Doom64 is absolutely horrible

 

I play a lot of games in a lot of genres and as a result of that I also play a lot of complete and utter shite.  Every so often, though, a game comes along thats so rancid in its design and content that it lodges itself in my brain and I can't stop thinking about it for a long time.  It's like seeing a horrible road accident where the images of people being sliced in half by pieces of car metal stick in your minds eye for weeks after the event.  It happened with Outlast 2, it happened with Holy Diver and now it's happening again with Doom64.

Doom64 was released, unsurprisingly, on the Nintendo 64 in 1997 and unlike previous console ports of Doom where it was just Doom 1 or 2 being brough to console, this was a whole new thing.  A unique Doom game for a brand new system, fucking wow, but in terms of the larger conversation of Doom and Boomer Shooters in general, 64 is a bit of a black sheep in the series and the genre.

On it's surface its a pretty competently made Doom game.  It's basically just more of what we got with Doom 1 and 2 with some redesigned monsters and a new gun to play with, what could possibly go wrong? Well fucking everything really.  

The first and most minor problem is the controls.  The N64 controller is already a gigantic piece of garbage made for octopus people (and even they don't like it that much, they told me) and playing an FPS on it feels like pulling teeth.  Running with the stick and walking with D-Pad is irritating but but the absolute worst thing about the controls is weapon switching.  The number of times I fucking died because I got ambushed by a large number of pinkies or imps and either couldn't pull the appropriate gun out fast enough OR accidentally switching to the rocket launcher and blowing my own face off made me want to rip and tear my own throat out.  There's a reason these games were originally made for PC where you could switch guns with a number key.  It's because using the right gun for the right situation is key to gameplay and having that shit hindered by having the guns just be in a list makes for a fucking awful time.  

Then there's the level design just being generally fucking awful.  When I was playing Doom 1 and 2 on stream I'd often complain pretty vocally about how I dislike the majority of levels designed by Sandy Petersen but I feel like I owe him an apology now because the Doom64 levels make even his most diabolical outings look like a walk in the park.  Sudden pits, crushers out of nowhere, pitch black rooms full of enemies, PLATFORMING are all common features in Doom64 maps that are likely to drive you insane.  One of the worst examples of this is a level early on where you are expected to sprint across a number of platforms that change height as you touch them.  I didn't know that's what was going on at first so I had 3 or 4 attempts where I just fell into the black pit of pinkies and ate shit.  The point of the section was so poorly conveyed that I had to look up a fucking YouTube walkthrough just to be able to tell what was even going on.  That's just one example too, go watch the VoDs on my YouTube channel of the playthrough I did recently for many, many hours of similar and equally frustrating bullshit. 

Then there's the thing that really stuck in my brain which is the games penchant for teleport ambushes.  In original Doom, ambush rooms were a common-ish thing.  You would walk into a room where there would be a gun or a key and when you grabbed it the walls would open.  The concept is introduced in E1M3 (I think) where picking up a blue key opens a wall to a few shotgunners and then you know its a thing you're supposed to look out for.  You can walk into a room and maybe predict if the walls are going on open, for a new player its a guessing game that keeps proceedings intense, keeps you on your toes.  Doom64 said fuck that though and just teleports enemies into a level, usually in positions that will completely fuck you with no warning.  The second to last level in the game is a great example of this where killing a Mancubus (at least I think that's the trigger) will spawn in an ARMY of imps, directly in your face.  If you know its coming you can move out of the area as your rocket travels through the air and avoid too much damage but for a new player it's just a shitty rookie trap.  Kill the enemy, OH WHOOPS NOW YOU'RE TRAPPED, dead and restart the level.  Imagine if you were playing something like Dungeons and Dragons and then when you kill a monster the dungeon master suddenly goes "oh by the way, there's 100 goblins in the room with you now".  You'd call him a piece of shit, break his teeth and never invite him to DnD sessions again.  That's what teleporting ambush spawns makes me want to do in Doom64.

The final and most irritating thing in Doom64 though is the final level.  It's a simple stage, a small room with a bunch of guns in it and then an arena.  At one end of the arena are 3 portals that spawn in an absolutely unreasonable amount of demons.  Once you kill them the final boss appears in the middle and starts barraging you with what I can only describe as a Mushihime-sama style bullet hell pattern.  Here's the kicker though, if you were thorough enough in the previous levels to find the secret maps then you may have also found 3 Hell Keys.  The hell keys upgrade one of your guns AND allow you to close the portals early, meaning the number of pre-boss demons you have to fight is significantly more reasonable.  The game makes no mention of this at any point and I don't care if its written in the manual because who the fuck ever kept manuals for N64 games? No one I knew that's for damn sure.  I have seen footage of people beating this stage from a pistol start without the keys because my initial reaction was that it seemed impossible without them but in order to pull it off you actually have to be some kind of Doom God.

Here's the thing though.  The game fucking sucks.  I don't WANT to explore the levels because the levels are ass and full of bullshit, I just want to get through them as fast as possible so I can stop fucking playing Doom64 and move onto a better game like Action52 or Video Cart-8: Magic Numbers for the Fairchild Channel F.  Getting good at something or taking the time to explore something is only worth doing when the game is good and Doom64 is certainly not that.  Therefore, I fucking cheated to see the ending.  Usually I'm extremely anti using codes and stuff to get through a game but when the thought of playing it any longer was actually ruining my mood and the prospect of streaming it further was ruining my entire DAY before going live, I don't give a shit.  Maybe if there was any indication of the existance of those keys, even in the form of a cryptic comment or something, I would have grinned and beared it because then its my fault, but to be blindsided by a sudden key requirement on the final level that would require me to go play the majority of the game over again?  Get fucked.

Doom64 got re-released for PC where you can use mouse and keyboard and they brightened the game a little bit so its not so unplayably dark at all times but even then I can't imagine it being any better.  Maybe my point about the controls being ass would be fixed but the rest of the broken, rancid design of Doom64 still remains.

Fuck this game, send it to hell along with the people who made it

Remnant: From The Ashes

Remnant: From The Ashes is a game from 2019 that I have just finished in 2024 thanks to the Epic Games Store giving it to me for free.  I remember when it came out and it had a bit of a buzz around it for being essentially "Dark Souls with Guns" but while also having a solid multiplayer com.  Well I didn't try the multiplayer component and let me tell you, Remnant: From The Ashes is the worse than bad, it's fucking boring.

