Fire Emblem Perma Death is Important

 

In the last week or so I've fallen down a sort of rabbit hole of Fire Emblem content on YouTube which has acted as the inpiration for this post and I want to take a moment to discuss one of the franchises sort of controversial mechanics

If you have never played a Fire Emblem game allow me to fill you in on what I'm talking about real quick.  Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs that has been running since the NES with stories focused on warring nations and their armies and such.  Unlike something like Advance Wars though each unit in a Fire Emblem game is its own character with dialogue, story beats, personalities etc. and if they fall in combat they are usually gone for good.  Some Fire Emblem games have methods of reviving dead party members in extremely limited capacity but generally speaking if someone dies in FE, they are gone for good.

What a lot of players have been doing for years and years, then, is to reset a mission as soon as a single character falls and in the case of the later games the perma death has become a toggleable feature that can be turned off entirely so a fallen unit just "retreats" from the battlefield and can be re-deployed again next chapter.  People do this generally for two reasons.  The first being that they have sort of grown attatched to the character either for mechanical or story reasons and the idea of moving on without them fills the player with such dread that they would rather hit reset and tediously do an entire mission over than carry on without them.  The other reason is fear of "softlocking" themselves by losing either a character they feel is proficient or losing too many characters in a single chapter.  They worry that by losing certain characters they will be totally unable to clear the next chapters and thus have to restart at an earlier save or, in the worst case, the entire game.

Well on both fronts this is completely stupid because these games are designed with player loss in mind.

The softlocking thing generally speaking will not happen on a normal play through of a Fire Emblem game almost no matter how many units you lose.  In each game you are given a lord character and if this guy or gal falls then you are met with a game over and are forced to restart the chapter.  If you're losing bad enough on a map to get more than 1 or 2 characters killed, chances are your lord is going right down with them so progressing past a massacre like that is probably not going to happen.  But even if it does, what Fire Emblem has been doing even since the NES is constantly giving you a stream of replacement units that you can use if the worst case scenario happens.  If you play a Fire Emblem with the perma death turned off or you reset upon a death you will generally find your roster to be filled with tons of duplicate classes.  The units you get later are probably not going to be quite as good as ones you get early that you can train for an entire games worth of maps but if you press on through every death, the chance of you making the game unbeatable are EXTREMELY low.  

Just to really hammer the point home here is a video example of how hard it is to softlock a Fire Emblem game in this manner.  The amount of effort this guy has to go through to get a handful of maps to be in an unbeatable state would never happen in normal play (also sub to this guy he's very cool)

The idea that being able to turn off perma death "for new players" in complete nonsense because Fire Emblem has ALWAYS been kind to new players.  All you're really doing is allowing for sloppy strategy in your STRATEGY. WAR. GAME.

But then there's the other more personal reason of become attatched to the cast and not wanting to continue if someone you like bites the dust.  Well I also think you're being silly by resetting or toggling to off because you are sort of undermining the entire point of these games' stories and removing any and all tension from individual story beats.  These games are about war and war is both brutal and unpredictable.  What the perma death does in a Fire Emblem game is really make you feel the weight of what these characters are going through and adds a lot of immersion to you, they player and supposedly master tacticain, as you work as hard as you possibly can to keep all these indviduals safe.

Here's an example

In Fire Emblem 3 Houses there is a mission when you're looking for a kidnapped person inside a spooky basement.  As you're going through the mission a guy on a horse weilding a schythe with a skull mask on turns up and starts threatening to push your shit through your nose if you don't get lost.  His stats are very high for that point in the game and you are supposed to be intimidated by this guy.  If you have the perma death turned off for this mission you are sucking every last part of the tension out of this scene.  If you screw up and get one of your students in range of him, he will just bonk them on the head, they will say "owie zowie see you next mission" and vanish off the map.  Only with the perma death turned on do you get the intended effect of this enemy.  With it on you'll probably want to stay well away from him to stop that scythe from dicing your cute mage waifu into little pieces or cutting your handsome lance boy right down the middle and thus you must also play smarter and be more creative with how you play.  It's the difference between having a story about war and having a story about a paintball match with swords.

