The Strange Grandstanding of Evo/Wave

 

Every so often on the stream (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) we do a little segment that I have dubbed the Free Game Dive.  It involves going on Steam or websites like Itch, downloading free to play indie games and playing them through.  I've found some real cool little titles over the course of doing this segment so it's generally a lot of fun.

Recently, one of the games I finished as part of this segment was something on Steam called Evo/Wave, a short collectathon platformer in the same vein of something like Banjo Kazooie or similar titles.  The story is about an old AI called MagnaVex (get it?) drestroying some kind of computer core that causes the world to get all screwed up.  You, playing as a little robot dude, have to go into 3 worlds, collect some shit and reverse the damage that MagnaVex has done. 

According to Alexandre Isidorio, the guy who designed the UI, the game was made as a student project for a university course and as far as the game itself goes it's actually pretty good.  Having just finished Yooka Laylee and absolutely hating it playing a game like this which actually seemed to have a bit of thought and effort put into it was nice.  The final stage as well where you fight MagnaVex in a series of platforming challenges was particularly fun and did a good job of testing your skills with the games various power-ups, worth a shot if you have a couple hours to kill one day for sure.

But there's something weird going on with the games story, what little there is of it.  When you collect all the parts in the games three levels and are about to enter the final encounter with MagnaVex, a cutscene plays where he makes a bit of a speech about the current state of the industry, about how games have become unimaginative, constant installs and updates are annoying and companies are nickle and diming using at every turn and it's done in this sort of "old man yells at cloud" tone and yet, is he wrong though?

The constant installs and updates ARE annoying.  It's not something I've ever been too bothered by because I'm more than happy to just play or do something else while it goes on but the fact that the days of being able to just buy a game, slam it in my machine and just play right away are long gone IS annoying.  The fact that every time I fire up Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch and it asks me to do a software update on a game made THIRTEEN fucking years ago is cause for minor irritation.

The nickle and diming of the industry as well is also a well documented and often complained about side of things.  Battle passes, microtransactions and bullshit DLC featuring content that should have just been in the initial purchase are rampant not to mention the constant remaking of safe bet, classic games in a thinly veiled attempt to get you to open your wallet for that nostalgia hit

But it's the criticism of people that feel that the creativity has been largely sucked out of games in exchange for varients of the same thing that really rubs the wrong way.  I'm not one to say that ALL of gaming has become stagnant, I'm far too widely versed in the deepest, most obscure realms to honestly think that but I do feel that generally speaking gaming, at least the mainstream stuff, has sacrified being interesting in exchange for being mostly OK.  What I mean by this is that if you look that the libraries of anything from back in the day, take the PS1 for example, the games are widely varied, even within the same genre.  There's a lot of experimentation going on with style, mechanics and presentation and while it makes the sysem interesting there are quite a lot of just flat out stinkers on that system.  Nowadays I feel that everything is sort of made from a template, usually something that worked well in the past and while that means that truly, honest to goodness fucking AWFUL games aren't really all that common anymore the creativity within the medium has suffered greatly as a result.  

It's been a thing in the AAA scene forever but even the indie scene hasn't avoided falling into this trap.  At time of writing there are two big indie games that I am told are very good.  Lies of P and Sea of Stars.  I have yet to play either of these and people who's opinions I don't immdiately disregard have told me that they are good games and they sure as shit look pretty cool but Lies of P is just Bloodborne and Sea of Stars is just Chrono Triggter (it even has Yasunori Mitsuda doing the music, for fucks sake).  I'm always glad to have more of a good thing, sure, but it doesn't make me a cranky old boomer, like Evo/Wave suggests that I sigh a little at all the safe bets and appeals to nostalgia.

Still, Evo/Wave is an pretty good Free2Play thingie if you have some free time and nothing better to do.  The dev might have his head up his own arse on the state of the industry but this is a game that fucking NO ONE gives a fuck about so collect the shiny objects then turn it off and ignore his crap opinions going forward.

Returning To Cookie Clicker

 

Back in 2013 I caught wind of a little game called Cookie Clicker, a silly little browser game where you click on a cookie to make a number go up.  When you have enough cookies you can buy buildings that make cookies for you and the goal of the game is to make number go up and nothing more.  