The game is set in some kind of post apocolypse where you are tasked with getting to some island that's protected by a big storm in order to stop The Root, tree people that seem to enjoy human murder.  What follows is, a shameless Dark Souls clone with the twist being that the game focuses on ranged combat which, at first, starts out somewhat interesting.  For the first few areas of the game there's some degree of intensity to the gameplay.  The enemies are dangerous and resources are scarce so exploring the environments for healing items and ammo boxes so that you can free up your currency for upgrades is fun.  But then, after a boss or two, things start to go downhill extremely quickly.

As you kill enemies and gain experience you gain "trait points" which you can put into a variety of skills in your menu.  The most obvious thing to do is max out HP and stamina because having more numbers to get hit and dodge with in a game where damage values are so high is pretty valuable.  Once you do this, however, and max those values a lot of things in the game become trivial and when the challenge starts to die in a game like this, it's the beginning of the end.

What then makes things even worse is that after the initial area of levels set on Earth, you are transported to different, alien worlds on your quest to stop the Root and it's when you get to these areas that a lot of shit in Remnant is re-used.  In the desert area known as Rhom I think I went through the same dilapidated set of corridors about 6 times.  Not as backtracking during exploration, I mean that on the foward path, en route to new areas, the same indoor environment had been copy pasted that many times but just with the enemies shifted around slightly.  It was in this world, the second of 4, that I basically vowed to stop exploring anything because having to endure the same area over and over again was just mind numbing.  

Not that the vow I made meant anything in the end because not only is area re-use up the wazoo but after the first area things get extremely linear.  Like, Final Fantasy 13 levels of linear.  By the end of the game I was rushing through every zone just so I could get to the final boss as fast as possible and I STILL managed to find a ton of rings and trinkets that I basically had no use for because there are two very good rings and then a bunch of trash which will just take up space in your inventory.  

What makes the game completely unbearable though is how, after a certain boss in the second world, the game becomes COMPLETELY braindead.  One of the bosses grants you a beam rifle weapon that is so significantly better than every other weapon that you get your hands on that regular enemies won't even have a chance to get near you, let alone hit you with anything.  It also makes bosses a completely joke because you just aim and hold down fire which allows you to dedicate 100% of your brainpower to dodging the incredibly easy to avoid and heavily broadcasted attacks that they do.  By the end of the game, between trait points making everything a joke, overpowered weapons and boss design that felt like the devs just gave up, you're playing Remnant in a sort of mindless haze that fails to engage or entertain in any way at all.

There is a heavily emphasized multiplayer component that I didn't touch because who the fuck is playing Remnant: From the Ashes in 2024, really? but I can't image that having an extra person in my game would make things any more fun.  It would just be a second drone to mindlessly beam down all the enemies with and, if anything, would make procedings even easier.

So in closing, I fucking hate Remnant.  I always say that bad games have value because at least in getting mad about them or finding them funny in some way you are getting something out of it.  But Remnant is boring.  A game that you will play, finish, feel nothing while playing it and then never think about it again after the credits roll and that is way, WAY worse.  A truly miserable game made by truly soulless people to ride an action RPG wave they didn't understand.  Sad and embarassing

Bioshock Infinite Is a Bad Game

 

Recently I did a stream where I finished Bioshock Infinite in a single session so I wanted to spend a post talking about it a little bit because while I didn't have an awful time with it, it's a pretty shitty game.

Bioshock Infinite was released in 2013 and follows the story of a dude called Booker DeWitt as he travels to Columbia, the city in the sky, where he is tasked with saving a girl called Elizibeth from some evil bloke called Comstock.  Elizibeth is no ordinary girl though as she has the power to open holes in space time so the two of them meet up and then go on a shooty, multi-dimensional journey to escape fantasy turbo-racist sky America.

As a game in it's own right, Bioshock Infinite isn't a bad game.  The gunplay is just fine, the Vigors (formerly known as Plasmids) make a return and give a few extra options to things when fighting and also there are set places where Elizibeth can open some space time holes for you that grant you access to guns, robots to shoot for you, movement options or cover.  By itself, Bioshock infinite is FINE, a good old turn off your brain and shoot bang the bad men until they go away and do it in the admittedly quite pretty backdrop of a sky city.

However Bioshock Infinite is not an original IP that we can judge entirely on its own merits, it's the third entry in a series and when you start to make those comparisons Bioshock Infinite becomes a incredibly dumbed down boredom-fest that is nothing more than a shell of what it once was.  Bioshock 1 and 2 didn't quite have the depth to be called a full on "immersive sim" but there was still a quite cerebral element to play.  For example you had lots of choices with what guns you used, you could carry all of them at once, pick a few to suit your play style for upgrading purposes and then attempt to tailor your approach to a situation based on that.  For example, if you were the kind of guy that favored getting in there with a shotgun you might use the ice plasmid for your human foes and the electro bolt to disable mechanical ones and go apeshit in a group of enemies.  If you prefered to be a bit more sneaky you might want to use the grenade launcher alt-ammo to lay down traps, equip plasmids that turn enemies on each other and try and avoid the fray.  There were a lot of options for play style and there were a lot of chances for you to use the environment to your advantage.  Another example might be that enemies were prone to running to a healing station in a level if they were low on health.  If you werent good at hacking or couldn't be bothered (the mini game did kind of suck in Bio 1) then you'd have to drop what you were doing to go deal with the fleeing enemy.  If you DID like hacking though, you could hack the healing station so that when an enemy tried to use it they would take damage instead, meaning that a fleeing foe is something you don't have to worry about during a heated shoot out.

These are just some very basic examples of stuff from previous games that you could do but Bioshock Infinite has NONE of that.  You only get 2 guns at a time, so there's no emergent play style because you aren't using guns you like or guns that are good for a situation, you're using whatever is lying around so that you have ammo for it.  The Vigors in this game are absolute dogshit and barely do anything most of the time.  I only really used 2 vigors the entire game which was possesion and shock jockey.  Possession was particularly broken because once upgraded it basically becomes a "delete a guy" button except before deletion he will fight for you.  I got a whole bunch of things that all kind of did the same thing, boiling down to nothing more than "click to do thing, hold and release to drop a trap for that thing".  Even the environmental stuff was bullshit because every area is just a shooting arena with a couple of rips in space time for you to abuse.  I didn't have to think about if I wanted to use the gun turret rip in space time, I just did it because why the fuck would I NOT want a robot gun helping me save ammo?  There's not even anything clever with the health system because they turned that into fucking Halo of all things.  Get hit, lose a shield and then suck your thumb behind a wall until it comes back, rinse and repeat until the fight is over.

