Hey, I’m posting this ahead of schedule, because I plan on squealing over PAX East when it ends, where I’ll pretty much link to Destructoid’s coverage while typing out words of happy and cynicism. But some stuff happened before that, so I’ll just talk about that. Also, new title because I realized that I’ll just use this format for events as well.
Kicking things off, my Jimmies have been thrown off in delight once again, only to be placed back on because it involves the PSP. Namely how an Otome game is coming out in North America! Entitled, “Sweet Fuse: At Your Side” It is about playing as Keiji Inafune’s fictional niece and theme parks… How much is the Vita again? $250 with memory cards up the bum in prices? Granted, I’ve never played an Otome game to the point where I learned its definition by reading a manga series about Dating Sims, but not entirely. But the very idea of them, and the traditional male perspective dating sims, certainly seem like something I could sink my teeth into. Despite how much I’ve been avoiding Professor Layton and Ace Attorney, but I blame that for how I prefer the manner Zero Escape did puzzles. Rather than penalizing players for wrong guesses, and removing the same sense of accomplishment by making it seem more like the trial and error phase is only for stupids.
And I actually find the trial and error phase to be pretty rewarding near the end, to the point where whenever I see a stealth game where it all but says, “Are you a bad enough dude to not make so much as a peep and harm literally nobody?” I feel compelled to take it up on its offer, assuming it will let me know that I screwed it up because of electrified floors. Or moving bodies in the wrong way. But at least Eidos Montreal’s next title is looking to fix that. Yes, after a fairly lukewarm response from, well, me. Thief will have no required neck stabbings. I just hope it does not undermine every item at your disposal like their last title did, seeing as how broken the EXP system was. Well, maybe the Director’s Cut of the WiiU will fix that. Or will contain Deus EX HD… Nah! Just include the upgrades as DLC to make other system owners happy.
But speaking of things that I think are broken, EA’s CEO has stepped down. But before we gallop to the town square and enjoy a shanty of singing Ding Dong the Witch is Dead while eating pheasants, I must wonder, what does this mean for the company in the long run? Yes, a CEO is a big part of a company, like a President is a big part of a country. They may leave and minor things could change, but it would only be minor in the long run. I could be wrong, but I’m expecting things to be the same, seeing as how I doubt they could get too much worse. Unless EA blocks all used versions of their games, and makes every new title $70. That would suck.
But in the polar opposite direction, there’s a new game by ex-WayForward developers. A term that makes little sense to me. Why would you leave WayForward? Sure, I doubt you’d get much money, and you’d need to do licensed crap sometimes, but I’d guess there would be no pricks in sight. Either way, it is called Shovel Knight, and promises to be Megaman+Castlevania+Dark Souls, when it looks most like Duck Tales and Zelda II. Which I hope to be the case, because making a game hard for the sake of being hard is like making a movie dark for the sake of being dark. You just look like an ass near the end.
Meanwhile, current WayForward staff decided to take the cops and robbers dynamic of Mighty Switch Force, and make it about a female Fireman instead, because I dislike the term Firewoman. Under the ever creative title of Mighty Switch Force 2, I would be excited, except for how it will likely get an up-res version for the Wii U soon enough, and how I never actually beat the first one, and don’t even recall liking about half the stages. Which I don’t say bitterly, because I would have liked to like pretty much any game I didn’t like.
Well, there is one series that I doubt I’ll ever like again due to how the trailers for its newest main entry make me feel bad just by viewing them, Final Fantasy. And after, what was it, two years? Squeenix decided to talk about Final Fantasy X HD, or more specifically, Final Fantasy X and X-2 HD. Yes, after I thought the project was just quietly canned, they announced that its less loved sequel will be paired with it, because I guess it wouldn’t take much work, seeing as how FFX-2 was made up of some unused assets from FFX. It will certainly be interesting to see how the reaction to this remake will be, seeing as how little renown the franchise has nowadays.
I mean, the most worthwhile thing about Final Fantasy XIII was how they included a female as the central character. Which according to a developer for Remember Me, a fun looking action title about Future France and mind manipulation, is not what the industry wants. To which I say the industry is dumb, but I’m not that better. To prevent me from writing a fifth draft of this, I’ll just say that there is still a non equal board for gender in pretty much all media, when they shouldn’t matter.
Yes, I attempted a narrative series from the POV of a white male, but that was more or less my desire to make a platinum blonde protagonist who doesn’t look too dumb in my head. And I believe the archetype works best for a character dumped into a weird situation when the idea is having them be asexual. Or perhaps I just didn’t want to talk about the female to male side of possession as opposed to the male to female side, because I consider the other way to be a downgrade due to both personal biases and character design. Which might also be why I don’t write character who look like they descend from Central America or Africa. While the notion of South America being a place is something I plain old forget about, because I’m not sure I ever met one of them. Although, I could say the same about homosexuals, but I never really write about sexuality, unless I think it would be funny.
Where was I, oh right, Video games! How about… Walking Dead: Survival Instinct! Merlyn Derill on a quest made in a year. Mice cursors on intro screens, and AI as dumb as brick. Naturally, the rushed licensed game has received bad scores, but this was pretty much the one title of Q1 that everyone knew would be a piece of crap. The scores are pitifully low, and I hope it gets some form of infamy. Why? Because bad games are fun to mock, even though people spent a lot of time working on the title, but screw it, they got paid, didn’t they?
