Imagine If... Shin Megami Tensei AR Game

 

I remember when Shin Megami Tensei Dx2 Liberation was announced.  It was around the time that Pokemon Go was still riding a wave of popularity and I got the (mistaken) idea that Dx2 was going to be that kind of game but when it came time to download I was sorely disappointing.

 When I spoke about Dx2 on the blog I had a few nice things to say about it.  Despite the awful gatcha system and some legendary amounts of grinding that needed to be done, for a shitty little mobile RPG it wasn't actually that bad.  There was even a mode available to some phones where you could use an AR thing to take pictures with your demons in the real world but it didn't really have anything to do with the game itself.  So I'm going to use this post to sort of dream up what I think a proper Shin Megami Tensei AR game would be like and hopefully someone at ATLUS will stumble on this page and steal the idea.  Probably not but a mans gotta dream.

Your phone in this hypothetical game would take the place of the COMP or maybe the gauntlet from SMT IV.  In fact the gauntlet from SMT IV makes a little more sense because in that game you buy "apps" with "app points" as you level up allowing you to store more demons, get more skills or make various features cheaper.  From your phone then you'd manage your team, manage your items, buy player focused skills and you could probably put the Cathedral of Shadows in the main menu too.

The main meat of the game I suppose would be the same thing as Pokemon Go.  You would go outside, walk around and get into encounters on the map where you would fight demons. In those fights you could kill the enemies for EXP or you could do demon negotiation to recruit them into your party.  That of course isn't enough to hold an entire game by itself so you'd have to lift some things from Pokemon Go, mainly the raid system.  Instead of calling them raids though you could take a page from the Nocturne book at have "Fiend" battles where groups of players would fight a single enemy.  For the 6 people in the world that have played Dragon Quest Walk, sort of similar to how raid battles work in that.  When you beat a raid in Pokemon Go you are granted a chance to catch the rare monster but that wouldn't really work in a game like this, so pulling from the SMT3 book once again, a Fiend could drop a menorah that you could use to access a dungeon.  These dungeons would be separate from the walking around and be done in a first person view, a nod to the classic games for the long term fans, and in these dungeons you'd have a chance to get rare items and recruit strong demons.  Although it would be unfair to lock out players from this side of the game if they aren't strong enough to do the fiend encounters so randomly around the map you could spawn "Amala Terminals" or something like that.  Players could walk to these and take part in a sort of mini dungeon-crawl  and these areas would have their own loot and demons to gather.

Of course, this is just my personal dream of what an SMT AR Game would look like, I'm sure some actual game designer with many years experience over me could put something better together but it's nice to dream about something that could be.  Although, being really honest, I'd rather ATLUS just get SMT 5 out rather than focus on side projects like this.

 

I just want ONE AR zombie survival game

So a little while ago a friend of mine brought to my attention a game called mobile called The Walking Dead: Our World.  The game looked, at first glace, like a sort of Pokemon Go-esque thing where you go around killing zombies and it looked pretty cool.  However when I got home I found out that going around killing zombies with your phone camera seems to be the ONLY thing you do.  Granted I haven't played it yet and I'm such a sucker for TWD I'll at least give it a try but my disappointment is pretty high.

Ever since the success of Pokemon Go I've had this fantasy about an AR zombie survival game that would involve running around your local area to find supplies and fight for survival.  At the start of the game you'd register a location as your "base", it could be your home or place of work or wherever the hell you like.  You'd build up a base and gather survivors and every so often on the map little caches of supplies would pop up around the area your in.  You'd be tasked with going off and gathering supplies and keeping your camp alive but when you went out you'd be chased about by zombies (or whatever else) and if they caught you, you'd game over.  Maybe if you had a survivor in your camp it could act as an extra life or there could be some perma death system, I don't know, but I just want that kind of game to exist.

I got the same pangs of disappointment when I played Zombies Run, a sort of fitness app for mobile.  I thought it would be just that where I'd have to jog about collecting supplies but from the little I experienced of it, it's basically just a podcast you listen to while you go for a jog and the "fun" comes from the fact it asks you to run a bit faster every so often.  Not a bad app by any stretch but just not the zombie mobile survival game of my dreams.

So if you're a game developer and you stumble on this post, please go and make that above idea a reality.  I'm not a game dev so tweak it and make it actually good but at least give me a credit as "Blog Prick" or something like that.  I know zombies are an over saturated genre but I seriously feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in the world of zombie AR, someone needs to get on it.

Mobile Gaming is Shit

I have a Japanese exam coming up soon and the chances of me passing it are pretty fucking slim.  This is one of the reasons that content has been so thin on the ground and it's partly because when I'm not eating, sleeping or wanking I've replaced a lot of my gaming time with studying.  This means that the only gaming I've been doing for the last few weeks has been little bouts of mobile games during my commute to work or lunch break or streams of Resident Evil 4.

So mobile gaming is shit but not for the reason you might think.  A lot of people rag on mobile gaming but actually in recent years it's been getting a lot better.  You still have your cheaply made puzzle games and various shit quality rip offs of whatever the mobile hit du jour is but it's a lot easier to find something of at least some quality now than it used to be.

For example I've clogged up my phone with a whole bunch of games such as the Shadowverse, a card game which makes Hearthstone look like a soggy pile of shit, Idolmaster, a rhythm game with a staggering number of songs for a free to play, Gyrosphere, a slow version of Monkey Ball and Perchang a fun little puzzler that I play while taking a shit.  Not to mention all the ports of actual games that exist on the app store now, mobile, at least from a selection stand point, isn't as painfully awful as you might think.

However I still fucking hate it because phones were just not designed for gaming and playing games on these things is a highly frustrating experience and a lot of the time I'd rather do my own wisdom teeth surgery than deal with the shit that these games are causing me. 

For example, phones do EVERYTHING nowadays but they also have limited space.  So it's all well and good having a decent selection of games but eventually you'll probably have to delete them for apps that are actually useful or so you can take a picture of that stupid cat you saw on the street yesterday.  But let's say that's not an issue for you because you're one of those weirdos that bought the million gig version of your phone, the controls are still shit.  Touch screen controls are wank outside of tapping or sliding, as soon as you have to start making precise movements or, god help you, playing with one of those stupid on screen D-Pads (Like in Sonic CD) playing the game becomes insanely annoying.  But OK, maybe you're a fucking twat who bought one of those controller add ons instead of just buying a portable system, the biggest problem with mobile gaming is the battery.

Games eat battery life faster than your mum eats sweet and sour pork at the all you can eat Chinese buffet.  Pokemon Go was the best example of this where playing the game for about an hour would drain you from 100 to about 60.  Any game beyond a shitty angry birds clone tends to destroy your battery and this problem is made worse if your phone has a little bit of age on it so the battery life isn't quite what it used to be either.  I started my lunch break yesterday at 80%, played 2 games of Shadowverse and was knocked down to about 20.  On the other hand I can grab my PSP and finish Ys1 Chronicles about 8 times before the battery light even starts blinking.  Yes, I know portable chargers exist but that's just another fucking thing I have to buy with my hard earned cash to play games that just quite frankly aren't as good as proper portable games.

It's nice to see the quality of mobile gaming go up but the hardware just isn't appropriate for any kind of meaningful gaming experience without being tethered to a wall socket or spending a decent amount of cash on extra bits.  Hopefully in a few years I'll be able to make a post talking about mobile gaming being the bees knees and praising how far it's come but by that time I'll probably be dead.

Tau Vlogs: Pokemon Go