They had made TWO games, even more if you include the System Shock games that worked and were fun and cool and instead of building upon the ideas layed down in all those games, they ripped it all out so you could play Call of Duty: Wizard Edition.  I'm not going to spoil anything in this review but clearly all the efforts at being "clever" went into the plot which involves time travel and multi-verse type bullshit but it's all just a bunch of pretentious nonsense and once you get to the end it's just as unsatisfying and the gameplay 

If there's one thing I cannot stand its the dumbing down of games.  If you want to make an original that's about a shooty person making heads explode then fine, do that, I'm sure it'll be a good time.  What you shouldn't do is take a game series that already exists and is interesting and rip all of the interesting aspects of that series out to chase lowest common denominator bullshit.  That just makes you an asshole

I finished it on hard, I might go back to check out the DLC chapters that were set in Rapture but I have no intention of ever playing the sorry excuse for a campaign ever again.  Fuck this game

Tomb Raider 2013 is Embarrassing

 

I didn't play the Tomb Raider reboot back when it launched because I knew I was going to hate it.  But then I picked it up for less than 5 bucks in a Steam sale and then it was given to me for free (along with its two sequels) on the Epic store so I installed it, fired it up and decided to give it a whirl anyway.

And I was totally right, the game is absolute fucking garbage and I hate it.

If you're an embyro that wasn't aware, Tomb Raider 2013 is a reboot of the long running Tomb Raider series that's been going since 1996 back when Lara Croft had 2 pistols, triangular titties and the game was a sort of Prince of Persia-esque platformer type thing.  So of course for the reboot they stripped all of that away and made it ANOTHER fucking over the shoulder 3rd person cinematic adventure game/fair ground shoot the ducks sideshow attraction.

Putting itself before the events of even the 1996 original, it shows a young Lara on a boat to go and explore an old Japanese island only when she gets there she finds that its full of cultists that want her and her friends dead AND an ancient mysterious power that wont let them leave no matter how many times they call for rescue planes.  The rest of the story is just bad voice acting and Lara getting beaten up by both the baddies and mother nature and that's about all their is to it.  It tries to do some "maybe YOU'RE the bad guy here Lara" at the end but it's such a pathetic attempt at giving the plot some depth that it doesn't so much fall flat as much as it falls right through the Earths crust and disintigrates into the core.

The gameplay is Uncharted.  Not "like Uncharted", it is just Uncharted.  Run from place to place climbing on things and shooting dudes until you get to a big set piece where you'll run away from something thats exploding or crumbling beneath you and there's no actual risk of a game over unless you have a sudden stroke and let go of the W key, or maybe S if its doing the run towards the camera thing.  Slightly different from Uncharted though it adds experience points for you to learn skills and gun upgrades, none of which you ever really need but you have to spend those skill points and salvage on something I guess.  It also adds a TON of optional collectables that aren't fun to look for and aren't actually worth anything except exp for more skill points so thus making the completion percentage on your save slot completely fucking worthless.

Worse than generic, boring gameplay however is the fact that, at least on PC, it's buggy to all hell.  I say without hyperbole that every single death I experienced during my time with the game was due to a bug.  Lara not grabbing things, Lara not shoving her pickaxe into a craggy wall after a jump, Lara's melee attack just going right through enemies thus giving him a chance to fill me full of hot lead, the whole works and every time I would shut the game off and refuse to play it for a few days thus making the playthrough feel PAINFULLY long.

The game ends with "The team worked the hardest they could to bring you the best possible game they could make" and I know it's harsh but if THIS is the best game you could possibly make then you should quit making games because your attempts are sad at best and anger inducing at worst.  Still though, enough idiots bought and enjoyed this pile of crap for it to warrent TWO bloody sequels which the Epic Game Store vomited into my backlog so I'm hoping that the other games are at least slightly better at this one.  I hated 1996 Tomb Raider and I hate this one even more and for all the shit I give old school Tomb Raider at least it had some personality and stood out as an original game.  2013 is just another generic, "cinematic" piece of shit to add to the pile and be forgotten.

Fuck this game

The Misguided "Horror" of Dead Space

 

Dead Space is one of those games that reminds me just how old I'm getting.  I still remember buying this, in 2008 when it first came out as a first year at university.  Going to the local GAME (UK Chain of game retailers), picking it up and rushing back to my dorms to slam it in my 360 and play it through almost start to finish in a single go.  Despite the fact that I remember having a good time with it and despite the fact that I still had a fun time with it on stream recently, it still BAFFLES me to this day that various people I know personally and a number of media outlets will praise this game for being scary.

Before I start talking about ineffective the horror is I do have to at least admit that the idea of making limbs the primary target for weapons rather than standard headshots is a least somewhat interesting.  In most games, carefully placing shots to the noggin is part of the core skill set required for success but in Dead Space it asks you to instead aim for the flailing limbs of the monsters instead.  Luckily, with the protagonist Isaac being an engineer, a lot of his weapons come in the form of tools for cutting stuff with, so in this regard it's a nice melding of story and gameplay.  

But that's about the only nice thing I have to say about Dead Space.  While it is a competently made third person over the shoulder horror shooter which every bloody action-horror game has been since RE4, it is probably one of the least frightening horror titles in recent memory.  

The most striking problem with the horror in Dead Space is the enemies.  The first time you see a Necromorph wildly running for you it can be a little intense while you try and line up your shots to its shoulders and thighs to blast its appendages off but throughout the entire game there's maybe like, 6 flavors of Necromorph and they are ENDLESSLY repeated through the entire game.  So the first encounter with each type might get you but by the end of the game they become an annoyance more than anything else.  Another stupid "thing" you have to clean up before you can carry on following your little blue line.

This then leads into the second issue of the horribly designed areas that you must wade through as you embark on your adventure through the Ishimura.  Sure it all looks very nice and it's trying very hard to be atmospheric and oppressive but the overall design of the place is so obvious that it sucks any potential impact out of a potential scare.  A long corridor with a vent or a dead body at the end? Yep, that's an ambush.  A large room with a big door leading to your objective on the other side? Ambush or boss encounter for sure.  It's trying very hard to surprise you but the level design is so uninspired and lacking that there may as well be big neon signs flashing bright red with "THIS WAY TO NEXT COMBAT ENCOUNTER".  There's one point where a big tentacle grabs you and tries to pull you in a hole and the first time, unless your paying extra special attention, which you probably aren't, this is actually fairly effective.  But they do it again later on and it's so obviously signposted that you end up rolling your eyes as you get your Plasma Cutter out and prepare to wrestle with the shitty aiming.