Not that I would call the game unfinished based on the footage I’ve seen, but that may be possible in the future, seeing as how Steam’s adding the ability to play unfinished titles. This is actually a pretty neat idea to me, and would be nice for Betas of games that aren’t even multiplayer, would allow creators to get criticism sooner and make games better. But seeing as how Steam Greenlight ended up getting stuff like War Z out for sale, this might not be the best thing ever. I hereby don the cloak of scepticism!
…Which I quickly discard and place on my cloak of, “I want a PC” bitterness. Fan projects are wonderful, and I admittedly have a large bundle of nostalgia for the Sonic series due to the early 3D titles… Let that sink in! Either way, the fanbase is continuing to be more radical than the company that made most of the recent stuff, and are remaking Sonic Unleashed with the Sonic Generations engine. More specifically, just the daytime stages, because they seemed like a step in the right direction based on what I can remember. Would comment, but I have still yet to beat Sonic Colors. Will do that this… Summer? Or maybe I’ll go through every 3D Sonic title, except for 2006, because it would be pointless.
And speaking of summer, Saints Row IV update! Yes, I will touch every new tidbit of information in anticipation for a review that I will have whenever I end up getting the game shipped to me. This week is a vote for the collector’s edition, which I will only buy if it looks cool and is cheap enough. Personally the idea of kinky handcuffs, a belt buckle, or a cigar box does make me squirm, like that Saints Row flashdrive did, at least before it broke. Truly the greatest villainy committed by the Gamestop! Even greater than that of Ieyasu!
However, at least they promote games that are coming out, unlike Tecmo Koei, who released a game without anyone knowing… Yes, it is a port, but it is part of a series with an audience. How did you pull a Konami with Blades of Time? Hell, they at least confirmed it was coming out, I think. You literally forgot to announce this game! I mean, what could be more of a derpy thing to do than that? Well, Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series, said most game designers are lazy. To which I say, Yes, Robert Boyd is a slacker who tries to embrace an old genre and artstyle. And Edmund Mcmillen just thought the Binding of Isaac up in a week before lazily clobbering it together over three months. Or all those lazy bastards with the 24 hour game jams! Be like this man, and creating a game that looks just like their previous titles, but with revamped lore… Wait a tick!
Yes, the industry could be more creative and risky, but calling someone who works overtime very often and spends two years trying to finish a massive project in as appealing a manner as possible, lazy, is arrogance! While you made several classic games, you made old games. It is hard to be extremely creative and innovative when you need to ship a product made to sell. You went to space! You literally went into outer space! You could do whatever you wanted and be just fine! I mean, why do you even need a kickstarter for a project? Your Good Old Games royalties could probably have you own a white tiger who eats the finest hams in the world every day, and still own a harem! He is an astronaut! He can only talk down to us Plebeians! Damn you Ieyasu! Why did you give him all that money!
Yet the very similarly renowned Hideo Kojima still makes me shiver with most of the things he says. This week, it’s about his Fox Engine, which apparently does photorealism… Because magic! Yeah, I don’t really understand what he is saying, because the translations of tweets is not the best way to sound inspiring. But hey, we’re getting two Metal Gear Solid titles, which is keen as a bean to someone who is shakey over the thought of playing the third numbered title. But I am expecting his Fox Engine render to host his GDC conference, as I will be watching that, along with PAX East closely because of Spring Break.
Speaking of Spring Break, Bioshock Infinite is released during that time and good bonking god of funk-a-licious, the budget is up the bum! 200 million American crispers, half for the game, and half for the marketing- Wait, what? 100 million on marketing…. Excuse me for a second. *Runs to the empty field less than a block away* “IEYASU!!!” How the bonk do you flip tables like that and call yourself a gentlest gentleman? You need 100 million to make a game like this? Okay, it’s a big title, a lot of research has been done, and it looks great. But as a successor to one of the biggest games of the generation, you need to throw in twice that to get it out of the house? Ieyasu, why must you bring me so much suffering with your bottomless foolishness?! Or according to Ken Levine, the director of the game, that is bunkus… Still keeping my paragraph!
Speaking of foolishness, the good fellas at Twisted Pixel examined some data and came to a conclusion that, “No the industry isn’t dying, stop being such a silly. But it is not doing super well either.” I’m really not sure what to feel about this whole kerfuffle, part of me wants to see a restart of the entire industry to weed out some of the bad stuff, but everything going peachy for the next generation would also be nice. But as with Bioshock Infinite, I can’t help but feel as if they are throwing too much money into these projects.
As much as people try to push it, games are still not a major part of many people’s lives, and probably never will be. And while I hate it when people say it, they have a point when they note how games require you to do work, while watching something doesn’t. And while little phone games might be an exception, it is not fully likely for them to expand beyond that. Not every game needs to be massive, not every game needs to be $60, not every game needs to be super long, and not every game should be expected to score X on metacritic, or Y million within the first month.
But at least they aren’t doing something like manipulating the marketing to make games look worse… except they are. Well, they wanted to, anyhow. The subject of the day, Beyond: Two Souls’ marketers wanted lotsa guns in the promo. Why? Because ‘Merika! No, I kid, because they think that only uninteresting sludge will sell, which they would be right if everyone was a nitwit, which I think they might be. But I can safely avoid Bioshock Infinite for now because of its crappy box art… and season pass, so I’ll be even more attracted to this game than I was because of Willem Dafoe’s presence. Nyeh! Ieyasu, where’d you put the sammiches? Nyeh!
Well, that was 16 or so topics addressed in just over 2300 words. I think I’ll go away while shaking my fist as Ieyasu again, because he is the prick of a prick, and did bad things to nearly everyone…I’m playing Sengoku Basara, and I’m having fun! Thank you Voltech and Game Grumps. However, the game is the longest non-RPG or open world title ever!