Tau Plays Outlast Part 14

Well this one went a lot better

New Gauntlet! Get Hype!

It's not very often that I get hyped about things, but I can't help but feel a great sense of excitement when I see the trailer for the new Gauntlet game!

First take a look at the trailer, it's rad

Now in case you don't know what Gauntlet is, it's a game where you pick one character out of 4 classes and you go through a big fat dungeon collecting loot for score and killing HUGE numbers of monsters.  The game is well known for it's fast paced game play and co-op multiplayer and has a large place in the heart of many people my age.

I still remember back in my early teenage years, going over to a friends house and playing the shit out of Gauntlet Legends.  Raging over who was getting all the food and gold and eventually overcoming all the big bads the game had to throw at you.  It was a time filled with both extreme amounts of anger and extreme amounts of joy.

The reason I can let myself get so hyped for the new Gauntlet is because it's the kind of game that's very hard to fuck up.  All you need is 4 classes, a lot of baddies and co-op play, if you have those 4 things then you have at the very least an acceptable Gauntlet experience.  Add some polish, maybe some online functionality to bring it into 2014 and some well designed dungeons and the new Gauntlet will be something really special.

The only thing that pisses me off is the name.  Why is it called "Gauntlet"? Now everyones going to get confused when you say Gauntlet because they won't know if they mean the 1985 arcade game or the 2014 game. 

I'm going to be watching that space with much excitement.

Tau Plays Outlast Part 13

Everything that could have gone wrong with this episode did.  The level itself AND the upload to YouTube.  Goddamnit

The BBC: Masters of the fucking Obvious

The whole video games and violence thing is the kind of issue that has been talked about since gaming was even a thing.  Doom, Postal, Grand Theft Auto and many more have come under the fire of retards who don't know what they are talking about for their graphic content.

For the longest time people have claimed that because these games show violent imagery the people who play them become violent and will eventually hurt someone or shoot up a school or whatever stupid bullshit.  Usually when they say this, they mean impressionable kids but if you let your kid go around hurting others just because he/she saw it on a video game, then you're just a shit parent and that's all there is to it.

But then, the BBC come along with this article

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26921743

Now I'm being unfair to the BBC because it's not really them that did the research but whatever, it wouldn't be as snappy if I put "The University of Rochester" now, would it?

Anyway, some twats in the UK apparently did some "research" and discovered that aggression is linked to bad game design rather than the content itself.....

NO FUCKING SHIT

Have you ever bought a thing like a microwave, toaster or flat packed shelf unit?  You go home and take it out of the box and you THINK it's going to be easy to set up but it's not.  The piece of shit wont work properly or fit together properly or it's too big or some other bullshit and it makes you mad.  You start cursing at everything in the house and cursing the very life of the person who came up with this monstrosity you're trying to make work, the very thing that was supposed to make your life easier.

Games are the same.

The very thing that you were supposed to be able to just sit down and chill out with doesn't fucking work properly and ends up making you frustrated in the same way.  Having a character not do what their supposed to do or having the game just crap out on you because they are a badly coded buggy mess is the EXACT same thing as the above example.  You end up squeezing the controller as hard as you can and cursing the very life of the person who developed the piece of shit that is clogging up your gaming system.

So well done BBC and everyone involved in that "research", you discovered something that anyone with half a functioning brain worked out back in 197 fucking 2.

3 Game Concepts That Need To Fuck Off

I've spent a while doing playthroughs and streams now and there are certain things about certain games that really really piss me the hell off.  So today, since I came home late from work and feel like having a vent about some stupid bullshit on the internet, I'm going to share with you 3 things about games that especially piss me off.

NUMBER 1! THE SEWER LEVEL!

You may have gathered from the image at the top of the page that I dislike sewers a lot.  I'm not the only one to have this view on sewer levels, it's an opinion held by any person who has enjoyed games for any amount of time, these things are the fucking worst.  But why are they the worst? 

Is it because they are hard? No
Is it because that they are full of bullshit puzzles involving levers and keys and other crap? A little but not really, we can deal.

It's because that when you include a sewer level in your game it screams "WE RAN OUT OF IDEAS!".  Every sewer level ever made is the same brown or gray series of bland corridors with a stretch of water running down the middle.  It's always the point in any given game where the fun comes screeching to a halt and you have to just deal with a shit boring area for anything between 10 minutes to an hour.

Silent Hill does it kind of right by keeping it short and simple but there are games like Legend of Lagaia 2 that have really long and stupid sewer sections that make me want to kill myself.  Doesn't matter if you do it "right" or not, the sewer level needs to fuck off out of gaming forever.

NUMBER 2! ESCORT QUESTS!

Can anyone on Earth name a single game that has an enjoyable escort quest?  Every single time one of these things pops up it makes people just want to put down the controller and never touch that damn game again.  Doesn't matter how good the game is, an escort quest WILL make people rage quit as they just don't want to have to deal with terribly programmed AI and having to restart because your partner walked themselves into a group of enemies and got their dopey arse killed.

