Sonic Frontiers

"What you see is what you get- just a guy who loves adventure!"

I don't think there has been a single moment in my life where I've degraded myself to such a point whereas I would self identify as a 'Sonic connoisseur'. (The very prospect sickens me to my core.) But I have certainly had the time and wherewithal to play through the vast majority of Sonic games in existence, and complete most of them, and through osmosis have learnt everything there is to know about all the other games in the series, so I've ended up with more series knowledge about the little blue cretin than I care to admit. Ask me to name the most obscure Mario title I can think of from the top of my head and I'll juggle about the sports-themed titles trying to pick which is the weirdest, (I guess the Football game 'Strikers' was pretty out there) my point is I won't pick a good one. Ask me about Sonic and I'll just be spoiled for choice, maybe you want to go back to the woefully misjudged perspective swap of Sonic 3D blast, or the spin-off reskin of Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, or perhaps I should delve the true realms of antique horror in order to rouse the spirits of that most eldritch of cosmic horrors: Sonic Eraser.

With all that history, all those branches, it seems insane to me, nah- unbelievable to me, that the Sonic series could be the verge of doing something new. It's been Thirty years, and those years haven't been spent remaking the same base product like Pokemon have done, what could possibly be left to try out? Well, actually quite a few avenues. For one, despite having a prototype in the works at some point, Sally Acorn never made her videogame debut alongside the Sat AM world, there's yet to be an XCOM style strategy role-based sonic game (Although Chronicles was an RPG, so that counts) and there has never once been a fully openworld Sonic ga- no they couldn't. After all this time, surely it's too late. And yet here I am, getting actually excited for a Sonic game despite myself, which means they could only be doing one thing. Open world Sonic after all this time.

It seems like a no-brainer, does it not? Sonic, with all of his speed and manoeuvrability, is always struggling each entry to let the extent of his speed be known. And it's pretty important that speed is present in the games he appears in, because that's kind of his whole shtick. That, eating Chili dogs and going toe-to-toe with Ash Ketchum in competition for who can stay a teenager for the longest. (It's a close contest!) Sonic 4 famously messed up the speed equation and made Sonic feel like a weightless, momentum-free dash meter, the aforementioned Sonic 3D Blast failed to represent any of Sonic's speed whatsoever and the Boom series constrained Sonic's speedy exploits to tiny running sections and made him a boring platformer bot for the rest of the gameplay. Even Sonic Forces has me a little suspicious of it just because of the fact that fan OCs are apparently capable of keeping pace with the Blue Blur. What's that about, huh? Fastest thing alive, matched by a self insert? No thanks.

All the time it's felt like the constraints of the game design has been holding him back. When we got the chance to go all out in the originals, Mania or the speed sections from the 3D era, you felt like the proper Sonic, and when you had to tune things down in order to fit some strange restraint with your group of animal dunces, or stomp around for a stage as a 'Werehog' (Were means Man!) something felt off about the situation. The obvious solution would be either to make a game purely about those speed sections, but that would get old fast, or rethink how we approached Sonic games altogether so that the control of the navigation is handed over to the player. And what genre of games epitomises player choice navigation and exploration like an open world does?

The Game Awards trailer for this bold new hedgehog direction was certainly evocative to say the least. Building from that teaser released a few months previously, I'll be honest in saying I wasn't expecting anything at all. In fact, judging from the coloured flashing geometric shapes that flashed briefly, I though this was a trailer for Sonic Colours Ultimate: but thank god I was about as off base as I feasibly could have been. Instead what we got was a sweeping and ponderous trailer, focusing on rolling green hills and angelic emerald expanses. A quiet restful score also diverged widely from the increasingly outdated poprock-bait soundtracks that Sonic had been embracing in recent years. (Crowned, of course, by a character theme so nakedly 2000's that it's the first result on Youtube if you type in 'Edgiest Song ever'.) But what exactly was the trailer evoking? Breath of the Wild. It was obvious, they practically copied that trailer's storyboard beats, only they lacked the bit when the music goes still and then releases into a swelling orchestral suite that never fails to swoon the heart. (Maybe they'll save that for the gameplay trailer.)

Unfortunately we're sitting in that stage where what we can definitively say about the game and what it will contain is decidedly limited, SEGA want to keep this as close to the chest as possible and haven't even come out to officially call the game open world. (The marketing does use the functionally meaningless phrase 'Open zone' however, so we can call that proof enough.) All we can be certain about is that the game will take place over a set of landmasses called the Starfall Island, which I guess forms the set-up for biome segmentation typically expected from 'zones' in our Sonic games. Also, we know that this will herald a return of the 'entire' Sonic voice cast, not too long after they were all apparently recast for some Sonic TV show or something. Or rather, we know that Sonic, Tails and Amy are back but come on... you can't have a game with Amy in it and just not include Knuckles, that'd be silly.

As for what we want from the game- well that's not much... we just want a world with comparable depth and scale to Hyrule. Okay, that's likely not possible, but given that SEGA is at least looking that way for inspiration we can least hold hope that they're taking this seriously. And why wouldn't they, this is a big step for the world of Sonic that is no doubt going to turn all heads, even those who wrote off the franchise years ago are folding their arms, leaning back and saying "Okay, lets see what you got!" I want to see challenge areas, I want to see natural hubs, I want to see character based side quests, I want exploration zones that reward- what I don't want to see is a single lesson of open world design that has been pioneered by Ubisoft in the past 10 years- god, no maps full of meaningless icons next to checklists. (Be better than all that, SEGA!)

Of course, all this influx of hope in the Sonic fandom does conveniently slide in to wash away the bitter disappointment of SEGA breaking up with Sonic Mania's creators. (At least it does for everyone else, clearly not so much for me.) I just think it's kind of grim to discard creators who did so much for you that they built up the plot device of your big 3D game in their big 2D game, do you know how long it had been since any Sonic title had connecting story elements, they did you a damn service! I suppose Frontiers means an official end to the kind of 'have your cake and eat it' era of 2D and 3D Sonic crossing over, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, I just wish it didn't have to come with the axing of 2D Sonic in his entirety. Seeing as we have until December next year for this game to be inevitably delayed, I suppose we can expect to hear more at E3. (If it doesn't show up at E3, just scrub the game from your calendar because it will not make it out in 2022.)

Dragon's Dogma Netflix Episode 3: Envy

 And watered blight

That's right! I don't make promises lightly! (Unless that promise is to continue that damned XCOM Blog, that one is going to take a while longer) After months of 'being on break' I've finally dragged myself back around to seeing the next episode of Netflix's Dragon's Dogma anime, which is something that a Dragon's Dogma super fan like myself should be heavily invested in. In the time off I've actually taken the time to freshen up my memory with a full playthrough of Dragon's Dogma the game, and so I'm much more up to date on things that snuck around me last time, like how this adaptation is absolutely using the rough framework of the game to make it's own world. Ethan looks like the prequel Arisen, but he isn't. Cassardis shares the same name as the sea-adjacent fishing village from the game, but it's clearly meant to be something else entirely here. I'm not personally sure how I feel about an adaptation playing things this fast and loose, but Dragon's Dogma's chief-most strength was never in the robust nature of it's world so I'm not heartbroken or anything. (I just don't know why they needed to pinch concepts like that, it felt a bit like leading me on.)

