Yokai Watch Is Bullshit

I don't know about the west but in Japan you almost can't go a single day without seeing some stupid reference to this stupid fucking TV show.  I hate this fucking show and the worst thing about working as a teacher for elementary and kindergarten kids is that they won't shut the fuck up about it.  They bring in toys and branded pencil cases and just blab on about the show and good lord it's enough to make someone want to die.

Yokai are these things in Japanese folklore, kind of like ghosts but not quite.  They usually cause some kind of trouble which can range from mild inconvenience to outright killing folks.  Go look up the Wikipedia article if you want a quick low down on Yokai, it's a long standing Japanese folk thing that would be way to hard to explain in a single paragraph.

So then Yokai Watch fucking comes along and just repackages years of Japanese folk tales into trite little shit shows for fucking stupid bastard children to enjoy.  Apart from the fact that I'm assaulted constantly at work about the show and it's workings, they have the fucking gall to release a number of shitty Pokemon type rip offs for the fucking DS.  I remember when Yokai Watch 2 came out and every single game store had big fucking posters for it everywhere and I couldn't move without seeing this cheap knockoff Pokemon shit everywhere.  This of course attracted lots of kids to the store and kids in game stores are the fucking worst, always begging loudly at their parents and getting all twinkle eyed over the most obvious pile of shit shovelware on the shelf.

What's funny is that hating Yokai Watch makes me feel old.  I have a buddy in his 30s who HATES Pokemon with a passion.  I don't really give too many shits about Pokemon, I stopped dealing with it a long time ago and while the games are pretty bad they are unfortunately the best place to go if you want online monster breeding action.  I never understood his deep seated hatred for Pokemon but now I do because that's exactly what Yokai Watch is, Pokemon for a new generation of thick pricks.

What's even more depressing is that I quite like reading about Yokai and shit.  Game developers, especially for JRPGs would often use these Yokai folk tales as a sort of inspiration for their enemies and bosses.  I would then go off and read these folk tales and it would be extremely interesting to see which part of the culture these things came from.  But now Yokai Watch has completely ruined all that, now I feel like a complete twat for looking any of this up because you know there's some fucktard on the internet or some shit weeaboo somewhere who will hear you mention it and use that as an excuse to regail you with their Yokai Watch knowledge.  What makes it even worse is that half the fucking Yokai in the show aren't Yokai, their either completely made up or taken from non-Yokai stuff like Shinto lore, stupid shitty writers.

Shin Megami Tensei is a great example of a monster breeding game that draws from folklore instances without being geared at twats.  Unfortunately the genre of monster breeding games is completely shit up because of mass market bullshit like Pokemon and Yokai Watch making cutsey shallow bullshit the norm for the genre.  Fuck Yokai Watch, fuck Pokemon and fuck all of this other shallow crap, burn it all.

Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 is a game that I love so damn much that I'm about to start speed running it.  It's part of the much loved Silent Hill series which was at one point a wonderful collection of genuinely terrifying and wonderfully well written survival horror games.  However, like Resident Evil and the survival horror genre in general, Silent Hill has become complete shit being developed by people who have no clue about what it is about and seem to be allergic to good game design. 

Just like how Resident Evil 4 turned the series from tense survival horror into big loud not scary action, Silent Hill 2 is the reason that the series went from well thought out demonic cult story to series of twats facing inner demons.  Unlike Resident Evil though, Silent Hill 2 was an interesting take on the story from the original team which was then completely ruined by outside influences while Resident Evil just got turned to shit because Capcom thought the fan base was full of thickos.

The story of Silent Hill 2 involves James Sunderland who travels to Silent Hill after getting a letter from his dead wife.  There he has to travel through the town in an attempt to find her all while being confronted by horrible manifestations of his inner self, a power that the town itself gained after Silent Hill 1 happened.  Not only that but he has to deal with a small handful of other twats with their own inner demons that are getting in the way with their shit when all James wants is to just find his dead wife and be happy again.

Silent Hill 1,3 and 4 on the other hand tell the stories of characters dealing with a demonic cult run by some really evil twats that want to birth their horrible "God" into the world.  The town of Silent Hill is still running rampant with manifestations but they aren't the manifestations of the main character but usually someone else and that to me is just what makes these games a little bit scarier.  You aren't dealing with your fucked up brain, your dealing with another persons fucked up brain and they've all been tied up in demonic cult shit so they're way more fucked up than you could ever be.

