshit level of bullshit is the "I want to stab you in the brain with an icepick" level of bullshit, so let's address each one, one at a time.

So bullshit level 1 (a.k.a. Sucks now but it may be sorted level), is the number of technical bugs that are involved in this game.  The game glitches, freezes, slows down and stuff bugs out all over the place.  The sound doesn't work properly, when you fire guns, the sound just glitches all over the place and the the shell casings play twice or even 8 or 9 times in quick succession.  Even worse than that is  the fog, oh god is it FUCKING AWFUL.

There is a picture that was shown to Masahiro Ito (the art guy) before the game came out, and it still looked like that after release, you can see the goddamn floating bit of rope because they were using fog to make up for any limitations like that.  A google search or a youtube search can get you all the other weird fog glitches, and the fucking fog was one of the most important parts of the games look and feel, if you can't get that right WHY IN THE FUCK would you even bother to release.  That's not even all the problems as well, I've not even mentioned the mixed up eye texture (google that one to have your mind blown on just how bad this remake job was)

But you know what? These problems are all technical and can be sorted with patches.  In fact, there was a patch that helped with a few of these problems, but I think there are still a shitton of issues.  So even if you set aside the game not working properly, lets move on to the deeper layers of bullshit.

So level 2 (a.k.a. I can't believe you fucking did that) is the changes to the voice acting and general design of the game.

The changes to the design of the town are pretty bad.  One thing that really helped the atmosphere of the game was just how dirty everything looked, even when you weren't in a nightmare, but for some reason, probably for the purpose of making it all "HD" and shit, it just looks boring and uninteresting.  But apart from the art being changed, the voices were changed and THIS is the biggest offender.  It's not that the voice acting is bad on its own, they gave solid performances, but when you put those performances into a Silent Hill game, they are fucking muffgabage.  Team Silent carefully picked its team of actors to give the characters a certain feel, and the new performances just shat all over that.  Finally, the way they up scaled the scenes is fucking stupid.  They put these weird borders on everything, most notably the scene in the hotel where you watch the tape of Jame's wife, where they put this really stupid fucking TV border round the whole thing and it crops out half the fucking video.  Whoever decided that is a wanker and I want to beat him with a bag of frozen bread until he gets a concussion.

The final level of bullshit (a.k.a Stab you in the brain with an icepick) comes entirely from this man.

This is Tomm Hulett, he works for Konami as what I think is the guy in charge of Silent Hill nowadays, and is the grand master of missing the point.  I don't like this man, he is a stain on the gaming industry and his bravado is offensive to basically anyone who has to listen to it.  He claims that nobody loves Silent Hill as much as he does, and has said other things like the gameplay in the old games being shit, or the voice acting being bad etc.

Basically, his very existence in Konami is a giant middle finger to the original Team Silent.  This man remade Silent Hill 2 and 3, not because he wanted to bring these great games to a new age, but because he thought he could "improve" them and get rich and famous off the back of someone else's  work.  The funny thing is, the "improvements" this scumbag made to these games has just enraged fans and to be quite honest, the fact he felt like he needed to make improvements at all is really offensive to the original Japanese team and the only real way for him to apologise for this "remake" is to get on his knees and cut his own stomach open.

Fuck this remake
Fuck Tomm Hulett (Book of Origins looks shit too by the way)
and fuck everything that western developers like him have done to this series

God. Damnit.

Note
I'm linking to a really good channel on youtube called TwinPerfect.  These 3 guys did a series on Silent Hill called The Real Silent Hill Experience, and I recommend that you watch it, if you're a fan or even just to learn about what you're missing out on.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TwinPerfectChannel

Reset

While I was clicking around the Internet today, I came across a trailer for a very mysterious game indeed called Reset by Theory Interactive.  Here, take a look

The reason I say it's a mysterious game is because I can barely find any info on this thing at all.  There is this trailer, a facebook page and a blog, but none of this stuff contains any info on the game itself.  What I have found out, according to the facebook page is that Reset will be a "Single player co-op first person puzzle game with emphasis on story and atmosphere."

The reason I decided to blog about it, is according to the information section for that youtube video, everything in that trailer was done with the in-game engine!!  Holy shit, is this going to be one pretty fucking game.  I think we're going to be looking at the next benchmark title for graphics when this gets a release so start saving those pennies so you can run this thing at launch.

The release of this thing is yet another mystery as the game isn't even in alpha yet, so we will probably be waiting quite a while for this one.  Let's hope that Theory Interactive takes its time and gives us something really special here.