I think the best sort of half way point that has been devised by the developers in the pulse system thing found in 3 Houses on the Switch.  In that game your lord character has a power to rewind time a little bit.  What this translates to for the missions is that if something goes wrong, you can pulse and reset a few turns and try to re-jig your strategy to not get someone killed or get a more favorable position.  This allows the player to still make mistakes or try risky strategy but not get punished too hard for it.  Do it too many times and your pulses run out so after that you're up shit creek so the tension is still there but you still have to play smart.  It then goes and ruins it by ALSO having the death on/off toggle but at the very least I have to give it credit for trying a solution more involved than just a lazy on/off switch.  The best thing about the pulse system is that players who were turned off by the perma death but still wanted to be a little brave and play with it turned on now have a title in the series to help them realize that it's not as punishing as they might think, and as a way of gathering new eyes for the series that's a good thing.

But whatever, if you enjoy FE as a reset-fest or you want to play with it turned off, then power to you.  These are single player games either way so just enjoy them your way.  All I'm saying is that I feel you might get a little more of these games if you played with it turned on.  Greater stakes equals to greater satisfaction when you win which equals greater amounts of fun.

Yakuza Kiwami 2

 

I just beat Yakuza Kiwami 2 on stream recently so I thought I'd share some thoughts on it.  

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a remake of Yakuza 2 on the PS2 originally released in 2006 but with beefed up graphics and extra content out the wazoo.  Being a direct follow up from Yakuza 1 it follows Kazuma Kiryu as he gets involved in an inter-family war between the Osaka and Tokyo branches of the Yakuza.  There's also a korean mafia involved and a plot involving the police and if I tried to write up a true plot summary this post would take me literally all day considering how many twists and turns it takes.  But really I'm not out to spoil anything in this post so all you really need to know is that the plot is absolutely bonkers and you MIGHT have some trouble following it completely if you have not played this first game.  There is also a remake of Yakuza 1 though (Called Yakuza Kiwami, go figure), so I might suggest giving that a go before jumping into the second one.  

This is a Yakuza game though so the plot is only about 25% of the overall experience because, as any fan of the series will tell you, these games are DENSE with additional stuff to do.  In fact, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is so dense with content that it's basically 3 games in one.

The first game is your classic Yakuza experience.  You wander around Sotenbori (based on Dontonbori in Osaka) or Kamurocho (a made up bit of Tokyo) progressing the story while you fight thugs, goons and other Yakuza clan members.  On top of that there are a ton of mini games including things like; Golf, Majong, Shogi, a karaoke rhythm game, UFO catchers and full versions of Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua On just to name a few.  They may seem like just distractions to pad out the game but not only are they fully formed games that are fun to sink a lot of time into in their own right, you get rewards such as experience and money for engaging with them so they directly help you out for the main game.  On top of that there is also an INSANE number of sub stories dotted around the two towns which also net things like rewards and extra finishing moves for combat.  Some of them are very basic and just involve beating up a couple guys and some of them are fully fleshed out, sometimes with cutscenes, mega side quests that involve going to multiple locations and really getting into the nitty gritty of the weird goings on of the two locations.  There is so much stuff to do in just the main game that you could play for multiple hours and not progress the main story a single beat but be constantly getting fun and engaging story and gameplay.  

But then on top of that you have the Cabaret Grand Prix.  The Cabaret game is unlocked pretty early on and involves Kiryu helping a down on its luck hostess club as it climbs the ranks of a sort of hostess battle tournament where the club with the most profits takes home the prize.

It's presented as a mini game but it's a full on hostess sim where you have to recruit girls, manage their mood, help them with customers during the game proper when you are making money and each segment of it has a full on plot going along with it where you get to know your staff and there's betrayal and intrigue and all sorts of shit going on.  The story and character development here is so well done that if you presented "Yakuza: Cabaret Grand Prix" as its own spin off title I would have bought it.  Also the "villains" of of the plot are cameos of various porn stars (pictured above) which is a fun little cherry on top of the cake if you're a complete degenerate like me.  