But then the series ended with Silent Hill 4 and a bunch of westerners decided to give it a go in order to keep it alive.  The most popular game in the franchise was quite clearly Silent Hill 2 so because these people couldn't be fucked to actually learn the ins and outs of the incredibly well crafted plot, they just played that one entry and used it as a template for EVERY OTHER GAME TO FOLLOW.

So that leaves us where we are now, in a horrible situation where there are now more terrible Silent Hill games than good ones.  Games that miss the point of the original series or just flat out get things wrong for the sake of making twats who misunderstood the first 4 games feel good about themselves.  All of these games have that theme of "person facing their inner demons in Silent Hill" and quite frankly I'm sick of it.  This series was never about that, it was about demonic cults and everything came to a nice dramatic close in Silent Hill 3, there didn't need to be more fucking games.

What people are making now aren't psychological survival horror games but action games about psychology and that's just fucking sad.  Genuine terror has been replaced with laugh out loud retardation, jump scares and people ripping off Saw.  The writing has gone from pure excellence with some of the best continuity in any work of fiction I've ever seen to non nonsensical bullshit where the games themes are slammed across your face like a wrecking ball made of adamantium spikes.

Sadly, it's all Silent Hill 2s fucking fault.  If that game wasn't so fucking good then twats wouldn't have tried to copy it in order to make a quick buck.  It's tragic too because Silent Hill 2 is genuinely a really good game that everyone interested in games, especially the ones looking for good examples of "games as art" should play.  Luckily, no matter how hard twats who aren't Team Silent try, they can never ruin the quality of the original games so just do what I do, stick your fingers in your ears, bury your head in a rusty room and pretend like the new ones don't exist.

Tau Plays Discworld Part 15

Fuck An Ice Level

Holy shit Nagoya is fucking cold and I'm going to do what any other self respecting British person does and complain about the weather.  Except if I just did a post about how much I hate the cold weather it wouldn't really fit the whole "Gaming" part of  Identity Gaming so instead I'm going to moan about a type of level in video games I fucking hate with a passion, the ice level!

Now we all know about the sewer level and how much that sucks but that one is fucking obvious.  You step into a sewer and you know from the levels entry point that it's going to be a fucking maze with terrible backtracking, stupid level puzzles and crap enemies.  The ice level though, while generally a giant stinking pile of shit is a bit less obvious because there do exist good ones.  A great example of a highly enjoyable ice stage is the Ice Cap Zone in Sonic 3, an ice level so iconic in gaming that almost everyone and their dog knows the fucking theme for it regardless of if they have played the game or not.

For the most part though, ice levels are only one step above a sewer level when it comes to most games.  It's always a terrible excuse to have a shitty slip-sliding mechanic where the level designer to do their best to slide you into an enemy or a pit for an instant kill.  If it's not that then it's stupid sliding block puzzles where the blocks will fall into pits and never stay where the fuck you want.  Failing that it's stupid crap that involves freezing or defrosting things which usually involves copious amounts of stupid backtracking, the same concept as a level puzzle just with ice instead of levers.

One that's sticking out in my mind right now is the Ice Cavern in Ocarina of Time.  It's strange that this one should stick out so much because in terms of difficulty it's not all that bad.  However, it has all the things I hate about ice areas.  Slippy block puzzles, enemies that screw you with your lack of normal mobility, defrosting puzzles that involve backtracking if you didn't manage your bottles right, the whole shabang.  That and at the end of it you get iron boots, which on the N64 version of that game sucked because switching gear in that game was tedious as all hell although it's an issue the 3DS version does not have.

Another middle finger goes to Final Fantasy 10s Cloister of Trails for Shiva.  The cloisters were more of a mild annoyance than anything else while you solve baby's first RPG puzzle but the Macalania trail is just fucking dumb.  Lots of chances to fuck things up which means you have to reset stuff and getting the destruction sphere in that trail is probably the biggest pain in the dick thing to do in that whole game.  I'd rather spend HOURS grinding master/clear spheres to max stats then do that fucking trail.

Unlike the sewer level, I don't think ice levels should be abolished because like I said before there do exist good ice levels.  Just if you are going to make an ice level, don't be a fucking asshole about it.

Steam Censorship: What's The Point?

Before I start this isn't going to be a kind of "OMG CENSORSHIP SO BAD blah blah blah" kind of post.  Censorship of any kind is complete and utter bullshit but I can kind of see why they are doing it here, I just don't see the point.