Somehow this game became a sort of internet sensation and gave rise of a plethora of imitators thus giving birth to the "idle game".  A genre where you fiddle with a thing for a bit and then you have the game basically play itself and you come back to check on it every so often to buy upgrades to make whatever number you're trying to raise go up faster.  For the most part it's a pretty insipid genre that isn't worth your time at all full of low quality titles made by devs looking to get something quick into their portfolio or worse, to try and get a quick buck out of you for very little effort.

But during a particularly boring work day I got curious and decided to return to the OG after 10 years to see if it was the same old silly distraction and was surprised just to see how much it had expanded.  I didn't think there was a lot you could do with a game that's solely about clicking on a cookie to get buildings to get more cookies but it seems I was mistaken.

The standard cookie clicking, building aquring gameplay is still there but now you can harvest Sugar Lumps once ever 24 hours to upgrade the buildings for greater efficiency but there are a few buildings that, when upgraded have mini games attatched to them now.  For example one of the buildings you can buy is a bank and when upgraded with a sugar lump you get access to a simulation of a stock market where you can buy and sell goods that change value every 15 minutes or so and you can get a quick burst of cookies if you invest wisely.  It comes complete with the ability to upgrade it further with sub-buildings and brokers and it comes with a full on graph that updates in real time and it's not very complicated, sure, but its an interesting addition considering the main game that it's attatched to.

Another feature that is new from when I played it all those years ago is the ascention system.  When you bake a certain number of cookies you can ascend, as in lose everything you currently have, for a permanent buff and a token to spend on a staggeringly large talent tree.  I have no idea what half the upgrades even are as they are hidden behind branching pathways I can't see yet but the most useful one so far has been the one that allows cookies to build up at a reduced rate while the game is closed.

The game has so much stuff going on in it now that there's a dedicated wiki for it and even that's telling me about stuff that I haven't, after about a month of playing, haven't even caught a whiff off yet.  For example there's a thing called the "Grandmapocolypse" which involves making all the grandmas you bought get mad at you for some reason and the game starts spawning "wrinklers" or something and I have no idea what those are.  The art changes to this sort of weird horror-esque mural and it all sounds very strange and I think the mystery of what this feature is exactly has me captivated enough to keep an tab open every day that I fiddle with between other games and housework.

It has got me wondering if there are similarly fleshed out and feature heavy idle games out there that might be worth a look but unfortunately the genre is full of so much garbage that it will probably forever remain a mystery and I'm more than happy to just sit here and bake cookies for eternity

[Backlog Update] Having My Time Wasted

 

Since I just recently became a father my time for working through my backlog has been fairly limited but I have managed to find a decent chunk of time to put a decent-ish dint into Yooka Laylee and Xenoblade Chronicles.  The theme for both of these games seems to be wasting my time a great deal so let me vent about that a little bit

First Yooka Laylee which I had a rather large accident with about a week ago.  See, I just became a father recently and so in order to help with the child care I have moved my computer to the area of the house where the baby sleeps, it's not an ideal setup but it allows me to get a bunch of stuff done while not leaving the newborn unattended, for a temporary setup its not so bad.  My computers power cable is plugged into one of those power strips that have the little on/off switches on them and then that power strip is next to me on the floor.  As I was playing Yooka Laylee, pretty much the moment I picked up a Pagie (the game's main collectable, for those that haven't played) I accidently hit the off switch on the plug for my PC with my big fat arse and my computer abruptly shut down.  When I resumed, probably because I lost power as the game was saving, my file had been corrupted and I could not load my game.  I had to delete the file and start over again, but I can't be mad about this really because this is a case of me wasting my own time.

What I can be kind of mad about is just how stupidly Yooka Laylee is designed. One of the reasons I was hating it so much my first time round is that I would be exploring a level and be getting blocked every few minutes or so because I would start a level challenge only to find that I didn't have the right ability to actually clear it, a whole bunch of the pages across the first three levels are just completely inaccessible without skills gained from later stages.  This is fine in a lot of other games, Metroidvanias do it all the time but in a well designed game it happens once every so often, a little goody to keep in the back of your mind to come back to when you fill out your move set but in Yooka Laylee its ALL the fucking time and it was pissing me the hell off.  

In this second attempt though I said fuck ALL that and I'm basically blasting through each stage, getting the powers and the bare minimum pagies to unlock the levels and then once I have everything I'll come back and clean up to get the 100 I need to beat the game.  I'm hating the game a lot less now that I know to play it that way but even though I have a bit more momentum going this time the game just generally still feels very bland and soulless.  