This content wasn't actually in the original release of Yakuza 2 and has been added for the Kiwami version.  I've been told it first appeared in another Yakuza game that I've not played and then was added to Kiwami.  I'm extremely looking forward to playing this one again in the other Yakuza game soon.

But even then it doesn't end

Majima Construction is another fully storied, fully fleshed out, could have sold it to me as its own game "mini game" where you have to play a sort of tower defence/real time strategy game to defend construction sites from a bunch of land sharks.  While in Cabaret GP the guest appearances where from popular porn stars, this one includes a rather large cast of professional wrestlers.  If you have ever watched the "No Laughing" series from a Japanese show called Gaki No Tsukai, Masahiro Chono who is well known for slapping a chubby Rakugo man in the face every year, is the main bad guy for most of the adventure, voiced by the man himself.  

This game gets intense too with some of the later missions being quite challenging if you aren't levelling up your team properly and sinking millions upon millions of yen into upgrades.  This is another mini game that was included in a later entry and then reincorporated for Kiwami 2 so I'm once again looking forward to doing it all again at a later date

My only real complaint about the game is that it's too easy.  I was playing on Hard mode and had no trouble beating up all the dudes throughout the story and the main game.  By the end of the game I was so skilled and powered up that I beat the final boss mostly by not moving and just pressing triangle to do a counter when he attacked me.  If you are having trouble with an enemy, the game is also far too easily cheesed but equipping a weapon, chugging an energy drink to fill your heat gauge and then spamming the unblockable heat attack with it until their health meter empties out.  

Still though, despite the lack of challenge Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a fun, hilarious, exciting and sometimes heart wrenching game that is absolutely brimming with content and will keep you going for a long LONG time.  Probably one of the best open world type games I've ever played, and you should play it too

Yurukill Pre-Purchase Impressions: Worryingly Interesting

 

Yurukill is a game that doesn't come out until July this year but after seeing the trailer it's such a weird idea that I have to say a few things about it.

Yurukill is being advertised as an "escape adventure bullet hell" game that is planned to be released for the Switch, PS4/5 and PC.  From watching the trailer it's easy to tell that this means the game is a visual novel combined with a sort of point and click adventure type thing that's ALSO combined with a....bullet hell shooter...of all things.  It's an interesting idea that will either be really good or be the gaming equivalent of chocolate mint ice cream on black pudding.  An idea that's so out there that regardless of what I hear about it from now until release, it's basically guaranteed that I'm going to buy it

Being a cross genre game doesn't inherently make it a bad idea.  Games like Persona 3 and up that combined Tokimeki Memorial style dating sims with RPGs turned out to be a fantastic idea and indie darling Undertale showed that you combine bullet hell "shooting" and RPG mechanics for something really special.  However what a game like Undertale also shows is just how hard it is to make a decent bullet hell shmup.

Let's be honest here, the combat in Undertale is kind of ass.  With the exception of maybe Sans and Genocide Route Undyne, most of the enemies have boring as shit, dull as dishwater attack patterns and the controls feel sort of "heavy" and the combat generally isn't all that great.  The writing and characters in that game is what makes it so special and the sub-standard combat can be forgiven because it's contextualised probably as part of the story.  As a "shmup" Undertale is a pile of ass but when regarded as an entire piece, it's not bad at all.  The other thing that elevates Undertale is that the set pieces in that game are incredible.  Like sure, the controls are kind of dog water and the patterns are basic and a bit dull for a shmup but the overall vibe of a fight like Metaton or the emotional weight behind the battle with Asgore means that it can get away with it.

But then there's Yurukill 

Just from this game player trailer alone you can see that Yurukill is a boring, generic looking ass shmup that looks like it was pulled from the underside of some doujin game freeware site.  Also it's hard to say for sure given what we know right now but it also looks like it doesn't benefit from having story context to help forgive boring game play.  Like there's a bunch of visual novel shit and then "oop, time for a shmup break" and the impression I get is that it's poorly thought out.  Some proper Triggerheart Excellia lookin-ass garbage.

