The Resident Evil 4 Remake

My name is Leon. S. Kennedy; No way ___

So the time has come. Our most sincere warnings have not been heeded and against the best judgement of all the world we're currently looking at a Resident Evil 4 Remake rocketing towards us at speed of the ancients. (Which is to say it's due next year. Guess we're having a game free year for 2022.) At this rate we are absolutely going to see a Resident Evil 5 and 6 Remake, at which point they'll have successfully rewritten all the franchise to fit the RE7 model and they can stop? Nah, then they'll remake Revelations 1 and 2. Then... Umbrella Chronicles? We're well past the point of reasoning with the madlads and Capcom, and only abject insanity can inform their bizarre business decisions now. How else can we reconcile with a world that is threatening to re-release a game that was perfect where it was at. Not because of how it was made, or what it said, but because it was exactly what was needed when we needed it. You can't just replicate that magic! You can't remake it! All you can hope to do is preserve it. And I... heck, I just don't know.

To be clear, Resident Evil is actually on something of a hot streak recently. The likes of which I seriously couldn't have expected after the suicidal leap-into-the-abyss that the franchise was on before this renaissance. After Resident Evil 6 and Umbrella Corps it was really starting to seem like Capcom had lost the plot completely, even after 7 most were looking to one another nervously, rationalising the successful outing as little more than a flash-in-the-pan fluke moment. But Resident Evil 2 Remake? Resident Evil 8? Resident Evil 3: Remake? (Though it was lamentably short.) These ain't no one and dones. Resident Evil is back as the premier name in horror and I'm actually a bit chuffed to be able to say that. Walking around abandoned factories and being jumpscared by various off-brand rips of children's properties is fine and all, but the excitement of fighting for your sliver of health bar against an army of monsters is unmatched. (We really need a remake of The Suffering. Who owns those rights? Midway? Bugger.)

We're in exactly the right flow theoretically for Resident Evil to remake one of it's magnum opi, but does that translate into the real world so neatly? Maybe some products are just that smidge too perfect for any remake attempt and so it should never be tried, and maybe the very success streak in the horror market that Capcom are on is the problem that is going to bring RE4R down. Take for instance the fact that the original RE4 isn't even a hit for it's horror. Sure, there are horror elements to the game, such as the Sewer chase scene and the Regenerators, but the bulk of the game was this miss-match between traditional gothic horror elements and bombastic action set-pieces that should have clashed into a train wreck but instead synergised into- (wait, is this a Hegelian Dialectics moment? Am I ever going to understand that nonsense enough to be able to use that useless philosophical nugget?) 

In some ways the prevailing heart of horror that Resident Evil has been nailing lately is the very antithesis of what made Resident Evil 4 work. I mean just look at that reveal trailer, dour and brooding with a typically PSTD protagonist suffering from his past experience but swearing that this is the time he's going to set it right. All these modern reiterations and new versions of old game properties copy that exact same formula, it's really rather wild. Resident Evil 3 Remake had a tortured and haunted Jill who was brooding over the events of the one game that Capcom have skipped right past remaking, Rise of the Tomb Raider started with Lara in therapy for all of the super natural violence she perpetrated in the last game and 'Deus Ex: Mankind Divided' was spurred by the nihilistic declaration of 'I tried to save the world once, now look at it!'. The failed and/or tortured protagonist is a real edgy and avant-garde approach to take, or at least it is until it's been done so often it's wrapped back around into being a predictable trope again. This isn't going to be our happy-go-lucky, Zombie suplexing Leon Kennedy from prime RE.

I mean just think of what this more serious tone means for the game we already know and love! Can you imagine this 'Punished Venom Kennedy' quipping back to the call "I'm sending my right hand after you" with "Your right hand comes off!"? How about a laser-beam knife fight on an Island after gunning down monks with a minigun turret. (Or did the Monks have the minigun? RE4's craziness is starting to screw with my recollection again!) What if this whole new serious slant to the narrative causes us to more properly examine the premise of Resident Evil 4 and confront, as we've all joked in the past, how this narrative quite literally tells the story of an American Secret Service Agent far out of his jurisdiction wiping out a small Eastern European village because he thinks they're kind of weird and sort-of remind him of zombies. They weren't actually zombies, remember! They were just werido villagers who happened to be in a cult! Isn't that a little harder to swallow with a serious face?

But maybe that's the secret sauce we're not expecting. Maybe this renewal with straight faced seriousness is the tee-up that will make the ridiculousness of the premise and it's characters stand out even more starkly than they did before! How much more incredible would it be if Mr serious, PTSD suffering Leon, was caught fielding clumsy advances from the president's daughter, or getting uncomfortably flirty with his over-the-radio handler just because it's a female voice that isn't Ashley's. (Wait until he meets Hannigan and finds out she's not Asian. Quickest dropped romance sub-plot ever) Maybe this time the writers will remember to seed the player with some precedent as to Jack Krauser's existence so that his appearance holds some vague weight to it. (Have Leon off-handily mention that he owes his marksmen skills to Jack or something, I'm not your parent!)

