Crossfire X

Crisis should sue

Months upon months ago; around about seven, in fact, I remember seeing the trailer for Crossfire X, another game from one of those franchises that you've heard about before but whom always kind of linger at the periphery of own's industry-wide scope. At the time I actually picked the game out as having the potential to sustain a blog, I sometimes collect ideas like that in case I'm feeling dry on ideas, and wouldn't you know it: the only prompt I wrote down on the whole page to give me a brief reminder of what this game was is the same tag you see just above: 'Crisis should sue'. Now it's 2022 and I have to say, I was somehow right on the money because Crossfire X is upon us and of the many FPS' it shamelessly steals from, in it's pitifully bad and mercifully short campaign, Crisis is one of the most shameless. So though I am lucky enough to not have subjected myself to the torment first-hand, I have spent the past week or so just absorbing reactions across the Internet and I'd love to natter a bit about this disaster from my eyes.

So first off, I believed Crossfire X to be a Warface style game, essentially a free-to-play alternative to big shooter franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield, that swaps out the scale for charm. (I actually haven't played Warface for almost five years now. I hope it's still got that B-game charm.) And I guess that's somewhat true in the free-play department at least. Yes, provided you have an Xbox, you can play Crossfire X right now with your Game Pass subscription, or just free from the store page, apparently. Yeah, I literally just redeemed it right now, which made me wonder what the point of having a Gamepass integration even is, until I looked again and realised that Crossfire X offers it's bare bones basic online package for free, but the newly released Remedy Co-written campaign costs money or a Gamepass subscription. Woah, but back up for a second there... Remedy co-wrote this campaign? The Alan Wake, Control, Quantum Break, guys? Well that's something to write home about, right?

No. God no. CrossfireX made a single campaign for the game already without the help of Remedy, and it was all total mediocre bargain bin COD with enough faux-military dialogue drivel and gratuitously awful acting that it would make your typical Steven Segal movie just green with envy. For this sequel (kinda) plotline, Remedy took the mediocrity of that original as a direct challenge, to see if they could make something unquestionable worse. And they did exactly that, well done guys. Seriously, I need to know exactly what Remedy did to contribute to this storyline, because it is burning me up inside. Those guys are storytelling kings to many people out there! I mean, I don't particularly care for their stories to the same degree as a lot of other do, but they've never been anywhere near this bad! All I can think, is that Smilegate Entertainment periodically sent off their script to Remedy to do spelling checks, and that's the extent of this partnership. That's the only possibility which makes sense to me.

Operation Spectre, as the Remedy-assisted campaign is called, tries to marry it's poor military-fiction-written-by-teenagers plotline with some sort of sci-fi messianic prophecy story that combines about as poorly as that sounds, develops with agonising contrivance, and results in a Crisis 'homage' sequence that is so pathetic I consider it a direct insult to the game that they are ripping off! (I mean: 'paying homage to') Oh, and the acting is that special brand of lazy where you can hear the actors speaking with this harsh-yet-subdued tone, as though trying not to wake their parent's in the next room over or something. Every actor sounds like that. I don't know if it's a problem with the mixing, just crappy source audio or simply no one cared enough to try an iota in the booth. Assuming they had booths. (Nothing is a given for a game like this.)

The cutscenes are good, and here's another thing that doesn't compute with me. The animations, the movements, they're all fine- but then the voice acting is freakin' C-tier and I have to wonder why nobody found all of this objectionable. There seems to be a lobotomized head stuck on all the enemies for the way the AI seems incapable of any dynamism whatsoever (Just run to the spot you've been told to and stand there shooting- not exactly a real enemy AI set-up, now is it?) Actual shooting itself is said to be pretty bad, although there's no way for me to confirm that without picking up a controller and- yeah, I'd rather shoot myself. (The game is 55 Gigs, I'm not downloading all that just to see if the shooting is as bad as people say.) And the dialogue writing is so close to plagiarism at some points, that if I were in their shoes I'd have my lawyers deployed and on standby.  

One line really triggered me, and it was an of-hand exchange between two rando's in a level. They're enemies bemoaning how the bad guy General of the game ordered a missile strike on this position despite knowing that his people are there. They have this drawn out chat about questioning superior officers and all that jazz but all I could do was circle back to one nagging thought: This is just that iconic Modern Warfare 2 line rewritten to be less snappy. Do you remember the line about Shepard? "'Isn't this a little 'danger close' for the Task force?' 'Since when did Shepard ever care about 'Danger close?'" It's the same bloody line. They stole it and made it worse! Did they really think no one would notice an iconic line from a beloved entry in a global phenom franchise being stolen? This whole game is a maddening decent into whos, whys and hows.

What I can't understand is this: How did this game make it into the Microsoft game lineup? Seriously, this is an embarrassment. Xbox has been trying for an age and half to compete with Sony's cadre of quality first party games, and this is the best Microsoft can come up with? Exclusive rights to fisher-price COD? Is this what exclusivity looks like under Xbox? Because if not, then why wasn't this game buried under the deepest recesses of Gamepass so that it couldn't draw attention with it's vaguely impressive gameplay trailer made up of entirely hand crafted set-piece moments and surprising quality cutscenes? The profile this release had was the most noteworthy thing of the whole package, and that is owed solely to Xbox marketing. For shame, Microsoft. For shame.

It's not often that we see big 'so bad their good' games do the rounds, and that's typically because of a bunch of reasons, such as that games are usually so bad they're awful and frustrating, when we do get a bad game it's more a shame because you can see the hopefulness behind it, and that most of the titles that reside in that sweet-spot inbetween those extremes are buried beneath the deluge of Steam new release shovelware. So in that backhanded sense I suppose Microsoft have done us a solid by providing this unabashed mess of a game, with money and talent behind it, which is microtransaction strewn, for the world to laugh at. No guilty feelings here, I can point and laugh all day! There is so much more about this game which is borked, including the many lacklustre multiplayer options, but you'll have to see if for yourself from people who actually had the gumption to play the thing because this is a mess that needs to be seen to be believed. 

Ubisoft: Hope you like Crypto hats!

 What can I say except: "You're welcome!"

I see Ubisoft in this age as a fulcrum placed precariously between the next big grift of the entire gaming industry and a tidal wave of backlash and outright rejection that they've only begun to uncork, and for which I'm not entirely sold they can withstand nearly as well as they seem to think that they can. All over the place we're seeing ominous ultimatums from less scrupulous corners of the gaming world start to wax lyrical about the magical 'interconnected ecosystem' only accessible through copious and unregulated amounts of expensive NFT sales for which the publishers will net in stupid profits. (What a coincidence that the apparent next revolution of game design just naturally coincidences with the heft of the CEO's bank account. Who'd have figured?) But it's all just posturing for the moment and rhetoric it will stay whilst the only AAA studio dumb enough to bite the bullet early and be the industry litmus test, Ubisoft, drunkenly stumbles around like a toddler with a chainsaw, totally oblivious to the insanely dangerous tool they wield for everyone around them and themselves, but giddy about the fun noises and sounds their shiny new toy is exhibiting.

It's so fitting, that a studio renowned, heck, defined, by their terminal lack of originality and inability to innovate in any meaningful fashion despite their garish size and resources, would finally find their break and be the leader of the industry for the first time in an age, but with a lazy player-unfriendly scheme that has generated nothing but bad press for them every step of the way. It's like the ultimate rake-step move, you couldn't write a better stupid arc for a stupid company run by stupid people. But here we are; Ubisoft are the steaming epicentre of AAA NFT works in the gaming world and like-it-or-not, their every single move is destined to have a ripple effect on how the community views NFTs and in relation the rest of the world. You might think I'm overselling the position that Ubisoft is in right now, but let's explore that for a second.

So NFT's are an inherently difficult-to-explain concept to your average person, (it must be, given the amount of company heads who throw it's name around despite clearly having no idea what it even is) and that makes it easy to exploit it's image. Those with the money and desire to control (which just so happens to be NFTs current sole audience) can force their latest crypto scheme onto the zeitgeist of today through events like that awful Jimmy Kimmel interview, or paid-for positive web articles, (I've seen that a lot) as well as more traditional methods such as wash trading to inflate the value of NFTs and make them seem like the new age gold rush. ('Wash trading' is market manipulation through buying and selling of the same items. It was recently proven to be happening within the NFT space. It's also illegal.) Left unchecked, the result would be that NFTs slowly take over the news-space with positive coverage and gradually become an accepted part of modern vernacular and culture, where people don't have to try and understand it because it's just there now. Which expands the pool of available rubes for these Crypto bros to exploit. Or at least that would be the case.