But these are just my initial impressions from a trailer, who knows the later shmup levels might be crazy intense with fun game play and story context, don't judge a book by it's cover right?  I have another, slightly more personal reason for being wary of this game.  The first thing that this whole thing reminded me of when I first saw it wasn't Daganrompa, like it seems to in most people, but  Deadman Wonderland.  A fucking HORRENDOUS anime about a high school student being framed for a murder and having to serve a prison sentence in a theme park prison where people have to the death duels with their blood-based super powers.  It's fucking awful and I can't look at Yurukill and not get traumatic flashbacks to watching that pile of garbage.

Yurukill is an interesting combination of genres that means that even despite all the shit I just gave it in the above paragraphs I'm going to buy it and therefore I hope to whatever God may be watching down on us all that I'm wrong and the game is actually incredible.  But a dull shmup and a setting reminiscent of one of the worst pieces of fiction ever made means it has some work to do for a good write up.  

Fingers crossed though, I love it when whacky ideas work

Twilight Syndrome: Investigations

 

As a fan of the developer Grasshopper Manufacture and their lead dude Suda51, I decided to take it upon myself to go and experience a few of his older works when he used to work with another company called Human Entertainment.  Very recently I finished off Twilight Syndrome: Tansaku-Hen and so I thought I'd share some thoughts on the game.

Well I guess I should use the word "game" very lightly because there's very little in terms of game-play here.  Twilight Syndrome is a visual novel about 3 school girls who find themselves often caught up in some kind of spooky happenings.  Each chapter starts with some kind of rumor that one of them hears about and then the 3 go and investigate and a bunch of weird shit happens.  The main "gameplay" in Twilight Syndrome is the same kind of "gameplay" that you get in most games of this type, where you read the story and then every so often you are presented with A, B or C options and you pick one.  The choices that you make throughout each story change the outcome but I'll get into that a bit later.  Sometimes you are also able to control the girls around certain environments but there's not really anything to explore and they all walk so slow that I think going from one side of the school building to the other in Chapter 4, for example, caused me to age about 2 years.  Gameplay is not what we are here for.

Weirdly enough there is also an EKG at the top of the screen that at first made me think there might be things to hide from or options that would cause the girls to panic or die of fear, thus resulting in a game over but nothing ever came of it.  There's one chapter where one of the girls gets caught in a looping train station and every time you make the loop you find a public phone that's ringing.  If you choose to not answer the phone the girl runs away and loops back to it, causing the EKG at the top to pulse faster and change color from deep blue to green to red.  I wanted to test the effects of this so I kept on running away rather than taking the call and despite the bar being red and the pulse being extremely fast, nothing happened in the end.  I went the whole game and it never came into play so who fucking knows what that piece of shit bar is there for. 

I bitched about this in the last post but depening on the choices you make during each stage, you can end up getting a game over.  At the end of each chapter you are given a rating that includes 区 meaning bad luck, 中吉 meaning medium luck or 大吉 meaning big luck, based off what you get when you do those temple fortune telling thingies.  If you get 区 then the chapter is considered failed and you have to replay it.  This is annoying because the game doesn't feature a fast forward and it doesn't allow you to skip past the bits where you made correct decisions so if you fuck up you have to replay the WHOLE THING again, which is tedious as all fuck.  Usually though, these decisions are not hard to notice, where usually you'll get the worst result if you abandon an investigation early or leave a character behind.  For example there was one stage where one of the girls gets trapped in a room with a ghost and your choices shortly after are to either leave her behind and go home or go back and try to help her.  While I was streaming it I decided to leave her there to get ghost-wrecked because I didn't know about the game overs only to have a big 区 slapped on the chapter select list and told to do it again and properly this time.