But the worst thing, the thing that sucks all tension out of the game entirely is ammo and health management.  Resident Evil 1 for example is another game that I don't find particularly scary either because who the fuck in 2021 find slow shambly zombies scary after the complete over saturation of THAT genre?  But the game still holds a good place in the survival horror genre because while artistically it's not particularly scary, mechanically (at least your first time in) Resident Evil is intense as fuck.  Sure, you're playing as a highly trained S.T.A.R.S member and sure there's plenty of weapons lying around but ammo for those weapons is scarce.  It's all well and good having a grenade launcher that shoots acid but it's not much use to you against a hunter if you don't have any acid rounds for it.  Even the simple act of saving in that game could generate some intense emotions because "oh fuck what if I don't find any more ink ribbon soon" and this is an effective form of horror that's basically exclusive to this medium.  Dead Space however fucks all this up by tailoring drops and containers to whatever you are holding or whatever state you are in.  The game will only give you ammo for whatever guns you are currently holding with very little exception so if you are only carrying the plasma cutter, you can guarantee you'll be swimming in plasma cutter ammo for basically the entire game.  When the game does give you random ammo on the rare occasion? just go to the store, sell it for credits and buy MORE plasma cutter ammo. In fact, despite Dead Space having like 6 guns to choose from, you may as well never use anything BUT the plasma cutter.  It's strong, fast, has cheap ammo and is effective against all flavors of necromorph.  The game also does this with health so as long as you don't get one shot by a big machine you basically cannot die from normal combat.  

Yet despite all these massive glaring failures in both artistry and game design, the game still got 9/10s from critics across the board and millions of people signing it's praises about how they were shitting their pants real hard.  Maybe you should see a doctor about those weak bowels hm? 

But that's not to say it's a bad game, it's a fun game and nothing quite beats Isaac's legendarily strong stompin' legs but to this day I have no idea how anyone find this franchise scary.  Granted I haven't played much of the sequels but it seemed to lean more into the action focus than the horror focus and to be honest, that's fine, it was way better at being an action game anyway.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD

 

Recently I finished Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter and I wasn't really planning to write anything about it because who gives a shit about Serious Sam in 2020?  But upon putting the game up on my Twitter as part of a tweet train tracking my game clears over the course of the coming year, it got a bunch of positive feedback on it.  People saying how much they remember enjoying playing the game and I'm nothing short of completely baffled by the comments.

To start off, I enjoyed First Encounter quite a bit.  It wasn't anything special but it was fun, fast paced, had fun weapons and some decent-ish level design.  The kind of game that you can just fire up, switch your brain off and shoot things.  When I finished the first game I quickly jumped into the follow up expecting more of the same and while it is sort of more of the same the game is just kind of lacking and ended up feeling like a boring slog more than a fun murder romp though fantastical settings.  

At its core, it really is just more of the same thing as the first game.  Lot's of running around, shooting monsters and finding trinkets to open doors that lead to more monsters for you to shoot with your fun array of weapons.  But The Second Encounter is extremely lacking in its level design and it has exactly one trick up its sleeve to try and kill you that it uses over and over and over again for it's entire playtime 

Every single level in The Second Encounter is just a big room, usually square, sometimes rectangular and if the developers were feeling particularly mean they might put you in a corridor.  Upon entering the room, you will quickly notice an exit on the other side and as you are crossing it the game will spawn in enemies for you to shoot and the door will not open, in most cases, until all those enemies are dead.  Now when I say the game spawns in enemies, I mean A LOT of enemies, it can easily feel like hundreds per area depending on the type of enemy they decide to use too and with every room being a flat box this kind of encounter gets very boring very quickly.  

There are a few exceptions to this rule, for example there is one room that sticks out in my memory where Sam and the enemies are bouncing off the walls like crazy and shooting shit while things are flying all over the place sounds like fun, the whole thing actually just makes aiming anything a massive pain in the dick and it becomes a test of patience and frustration instead.

It wouldn't be fair to call The Second Encounter a "bad" game per se, it's still a competently made shooter with fun weapons and interesting enemies but after the first episode of the games content, the game feels like a slog.  More flat rooms with more endless waves of enemies for you to kill ad nauseum  until you either see the ending or get bored and turn it off.  It crossed the brainless threshold JUST enough to go from cathartic to boring, and it's a damn shame

The Last of Us Part 2 leaks and Naughty Dog (Spoiler Free)

The Last of Us Part 2 has been delayed and of course, the internet is not happy about it.  People are (or from what I can tell on Twitter, were) excited for this game and some users in particular are not taking the news of the delay very well.  However as you can probably tell from the title, delays are not the whole story with this, there have been big leaks regarding the story and while I have read them myself, I'm going to write this post without referencing them directly.

Before I get into the real meat of this issue though I'm going to once again touch on the issue of spoilers.  While its true that ruining the big twists of any piece of fiction for a new user makes you a bit of a dick head, at the end of the day, spoilers don't really matter do they?

For example, to take a non-TloU example, imagine that you're playing Final Fantasy 7 (PS1) for the first time and someone tells you that Aeris dies.  No more details than that, they just run up to you, scream that in your face and run away.  If you are the kind of person who, upon hearing that, throws a tantrum and stops playing the game, then I'm sorry but quite frankly you're a little bitch.  If anything a spoiler like that should have you asking questions of who, where, why or how and having you pushing on just to see how exactly something like that came to pass.  Hell, when I was streaming Resident Evil 7 around the time of its launch, some dude came in my chat and spoiled the game for me.  Only his spoiler was lacking in any detail so my reaction was one of more intrigued excitement rather than being upset or angry.   I even ASKED my friend for what happens at the end of the FF7 Remake because I had these ideas about the plot and when he explained what happens it sounded so batshit that it just made me want to play the game MORE so I could hurry up and see it for myself .

But the spoilers are only really half the story here when you start to look into just why these details were released in the first place.  From what I understand there has been some kind of pay dispute between Naughty Dog and an employee and when the company wouldn't cough up the money he was apparently owed, he coughed up the spoilers to the internet.

