How about finish your stupid game?

 

I know I was supposed to be using the blog for a sort of diary type thing nowadays but today I have to spend some time going off on one.

If you do care about what I've been playing today and yesterdays its just making the usual rounds with SMT V mainly; grinding, recruiting, dying, you know, all the good stuff.  I also streamed a whole bunch of Yakuza where the combat in that games just swings wildly between insultingly easy and actually impossible.  There's one guy in particular in the collesium who is just consistantly clapping my cheeks and I just cannot seem to get the better of him.  He's not THAT hard but getting hit like, once, means that a quarter of my health vanishes and unlike fights in the story, I can't spam convini energy drinks.

But what I want to go off about today is a game called Ghostrunner.  I bought Ghostrunner after seeing the trailer because it looked like someone took Mirrors Edge and Hotline Miami and then smashed them together.  The atmosphere of the game and the soundtrack are right up my alley so I snapped it up right away.  At first I was having a good time with it but the more I play it the more janky and buggy it seems to get and it all came to a head yesterday with a certain platforming challenge.  

In one level of the game you have to run through these giant spinning discs that have breaks in them.  At first they are spinning too fast so as you approach them you have to right click them to slow down time on them which allows you to either pass through them or run along them.  Now one thing you have to understand about Ghostrunner is that it's not an easy game.  It presents you with pretty rough challenges that you will probably die on a few times but will also give you pretty frequent checkpoints so you can try over and over nice and quickly until you get it.  

I came to one spinning disc section about half way through the stage where the disc was horizontal and was positioned near a wall.  The idea is that you time slow the disc and run along top of it, jump off and wall run along the wall to the next platform.  I will attempt to crudely draw a diagram of the scene in MSPaint

The black thing is the disc and the red thing is the wall, looking at the part of the level sideways on.  So I slow the disc, jump on the wall and screw up my jump to the ledge and die, no problem I'll just start again.  Only problem, when I hit the restart button the scene had changed.

The disc had like, pivoted and was now clipping through the wall as it spun around.  I tried to press on anyway only to find that the angle of the disc and the spinning meant that it would make the wall run impossible or, if I could get on the wall, I'd get clipped by the edge of the disc and knocked off to my death.  Completion of the room was impossible and my only solution was to quit the game.

Now while each level has a great number of checkpoints that make dying not a problem, the game DOES NOT save progress at those checkpoints.  So I had to do the entire fucking level over and then hope to God that it doesn't happen again.  Well it DID actually happen again, 2 more times on 2 different discs in the stage only I got lucky the other 2 times and the disc pivot was either not a problem or a minor annoyance at best.  

This has really soured my view of the game now.  When I fire up Ghostrunner now I'm constantly worried about what game-breaking bullshit is going to pop up out of nowhere and force me to restart enitre stages thus wasting god knows how much of my life with this crap.  I went onto the Steam discussion page to see if anyone else had experienced it and while I couldn't find anything about it, I was greeted to thread upon thread of people complaining about other, way more serious bugs and glitches.  

I know game-dev is no easy task and obviously its not really realistic to expect a developer or studio to find and fix every bug before release but this is game breaking shit.  Ghostrunner is 25 pounds and apparently developed in part by 3D fucking Realms of all people so having level geometry just randomly break or game crashes or major performance hiccups just is not acceptable.  

How about finish your fucking game and make sure it works before you charge me money for it, eh? Is that really so much to ask?

DLC Can Go Fuck Itself By Duwiol [Guest Post]

Why is it that so many game companies have decided to become complete and utter assholes? Whenever I think back to gaming in my childhood, I always think “it’s probably just the nostalgia, it probably wasn’t THAT great”. But there’s one thing that WAS GREAT, and that was paying for a game and getting the whole fucking game!

When I bought the Age of Empires, Final Fantasy (any of them!), or Star Wars MOTHER FUCKING Battlefront, I got a full game. Then some time down the line, the company that made the game might release an expansion for the game, e.g. Age of Empires 2 followed by Age of Empires 2: Age of the Conquerors.

The thing is though, these expansions were like games in themselves! They added MORE to the already existing game! Now, I buy a game from a lot of my hard earned money, get home, start playing, and… it’s about a third of the fucking game! To me, this is nothing short of daylight robbery! Then they have the fucking gall to then say to the angry and disappointed masses “oh you wanted this? Well don’t worry! Give us MORE money and you can have some of it. Then wait a little while, give us EVEN MORE money, and then MAYBE we’ll give you the rest… or we might just keep some of it back to charge you again later”.