I'll be honest with you all, I was avoiding watching this episode for quite a bit, and that's because I already sort of knew what was coming in it. Not the broader strokes of the narrative, but the introduction of some creatures that act rather differently than they did in the games. Rape goblins. I knew they were coming. Why is it that Japan are obsessed with the idea of little green goblin men being vicious sex fiends? Heck, there was an entire Manga turned Anime based off that very concept with Goblin Slayer! (Okay, Goblin Slayer is about a little more than just the aggressive sexual proclivities of goblins, but I digress!) I feel like in the West we take this almost piteous view on the Goblin kind, maybe influenced by DnD which constantly tries to hammer home how these are some of the most pathetic creatures to walk the earth. They seem downtrodden, beaten, even cute in a utterly ugly way. But in the East? No, that ugliness spreads a lot deeper than just the surface, it burrows right down to the soul!

But yes, Envy begins with a small retainer of two guards, a noble's son and his wife being overwhelmed by Goblins (someone tell those guards to hand in their badges, damn.) and the wife falling into a decidedly rape-y scenario before Ethan swoops in to spare us from this becoming a much darker Anime then it already seems to be edging at. Once more the animation and general movement of the show is the standout for me, with the action scenes looking like they were extracted right from the game with a little more stylistic flair giving to the shading and flourishes. I think the only thing holding it back, and this might just stretch towards the show in general, is a lack of grand direction. The Goblin chopping sequence was fine but it could have exciting and fast, showing off the sheer numbers of the foes and how clever strategy can overwhelm. Instead they just slay a few and the rest scatter, it almost feels like a waste of a scene. (Maybe Jojo has ruined my expectations.)

As was the case with the previous, almost anthology like, episodes, this one introduces to a few new characters and motivations, just not for the main cast. The soldiers weren't very interesting and I can't remember their faces, but the cowardly husband and his wife did ring a bell. In fact, if I squinted, it almost seemed as though the wife character was based on Madeleine in some vague twisted fashion, although if that is the case then it's easily one of the lesser examples of concept borrowing from the main game. (They aren't overly similar) Funnily enough those two characters were probably the only stand outs from this episode, given that own two main leads are currently Hannah, a pawn characterised by a lack of emotion and desire, and Ethan, who just seems to be angrily hunting this dragon down for something he hasn't even hammered out yet. I suppose vengeance- but to what end? His family is good and dead. At least the husband and wife have an arc this episode.

Although on that note, I am starting to wonder if the cynical tone of the show is starting to edge events into predictability, because I figured out the ending before our hero even popped up on screen. Essentially we have a fairly prototypical setup, with a weak and scared husband character who's so pathetic he can't deal with Goblins (Seriously dude, you live in a world with Hydras; you've got to learn how to deal with footlongs) and his flighty wife who seems a little bit... shall we say, friendly, with old Ethan after he steps in to save her life. (Too bad for her that Ethan is currently in the middle of his descent into a revenge fuelled misanthropy, not really the kind of mood fit for a quick night-time dalliance.) The stage is set for a redemption story, but the precedent of the narrative paves way for a subversion, so the episode really lays itself bare.

One slight irk that rocked me was Ethan and trying to come to terms with his competence, an important part of any characterisation, I believe. We've been given hints that Ethan was much more than just a farmer in his past life, with his combat prowess alone indicating he was something of a solider before. That's evident, and yet he spots a griffin and turns into toddler mode asking "What's that?" One of the most common plains creature in your world? How can you not know what a Griffin is? Plus there was the odd faffing about with Hannah at the climax of the episode where she was readying her fire-bow shot for all of 3 minutes. Not sure what that was about. Actually, it sort of felt like an artificially constructed tension point where she had to be 'defended' whilst aiming her shot like she's some kind of freakin' robot hacking a door. Again, animation great-underlying intention behind that movement, not so much.

The big twist at the end of this episode, and where it earns it's place in the seven deadly sins, is wherein the husband is forced to save his wife from the return of the rape goblins whilst everyone else is busy on the Griffin. He massacres them all, becomes the man he could have always been, and then turns around and stabs his wife too. Turns out the guy didn't want to lose her and thought that this would be the way they could stay together, his envy bubbled up and drove him more than a little crazy, it would seem. A dour ending to extinguish a vaguely triumphant moment and another rung on this Anime's journey to drive something home that is slightly evading me thusfar. The cynicism has already grown predictable, so I'm just riding on there being some sort of satisfying payoff bubbling in the background somewhere. Either that or a finale spectacle which redeems this cursed world just a tiny bit.

Once more another middle of road sort of episode from the Dragon's Dogma anime for many of the reason that I've laid out. Ethan and Hannah aren't making for the most scene grabbing protagonists and the overall arching story is just 'follow the dragon', I'm sure there must be more coming eventually but I'm not sure how far this show is capable of dragging me along until we get there. I appreciate the odd skewered narrative shift, but right now it's feeling like without those this would be a fairly standard fantasy show, and I know Dragon's Dogma as a license is capable of more than that. I just need to see that represented in this show. With all that in mind, I can't really give this episode any mark higher than a C, but I did like the action of this episode a bit more than the last on so I'll bump that up to a C+. It can definitely get better from here, I have hope.

Hollow Knight Review

 Dream no more

Every year in this pleasant little industry we have on our laps, two major sides to the general gaming fandom arise from the disparity ushered in by the sparking of The First Flame. The big AAA world-burner games that are, to coin the name of that first achievement from Modern Warfare 3 that I've never forgotten after all of these years, 'too big to fail'; and the more demure and refined shade of independent fandoms which may not burn as loudly but often, due to the more intimate nature of the relationship between fan and developer, burns a lot brighter and longer. A great AAA game will usually flare up in popularity for a few months, in incredibly rare cases it may be good enough to last years, but typically the next entry will drag everyone's attention elsewhere. Good indie titles seem to almost imprint on the very souls of their fans to the point where those very people will swing their bulwarks in it's defence and readily sing it's praises from the rafters until there are none left who haven't heard of the game in question. That was how, after all of these years, I finally got around to playing the indie darling cult-classic Hollow Knight.

I tell you this story because, if you've hung around this blog for a while, you'll know that platformers aren't typically the sorts of games that I shoot for. I'm not good at them, they can get repetitive fast for me, and I even got bored playing the beginning areas of Metroid Dread, so you know I'm predisposed against this style of game. But after the third consecutive year of hearing this thing's name dragged into otherwise sensible conversation, seeing the infectious, feverous stupor behind these rapid soul's eyes, well I've had to give the source of the infestation a little look over at some point, just to see what all the fuss was about. Afterall, that was how I discovered 'Star Wars Empire at War', despite being a total strategy dunce and now that's my second favourite Star Wars game of all time! (Actually... I have played Fallen Order since then. Hmm... Nah, Order can take Third.) With a positive mental attitude and an appetite to be invested, I snatched up this game with the cute little stag beetle on the cover and dived into Hallownest for the first time.

In an utterly basic premise, because I would be totally sickened with myself were I to tread on the carefully manicured storyline that Team Cherry orchestrated, Hollow Knight is a game about bugs. But of course there's more to it. It's a magical society of sapient monarchist bugs, sprawled in a vast and undeniably deep 'dark fantasy' world called the Hallownest. You arrive in these lands as a voiceless Knight, find the solitary surface town of Dirtmouth practically abandoned and get to the work of unravelling the mysteries of this place and it's many decidedly truculent inhabitants. (98% try to kill you the second they see you; so that's a bag of worms to unravel all on it's own.) How everything plays out from even that beginning point is too interesting and intricate for me to lay out here, but I will say there's a clear and incredibly well-executed mimicry of Dark Souls-style storytelling on display here. Drip fed myth wrapped in stories and bequeathed in a box of mystery. And knowing the love I put upon Dark Souls' name, you know that's not a comparison I make lightly.

