Morality Systems are Dogshit

 

Recently I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic on Steam and as someone who doesn't really give two flying rat fucks about Star Wars, I'm having a really good time.  The game, however, features a morality system of the player either being a light side or dark side Jedi and what the game decides are light side actions and dark side actions are complete bullshit and this is a problem that has plagued games for a long time so I'm going to rant about it a little bit.

The first instance that got me really hard in Knights was when you get to the Wookie planet with the name I can't remember how to spell.  When you arrive there's some kind of trading company that has set up shop and is kidnapping and selling the native Wookies into slavery.  If you ask me, these are some pretty fucking bad people, but some time into a quest line you are given an option to kill a bunch of them or chase them away.  My attitude is that if you come into someones home turf and start selling them into slavery, you sort of forfeit your right to life on account of being a cunt, so the lightsabers and blasters came out and the party put them down.  Upon concluding the fight I was given Dark Side points.  Dark Side points, for killing invading slavers.  I think it has something to do with Jedi not killing people or something but come the fuck on, you can't just go up to people like that and say "um, excuse me, would you mind NOT enslaving a native race of forest people please?" and just expect them to agree, violence IS the answer here.  But even worse than that there's another quest later on, on a different planet, that involves investigating the murder of some women by some dude.  The way the quest is prestented to you, the situation seems pretty fishy (if you know, ha ha, pun intended) and it looks like the dude that's been arrested has been framed.  On your investigation you go to a hotel where you can question some witnesses and during the dialogue options you can choose to use your force powers to get more details out of a certain NPC.  Using your force powers in this way gets you fucking EVIL points.  Investigating the highly likely framing of an innocent man in a way that guarantees that justice can be served in the correct way is considered to be EVIL by Bioware.  This may be another Jedi thing that I'm unaware of but I remember Obi Wan or whatever in a new hope using the force to manipulate people like that and no one really blinked an eye when HE did it.  Either Bioware have a completely fucked sense of morality or the Jedi are fucking lame, either way it sucks.

But at the very least, in Knight's case, there's a discussion of the morality to be had.  Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to use brain magic to get secrets out of people, sure, fine, whatever, but in a lot of other games morality systems are just tacked on lame bits of shit that aren't engaging in any way.

Now I love Bioshock, it's a cool game but it really does highlight just how poorly thought out these things are.  In Bioshock, upon killing a Big Daddy you are granted a "moral choice" of infanticide or to not do that.  Killing the little girl nets you more points to buy plasmids with and not doing it gives you a bit less and a different ending.  The thing to consider though, is that Bioshock, even on hard mode, is piss easy and you can get everything you need by not killing them which makes the choice feel hollow.  The ONLY reason to kill little sisters in Bioshock is to either be edgy or because you specifically want to see the "bad" ending.  

Another big example of this is Mass Effect, a game that presents you with "moral choices" at various parts of the story but the only real options for each situation is to either be the literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ or to be the biggest ball-bag in the galaxy.  No way to be even a little bit moderate or level headed in any of these games.

Morality on a binary scale like this is a stupid, useless feature that feels like padding.  It's a lazy way for developers to claim their game has replay because you essentially have to play the game twice to see everything.  Really bad offenders in this category include things like Dante's Inferno where the game doesn't really change significantly either way, just do it once where you stomp a dude and once where you play DDR every so often.  

The truth of the matter is simple, it would take far too much work to put this into a game in a way that would actually be interesting or even a little bit realistic.  It would involve a great deal of skill in JUST the writing, let alone all the technical stuff that would then have to come from that to then put it in the game.  There are games that have come kind of close, like New Vegas, but really I can't think of a single game off the top of my head while writing that's had a morality system in it that doesn't just come off as lazy dogshit that only lets you play to extremes.  

Just don't fucking do it

Rogue One

Recently I saw the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One and if you're worried about spoilers in the upcoming few paragraphs of text then don't worry yourself because I'm not about to do that to you.  I'm just here to share a few thoughts about the movie in general.

Rogue One is a spin off title in the franchise that's set between episode 3 and 4 and follows the adventures of Jin and her struggle to get the plans for the Death Star.  I know I mentioned spoilers before but if you can't predict just how the movie will end from just the synopsis then you're a bit of an idiot.

Anyway let me start by talking about something that I didn't like about the movie which is the first handful of minutes of its run time.  You get sort of an information dump with the movie switching between many different people, places and even throwing in a handful of flashbacks.  It introduces almost all the characters and locations straight away and for me personally this was a little much.  I found myself getting confused as to who was who and where they were and what they were doing.  Eventually though the movie stopped dumping information into my face and after that it was a highly enjoyable experience all the way to the end.