But NFTs are a laughing stock. Every single positive article is overshadowed by a dozen negative reactions, and a large part of this abject rejection originates from the gaming space. Because we've been exploited and belittled every which way under the sun, we don't trust a single speck of crap which flies out of the mouths of publisher giants whenever they try their new swindle, as such we could see right through this NFT scheme the moment it was first announced, and some of us are very vocal. Stalker 2 pulling it's NFT plans, that was because of vocal gamers. Troy Baker officially distancing himself from a voice-acting NFT project, both because of gamer backlash and because he was a bit of a chode in the announcement tweet. And Ubisoft's sweetly optimistic adoption of all things NFT going forward? That is being dogged by us to the letter. This backlash gets attention, that attention attracts news stories, and people who read these headlines that might have otherwise been clueless start to realise exactly what NFTs are and usually don't take too long before starting to actively reject them in kind. Like I said, it's a tidal wave of pushback that it destined only to grow, and with Ubisoft as the industry's unwitting vanguard in this endeavour; the next two years of their conduct could shape the public perception of this whole movement.

And boy are they doing a hilariously poor job of selling it so far. There was the horribly dire situation with the NFT gear that Ubisoft was hawking off on, already-struggling game, 'Ghost Recon: Breakpoint'. They wanted to sink that game's reputation even lower by advertising just the most embarrassing collection possible where players were incentivised to turn in their 600 play hour time in order to receive a stupid looking tactical helmet with a unique serial number posted on the side. Needless to say, most of these hats went unclaimed, but as with any grift there were a few who bought into the hype. I've seen at least one community-made tutorial on how to claim the helmet which proves well enough that he, at least, sacrificed his dignity for Ubisoft's gain. Still, first adoption saw Ubisoft losing out from gas prices, and some part of me hopes they still haven't managed a profit even after all this time. (It's a pretty big part of me actually. I'm vindictive.)

But one aspect of that debacle I failed to cover (They hadn't spoken out by the time I was writing that blog) is how the actually hard-working developers of Ghost Recon, struggling to win over an apathetic public, felt about being used like a guinea pig. They ah- they didn't like it. Apparently there's this strange phenomena going around where people who aren't currently rich and so don't stand to benefit from this whole NFT movement, don't at all care for it's implementation. (Weird) This mandate felt forced upon them, and it totally undermined all their efforts of community outreach in favour of toeing some very unfriendly waters. Well Ubisoft is always a company that knows how to treat it's people right, and so in recompense for this kick-to-the-balls, management has decided to reward it's employees with NFT hats.

Look, I'm not- I'm not making this up. I wouldn't think to make up anything this hilariously sad. Like your grandmother going out of her way to buy you something for your birthday that you really don't want and wish she just gave you the money to buy something yourself; grandpappy Ubisoft decided that a flat bonus wouldn't be nearly as dear as an NFT, which has a miniscule chance to grow in value! (Of course, if it does and the employee then sells it, Ubisoft sneaks some of the profits. How is this allowed?) Reactions have been aghast from insiders and I'd imagine that most who haven't yet spoekn out, still haven't recovered from that state of shocked bittersweet admiration of the sheer balls it takes to do something like this to your own employees. I mean Ubisoft just has to assume that everyone has a wallet, is willing to share that address to their employer, and is lacking enough in self-pride to flaunt this embarrassment as their newest plaything on all social media. I don't even think South Park could tale a joke so perfectly twisted.

Strauss Zelnick have recently come out to confirm his definite interest in exploring NFTs, and through him (being CEO of Take-Two) that puts the next GTA in danger, Activision is flirting with the idea and thus so is Blizzard, and I'd wager that Bethesda it adding up it's odds as well. Ubisoft is the sacrificial pig, and if the offering turns sour, they will be the hill that this NFT fad dies on. And so I say to keep on the pressure, the mocking, the abject rejection of all things non-fungible and with luck, maybe, we'll be able to rout the age of 'for-profit' gaming that these ghouls in suits think we're too dumb enough to see barrelling our way to taint this pastime a little bit more. And if the mark of resistance is as simple as pointing at laughing at the absolute state of a studio that Ubisoft already was, then I'd say that's something we can all get behind, no?

So what's up with Star Citizen? Jaunary 2022 edition.

 Different year, same routines.

Another year, another check in with one of the most belated, bloated and beleaguered perspective game titles ever to grace this gaming industry of ours, cursed with indolence and fuelled on the back of inescapable sunk cost fallacy. If you've ever scoured the weirder corners of the web and found yourself utterly puzzled at how such bizarre fetishes as 'pay pigs' can exist ('in this economy?') then to you I say: at least those get to see the hole their money is being thrown down. Star Citizen is fraught with so many projects and side projects and reworks and redesigns and reimaginings, that one needs a four-year degree on 'Forum browsing' with a five year residency just to have any idea what this game is even meant to be anymore. Was it ever meant to be anything at all? Or was this just Chris Roberts' attempt to embark on a forever project that would keep him busy and stave off that sinking existential despair of uselessness that creeps upon us all in our quietest thoughts. Keep running Chris, but every time you pause to take in the scope of all you have wrought, know well that your substance is but vapours.

According to the claims of the developers themselves, this has been a project in the works for around about 11 years of active production and development, and to say what they have to show for that time is embarrassing is an understatement. There's a game, sure; but compared to the scope they proposed and still wrangle people on with, pertaining to the mythical, unattainable, 'full game'; it's a piddling and unimpressive thing. Sure it looks good, and I'm going to make a charitable guess and assume that in the two years since I last looked the thing up it probably at least runs with something approaching stability now. (Right? You finally made it run good- didn't you?) I would check first-hand myself, but Chris is charging a minimum of £45 in order to play his unfinished beta of a game which has enjoyed just above 463 million in largely independent funding. (63 million of which was from last year, apparently. They ain't hurting or slowing down at all.) And... yeah, I'm not doing that. If that were the way I liked to treat my money, I wouldn't have anything left.

And maybe you're out there right now going "Hey, at least they got out something for people to play whilst they drip-feed it into a substantial game." Which is entirely true, they've put out a thing. But I never claimed this whole endeavour was a scam, if it were I think Chris would have lost his nerve and cut away from this project years ago. No, this is a concerted effort from an overly ambitious man to make project that he has been unable to square-in on for more than a decade of supposedly active work. I'm not saying that makes him a bad developer, or even a bad person, but is sure as the sun is wide makes him a pretty pitiable manager. If Chris were put in charge of Anthem, that game would have launched with the amount of polish of your average Steam-store asset flip. He's a wild mind in need of some serious taming and the 10 years he's spent chasing a lofty pipe dream should be a testament to that.

Heck, we're still waiting for this 'incredible' single player campaign to release within this universe called Squadron 42. We've seen the technology behind the project, watched development goals slip out of timelines and into obscurity and still we're no closer to this key pillar of the original pitch. After a decade! This has taken so long, that actors who were signed up to this because of their Game of Thrones fame are now no longer hot-topic talk because that series went down in flames, they've lost the heat of the moment with all their shifted priorities and unfinished projects. (Who are these developers? Me?) All we get are vague platitude of what the project wants to be, or what we'll theoretically get out of the project. Oh, did you know that your performance in Squadron 42 will have an effect an your career in the main game? (Whenever that launches) What does that even mean? Do I have to scroll through forum posts until I'm blue in the face to find some clarification on the fifth page of the 'Why all forms of criticism is actually just as bad as race supremacy' forum thread?

Talk about a segue way, because that neatly leads into the topic that rocketed Star Citizen back into my mind after an era or two of down time. Recently, word from the main development team has been to lash out at it's many backers who have, arguably with just cause, taken the team to task over the years about the constant empty promise Roadmaps that the team have bought out only to reshape them as quarters are missed. Their excuse: Oh, you guys don't understand game development. Now you know how I get when people condescend me, and although I'm not a backer and so this isn't necessarily aimed at me, my empathetic drives are making me a little flush faced- so let me try and explain as calmly as I can the problem with this. By the team's definition (although this honestly reads like the whingeing of Roberts personally, and so I'm going to refer to this as Robert's words going forward.) previous roadmaps have all been fanciful estimations of ideas and concepts that Robert's wants to work on, not promises of what he thinks he can get done. How silly of stupid, childish, fans not to realise this most simple of concepts. Here is the issue with that.

No it's not. Seriously, what are you talking about? Companies have been using Roadmap marketing to push their unfinished 'live service' messes for nearly five years now and the understood definition of these documents is: This is the game plan for all the content we're going to finish, so get aboard now and you'll be able to enjoy all of this in the near future. It's a symbolic gesture to try and make players feel like they're in on the ground floor, make them feel as invested as those behind the scenes, when really it's just theatrics. When deadlines have been missed, reactions have been negative, because it displays a clear lack of understanding for what the team believes they are capable of and undermines the supposed 'trust' they've imbued to the player by flaunting these expectations in the first place. This isn't a matter of debate or interpretation; this is the clear and present effect that the introduction of 'Roadmap culture' has had on the consumer/developer relationship. Retroactively claiming that your roadmap is somehow atypical to that and that players must be morons for not clocking in on this division is not only insulting, it's disingenuous. 

