Martha is Dead Censorship

A few days ago I came across a news story about some horror game I hadn't heard of until that point called Martha is Dead that was apparently being censored on Playstation and left alone on PC and X Box.  I then made an offhand tweet about some silliness I saw in the discourse surrounding the game only to find it getting flooded with likes, retweets and a couple of absolutely brainrotten comments from people who cannot read.  So I thought I'd take a little bit of time to say a few things on the issue here.

First of all the censorship itself seems stupid but at this point it's something I have come to expect from Sony.  The clip that is circling around social media is a scene of the game where the player is holding a severed head of some woman and the player character proceeds to use a razor to make cuts in the side of the head and then pull off the face (complete with button prompts!) and then they wear it or something. Sure, the scene in question is sort of shocking but it's no worse than anything else that comes out of other titles in the genre and even out of the genre of horror.  Severing limbs and DIY eye surgery in Dead Space, Lara Croft getting brutalized in the reboot games, Fatality animations in Mortal Kombat, no one seems to give a shit when this kind of thing is going on from huge studios but a small indie group make a face-ripping scene and suddenly its all "ooooh this is absolutely disgusting how could anyone possibly make this?!"

At least for me in Japan, Sony censoring violence is nothing new.  I have talked at length both on the blog and on stream about how parts of Until Dawn were censored so heavily that if affected the story.  Resident Evil is also very heavily censored when it comes to violence even in it's more expensive "Z-Versions".  The story I have heard (Im not sure how true this is, keep in mind) is that in 1997 is that some 14 year old kid abducted and beheaded a couple of Elementary school children and left their severed heads on the school gate for people to see.  The kid was caught and after all was said and done a politician called Shizuka Kamei put the blame squarely on "violent and cruel movies" and so acts of extreme violence in mutilation in films and games have been censored or not really done since then.  

So while the censorship is stupid and shouldn't be done, it at least makes some degree of sense that one of the biggest companies in the entire country wouldn't want to get on the bad side of those rules.  Nintendo, as far as I know, doesn't really have any games in their library that would require that kind of censorship and Microsoft is an American company that doesn't need to give a shit, which is why you probably don't see this kind of thing happening on those platforms.  

But I'll be honest, I stopped giving a shit about Sony censorship a long time ago, thems just the breaks, what my tweet was actually about was the individual user response about the content itself.  Most people responded with outrage at the censorship and that it should be left alone and if that kind of extreme violence in a piece of media makes you uncomfortable to the point of "literally shaking and crying" then just don't play it, something I agree with quite strongly.  What people need to realize is that while "video games are for everyone" is a nice fluffy statement that lets you pretend to be a good person on social media, the truth is that while games are for everyone, not ALL games are for everyone.  If you don't like violent, grotesque acts in your games, don't play horror.  If you don't like difficult gameplay, don't play Dark Souls or Cuphead.  I don't like endless boring life-sim bullshit like Animal Crossing but instead of moaning about it I can very easily accept its just not for me and then not buy it, it's really that easy.

Where I get my back up is when I was scrolling through the tweets and I saw someone describe the developers as "irresponsible" for "releasing the games without trigger warnings".  What this is doing is attempting to villify the creators of Martha is Dead for hiding the nature of the content in the game and acting as if the violence and adult themes are some kind of surprise.  Except that's not true is it?  The game is rated M and has all the relevent warnings and even if it didn't have that, the literal FIRST THING you see when going to the Steam page is this.

It's RIGHT THERE, before you can ever access the game description or the button to buy, you have to accept this warning.  Do not try and pass off your inability to read or lack of attention span on the developers as if it's their fault.  Just because it's not written with the words "TRIGGER WARNING" at the top of the page and is written as a paragraph full of vapid social media buzzwords doesn't mean it's not there.  

Anyway, I had no idea what the game was before this controversy and now I'm excited to pick it up for myself, possibly to play in some kind of October Horror Playlist on stream later this year.  So while the censorship is bad and the controversy stupid, at least I found an interesting game out of it.

Plans For Identity Gaming 2022

 

It's mid-November at time of writing I've come to the grim realisation that I've barely posted anything here or on YouTube for MONTHS.  Here I've been posting once ever so often but YouTube has been particularly barren of content for maybe over a year.  So the purpose of this post is to layout a plan for the 3 main platforms that I use for this charity page and maybe then I'll stop procrastinating and not let things like this or the YouTube channel fall to the wayside.