Everything about this movie is pretty much on point.  The acting, special effects, set piece moments are all really good with one of my personal favorites being a blind Donny Yen beating this shit out of a bunch of dudes with a stick.  It's the sort of fight choreography that I don't think we've seen in a Star Wars movie before so it was pretty cool to see.  Although while the ground combat is entertaining to watch, I can't help but feel that it's the space battles where the movie really shines and there's a certain scene involving a star destroyer that had me grinning ear to ear like some kind of school boy.

Now I'm no Star Wars fanatic.  While I think these movies are very good I'm not quite as clued up on the universe as many other fans I feel.  That said, sitting next to two people in a bar who are HUGE fans and listening to them gush about this film should be a good indication that it's worth seeing.  Even if you aren't much of a Star Wars fan it's worth going to see and you won't have to worry about being lost with what's going on because it's a prequel to the good trilogy so you're coming in right at the start technically speaking.

Now maybe with the success of these movies we can get another Rogue Squadron game because they were pretty good.

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.

The TGS 2015 Roundup!

Well I'm back in Nagoya and I'm recovered from my post show drinking hangover so now I'm ready to share my thoughts on the Tokyo Game Show.  While I had a lot of fun at the show walking around and staring at all the shiny new games, I was a little disappointing and there isn't really all that much I came out feeling excited about.

So, let's gets started with the good stuff. 

The first thing we saw as we came into the entrance this time was the Playstation indie booth thing which contained a number of games made by different people from all sorts of backgrounds.  2 games of note that I got my hands on were Slashy Hero and Illan.

Slashy Hero is a dungeon crawling game for mobile platforms where you control a little dude during Halloween slicing up monsters for candy and collecting loot to progress.  It's free to play, fun to muck about with and the system of changing costume to modify stats reminded me of Costume Quest a little bit.  However, Costume Quest sucked a massive cock and Slashy Hero is actually pretty good.  It's available for free next month and I'd totally recommend checking it out.

A little later in the day I got my hands on Illan: Shades of Memories which was a really cool puzzle platformer for PC.  You control a cute little black thing called Illan and you must solve puzzles and do some light platforming to progress.  Really fun and kind of relaxing to play but taxed my brain just enough to avoid becoming boring, nice and chill.   Right now Illan is not available for purchase BUT if you are interested then it is available for voting on Steam Greenlight, so go hit that vote button and get this thing on the store.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=507636802

After we left the indie booth we looked at the cosplayers for a while which was your same old attractive Japanese girls wearing either not much or incredibly elaborate costumes.  I snapped a few shots but right now my camera is inside my bag and I'm too lazy to get it out, so maybe I'll upload later.

Next we came across Star Wars Battlefront which looked absolutely INSANE

I don't really need to say much about this one since people are familiar with other games in the series and there's already a lot of excitement.  That said, this thing looks INSANELY fun and I can't wait to get my hands on it.  Tokyo Game Show are very uptight when it comes to taking pictures and videos on the show floor but I managed to get a minute or so of footage of the game play so I'm just going to let that do all the talking for me.

Moving on from there we saw the Sony booth which had a number of cool looking games including a new Star Ocean, some JRPG thing called Exist Archive, new content for Bloodborne, a collection of the Uncharted games and a whole host of VR stuff which unfortunately we couldn't get our hands on.  Other cool stuff included a new game play video for Persona 5 and a remake of a PS2 game I really enjoyed called Odin Sphere. 

The final thing to jump out of my mind was a title called Nioh

A game being developed by Koei Tecmo and what essentially looks like Asian Dark Souls which is not a bad thing.  I'd never heard of it before but apparently it was showcased back in 2005 and then vanished for some reason and now it's resurfaced at TGS which is cool.  Game looks really fun and is just another reason that I need to go out and buy a fucking PS4 already.

Now let's talk about the not so great stuff about the show.

Now I'm not the biggest fan of mobile gaming, I don't mind giving the occasional title a try and sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised but there was SO MUCH fucking mobile at TGS this year.  You couldn't walk 5 fucking minutes along the show floor without seeing a booth that had a fucking iPad hooked up to it.

I can understand why companies may see mobile as a decent platform because almost everyone has phone so your game will reach a much wider audience.  However, you can't get a decent experience from a game on a mobile device.  Mobile is perfect for games like the aforementioned Slashy Hero because that's the kind of game I can muck about with on a train and then put away when I get to work.  But playing RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest or god forbid even trying to play FPS games on a mobile platform?  FUCK. THAT.

Call me a purist, call me a snob, that's fine but Tokyo Game Show was fucking drowning in mobile stuff and I couldn't help but feel like it was a bit of a shame.  Hell, one of the biggest games at show was a fucking social RPG from 2013

Now granted, since returning from the show I have downloaded and given Granblue Fantasy a go and it is one of those rare mobile games that is actually pretty decent.  Hell, it even has Nobuo Uematsu and Hideo Minaba of Final Fantasy fame behind it so I guess that has to say something about the amount of effort in it's production.  That said, the game is from fucking 2013, why is it so prominently displayed at a big games con 2 years later?!  It's not new, I go there to see new shit, not to wank over above average phone RPGs from 2 years ago...