But here's the part that really rubs me the wrong way, and the phrasing which makes me honestly believe this message was at least partly transcribed by a peeved Chris himself. "there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community, as well as to prospective Star Citizen fans watching from the sidelines at our Open Development communication." That is verbatim. I copied and pasted the words themselves because I wanted you to read them pure and untouched. Needless to say, it's taking a lot of self control not to start swearing right now. This, right here, is the height of condescending and even breaking that down seems like I'm undermining everyone's intelligence. But trust me when I say I'm doing this for me, not to disgrace you. So, referring to critics within your circle of consumers (because you need to own a version of the game to be part of the forums) as 'noise' and dismissing them as 'Roadmap watchers', is a betrayal to people who have donated money, time and belief in this project and just want to see it be realised as the best it can be. Chris has no superiors, no producers, no one to tell him to pull up his socks and come together (which, historically, every project he's worked on has desperately needed in order to actually release) and all he is required to do is treat paying members of his own fanbase with basic human respect, and he can't even manage that. They're "distraction"s. And worst of all, their good-faith criticism gains attention whenever a new eye looks upon the Star Citizen project and says "Oh this looks coo- oh wait, it seems they've failed to hit their development objectives repeatedly for years on end. Maybe I'll hold off on that purchase." If I wasn't so sure Chris was a hopeless dreamer, he'd fit the archetype of a opportunist scammer so well.

Everything that Chris Roberts has helmed in the past has been over budget or late, Star Citizen is both, and has been for a very long time now. From here on out, Star Citizen is going to stop publishing roadmaps and focus only on the next update, and were this the proclamation of a proven and put-together developer who has shown they can go through this beta process timely and deliver high quality outputs before (like Larian Studios) then I would have no problem with that. We're talking about a poorly managed machine with a broken navigation module, and now we won't even be able to probably chart when they're going off course anymore because the team have chosen to hide it from us. 'We'll take the free funding money, but we're going to hold off on the accountability, thanks.' At the end of the day, nothing real is going to change. Star Citizen will vacuum in the sick investment dollars, those who wake up from the dream-spell Chris has them under will be quickly replaced by other useful rubes and Star Citizen will continue to miss development window after development window in perpetuity. It's the circle of crappy management, and it disappoints us all.

Can someone explain to me why everyone seems to love 'Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon' so much?

 I guess I'm the one out of ten.

It has been nearly 9 years, we've had three full new Far Cry games and two spin-offs come out in that time, totally- well, I was about to say 'totally revolutionising the franchise', but let's be honest these are Ubisoft games and Far Cry in particular is egregious in recycling itself- yet even today I'm still hearing talk about Blood Dragon like it's some little known gem from a more civilised age. It's like all of those recommended Google articles you get where some website is playing interpretive guessing games with it's titles "Catch this unsung Sci-Fi sequel masterpiece, shunned from it's age, that is finally getting the foot traffic is was denied through a successful Netflix run, before it leaves the platform." and you've got to take that insubstantial word-salad and try to match it with the, always vague, picture to try and figure out what the hell they're talking about without feeding them a quick click. Then you give up and realise they were talking about bloody Bladerunner 2049. Yeah; really 'unsung', guys! But unlike the naked attempt to get a view out of me I see from those articles, for the love of me I cannot understand why Far Cry Blood Dragon is imbued with the incandescent fame that it is.

And just to be clear: I have played Blood Dragon. Heck, I've played every Ubisoft game up until Far Cry 5 when I decided that I couldn't do it anymore; there were so many truly brilliant games that weren't getting my attention because I was fumbling about with yearly multimillion dollar copy-paste series number 3 instead of going out there and spreading my attention. So I know what Blood Dragon is about, I've finished it on console, I've started it on PC about 3 times and there's no secrets in this game unexplored by me, which qualifies me enough to tell you about what it is. 'Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon' is a totally stand-alone DLC/New game to the Far Cry 3 framework that takes the first-person jungle-running exploits of that classic and drowns them in hyper-eighties funk. You have neon text menus, garish palette swaps of the sky and grass, and wink-and-a-nod references and jokes to the targeted era wrapped into every microfibre of the runtime. It's a joke concept stretched out to fit an entire self-contained non-canonical DLC.

That is what the game is and yet everytime I see another annual article dragging this game's name back on it's pedestal to praise it as one of the single greatest Ubisoft projects ever put to code: I begin to doubt my intimate understanding once more. Three separate times I have reinstalled Blood Dragon expecting some mind-blowing rip-roaring experience that blows me away and leaves me begging for just a little more from papa Ubisoft. Three times I've stopped playing after the intro mission only to uninstall at a later date because I remember: oh yeah, this sucks. Okay, that's entirely unfair; the game doesn't suck, but when compared next to monumental edifice of abject perfectionism that game journalists over the years seem to always construct for it: well yeah, then it does kinda suck. This isn't Baldur's Gate we're talking about here for games that stand the test of time, and in fact I've never seen a modern article recommending Baldur's Gate; yet just last week, another there was another "Blood Dragon is actually the last gift that god granted this world before he departed" propaganda piece, and for the life of me I just don't understand it.

Now again, I don't want anyone coming from this saying "This guy says Blood Dragon is awful and anyone who likes it is an ass", because I'm not. I'm all for people liking what they like and in fact it's my express-most wish to identify that appeal so that I might resonate with it too. If I hadn't taken the effort to try Borderlands 2 again and see it from the point-of-view of people who loved that game, I would never have seen past the humour to realise that there was an incredibly replayable experience tucked in there too. I want to be able to do the same for as many other games out there that I can, because falling in love with something is so much fun, and seeing a new light in a game I'd not yet fully explored it one of coolest experiences a fan can go through. (I literally just discovered a new vanilla dungeon in my latest Skyrim playthrough; Wild.) So that is why I am being utterly sincere with my article header: Please explain your love of this game to me, anyone who can; I would be so very happy to share in that love too.

Because Far Cry Blood Dragon is a decent game and all, but man did it leave such a minor impression on me. I think something which taints my potentially fond recollections more than anything is the visual design, both what they were going for and what they achieved. And I'm not talking about the strips of neon everywhere from the skirting of concrete buildings to the bodies of the titular Blood Dragon's themselves, (although that does get to be monotonous stand-out design consistency in the late hours of the game) but just the general palette. All the grass in this game is some sort of deep burgundy or black, the sky is various shades of dark purple or red, the world is forever set at night. Now for a brief mission or two this suits perfectly, you're in a world lit exclusively in neon and neon shines best at night, but for an entire mini-campaign is just start to feel dull and oppressive. When every bright colour in your game is blinding glaring flashes of pulsation, and all else is various shades of moody, the general aesthetic begins to feel aggressive and dour, like what you'd expect from a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a rip-roaring eighties-themed cheese fest.

Then there is the gameplay loop itself, and do I really need to say anything about how this game plays out if you've played literally any other Far Cry game before in your life? It's all about going to outposts and seizing them from the enemy by killing them in your typical ways, shooting, melee takedowns, bad stealth or, if you're really feeling like hobbling yourself, using the enemy animal AI to your 'advantage'. (Not sure how much on an advantage it is watching a lumbering animal get shot to pieces, but there you are.) The only difference is that Blood Dragon has less guns so there's less illusion of choice. To be fair, the team added a minigun to the line-up, alongside a slew of weapons that are mostly all references in some way or another, (Robocop's pistol, the shotgun Arnie uses during the viaduct chase in Terminator 2, etc.) but, and I accept this is matter of deep opinion, I just don't find shooting lasers as satisfying as shooting bullets. Firing thousands of bullets a second and watching them rip vehicles like a hundred tiny fists is adrenaline pumping in games like GTA, but seeing rotating lasers zap someone to death- it just lacks punch to it. And most of the weapons in this game shoot lasers too, so the gameplay is completely familiar to what you know, lacking in the variety you know and, in my opinion, not as fun as know from other Far Cry games.

Then there is the writing and narrative, and for this Blood Dragon has the lucky excuse of "this is all a joke, don't take anything too seriously." Through it's length Blood Dragon display nothing but irrelevance and eighties cheese so that the player is never in the slightest danger of taking a single second seriously, and with minute-a-mile quips every mission you're expected to be at least chuckling from start to finish. So I hope you like jokes about the eighties, because that's what a lot of them are. And if you find the whole '80's nostalgia' thing a bit pastiche and played-out, tough luck because this game is relentless. Of course that's not all the humour, and as a fan of sixth-wall breaking there are some fun jabs to game design to smile at here and there, but I wouldn't call this a timeless comedy force of nature. It's alright. Which kind of sums up my feelings of everything in Blood Dragon. It's not great, not terrible, it's just alright. So what am I missing?