Xenoblade on the other hand isn't particularly badly designed, I'd say generally speaking it's a good game when you're moving the plot along and having fights with monters your level but MY GOD does this game love to fuck you about with just the most boring area design and the dumbest side quests I have ever seen in an RPG, I am starting to remember why I gave up on it back when I played it on the Wii.

I got to a town called Aclamoth? Akalamoth? Alakazam? I can't remember but it's full of bird people and this place is fucking HUGE.  It looks like the kind of place that would sit right at home in some massively popular MMO with other players running around shopping, handing in quests and looking for raid groups but Xenoblade isn't an MMO it's a single player game and therefore this area sucks shit.  It's full to bursting with side quests from various NPCs and all of these guys are spread way the hell around so just running from one exclamation mark to the next took fucking ages and then once you've done that the quests you get aren't any fun either

One quest had me going back to an area called Tephra Cave, an area from the start of the game with level 5 monsters (I'm 40-ish) to collect NINE randomly spawning little blue balls.  If that isn't the very definition of a time waste then I don't know what is.  I don't mind quests to kill X number of Y if it's done in the current area and killing those monsters is a nice excuse to get some bonus EXP but half of the quests from this town are like that Tephra Cave shit and I can barely stay awake playing it.

You COULD argue, if you were a stupid twat, that these are optional side quests and if they suck so much I should just skip them but fuck you if you think that because I paid what? somewhere in the realm of 3-5000 yen for this shit.  I didn't pay my hard earn money to NOT engage with its features and content, I'm not a shitty journo that plays only easy mode and then shelves the game for life, miss me with that shit.

Anyway I've finished most of those quests now so hopefully by the time I have another backlog update I'll have something nicer to say as the plot, which admittedly I am quite into, progrresses. 

Making Anime Robot Fights Boring

 I had a series that I did over on YouTube for a while that I called "Battle Against the Backlog" where the idea was that I'd sort of vlog the progress through my insane 1000+ game backlog.  However thanks to an obsession with Dead by Daylight and some life things getting in the way, finding time to write a script and then edit all the footage together, even for videos as simple as that, was proving far too time consuming.  So I thought since the blog has been neglected for a while in favor of Twitch and YouTube, I will move the backlog stuff here so that there's at least a new post once a week and then I'm freed up to either play more games or work on bigger projects I have flying around my big dumb brain 

Anyway, like I said I've mainly been playing Dead By Daylight as opposed to making progress in anything that actually has an ending.  I don't know what it is about that game considering it has exactly 1 mode of play and it's essentially, when you boil it down, just freeze tag but it's a weirdly compelling experience.  You might think that the one mode thing would make it get boring pretty quickly, it does it other games after all but I like to think that Dead by Daylight is the Ichiran Ramen of video games.

In case that reference went over your head let me explain.  Ichiran is a chain of ramen stores here in Japan but unlike every other ramen store that have menus of different kinds of ramen, Ichiran has one thing.  They do that one thing SO WELL that no matter how many times I eat it, I never get bored of it and I quite often get urges to go back. That's what Dead by Daylight did, they picked one thing and have done it so incredibly well that I don't seem to ever get tired of it.  No matter what side I'm playing on I'm just constantly hankering for more.  It's even gotten to the point where I'm looking up DbD content while I'm working and listening to pros talk shop.  Maybe once I get better at the game and I start hitting the higher ranks more consistantly the allure might wear off but for now I'm absolutely HOOKED (haha)

Anyway, onto the actual subject of the blog post because I did finish one thing recently, a big thing, and that was Daemon X Machina.  Daemon X Machina on paper sounds like it should be cool because it's a mech combat game made by some of the same people that previously worked on Armored Core but the game is just awful.  It's fine for the first handful of missions where there's some mystery regarding and apocolypse and you're blowing stuff up but then you quickly come to realize that all the missions are the same.  Every mission involves either blowing stuff to or preventing something from being blown up by blowing stuff up which sounds like all you'd need from a game about giant robots but the enemies barely fight back and every enemy can be killed by just locking on, holding down both mouse buttons with rifles equipped and spamming the Q key to fire extremely powerful homing rockets.  There where even a number of instances where I didn't even have to move to fight bosses and other mech-style enemies, it was an actual joke

The story isn't much better either because the game throws way too many characters at you all at once, none of them are fleshed out and you don't care who anyone is or where their allegiances lie and then near the end of the game it starts killing a few of them off in heartfelt death scenes but instead of having any emotional impact I was sat there saying "who was that again? have we even been in a mission with that guy yet?" 