Take the new Star Wars Battlefront for example. I LOVED the original two games. They were, in my opinion, some of the best shooting games of their time. You had capture the flag style gameplay, space battles, heroes vs villains, and a HUGE number of good and bad guys to choose from.

Now, let’s look at the new Star Wars Battlefront. The fans went nuts when they heard the news that there was going to be a new Battlefront game, myself included. Then as time passed and the game’s release got closer, more and more shit started surfacing. NO Clone Wars, NO Galactic Conquest, NO Story Mode/Campaign, Only 3 Heroes and 3 Villains to choose from, the list goes on and on. The fans are understandably angry, and what happens? They start HINTING that these things will appear over time as DLC. FUCK THEM! You cannot take a game that is already established, remake it, then only offer 20-30% of the original game’s content, and then tease and taunt us with the possibility of getting the rest.

What angers me, and many others, about this is that this kind of behaviour wouldn’t be tolerated in any other industry. You wouldn’t listen to a song then half way through it stops and they say you have to pay more to hear the rest of the song. You wouldn’t get two thirds of the way through a book then find the last pages missing and a note saying you have to pay to get the other pages. Just like you wouldn’t watch a movie where sections were blacked out and you had to pay more to reveal the rest of the screen.

I will say one thing, not all DLC is like this. There are some DLCs that are purely for cosmetics, are optional, and are little add-ons to the game itself (custom skins for example). But that doesn’t justify doing this to the game’s main content, and Its reasons like this that I am very selective with what games I buy, and what companies’ games I choose to play. I for one will not help fund this bullshit, I’d much rather support the companies that still hold true to giving the players what they want, a complete game and experience.

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.

Why Gender Politics Pisses Me Off

So I've made posts in the past about this kind of issue and why it isn't really important to gaming as a whole but I've never really explained why this thing ticks me off so much, so I thought I'd shed some light.

Just to give the reason I was inspired to do this post, I read a thing on IGN about the new Zelda Triforce Heroes game and here's the link

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/30/e3-2015-why-you-cant-play-as-a-woman-in-zelda-tri-force-heroes

This fucking hack job writer gets an opportunity to talk with the director of the game, Hiromasa Shikata and what does he ask?  He asks fucking questions on if it's possible to play as a woman.  WHO GIVES A SHIT?!  What a crappy series to ask this question for as well because Link is so fucking androgynous anyway.  I have to give big props to Shitaka though because his response was essentially "because we want it that way" which is what all developers should be doing when asked stupid, inane questions like that one.

So just why does all this talk of "female representation" and all the other crap that goes along with it piss me off so much?  Well if you believe what you read on most of the internet its because I'm a no-life nerd who lives in my mothers basement and hates women.  Except that's not true and the reason it really pisses me off is because almost EVERYBODY making comment on this subject is fucking WRONG and has no fucking idea what they are talking about ever.

The two main arguments that I see flying around the internet are "there aren't enough strong female characters in games" and "there aren't enough women working in games".  Both of these points are complete bullshit and have been complete bullshit since the dawn of the fucking medium. 

First the whole "women in the games industry" thing.  There are plenty of whiny, talentless idiots on twitter and various other gaming websites who will argue that there aren't many women working in the industry and it needs to do more to hire greater numbers of female staff.  Well I call bullshit on this point because you can look at the credits list for basically any game ever and you're guaranteed to find a bunch of women on there in all sorts of roles.

Hell, I looked at 3 titles on my way home from work just to make sure I wasn't chatting out of my ass.  I looked at the credits list for Bravely Default, Persona 4 Golden and The Last of Us and there were plenty of women kicking around those development teams.  Hell, just go look at the credits list for Persona 4 on Giant Bomb and the fucking EXECUTIVE PRODUCER IS A GODDAMN WOMAN!

The reason these hack indies want to make it seem like women aren't valued in gaming is because it gives them an out and an excuse for whatever shitty game they made.  Suddenly, their games go from sucking due to having no talent to unappreciated due to gender of the creator.  The only other people pushing this idea are the ones who are looking to profit by playing the victim in a so called "oppressive industry".  They make up a bunch of bullshit about how awful things are in order to generate outrage and then they have, quite cleverly I might add, found a way to capitalize on said outrage.  It's sad, pathetic and it's a point that's INSTANTLY disproved by a quick Google search.  These talented women who are making good games aren't speaking up because they are "oppressed" or "undervalued", I'd bet money it's because they are quite happy doing what they are doing.