Seriously, the way you see people beg for sequels in their articles you'd have thought this game was a Knights of the Old Republic level masterpiece, totally sweeping players away and leaving them thirsty for anything more, but then you play it and realise that it's just a high budget joke vehicle. I can honestly say that if I were to see a Ubisoft announcement for Blood Dragon 2 in the near future I wouldn't be excited. I would have flashbacks to the 'nothing' side quests, the monotonous-looking world, the increasingly insubstantial main missions as you drive further through the story ('defend the point' central) and I'd just stay the hell away. Not to mention the CRT bars over the screen; there's a design idea that never should have left it past the boardroom right next to 'motion blur'. Clearly I missed the secret 'make this into a masterpiece' button in all of my previous playthroughs and if someone could point that out to me, maybe with a comprehensive guide, I would be so very grateful. Thanks in advance!

Nioh's Elixir problem, and why it's my fault.

 Think me, think!

Recently I finally got around to finishing my playthrough, and consequently my wrap-up blog, on the first Nioh game. If you haven't read it, I was largely complimentary on the raw moment-to-moment gameplay of the game, which I thought was both lively and complex, but not so much about the structure of the game in story, the way it introduces it's systems and it's drawn-out length. But if there is one problem I had playing the game which I didn't air, it was the way this game dealt with the Souls-like staple of having healing items. Namely Elixirs. I didn't go into it because it largely wasn't pertinent to other's enjoyment of the game, because all of my struggles and tribulations with this very system lied on my own disadvantages that I have ingrained in myself after years of playing RPGs in the wrong way. (Something I actively try to stamp out all the time.)

So what are Elixirs? Well, you're essentially looking at your Estus Flasks for this game, expendable mainstays of your quick-item slots that heal you up nicely and restock every time you rest at a shrine. And the drinking animation isn't as much as a death sentence as it was in early Souls games. (You know, when our idiot undead had to check what was in the flask everytime before he drank it.) The twist isn't anything you'll at all be unfamiliar with if you've played any of the ancillary FromSoftware games such as Demon Souls or Bloodborne, the Elixirs are limited in supply. They don't fill up magically and are actually drawn from a supply you scavenge off of enemies- except when they do get filled up magically. Getting into this really means I have to break down another one of Nioh's strangely complex systems so you'll have to bare with me.

One of the constant supernatural creatures you'll encounter across Nioh are the Kodama, little green Moogle-looking creatures that are hidden across each level and which congregate at your shrines once you 'discover' them. This is a great way of incentivising exploration, obviously, with rewards being that the more Kodama you stock up for, the better benefits they can grant you. You can stack up a buff in item discovery rates, Gold discovery rates or, and this is key, Elixir discovery and conjuration rates. You can only pick one, but when you're early on in the game and still learning systems, getting stomped on by every Yokai you see, expending Elixirs faster than you can amass them, there's only one real choice. The Elixir buff stacks on the drop rate of Elixirs, but it also adds a 'buffer zone' of stocked Elixirs, so that when you expend enough Elixirs, a certain number of complementary Elixirs will be granted upon you, free of charge. (Do you think I've written the word 'Elixir' enough yet?) And that is the hook.

Now you have to understand something about me as a player of RPGs; I hate expending items. Yes, I'm one of those terminal potion hoarders, one who piles crates upon crates of  every kind of consumable under the twisted ideal that "I'll use this one day, definitely!" all the while knowing I'm just going to watch my stash bloat up like a drowned pig. So when you throw at me a resource I'm going to expending despite myself, such as a limited supply of healing Elixirs, I'm going to start getting nervous, and everything I work towards is going to be in ensuring my Elixir supply is never in the red. Because if it does get like that, then I won't stand a chance for clearing these levels and then I'll have to grind away at lower level enemies for god-knows-how-long in order to gather the resources for each level and it will turn into a vicious cycle of scrounging up resources that are then wasted and on and on- you can see where my neurosis is kicking in, right?

And do you wanna know where it gets worse? Of course you do- so all that stuff I told you about Kodama buffs and drop rates? They're independent to each region of the game. Which means that the second you move onto another region of Japan (roughly every three or four missions) all of your drop-rates are reset and you need to scour the levels for tiny Kodama again. Suddenly the fun exploration incentive feels like a mandatory chore, the Kodama-sense support-item descriptor becomes essential gear no matter how under levelled that piece of equipment becomes, and never once in the length of the story do I ever become comfortable enough with my Elixir drop-rate to even experiment with any of the other Kodama boons. That's right, throughout this entire game, even the loot-hunter endgame, I had the Kodama Elixir boost running for every mission, all fuelled by a vain desire to never run low on Elixir's just in case the next boss is going to kick my ass and drain my supply. (To be fair, Loot drop rates aren't so helpful in the endgame because Divine equipment only ever drops as +1 and above from bosses, chests and pre-set mission rewards; trash drops are useless.)

So even by the final boss of the final DLC, I was still hoarding Elixir Kodama boons in my Shrine, despite at that point having Ninjutsu that provided endlessly rechargeable regeneration scrolls (they heal pretty slowly, to be fair)  a vampire-health effect on my weapon (it only healed a tiny bit, to be further fair) and a policy in which I would try my hardest never to drink an Elixir outside a boss battle. In fact, my neuroses were so bad, that if one boss managed to cost me around twenty to thirty Elixir's, I would absolutely take a break to go Elixir hunting. This bug got me bad. But here's the kicker, the point where I reveal how far this insanity spread, because by the time I saddled up to the Nine-Tailed Fox (Whom cost me almost eight Elixirs but I still managed to beat first try) I was looking at a stockpile of over 200 Elixirs. And yet I still didn't even consider switching my boon. Yep, I have a problem.

The idea behind this limited healing item is very sound and I appreciate it greatly; you are forced to value this limited-quantity item greatly which forces you to play better, without just accepting damage because you know you can freely heal. Plus, you have an item drop to look forward to if you happen to get an Elixir top-up after a rough run. But combine that with a player who hoards, like me, and you have a recipe for ruin. Everything becomes shrouded in 'what if' and 'just in case', and I get to the point where I'd rather stand and die than waste any of my precious healing items even when sitting at triple digits. When would I have stopped? In the thousands? Tens of thousands? This was one well meaning and decently implemented system totally bastardized by my paranoia.

This is perhaps the one thing I'm scared of in Bloodborne or Demon Souls, (if either game ever comes to a non-Sony platform) that my own insecurity will railroad me into becoming a desperate fretful hoarder who doesn't have it in him to take the necessary risks. And so maybe you can see why I didn't mention any of this in my review. This Elixir 'problem' is borne strictly from my mind, and although I've taken great strides to force myself to use more consumables and enjoy their effects in RPG games (titles like Pathfinder pretty much demand this in their harder fights) there's still some of that lingering trepidation gnawed into my psyche even now. So take it from me, don't be afraid to spend virtual resources in a well balanced game under some false construct of scarcity, because that's stupid. Don't be stupid. Don't be me.  

Stadia's Penultimate act

 Lifesupport: Activate

I have put this off for as long I need to in order to expunge that vile sense of smug satisfaction I've gotten from this news, because one should never celebrate the downturn and slow death of a project people believed and trusted in; but after years of trying to advise an audience that vitriolically condemns you at every step, the smugness feels somewhat fair. That being said I want to be respectful, because I know that there are people out there who really did invest their time and money until this, and unlike with those who dropped thousands on Star Citizen never once caring about how blatantly they were feeding a nepotistic engine of cannibalistic feature-creep gone wild, I can understand and sympathise with adopters. Google Stadia made sense in it's premise, it can from a company with the sort of size to make it work, and there's no sensible reason why it wouldn't be a flagship service that Google sticks behind and champions far into the future until the infrastructure of the world is ready to maintain such a trailblazing concept. But we don't always live in a world of fairness, now do we?

Over the past few days we've been hearing word, mostly derived from industry sources because Google is nothing if not incessantly reticent to be openly communicative with it's users, that Stadia is quietly being scaled back in prospects from being the new frontier of gaming to settling into just an infrastructure that other, more established, game companies use to get into the whole 'cloud gaming' market. So not the worst news in the world: it's not like Stadia is planning to shut down overnight and take all the hundreds of games people have purchased with them, but not the glowing endorsement of health that the community has been longing for so long now. These are people who were promised dedication by Google to creating an infrastructure that wouldn't just rival, but would be set to succeed the big companies of today, shirking the physical aspects of gaming altogether to prove how much more promise cloud gaming would hold. This meant exclusivities, building a huge library of games and even the creation of endlessly ambitious first party titles that would dwarf the ambitions of traditional media software. Stadia was meant to be the future.

Of course the problems with this concept were clearly sprawled on the wall for anyone with the mind to see it; Google maintains a terrible track record for keeping up with it's ancillary ideas and has killed a stupid number off completely unless they become immediate successes. Stadia didn't seem to have any plan for tackling real infrastructure issues that were destined to limit growth, such as 5G coverage and strict ISP data limits. (Not that I can really say I know what Google could have done about either of this massive issues, but choosing "Do nothing and see what happens" isn't typically seen as setting oneself up for success.)  I mean you have to know things aren't heading for a meteoric rise when the biggest story of last year is about how they finally got around to adding a search bar to the store after a year. (To be fair, they didn't exactly need a search bar for the thirty or so games they launched with, but Google took way to long to catch up with that.)