Of course, new Resident Evil remake means new remake faces, and whilst we're getting what looks to be the same Leon from the previous Remake (and presumably the same Ada) our supporting cast is going to be brand new and photographically mapped to some increadibly attractive face for unclear Capcom reasons. This time we've seen Ashley who borrows her likeness from a Dutch Instagram model and I have to admit- this girl actually looks like the original model a little bit. It's not as jarring as the Russian super model face now stuck on Jill's head, at least. I mean, Ashley has lost a lot of her frumpiness in favour of morphing into this homogenously classic depiction of 'attractiveness', which is certainly going to make her a little less charming to hate; but what are ya gonna do? Capcom will Capcom.

At the end of the day do I have faith that Resident Evil 4 will be a good game? Of course I do, I know how good this new line of Resident Evil has been and have no evidence to infer they're going to falter anytime soon. But will it be the right kind of good, to match the ethereal fame of a Resident Evil game that totally rewrote third person action gaming and the overall narrative tone of one of gaming's oldest horror franchises? I just don't think so. And no matter how polished the game is, how professionally sealed the product ends up; it won't ever live up to what to a game which was as much a movement of culture as it was an entertainment product. is failing to live up to that a point of shame? Perhaps not, but it does leave me wondering how Capcom could be so utterly hubristic as to try. I'll still play it though, why not?

The Last of Us: Highway robbery edition

 Your money or your Remakes

Ah, another day another exciting remake the likes of which  will completely reimagine a game that we hold so dearly to our hearts, not just bringing it up to snuff with those rose-tinted recollections from the backs of our minds, but surpassing even our wildest dreams of what that game once looked like! Who could forget that incredible Resident Evil 2 Remake, or the genre bending Final Fantasy 7 Remake? Even the Demon Souls Remaster-style Remake truly pushed the boundaries of fidelity past their resting point! Truly we're in the age of the increadibly transformative remake! So what's up next? The Last of Us? The Last of Us Part 1? That's... not even an exciting sounding new suffix, it's actually almost insulting in how basic it is. And it's going to... what? Remake a game that was already remastered for the last gen? Why? What can you possibly bring to the game that wasn't already there? Is this another 'technical remake' where everything is functionally the same but they had to create it from scratch on a new engine? I'm feeling like it is.

Not to pour water on the people out there who are obviously going to be excited about this, but this feels kind of lack lustre. I know there will be fans, people would give their first born child to save The Last of Us 1, afterall The Last of Us Part 2 has people who sing it's praises to this day even with the numerous garish and whole-hog-fisted thematic choices that stink of 'look how clever and artistic I'm being!' (Yes Neil, you had a boss fight against two people wielding a Hammer and Sickle, truly your intellectual ingenuity knows no bounds.) Of all the games that really need a remake around about this time in the industry cycle of trends with Resident 4 and Knights of the Old Republic on the docket, does The Last of Us really deserve a place on that list? Is it going to earn a spot? I doubt it, somehow.

And it's not the only piece of Last of Us news which fell a bit flat. There's the show which, again, looks like actors in dress-up rather than anything with a heart and soul of it's own. And maybe that's the taint of having endured the abysmal Halo TV series which is making me see things that way; that show could convince me that the Godfather movies were on the same level as The Room which it's mind-addling awfulness; but I'm just completely not sold on this show and why it has to exist at this point. Then again, I have admitted to feeling that way about pretty much every videogame adaptation in production. Metal Gear, why? Mario- okay that casting still makes me chuckle so that might be entertainingly weird at least. Yakuza- wait is that real? Damn it's just talks about prospective production studios right now- that would be amazing, that's the only adaptation I approve of!

At least there's the The Last of Us factions game coming out which is, thank god, new content. It is ancillary universe stuff for a world which I don't necessarily think warrants genuine building beyond the trails of its title characters, but maybe I'm looking too critically at things. (I have a tendency to do that from time to time.) To be fair, The Last of Us was one of those games with a surprisingly decent multiplayer mode, and whilst we'll never get a full game adaptation of Max Payne 3's excellent multiplayer, this makes a decent enough consolation prize. Oh but here's a special bit of news; that Last of Us remake is coming to PC! Hark? Well that's such great news I can overlook the unnecessariness of it's existence. In fact, heck I can even justify it! Yeah, the original game was probably too tightly wound for a decent port, this remake was the only way the rest of the world would see a decent build of the game. Yes, this had completely turned the news around and there's nothing which could now put a damper on- wait, it's how much?

Okay. We need to have a chat about the utter SHENANIGANS that Sony Entertainment Studios is grinding on these days, because it has to stop. You too, Square Enix, don't think you can slink away with your head down and get out of this, you both have some explaining to do! What, in the stinking cursed depths of Merlin's soggiest posing pouch, do you think gives you the right to try and force the gaming industry to up the standard price of new games up an extra $10? Tell me true, because I don't wanna hear any of the lies again. I'm done and tired with the cow waste, now I wanna hear the facts! Because let me tell you, one and all, that there is quite literally no publicly presented excuse for this pathetic attempt at a price hike that can withstand against the slightest scrutiny of a critical eye, and I'm about done with stuffy suited saps telling me otherwise.