The second point is the whole "not enough female characters in games" or "too many sexist female characters in video games".  This is also complete bullshit and can be easily debunked by anyone who knows a single thing about gaming outside of the shit you are spoonfed by major gaming news outlets.  There are TONS, fucking hundreds upon hundreds of great female characters in games ranging from protagonists to antagonists and everything in between.  Hell, the character I put at the top of this post is a good example of a good female protagonist and I bet half these idiots complaining have never even heard of Koudelka.

Even the idea that a sexy character is sexist is fucking dumb.  Take a look at this.

This is the kind of character that would get instantly slammed for being sexist filth, but it's not sexist at all.  The developers of this game don't hate women and their intention isn't to degrade them, they are just developing for a certain market.  There are plenty of men (and women I've found since coming to Japan) who enjoy this kind of thing and that's fine.  I'm sure this animated underboob isn't oppressing you or making your life any harder so just shut up and let people enjoy some fucking fan service without having to be ashamed of their sexuality.

So there you have it.  The tl;dr version of this post is that the gender politics thing pisses me off because it's made by clueless fucking idiots who don't know anything about gaming.  It's double annoying because these clueless idiots are being paid to write for games.

Well whatever, guess I'm just going to enjoy my games and try to ignore these morons.

Law and Order, Games Media and Women in the Idustry

In the last couple of days there was a episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit aired on TV where the story was based on the #GamerGate controversy.  It was laughably bad, overblown, poorly written and poorly acted.

The story of the episode revolves around a bunch of gamers who aren't happy with some woman making a game.  The reason they are unhappy is not because her game is bad or anything like that but just because she is a woman.  Things escalate when she goes to give a presentation about her game and she gets kidnapped, beaten and raped by a bunch of weirdos in ski masks from a site called Redchanit.  The episode ends with the cops catching/killing the gamers and saving the woman but she decides to retire from gaming because clearly she is not wanted or some such stupid bullshit.

The whole episode is cringetastic with Ice-T saying lots of stupid bullshit about video games.  The worst part is right at the end during a rooftop shootout where they decide to go first fucking person.  It's like that one bit from that shitty Doom movie but with the shitness dial turned all the way up to fucking 15.

What's sort of hilarious though is the reaction to the episode from various groups on either side of the controversy.  From what I can gather off twitter, the social justice types such as Sarkeesian are not happy with the episode.  There are a number of people on that side of the coin though who are playing it up saying that the events that happened in the episode have actually happened despite the fact that no kidnappings or rapes have occurred because of GamerGate. 

What's funny is that these people have absolutely no right to be dissatisfied with the episode because they basically wrote the damn script.  These are the people who view a disagreement as "misogyny" or "sexism" and a request of proof for their claims as "harassment".  It's even been proven that certain members  such as Brianna Wu have faked harassment in order to receive more coverage/gain ammunition to use against certain people.

Wu "harassing" herself on Steam but forgetting to log out of her Developer account thingy.  This thread was deleted.

These are the people who cherry pick all their information and use great amounts of hyperbole in order to push this quite frankly preposterous idea that women are somehow oppressed and unwanted in gaming.  I mean look at this shit.

This is just a small collection of some of the women who are celebrated within the medium.  There are tons more than this both recent and from ages past and as long as more women are willing to bring their skills to the table many more will be accepted and appreciated for their works.

The reason why gamers don't like people like Wu and Sarkesian is because they are fucking idiots.  Everything Anita says in her Tropes Vs Women series is quite frankly wrong and her examples are cherry picked so fucking hard that I'm surprised the cherry tree isn't completely bare.  It's so transparently wrong as well, with anyone having played the games she talks about being able to shoot down her "arguments" instantly but of course this is labelled as "harassment".  People don't like Wu because she's constantly prodding GamerGate for a rise so she can play it up and ask for money.  "Help! I'm being harassed! <Insert Patreon link>"  or saying flat out stupid things such as "I'm risking my life fighting GamerGate" as if we are some kind of heavily armed, anti-woman army.

But what the games media is doing isn't exactly new.  It's new for them but in terms of their methods this has been going on for years.  Way WAYYY back people who enjoyed table top games such as Dungeons and Dragons were branded as satanists.  Back in my youth people would claim that anyone who played games would become a violent murderer.  Now the new buzzword du jour is "misogyny" with every gamer being a woman hating basement dwelling nerd or some kind of closet rapist. 

The only thing that's different this time round is that the image isn't being perpetuated by news outlets with reports being written by people who no nothing of games.  This time it's games media ITSELF putting forward the image that all it's readers and fans are rapists and harassers.  At the end of the day though, it's only a case of same shit, different buzzword.