Konami was also a fucking disgrace this year

When I arrived at the booth my eyes were greeted with a football (soccer) game, a baseball game and 4 girls (admittedly rather pretty) dancing around and lip syncing to some shitty Japanese J-Pop song.  We were so bored and disgusted that we left after a short time but upon googling something I remember seeing in the background of the dancing girls there WAS actually a game being talked about.

The game is called Tokyo Xanadu, being produced for the Vita and actually looks like it could be kind of fun.  However I wouldn't have fucking know that if I hadn't remembered the title that was hidden away behind 4 girls dancing about.  Fuck you Konami, you're a fucking mess.

The last thing that kind of ticked me off was the content for The Last Guardian

All they had was some fucking projection of the dog-eagle thing that you could stand in front of and it would kind of react to your movements and a short demo video of footage that we had seen months ago.  I'm excited for this game but what was on display at the show was disappointing.

---

So that's it folks, my thoughts on TGS 2015.  Not completely shitty but definitely not as good as it was last year.  Few things to be excited about and some cool indie games made it worth while.  Here's hoping that next years show will bring much more excitement. 

I'm not sure if I wrote about everything, I'm going mainly off the top of my head, if I remember anything extra I'll throw it up on twitter.

Steam Early Access Needs to Fuck Off

If you want a way to guarantee yourself a lost sale on your video game, release it as an early access title on Steam because then unless it's gifted to me I'll never fucking play it.

If you don't know what Steam Early Access is, it's a thing where a developer can release their game on Steam basically before it's finished.  They allow people to play it to get feedback on their game, improve things, maybe drum up a bit more money to make it even better, that kind of thing.

When Early Access first became a thing I thought it was a kind of neat idea, I didn't mind it, but now it just pisses me the hell off.  Right now, half of the games on the "top selling" part of my Steam are fucking early access games.  The only reason it's not more than that is because Darksiders is on sale right now and the pack is taking up a spot and the same thing with a Star Wars pack.  If those two things weren't on sale, I guarantee there would be early access games clogging up the damn list.

Maybe I wouldn't be so upset about it if the top selling game wasn't fucking DayZ for a whopping £20!  TWENTY POUNDS, for an unfinished game, that I've been told by 100% of people I know who have played it is a buggy piece of shit that they want to enjoy but can't!  Now I've not played DayZ so I'll hold off on my own judgements but it's not going to get me to shell out £20 on a game that barely fucking works.  Until I hear something remotely positive about DayZ being simply playable I might consider it, but right now, based on the feedback I've had from friends, DayZ can go fuck itself.

Worse than that there's a game at the bottom of the list called 7 Days to Die, a game I've heard nothing about really so I suppose I can't say anything about the game itself BUT it's £26.99!!!! That's borderline full fucking price, for an UNFINISHED game, Jesus Christ.  Oh, and it's another zombie survival game, so original!

I remember when I bought Minecraft back when it was in it's beta or it's alpha or whatever the fuck stage it was in.  Sure, it was an unfinished game but Notch was only charging something like £5 for it AND he had a free browser version working to at least show me what the game was like, so I knew going in that I was getting a playable game for a really cheap price.

If the Steam Early Access games did this, and the prices were a fraction of what they are now, I'd be more forgiving, but they are asking you to pay full price for their game and worst of all there isn't even a guarantee they will finish the damn thing.  If the project goes under, well fuck you enjoy your broken ass buggy game.

There is some good in Early Access, I can see why people would WANT to support their favourite upcoming games, but just stop mixing it in with the normal store.  I'm so sick of seeing a game that looks sort of interesting, then it having "early access" written on it, turns me RIGHT off. 

If you want my money, finish your fucking game first!

Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

What you are looking at in the opening picture today, is the end credits for Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.  That's right folks, despite a lot of complaining about it in various posts over the last few weeks, I finally beat this fucking thing, so I thought I'd give a little review.

Well first of all, I was describing the goings on to a buddy of mine via facebook chat, and the impression I got from him was that this game doesn't really do a good job of following the movies too closely.  Some of the core scenes are there, but it does a lot of stuff to sort of "game" it up, which is fine I guess.  When making a side scrolling platformer you can't really expect it to be too faithful, as long as it's fun really.

So that's the big question here, is it fun?  Well to be perfectly honest with you, for me, yes, for most people, probably not.  This game is HARD, and when I say hard, I mean that unless you play a level perfectly this game will shaft you up the ass so hard that you will not be able to walk for days.  The checkpoints in some stages can be really unforgiving, especially in the final level.