The worst game for this example off the top of my head is Dead Rising

Famous for it's terrible partner AI but most hated because you weren't tasked with just one escort, you had to take large groups of brain dead twats around a zombie infested mall.  Luckily it was mostly optional so it didn't ruin the overall game but it was still really annoying. 

The game that did it "best" was Resident Evil 4 because Ashley had the decency to sit in a bin for long stretches of time, but this just made the whole thing feel pointless and was just a stupid preparatory step you had to take before engaging in combat.  Either way, escort quests need to just fuck off forever.

NUMBER 3! EXCESSIVE BACK TRACKING!

There are two kinds of back tracking to be found in games.  The first kind is the kind found in games like Metroid.

This is the good or acceptable kind of back tracking.  As you progress through a level bits of it are cut off since you don't have the right tools to get through, then when you have those tools you go back so that you can go see what was behind that locked door or small hole or whatever.

This is an OK form of back tracking because it's kind of exciting.  You get your new toy and then you get all this build up as you make your way back through because you know for a fact that there's going to be something new after making the short trip.

But then there is the terrible kind of back tracking, forced and samey.

Silent Hill 4 is a great example of what I mean.  You play through 4 levels of the game and then after that you have to play through them AGAIN but with a stupid escort quest tacked on and bullshit ghosts trying to kill you.  Nothing new to look forward to, just pain and suffering as you fight your way through the same subway, prison, forest and town, it's garbage.

Devil May Cry 4 did the same kind of thing, where you played through a bunch of levels are Nero and then AGAIN with Dante but backwards.  It was crap but at least the game was good so we could focus on that but there are plenty of games that have this kind of thing but not the good gameplay to make it worth suffering through.

Give a decent reward for having to back track or don't include it.  Making me replay through half a game I already played is a thing that absolutely needs to fuck off.

So yeah, 3 things that piss me off about games and that ain't all of them so maybe I'll do another one of these another day.

Why I love Speed Running

Very recently I've been speed running Silent Hill, or at least learning how to but if you watch the stream at all you already know this.  One thing I find when I talk about speed running to a few of my friends is that sometimes they say that they don't get it.  "Why would you want to beat a game as fast as you can? why not just enjoy it?" is the most common thing I hear from various people so now I just want to take a moment and explain why I love doing it so much even though I'm terrible.

Reason #1: Game Longevity

With some games people may complain that replayability is an issue.  They beat the game once and then have absolutely no desire to go back and attempt to beat it again because it's just not as fun as second time round.  What speed running does, for me at least, is makes games that have that issue a lot more fun to play over and over again.  For example, Hotline Miami is the kind of game that originally I had no interest in playing through more than once.  I'm not the kind of person who is interested in high scores or anything like that outside of the shmup genre so after I beat it once I didn't have much desire to go back and play.  But since discovering speed running I've played the shit out of Hotline Miami, just because the idea of beating my own time to the end of that game is really fun to me.

Reason #2: Knowledge of the title

I think that one misconception that people have about speed running is that it's JUST "getting to the end as fast as you can", but really it's a little more than that.  Let's say I go and pop in Metal Gear Solid 3 right now, I've played that game A LOT but there's no way I could do an effective speed run.  That's because the knowledge required to simply beat a game and the knowledge required to speed run it are 2 entirely different things.  Usually speed running will require quite intimate knowledge of the title and not just the route through each stage.  You have to know basically every little thing there is to know about not only the game itself, but all the technical things surrounding that game such as how many frames of animation something might take or how the hit boxes function.  It's something that I find fascinating to "study" and kind of goes hand in hand with the whole game longevity thing that I mentioned before

Reason #3: The community

It's weird, I've entered quite a few gaming communities over my many years and I'm sorry to say that the vast majority of them are filled with complete twats.  This isn't true for 100% of them though, and the speed running community are one of those few groups that aren't heavy on the twats.  One thing that people worry about when they are new to speed running is that "oh I'm bad, it would be embarrassing to even try when there are already so many good players".  But this is a load of crap because generally speaking people who speed run stuff are really nice.  I'm terrible at Megaman X but when I've done races on Speed Runs Live for it, people don't come into my chat to mock me, they come to give me advice and help me to improve my times and that level of friendliness is hard to find when it comes to strangers on the internet.

So, that's the big 3 reasons why I love speed running so much.  I know most people reading this probably don't care about why I love speed running so much, but it was something I thought I'd share so that maybe I could inspire a few others to take it up.

Tau Plays Outlast 12

You may be noticing that I'm hammering the YouTube content recently! Well I'm hoping to get this Outlast playthrough done soon so I can move on to the next game.  Enjoy the vid! Like and subscribe and all that good stuff!