But who in this whole controversy is REALLY being the most damaging to women in gaming?  Is it gamers?  Well no because I've never met a SINGLE person within this hobby say that the don't want women in gaming and if anything it's the exact opposite of that.  Is it companies not hiring women based on gender?  Not that either because everything I've heard about the hiring process for these companies is based on skills, not gender.  If you are good at coding, drawing, making music, writing or whatever then you have just as much of a chance at a position as anyone else.  Hell, in the US it's fucking ILLEGAL to discriminate based on gender and I don't think companies are going to risk their business just to spite someone.

No, the most damaging thing to women in gaming right now is the people claiming to be on their side.  Every day the spin this narrative of fear.  They lie constantly or spin convenient half truths that push their controversial stories for ad revenue.  These claims that women aren't welcome or that they will be harassed out just for being women will only serve to scare them away and we risk losing a lot of talented people as a result.  If it was true then I promise you that the gaming community would be right there trying to make gaming a space for everyone to enjoy, like they have been doing since THE DAWN OF FUCKING GAMES.  These people are pushing this story for their own selfish means and it's absolutely pathetic.

Gaming and games media would be a much better place without these people shitting it up.  No one wants to keep anyone out, we just want  to play some fucking video games.  We also don't want to be lied to and misrepresented by the people who deliver information about the industry to us, that's all.

Let's just get along and play some goddamn games.....fuck...   

Tokyo Sucks

Right, I'm sorry, I know this isn't video games but I'm stuck here for another couple of weeks so I just want to let off some steam and rant about how much I fucking hate Tokyo.

Tokyo is a shitty place.  It's SO horrible that just the act of going outside of my hotel room is enough to make me fucking miserable.  There's nothing wrong with the hotel I'm in, it's quite nice really.  I can play some games, chat to my family, watch TV and all that good stuff but as soon as I step outside I just want to hang myself.

My first big problem with Tokyo is that it's too fucking busy all the fucking time.  No matter where I can I can't escape large crowds of people and people who walk around the streets of Tokyo seem to have some kind of problem where they can't stop bumping into things or being in the way.  I've only been here for about 2 weeks now and I've lost count of all the times I've been stuck behind large groups of people, been bumped into or pushed around or had to pause because some twatsocket has to stand in a fucking doorway or stairwell to check a map or read his phone or some shit.

Speaking of busy, the trains in Tokyo are the absolute fucking worst thing I have ever encountered in my life and coming from someone who spent 3 months riding around on the PARIS metro then that's saying something.  The Tokyo train system is large, confusing and bullshit and getting lost when trying to go somewhere is really fucking easy.  Also for some reason, on the line into the place where my hotel is, they just decide to NOT announce the stations.  You see in Nagoya, when you arrive at a station an announcement will say something like "You are now arriving at Nagoya" or something, right?  But not here, oh no, the train just stops and you get some vague mumble as the door opens that you can't fucking hear because there are too many people talking or whatever and before you know it BAM! you've missed your stop because you were too busy fretting over the map trying to avoid just that.  Fucking stupid train, ANNOUNCE YOUR SHIT LOUD AND CLEAR.

Also the sight seeing in Tokyo sucks anus, just go to Kyoto instead.  Everything here is way too fucking expensive and way too fucking crowded.  Just off the top of my head as a write this rant, the things that people go and usually see are Tokyo Tower or the Sky Tree.  Both are overly expensive and not worth it because if you pay the 3000/4000 yen to go to the top or whatever then the only view you get is of a big fucking city.  If you live in a big city just go to the top of the highest thing your city has and look at it, it's the same fucking thing.  There's a lot more than just those 2 things but to get to them you have to ride the subway so fuck that shit, just stay in the hotel and eat shitty food from Lawson or whatever, you'll have a much better time.

But what pisses me off more than anything else are the people who come here and then brag about it.  I've met many people in the UK and Japan who are like "uhh, I've been/lived in Tokyo" like it's some kind of big fucking deal.  As if going to the capital of Japan is some kind of massive undertaking and they are so fucking cool for having done it. 

Tokyo is Japan on easy mode to be incredibly honest with you.  This is the city where all the idiots who can't speak any Japanese go because it's the place where the most English is available.  You didn't challenge yourself or do anything amazing by coming here, you did a shitty overly expensive holiday in a city that isn't really distinct from any other shitty capital.

In short, fuck the people, fuck the trains, fuck the sights, fuck the cost of everything, fuck the tourists and FUCK TOKYO!