So then the obvious next question would be: is this a Souls-like? To which my answer is no. Whilst there is a mechanic of dying and leaving a wraith with your currency that you then have to hunt down, that's where the similarities end. This isn't an RPG with stat sheets and the like, and there's no tons of weapons and armour sets to go hunting down for obscure boosts to some ridiculous stat like 'Resistance'. Instead what we have here is a much more time honoured genre of game in a 'Metroidvania', which is to refer to the sort of game designed in the style of old school Metroid. (And Castlevania, I guess, but Castlevania grew into that sort of game, Metroid more pioneered it.) So the name of the game is exploration, discovering the environment, mapping your progress, spotting dead ends and then becoming intimately familiar with the place so that you backtrack across the land once you've got this one piece of gear that works in this certain area. It is perhaps one of the most time-consuming types of platformer one can make as it requires a 3 dimensional design philosophy to always account for the relationship between areas, how shortcuts might fit in, the places in which the story will lay itself out, and all that nattering organisational stuff. (It sounds like a headache.)

I've played a fair few games like this in the past and have a sort of love-hate relationship with the set-up. On one hand, when done well it can result in an incredibly organic feeling game world that you come to memorise as one might a childhood haunt, so much that you squeal with wonder a little everytime you uncover some wild new route that connects to areas you thought you knew so well. Hollow Knight performs this style of game incredibly well and discovering it's little nooks and crannies sometimes surpasses the handle on this genre that classics like 'Symphony of the Night' manage in their execution. I've stumbled into odd little caves and discovered whole new environments that are entirely non critical to the core story and just full of little secrets and charms, or sometimes even just a snippet of lore. Yes, Hollow Knight is the sort of game which is so proud of itself that it can place its hardest optional platforming challenge in an area where the only reward on the otherside is a 5 second cutscene, and it still feels somewhat rewarding. (Tell Miyazaki and I'll deny I ever said it, but sometimes I think this world might even be superior to some Souls ones!) 

That praise comes all down to the execution of The Hallownest, the subterranean collection of terrarium-esque distinct biomes the populate this rather hefty and dense world. These environments are lovingily drawn and rendered with that moody, eerie atmosphere of a rich world recently made utterly empty which Dark Souls veterans will be more than familiar with. Aiding this is the gorgeous musical score by Christopher Larkin which broods and gently whispers in the Forgotten Crossroads, skitters and crawls in the Deepnest and howls and whines in Kingdom's Edge. (Or Howling Cliffs- dammit, I forgot there's an optional area named after that!) It is unerringly beautiful, from the depths of the Abyss to the summits of Crystal Peak, and those who may have glanced the odd screenshot and feared for those dour blues need not be concerned; though the palette is typically demure, you do have explosion of greens and purples and billowing cloudy golds depending on the biome you're trekking around in. It's just one of the many ways the developers successfully segment their world in order to make the space feel naturally enormous whilst in reality being actually rather comfortably manageable. Going from one end to the other might take all of 10 minutes, (provided you know what you're doing and have all movement tools) but it feels like an epic adventurous trek, and you know that's what I seek most of all from my game worlds.

Speaking of 'worlds', I want to vent a little bit about how the Map works, because I think it alone tells you the sort of experience that Team Cherry want exploration to be for the player. When you first rock up to the Forgotten Crossroads, you have absolutely no map. At some point you'll happen upon a studious Weevil with a pleasant hum and a penchant for leaving discarded quills about the place leading to his location. (a clever environmental tool for finding him in future encounters from Team Cherry.) He'll sell you a map to your location (each area has it's own map), so that's already pretty eyebrow raising for not being a freely given map like most games prefer. Then you'll learn that the map has some locations filled out already, which doesn't cover the breadth of the area and nor does it update. No, you have to trek all the way back to Dirtmouth in order to talk to his wife to purchase a quill and then you can update the map. But even then the map only updates when resting at a bench. (this game's substitute for bonfires) Of course, even at that point you're using the map like an 18th century cartographer, trying to desperately match the shape of the world with the shapes on your paper, because you yourself don't appear on it! For that you need to source another item in the Charm called 'Wayward Compass'. And so you can glimpse the intentions of the developers; they want your exploration to be organic and fuelled by curiosity rather than "Well I haven't been to this part of the map yet" which sets you in the mindset for learning to look at the world and really start appreciating the helpful quirks to the world which makes every corridor distinct and new.

Which brings us, I suppose, to Charms: Hollow Knight's gear system. Rather than throw dozens of new rapidly depreciated spears and swords at the Knight, Hollow Knight gives the player a single blade (adorably called a 'Nail') Which it expects the player to slowly level up over the course of the game in a manner befitting a proper Metroidvania. But builds and playstyles do still exist in this meaty little package through the inclusion of Charms, little trinkets that the player can equip a certain number of (dependent on their power level and the amount of Charm notches owned) and which all provide a unique boon of some sort. We've seen these sorts of systems done before in other titles, but once again I have to take off my hat to Hollow Knight for doing justice to this setup. You see each charm is unique, which means you're not going to be digging up some minor bauble which grants plus 4% to attack damage, but beefy Charms like 'Fragile Strength' which increases damage by 50% but breaks if still worn when the player dies. Or 'Thorns of Agony' which lashes out some revenge damage everytime your little Knight gets hit. 'Quick Slash', which boosts the speed you swing you Nail, might work well with 'Fragile Strength' which also synergies with 'Steady Body' (nullifies player recoil) in order to make your Knight effectively able to pingpong charging enemies and do rapid damage around as long as that particular foe can suffer knockback. That's just one potential set-up and the game has a total of 40 charms. Mixing and matching is essentially setting yourself up for a different build and can be done totally freely at any bench, fleshing out topics like boss strategy to a whole new dimension through rapid build adjustment. I won't claim to be an expert and I'm still finding new Charms that I love for the day all the time, and that just goes to show you how well a deceptively simple system works at drilling depth into a game like this.

Enemies are, of course, a big part of the equation when it comes to Metroidvania games, as these are the many folks you'll be slaying to pieces on your journeys from one important story locale to another tough boss beatdown. Lots of games in this genre have these iconic trash mobs whom have you struggle almost as much as the end of level boss does; The Medusa heads from Castlevania, The Iron Knuckles and appropriately named 'Fokkas' from 'The Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link' and pretty much everything with a pulse in Irithyll from Dark Souls III. I didn't really find that trash mob in Hollow Knight. Don't get me wrong, there were the odd tough enemy which had me sweating the first few times I faced them, but no one creature which had me sighing my guts out everytime I saw them. Which is somewhat indicative of the difficulty level which the entire game operates under. Hollow Knight is actually somewhat approachable to casual platform players in it's base body. Almost deceptively so...

Bosses are what the game is mostly about, although I will say that I expected them to take a much more prominent role in the structure of this game world. There were times when I had entered and explored a new area head-to-toe (as much as I could for that first time) and didn't encounter a single boss creature, which sometimes made me feel as though I wasn't exactly progressing with pace. (In my Dark Souls-addled mind) When they did take the time out of their day to come and meet me, they were certainly worth the wait. Great bug-themed enemy visual design, rhythmic and well animated attack sets and a fantastic array of unique tracks from the OST makes every single Boss memorable. (Even the silly throwaway bosses, like Gruz Mother) Although... and I'm being nitpicky here- they were all pretty easy. I mean throughout the whole game. I don't think a single boss from the main game had me actually sit-up and pay attention for the first entire half of the game, and even in the second half I never really sweated it out. This game didn't use me like a ragdoll and toss me aside like the Souls games usually do on my first run, and maybe that's a consequence of the comparatively straight-forward and easier to grasp 2 dimensional world, or maybe that's a conscious effort from Team Cherry to be accommodating to non-hardcore players. None of the base game bosses felt like throwaway trash, and I never found a vanilla boss moveset I thought to be 'unfair'. (In keeping with the general polished sheen of the whole game, I guess.)