But that's fine, that was me fucking around with the obviously stupid answer and finding out.  However there was one chapter where the wrong decision didn't feel so obvious and caused a game over.  It's in the aforementioned train station chapter near the end, where the girls find themselves on a ghost platform with a ghost train.  One of the girls decides it might be a good idea to ride the ghost train and you can choose between talking her out of it, or lending her about $300 for a ticket.  Now before I said that most chapters end in 区 if you abandon the investigation, correct?  Well this is the one time in the game where you HAVE to abandon the investigation or you get a failing grade.  Failing to talk her out of the train ride leads to her going missing for a week and then the police find her somewhere out of town with a hard case of amnesia.  What makes this double annoying is that this comes right at the END of the god damn chapter so if you got on that train because you've been conditioned to see your spooky shit to the end, then enjoy re-reading the whole thing, fuck face, 区 for you.

Annoying design problems aside though, the game is sort of interesting.  It sort of reminds me of something like Goosebumps are Are you Afraid of the Dark or some shit.  Not something I'll be ranting and raving about like Suda51s other works such as Killer7 but interesting for a one time play through and good enough to make me interested in it's sequel which is also called "investigations" but in Japanese it's 究明 instead of 探索.  Maybe "search" would be a better translation for this game's title but that sounds stupid as fuck to me

Anyway, if you were looking to play this for yourself you might be shit out of luck because as far as I'm aware none of of the Syndrome games have English translations.  Someone on YouTube has done a playthrough of them with English Subtitles attatched though so you could go look that up and just watch that instead.  You're essentially getting the same experience.  

For me though, this game ended on a cliffhanger so I'll probably write another post when I beat 究明

Subscription ROM Services are Dumb

 

Yesterday I caught some news that Sony is joining Nintendo in giant game companies providing ROMS via a subscription service and it's pretty darn stupid to say the least.

On the surface it sounds like it could be a good idea.  The idea is that you pay a every month to get access to a collection of back-catalogue games from the companies previous systems to play as much as you want, good deal right?  Well no.  The initial problem with all this stuff is that you're only getting a very small amount of the back catalogue and usually only the best sellers.  This means that any hidden gems or good games that were less popular just get ignored and fall to the wayside which means that despite these services if there's an obscure game you really love you'll probably never get to play it on your modern hardware no matter how much of your hard earned money you give them.  If Shadow Hearts, for example ever turns up on PSN premium I will literally eat an entire shoe store

Money is the other problem because these companies are essentially ripping you off at every turn.  Nintendo released the expansion to Switch Online where you have to pay fifty bucks a month for a smattering of N64 games.  What's worse is that a lot of these games aren't very well presented with the Switch version of Ocarina of Time being somewhat famous for how shit it was compared to regular emulation on PC.  I've heard it has since become a bit better but the fact it was released in the condition that it was in for that price point AT ALL is really stupid.  Sony are even worse wanting $120 per year just for the ability to play some of the PS1/2/3s best sellers which is INSANE to me.  Maybe if it was a one time payment of 120 to play all those games forever, sort of like a giant greatest hits collection, then I wouldn't be moaning but these payments have to be constant.  If you stop playing for Switch online, no more SNES for you.  Stop paying for PSN Premium? Kiss your games goodbye until you cough up more cash.

All of this, when emulation exists which can be done for free and usually at a higher quality than anything Sony or Nintendo will give you.  Now I'm not going to argue the legality of emulation.  If you download some SNES ROMS or some PS2 ISOs and Nintendo or Sony come after you, they are well within their legal rights to do so but just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.  

Let's think about Emulation for a second, who is it hurting?  For this example let's take someone downloading an ISO of Shadow Hearts on the PS2.  You could argue that they should be paying money to play it to support Sony or the developer, Sacnoth.  Well that argument doesn't stand because 1) Sacnoth ain't around no more, 2) The game isn't being sold anywhere no more and 3) The game isn't avaliable on the back catalogue subscription service.  "So go and buy a disc copy instead of pirating then!" I hear you cry through a wave of drool.  

Shadow Hearts on disc is about $130-300 depending on where you buy it.  Now let's say you go this route, where does that money go?  Does it go to Sony to support their production of future games?  No it doesn't.  Does it go to Sacnoth or their parent company Aruze to maybe fund another Shadow Hearts game?  No it doesn't.  So where does the money go then?  It goes to some fat, middle aged neckbeard who hasn't showered in 2 weeks so he can go scoop up more retro games from garage sales and used book stores to over price in online marketplaces.  I know it feels "morally correct" to buy a disc version of a retro game but you're supporting an absolutely disgusting marketplace that's really bad for players.

