Fanbases Ruining Games For Me

You may think that title is a bit strange but it's something that happens to me quite often and it's a shame because usually the thing I end up hating ends up actually being quite good.  The problem is that my stubbornness to not be associate with the legions of twats kicks in and I end up nitpicking every little problem I can find with a given title or series and I convince myself it's shit.

This happened pretty hard with Final Fantasy 7, a game I got when I was quite young and loved the fuck out of it.  I'd play it for hours a day, multiple play throughs and even talk about it at length every day for weeks at school with my friends.  Then I got my hands on an internet connection and discovered a whole bunch of annoying twats that started to make me hate it.

It was a slow process.  First I found all the twats on forums and sites like GameFAQs or I'd see read some cringe worthy fanfiction and have to stay away from the computer for a few days to recover.  But I'd still play the game and enjoy it, their shittiness didn't affect the quality of the game after all.  But then I stopped playing it and eventually my memories of the game started to fade away and me being me the things I remembered most were the things that I had problems with.  Then large groups of twats would come along and brand it "THE GREATEST RPG EVER MADE!" or you'd play a game and there would be some 13 year old boy with XxSephiroth007xX as his username and eventually I'd end up hating it.

Then in 2010 I got over myself I replayed Final Fantasy 7 and.....loved the fuck out of it the same way I always did.  It's happened to lots of other things as well such as Kingdom Hearts and Halo with both communities being filled with the largest know-nothing sacks of shit to every curse a keyboard with their greasy hands and while neither of those games are bad there mere mention of it in conversation makes me roll my eyes and sparks thoughts of suicide.  Kingdom Hearts fans with their "2Deep4U" shit and Halo fans who will be OUTRAGED if you claim that Halo has always been a mediocre shooter that ruined the genre and the idea of sharing a common interest with these people makes me sick.

It even happens in other fucking mediums too

Attack on Titan, a big popular anime in Japan that seems to have garnered a pretty big western following I  think is a show that I've never watched but I fucking HATE IT.  It seems like an interesting premise but back when it was fairly new there were a large number of cockrockets on my Facebook feed posting shit like "LOOK AT HOW ADULT IT IS!" with a screenshot of someone being bitten in half.

Violence doesn't make an anime adult, you can't just look at a scene of someone being eaten and claim that's what sets it apart from anime who's target audience is school children.  I have a better argument, it's published by fucking Kodansha so OF COURSE it's not adult, it's just shonen trash.

That said, if I watched it I'd probably get a kick out of it because shonen trash does tend to be sort of entertaining in a mindless way where you can just admire the spectacle of some insane shit going down.  I can't ever bring myself to actually watch it though because alone I cant justify spending my time like that and with friends I'd just be nitpicking and pissing them all off.  So thanks Titan fans, you ruined that show for me forever.

I'm sure one day I'll get over it give it ago but until then there's a lot of things that are being ruined for me by twats.

The Problem With Hype

I know I made a post about a week ago about how totally hyped I am for the new Gauntlet, but getting hyped for something is not a thing I enjoy doing to myself.

You see, if you get hyped for a game and follow its development and look up all the information you can on it then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.  If the game that you've finally been waiting for comes out and it ends up sucking great deals of ass, then you are going to feel pretty crushed.  This has happened to me on numerous occasions and maybe that's why I'm a little jaded when it comes to new releases.

On the flip side, if a game comes out and you weren't really expecting much from it but upon playing you realise it's actually really good, then that's a really nice feeling.  That's not to say that you should go around hating on any release that gets any kind of press in the name of avoiding disappointment, but not getting too caught up in the whirlwinds of hype will help soften the blow a little if a game you were hoping to enjoy sucks.

But building excitement for a title is what's done for any entertainment medium, it's how sales are generated.  But for me, when certain games start getting a lot of hype or a lot of praise on release, I instantly start raising eyebrows and it causes me to judge a game a lot more harshly that I would have done previously.

Halo is the best example of this that I ever experienced.  Halo (the first one) was a good game, I enjoyed playing Halo on my friends Xbox when it first came out, it's a well polished FPS experience.  However, Halo got a lot of praise and I mean A LOT of goddamn praise.  It was being given perfect scores and hailed as one of the best games fucking ever made in the history of games.

However during the time of Halo's peak popularity, I couldn't help but find all the praise to be very silly.  I really enjoyed playing it but I had a lot of problems and quite frankly it felt like a massive step back from a lot of the FPS games that I played during my youth.  When faced with a Halo fan I would start to nitpick every little thing because of all the hype it received and in doing that I ended up kind of convincing myself that I didn't like it.  It was only when I got over myself and popped it in again that I realised that is IS a good game, it's just not the 10/10 supergame that everyone made it out to be.

It sounds really petty I know, but if you throw down a 10 I'm going to pull out the magnifying glass.