Developers have left the company or been reassigned to other sectors within Google, all first party development methods have ceased, Stadia hasn't had an exclusive on it practically since launch, and to this day, amazingly, they haven't even hinted at the possibility of working on that Youtube crossover functionality they showed off working in the announcement stream. Possibly the single best way they could have marketed this platform, by piggybacking off the (now second) largest video streaming platform on the internet, and they never once got around to it. Sometimes it's hard to tell if Google ever took it's own platform seriously what with how lacklustre everything ended up being. I mean, the only thing worse would be if people actually took this seriously and got burned in the process.

One of the most headscratcher subreddits on the platform, the Stadia Reddit has been very divided on the news that the platform which was meant to be the future of gaming is quietly being relegated to a third-party stepladder. On one hand, for the first time since it's inception, we're seeing people finally blink the gunk from their eyes and see the world for what it is- realising that Google lacks the love and care to stick by a game's platform long enough for it to become a contender, let alone a competitor. And the others? Well you remember what the first stage of grief is, right? I'll let you quickly play through Majora's Mask in your head again to remember. Yes, the rest of the Reddit is deeply entrenched in denial syndrome to a near-terminal degree. I'd question how anyone could delude themselves so fully, but after the past few years we've had that's no longer some grand mystery to all of us, now is it?

"This was part of the plan all along!" Many posts seem to say "This leak is a bunch of propaganda nonsense, nothing is being scaled down whatsoever!" And I suppose that as we currently stand in a state of 'their word versus ours', it can be easy to buy into that belief and remain in the comforting dream-world where Google is your best friend gently caressing it's valuable tiny community who doesn't even come close to paying the bills for them. You know, just 'cause. But then think about what these defenders are actually saying. They're claiming that all of these journalists and reports are sacrificing their reputations to coordinated a false narrative in order to attack a long-disgraced video game platform that no one of the outside even thinks of more than once a year. And their evidence? Because Google Stadia's Twitter said so. Kinda.

Yes, Stadia recently rallied on their Twitter about how they're still dedicated to making games and keeping the greatness of the platform growing, and we know they're trustworthy because of how honest and open they've been throughout every step of this process. Right? And then there's the news of trademark filings in new countries that Stadia supporters take as a vote of confidence towards the platform's imminent expansion. Or it's just an expansion of coverage that will further fit their plans to convert this games platform into a tool for paying developers, as those developers would probably want to reach as far across the globe as they can. But what's a thing like 'logic' worth to those that have spent the past year crying about the perfection of gaming's latest platform being treated like a laughing stock? They've been mocked past the point of rational reasoning; they're running Chaos logic now, baby! 

And so we're left with a state where the Google Stadia team have quietly abandoned it's lofty dreams in favour of this holding pattern which will make it easier for them to sneak some profits out of the infrastructure, even if it won't exactly further the team to the original goal of changing the gaming landscape. I've called this 'Stadia's Penultimate act' because this reprioritisation is indicative of an impending hibernation state for Stadia, regardless to what the ill-informed interns running the Twitter seem to think, that will likely either be feasibly endless or will last about a year or two with no update before Google pulls the plug and hopes no one notices. Still, at least those who've followed Stadia up until now can look forward to enjoying their games for however long that lasts. It's such a shame too. Maybe Stadia would have been able to run an actually good version of Crackdown 3...

The Wolf Among Us Season 2 is still real!

Something like that

Telltale are a studio that tried to do something transformative for the medium and make it sustainable. They took the narrative-based story-game model and moved it on from Visual Novels, and even Point-and-Click Lucasarts games, and move that same world into exploration based 3D environmental... point-and-click. Okay, it's largely the same; but the presentation had pizazz! I'd like to say they did a great job with half their goal, but given their surprise folding a while back it's clear they never quite cracked sustainability. But in the time they were alive they made some absolute banger games. The fantastic Walking Dead games, the hilarious Tales from the Borderlands, Life is Strange (Not directly 'developed' so to speak, but DONTNOD would be nowhere without them) and many smaller hits and misses in-between. With their library I think everyone has their favourite. That one story, with the right presentation at the right time which just transcended the confines of the game and became an obsession. That series you'd needed more from. For me that series was The Wolf Among Us.

Now a lot of that comes from the source material that Telltale based their game around. 'Fables' tells an endlessly enticing 'American Gods' style story of various fantasy fairy-tale characters living in the modern day real world as faded husks of their glorious namesakes. Bums, deadbeats, hookers and thugs; most former princesses and princes plucked from their happily ever after into the harsh reality of a cold world that doesn't care for anyone. The Wolf Among Us, as I recall, serves as a prequel to the comic series, showing us this world through the lens of the Sheriff of this secret community of Fables living in the middle of New York, called Bigby Wolf- literally the Big Bad Wolf from stories such as Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. He navigates a noir-themed world of debauchery and homicide while trying to reconcile the monster he once was with the protective figure he represents nowadays, all the whilst keeping his true form in check.

It's hard to quite convey all the reasons why Season 1 of this game hit all the right notes for me, but I think the biggest key lies in that very first episode. You see, the first episode is dripping the style and mood of your typical Noir-themed world, with long shots bathed in heavy shades occasionally cut with a brilliant stark primary flash, a spiralling narrative of a world that always seems that bit more depraved the further you peel back, and of course, the rugged and hard-faced Sheriff who comes across as the hard edge of the law but wears a large heart on his sleeve. (Although I suppose that last point depends solely on how you play him. Bigby can just as easily be every bit the arse that everyone seems to think he is.) But more than the presentation, I think the key for me came from an ostensibly accidental stunt that Telltale themselves pulled when making this series. They delayed the second episode.

And when I say 'delayed', I mean by a lot. We weren't talking days, we were talking months. And when you have the first episode end on a cliff-hanger like that; you best be working on resolving things post-haste. (I refuse to spoil the ending of Episode 1 because I know people haven't played it and you need to) I remember being in that community and tearing my hair out over the implications of that finale and where on earth the story could go. Torn between grief and intrigue, all from a single episode of this series. That fever pitch which built, like hot air culminating in an enclosed space, just burst through that veneer of trepidation and carried away my heart in the carnage. I fell for the series, utterly and totally, and I needed to know every thing that would happen, see every which twist of the tale and meet every twisted caricature of the fairy tale heroes we all know so well. I adored The Wolf Among Us Season 1. And now we have a release window for Season 2.

Unfortunately it's 2023.

But let's focus on the positives, such as the brand new trailer which shows honestly to goodness rendered footage and it looks good! Really Good. I always thought that the stylised art of the original game made sure that it held up extremely well, but the limitations of the engine running it are still obvious, and making the thing look smoother, pop it's colour saturations better, and use thinner outlines to achieve greater detail for the animations to flex demonstrates tangible steps up. Also am I incredibly glad that the apparent 'leaked screens' that have been floating around for the past couple of years that seemed to show a drastically redesigned Bigby were false; the whole 'mountain-of-meat' aesthetic doesn't really fit the Noir presentation outside of maybe Hellboy. But even that comic used long, thin character designs to offset the general size of it's protagonist.

Also, what a surprise it was to see the creative team moving away from the Grimms Fairy Tales source for characters. I mean there already was a bit of that in the first season, with prominent character 'Bloody Mary' obviously being based on the old children's horror story around... Mary Queen of Scots, I think? But having Dorothy and gang from The Wizard of Oz is a step up even from that! At his rate I'd say it's only a matter of time before Alice Liddel shows up, if such a prospect wouldn't end up being so much of a predictable cliché. Although, if they decide to adapt the right Alice... No, I should stop. As much as I would kill for a surprise crossover between Fables and American McGee's Alice, that's a pipe dream too far even for me. But the point is we're seeing variety, and that may come from necessity due to limited choice, or just a desire to pull from wider source, but whatever the impetus I see the promise as exciting!

And then we have the set-up of the trailer itself. Cliché, kind-of-hammy, but a great reintroduction to simple snippets such as the fact Bigby has the same Voice Actor. (Hell yeah!) The whole 'anger management' setting is a bit eye-roll worthy, although I do find it funny to think Snow herself enrolled him against his will. (Does that make Snow his official boss now?) But it gives us a natural way to show him Wolfing out, and considering those were some of the most hype moments from season 1, (the Dum and Dee scene in the Alley will forever be one of my favourite moments in any narrative game ever) I'm not really going to start complaining. I just pray, in my heart of hearts, that Telltale haven't forgotten about that little story hook which was dangling at the very end of Season 1- because I've been hanging onto that fishing line for too long for them to cut me off and start a new thread. (I'm not asking for a whole overarching plotline, but just a bit of recognition would be nice.)