It's Not Nostalgia Goggles

Sometimes I get into discussions with my friends or on forums and things like that about how older games are better than modern ones.  I'm one of those people who is inclined to agree with that idea because personally I find a lot of modern games to be a bit of a joke.  That doesn't mean I think modern gaming is bad but I just find the older experiences a lot more enjoyable.

At first I thought it was just a case of personal taste or hell, maybe it was really nostalgia goggles but on my long boring train rides I decided to think about it a bit more critically and old games are really just better.

So here's what I'm going to do to illustrate my point.  I'm going to take the first 3 genres that pop into my head and explain why old games in the genre are better than the newer ones.

First Person Shooters

This is a no brainer since if there's any genre that is guilty of being dumbed down for mass consumption its this one.  Take old games like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Hexen and many many others.  These games were popular not only because of their ultra violence, but because of their big sprawly labyrinthine levels full of secrets and generally speaking you needed some degree of brain power and strategy to win at these games on higher difficulty levels.

Contrast that with now, where all the exploration and skill that this genre was famous for has been completely stripped out for an experience that people who don't want to spend time learning a title (read: idiots) can handle.  Regenerating health was the first big culprit, then came limited weapon inventories ruining strategy and limiting your play style.  Also every level in a modern shooter is basically a corridor and all you do is hide behind cover and pop heads.

That's right, modern FPS is nothing but the fair ground duck shooting attraction but with a military theme and attached to a roller coaster track.  Finally, don't give me none of that shit about Multiplayer either.  If you think Call of Duty or Halo stack up to something like Unreal Tournament or Quake then you need a slap.

RPGs 

RPGs barely fucking exist nowadays and that's a damn shame.  Just to qualify, when I say RPGs I mean both the J and W type, so don't worry I'm not discriminating between countries.  Western made RPGs used to be such deep and rich experiences.  Things such as Ultima, Baldurs Gate and old school Fallout were such joys to play with so much goddamn content in them that it would probably take a few playthroughs just to notice all the little details about the world you were in.  Japanese RPGs were a little more simplistic but the variety of what was on offer in that genre back in the day was absolutely staggering.  Most western games tended to focus on Tolkien-esque swords and sorcery settings while JRPGs tended to have more outlandish settings and characters.

Contrast that with now, where every Western made RPG just feels like a cheap knockoff of something that came WAY before it.  Most RPGs today have these terrible fucking "morality systems" and stupid branching dialogue trees with only 2 or 3 options on them and the extra tidbits about a worlds lore aren't even half as developed as they are in older games.  Just look at how Elder Scrolls started and look at it now and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Japan on the other hand seems to have forgotten how to produce anything that isn't shallow, moe, otaku pandering bullshit with every game box on a store shelf having some wide eyed anime girl on it doing something cute and the game play is much shallower.

The Point and Click Adventure

 Do I even need to explain this one to you?  Just look at stuff like Monkey Island, Sanitarium, Myst, Grim Fandango and god knows what else.  Then look at what passes off for an "adventure" game nowadays.  Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Serina just to name 3.  A genre once known for it's insane mind bending puzzles and great stories now reduced to walking simulators with barely any game play produced by people who can't make a game worth a shit and can't write for shit either.

Let's just be happy that GoG exists to preserve all the great point and clickers so that people can still experience them and all this modern badly written bullshit can hopefully be forgotten about

---

Now I know I've been ranting and it sounds like I hate modern gaming with a passion but that couldn't be further from the truth.  Modern gaming is still great and there are still new titles that come out and I have plenty of fun with.  It's just that gaming has gotten noticeably stupider and I think it's a damn shame.

Also I know I've been talking about "modern gaming" in general terms but there are exceptions to all the above and in all other genres.  Some developers are still trying to capture the magic of the old school shooter with things like Painkiller and The Rise of the Triads remake to varying levels of success.  I've been hearing great things about Divinity: Original Sin and Japan is still producing RPGs of the old quality such as "俺の屍を越えてゆけ２" which looks fucking radical

The point and clicker is still being moderately screwed but an HD remake of Grim Fandango is coming out so I guess it's not all bad, just a shame that the newest thing I can think of in the genre worth a damn is Anna on PC

So to all you devs trying to make intelligent games for the modern age, keep on going.  Finally to all you devs making safe, mass appeal bullshit, try pushing out the boat a little more will ya?   You can still make buckets of money with a smart game, I'm sure it'll be OK.

The Japan Gamer (Mini): Language Rant

I go off on one about how much I dislike hiragana only games and obscure kanji.  Big thanks to my buddy for the stupid skit at the start.