The Blog

It's been sort of hard to give a shit about updating the blog over the last year or so.  My main method of content production for the charity effort has been through the Twitch stream and on there I'll discuss things that I'd usually write here but live and with a chat.  I don't need to write a piece about my thoughts on a game I've been playing here because while I'm chilling with chat I can just talk about it there and hear other peoples opinions on it in real time, which is much cooler.

But the blog is where this whole thing started so I don't just want to let it die, so starting from either this evening (I'm writing this around noon) or tomorrow evening I'm going to start using the blog space as a sort of "Game diary".  Just a place I come to every evening before bed to write out what I've been gaming on that day and how I felt about it or some quick thoughts about some piece of news I found or whatever.  A pure stream of conscienceness with no real rhyme or reason, just to give people a little insight into what I've been doing and what kind of game-related thoughts are flying around my dumb brain.

The YouTube Channel 

This is the one facet of Identity Gaming that's basically been dead for a long-ass time.  I used to upload off the cuff lets plays and I experimented with some kind of unscripted ramblings about various topics to not a lot of success.  I'm not usually one to care about subscriber counts and video view counts and I was happy to upload that kind of content to an minescule viewership just because it was fun to turn on my mic and ramble randomly about something while I played odd games that interested me.  Back then though, the YouTube channel was making a small amount of money.  I forget what the network was called but I was getting about $20-$40 a month which I would then funnel into the charity.  My low effort content was generating cash for the Alzheimer's Society and that felt good.

Then YouTube changed the rules to me needing 1000 subs, I lost monetization and, since the point of Identity Gaming is to raise money for a charity I let the YouTube side of things die almost completely, acting more of a sort of repository for when I did something cool on stream like a speedrun PB or my Cuphead 200% deathless run. 

But that's sort of defeatist isn't it?  I'm ignoring an entire avenue of potential charity raising just because I'm too lazy to put some effort into a video.  Well then I got to thinking, I hate the state of modern game reviews and I'm a big fan of YouTube made analytical content, so why don't I do that?  The YouTube channel going forward will be used for long form video essay type shit about games wot I love or games wot I hate.  I've already started working on recording and scripting for the first one and for the first time in a while I'm actually having fun producing for YouTube again.  Even if it gets 1 view, 1 like and my channel doesn't grow at all off the effort, it's better to at least try than to just let the channel die.

Twitch

I don't even need to say anything about Twitch really, do I?  Nothing is really going to change here.  More streams, more donation incentives, more prizes being added to the list via the streak system we have going.  Hopefully I can find a little bit more time to work on emotes, overlays and all sorts of other stuff to make the viewing experience overall better for you guys but generally speaking it's business as usual here.

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There's some other minor things like Twitter where I'm planning to stop doom-scrolling through bad takes written by IGN journos and being toxic and instead I can just fill my timeline with me just enjoying things that I'm playing or finding cool indie projects that I think are worth keeping and eye on.  There's also instagram which is about as equally dead as the YouTube at time of writing so maybe I can put more effort into posting some cool game stuff I find on my travels while drowning the image in hashtags.

I'm hoping we can meet some BIG goals next year both for the content and for the charity and I cannot thank you all enough for your continued support up to this point.

Skyrim Grandma Vs VG247

When games writers aren't spending every minute of their day sucking at absolutely every single game they play they like to pass the time by just making shit up.  This story isn't exactly big news or anything but having and excuse to point and laugh at these people is something I don't want to pass up.

Website VG247 posted an article with the headline "YouTuber Skyrim Grandma announces she is scaling back streams for the sake of her health after receiving onslaught of patronizing comments"  which sounds terrible right? I didn't actually read the article in the end because very soon after it was posted, the woman herself (@ShirleyScurry on Twitter)  tweeted at VG247 directly asking them to delete the article because it's bullshit.  Apparently the fact that she is scaling back streams because of her health is true but she claims that most of the people on her channel are actually very nice.

This has of course led to VG247 getting a good grilling on social media for a laugh but I can't help but wonder why this was even posted in the first place?  Just some sad little idiot putting out some nonsense in order to generate clicks for a crap website.

I have no real interest in Skyrim but Scurry's fans seem to enjoy her content a fair bit so if you're a fan of Bethesda games she might be worth checking out.  Maybe a nice change of pace from the content creators that clog up YouTube? It's always nice to see people on the older side of things enjoying the medium just as much as everyone else!

