Kratos Is A Shit Character

So recently I've been playing the God of War HD Collection for the PS3.  God of War was a game I played a long long time ago during my high school days and while I enjoyed the first two entries in the series I never played Chains of Olympus on PSP (despite now owning 2 copies) or God Of War 3.  I'm actually surprised about how little I remember about these games.  As far as the first game in concerned I remembered everything pretty vividly up to the point where you go and get Pandora's Box and then it almost feels like I'm playing it for the first time once again.

Kratos, the lead character of these games, while not as universally recognizable as something like Mario or Sonic is a stand out face in the world of gaming.  God of War is a big popular IP for Sony and people who are at least a little into games have probably seen Kratos at some point.  Hell, even at the last E3 people were losing their shit for fat dad Kratos since there was a new God of War game on the horizon.

However what my current play through of the first game has led me to feel is that Kratos is just a bit of a shit character.  Now the shitness of his character doesn't reflect on the quality of the games, they are good games, but Kratos is a completely unlikable prick. 

His story seems to be that he was a general in the army who was pretty good at killing things but in some battle against barbarians he got his shit kicked in.  So just as he's about to get his head smashed with a hammer he calls upon Ares, the God of war and Ares comes down, saves the day and makes Kratos his bitch.  So Kratos does his bidding for a bit but one day wanders into a village and "accidentally" kills his own family.  Pissed that Ares made him do that, Kratos vows to kill him and so begins the first game in the series.

Granted that I've not finished my re-play of the first game yet so maybe the ending will make me rethink this entire post but it feels like they were going for some kind of redemption plot line.  Kratos wants to kill Ares, get his life back so he can stop being a prick.  But it's impossible to feel sorry for Kratos since being a prick was all he was made to do, with or without Ares and my bet that if that whole silly family killing thing hadn't have happened then he still would have carried on in his hobby of draining things of their blood.

Playing as a hilarious asshole can be fun, there's nothing wrong with that, but trying to throw in certain story aspects to try and make us feel sorry for a character who is just a prick and nothing more feels silly.  Like I said though, my memory of the first two games is fuzzy at best and my lack of experience with the third means that there may be things that they have done with the guy to make him a bit more likable but the first games attempt is quite frankly, laughable.

Stop HDing Things

You know I don't really have a problem with HD collections, at least not most of them.  It's sort of nice to be able to get one disc and have all the Devil May Cry games available so that I don't have to change discs if I want to play DMC 1 instead of DMC 3 for example.

That said, I do think they are a little bit unneeded.  It's not like I was sat here thinking "oh, Shadow of the Colossus is a really good game but it looks like shit and I can't play it anymore".  The game looks fine on the PS2, and playing it now is just as much fun as playing it when it first came out.  Sure the HD collection made it look a bit nicer but at the end of the day it's still the same fucking game.

It's not like all HD collections have been successful either, with Silent Hill basically ruining whatever legacy Silent Hill 2 and 3 had by convincing all new users that the game is a load of arse.  Some HD collections even seem a little pointless, like God of War since it's not like original PS2 copies of those games are hard to find.

Well the reason I'm moaning so much about HD releases is because I'd rather see the money spent on that put into something new.  One of my biggest problems with this industry is that there are too many sequels to things and some things are getting a little stale.  Instead of pumping money into HD remakes of old games, why not try and create a new IP.  Something new and exciting that we can all point and go "holy shit look at that!" instead of "oh....another Assassins Creed" or "oh.....more Call of Duty"

Even something like Metal Gear Rising would be fine where your making a new game within an established series universe.  We get more of the story and characters we like but a fresh new way to play with them, which at least prevents me from being bored.

Basically, money should be going towards new stuff, not making old stuff prettier.  Give me something new and not just an up scaled version of a game I played less than 10 years ago, goddamn it.

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