It's been two years of silence but Telltale is back and The Wolf Among Us is back, I could care less for anything else that studio is working on because this is the flagship for me right now. With a whole year of waiting to look forward too, I'm just clasping my praying hands together and entreating all divine ears still open that this game, of any game, be good; because I really need a little faith in my favourite pastime to be restored around about now. Coming out swinging with such a big sequel like this is a gamble for new Telltale, but if it pays off, by golly, they will shoot back into the industry on a pedestal of success so resplendent it will be like they never left. So the absolutely best of well wishes to the Telltale team, I am routing for every single one of you.

The Book of Boba Fett is over.

 Boba needed a ghost writer

Okay so video games exist and so does Star Wars an- actually, you know what I can make a convincing argument as to why this show belongs on this blog. Here we go: okay, so Star Wars 1313 was the last big Star Wars game to be made before the licence was swallowed up by Disney. Although 'made' is relative because the game was cancelled shortly after the deal despite being into some form of production. Over the years we've heard snippets about it, seen concept art and recently saw a whole gameplay demo reel; all of this building up to the fact that the game was secretly built to be a early-adventures tale following young Boba Fett. Now we have the Book of Boba Fett which is an entire show that seems concerned with reconciling the image of Boba Fett as he existed in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Dave Filoni's 'young Boba' vision from the Clone Wars. Thus, in a way, we're talking about ground that the video game would have helped cover, making this a relevant topic for this gaming blog. What do ya think? Do you buy my excuse? (Spoilers for the whole show coming.)

 

So we're on the tail end of the latest series out of the new Star Wars TV renaissance and I don't think it's any great controversy to say that this series has been the weakest yet. And I found myself somewhat fascinated about exactly why that is, which is the only reason I took to blog on this topic; I tend to come to my most fully formed conclusions when putting myself to task like this. I also want to throw some ideas around about why this series was bad and what could be improved to ensure the next Boba Fett series, which I think is inevitable at this point, really does the heavy-lifting to make up for this narrative dud. Because I would very much love a sequel to this show to bring a new angle to the Star Wars universe that I actually want to pay attention too. New vectors of fandom are nice.

The problem is so obvious that most simply dismiss it straight away, assuming there must be some greater flaw hiding behind the surface and dragging everyone else down. But there's no point hiding it: the problem is Boba Fett. Defenders will prattle on-and-on about how little screen-time Boba had in the movies, and how he had absolutely no characterisation here and so everything from this show is building upon a blank slate, as though characterisation can only be achieved through concentrated character scenes heavy in obvious dialogue and hand-holding explorations. Yeah, that's not the case. Characterisation is informed by action, attitude, presence and even visual design. The original Boba Fett stood just behind the main bad guy, he was designed to look menacing and emotionless, and when one of the heroes was about to be frozen his only concern was if that hero would die because then bounty on him wouldn't be as valuable for a corpse. You don't need anymore than that to know you're looking at a cold, ruthless hunter with low morals and selfish drives. Plus he looks cool. That's important characterisation too.

It's important to identify the character that was, because that image bears absolutely no resemblance to the dull plank of wood which was wheeled out before us in The Book of Boba Fett. I'm not saying this because Boba Fett was presented as a good guy protagonist character, although that felt like a toothless compromise from Disney. ("If he's the guy on the front  of the box, he needs to be nice!") I say this because having a character established to be a ruthless bounty hunter minion for the fascist imperial machine just suddenly become good because he got half-digested by a Sarlacc, feels like we, and by extension the show creators, have missed several galaxy sized opportunities for character development. (And before you 'Star Wars heads' jump on me, I use 'half digested' as a common phrase and not a measurement. I am well aware that the Sarlacc digestion process takes a thousand years and Boba was nowhere near the half way mark when he burnt his way to freedom.) I know now that the problem with this show is the character they actively chose to make Boba and not the writing quality itself because of the two episodes in which Boba did not say a word.

Yes, halfway through this series ostensibly about Boba Fett, the show veers wildly off course to show us what's happening with the Mandalorian. And this isn't a case of 'Catch up with this other character's journey so that we can explain how he naturally fits into the main show's plot'. No. He literally hijacks the show with his own goals and stories that don't interact with the main narrative at all, and you know what? His storyline is better! Boba Fett stretches out the journey of how he became an adopted Tusken Raider alongside a criminally lethargic gang-war plot line over 7 (more like 5) episodes, but Mando gets to explore the aftermath of leaving Grogu, how that weighs on him and interferes with his destiny, and is even given a compass for what he needs to pursue in The Mandalorian season 3. That was just in the first episode he stole. The second one had him pretty much doing the prepwork so that his next series can start off running. All at the cost of Boba's own screentime in a show with his name plastered on the front.

But there was actual character work done during Boba's absence, we had The Mandalorian express his goals and how he is invested in the world around him, as well as why he cares, allowing the audience to care along with him. Picture this alternative reality; instead of the several episodes dedicated to flashbacks of Boba's time with the Tusken's, we have some of those flashbacks interrupted with further flashbacks of his time working for the empire. The brutal, cruel person that Boba used to be would be juxtaposed against the loyal tribe member that his time with the Tusken Raiders was making him and we'll get to connect with that journey. It wouldn't a cure-all to the series' issues, but it would allow us some small window into the drives and motivations of not only what it is Boba wants but why he wants it. We'd see that he wants to put his past behind him, so that the standoff scene with Cad Bane, wherein he fails to win using the vestiges of his old life and resorts to the Tusken tools to save himself (and one really garish jump cut) would really hit home instead of just making us all collectively sad that they wasted such an incredible looking villain.

It looks like in the future we're heading towards a stand-off between new Boba and the Jabba's twin cousins, and we really need some exploration as to what it is that Boba wants going forward in order to make all of this work. Now the fanboy in me, who wants this series to be truly incredible, would want this series to depict Boba getting involved in a brutal turf war against the Hutts that forces him to slowly and gradually surrender more parts of his new-found moral compass until, in order to defeat them fully, he has to descend into the heartless monster he once was. I'm talking going full blown psycho mode, fire bombing huge swathes of Nal Hutta just to get at the twins. Such a shift would have to be spurred on by something tragic, like the loss of a close companion, (Which I don't want to be Fennec, but I literally have no idea who else Boba would be close to because this series showed up none of the person under the armour.) and the result would be turning Boba into the warlord potential antagonist for the Mandalorian franchise shows. But that would absolutely never happen because Disney are abject cowards. Still, I can dream.

I could go into breaking down every single episode and which ways it misstepped alongside parts that did work, but instead I'll just summarise the show like this: It was mediocre. Not awful, absolutely not good, but largely dull. Some of the set pieces were cool on their own, such as Boba Fett blowing up those bikers in the Slave 1, or most of the last episode, but when married back to context they end up feeling like they deserved to be in a better show. I want there to be a season 2, but if it was suddenly cancelled I wouldn't be heartbroken. The Mandalorian, Ashoka, heck even 'Andor', has more promise going forward simply because they have characters with noticeable drives and goals. I wonder about Kenobi though. Seven more episodes set in wild and expansive Star Wars universe but stuck on the barren Tunisian dunes of freakin' Tatooine again? Please no... 

"We've got Bloodborne at home!"

 You're doing god's work

Even now, in this brightened age of ports and withdrawn exclusivity, a few lingering shadows billow then darken more and more. And in that bubbling, pustulating darkness writhes a gem most brilliant, most incandescent, stolen and hidden away from our wider world. Bloodborne, they call it. A game, a masterpiece so say, but one jealously hoarded by the drakes of Sony Entertainment. People cried, hers and ours, to set the jewel free for the masses, to grant that brilliant warmth to lay rest upon us all, but it was a vain hope, crushed with uncaring silence time after time. But perhaps their something of a hope, as lowly and forgotten as it may be, for those of the Desktop persuasion to capture the faintest glimpse of their lost swansong, a peering through the looking glass of the world that could, or should, be. Such was not granted by FromSoftware, nor by Sony, but by an indiscernible talent known just as LWMedia.

Yes, my experience with Bloodborne is so non-existent that I can't even do a decent parody of it's intro and have to settle for a half hearted Souls-spoof. (More of a spoof in language than structure. Hmm? What do you mean I'm rambling? Oh, right.) So people like me, unflinching fans of Miyazaki's work, (the director and the game developer, incidentally) have had to watch by the side lines as again and again Bloodborne is awarded with the 'greatest Souls game' award and praised as 'A masterpiece'. Well, I'm sick of it! It's been nearly seven years now, when will those ghouls at Sony just okay a PC port? And I guess I'm not the only one, because someone whole boat-loads more talented than me decided to pull together and make his own port of the game. Straight up! Only it's less of an actual 'port' and more an artistic reimaging born of a trend that no one could have expected would peak like this.

