Stop Making MOBA Games

If there is something which could quite easily be described as pointless, it would be making a new MOBA game right now.

So we have DotA2 which is the big one, one of the most played games on steam and has a massive user base that includes people who have been playing since the days of the old Warcraft 3 mod and people who have recently picked it up.  On the other side of that you have League of Legends, a similar game with simpler mechanics and a more newbie friendly approach to things and this game also has a massive userbase.

Before that we had Heroes of Newerth, which was a game that was basically trying to be DotA but with it's muddy art style, crap characters and awkward transition into a free to play model, it was quickly forgotten.  Then on top of that there have been quite a few other titles which have been trying to take the crowns from DotA and League.  Stuff like Bloodline Champions, SMITE and a few others are all there and available to play but very rarely do you see anyone talking about them.

So you would think at this point people would be like "well shit, guess we're not taking them down anytime soon, guess we better go make a different kind of game" but you'd be wrong.  There has been talk for fucking ages of "Blizzard DotA" although I have no idea what that's going to be like and then more recently we have this thing called Strife made by the same guys who did Heroes of Newerth.

This is a terrible idea because what do you expect happen, really?  These games will get released, be played for a few hours by a small group of people before being binned and ignored for League or DotA.  These developers should be channelling their efforts into making something different, something new or original, but instead we're just getting shit games that'll be forgotten within a few months.

We've seen this exact same thing happen with MMO's thanks to World of Warcraft, and it's happening again now with this shit.  Stop making these games because getting people to switch or even just take interest isn't really worth the time or money.  Maybe in the future, once DotA and League have lost some steam, but doing it now is the epitome of pointless.

Tau's 10 Minutes of Yaroze!

Well here we are, the new feature for this blog!  Basically how this works is that I fire up an old Net Yaroze game and play it for 10 minutes while sharing my thoughts about it and maybe any memories that I had associated with it.

After 10 minutes I'll cut the video and if you want to see more then you just have to go try it for yourself.

Today I'm bringing you my first Net Yaroze experience, Pushy11b, a puzzle game about pushing things.  Enjoy!

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.

Killer Is Dead

Killer is Dead is a game I have not finished yet, but due to it being fucking amazing I just had to talk about it right now.

The game follows one very smartly dressed assassin known as Mondo Zappa and his adventures doing work for an orginisation that involves killing an array of downright weird targets with the help of his happy go lucky school girl friend.  He has a big robot arm and a tormented past and he gets caught up having to deal with some guy called David doing all sorts of evil stuff from his base of operations on the moon.  Keep in mind though that this plot was written by non other than Suda51 of Killer7 fame and isn't scared to go right off the handle at basically any point during the game.

The gameplay revolves around hacking and slashing your way through levels of strange robot zombie things called Wires before eventually fighting one of the games strange and incredibly intresting boss characters.  On the way you'll find pickups to improve your weaponry, health and blood gauges that will help make the killing of extremely dangerous criminals a lot easier.

On top of all that there are a ton of side missions that involve all sorts of varied and interesting goals such as securing a bonsai tree or making laps of a Kyoto village while running over Wires.  If you need a break from the killing there are the games Gigolo Missions which involve hitting on attractive women and giving them presents so that their mutual feelings result in them giving you an upgrade of some description.  I could rant for an entire post about the press's reaction to Gigolo mode but instead of that I'll just say that the content off these missions has been grossly exagerated.

The graphics are also really slick with cool looking character models and interesting levels that are varied enough to stop you from being bored visually speaking.  The music is also pretty good and the game comes with both Japanese and English voice audio if you're the kind of person that wanted to hear the script delivered by the Japanese cast.  The English voice actors did a good job of delivering the lines though so it would be worth switching between the two for the full experience.

That said the game isn't perfect and the biggest thing they fucked up with this one was the difficulty.  Hard Mode was obviously designed to be played on a new game+ (assuming there is one) and playing it on your first time round can seem a little unmanageable at certain points, especially the side missions.  The problem with this is that normal mode is way too easy and I have no idea what the challenge is like on easy mode but judging from my current experience you could probably beat the game with one hand there.