You can tell as well that the developers just completely ran out of ideas by the end because the final 4 missions all take place on the same stage where you do the same thing.  You fight 4 different characters as boss fights but all the enemies fight in the same way pretty much so it's literally just the old double click spam Q song and dance for half an hour while the AI partners babble on coms and not help with the combat

It should be impossible to make anime mech fights boring and some how this game did it, so hats off to the developers for doing something that I thought was impossible. 

Anyway, that's about all I've done recently.  I've also been playing Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch but I got to this place called Makna Woods and have been bogged down in side quests for many hours now so not a lot to say there really. I'll try to put DbD down for a while so I have something interesting to say next week!

May Horror Month

 Every october I like to go all in on the halloween spirit and attempt to finish 31 horror games within a month.  This year, however, I have a number of plans already set in my calendar for October so finishing 31 games in a month with that kind of schedule is probably not happening but instead of not doing it at all, I thought we'd instead just move it to May!  So here is the list of games we'll be playing between May 1st and May 31st

1. Spookys jump scare mansion
2. Metro 2033 REDUX
3. Within skerry
4. Pony Island
5. Visage
6. INSIDE
7. Necrovision
8. Nosferatu: wrath of the malachi
9. The Evil Within.
10. Penumbra Black Plague
11. Ring: Terrors Realm
12. Signalis
13. Devil May Cry
14. Resident Evil: Dead Aim
15. Cold Fear
16. House of the Dead 2
17. Sagebrush 18. A girls fabric face
19. Suite 776
20. Snafu
21. Gray Dawn
22. Silent Hill 3
23. Echo Night
24. Enemy Zero
25. Siren
26. F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate
27. Castlevania 2: Simons Quest
28. Outlast
29. Luigi's Mansion
30. The Suffering
31. Traumada

If you watch the stream much you'll know I have a fetish for spinning wheels so this year, instead of deciding the order in advance we'll just slam everything into a wheel and play the games in whatever order that dictates for is.

Come watch it live from May 1st over at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

See ya there

The Legendary Hochu Otsuka

 

Recently I've been playing Triangle Strategy on my Switch and by default the English voices are turned on.  Upon hearing them, I cringed myself inside out at the awful performances and then promptly went to the options menu to change the voice over language to Japanese and not only were the voices across the board MUCH better but I was greeted with a little suprise of a bandit being voiced by this dude in one of the first scenes. 

Born in 1954 and active as a voice actor from 1976 (according to wikipedia) Hochu is one of those big-bad motherfuckers in Japanese voice acting.  He's so prolific that I can almost GUARANTEE that if you're some kind of weeb that watches a lot of anime or the kind of person that enjoys JRPGs to a large degree and plays them with JP voice over like a sane person, you have heard this man at least once or twice in your life.  

I first discovered him when I was quite young, I forget how old exactly but it would have been primary school with his role as Skid Ops Gash in Panzer Dragoon Saga.  He appears shortly after the opening valley section in disc 1 so him, along with Akira Ishida, Masato Ibu and Toru Okawa were some of the first examples of spoken Japanese I ever heard in my life and considering how big of an influence that game was on me wanting to learn Japanese, these guys are kind of a big deal.  

But I'll be honest though, Akira, Masato and Toru, while talented voice actors, are not the kind of people I could pick out of any given production.  For example I googled Akira Ishida and he's been in TONS of shit that I've watched and played but I had no idea it was him at any point.  That's not a weakness of him as an actor, that's more me not paying attention to the credits but I think it says a lot, then, that someone like me who spent a lot of my life not paying attention to credits was able to pick this guy out, Otsuka puts in some really stand out performances.

His performances are all quite similar sounding and for some that can be a really bad thing.  Take Amanda Winn Lee for example, it doesn't matter if she's playing Yukiko Amagi, Jinana (Digital Devil Saga) or Heather Mason, she sounds basically the same every time.  Otsuka on the other hand is a master of injecting a great deal of the characters personality into each individual performance.  Gash, Jiraiya (Naruto) and the Kurata Dealer (Akagi) for example all have the same sounding voice but even just hearing snippits of their dialogue you can tell just how different each character is, he's a dude that really manages to encapsulate a characters personality.