Going retro has always been a big appeal for developers in the game development space, it allows for a tuning into that ever profitable market of nostalgia. Who doesn't like dreamily thinking back to simpler times where your past self seemed happier and more put-together, and what symbolise freedom from responsibility more than gaming? It's the reason why 2D platformers remain popular despite the development zeitgeist firmly leaving it behind, why 16-bit graphics are a popular visual style even today, and why some genres actively try as hard as they can to invoke the feelings of their progenitors. (Just look at CRPGs) It's this appeal that I think first led to the PS1 style of horror game to become popularized, and it is a popular trend among the more talent visual artists out there. That style of blockish featureless faces and firmly square geometric spaces invokes both warm nostalgia and a feeling of some far-removed distant past full of long dormant secrets. The perfect fertile ground for indie horror.

I think that perhaps the lingering fascination with bizarre PS1 games like 'LSD Dream Emulator' might have played a part in this trend. As if somehow these developers were trying to capture certain shades of that kaleidoscopic experience piece and filter into something concentrated and evocative. And when using a familiar yet strange palette like the PS1 design suite offers, it feels easier to slip into the player's sense of childhood and manipulate their emotions from the inside. That's all my hypothesis on why the trend took off, how we got to a state where someone felt the need to transfer that to demaking games in this style, let alone Bloodborne specifically, is a tad beyond me. Although I suppose Souls games in general, and Bloodborne in particular, do flirt with the atmosphere of horror and horror-like concepts, so perhaps Bloodborne makes a better fit for the demake space than it ever did in it's original state.

The project to de-evolve Bloodborne has been active for quite a while, and there was a time when I tuned into every single update just to see the clever ways that the developer tried to evoke the spirit of Playstation 1's limitations stretched across a Modern-ish FromSoftware frame. The limited character customisation with unintuitive arrow selection menus, the loading screen transitions indicative of much stricter memory limitations, the strangled gasps this dev called the Cleric Beast's scream, compressed into oblivion to match a Playstation's audio capabilities. There's many funny examples of intentional backwards steps in design to capture a feeling of the past, and the purity of this project in general is that it's not driven by some rosy-tinted perception that all in the past was better and that this game would be infinitely more effective in it's mood with this visual flair, but rather just the desire to bring this beloved game back to this period in game development because it means something to some people out there. It's niche, it'll age, but for the moment it's special, and there's something eerily transcendental about that.

Much to my surprise, and you've likely been made aware, this project did not limit itself to the Youtube space and right now you can download this single developer's concept piece and play it for yourself. I've done just that, and can confirm that some incredibly talented work was put into making this feel like a FromSoftware game, as if it's from an alternative universe where King's Field games were 3rd person. And better. Oh and thankfully our Dev was kind enough to ensure this thing runs on modern resolutions full screen, because there's nothing more annoying then having your entire screen smooch itself just to play an old game. Bloodborne de-made is surprisingly faithful, (from what I've seen of the Bloodborne intro, having never played it myself) stupidly well animated to capture the feel of the game-in-motion to a tee (it feels like your just running an PS1 emulator render over the original game, the thing's fidelity is that close) and the analog sticks are disabled so you can only use arrow buttons. That part I hated, god I can't stand D-pad movement.

One thought that kept kicking about as I played though intro moments was "Wow, I think this might be one of the greatest retroactive PS1 titles I've played" because LWMedia went through pains to ensure the pure Bloodborne experience was intact. Heavy attacks and bullet parries, (that was cool to pull off for the first time ever) revenge health-back system, and even Father Gascoigne's fight is here (According to the screenshots, I haven't reached him myself). But of course there comes the limitations, such as the cumbersome menu navigation, and the quick bar menu, crowned off with the necessity to use the back bumpers are camera adjustment controls. It all works, it's just cumbersome; fitting the aesthetic. I also ran into some choppy frames in the larger sections, betraying the range of the engine in use here, but again that's to be expected.

This project is so faithful to the original that I got stuck on how to progress and looked up a Youtube walkthrough on traditional Bloodborne in order to guide me through, that's some dedication to the bit. I think it's incredible that games like this are being made and very fortuitous that none of this has been shut down by Sony or FromSoftware yet. (fingers crossed they can just admire in something incre#dible too.) I know that the creator is also hoping to bring out a jokey Bloodborne Kart spin off sometimes soon, so that's going to be fun, and I think that after a stunt like this just about anything that LWMedia is going to turn his head to next is going to draw some well-earned attention. What more can I say than play the game right now, there really is no good excuse not to.

The Legend of Vox Machina. Episode 2: The terror of Tal'Dorei Part 2 Review

I'll go.

Once again the Vox Machina shows appears to offer itself as a bridge to people who are interested in Fantasy but perhaps not completely up-to-date and on-the-ball about every snippet of Dungeons and Dragon's specific lore. How this will then go on to translate to people with only the slightest of wisp of a care? Well that is the question I really want to explore as I look into the boons and benefits of the new animated series based on the D&D series, Vox Machina. My forced perspective will try to be from the eyes of someone with minimal knowledge as to who these people are or what the world they live in will be like, and my thesis is that by looking through these eyes I might be able to see how viable shows in this vein can be when hosted on massive streaming services like HBO Max. Because that might be the 'Game of Thrones'/'New Lord of the Rings' homehub, but make no mistake, a lot of those series' fans are very much still normies. There were people watching GOT just because it was popular back when it was still good, the kind who got confused about basic plotlines and allegiances whilst the show was still going! I understand that perspective now, it was a lifetime ago, but during? What was their brain doing for the entire duration of the show? So that's the kind of mainstream audience this series ideally needs to break with. Needless to say, that's an uphill struggle.

First off I'd like to say that it very much appears I was wrong based on my limited experience with the show of Critical Role. Back when I was still watching the show, I'd just gotten through the saga of rescuing Lady Kima from the Mindflayers (that would have been very cool to see recreated) and was between major story arcs. Thus I didn't recognise any of what was going on in Vox Machina episode 1, although I should have known that wouldn't be grounds enough assume this show was running on it's own fumes. Maybe it actually is for the moment, but it clearly won't be for long. Spotting the Briarwoods as a tease for this series, a huge plot piece that was being seeded throughout the early Critical Role episodes, tells me that this is more shaping up to be a stylised cliff-notes of the Vox Machina story (with one obvious character exception) which actually frustrates little ol' me. And I mean only me, because it seems I'm going to spoiling some key moments in the adventure by watching this show. But meh, I've committed so there's no backing out now.

Firstly I want to talk about the dialogue and writing, because it's something I've been most on-the-fence about with this show. This is an aspect that couldn't just be lifted whole-sale from the live shows for several reasons, most key of which being that all those live-streams were off-the-cuff and natural, so it wouldn't work just parroting jokes and quips in a more organised setting. Now with this second part of the first episode, I'm starting to see the characters hit their stride and see them beginning the process becoming endearing. Grog is just on that cusp of being the lovable stupid strong oaf, Scalan seems a touch less relentlessly eccentric than I remember but I think they've left adequate room just in case he goes off on any truly wild capers in the near future. Vex and Vax, look I still don't know which is which, teeter nicely between 'sarcastic' and 'straight man', (even if Laura Bailey's chosen voice makes me wince on some of her more drawn out syllables) and Pike and Keyleth are... there. They'll get their chances to shine, I'm sure. Pike has the potential to be the key component of this group mechanic and I want to see that bought to life.

And now I want to talk about something I absolutely adored from this episode, and something which I don't think even the most curmudgeonly fantasy-hating viewer could deny; this action in this show looks incredible. There were some fighting scenes in the first episode, but that bar brawl was very busy and the battle at the end of the episode was more of a teaser; Part 2 is where we get the main course. Seeing the animation team go all out, with the movement of the characters, mixing one giant 3D monster in a 2D world, the cohesiveness of choreography, the satisfaction of impact, the cleanness of action- this is all beyond what I ever expected. This honestly looks to rival some of the more action-heavy Anime's out there with it's mastery of mostly traditional animation, and the effect is that these fights feel great to watch. There might not be anything excessively clever in the writing for these set pieces, but the eye-candy covers that ground admirably enough on it's own.

To my surprise, this Episode actually saw a resolution to the set-up from the intro, which I found quite surprising given the very real potential this plotline had to last the whole series. I mean, part of me is grateful for how heavily the show tipped it's hand in this storyline from the first episode, it would have been torture to see that dragged out for an 8 episode stretch, but the scale of the threat, and even the staging of that final fight, really felt like it could have been material for a half decent finale. That they didn't go that direction is both interesting and concerning. Because now Vox Machina has set the bar they need to top with the series bow-out in order to make that worthy of closing out the show, or else this series might end up feeling like a string of disparate plotlines. (Which they might end up actually going for, it's hard to tell at this point.)