Exploration was a somewhat consistent source of frustration for my early snippets of gameplay, and not just for that fiddly map system. Whilst this game's narrative drinks deep from the Dark Souls well of wanton obfuscation, Team Cherry actually dared to go one devotion higher by literally giving the player no motivation until they reach the middle of Hallownest. (which is a good chunk into the game, mind.) Meaning that for a solid few hours you literally have no idea where you're supposed to be going. This would be fine if not for the fact that a few of the directions you're supposed to take are so off-the-beaten path that it can be genuinely frustrating to walk back and forth feeling stuck about what to do next. Add onto that the fact that blocked routes (places in Metroidvania games that are designed to be dead-ends right now so that they can be navigated later with a specialised piece of equipment) aren't ever marked on the map. When you get to the middle stages of the game, and are juggling three different area maps in your overworld, it can be a real headache to try and figure out what routes you got caught off at and which you might now be able to traverse with your cool new gadget. And I know this is a genuine issue the developers themselves spotted late, because the first update for the game included the ability to buy little manual map pins that you can slap around yourself to keep track of niggling dead-ends.

On the topic of updates, there's a reason why I subtly specified 'the base game' when talking about Hollow Knight's difficulty. Everything was pretty easy in the base game, no bosses felt cheap or overly annoying in the base game. That's because Hollow Knight was treated to four rather substantial updates that each acted like free fleshed-out DLC packs to the game, most of which were decently embedded into the base structure of the world to feel like natural optional content. And whatever lingering glimmer of goodwill that Team Cherry felt towards their players when making the base Hollow Knight was clearly long expended by the time they reached these updates. Two of the updates in question added some mechanical things here and there, changed up small parts, sprinkled some extra depth to the odd bits and ends, and even added a couple of secret remix bosses. The last two were a declaration of war on anyone who found Hollow Knight too easy.

The Grimm Troupe adds a delightfully fun mini-story largely unconnected from the main narrative that introduces a few charms and one of the hardest boss fights I think I've ever endured. Oh yeah, Nightmare King Grimm ripped my Nail in half, stuck the sharp end down my throat and used me as a mop to scrub up the excrement I involuntarily released in response to the sheer ferocity of his moveset. Good. God. Every single pirouette, dive, spike, bat flurry and ball-shooty-attack-thing was layered with enough cheese to stink out the Louvre. Reaction times were as strict as they feasibly could be, and layered with special little 'F#@> You' flourishes that made every mistake a practical death sentence. Ask me no longer if I've ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight, because after NKG I've mastered the Backwards Atomic Breakdance Boogie whilst serenaded by the cacophonous throbbing pulse of the nightmarish heart of Hell itself dragged up from the lakes of Pandemonium to sear its grim beat into the white flesh of my ear drums. The only saving grace of this travesty is that Nightmare King Grimm's theme slaps stupidly hard. Thank you, Christopher, your music alone kept my head above the billowing furrows of abject insanity.

Godmaster is the final DLC/free update and is served as a fitting send off to the game from the team. Functionally a boss rush mode, Team Cherry spared no expense intricately crafting a narratively sound implementation for such a mode to exist within the world of Hallownest and crammed enough content for an entire small game's worth of gameplay to be experienced in this one area alone. Godmaster is essentially a challenge to prove one's mastery of the game, with Pantheons of bosses that stretch from sweat-inducing to "Oh, my god this is going to take an hour to even attempt", Challenge modes against each individual boss that range from "Oh, the arena is slightly changed and he hits twice as hard" to "Help, the boss will kill me in a single hit. Save me from this carnage!" and even a brand new ending thrown into the game with remixed bosses and a seriously cool last showdown that's its almost a shame how few of the fanbase will be willing to endure the 42 straight boss rush required to see it. (I am not exaggerating.)

The only part of this game I can't breakdown for fear of spoiling the fun is the narrative, but maybe a more general assessment of it as a whole will give you an impression of my thoughts. Whilst coming across decently Soulsian in it's presentation, I actually found the bare narrative beats decently easy to follow so that I didn't suffer that typical Souls-like dilemma of "Okay, I beat the final boss and got an ending. Now what does that even mean?" But the storytellers take easily discernible glee in hiding the finer points and grander motivations behind the literarily enigmatic ramblings of some strange NPC tucked in the furthest reaches of the world behind an illusionary wall somewhere. It's practically nectar for people like me who delight in piecing together the significance of an addled Knight's turd sculptures and their wider lore implications. (Oh, he makes one of you at some point... how delightful...) Unlike Dark Souls (I'm sorry for the constant comparisons but I swear they're made with love!) Team Cherry aren't afraid to snatch the player up for a few set piece moments that land beautifully not just for their gorgeously grand delivery but their relative rarity against the rest of the game. The set piece for the true ending of the base game in particular is just epic. It's worth going the extra mile just to experience that alone.

Summary

In conclusion, Hollow Knight is a hauntingly beautiful swanswong of a Metroidvania title, effortlessly colliding intriguing world design, engaging gameplay and a brilliant score. The amount of content and depth tucked away in all of it's little corners is enough to give a satisfying and surprisingly hefty first playthrough and lay enough groundwork for significant replay value. Some of the later challenges, specifically the postgame content, veers a little into 'ridiculously hard' territory at times, but for the most-part Hollow Knight remains an enjoyable and rewarding experience from beginning to end. Provided you're willing to buy into it's premise and immerse yourself in the world, Hollow Knight will snatch you away into a rich Dark Fantasy adventure that takes itself surprisingly serious considering the almost cutesy visage of The Knight on the boxart. I, personally, cannot put the game down to the point I've been dipping out of this review to bang my head on 'Godmaster' some more, that's evidence in itself for how addictive this lean little title can be. For those with a love for Platformers, Metroidvanias and all things Souls-esque, this is a must-buy recommend, and I think there's something here for you even if you're a platforming agnostic. With a little bit of deliberation on the sub-grade, I feel comfortable giving Hollow Knight a solid A Grade, flanked with an order to pick this game up if you haven't already; these are the sorts of crazy good games we need more of in the industry! My only lingering gripe is now I have this game's upcoming sequel, 'Hollow Knight: Silk Song', on my watch-list, towering that pile of 'anticipated games' to about level with the Burj Khalifa.

Oh, So Final Fantasy VII is £70 now? Huh...

 This is fine >Starts hyperventilating<

There's this belief going around the video game industry, one fuelled by wanton and targeted cognitive dissonance. It's the kind of thing that makes sense when it's told in those first fleeting seconds after it's first described to you, as certain figures insist on doing again and again, but which falls utterly apart upon the slightest further scrutiny. I'm talking about the idea that the video game industry hasn't evolved with inflation. Yes, gaming companies, first Sony and recently Square, love to remind people that games have been going for £60 since the nineties, and though they've only become more expensive to make, they arrive at our shelves with the same price tag. It sort of makes sense, but it's woefully, intentionally, misleading. Because whilst the base price of games has remained frozen for the longest time, it's done so at a price point which is entirely reasonable (In fact, a lot of times it's a bit too generous) and doesn't have any of these companies hard-up to run their day-to-days. But the industry has evolved considerably in other ways.