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.

Yoko Taro: The Hero

Nier 2 is on the horizon and I'm hyped as all hell.  If you don't know what Nier is then I don't blame you because it was a little niche but it's easily one of the best games on the PS3/360 and while it wasn't so hot in the game play department, the story was awesome and the soundtrack was out of this world.  If you can get your hands on a copy of the first Nier game before Automata comes out then you totally should give it a go.

Right now he is working as the director for Nier Automata and this guy is a fucking nut.  He always comes out in a big mask shaped like one of his characters and all of his videos are a bit mental.  I watched an announcement this morning about how if you pre order Nier Automata you get a T-Shirt and it ended with him rolling around on the floor rubbing the T-Shirt over his body.  He's fucking great.

Apparently there was a bit of controversy with the upcoming game though because some people don't appreciate the main characters ass being on display.

Outfit is hot as fuck by the way.  A photoshopped image of the character appeared which showed the character climbing a ladder or something and you can see what looks like a butthole.  Of course, certain groups on sites like twitter got all upset and stuff except the image in question which you can find with a simple google search isn't actually from the game itself.  There's a company that makes porn games called Illusion and a lot of their games have really in depth character creation tools so someone made a model of the character and then used it to take the screenshot so at the end of the day these people are just getting upset over nothing.

But the absolute best thing to this whole situation is Yoko Taro's response

The general gist of the tweet is that because of the controversy a lot of rude pictures have been made of the main character but collecting them is a pain in the ass so he wants someone to send them to him in a ZIP file every week.

WHAT. A FUCKING. LAD.

There have been tons of examples of games being changed or censored in some way, especially during localization, because there are lots of crybabies on the internet nowadays who will get all up in arms if you dare to have an ass showing or a character in a bikini or some shit so it's nice to see a developer who embraces this side of things.  No artist should ever have to change their shit just because some prick on twitter or tumblr is "offended", these people should be told to fuck off and their stupid whining ignored.  According to his wiki page as well he likes to be blunt with his opinions and feels that fans deserve truth and honesty.

So let's take a moment to appreciate Yoko Taro, truly a hero that we all need right now.

Gaming and Social Media

The fact that gaming and social media have sort of come together in recent years is such a strange phenomena to me.  Back in my younger years if I shared gaming related things on my Facebook wall then I would be ridiculed for being a loser but now I have game systems that let me, at the push of a button, upload screenshots, videos or even put out links to my Stream direct to Facebook and other platforms.

Allow me to share a little story about my first experiences putting gaming content on social media platforms.  A long while ago I used to play a lot of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on my PSP, it was a grand old time.  Just when I was starting out, I managed to grind enough of a certain creature in order to get my first full, self crafted armor set so I was pretty excited.  I thought I'd share this excitement with some of my so called "friends" on Facebook so I snapped a picture, uploaded it and put a caption on it like "woo! first proper armor!".  The comments that I got back were things like "holy shit you're such a loser" or my personal favorite "there's casual, hardcore and sad.  Guess which one you are".  THEN fast forward to 2016 where I can smash a button and upload a screenshot from Bloodborne where I just killed a boss or something and suddenly the comments are things like "well done that game is hard" or "omg I wanna play that game so bad".

This is just one example of that happening but it happened many times more and with other titles.  If you were to go through my old photo albums and look at the screen shots for Left4Dead, Guild Wars or Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine then you'll see a lot of abuse but viewing similar content on newer titles or even posts for this blog clearly shows that gaming content has become a lot more "acceptable" on social media.

Gaming platforms have always had their social elements to them with things like Steam offering ways to share pictures or content with other players but with that it's always self contained within it's own community of gamers.  Facebook is where a lot of the filthy non-players reside, the kind of people who don't understand games and think they are either for kids or for lonely, fat basement dwellers with nothing better to do with their lives so the fact that people now are willing to more openly share their gaming experiences is a bit of a shock, but a good kind of shock.