My two major complaints however, do not lie with unforgiving checkpoints or game difficulty, but with taking damage and boss life bars.  When you take damage you dont fly back like you do it games like Castlevania, you get pushed back.  This is fine, but in some situations the whole being pushed thing will fuck with the controls and you'll die for stupid reasons because the enemy has been placed somewhere really obnoxious.  When it comes to bosses, their health bars are just flat out too big.  These make easy bosses really tough because it turns into an endurance match rather than a test of your accumulated skill.  The most bullshit example is that bogmonster I posted a while back, which required you to shave off bits of his body before you could even touch his main health bar, he wasn't tough, just resilient as fuck.

In the end though, the game is pretty fun, but if you want to win you have to be one hell of a patient player with a high tolerance level for bullshit.  If you like a challenge then go emulate it or find a cart or something but if super hard games aren't your thing, no matter how much you like Star Wars this one is just not for you.

That feeling of satisfaction

You know, I was going to use this post to complain about how bullshit some bosses can be in certain video games, but after I took the picture to complain with I won, so I'm gonna talk about this instead!

The super hard Empire Strikes Back playthrough continues, and just as I'm starting to get frustrated at the Cloud City boss, I go and pull a win right out of my arse.  This reminded me of one of the reasons I love playing games so damn much, and it's that feeling of satisfaction you get when you finally overcome something that felt previously impossible.

Sure, it's face meltingly frustrating to have to do the same part for hours and hours (or in the case of this stage, days) but when you finally do it, you feel like king of the goddamn world.  It's a feeling that I've not had for a long time with modern games being a lot easier than they used to be, which is a shame but I understand why it's happened.  There are a number of reasons but the main one I think, is that it's just not profitable to make super hard games anymore.  There is a majority of people today who don't want to actually have to try, or think, or use strategy, they just want something fun to whittle the hours away with, and it's these people that companies are making games for.

It's sort of a shame that this seems to be the case, but at least it opens up the medium a bit.  So if you're getting tired of the easefests, fire up something retro, get that passion for clearing a challenge back. 

More Star Wars Woes

Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back continues to give me trouble with what might be the most arse boss fight I have ever had to play through in my life.

Basically, this huge bogmonster scrolls left and right, shooting worms at you.  The monster himself isn't that hard to dodge, but when you hit him you don't damage him right away, oh no!  There are 5 nodes on the top of his head that must be shaved off before you can reduce his life bar.  This means the fight is extremely long and eventually the constant onslaught of crap just ends up killing me.

On top of that, for some reason I keep clipping through the fucking floor, and when that happens he just rams into me and takes off a big chunk of my HP.

I'm sure I'm probably doing something wrong, and because I'm so thick headed I'm not taking the time to truly figure him out, but goddamn is this one hard son of a bitch!

Just to give you an idea of how hard
Me- 0
Bogmonster-20

It's that bad...

UPDATE: I killed him!  Turns out there was a healing force power hidden away in the level, once I found it, dealing with his bullshit was a lot easier.  He still takes far too long to die though

NEW SCORES!
Me-1
Bogmosnter-20

Yeah.....

Snowspeeders are not fun!

So you may have noticed that Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back appeared on the sidebar of the blog.  Well that wasn't just some random urge to play a Star Wars game, hell, I don't even know all that much about Star Wars, I never really followed it, but I was challenged to beat this game, so that's what I'm doing.

But this is one of the hardest goddamn games I have ever played in my life.  Not the good kind of hard either, the bullshit kind of hard that makes you want to tear off your own face and frisbee it out the window so you don't have to look at the damn thing anymore.

Yet, I am carrying on, beating this thing one step at a time, one password at a time.  But I just now beat 2 stages that are quite possibly the worst stages I have ever played in any game ever, and these are the snow speeder stages.

The first is a  faux 3D stage where you have to destroy certain numbers of things.  First it's probes and bikers, which are easy, then some ATSTs (I think) which are a little harder since they take more punishment, but they are OK.  Then the bullshit flies when it wants you to kill AT-ATs, and you have to fly round them with the cable.  It's not too hard but after playing it with a while it fucks with your eyes.  Also the first time I beat it I think it bugged and it wouldn't give me the results screen, piece of shit game.

The next stage is even worse

So it's a kind of shooter stage, but it's the most bullshit fucking shooter stage I've ever seen.  First, your ship is the size of 3 elephants glued together, which is bad enough because you can't dodge oncoming fire, but what makes it even worse is that shrapnel from shot down enemies fucking hurts you!  What's the fucking point of letting me shoot them down if they are just going to hurt me anyway?! It just makes the stage needlessly hard and to beat it, all you can do is mash the button and move up and down and HOPE TO GOD that your life bar lasts out.

So fuck this game, needlessly hard piece of crap.  Still, I won't let it beat me! ONWARD!