In the age of Microtransactions, booster packs, battle passes and now NFTs, who are the gaming industries' elite fooling when they tell us they're making no more on games then the did thirty years ago? Rockstar makes over a billion each year on the back of one game, which they released eight years ago. That's not because of the price tag on the box, let me tell you; it's the Microtransactions they've been pushing for all that time. And they aren't outliers, almost every AAA game has it's ingame store nowdays, to the point where it's more notable when a game doesn't. (Remember how Jedi Fallen Order scored headlines simply because there was no microtransactions? Shouldn't that tell you something?) Heck, as a whole the gaming industry recently crossed the threshold of becoming the most profitable entertainment industry in-the-world. All of this is to say plainly; there is no sensible reason on this green earth why the premium price of new games should go up £10. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, scrutinise their stake in the situation until the obvious bias unravels itself.

Thus it's with that utter disdain, edging on loathing, that I look upon Final Fantasy 7 Remake's £70 price-tag. More expensive then the original game ever was, to be clear. This matches alongside a release exclusive to the Epic Games Store, a platform which only last month got around to implementing a cart, (A FREAKIN' CART) essentially proposing a plan where customers pay extra for a worse experience. The cherry on the cake of course being the fact that this release is a bloody PC port for a game that's over 2 years old, because Square are just making a power play for how much they can bend people over before they refuse to bend anymore. This isn't a one off. Forspoken, that strange Isekai game which is undergoing marketing ramp-up all over Youtube despite the fact the game isn't due till May, is also set to land with £70 on the price tag. Square are shooting for this, and if they are rewarded for this utter transgression on consumer rights it will pick up steam, and it won't be long before the entire AAA industry is charging a sixth of a brand new console for the privilege of buying software. Tell me I'm not the only one who finds that utterly repugnant!

I've said before that Sony are all aboard this train, and I'm not joking. For their first party titles, Sony has reached for £70 across the board in this next gen tax. Something which would have blown up a lot more if people could even buy up the consoles in order to see that affront to justice in the first place. But considering Xbox wasn't following suit, most could see this as a simple growing pain misstep that some consoles do in their first year or so. A stupid move that they get rightly lambasted for, and then is quickly forgotten as we move into the meat of the console age. But now Square Enix has now bought this scheme to PC, and that makes it a lot more real. Sony fans are happy to put up with Sony's crap because they believe in some twisted concept of 'brand loyalty', it's really rather sad. PC fans don't have any such delusions, and their relationship with Square is rocky as it is, so if Enix wants a fight over pricing then they've got one.

Although this might just be a fight which wages itself, because it hardly took any time at all for people to raise the fact that- oh look: the PC Port of FF7R is a piece of crap anyway! Well that is to say it's a port of a game that is said to be a very decent translation of an RPG classic, but a port made by a team who clearly don't think of the PC players as a viable market as evidenced by the effort they put in. Yes, in typical Square Enix fashion this port is about as optimised as horse-drawn carriage. That simile didn't make a whole lot of sense, but neither does selling a game with consistent frame drops on a 3080 for busy scenes! If one of those god-cards can't smoothly run this thing, I don't even want to think what the damage would be if I tried to run that on my system! (My graphics card would probably just explode.)

And whatsmore, we're looking at a port which fails to provide the standard acceptable amount of graphical options to keep your average PC fan happy; and at this point that's pretty much the laziest possible thing a port can do. Is it really breaking the bank to spend a week or so creating an options menu? Because even if it is, then that'll be worth the time because that work would demonstrate even the slightest degree of understanding for the PC market. PCs, by their nature, are varied and non-uniform beings, with some entire rigs unique and entirely different to others. We need to have the sort of optional flexibility to tailor experiences to our specific rigs. And if you can't manage that much, can't deliver an optimised experience and can't even release the thing on all store fronts, then frankly your work isn't worth £60, let alone £70.

Of course, this isn't the first time that Square has spat in the face of PC fans. Seminal android hack and slasher game, Nier Automata, famously launched on PC with pretty much no PC options whatsoever aside from resolution tweaking. They may as well have just slapped a last gen console emulator in the box and sold that. This was lambasted, reported on, shouted from the high heavens, and what did Square do? Nothing. It fell to modders to create their own configuration menus for the game. What is that about? Making your community handle basic utilities? What are you worth anyway? Final Fantasy XV is said to have been a bit better, to the point where people could at least tailor the experience they wanted out of that game. But 7 Remake? The biggest release they've had these past 3 years? Not worth the work, apparently.

For the games that you desperately want to support and make sure does well, it breaks one's heart to see the decision maker behind the title doing everything in their power to screw things up. A dedicated and talented team sat down and made Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and then the higher-ups swooped in and stuck their stupid price tag on it and then handed it off to a team of PC illiterates to botch up a port. What are you supposed to do as an artist when your superiors are actively sabotaging you? I would almost feel bad for Tetsuya Nomura, but I haven't forgiven him for the HD remake of Chain of Memories. (And likely never will.) Do I expect Square to back down, or fix their port? Maybe... on the 'fixing' part at least, there's no way in a million years they'll stop greedily slobbering over the premium pricing in their hedonistic ritual dedicated to profligacy. And this, once more for mister Days Gone director (wherever he may be), is why I buy only on steep discounts.  

Splinter Cell is being remade!

 What's that chill running up my spine?

There's never just one side to a popular genre, unless I guess we're talking about the trailblazing Strand-like genre! (Although that example in particular is likely to remain one-of-a-kind now that PlayStation has gone ahead and trademarked its unique systems.) Which is why someone who loves the stealth side of gaming like me is going to be intimately familiar with both of it's leading faces. Yes, I said both. For whereas Metal Gear is the series that I've chosen to take into my heart, many others credit the best this genre has to offer to another popular title: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. A few years back I decided to enrich my personal culture a bit and play through every single entry of the series I could get my hands on (Pandora Tomorrow is still absent from Steam for some reason) and I cottoned onto to the rampant adoration people have with the series. And thus I could feel a shade of the sadness they regularly exposit, considering the series is considered on-ice. Or rather it was.

Having Ubisoft as the holders of your favourite IP is like watching a seagull make away with your freshly cooked packet of chips; you just know you ain't seeing that again. Unless you happen to be in love with their three stooges game series; Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs and Tom Clancy lite (their bastardised vision of Tom's series') you can fully expect to be out of luck. And in fact, even if you are into one of those series' you may be out of luck anyway. Sam Fisher and his various undercover sneaking exploits across the espionage world were beloved by many back in their prime, and despite sharing the Tom Clancy brand we haven't seen a new title since 2013's Blacklist. Oh, but Ubisoft were more than happy to pick from the bones of the franchise for their little cross-over Clancy-verse moments, slapping the Fourth Echelon name on anything that blinks. Heck, they even roped in the original VA for Sam to do some small recording jobs for Ghost Recon's newest games. To be frank, Ubisoft hasn't shown Splinter Cell much respect, which is why it's with very mixed emotions that I read how Splinter Cell is apparently getting a remake.

I think my concerns start with the base news. A 'Remake'? Why. No seriously, why in the hell would you make a remake of a series which still has so much untold? For god sake, they ended the last game on the same damn cliffhanger that Conviction ended on, straying dangerously close to Metal Gear/ Deus Ex conspiracy theorist territory all the while. Wouldn't it make more sense to pursue some of that? But instead what we're receiving is touted as a remake that hopes to capture that nascent spirit that the early series exhibited. Which again confused me. Are they talking about the earliest games, where everything was strictly linear to such a line that you were explicitly told what weapons to use at what point in a mission? Or are they actually playing to the crowd and saying that they're basing this on the fan favourite entry, Chaos Theory? (A claim also made when the team was marketing Blacklist, it must be remembered.) Does the team know what they're even doing with this remake, because they're not really selling it me.