So tell these subscriptions to go fuck themselves and go fire yourself up and emulator.  I'm sure the multi-billion dollar corporations won't go under because you decided to fire up Yakiniku Bugyou on ePSXe, you don't need to worry your damaged little brain about it

Adventure Game Game Overs are Bullshit

 

People these days like to often go on about "objectively bad game design".  Usually this is in reference to some difficulty related thing in a Souls game or used to try and talk smack about a game that a particuar person finds too hard but allow me to lay on you some ACTUAL bad game design and that is the Adventure Game game over.

You may think that when I say "Adventure Game" I'm talking about something like Zelda but I'm not, game overs in those games when you run out of HP or whatever make total and perfect sense.  When I say adventure I'm talking of mainly the point and click variety when referring to western games or alternatively what the Japanese refer to as "adventure games" which is what us filthy gaijin would call "Visual novels", for the most part 

This is the google image result for googling "adventure game" in Japanese, just so you know I'm not talking completely out of my arse.  

The point and click adventure, Monkey Island for example, is a mostly dead genre in 2022 but is an often fondly remembered genre from people who grew up playing PC games on Windows 98 and earlier.  For example a while ago I played Beneath a Steel Sky on Good Old Games and while it was a charming little game that I enjoyed playing overall, you can be hit with a game over screen if you move into the wrong place or click the wrong thing.

Probably implemented to stop the usual point and click strategy of "rub everything on everything" but annoying nonetheless when you haven't saved for a while and your curiosity decides to screw you over.  Usually in these games though you can save whenever you want so its more of a mild annoyance than anything else.

What I'm mainly talking about, and what prompted this post, are game overs in Japanese style adventure games, mainly the one at the top of the article called Twilight Syndrome: Investigations.  In this game you play as a group of 3 school girls investigating various rumors and spooky happenings and for the first 2 chapters its fairly basic stuff.  But when you get to the third chapter, there are a number of points where you can make an incorrect decision and be hit with a big fat game over.  This, at first, seems fine, but then you realize that the game has no dialogue skip, no mid-chapter select, no way to speed anything up.  If you game over you have to start the ENTIRE THING from the start and sometime the bad decision can be made right at the end of a chapter so if you fall upon that you have to watch the WHOLE THING play out again.  

For example, in the third chapter, there is a bit where one of the girls gets possessed by a ghost and you get the decision to run away or try and help her.  If you run away, you game over and if you help her the story continues.  I picked the run away option when I was streaming the game to see what happens and wasn't really surprised when the game punished me for just abandoning members of the main cast.  But later on you are hit with a similar decision after making a phone call but if you fuck up the phone call, a murderous teacher comes along and ends you.  The problem is that there's no real way to know HOW you fucked up the call when you do.  There are multiple, 3 choice questions at multiple points in the conversation and its not obvious which one leads to death and which one leads to the story continuing.  This call is also at the end of the chapter so fucking it up means you have to slowly watch the entire thing play out all over again and its tedious as all fuck.

Its not like this in all adventure games thankfully.  Kamaitachi no Yoru (on PS1 and 2 at least) as a "story branch" thing where you can select specific scenes and text boxes to jump around the game.  So if you picked an option that you think lead to your death, then you can quickly go back to that exact choice and try the other path.  Why Human Entertainment decided that I have to re-read the entire fucking game for a single bad choice is absolutely baffling.

Basically, Twilight Syndrome pissed me off and I wanted to have a cry about it.  Despite these annoyances the Syndrome games, Beneath a Steel Sky and most other games that fall under the umbrella of this genre are actually really good so go play them. 

PS3, PS4 and the Switch Controllers Can Kiss My Ass

 

Somewhere in a cardbox box, probably located in the family home I still have the Sega Mega Drive I got when I was 4 years old.  I can hook that bad boy up and shove a cart inside it and I promise you that the controller will still function.  I will be able to sit down and play a game of Gunstar Heroes or Vectorman on that thing from start to finish with no issues.  This level of durability seems to have gone completely out of the window in semi-recent times and I absolutely can't stand it.