The game also has a few bugs of which I shall share two stories with.  On one level, after performing a special kill on an enemy I just fell through the floor and had to restart the mission from a check point which was rather annoying because sometimes the checkpoints can put you quite a ways back.  On a side mission involving a gun turret one of my targets glitched behind a wall that I could not shoot through which resulted in me having to start the whole thing over from the beggining which pissed me off to no end.

Still, difficulty problems aren't game breaking as you can still enjoy the experience on any setting and game bugs are infrequent if a little annoying so Killer is Dead is still worth picking up and blasting through just for it's truly unique brand of Suda51 strangeness.

The Blue Bomber Returns!.....Kind of....not really

Remember Megaman?! I sure as hell do because it was only a few days ago during a boring part of my afternoon that I sat down and blasted Megaman 4 on NES.

Anyway, Capcom hasn't been treating it's little blue robot very well recently.  The closest thing we have had to a Megaman game was Street Fighter X Megaman, which is fine but it's a fan game and didn't really have anything to do with Capcom from a development standpoint.  I think we also had that Megaman XOver thing or whatever it was called which was a auto scrolling game that bascially played itself for the iPad.  Not to mention Megaman Legends 3 getting cancelled which a lot of people were upset about, so let's just say that the poor guy hasn't been having a good run.

So, what I can only imagine was a case of people being sick of Capcom's shit, Keiji Inafune and a bunch of other people have taken to the internet to crowd fund their upcoming project "Mighty No9", a Megaman game in everything but name.  Basically they took Megaman and changed everything just a little bit to avoid being sued, but not enough so that people won't know what's going on.

I'm not going to talk about the game itself here because one google search will get you a wealth of information on that, so go look up their kickstarter page which has already met it's goal.  The only thing I'm going to say is that I'm hype as hell and I'm glad this has happened.  It's been far far too long since we had a good Megaman game and even though this isn't QUITE the same, it's close enough to qualify.  Capcom sure as hell aren't going to do it so let's hope Inafune and his buddies can bring back the magic.

Final Fantasy 3

Right, last night I took down Final Fantasy 3 on the stream so now it's time to do a post about it.

Final Fantasy 3 was the last of the NES part of the series and the first to use the famous Job System that a few titles in the series have become quite well known for.  The story follows 4 youths on their grand adventure through the lands to restore 4 crystals and save the world.

Now I like Final Fantasy 3, but fucking hell is it a really annoying game.  The game itself is fine, it's basically the same as Final Fantasy 1 and 2 but it plays a lot smoother and looks a bit nicer compared to it's other 8 bit counterparts.  The problems with Final Fantasy 3 really only come in when the game starts forcing jobs on you.

You can tell that Square were really proud of this system that they had implemented it and they sure as hell were going to make sure you used it.  Sure, you can use a normal job setup of fighter, utility, black mage, white mage, but there are certain parts of the game where that shit just won't fly.

The one part of that game that I will never forget is the two dungeons with the monsters that multiply on hit unless you one shot them or use magic.  They are found in a long dungeon and and if you let the multiplication get out of hand then you are just fucked.  What you were supposed to do was change everyones job to Dark Knight and just physical attack your way through all the enemies.  So not only did the dungeon take me ages because I was being hard headed about my party, but the solution to my problem was fucking boring.

The same goes for other areas of the game that will just shove a handicap on you for absolutely no reason such as any section that involves turning your party into frogs or mini people.  Still, despite all my complaining about the game being a bit annoying Final Fantasy 3 is great.

The DS version is a hell of a lot easier than the NES version so really you only want to give this one a go if you're looking for a bit of a challenge.  The things that I have complained about above I don't remember being an issue at all in that one.

Well, onto Final Fantasy 4, view it here
www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Stream Week!

Right, last night I missed my stream day due to being at fancy dinner parties and drinking way too much.

Anyway, my personal life aside, I've been thinking it's about time I made a ton more progress into this final fantasy thing, only 3 games in and there is still a lot to do so this every other day stream schedule just ain't cutting it.

So, from today until next sunday I'll be streaming every day from 9PM CEST until at least midnight and probably longer as long as some stupid bullshit doesn't end up making me want to quit.  So get hype and get your donations ready, I'll try and think up some incentives for the upcoming Final Fantasy 4 as well as the other games.

Tune in here
http://www.twitch.tv/taurinensis