In my mind, when I allow the cynicism to fully wash over me and candidly ask: why would they even consider a reboot the series, I only land on one viable answer- it's about Sam. Or rather, his voice actor. For years Michael Ironside served as the voice and personality of Sam Fisher, bringing his iconic delivery as a veteran actor to the role. His voice was beloved, his wisdom fit the role and people cried tears of blood when he gave up the role for Blacklist because he could no longer feasibly do the mocap. (Which to this day remains a bizarre excuse. It's a video game, we don't need the mocap to match the voice!) The new guy was fine, but bland. Lacking charm and charisma which failed to distract away from the dialogue which was pretty poor too. Consensus seems to be that Blacklist was written worse than previous entries, but I think that game just marked the first time people realised that Splinter Cell actually never had the best writing in general.

With a reboot the team can successfully recast Sam Fisher and all we fans can do is bite or lips and go "Darn, well I guess that does make sense." I think that tracks, because otherwise there's literally no justification for this reboot decision and I'd have thought that Ubisoft themselves had forgotten how narratively bare the first game actually is. (I assume they're rebooting 1, right? Heck, who knows- after the travesty they created during the Prince of Persia reboot, nothing is beneath them.) This will also give them the chance to try and tie in this new nowhere storyline they've been drip feeding Sam Fisher through his Ghost Recon cameos, although to be honest those are voiced by Ironside so maybe they'll look to drop that altogether too.

Looking at the positives, this will be the first time we can see what a new gen AAA stealth title can look like thanks to the self immolation of Splinter Cell's keymost rival, curtsey of Konami. Who knows how this could innovate AI packages, lighting effects, environmental interaction, the openness of levels and just all that innumerable good stuff which makes the future of gaming seem so bright? Some floating rumours here and there cropped up claiming that this title would be open world, which has thankfully been outright denied at the same time as the project being announced. Of course, that doesn't discount the team taking full advantage of the next gen hardware to create huge sprawling levels with interweaving guard patrol routines and stealth mechanic systems which could all shake hands harmoniously without the memory limit jumping out of the console and literally throttling the user. But that's the best case scenario and we're talking about Ubisoft...

So you know already that this means the Ubisoft higher-ups are making serious discussions about the viability of NFTs being implemented, don't you? And they are coming, don't you worry. Yves 'Le Rat' Guillemot has weighed in on the discussion about NFTs being poorly implemented into Breakpoint by letting everyone know that this is just the beginning, whilst simultaneously vomiting enough toothless marketing gibberish to cotton everyone onto the fact that, guess what, the idiot doesn't even know what NFTs are! Or at least he has no idea what they represent, how they operate and what he can do to utilise them in art! He's so far out of his depth it's laughable, and I'll bet he's just holding onto the craze hoping someone with more talent peeps a head in his office and of-hand mentions an actually viable and clever way they can take actual advantage of this tech, so he can gratefully steal that idea and claim he came up with the whole thing. Instead he want's to use them purely for their digital signature and the second hand market, easily replicable without any blockchain work thanks to the fact we're talking about an online game with data that can be kept server side. Seriously, if there's any greater indication that your CEO is too far out of touch to run the bleeding edge anymore, let this (and the past 10 years of the studio) be your neon-studded red floodlights!

And if the NFT thing has run out of steam by then, it'll be a booster store. Or micro DLC. Or any number of the eye-rollingly cliché dime snatching techniques that the hacks in Ubisoft head office regurgitate with glee. Splinter Cell is walking a tight rope supported by a studio that seems woefully incompetent at any remote form of innovation, dangling over a pit of bad decisions that same studio regularly makes. It makes one not too confident on the eventual quality of this game, even if we are as early in development as the news is claiming. So despite the fact it kills the little kid inside of me who wants to jump up and down so badly, I've got to cut my losses early and say this has a high percentage of being a dud revival of Splinter Cell. If I'm wrong, I'll celebrate- but nowadays betting low is a pretty safe wager to make. But then again we are talking about a game maybe 3 or more years down the line, and who knows what sort of things might have changed by then? Perhaps this upcoming Prince of Persia remake will dictate soundly how well Ubisoft deals with revisiting past glories.

Torturing myself with games

 Why are we still here? Just to suffer?

The role of video games and how they serve us in the entertainment field is obviously (or at least obvious to anyone with the mind to look and pay attention) a lot less linear than 'play game makes me feel good'. Games can exist to tell intriguing stories, convey complex emotional journeys, reconstruct the way we form and recount narrative and, in some instances, inflate our sense of self worth through the bitter crucible of challenge. I've sought out games for most of those reasons in the past, but today (and the last half of this solstice) I've been truly sold into the dance of self flagellation and it is torturous. My punisher? Hollow Knight. That game I already completed and thought; 'Once I get that blog out, I can put the thing down. Maybe once Silk Song gets a release date I'll pick it back up for another playthrough.' If only my plans were strong enough to make it to paper. Instead I've been torturing myself for day after day and I'm getting to the point where I have to ask; how bad for me is this really?

Just to give any of ya'll a headsup, this isn't a topic on how healthy games in general are but rather my relationship to them, as such it's going to be a personal dive but I hope there's something others can ascertain for themselves through this light introspection. So, Hollow Knight. From the start all I wanted to do was finish the game, learn what it was about, and final to satisfy the story. Team Cherry really won me over with their surprisingly straight-laced dark fantasy narrative and I adored how the true ending played itself out. I was happy with that ending. It was fulfilling. But of course in discovering that ending I did learn there was another out there, a sort of 'alternative true ending', which doesn't mechanically change the events of the world, but plays them out in a different fashion. And in fact, it was an ending added by the Godseeker update.

So what exactly is this ending and how does it relate to my torture? It's the reward for completing all the Godseeker Pantheons (boss runs) before unlocking and completing the Pantheon of the Hallownest. That final Pantheon entails fighting every boss in the game, or a specifically designed harder version of one of those bosses, in a 42 boss straight run. It's essentially a middle finger in the face. And were this proposed by literally any other game I'd have ignored it entirely... but Hollow Knight is really fun. The controls are tight, the bosses are creative and cool, and some part of me wants to at least experience all the developers have made for this title. But 42 bosses? Am I really that masochistic? And why is the answer yes? For the past few days whenever I've found myself not actively doing something for more than three minutes (so yeah, pretty much every other second during Christmas) I've hopped onto the Pantheon grind once more to make myself a little better. And I'm reaching the point where I don't even know what I'm getting out of the experience anymore.

So far I've completed each of the first three pantheons and their Binding challenges (If you don't know what that means, just imagine I was punching myself in the face constantly during each run. it's essentially that.) I have the Knight's Pantheon next and then I get the right to even attempt the Pantheon of the Hallownest. And I'm a little worried. Not worried about being able to reach it. (I've been practising Pure Vessel all night and have downed him at least 8 times, I'm getting better.) But rather I'm afraid of getting into the challenge and being unable to put the thing down for the amount of devotion it's going to demand of me. Is this even about the ending anymore? I can look that up on Youtube. No, at this point I'm driven by the frustration, anger and loathing of each failed attempt. It's as though I'm dragging myself through this in the vain hope that once I've topped everything (if I get that far) then I'll finally be beyond the self deprivation that swells in the quietest moments, at least for today.