A quick google search can get you all manner of articles about the working hours and the working conditions at Naughty Dog and they sound pretty bad.  "Crunch" has been a problem within game development for a good while and can have some really negative effects on the people that are being subjected to it.  Hell, one quick Google search of "Naughty Dog working conditions" quickly gets you an article that references a tweet from Jonathan Cooper who states

This isn't cool, even a little bit.  These people are being worked to the bone and for what? so you can have some grimdark movie-game about a not-zombie zombie apocalypse.  Factor these statements in with the apparent reason for the leak and its easy to paint a picture in your head of the Naughty Dog offices being filled with overworked and underpaid staff.

If you're the kind of person who is currently on Twitter throwing a tantrum about <redacted> happening or Druckmann being a "SJC cuck-tard" then you're an idiot that's missing the real problem here.  Sure you can dislike the direction of the story or dislike Drukmann and his attitudes (of which there is good reason to, mind you) but what the real focus of all this SHOULD be is the way that, not just Naughty Dog, but studios in general treat their staff during a games development.  I think this story breaking off the back of "Gearbox (Borderlands) underpaying staff with promise of bonus based on sales and then not paying the bonuses" should have people getting quite upset.

These are the people that make your fucking games for crying out loud.  They put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into these things and they deserved to be compensated for that much work.  You can bitch and moan about the story or the delay but without the team behind this stuff you wouldn't have it any way, shape or form in the first place.  If you want more content like this that you really enjoy you should at least be making sure that the creative teams and minds behind it aren't dropping dead in the process of trying to get it to you because you know, a dead or hospitalized developer can't make games.

There's word in Japanese, 過労死 (karoshi), that literally means death by overwork, its been a huge problem here since long before I arrived in the country.  You HAVE to look after your staff because best case they get mad, leave and spoil your video game and worst case they just fucking die.  It's cool that these people have such passion for what they are doing but if we want to keep enjoying the fruits of their labor then we have to make sure that these people at least don't work in literal hell holes.

It's good that you're mad that this shit got leaked, just make sure your anger is being channeled in the right direction.

My Friend Pedro

Just before my winter holiday started I had the joy of playing through My Friend Pedro on PC and while it is a simple game, it's an extremely fun one that you should check out.

There isn't too much of a story to speak of in Pedro, you wake up in some place and get told to kill dudes by a Banana.  I think you're trying to get revenge on someone but I don't really remember since it was early December when I finished it but the story is basically just background noise as you run through stages shooting dudes and having your banana companion quip at you.

The gameplay however is where things get interesting.  At a basic level you are tasked with running through the stages from the start to the end, killing all the dudes along the way.  You are given a pair of pistols to do this with and you can find a bunch of other weapons on the way.  You are also given a bullet time mechanic to help you line up shots and avoid damage and if you are wielding two guns you  can use the right click to split your aim between two targets.  The game itself, at least on normal difficulty, isn't that hard to just finish, but where things get tricky is the scoring system.  You are given points for each kill, for each kill you make within a certain time frame you are given a multiplier for those points and on top of that you are awarded extra points for being flashy.  So for example, you COULD stand at a distance and pop at guys one by one and play it safe OR you could run into the room, flip off a wall, shoot and exploding barrel and use your split aim to headshot the two guys nearest to you in mid air for big score.  There's also plenty of pans, bouncy thingies and other environmental things to help you with the carnage.  Those who play nice and flashy are rewarded with a rank at the end of each stage AND the game gives you a little gif of your flashiest kill that you can share on social media.

There are a couple of stages that change up the gameplay style such as a bike chase and a part where you're falling off a building but these really just amount to auto-scrollers where you shoot a set amount of dudes and maybe fight a boss.  Each stage also has its own little gimmick which means that you have to juggle planning the best way through the stage to not die and trying to find a way to get the most score.

My Friend Pedro, while a little on the short side, is a great game with quite a bit of replayability between hunting for ranks and extra difficulty modes and at 15 pounds that's a pretty good deal for what you're getting.  So if you're into things like Hotline Miami and other arcadey type, over the top action games, give this one a try. Oh, it's also avaliable on Switch.

Fortnite Season 4 and leveling frustrations

If you've been watching the stream you might now that I've jumped on the Fortnite wagon pretty hard.  How could I not when for a while almost every advert I saw was "CHECK OUT THIS AWESOME FREE GAME!"  I wanted to try a battle royale game but PUBG was £15 and looked shit, Fortnite at the very least had some personality.

So it dragged me in really hard with its fast paced game play that was enjoy to enjoy in short bursts.  It also helps that I can just camp in solos while I do housework or work on other things and the occasional fiddle to get inside the zone helps break the monotony. I really enjoyed the the event with the meteor and the map change that came with it too, the game is telling a sort of loose story without words that you have to figure out by yourself by observing small changes to the map.  It's a cool way of doing it that gets a community discussing ideas about what might come next.  

I enjoyed it SO much I ended up dropping 1000 yen on a premium battle pass, which is very out of character for me since I've not payed for a cosmetic since about 2010 but I just couldn't help myself.  The battle pass and the challenges that come with it are a nice mixup to play and without them I'd probably play at lot less.  It's crazy how a simple objective like "get a kill with a trap" can make you want to play over and over again until you get it.  

The big pot of gold at the end of the battle pass is the Omega skin and the "omega challenges" that came with it.  I was hyped for this, I was expecting some really hard shit that would really test my skills but when I unlocked it all it asked me for was to level to 80.  That's not a challenge, that's just demanding my time, and a huge disappointment for all the work it took to reach tier 100 on the pass.  

Still, the good thing about the premium pass is that it spits out enough currency to get the next one for free.  Now that I know what's coming I know that AFKing for exp is something I need to do more of if I want to 100% everything in season 5 but I don't think I'll ever quite forgive Fortnite for this crushing letdown 

One to Watch: My Friend Pedro

Usually when I'm flicking through Facebook videos and something gaming related comes up it's usually some kind of thing that I'll close out of pretty quickly.  Some kind of meme video, top 10 or people getting their jollies off whatever big AAA game du jour is. However when the trailer for this little unheard of title crossed my feed I felt compelled to watch it all the way through.

From what I can tell, My Friend Pedro is a game about a man who seems to enjoy cosplaying as Deadpool a little bit taking instructions from a sentient banana to go into buildings and kill a bunch of bad guys.  As far as the premise in concerned it's not going to win any awards for best writing but let's be honest, with a tagline like "blood, bullets and bananas" were you really here for the plot in the first place?