This improving of the relationship of social media and video games is something we all frowned upon back during the launch of the next gen systems.  You had people on stages at press conferences harping on and on and on about social media this and Twitter that and we just turned up our noses and said "where are the games?".  However we now live in an age where there's a large number of people working within gaming media who are trying to smear and shame it.  Lot's of articles about gamers and games being sexist or violent.  It's stuff that happened before but now it's coming from within.  Except what these social media features allow us to do is show the people directly, the people who don't know any better and would buy into this shit otherwise, that this just isn't the case.  We have been given the tools to fight back against the clickbait, sensationalist bullshit that would seek to damage gaming for a fast profit rather than help us evolve the medium.

Times have changed drastically and I'm actually rather thankful for it.

Norman Reedus X Hideo Kojima

So a while ago, Kojima of Metal Gear fame was set to work on a new Silent Hill title with Guillermo Del Toro.  The game was also to feature actor from Walking Dead fame Norman Reedus and thanks to a demo released on PS4 known as P.T. the game was getting quite a lot of attention.  However, Kojima was given the boot from Konami and the project was quickly shut down which was quite good news from my perspective because as a Silent Hill title things were looking a bit grim.

http://identitygaming.blogspot.jp/2015/04/silent-hills-apparently-cancelled-and.html

You can read about why I was happy about the canning of Silent Hill there.  It looked decent enough as its own it was gearing up to be yet another weak entry in the now butchered Silent Hill franchise.  However one thing I did say in that post is that if that team was to get back together in the future to work on the project under a different title, then maybe I'd be a little more interested.

This is what some other websites as well as some of my personal friends have been saying, that the idea of Kojima and Reedus having talks points to the idea that maybe this stuff is happening again and that we should have some reason to be excited.  I mean, this one tween about a reunion with Reedus doesn't really mean anything on its own but even if it does point to that is it really worth getting that excited?

Survival Horror is a dead genre, games like that just aren't made anymore (unless you count the yet unreleased "Back in 1995", look it up) and modern horror games are a fucking shit show.  Horror has been reduced to either bombastic over the shoulder 3rd person games that feel more action than horror or first person stealth games that have a "scary" monster instead of some kind of facility guard.  There are certain quality titles in the genre but none of them even come CLOSE to having the same amount of horror impact as the classic survival horror titles of yesteryear.

IF it turns out this project is back on its feet, hype is the exact feeling we should not have.  No one has any reason to be overly excited about anything because they are making a horror game and that would be excited about watching someone take a shit.  That said, Hideo Kojima is a talented man who makes good games and Reedus is pretty popular for his work on the Walking Dead TV show.  What a re announcement of this title under an original IP is a glimmer of hope.  Maybe, just maybe we can have a horror game that doesn't play like shit and maybe has a semi-decent story behind it too.  Maybe we can have a horror game that ACTUALLY inflicts some scares on the player rather than just the BOO JUMPSCARE shit of today's horror titles.  Maybe Kojima will have the sense to hire some enemy designers who know how to do more than just dudes with cut faces or silly looking piles of meat.

There are a ton of reasons to look at a Kojima developed horror game and think that the genre might have a chance at a comeback.  It's doubtful but we can dream.  Hope not hype.

Why Gender Politics Pisses Me Off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam Refunds!

One of the big complaints about Steam from a long time back was that you can't get a refund for games that you have purchased.  This meant that if you were getting all experimental then you might end up stuck out of pocket with a shit game clogging up your library.  WELL NOT ANYMORE!

The policy on refunds seems rather simple, the request has to been made within two weeks of you purchasing the game and you have to have less than 2 hours play time clocked for the title on your steam account.  This seems fair to me and refunding titles has been a thing that console folks have been able to do since forever so it's nice to see PC finally getting the same treatment.

Of course, this has led to a number of people in the indie scene taking to twitter and moaning about how it's unfair.  Their main complaint is with the two hour time thing saying that now they are unable to profit from making shorter, artier type games.

Well guess what?  Fucking good, I'm glad you hacks can't peddle your arty farty non-game bullshit around Steam anymore.  There is nothing inherently wrong with an arty type game but I have never EVER seen one that is remotely any good.  If a developer does manage to make an arty type game that is good I promise you that people won't want to refund it, they'll keep it so they can support the creator in the hopes that maybe they'll make another one.

To be quite honest, if you're game is less than two hours long it probably shouldn't cost anything anyway.  When I play a game I expect there to be some substance to it, I don't want to be able to beat something in the time it takes me to commute to work.  If you are going to make something arty, now you have to be sure it either has some actual game play value to it or it's absolutely top fucking quality.