As strange as that sounds, that really is the underlying neurosis that drives my obsession with all ludicrously hard games and why, when the game is solidly made and boasts control fidelity to the point where every single failure is the fault of no one but the player, I physically cannot bring myself to back down from the challenge. (If it isn't that finely tuned then I can walk away easily. It's as though my hope out of the experience is to be in situations wherein I can blame myself for not being good enough.) It's a feeling I get from seeking out games like Pathfinder Kingseeker (A near miserable experience on even moderate difficulties) when I have just as many casual games waiting untouched on my harddrive, like Stardew Valley or Terraria. (Terraria is super causal the way I play it. I essentially just make it my box-cave generator game.)

Stubbornness is a centripetal force at the heart of this equation which pulls me into it's orbit incessantly, because part of the only value I've ever managed to unerringly assign myself is my willingness to be stubborn in all life. Even when I accept something is never going to work and I'm trying in total vain, I'll push against it anyway because of some misguided ideal that rewards the blunt force of 'stubbornness' in my head by transforming it into a phantom called 'perseverance'. Call it the P word and suddenly is sounds like some heroic feat of man, to strive in the face of adversity, but strip it away to what it is and the truth lays itself bare: it's just nasty and cannibalistic and distressing. That relief which most who enjoy these types of games seek is horrendously shortlived for me, because Stubbornness isn't about succeeding, it's about struggling, and when there's nothing left to struggle against it just leaves me feeling empty.

At the end of the day this all funnels back to something I've touched on briefly in this blog, my personal depression bug. (Oh that wily little worm!) Total diminishment of self worth is a common symptom and I have other ways of seeing myself through bad patches than video games. In fact, for the really bad patches I can't even bring myself to play videogames. But sometimes I get into these cycles where a few of the games I play are feeding me into these cold, bitter cycles of finding dredging up ever more inferiorities and hammering them deeper and deeper into my skull. Through no fault of the games in question, I hasten to add, but my own self-poisoning mentality. But then I get struck with the sense that the very partition between the real world and the game world is allowing my demons to exorcise themselves in that fantasy space thus giving me the chance to be my normal muted self in the real world. God knows how terrible I'd feel if I became the sort of person who lashed out at others because of their depression. We like to think that's never the sort of person we'd be, but I just don't know sometimes.

So that's the sort of thing which bumbles about my skull in this crappy, cold, dark time of year we call Christmas, if you need any concrete evidence for why I bitterly hate this time of year. Also, I've had a cold all last week, so that doesn't help matter none either. But I don't wish to sound like a totally hopeless bitter old shrew or anything, and in fact merely going over this in my head (or spelling it on on digital paper) works wonders in shifting perspective in my head on seeking a healthier dopamine distribution in this silly little noggin. Whatsomore, the positive attitude helps me perform a tiny bit better somewhat. Heck, I just served up the Pure Vessel twice in a row. (Is that enough to take the Pantheon plunge? Maybe I need a bit more practice runs first...)

Christmas 2021: Here we are again.

 You're joking, you're joking: I can't believe my ears! 

It's that time of year again. You know, the one that everyone talks about in the songs and things. Even in the songs where they say they hate it, although are still willing to go and croon about it for three minutes straight for whatever reason. The night after the nightmare before. The single contractual working day for immortal do-nothing-slob Tim Allen. The envy of all of Tamriel's traditional celebration festivals, due right on Evening Star. The thing that Master Chief knew he had to get done first before he 'finished the fight'. The time of year when elder old buff gentlemen start falling off rooftops in Cairo just before a brutal massacre occurs in a split second and a 100 year bisexual vampire starts floating next to a teenage Japanese delinquent. The ideal time of year to find New York city policemen crawling around your vents. And that forgettable day for which every resident West of Loathing dons their well aged spittoon hats and joins hands in celebratory fear of the great cosmic death cow invasion force from the heavens. I'm talking about Crimbo.

But Crimbo hasn't come this year without leaving a good twelve months worth of brutal destruction in it's wake, pretty much touching every corner of society. Whilst this remains a gaming blog, however, I don't have to worry about other parts of society and unless that part of society decides to start a cryptocurrency and the talentless, sludge-like hacks over at Ubisoft start pouncing up and down like starving hyenas. And so I'm free to do that most lazy of Christmas blogs and just talk about stuff that went down this year in preparation for the next one in a sort of giant exhale of breath. Just letting everything out at the end of this year before the start of the new one, like any sensible mud slinger should. Like a final grand detoxification, what follows will be a purer year with a better me and less stories about NFTs, please god I can't take them anymore. We good? Let's go.

And first of all we have that classic update on the problem of the current generation. We're about an eighth of the way through this generation and people still haven't had a chance to adopt it widely because of mounting supply chain issues. Playstation 5s and Xbox Series X's are myths of the most annoying calibre, and I think most developers are really starting to sense that. When was the last time you saw someone other than a first party studio excitedly whisper about the future of gaming tech? No one wants to jump forward to sell their games exclusively on platforms where it's going to reach a vast minority of their fanbase and it's leading to this great stall in technological innovation. But then remembering how iffy the experimental years of a next generation usually ends up being, maybe this new status quo is for the best? I'm trying to squeeze my lemons into lemonade, okay; just like Jeff Bezos taught me. 

Speaking of Ser Jeffers, his little start-up company got out their first game, didn't they? Well, actually I guess it's not their first game, more like the first good attempt. (Let no one ever forget the abject disaster that was The Grand Tour video game) New World is the new MMO of the year and as much as I hate to admit it, the game did make some numbers when it first launched. Those record numbers have staggered a little now that everyone is chomping at the teat of Final Fantasy XIV, but they proved their little experiment has the staying power to be around for a fair few years, so now we can officially induct another morally bankrupt company in the pantheon of influential video game developers. (I like to nick-name them: The Council of Awful.) Of course, for me they'll be remembered always as the MMO that pioneered such a bad economy that it forced their community to resort to a bartering system, and then turned around and said this was how the game was designed to work from day one. (Keep on making eyebrow crossing-worthy headlines, Amazon, you're great at it!)

This year has to have had easily the worst blockbuster game month of recent memory. Every year we have this crazy month wherein all the big releases try to get themselves out just before the Christmas rush, the end-of-quarter financial report and the award ceremonies. (I'd imagine that last one is the very least of their worries) Typically you'll get one of the big year releases be a mess, I can't remember the last time it was all of them. Battlefield 2042 was a practical joke played on it's audience for how bad it was, Call of Duty has a campaign so bad that people are starting to rethink their stance on Ghost's (the online portion of COD seems deeply split on critical reception, with haters and lovers) and Grand Theft Auto released legendarily bad remaster/remakes of their classic games. At least Halo Infinite dropped an undeniably solid free-to-play online mode- ahh, but the progression is so screwed that the team are having to spend their Christmas breaks planning how to fix everything when they come back. (The AAA's really dropped the ball this year, huh?)

NFTs have been a big surprise reveal this year, for their total co-optance into scam culture the world over. It seems they were spawned from a semi-optimistic idea to makes the art world more accountable and rewarding to artists, but that lasted all of one weekend before everyone started slobbering over themselves to turn this into a multimillion dollar generating JPEG flogging venture. Ubisoft have been kind enough to pioneer in this field for gaming (literally the only innovative concept they've heralded in the past decade, and it's this. For shame.) Ubisoft have managed to springboard from their many controversies, outside of the absolute state of their games, to being the laughing stock of the industry, likely not helping the apparent 'mass exodus' that has been occurring for many top level staff over the past year and a half. Oh, and Josef Fares said he'd rather be shot in the knee than buy into this stupid NFT trend, further proving what an industry treasure that man is.

