So, Comiket 88 was held in Japan this week, the week of Gamescom, and it naturally had a very spiffy showcase of Doujin games, some very meh looking, others on par with content the lower to mid tier Japanese developers put out. However, I will not be able to play most of them because the world is still greatly divided by languages, when this shit should have been figured out years ago. I’m not saying that English should be the default for the world, as English is a pretty poor language in my book, but I feel that everybody in a developed part of the world should be able to speak a global language as a second language, while most media would be produced in that language to maximize the audience size, and slowly weed out old languages. Now, some people say that a wide variety of languages helps encourage differences in the world and allow people to think differently. I say that while there may be some truth there, some things need to be sacrificed in order for the world to progress and become more understanding. I mean, it could actually help global understanding of others quite a bit if you design the language properly and based on the pros and cons of other languages.
I honestly am having a blast with this whole collapse of Konami thing that has been going on over the past few months. First off, it has been revealed that they are rather horrible to their employees. From public scoldings after being late, not having a permanent email address let alone internet access, and demoting developers to janitors and security guards are just some examples of how this company is trying to get out of the game business by being shitbirds. Granted, this is something of a greater problem with the Japanese industry as a whole, as pointed out by gamesindustry.biz, but this still makes the company look like a rancid pile of horse poop, and one who I would like to see burn. Actually, I would enjoy reading an article that details how the higher ups at Konami died of from consuming sake mixed with a cup of blow, their corpses rotting on top of a group of sexually abused OLs, their legs scared, bags covering their face so tightly it caused brain damage. Konami has also given Silent Hill 2 a pachinko slot game, as a means from profiting off of the voice actors they refuse to pay and using people’s memories of a beloved game to spread the evils of pachinko to a new group of people who will die from the smoke fumes at those cancer parlors. It actually makes news of Metal Gear Solid V’s online being delayed rather quaint and unsurprising.
On a less disheartening note, after doing a horrible job with the ports of Dead or Alive 5 to the PS4, XBO, and PC, which were among the worst in recent memory, Team Ninja decided to redeem themselves with the long awaited Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 3 which will be released in Asian countries. What does this mean? No clue, maybe something and maybe nothing. Tecmo Koei is pretty darn good about localizations, so I’m guessing their soft smut will come to the west in due time. And seeing as how this is the most relevant place to insert fighting game news, as there is a good fighter behind all the cheesecake, Vega Claw is coming to Street Fighter V, not really surprising anybody, and more or less confirming that Balrog Boxer will join the remaining few returning characters. I mean, M. Bison Dictator was already confirmed long ago, so it makes sense for the original antagonists, I think, return…. Also, damn you Capcom localization department circa 1989 for messing up these characters’ names.
Okay, that was early on in the week, which happened to be the time of E4, the European Electronic Entertainment Expo, or Gamescom. Microsoft began the show with off a lot of their titles planned for early to late 2016, including Crackdown 3, being a super powered sandbox wherein you can blow up an entire city, which sounds like a dream come true for me, but the multiplayer focus on the trailer and the whole always online requirement that comes with a game powered by the Microsoft Cloud makes me hesitant to care about this. Oh, but Scalebound, freaking Scalebound, is thankfully not a character action game, which makes me so, so incredibly happy. Instead, it is like if you combined Devil May Cry with The Last Guardian and any open world western fantasy RPG. It has such a carefree approach to fantasy stuff, which I have been pining for over the past several years, as the genre has become so complacent melodramatic struggles. It is a game where you throw bombs at crab monsters, send your dragon to breath fire at it, become a dragon man, and then blow it up into gems all while listening to music that beautifully clashes with the gorgeous and carefully constructed backdrops. Also it has co-op, which, being the friendless loner I am, would not touch.
I also will likely not touch Quantum Break, as despite having some nifty looking time powers, looks too… devoid of art direction otherwise, as I do not consider realism to be an art direction Same thoughts on Homefront: The Revolution, which would have the potential to be nifty if not for the inherent patriotism, which I find to be bad in 99% of cases, and its premise actually made a lick of sense. Oh, and there was Halo Wars 2, a sequel nobody asked for but this time developed by Creative Assembly because they did not want to do a wave of layoffs and could not make Aliens Isolation. Thankfully this stuff was mixed in with We Happy Few, Dark Souls III, and a bunch more games that looked pretty spiffy, but I shall not play until they are at least a year old. Oh, and Battletoads are coming to Killer Instinct, or to be more accurate, one is, Rash, the one with the sunglasses and who was player one in the NES game.
Mafia III was also announced at Gamescom, which struck me as odd as I only remember people being apathetic to Mafia II. Either way, it is set in a late nineteen-sixties New Orleans where you play as a biracial war veteran who is going on a quest about family or some such thing, I could barely make out his gruff voice from the trailer. That said, it thankfully does look to be doing something different than what first popped into my head, but as I will always say, showing a CG trailer for your game really is not as impressive to me as seeing concept art and hearing some gameplay mock-up screens. I mean, that trailer alone had to have cost millions, ya dinguses.
On that note Final Fantasy XV got a new CG trailer, one that was incredibly cryptic and began with the phrase “fifteen years ago”. Making me momentarily think that the game has been in development for that long… Seriously though, it is 65-70% done from what I heard, and should be out next year, so it really only was a ten year wait… You know what won’t take a decade to be completed, Attack on Titan, if the creator’s words circa 2013 are anything to go on, as it should end with volume twenty, and it’s taken six years to get to almost seventeen volumes so late 2016 or early 2017, I guess. As such the time to cash in is now, and Omega Force, the Musou guys, are making an Attack on Titan game for PS3, PS4, and PS Vita.
On the subject of spreading oneself to as many platforms as possible, word down the street, from Jimmy and the beavers, is that Destiny may be up for a PC port after they kinda screwed themselves with poor practices and an underwhelming base game. But before I walked away, one of the beavs said that the game was being reworked and rebalanced as means of redemption, and also Nolan North will now be that ball, meaning he may sound like he gives a toss about anything. While this wannabe MMO is getting a revision, the biggest MMO, World of Warcraft, is getting a new expansion entitled Legion. I would make a comment about this, but I know nothing about the game, other than it is evil. Seriously, people, please stop playing it. You’d be getting more out of life by masturbating in between creating spreadsheets.
That said, I do like the idea of expansion packs, and a game I am really looking forward to playing, Ori and the Blind Forest, is getting one later this year, which is both abnormal, and pretty dang sweet. Yet the news of SNK lending their properties to the Chinese company, Leyou Technology, to turn their rich IP into anime, movies, television shows sounds like something made up in a video game ad lib. Leyou also plans on purchasing most of SNK’s stock, meaning they will be responsible when and if that company ever goes bankrupt, which it might any moment now. Same with Majesco, who has survived thanks to wizardry at this point, but are putting out a new digital A Boy and His Blob game. I would have also been fine with an HD version of the Wii game, as it looks fantastic, WayForward should still have the original production assets, and the game has a hug button, so naturally I would pick it up.
Gal Gun: Double Peace, the sequel to that game where you used love bullets to stop girls from glomping you after a cupid done messed up and made your generic protagonist butt smell like the sexiest thing alive, is getting will be released in the west. Meaning it does not need a fan-translation, like Captain Rainbow just recieved, as that game, which I was really excited about back in the day, was fully understandably not localized as there is a quest for butt dildos for Birdo… Yep, got a title, so I am out for this week, peace out my Kawi T-Boys, T-Girls, and all you peachy keen genderqueer tweens. Bye-nee!