Stream Update and May Event!

This is just a small update post to inform the good people about some updates to the Twitch channel!

One thing I have ignored completely since they launched are Twitch Channel Points.  If you aren't familiar they are points that accumulate while you watch a given channel.  The idea is that as you build them up you can use them to claim various rewards but apart from the default rewards that no one uses I had not set any up.

Well that's all changed now and you can use your channel points to do various things within the channel.  You can check them out yourself since it's all sort of standard stuff but the one I want to make a big deal of is the Points for Alzheimer's reward.  For 50,000 channel points I will drop what I'm doing an make a 2 Pound donation of my own money to the Alzheimer's Society right then and there.  The reason I've implemented this is so that people who might be unable to donate with their own cash can still find a way to support the charity directly with their viewership.  Of course, if you want to spend the points on the other options that's also cool but the option is now available!

Also, the mini-marathon for May will live on the 23rd/24th!  It'll be 2 8 hour streams of each segment.  Probably 4 hours each of requests and Cuphead on Saturday and 4 hours each of variety and NES challenge on Sunday!  If I can do it within the week leading up, I'll also offer some prizes but there's a chance I might not have time.  I am planning to do more consistent givaways though so watch this space for prizes in the near future.

Difficulty Options are Bullshit

Ooooh isn't that a shamelessly clickbaity title and image I used for this post?  When people read a title like that the first reaction I imagine is

"Just let people enjoy games the way they want!"

Or maybe some stupid comment that involves the word "Gatekeeping"

But despite my clickbaity title I'm not actually here to rag on you for playing easy OR big you up for playing hard.  People SHOULD just enjoy games in whatever way they want, that's totally fine and not something I have an issue with.  My issue really stems from the way that difficulty is implemented.

There are a lot of games that, when started, will prompt you for a selection of how hard you want it to be.  Games like Wolfenstien or Doom like to put fun little titles on it but most of the time it just boils down to Easy, Normal and Hard.  If you choose Normal you generally get the sort of experience that I feel was intended for that game.  Easy tends to make your character beefier, reduce incoming damage and gives you more resources to use while Hard does the opposite of this.  In MOST games I've experienced, in terms of actual technical skill at the game, there isn't really all that much difference between the 3 modes.  All that you're really choosing is how heavily you want to be penalized for any mistakes you make during play,

Metal Gear Solid is a good example of this.  On the harder modes there tends to be more enemies with longer vision ranges, they do more damage, caution mode gets triggered more easily, you can carry less stuff etc. etc. This at first glance is a fine approach to the issue, especially for a first time player.  Someone who isn't confident that they can stealth and fight effectively are allowed to take more hits, carry more ammo and healing, makes perfect sense to allow someone new to the series to enjoy it for all its worth.  Now if you're the kind of person who buys a game, does 1 play through and then shelves it for all eternity then maybe you will not understand my problem.  However if you do multiple replays you'll start to understand why this system is so dull.  The leap between easy to normal and normal to hard isn't that great, not really.  If you feel that you are bad at stealth games and you put it on easy, I can almost PROMISE you that after an hour of getting used to it, you'd be fine to turn it off, start again, and play on normal, or maybe even hard.  MGS only really starts to get really challenging when you go into its top modes but at that point its doing stuff like triggering a game over on being seen at any point which is bordering on levels of daft.

Nier is another good example on why I hate these options so much.  When I first played Nier I put it on Hard mode and the bosses took so little damage that the fights became tedious and I started to get bored during each encounter, especially in the early game.  However after I beat that and tried it on Normal the game turns all its enemies into paper mache.  The enemies and bosses are doing the exact same things they were doing in hard mode, only they died much faster.  This ruins that hard mode because all you're doing is making it take longer, you aren't actually challenging yourself in any way.

A game that has difficulty options that comes so very close to getting it right is Furi.

At the start of Furi you can choose between "Promenade" and "Furi" with an extra "Furier" difficulty after you beat the game.  I say it comes so very close because in reality, Promenade is a waste of time and Furi is ACTUALLY the sort of tutorial mode to get you acclimated to the "real" game in Furier.  Furi is a game essentially about mastery of its controls and knowledge of its bosses.  You study the bosses, learn what they do and how to avoid/parry their attacks and then once you have that down you dance circles around them while you cut them to ribbons with your sword.  If you played Promenande then I'm not judging you for doing so but I feel sorry that content of the game was just cut for you entirely and you didn't get a chance to learn those things to build that confidence.  Entire phases of bosses are cut on its easiest setting which means if you go from Promenade to Furi, you aren't getting extra challenge but you're seeing all new things and in a game like this that feels sort of unfair.

The solution to all this? Player modulated difficulty, designing your game in such a way that allows the player to decide how hard or how easy they want it as they go along.  Dark Souls, despite its reputation, is actually very good at this.  Having trouble with a boss? Go farm some souls and upgrade your weapon and come back and give him a slap.  Boss that's weak to fire giving you trouble? Go get some firebombs and stand halfway across the room and lob them, means that you have to learn about half the attacks.  But some people aren't willing or able to put in that kind of time so a better example I have of that is Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami lets you pick a mask at the start of each stage each with a unique ability and you can pick it depending on what's giving you the most trouble.  Are dudes swarming into a room and killing you? Wear the mask that lets you kill them with the door to make your life easier.  Dogs killing you? Wear the mask that turns off the dogs.  Struggling to find weapons? Wear the mask that makes your punches deadly.  This is a very elegant solution to the difficulty issue because it allows the player to identify the thing they are having trouble with on a stage by stage basis and give them an advantage in that specific area.  What makes it even better is that for weirdos like me that like their games on the daft side, there are even masks that make your surroundings dark so you can see shit or, even better, reverses your controls to make the game just needlessly confusing as fuck, it's great.