Well done Steam, you've done a good job here.  To all those indie developers whining about the two hour playtime thing, go fuck yourself and make something actually worth playing/keeping and then you won't be so bothered by a basic fucking consumer right, assholes.

Online Harrassment Is Largely Bollocks

Thanks to the ongoing Gamergate controversy that I've been quietly watching from a distance it seems like harassment and cyber bullying have become hot topics for the games industry.  Not a day goes by on my twitter when someone isn't talking about "harassment" but quite frankly, harassment and cyber bullying is LARGELY complete bullshit and I speak from experience.

First I'm going to say a little bit about what I would define as harassment or bullying.  Harassment or cyber bullying, to me, would be a situation where the online nastiness that one is experiencing overflows into your real life.  For example, doxxing is a great example of what I would define as ACTUAL harassment.  Putting someones info such as their address and phone numbers on the internet and then having large numbers of people make calls and mail all manners of horrible bullshit is disgusting behavior that could only really be defined as harassment or bullying.

Also things such as DDoSing websites and such I'd define as actual harassment because if you're a content creator that relies on your site to make money (and maybe even a living) then you're directly harming them in some kind of actual way that they can't prevent.

However, saying nasty things to people on social media or in video games is NOT harassment and it's not bullying.  Even if there are large numbers of people doing it, I disagree with the idea that you are being harassed by randoms on the internet.  Almost every website, every social media outlet, every messenger service and every app has a block feature and an account removal feature.  If people are saying stuff you don't like then block them and if it becomes too much, shut down your shit, it's that simple.  Surprisingly, even in 2015, I'm pretty sure you'll be OK if you don't have to log into Facebook every day.

I'm sure there are people who are affected quite badly by people saying horrible things to you on the internet but I'm quite cynical of these people because, as I said before, I speak from a great deal of experience of being "harassed" and "bullied" across my life.  Allow me to tell you some stories.

In my high school days I was rather unpopular (nothing's changed lul) and I'd get bullied a bit at school.  As a young child I discovered MSN Messenger and on there I would talk to the few friends I did have and have a grand old time.  Occasionally, the bullies from my school life would appear to say nasty shit to me but I didn't mind it so much online because that was the one place where I didn't have to take their shit.  Without responding or even really reading what they said to me, I'd block them in a heartbeat and get back to living my happy life.  At home, on the internet, I didn't have to take that shit and so I chose not to.  Now we have a lot more avenues for communication like twitter, LINE, Facebook, Snapchat and all that shit, but I guarantee that they all have block features so you can avoid having to hear shit that upsets you from randoms on the internet looking for a reaction.

I'm aware that some people who are "cyber bullied" may then come off Facebook and face that shit in real life but when it gets that far, to me, it stops being cyber bullying and falls into the realm of just straight up normal bullying, right?

Now what about online harassment?  Things like emails and stuff that I hear people talking about so often?  Well that's bollocks too.  A long while ago my wife bought my Hatsune Miku Project Diva F2nd.  Since I'm a website that talks about games, I announced how pleased I was with the gift I had received with a little picture of the box on Twitter.  Not long after I made that tweet, I received an email telling me, in short, that I'm a horrible person and my wife is a traitor to women who should kill herself.

Pretty horrible thing to have to read right?  Well yeah, but it was sent by someone I didn't know and quite frankly, I don't give a shit about what anons on the internet think about me or my wife.  The criticism leveled against the two us wasn't constructive and the tone of his or her email was nasty so I just deleted it.  I received one more after that with similar words about me and no mention of my wife and did the same thing.

If it was continued assaults, there are features in my email thing to block addresses and filter shit as spam or whatever, so I could have just used those but I've not received one since and I refuse to let stupid shit like that get to me.

As for gaming there's been a sad change in what qualifies as harassment.  Back when I was younger, playing games online was an almost guaranteed way to hear something nasty.  Comments like "you're shit" and "fat nerd tryhard" as well as much wittier stuff was commonplace, it was just the rough and tumble nature of playing competitive online games and still is.  They don't know anything about me and they say stuff just to get a rise and 90% of the time it doesn't come from a place of malice so there's no need to get upset.