The game play on the other hand is where this game looks absolutely mental.  With the main character flying around the room blasting dudes like he thinks he's Dante from Devil May Cry or some shit.  There seems to be a big focus on environmental kills as well utilizing explosive thingies or having your bullets ricochet off certain surfaces to kill dudes from the safety of a nearby wall.  There's a part in the trailer (which I'll post at the end of this post) where he throws a frying pan in the air and has his bullets bounce off it to clear an upper room of guys.

The big reason that this game piques my interest is it has a very sort of Hotline Miami vibe to it but only now it's a side scroller rather than a top down game.  I get the feeling that while there is a lot of high octane action My Friend Pedro will probably, like Hotline, be more of a puzzle game with action elements rather than a straight up shoot-a-thon.  Lot's of strategizing and probably a lot of dying with quick restarts is what I envision for the first time player (just speculation) but either way it looks like the kind of game I will get very into very quickly.

Here is the trailer if you want to check it out for yourself, it's really fuckin' cool

 

Overwatch First Impressions

Very recently someone gave me a free copy of Overwatch for PS4 and I've been playing it quite a lot over the last few days.  It's been a game I've been kind of avoiding for a long long time, not because I thought it would suck or anything but because I've got a huge backlog so playing online games like this was something I was trying to keep away from.  However I couldn't say no to a free copy and now I'm fucking hooked.

If you've been living under a rock and somehow don't know what Overwatch is, it's a team based first person shooter akin to Team Fortress.  Each player picks a character and then you fight to take an objective on each map which can vary from pushing a big car to the end of a stage or capturing points or sometimes even doing both at the same time.  There's some kind of story but I'm not really paying attention to it but each character seems to have a backstory you can get into if that's your thing but there's no single player campaign to speak of, it's all online.

The game itself is actually really fun, there's a lot of style and polish to it and even though I'm playing on a console rather than PC the controls are tight and each character has a nice varied play style which prevents things getting stale.  Aside from that I find it hard to think of things to say about this game.  Nothing about it is particularly new, we've been seeing this exact kind of game since 1999 but what the game does do it does extremely well.

At time of writing I've only played the quick play mode so there's still a lot for me to explore.  There's an "arcade" mode that has players competing in other sort of mini game type affairs and they seem kind of fun and there's also a competitive mode but you can't access that until you're level 25 and I'm only about 14 right now.  I'll come back and do a followup post once I've explored much more of the game.

The one thing that might turn people off is the loot crate thing.  I'm sure there's a lot of people who would be wary of the term "loot box" after the whole Star Wars thing but I can promise you there is absolutely nothing game breaking in these boxes.  There's a mode where you can customize the skins of each character or change their victory poses along with other things.  The loot boxes ONLY contain this cosmetic stuff so you don't have to worry about another player having better gear or anything like that.  The loadouts and skills of each character is set an cannot be changed so everyone is playing with the same set of tools.

I'm looking forward to playing much more of this game and I'll update once I've explored more of it's content but right off the bat it's a solid class based shooter that I could recommend for any fan of the genre.

F.E.A.R 2

I've been on a little bit of a F.E.A.R kick again and about a week ago I played through F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin.  It actually took me a long time to finish because I'd play for an hour or two and then not touch the damn thing for about a week.  So a game that could have been finished in a single lazy weekend ended up being stretched to maybe a month or so.

The game starts out just before the ending of the first game where you play as a team going to get some scientist woman.  You have a couple of gunfights, the town explodes and you end up in a hospital where you've been experimented on and then there's a dude on a radio telling you how fucked you all but he also has a solution.  So you go to him, he gets murdered and from there you have a bunch more gunfights and then you get a girl pregnant and the game ends.  It took me so long to finish the game that I don't really remember the plot very well but I feel like I have the core parts of it right there.  The story is sort of dull and uninteresting and none of the characters are memorable aside from Alma so I just sort of tuned the whole thing out while playing

In terms of game play it's more of the same as F.E.A.R 1.  Rooms of dudes that you kill with slow mo vision followed by corridors of "scary" set pieces.  Instead of doing anything new with the core game play F.E.A.R 2 now lets you pilot giant robot suits in certain areas which, while fun, goes against the games tone a little bit.  Also everything looks and feels all streamlined and modern which I feel works against it.  There's a sort of charm about going back and playing the first one, that same feeling you get when you sit down to play something like Deus Ex or Half Life and the modern presentation, while probably a good idea at the time, sort of hurts the overall feel of the game when you replay it in 2017.

Once again, the game fails to be scary in any regard relying heavily on jump scares and lots of blood to try and get the fear pumping but falls flat on almost every occasion.  You can tell it's trying really hard but because it looks and plays like a modern shooter now all of the scariness feels even less effective.  The robot suits that I mentioned before pretty much put the nail in the coffin on any chance of it having any scary sections because nothing says horror quite like a giant invincible robot suit with machine guns and missiles mowing down hundreds of dudes who are walking out of doors in single file.

Still, it's not a bad game and if you need something easy and mindless to play then F.E.A.R 2 is a fairly decent option I guess.  The game is just so sort of "meh" that I promise you won't be remembering that lazy weekend play through about a year from now 

AKB48: Sailor Zombie

So yesterday I went to a place called Spo-cha which is a kind of public sports centre.  Aside from all the sports and physical activity stuff, they have a game arcade where all the machines are set to free play so you can get your entry fees worth of money just by playing a few rail shooters.  One of the rail shooters that they had this time was the rather strange AKB48: Sailor Zombie and thanks to free play I managed to play it from start to finish so I better say something about it.

If you don't know, AKB48 is a pop group consisting of a large number of young girls performing catchy yet ultimately terrible J-Pop and they have a stupidly large following of rabid fans who are almost completely on the wrong side of obsessive.  Personally I don't give too many shits about them, if you're drunk in karaoke then they are there to provide stupid songs that are easy to sing in Japanese but I'm not the kind of person to put them on by choice.

Anyway, this isn't the first game I've seen from them, they have some kind of dating sim looking thing which I THINK is called AKB 1/48 but that game kind of makes sense to me.  The idea of being able to romance your favorite member of AKB must have been prime spanking material for the aforementioned rabid fans but the idea of a game where you shoot the group in the face strikes me as kind of odd.