Difficulty levels should be abolished and games in general should just be designed in a smarter way.  Not only would that be much more interesting, I feel, for anyone of any skill level playing it but it would have the extra knock on effect of getting rid of that elitism that you see in certain people who only like hard games and people who like.  Some games I understand need these settings like shmups or rhythm games but for the most part I feel like this crap solution to this problem needs to go.

Cuphead Any% Deathless Stream Highlight

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.

A Slight Change of Pace

This is just a short update post regarding a little switch up to the stream for the next few weeks.

As you may be aware, between donation requests, challenge runs and the retro wheel there is a lot going on with the stream right now.  In order to make a decent amount of progress all at once with these segments, the stream schedule will be changed so that I'll be dedicating an entire week to a specific segment.  So for a while, the schedule will look like this

April 28 to 30- Dragon Quest 5
May 5-7 Cuphead challenges
May 14-16- NES 100 game challenge

I am also hoping that the marathon this month can fall on the 18th.  I'm sort of hoping that maybe this whole Corona Virus situation will just magically be resolved by then and we can proceed with the second half of Megaman 2P1C but I have another idea ready for the more likely outcome of everything still being closed and locked down.  I will announce that a little closer to the time after seeing what happens.

Don't forget to follow at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

I would be willing to bet a few hundred of my Yen that when Super Smash Bros Melee came out on the Game Cube and people saw Marth in this roster, they had NO idea where he was from.  Melee came out in 2001 and Shadow Dragon, the DS remake of this game, didn't come out until 2008 so I bet for a long time Marth's origin outside of "that dude from that FE game" was a mystery to a lot of people.  Hell, I even saw people who looked at Hector in FE7 on the GBA and was like "is that Marth?" when his name and weapon are clearly different.

Silly comments about Smash aside, I recently finished Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light on NES.  The game follows Marth doing some stuff against some bad dudes, I actually have no idea what the story is because the entire game is in Hiragana and if you think I'm going to read long textboxes of only that, you have another thing coming.

If you're unfamiliar with Fire Emblem then it is a series of strategy RPGs where the main feature is permadeath.  Over the course of your 25 level adventure with Marth, you'll meet and recruit a number of people of various classes and skills that will level up as they fight stuff on each map.  However, if one of your allies falls in battle they are dead forever, no coming back, end of the line.  This of course means that MOST people who play these games will have a save before each map and will instantly restart as soon as one character goes down.  I tried to avoid this on stream to make it more interesting but I did have a selection of 5 or 6 core team members who, if killed, would trigger a restart. 

Fire Emblem 1 isn't actually all that dissimilar from its sequels but there are a couple of features missing from this game that make it grueling compared to the others.  For example, this game lacks the weapon triangle from the later games and instead has weapons just having certain qualities.  For example swords are accurate but don't do all that much damage while axes are inaccurate and will cleave a guy in half like its Mortal Kombat.  In later games, you have a sort of "swords beat axes" type thing so if you take advantage of that the guy with the axe is a lot more likely to miss.  FE1 doesn't have that so occasionally a raider will just walk up to one of your mercs or even Marth himself and just send him to the shadow realm in a single hit and there's nothing you can do but curl up into a ball and cry.

Crits also seem significantly more abundant in this game for both sides.  I got out of many stick situations with a lucky critical but also I lost a fair deal of good, well leveled and geared units over the course of the game to some guy who usually does 10 damage, suddenly doing 30 damage to my guy with 27HP max. There's a lot of frustration with these games but that's what makes them all the more satisfying when you eventually beat them.

I wouldn't recommend Fire Emblem 1 on NES to someone new to the series, I don't even know if I could recommend it to a fan either.  It's not a bad game but its sort of obtuse, slow and seemingly unfair at times.  If you're new then I'd say go and play Three Houses on the Switch because I heard you can turn off the permadeath in that game so if THATS the feature that's turning you off, you can test the waters with a game that doesn't do that.  If you don't mind the permadeath though, go dig out your GBA and play Fire Emblem (7) instead although I'm only saying that because, despite owning Three Houses since December, I haven't actually played it yet.

I personally never want to play THIS installment ever again although I was digging through my old NES carts on Sunday and I found the sequel, Fire Emblem Gaiden so despite everything I just said about this game being obtuse and unfair, I'm probably going to start that very soon.

Regarding Megaman 2p1c

This weekend I was scheduled to do a 2 players 1 controller marathon of Megaman 5, 6 and X at Critical Hit Nagoya with the owner of the establishment however as I'm sure you're all aware, the world is getting fucked over by COVID right now and of course the best course of action for most people is to just stay home.

As a result of this, I'm sorry to announce that the Megaman marathon this weekend is cancelled for April.  That does not mean its cancelled completely, once this whole virus thing is over and we can safely gather once more a new date will be set and the stream WILL happen.  A 200 GBP incentive was met for this thing, there's no way its getting cancelled forever.

Instead of the 2p1c marathon, on April 11th and 12th I'll be doing two 8 hour streams consisting of a two hour session of each of the stream segments.  So the schedule will look something like:

100 NES Game challenge

Cuphead Challenge Project

DQ5 Playthrough 

Chillstream -> More than likely to be FF7 Remake

Also I'll be doing a long-ish stream of the FF7 remake on Friday, 10th April because I'm excited as all hell for that game.

So while it's a shame that we have to cancel Megaman for now, it's probably best for all of us to stay inside and stay safe.  It will happen, and for now we can enjoy the new releases and some classics over the weekend!