The problem is that nowadays, the definition of harassment has become silly and maybe that's another reason as to why I'm so cynical about it all.  Harassment on twitter can now be defined as disagreeing with someone or re-tweeting something that they don't like.  People like to use the word harassment to deflect legitimate criticism.  For example, if someone says something and you respond with like "well, you didn't really do enough fact checking, here are some sources of stuff that says you might be barking up the wrong tree.."  the person will just use the H word and large numbers of people will come to defend despite the idiocy behind the first statement.  I've also seen people use the word harassment to talk about calling someone shit at a game in an in game chat, which is just ridiculous. 

All this said, there are large numbers of people and large groups dedicated to stomping out or supporting victims of harassment and cyber bullying, so I'm more than willing to admit that maybe I just don't understand the whole issue.  If there's anyone with experiences they'd like to share or ideas they would like to put forward to try and tell me that maybe it's not all complete bollocks, I'm open to the idea that maybe I'm wrong on this.

Off to Kyoto and Osaka

The above picture is Kinkakuji in Kyoto if anyone is interested.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for a bit of a trip to Osaka and Kyoto with some buddies so for that reason there won't be any updates until I return and sleep off all the fatigue I'm probably going to build up on this busy little adventure.

If you're interested in seeing some of the stuff I'm seeing, follow me on Twitter (@Taurinensis) and I'll be uploading pictures and information about all the stuff I'm going to go and gawp at.

Once I return you can expect the last episode of Silent Bomber AND I'll be announcing my top 5 games of 2013, so you can look forward to that.  Also, now that all the hustle and bustle of the Christmas period is over I hope to start streaming more speed runs and Final Fantasy again, so get your donation money ready for some fun time streams!

Next Gen is Really Grinding My Gears

OK, this is fucking stupid. 

Not too long ago we saw the release of the PS4 and Xbox One, something that should be an exciting time with all these new games and fancy hardware to play it on.  But no, it's not an exciting time, it's a time filled with loud obnoxious noises, sighing and eye rolling.  Let me show you what I mean.

That's a montage of the Xbox One making horrible grinding noises when you put the disc in, and there is a PS4 version as well.  Not to mention that since the release of these systems, a great deal of my twitter feed is "oh, my PS4 broke" or people asking questions like "just how many people have faulty systems?" and then getting a ton of replies.

This is fucking unacceptable!  When I bought my fat PS3 when MGS4 came out, I had absolutely no issues, and until it got stolen there were no problems.  Same with my slim PS3, which is preowned as well, zero problems there.  I had no problems when I was gifted my first Mega Drive, no problems when the N64 came out, nothing for the Dreamcast and then in 2013 suddenly the cutting edge systems have stupid high failure rates.

Microsoft and Sony...why fucking bother?  I don't want to have to worry about my potential purchase of a PS4 or Xbox One maybe failing because YOU can't fucking quality control.  One or two faulty systems is just tough luck, that shit happens, but THIS much faulty hardware being sold to people is a fucking joke and you should be ashamed.

Just go look at twitter for a while or do some searching on YouTube and there are tons of people with videos or tweets about how their shit isn't working as intended or just flat out not working at all.  Hell, the systems are less than a month old and already the term "Blue Light of Death" has been made up for the PS4.

So until this shit gets fixed, fuck next gen.  Right now there aren't any games I even want to play and even if they were I wouldn't want to spend the money because my system probably won't work.  So yeah, get fucked Sony and Microsoft, how about making something that works before taking peoples money?  Bunch of arseholes need to go drown in a lake of dicks.

Update Regarding the Stream and Twitter

If you have looked at my Twitch page recently, you may have noticed that the stream has been offline for quite a while.

Really I'm just making this post to assure you, the fans, the Final Fantasy stream isn't dead, it's just on a break.  The reason for this is that the internet in my current apartment isn't good for things like gaming or streaming so it would probably lag to shit.  I might give it a go in the next few days but I can't promise anything until I move into my new apartment which will (hopefully) have sick internet.

Also, if you follow me on twitter you may have noticed that I've been putting up a photo of something in Japan, well that's going to become a daily thing along with the blog post so follow me on Twitter if you want to see something interesting from my Japan travels.

@Taurinensis

Stop Cheating!!!

OK, I don't know the ins and outs of this story but the sentiment of this post remains the same.

So according to the website Cinema Blend, Microsoft have been gaming the numbers in an online twitter poll in order to make the Xbox One seem more popular that it actual is in America.  You can read the article right here.