First the PS3 controller.  The PS3 Controller is a pretty good pad that feels nice and is easy to game with, a good piece of essential gear for the system.  However, lurking inside the controller is a small piece of styrofoam that over time, with use, will wear down.  When this sucker wears down it causes your controller to start putting out random inputs.  For example I've been trying to slog my way through Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, an absolutely terrible game that gets even worse when the main character, Gabriel, is just doing whatever the fuck he wants.  Sometimes I would be in combat and despite me not pressing the X button to jump, he would jump.  Even more annoyingly is that killing enemies drops souls that you absorb to charge a magic bar with the L3 button, but pressing L3 would also, for some reason, press L1 which would activate the magic mode and waste whatever energy you just absorbed. The game is already shit and with this extra hurdle it makes me want to not play it at all.  

So I head online and try to find a fix and thankfully I find one.  A simple fix that involves opening the pad, finding the little piece of styrofoam that is apparently the cause of the issue and wrapping some electrical tape around it.  So I did that, great success no problem!  However when I put the pad back together, that plastic that keeps the shoulder buttons in place was so old and shitty that it basically just shattered in my hands.  It's not like I was slamming the controller back together, I was trying to be as careful as possible and the whole thing just fucking fell apart.  But even if I was doing an Incredible Hulk impression with my controller, why the fuck do I even have to do this in the first place?  I have retro controllers that are god knows how many years old and those all work fine so why the shit is the PS3 pad made like this?!

What's even worse, is that I ordered a Hori 3 controller off Amazon to replace it.  I went for this pad because its compatible with the PC and I wanted a pad to replace the shitty PS4 controller.  The reason the PS4 controller is in the title is because while it does work great when being played with the PS4, playing with it hooked up to a PC is a FUCKING. NIGHTMARE.  The micro-USB connection in the top of the pad is looser that your mum and disconnects from the computer constantly.  If you've ever watched a stream where I'm using the pad, you will hear that disconnect/reconnect sound CONSTANTLY and its really fucking annoying when it happens in the heat of game play.  I've never had this issue with any other device that uses micro USB, why is the PS4 pad made like such garbage in this regard?

So the Hori 3 works great on my PC but plugging it into my PS3 turned out to be a complete shit show.  I fire up Castlevania and all the buttons work but for some reason the sticks don't work.  I can do everything except what is possibly the most important function of the character, move.  This would also happen when using the PS4 controller with the PS3.  All these pads are the same fucking thing why do they have to operate so differently between games?!  It's not even consistant either since I had an issue when streaming No More Heroes on PS3 where I couldn't block attacks only to realize that the issue was that in that game, the shoulder buttons weren't working and everything else was just fine.  Playstation hasn't changed its controller layout since the fucking first system they put out, how is this so much hassle? It boggles the mind.

Now I was only going to complain about my Playstation pad woes in this post but any chance to shit on Nintendo I'm going to take.  At least with the Sony controllers they either worked properly for a long time or have annoying things when being used out of their primary intended use.  However the controllers on the Switch don't even get that and the Joycons are quite possibly one of the worst things I've ever had the displeasure of using.  Not only do they feel like shit but they start to drift if you so much as look at them funny.  I was getting Switch drift in less than a year of owning the system and MAYBE I'd understand if I was playing Smash Brothers 10 hours a day but my sticks starting drifting after playing though Fire Emblem of all fucking things.  No real intense stick use, just moving a cursor around a grid and selecting things on a menu was too much for that flimsy sack of garbage.  The only game I played before that was Breath of the Wild which, while a bit more intense on the stick, wasn't too heavy on rapid or strong movements.

But we all know the reason why the Joycons suck so much shit.  It's so that you shell out an additional 6-8000 yen for a Pro Controller.  Do you want to enjoy the games for the system that you already paid money for or do you want to torture your hands and give yourself permanent muscle damage from using the Joycons? Well if its the former better break out your wallet, motherfucker

Fuck you Nintendo, I hate you