So for a while new Steam have been providing a few VNs and other games that are a bit more adult in nature.  What I mean by this is that they are flat out selling porn games (known as Eroge in Japan) except they cut out all the porn.  Now I'm not going to get all angry at not being able to see anime characters fucking in my steam games but the whole thing seems completely pointless.

Why bother releasing something which you KNOW going in is an Eroge or some kind of porno game and make it available on Steam with all the tits and fucking cut out?  When people buy these kind of games, about 70% of the time they are buying them FOR the tits and fucking.  After experimenting with the genre a little bit over the years I have found a fairly sizeable number of pornographic games which either have really good plots to follow or have solid game play.  Big famous examples of these porn games with a bit more than meets the eye are things like Yume Miru Kusuri and Sengoku Rance.  The first telling a gut wrenching story about bullying and being true to oneself while the other plays like a Total War title where victory is rewarded with sex scenes.  Both are solid titles that stand up without the porn, but there's porn included for people who need some....release and that's probably why they bought them in the first place.

In some cases I've seen games on Steam where this censorship for all ages has actually affected reviews from users.  One game in particular that I came across (I forget the name, but I'll edit if I find it again) had a bunch of negative reviews from people who had played the non steam version because plot important shit only found in the sex scenes had been cut from the game and the Steam version of this title was therefore incomplete.

Why censor these games at all?  Just have a 18+ section or some shit where you can provide these games in their original, uncensored form for the people that want them and then younger users or people who aren't interested know what those games contain before they even click the games store page.  Otherwise, why bother putting Eroge on Steam at all?  The tits, fucking and cute anime girls are the genres main selling people and you're taking 2/3s of that content out so you're just shooting yourself in the foot.  Why would anyone buy a game like that on Steam when they can get the version with the goodies somewhere else?  The only reason I can think is if they didn't know it was an Eroge before they bought it but then again people who enjoy this genre are fairly well clued in about it so I imagine that number of people is rather small.

Either sell porn games or don't.  There is no point providing them if you're going to censor them other than trying to score a quick buck off ignorant users.  I'm sure if you labelled it probably no one would give a shit.  That said, Steam is too lazy to properly label their early access bullshit on the listings so they would probably be too lazy to do this too.

Museca Arcade

The strangely named Museca is a game that has been released recently to Japanese arcades and with that big strange controller I couldn't help but give it a try.  With so many rhythm games available in the arcade just how does this one stack up?

Well, I did the first thing one does with every Konami game and I scanned my E-Amusement card.  If you're unfamiliar with how gaming IC cards work, please refer to this video for a quick primer

After typing in a name and setting a pin number I was met with a whole ton of story, which is strange for this kind of game, that I just skipped through and went straight to the music select.

The games music selections at the start are you standard Bemani rhythm game fare with lots of J-Pop and a couple of Touhou tracks which seems to be a standard every sine Sound Voltex.  Usually I like to crank up the difficulty level since I play a lot of rhythm games but I couldn't quite figure out how to do it and since it was my first credit I didn't care all that much. 

The most interesting part of this game is definitely the controller

There are 5 buttons in a sort of Pop n' Music style arrangement that can be both pushed and spun.  Under the machine there is a pedal for a special type of hold notes but 2 of the 3 songs I played for my first credit did not feature any pedal action so I'm guessing that's something that only shows up at higher level play.  There are 2 main types of notes which are taps, where you push the button in and spins where you spin the button like a turn table.  It's fun to play and for my first time, surprisingly confusing sometimes.  Considering that I play a little bit of IIDX I thought 5 huge buttons would be easy to adapt to but I still found myself losing my place on the pad a couple of times, guess I'm just a moron.

When you finish, assuming you have a card, you are given a screen where you can unlock new music.  I could only afford to unlock songs on their easiest mode because buying intermediate or expert tracks is outrageously expensive on the in game currency.  Then again, It seemed pretty easy to gather so I'm guessing it won't be too long before I'm able to try some higher level stuff. 

Well, that's enough reading.  All in all I think the game is pretty good.  I filmed a video of me playing the highest level song available to me at the time so check it out.  I'll be coming back to this game a lot so watch this channel for some cool videos in the future

Arcade Quickie: Final Fantasy Dissidia Arcade Game 1 (Loss)

Today I played some Dissidia Arcade and unfortunately lost the game.  Still having trouble wrapping my head around everything that's going on.  Didn't help that I walked into a brave attack like an idiot then followed it up with mass panic slamming of the summon button which just left me open.  Oh well, lessons learned!