I skipped almost every cut scene during my play through but from what I could tell there is some kind of zombie outbreak that has changed a bunch of the members into zombie and it is up to you, the player, to use your vaccine gun and un-zombie them.  You are joined by the one remaining not zombied member who will give advice, get in the way, spout nonsense and help combat the outbreak with catchy pop music.

Game play wise it's a standard theatre type rail shooter.  You sit in a dark booth with guns that are attached to a pivot and you use those to shoot school girl zombies in the face until they un-zombie.  There is also a boss monster that sort of looks like a big wolf thing that you have to fight a couple of times during the game who likes to jump around and be generally hard to hit but this wasn't an issue for me because ha ha free play.  However, this game isn't JUST a rail shooter, oh no, it's also a rhythm game!

 At the end of every stage you have to play a simple rhythm game where you use the guns triggers to hit notes to some of the most well known songs of the group.  They are pretty easy and it's hard to fail but if you're playing 2 player then your partners fuck up can cost you health which is a little annoying.  Then again, providing that you have a working brain these rhythm sections shouldn't pose any difficulty, it's overly simple and is more of an annoyance than anything else.

Anyway, just to round things off have a short video of some of the game play.  It would have been a little longer but my wife, who was recording the footage, wanted to play so this is all you get.

Alien Shooter

Alien Shooter is a game that's been sat in my Steam library for fucking ages and I have no idea when I bought it or why.  It was a game released back in 2003 according to Steam and it was actually quite a pleasant surprise to fire this one up.

There really isn't much of a story to this game.  It's essentially aliens have attacked and are you a bad enough dude to shoot them all in the face with big guns?  There is text at the start of each level that tells you stuff about what's going on but I didn't give enough of a shit to read it, with a game like this I just want to shoot aliens.

That said, the game absolutely lives up to it's title as it will let you shoot a lot, and I mean A LOT of fucking aliens.  At the start of each level you are given a screen where you can purchase weapons, equipment and upgrades with the money you find in each stage and then after that you are just let loose.  The first few levels are a little on the slow and easy side but once things get going, they get going hard.  Your screen will be FILLED with enemies and keeping them at bay can be quite of a challenge.  Once all the aliens are dead you can proceed to the next stage to do it all again. 

While it sounds like something like that would get kind of boring kind of fast, the game is a little on the short side but for something like that I'm not going to dock it points for that since it ends before it starts to overstay its welcome.  My biggest problem with this game was the camera since none of the walls have any kind of transparency.  During one of the final levels of the game I had killed all but a few aliens, just a couple of stragglers left over.  For these aliens the AI had bugged out and they were walking into the walls but I couldn't see them because they were hidden in a corner.  Usually the game gives you a little arrow to combat this but there were enough stragglers left for the arrow not to appear so until I got lucky I was just aimlessly wandering around for a bit.

That said, Alien Shooter is actually pretty good and it was enjoyable enough to get me to start playing the sequel pretty much straight away.  It's a little expensive at £10.99 on Steam but it's the kind of game that gets 80% off in Steam sales so just wait for one of those and get ready for top down alien shooting fun.

Fuck You Evolve

So Evolve came out a few days ago.  I have seen a few people getting really excited for it but after it came out the Steam reviews have been "mixed".  I've not played it and I don't really have any interest to.  Then again, this post isn't about the quality of the game, it's about THIS bullshit.

Holy shit on a stick look at all that fucking DLC.  This isn't a game that has been out for very long either, this shit is DAY ONE!  Hell, in Japan this game isn't even out yet so as far as I'm technically concerned, this is all shit I have to per-purchase or whatever.

So let's address what we are looking at here.  The first two options are essentially fucking useless.  Look at what you get in that Monster Race pack.  A fifth playable monster and two additional hunters.  What Evolve is basically saying is that if you don't drop the extra £20 or whatever (I suck at maths) then the game is just going to lock you out of a bunch of content.  I don't give a flying fuck if you can unlock it later, that's not the point.  The point is that there are putting a fucking pay wall on some of the games features and that's complete bullshit.

According to the internet, the game with all it's DLC costs $130!  I don't know if Steam price it the same way, I'm not arsed to figure it out, but if you do the conversion that's £85!  EIGHTY FUCKING FIVE.  I thought £35 for a new game was a little steep but £80+?!  Fuck that shit

Now here's where I imagine some tosspot will chime in and say something like "well yeah but it's only cosmetic skins that don't change the game" to which I tell you to go fuck yourself.  Back in MY day we didn't have  to pay for alternate costumes and shit, they were all in the game and you unlocked them by doing certain things within the game.  Why the fuck should I have to pay for fucking cosmetics?  Why the fuck should anyone have  to pay for ANYTHING after the initial purchase?!

I get what DLC was supposed to be.  It was SUPPOSED to be extra modes/levels/characters etc that you downloaded some period of time after the game was released.  While there are some games that may do that, the majority of DLC I see is fucking bullshit that would have been core content 10 years ago.

Fuck DLC
Fuck Evolve and its shitty pricing
Fuck anyone who buys this crap

Jamestown

The top down shooter and the side scrolling shooter are both genres that I really enjoy.  Yes, back in my day when you said "shooter", you weren't referring to a silly semi-realistic military game, you were talking about driving in a spaceship or something and blowing the FUCK out of everything on screen.

However in recent years, the "shmup" as it's now known has kind of died a bit.  Very rarely do you see any of these kind of games get released anymore, and when you do they are almost always small downloadable games that aren't very good.  Either that, or they are Japan made ports of arcade games that are so niche that the only people who play them don't want them for a console or PC because they are too busy in a game centre enjoying it there instead.

Jamestown is part of the small downloadable title camp, but instead of being sort of rubbish it's actually rather good.  To sum up the whole review of the game for those in the know, it's kind of like Donpachi.  For those that don't know I'll go on a little further to explain what that means.

In Jamestown you play as a ship and you are tasked with blowing up anything that moves.  At the start of the game you have access to one ship that has a standard rapid fire button and a slightly stronger beam move but firing this makes you move slower.  As you play you can buy other ships that are all slightly different but if you have ever played a game in this genre before then the selections are going to blow your mind; however the favourites are all there.

Now every shmup has a gimmick to set it apart from the rest and in this game we have something called a "vaunt".  As you blow stuff up, you collect little gold cogs which fill up a gauge and when it's full you can activate your vaunt.  This causes a circle to appear that cancels out all the enemy shots for a short time and during the vaunt you're damage goes up and you get twice the points.  Once the metre drops to 0 you are given a point bonus and you start all over again collecting cogs or you can cancel it early to deflect a few more shots so this whole system does add some strategy to each stage.