The dude is 68 years old so I was surprised to hear, and this was the inspiration for this post actually, his voice doing some kind of advert in a Family Mart a couple of days ago.  According to wiki the last video game he did was Nioh 2 in 2020 but he's still going in the anime scene with a role in something called A Herbivorous Dragon Get's Unfairly Villainized (? what the fuck) and it warms my dried up little heart to know he's still chugging along.

Next time you're playing or watching something maybe you'll be able to pick him out, it's really not hard to do.  I found out while glancing at the wiki page that he's done dubs of English actors like Jeanne Claude Van Damme and Kurt Russel and that's something I just GOTTA go experience.  What an absolute legend

Morality Systems are Dogshit

 

Recently I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic on Steam and as someone who doesn't really give two flying rat fucks about Star Wars, I'm having a really good time.  The game, however, features a morality system of the player either being a light side or dark side Jedi and what the game decides are light side actions and dark side actions are complete bullshit and this is a problem that has plagued games for a long time so I'm going to rant about it a little bit.

The first instance that got me really hard in Knights was when you get to the Wookie planet with the name I can't remember how to spell.  When you arrive there's some kind of trading company that has set up shop and is kidnapping and selling the native Wookies into slavery.  If you ask me, these are some pretty fucking bad people, but some time into a quest line you are given an option to kill a bunch of them or chase them away.  My attitude is that if you come into someones home turf and start selling them into slavery, you sort of forfeit your right to life on account of being a cunt, so the lightsabers and blasters came out and the party put them down.  Upon concluding the fight I was given Dark Side points.  Dark Side points, for killing invading slavers.  I think it has something to do with Jedi not killing people or something but come the fuck on, you can't just go up to people like that and say "um, excuse me, would you mind NOT enslaving a native race of forest people please?" and just expect them to agree, violence IS the answer here.  But even worse than that there's another quest later on, on a different planet, that involves investigating the murder of some women by some dude.  The way the quest is prestented to you, the situation seems pretty fishy (if you know, ha ha, pun intended) and it looks like the dude that's been arrested has been framed.  On your investigation you go to a hotel where you can question some witnesses and during the dialogue options you can choose to use your force powers to get more details out of a certain NPC.  Using your force powers in this way gets you fucking EVIL points.  Investigating the highly likely framing of an innocent man in a way that guarantees that justice can be served in the correct way is considered to be EVIL by Bioware.  This may be another Jedi thing that I'm unaware of but I remember Obi Wan or whatever in a new hope using the force to manipulate people like that and no one really blinked an eye when HE did it.  Either Bioware have a completely fucked sense of morality or the Jedi are fucking lame, either way it sucks.

But at the very least, in Knight's case, there's a discussion of the morality to be had.  Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to use brain magic to get secrets out of people, sure, fine, whatever, but in a lot of other games morality systems are just tacked on lame bits of shit that aren't engaging in any way.

Now I love Bioshock, it's a cool game but it really does highlight just how poorly thought out these things are.  In Bioshock, upon killing a Big Daddy you are granted a "moral choice" of infanticide or to not do that.  Killing the little girl nets you more points to buy plasmids with and not doing it gives you a bit less and a different ending.  The thing to consider though, is that Bioshock, even on hard mode, is piss easy and you can get everything you need by not killing them which makes the choice feel hollow.  The ONLY reason to kill little sisters in Bioshock is to either be edgy or because you specifically want to see the "bad" ending.  

Another big example of this is Mass Effect, a game that presents you with "moral choices" at various parts of the story but the only real options for each situation is to either be the literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ or to be the biggest ball-bag in the galaxy.  No way to be even a little bit moderate or level headed in any of these games.

Morality on a binary scale like this is a stupid, useless feature that feels like padding.  It's a lazy way for developers to claim their game has replay because you essentially have to play the game twice to see everything.  Really bad offenders in this category include things like Dante's Inferno where the game doesn't really change significantly either way, just do it once where you stomp a dude and once where you play DDR every so often.  

The truth of the matter is simple, it would take far too much work to put this into a game in a way that would actually be interesting or even a little bit realistic.  It would involve a great deal of skill in JUST the writing, let alone all the technical stuff that would then have to come from that to then put it in the game.  There are games that have come kind of close, like New Vegas, but really I can't think of a single game off the top of my head while writing that's had a morality system in it that doesn't just come off as lazy dogshit that only lets you play to extremes.  

Just don't fucking do it