And last but by no means least, Merry Christmas everyone from the Middle Kingdom because China has officially banned Steam. (They literally did it on Christmas Day) As far as I can tell that's a ban for the international version of Steam and not their own vastly reduced version of the platform, but it's still a blow to the many Chinese gamers who just aren't interested in playing the handful of decent titles that are there (like DOTA 2 and CSGO) and would prefer to get involved in this whole 'global community' thing we've supposed to have going on in the modern century. Despite their assertions to the contrary, China's government has taken an antagonistic stance regarding videogames and it stands to threaten us all eventually. I've said enough on this topic before, so let me just return to enjoying my cultural opium like the addict I am.

Which brings us to the bitter end, the longest stretch of nights just off the eve of the equinox. 2021 bows out with an ominous growl and an outstretched hand, promising new delights and worse lows, but at least it's something different. On one hand there's a bunch of super cool games that are lining up for next year, and some of them aren't even going to be exclusives to the crappy Epic games store! But on the otherhand we seem to be on the cusp of some very cringe-worthy developments on the wider gaming industry that are surely going to become full blown ballbusters as the year unfurls. (And I thought that Steam banning NFTs was a bit kneejerk at first. Now I'm surprised to say that was decently prescient of them.) But what's the point of being alive if you're always fretting about the future, I say; so let's just ignore the bad and focus on the now. Speaking of, I have a wall to go stare at for the next few hours by myself, so imma get back to that. See you next year.

Molyneux Malignantly Muddles his dignity

He can't stop falling

I'm pretty sure it's no controversial opinion to say that Peter Molyneux is something of tragic character in a greek play, in that he's destined to debase himself more and more when all he wants to do is change the world. And I do genuinely believe the man want's to change the world. Is he a pathological and compulsive liar? Yes. But will he hide that behind grand dreams that stretch beyond the mere ken of programming limitations? Everyday of the week. Because Peter is a factory of ideas, and sometimes he even knows how to implement them too, but far too often we're left with a Peter who sizzles out before the landing and, unfortunately, it's the missed promises that linger in the mind more than the hit and runs. It just feels more personal, like a childhood sleight. When you break a promise you shatter a glass heart, and glass can never be put back together the same way.

But we all know this about Peter, who he is and why that makes him such an unreliable spout of infomation, yet I think it bears reminding just so you know the depths to which he has sunk so far. Right now I think it's fair to call him a mostly well meaning business man who may have slipped out of touch with reality a while back and never quite managed to get back on the train. He directed fantastic titles once upon a time, but now his name attached to anything is like a death sentence, one a lot more reliable than any of his predictions for what his final games may hold. And to be clear, I don't hold him to the same regard as Sean Murray. (at least, not anymore.) Murray made one good game, for comparison, and tied a lot of behind the scenes talks into out-loud interviews without comprehending what the concept of 'marketing' was. The difference is, it took some time but Sean learned from his mistakes, he knows the team is best served showing what they're close to completing rather than candidly sharing some mild speculation last whispered over the water cooler a couple days back. Peter didn't learn. Peter never learns. And like the Greek tragedy, it's this fatal character flaw that will bring him down time and time again.

It's what bought him to overpromise with Fable back in the day, what had him grow disquiet when he received his 'lifetime achievement award' and act out on his own. What had him try and sell a tech demo as a game. (I bet his developers just loved him for that) What bade him to wantonly overpromise with his mobile app, then again with Godus and now, with the latest big craze. But you may be wondering exactly what vice the great M has gotten muddled up in this time. What strange juvenile delight has captured his perpetually mid-life crisis brain? Prostitution? Drug running? Nay, my friends, something much more dire and deeply dastardly. He's become a cryptobro, or rather, a feeder of these cryptobros, because our man has jumped aboard the NFTs.

I know, I know; I don't wanna hear about Non Fungible Tokens for the fifteenth time this last hour! But you know, I've been hearing regular updates about these things since around about March and I've done a wonderful job keeping them out of this blog until now! But all good things must come to an end and the video game industry loves to taste shoe every now and then, and so here we are, talking about the rampant surge of NFTs in our videogames. Yet I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the industry has spedrun it's way to the single worst possible implementation of NFTs in gaming, so news is likely to only go up from here. (It can hardly get worse) I'm being serious, when the idea of tying blockchain purchases with the video game world was first seriously considered, this was the cartoonishly worst-case scenario we all thought up but never believed anyone would be so mindnumbling idiotic as to pursue. But then that's the reason I introduced Peter Molyneux at the beginning of this story, now isn't it?

Molyneux want's to change things, just like he always does, only this time he wants to break the chains of modern design limitations, blur the lines between game and life, pioneer a new genre and create the world's first Strand-like ga- wait, that's something else. Actually, Peter Molyneux wants to sell you land. Virtual land, of course. His new game idea 'Legacy', will have people (turn to the entry 'Morons' in your textbooks) purchasing NFTs pertaining to ownership of land, upon which they will (and he has been very vague about these specifics) design and sell products that are 'real'? (NFTs is what he means, I assume.) Of course, the economy will be backed by real people and the products sold will be... virtual, I guess? Oh, and you'll be able to rope in others by selling them licences to start their own business selling your product, making them partners in your endeavour.

So essentially what we're looking at here is a sort of plan, or 'scheme' if you prefer, whereupon the first person makes up an idea to sell products and then sells the rights to sell that product to some people below them. Thanks to the nature of the blockchain, kickbacks head upwards so the person at the head will make money from everything that the people below them have set up, and those people will likely want to reach out to contractors of their own. Essentially we'll have made a business structure that resembles this sort-of Christmas tree-shape or a traditional triangle. Maybe even a pyramid. Which means that Peter's newest game will be in giving players the unmatchable honour of participating in this Pyramid-shaped scheme, wherein (of course) Peter and his team will be at the tip-top raking in those NFT royalties. When did gaming become everyone's 'get-rich quick' disposable dishrag again?

It's infuriating, because what started as a genuinely creative person with hopes and dreams behind him has devolved into a a swindler, plain and simple. There's no way to twist this into a good intention turned sour, he's a figure made famous for his creativity repackaging and reselling the idea of pyramid schemes in the guise of a video game. A game which, incidentally, doesn't even sound the slightest bit fun. And this isn't even a product made with actual game fans in mind either, it never is about the fans when NFTs get involved. Because typical fans aren't the one's going around dropping hundreds of thousands on intangible digital assets, they haven't got that capital. NFTs are just bait to drum up a community of stupid rich cryptobros to enter into an incestuous cycle of trading the same NFTs back and forth until this whole bubble bursts, meanwhile the guys lucky enough to be behind these communities are getting their cut of every single transaction without having to risk a cent. Is that laid out plain enough, do you think?

Of course, it doesn't matter what I or anyone else thinks because this has already worked. People have fed Molyneux's vultures over 50 million dollars just in their purchasing of fake land in this preliminary phase before the game actually comes out next year. And doesn't this all just remind you of something? It's pretty much that Earth 2 scam from a while back, with the only difference being that Peter actually has a team that can code so there'll probably be a game to use all these assets on by the end of this. Will that game be total trash? Who knows, I sort of hope not. But then again, considering the nakedly avaricious taint to this entire leg of Peter's life story, maybe I hope it is trash so that this sort of greed strewn swindling doesn't get enabled anymore than it already has. I wish I could say you've disappointed me, Molyneux, but in truth you've just lived up to the stereotype you've built for yourself. Merry Christmas.