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Xbox-One-Caught-Cheating-Twitter-Poll-Gains-60-Votes-With-Bots-58927.html

You can see in that article there is a bunch of dummy accounts spamming votes for the Xbox One to make it look more popular than it really is.  Now it's not really a big deal, it's just a an online poll, but that's exactly the point.  Instead of focusing on fixing the massive fuckup that is the Xbox One, they are spending resources on having people set up a bunch of bots to spam hash tags on twitter.  If they spent more time on actually making a good system and less time trying to damage control their shitty piece of hardware then the votes would come naturally anyway.

Xbox isn't the only one potentially doing shit like this though.  There is a number of rumours flying around the internet that Riot Games are padding out their Twitch TV viewer numbers with bots sitting around various channels just so that the numbers look higher than that of their competitors.

Rather than trying to cheat people and game numbers, why not just make a quality product that people would enjoy?  Hell, in the case of Riot games they don't NEED to game numbers on twitch because there are already shit tons of people who love the game, who cares if there are more people viewing on twitch compared to DotA or whatever?

Just stop it! Twitch viewer counts don't matter! Twitch polls don't matter! Stop it and focus on making things good!

Stop it and Grow Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcasty thing for July

So much hate and anger in games at the moment, when will it all stop!?

Borderlands 2 Racism Bullshit

Borderlands 2 is a game that has yet to be played.  I own a copy and it's been added to my eternal backlog, but as I'm writing this post, I've yet to play it.  Luckily, I'm not commenting on the quality of the game, but more the idiocy of certain people on twitter.

While browsing the internet I was made aware of this article.

http://kotaku.com/5981171/players-accuse-tiny-tina-from-borderlands-2-of-verbal-blackface-gearbox-writer-says-hell-change-her-if-racist

For those that don't want to read, some idiots on Twitter are claiming the character of Tiny Tina in Borderlands 2 is racist because she talks in black slang.  Yes, I am totally serious, the link above contains the story in more detail and the twitter conversation.

This is quite possibly one of the dumbest things I have ever heard and I can't believe that people have gotten to the point where they are being offended by the way a character speaks.  I've heard white people speak like this all the damn time, and a dialect like that isn't limited to just one group of people, any prick can talk like that, it's not a hard speech pattern to imitate.

The character of Tiny Tina, from what I looked up on youtube, is super annoying but not racist.  You would have to be some kind of drooling turbo idiot to think that speaking a certain way makes you a racist.  It pisses me off that there are all these people that are on a crusade to try and ban everything that may be even SLIGHTLY offensive to someone.

NEWSFLASH!  Probably every game/movie/book has something that offends SOMEONE, so if you start trying to change things so that no one will be offended, the only thing you can possibly do is just stop making things.  Example, I find these people on Twitter to be offensive, so I think they should stop posting, but they wont.  These people think characters like Tiny Tina are offensive and want them to stop being written that way, but they wont, so shut up.

If anything, I'd say that the dudes making the argument that the character is racist, are racist themselves since they are making the implication that the only kind of people who talk in low class black slang, are black people.  Maybe these people should think before they chat shit.

Some blog updates

OK! Now that I've dealt with a personal issue and I've had some free time, I've been doing some stuff, not big stuff but it's something

First of all, I just wanna remind everyone they can follow me on twitter.  I'm @Taurinensis and I use it to say when I've posted and I usually put my little gaming comments on there too.

The second thing I did was set up an email account for this blog.  The address is identitygaming999@hotmail.co.uk so feel free to send a message, hate mail, requests for games to review etc.

The final update is that I've been playing around with streaming and recording videos.  I've come to the realisation that commentating videos games as I'm playing them is actually quite difficult.  Sure, I could do it technically, but I want it to be interesting, you know?  On top of that I'm having some issues with my streaming software, so there wont be any of that until I iron out the kinks. 

The twitter name and email I'll put on the sidebar after posting this.  I do have a TwitchTV account, but I won't put that up until I have a good stream available.

A little update, twitter n' stuff

So basically the last few days have been quite busy, but busy in a fun way.  Hopefully I won't be missing days on the posts for much longer, but the 1 or 2 day break between posts that's been happening recently has at least resulted in some interesting game purchases, which I'll cover later.

The other little update I've got is that I now have a twitter! so follow me at

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis

if that's wrong can someone let me know, I don't actually have a clue how to use twitter at all.  Once I return home from work this evening I'll be covering my latest buys in Japan, so hopefully that'll be interesting for you.