Stop it and Grow Up

Twitter is cool, I don't use it but I can see why people like it so much.  It's a good way to have a direct line to certain people and have a platform to send them short messages or questions and it kind of brings people together.  That said, it's also a place for a lot of needless internet drama and despite it being really funny when it happens, it kind of needs to stop.

The above picture was a tweet made by Halo designer David Ellis commenting on a redesign of a Metal Gear Solid 5 character, here is what they came up with.

Now this isn't an issue about sexism or anything like that because I'm sure there are tons of morons already arguing about that shit, I have a problem with Mr Ellis's tweets regarding this design.

As far as I know, Kojima changed the design of this character to be "more erotic" to promote cosplaying.  Kojima isn't an idiot, he knows who he is designing this game for and that demographic like skimpy outfits on females.  He also knows that there are a large amount of female cosplayers in Japan who will jump at the opportunity to recreate this outfit so really he's just pleasing two fairly large groups of people.

Now you can criticise it all you want and no doubt there is definitely stuff to criticise with this design no matter how much I quite like it personally but calling Kojima a "man baby" on twitter is unprofessional, stupid and it kind of shows that you have no idea what you're talking about so you resort to petty insults because you feel like this should offend you for some stupid reason.

(As a side note, I don't think the man who's involved in making generic robot soldiers really has the right to be commenting on anything, get a clue)

David Ellis isn't the only person guilty of doing this shit though.  Phil Fish, a man who I have ranted about before was notorious for just insulting people on twitter and generally starting web drama because of his lack of tact and professionalism.  So you may be thinking "But Tau! You insult industry figures on your blog all the time!" and you would be completely right.  However the difference between me and them is that I'm a fucking nobody on Blogger writing for a small audience of people and I have absolutely no power in anything.  These people are industry leaders who should be setting a fucking example and going around twitter insulting people is not the example you should be setting. 

If it ever came to a point where I started having some kind of serious impact on anything, I would damn well make sure that I wasn't spouting the same rage filled nonsense that I do here.  If I was doing posts on let say, Tom Hulett for a proper website, they would be well constructed and thought out pieces on why his decisions are bad for the Silent Hill series.  Instead I can just down a bunch of caffeine drinks and smash my keyboard so that swear words appear around his name on the screen, but in this day an age I'm sure that would acceptable in a "professional" environment as well.

So basically, get a fucking clue and stop bringing school yard insults to twitter if your trying to criticise other professionals in your field.  It's childish, stupid and it sets a bad example and sends the wrong message.

Grow up and stop pretending to be offended by things for the sake of seeming "progressive" to morons on the internet.

Rabid Fanboyism is Dumb

With the PS4 and the Nextbox (because 720 is a dumb name) on the horizon, I've started to notice more and more fan boys popping up to defend their favourite system, and this is annoying and it should stop.

Above is an old advert for the Megadrive (Genesis if you're American and WRONG) basically slagging off Nintendo in order to try and drum up sales for the system.  Now I owned a Mega Drive back in the day, I thought that shit was the bees knees, but I never slagged off a Nintendo system.

Sure, I would have arguments with my Super Nintendo owning school yard friends over which shit was better, but that wouldn't deter me from heading to their house after school sometimes and playing some of the old SNES greats.  In the same way, when they would come to my house they would be really hyped to hop on a bit of Sonic 2 or Golden Axe or whatever.

The debates and the sharing of systems continued for years and years, when all of a sudden the debates around which system was better changed.  No longer would people argue the pros and cons of a system, it all just devolved into "MY SYSTEM IS BETTER AND YOU'RE DUMB!", but the language was much harsher.  It's basically been the same since that switch, where trying to debate systems on most forums will just land you a load of personal attacks rather than any decent discussion.  It died down for a while but the whole Microsoft Vs Nintendo Vs Sony thing is starting to rear its ugly head again.

So why did this shit even start? When did people get so defensive about their system of choice?  Well I'm going to make an uneducated guess and say it was when Halo came out.

As fun as Halo was, it was released on a system that basically had nothing else going for it.  There weren't all that many great games on the Xbox, at least not compared to the PS2 or whatever, but it had a few.  This is where I think it all started though.  People would buy an Xbox for Halo, then realise that there were maybe, 2 or 3 other games worth playing and then feel that they had to justify the big money splurge.

In trying so desperately hard to justify their purchase, they brainwashed themselves into having a sense of brand loyalty and that is how the "rabid" fan boy was born.  Then again, I'm probably talking out of my ass but fuck Halo it wrecked FPS (I just want my Doom-esque shooters to be popular again)

Still, it's not like fan boys are going to stop me from buying all 3 systems in the end and enjoying everything the next generation has to offer, but I wish I could have a decent discussion without having my sexuality brought into question just because I think the WiiU looks promising.  Your loss morons