In Jamestown there are 5 stages and you can play them all individually or back to back in what the game calls Gauntlet mode.  On top of that there are some bonus stages to play that task you with fulfilling certain goals and some unlockable difficulties for those who enjoy a bit of the old bullet hell.

The game also comes with 4 player co-op which is nice but if you're like me and don't have any shmup friends then there are also online leaderboards to keep you entertained.

So if you're a fan of shmups I'd give Jamestown a go, it's not going to set the world on fire but it's a fun game and it's a good break from a lot of the harder games in the same genre.  If you DON'T like shmups, then give Jamestown a go anyway, it's a good entryway into the series and clearing the higher difficulties will make you feel like a complete boss.

Tau's 10 Minutes of Yaroze! Blitter Boy!

Well, here is another episode of the old Net Yaroze stuff.  This time we have Blitter Boy Operation: Monster Hall, enjoy!

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

I don't know why I suddenly got this urge to play Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, but over the last few days I've managed to bash it out on hard mode, so now it's time to look back and reflect on the 2007 cover based shooter.

For anyone who's not played Uncharted, the game is basically about this snarky prick looking for a long lost treasure and on the way he has to gun down hoards of dudes.  Occasionally you'll have to perform some platforming but mainly this game is about gunning down dudes from behind cover.  The story is actually a lot more boring and uninteresting than I remembered it and just pulls this weird turn where at one point it becomes fucking zombie shooting game for like 4 chapters.

Anyway it may sound at this point like I don't like Uncharted, but you'd be wrong.  Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is actually a pretty fun game but it's not aged well.  Obviously, with Uncharted 2 and 3 making huge improvements on the gameplay it feels like a bit of a step back to play the first one now, but looking at it in 2013 really makes me wonder what all the fuss was about back then.

When I played it, I had just got a PS3 so it got a bit of a free ride since back in '07 this would have been the shit, but the controls can be a little wonky and the game I found was a little bit buggy.  I remember the first time I played it I jumped at a rock and the character entered a falling animation for about 5 minutes before just dying out of nowhere.  This time I had a couple of moments where I would just fall off things while platforming for no reason, which was a little annoying but due to generous check points it wasn't too annoying.

However this game committed a sin that I absolutely cannot forgive.  I've mentioned a few times that I like to play my games on the hardest possible setting and the hardest possible setting in Uncharted is called Crushing.  But I wasn't allowed to play it on Crushing because I didn't have a clear save due to my old fat PS3 that I originally beat the game on being fucking stolen last year.  I hate it when games just lock me out of modes like that for no reason, and I absolutely don't feel like playing it all the way through again now.

Anyway, Uncharted is still pretty fun to play now but if you really get an urge to play one of Nathan Drake's adventures, just play 2 or 3, you might ruin those early PS3 memories if you play the first one again now.

I think it's time Call of Duty just stopped

This was something I was supposed to talk about a long time ago but I got side tracked.

So Call of Duty: Ghosts got quite a bit of flak from people with taste after E3.  They made a big deal about this stupid dog and how you will connect with it on an emotional level or some such nonsense and then proceeded to show absolutely no game play at the major press conferences, at least none that I remember.

Then during E3 I found a game play clip that pretty much sealed the fact I'm never going to buy this game, and I'll show it to you.

Are people actually serious about this goddamn game?  There are so many problems with that trailer it boggles my mind.  How does a dog do that? How does one dog freak out a room full of trained soldiers to the point where the break the bloody door down and allow themselves to be shot in the back of the head. 

The people who think these kind of scenes are cool are either idiots or just underage.  It's been the same with pretty much every Call of Duty where all the set pieces are just either designed to shock the user or to imitate popular action flims.

I personally got sick of CoD a long long time ago, but this bit of footage really shows just how stupid the series has got.  It's probably still a ton of fun to play for the people who like these games, and I bet the multiplayer is a blast but I'm not going anywhere near this game upon release.

Don't Buy Metro: Last Light

Typing that title hurt, goddamnit.

Now before people start losing their shit and calling me a hater, because I do hate a lot of things, but Metro is not one of them.

Metro 2033 was one of those games I bought on Steam during a sale because I had some extra dosh sitting in my bank account and upon firing it up had absolutely zero expectations.  What I got was a slightly frustrating but all round awesome shooter, way different from most of the military CoD crap that I had long since got bored of at the time.

So when I heard about Last Light I was super hyped up and ready to throw my money at 4A Games in a fit of joy.  But then something went very, VERY wrong.  Once again, greed has come into play and has completely soured my attitude to this title.

Most people know what's up by now, but for those that don't a whole mode got removed from the game so it could feature as preorder DLC.  I wish I was fucking joking.  What's even worse is that it's the Ranger Mode that got removed, which was the whole reason I enjoyed the original Metro so fucking much.

What pisses me off about the whole thing is that I heard somewhere that the reason they did this is because they were being pressured by retailers to make preorder DLC available to push sales.  Well let's look at what preorder bonuses are being offered alongside the ranger mode.  An exclusive gun, 100 military grade bullets (game currency) and a digital comic.

THAT'S NOT ENOUGH?!  Let's make clear what is actually going on here.  Greed! Flat out, fucking low down, money grubbing, shitlicking greed.  They fucking knew how much fans of the original enjoyed ranger mode, so now their punishing consumers by fucking charging for it.

Oh yeah, you can still get it if you don't preorder but it'll cost you an extra $5 or £3 or whatever.  Fucking dogshit, especially out of a niche game like this and a no name developer.

So here's the deal, DON'T BUY LAST LIGHT! DON'T FUCKING DO IT!!  But if, like me, you want to play the game, just wait a while.  Eventually there will be a steam sale or the price will drop, buy it then.  Getting the game at a reduced price means that paying the extra for the ranger mode won't matter.  Vote with you're wallet! If you pre order the game or buy that DLC, you are sending a message to the developers and the publishers saying that this shit is OK, and it's fucking not.

There are plenty of other great games available on steam, for a cheaper price that you could have a crack at while you wait for this to go on sale.  Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if you had a few games in your backlogs to be getting through while you wait for Last Light.  So just chill out for a while and save a few bucks, let's not have this practice creeping into more and more games.