In terms of supporting cast I think the surrounding talent did decently, and have to put my hands together warmly for a Felicia Day cameo; can't do anything nerd-culture related without her involvement. I just wished for a lot more from (spoilers, I guess) my main man David. You had an iconic English actor in your show and you wasted him on an a two episode bad guy? I don't even think we got to hear his voice in Dragon-form, which is bizarre because I'm almost certain that D&D dragons can talk... yeah, there were some really chatty ones in Baldur's Gate 2! I don't know what I have left to look forward to in the supporting cast of thi- wait a second, why did I instantly get chills when I heard Lady Brairwood's voice? That can't be- oh my god, it's Grey DeLisle! They got Azula up in this show? Okay, sins forgiven, I'm absolutely all in.

One character I'm on the fence about right now, and it starts from his design and bleeds into the characterisation just a tiny bit; is Percy. (Which you may have realised after I totally forgot to mention him in my role call earlier.) There's an obvious anime-style inspiration in the characters for this show, with very thin athletic body-shapes, sharp-faces and even sharper hair, but there's still something of the animator's own thrown in there to keep it feeling 'fantasy' in the more European medieval sense that D&D is based on. Design elements here, hairstyles and elf ears. Except for Percy; he just looks like a stereotypical anime heartthrob snuck out from some action-focused Butler-themed Shonen. It's a small, almost unnoticeable, design clash that throws me out of the moment everytime he's centre screen. And then there's Percy's personality, being the refined-one, angrily embarrassed by his peers, which feeds into that 'uptight British Butler' stereotype perfectly. I know that Percy is due to get some more indepth characterisation, we're doing the Briarwoods afterall, but damned if I'm not going to frown in frustration everytime I see our resident gunslinger go to work.

In summary, I found this episode to be a more complete thesis on everything this show could be and I really liked what I saw. Gripes with certain character designs here and the occasionally flat joke there aside, the raw animation talent going to work on this show is absolutely incredible and on the backs of their work alone this has the opportunity to be a simply great animated action series. If the dialogue can slip out of it's comfort zone going forward I could really start seeing this as truly top-tier entertainment, which is more than I ever imagined a lowly D&D show could become. Ultimately I'm going to have to give-in to the excitement I'm still buzzing from over that stellar action scene and just bump this episode's grade up to a solid A, I'm eager to watch more and hope that somewhere ahead of us we'll have that extra little something waiting to shift this show into 6th gear. I have high hopes. Higher than I do for that live action D&D project that's floating around, what are Wizards thinking? We've been down that road before, it ends... poorly.

Oh! So Sony is buying stuff now? Okay.

 Destiny Dark

Okay, now it's time to start ringing those "Monopoly!" alarms, because we are on the verge of something very troubling indeed. It seems I'm not the only who thinks so either, as the FTC are at least looking into that whole 69 Billion dollar Activision deal that was written up from earlier this year, although it's questionable what will actually get done considering most in positions of power over in that country are so uniformed about the world of gaming that they're still trying to figure out how people are fitting an entire arcade cabinet in their little living rooms. But that doesn't stop the actual industry consumers, folks like you and I, considering the impact of having two or three large companies gobble up the world's supply of game design talent and independent studios in order to put them all to work as cogs in some grotesque exclusivity pumping machine. And yes, I know the various promises everyone is making, but we all know how this will really end up going, now don't we?

So in a move that shouldn't really surprise anyone at this point, but which still caught me blinking the morning gunk out of my eye so kinda blindsided me, Sony have declared their intentions to buy Bungie for a little under 4 billion dollars. And saying 'a little under' when talking in the billion sounds wrong, but in the grand scheme of things perspective just goes out the window. (It was 3.6 billion, by the way.) Now my first raw reaction to this news was "Oh my god, Sony just bought Halo!" before remembering that is absolutely not how that works, Halo is owned by Microsoft through 343 and has been that way for a long time now. Still, Sony get another potentially just as huge series (maybe not in number of games but certainly in popularity and potential to compete) in Destiny. And with that the huge purchase bar sort of makes sense. 3.6 Billion for a half a billion dollar-to-make franchise? It seems somewhat reasonable. (I actually don't know how much was spent on each game there, maybe Bungie still have some of those initial development funds left over and this shows a great appreciation in value on Bungie's end.)

And right away I think we can all look at this deal and agree it's a bit- ironic, wouldn't you say? Not in a 'big bad guy about to monologue about the futility of the hero's compunctions' kind of way, but in a 'how funny you ended up going out with my ex after all we've been through' sort of way. Bungie hit it's big stride working alongside Microsoft in order to give the Xbox one of it's flagship, icon-generating, series back in the early 2000s. They were Microsoft's bulwark against the slightly more established and industry-connected 'Sony' of the time, and together they wriggled a place in the current gaming Triumvirate we all still venerate to this day. After that golden period, Bungie moved on to become independent developers working on publishing through Activision Blizzard. Yes, the very same Activision Blizzard that Microsoft just bought! However that relationship broke down a year or so ago so Bungie just narrowly missed falling under the umbrella of their old masters once more.

It's within these independent years, however, that the seeds began to be planted which makes the news of this year not the most 'out of nowhere' twist of all time. You see, whereas one might think that Bungie would cater towards the Microsoft ecosystem with their new series, given the decade of hard forged experience they had with Xbox, in truth it was Sony and Playstation which would come to enjoy the majority of Destiny's love. It's hard to say exactly why this is, but given that the COD series trended to the same way until Microsoft recently snatched it up, I'd put my suspicions on 'influence from Activision Blizzard'. (It was Bobby Kotick in the dining room with a contract stipulation.) Playstation would get early access to weapons, preferential treatment and even an exclusive Atrike dungeon and multiplayer map! That stuff would make it's way to Xbox, but in a few weeks before Destiny 2 launched. (Well thank you so much, Bungie; giving us the table scraps the day before you move out. How utterly magnanimous.)

With this incorporation into Sony proper, it's safe to say that we're going to be seeing more deals like that trickling forward in every substantial future Destiny release as well as whatever game series Bungie looks to make in the near future. (I suspect we might be seeing a more single-player premium-focused brand-new exclusive from Bungie now, as that seems to be the cost of entry into a Sony relationship.) And to be clear, Sony have mirrored the same statements made by Xbox in that both promise neither of these series' (COD or Destiny) are going to suddenly be pulled from competitor's consoles. Not sure if I believe all that, but assuming it's true, this means we're definitely going to start seeing modes, and dungeons and basic game elements, get stripped away from these games so they can provided to the audience of their respective chief pay master's audiences as 'bonuses'. That's just business-based design choices 101; it's inevitable.

How it this going to effect the landscape for gamers in general? Well it's going to make the experience of cross platform users even more disparate than it already is and encourage this fetid sense of class differences between the two that already permeates. It's clear that these tactics are nothing that Microsoft or Sony have marked themselves too good for, and the experience of one side or the other is going to suffer for the cause of corporate mandates. I remember learning of the Strike being kept out of my copy of Destiny and feeling like a second class citizen within this game ecosystem. As in, just because I didn't 'buy the right console', suddenly my money just wasn't as valuable as other player's. A game already lacking in content was now even more sparse for me, someone who loved to go on all the new Strikes. At the end of the day, it's all too easy for some players  (often large swathes of them) to end up as the losers in these territorial bouts, and it really shouldn't be this way.

In Belgium there was a little headline doing the rounds wherein a store that was selling Playstation 5s attached a warning to the isle telling people not of scalping, not enforcing a one-console-per-player mandate, but ensuring people knew that Activision was now owned by Microsoft, and if that would effect the purchasing decisions that would be something people needed to know. It's always a shame when these supposedly huge and confidant companies need to resort to underhanded guerrilla tactics in order to influence players to their consoles, rather than trust in the merits of their machines in what is supposedly meant to be the most 'diverse contrast in console hardware ever in a generation', but it's a forgone conclusion that this is how console makers work at this point. Even brick and mortar retailers recognise and are informing their customers that this is the way these manufacturers are, and we as customers need to be wary.

So the rich get richer and the walls that divide us grow one parapet taller, at least out the other end of this Bungie have had a suddenly influx of an obscene amount of money which they can now wisely invest into new ways of nickel and diming players over event engrams and shaders or whatever this free-to-play new Bungie is up to next. And now it's not even facetiously that we ask: which huge gaming consolidation move is going to happen next? You know, Nintendo haven't gotten in on all the action yet, so I'd say my raised eyebrow is on them. If I were the Big N, I'd be eyeing up Square Enix in retribution for the way they betrayed me back over the original Final Fantasy 7 all those years ago, see how they like making some family friendly exclusives in recompense. But I'm not Nintendo, I'm just another penniless gnat watching giants on piles of gold shower themselves with praise, playing some huge obtuse game of strategy and crushing wide swathes of the consumers as they go. (All of which is fine as long as they remember to chant "It's for the players!" eveey fifth move or so.) What a glorious mess we're all perpetually in.