What's that they like to tell us? "Oh the price of video games hasn't risen with inflation for decades, it's just about time!" That's bull, plain and simple. If the price of games hasn't gone up in all that time then what the heck are special editions? $100 Collectors Editions? DLC? Microtransactions, subscriptions, lootboxes and all the other litany of extra revenue sources that can make a single game drain three figures worth of income out of some players? Whatsmore, how about a game that just came out, Diablo Immortal, that skewers itself on the pay-to-win spike so far that it turned the acquisition of power into a paid chances game where speculators have estimated it could cost around $100,000 to max out a single character. Don't turn around and tell me there were $100,000 games back in the 90's because there wasn't and you'd be arguing completely in bad faith.

And then there's the big one; oh games are so expensive, woe is us! That sounds a little bit like a *you* problem, not a consumer one. The trend of AAA development is to sink itself into this constant game of one-up-manship that just doesn't work with a qualitative metric such as art. Just take a look at modern movies and the stalemate they've met where pure spectacle films are reaping diminishing returns; this journey isn't sustainable. These games companies build themselves into a money sinking model and then try and punish the consumer for their own problems by charging extra for the games. No- this solution starts at you. As the market becomes more saturated with competition that is not the time to start upping your prices under the delusion that it makes you seem more valuable; it makes you look like an opportunistic arse, which may be truer to the point than we know.

$70 for a game is just too much, plain and simple. This industry makes literal billions and it sure doesn't sink all of those funds into development, not even close; so Sony and Square can get out of here with their silly excuses and justifications. And to try this on a remake- again! I can't believe I'm saying this, but these companies have somehow overtaken NINTENDO for the company that exploits it's legacy properties the most, because at least the big N only charges normal full price for twenty year old games. If you let them have this, give up and slap down a purchase, make no mistake that they will take a mile. What they want to establish is a sliding scale where games become steadily more expensive and we have the opportunity to buy less of them. I don't even want to get into the general world economy and wage stagnancy because I'm no economical professional and clearly neither are these games companies with the utter nonsense they're spewing! Nice try, Sony; but I think I'll look elsewhere for my fix. 

Fallout New Vegas Dead Money Review

 You heard the stories of the Sierra Madre. We all have.

The Fallout New Vegas experience remains on of my most cherished in all my long years of gaming. Seriously, I rate New Vegas as my second favourite RPG of all time, and a lot of that comes down to the DLC which launched after the game did. I played through each one as they came out in the order that they did, and fell head-over-heels when I realised that just as there was a great and sprawling narrative to be told in the New Vegas main game, there was a mysterious and personal through-line stringing together the DLCs. Like an episodic adventure full with brand new journeys within my most favourite Fallout game ever, how could I not just adore that? And the first DLC in that line was one which gets a lot of slack from people for the way it handled- well, just about everything. That DLC was called: Dead Money.

In my recent playthrough of everything New Vegas, I took the time to sit down and enjoy the full breadth of the DLC to figure out if I still found them all as endearing as I did and perhaps uncover what it was I liked and/or disliked about them. In doing so I feel it's important to mention that I was more than familiar with most of these DLCs beforehand, having played Dead Money countless times, Honest Hearts a handful of times, Old World Blues exactly three times now and The Lonesome Road now twice. I know what I'm talking about with these blocks of content, so try and bare with me as I compare each DLC not just with the base Fallout game but the other DLCs because unlike with some other Fallout game's offerings, each DLC is substantial and distinct enough to stand for it's very own merits. (Of course, I'm not including the pre-order bonus content in that metric.)

That being established, I think I'd have to say that Dead Money is the most distinct from the four Vegas expansions. Whereas the other expansions explored different themes and even styles of exploration design, Dead Money was the only one that tried to create a different style of gameplay; and that might just be one of the reasons why Dead Money usually ranks as people's least favourite of the DLCs. Right from the get-go Dead Money takes every bit of power that the player has gathered up until that point in terms of equipment and weapons and stuffs them in a world of total-death traps, horror-style patrolling monstrosities and a hanging cloud of suffocation and erosion. The Spanish styled tourist villa of the Sierra Madre is full of grim shadowy streets and sturdy 'Ghostmen' who can take down even the most experienced Couriers fairly quickly. The very premise is tipped to encourage and reward a stealthy style of play.

Now stealth is a bit of an iffy topic when it comes to Fallout, on account of the fact that it's never been the most fleshed-out or well rounded mechanic relying on fiddly line-of-sight equations influenced by a stealth score stat with an unclear specific effect on you, a totally esoteric sound-generation system which can betray your position from several feet away when completely cloaked and a total lack of decent silenced weapons which means that most of the time the moment you take out one solitary guy the rest of the area descends upon you like it's 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. So you can imagine how a DLC which prioritises and lionises those extremely rudimentary stealth mechanics is going to have some trouble winning fans right from the get-go. (Seriously, even Skyrim has better Stealth, and Skyrim stealth is not a solid measurement for great Stealth.)

The narrative of Dead Money is straightforward and effective, as it tells a story of greed through the lens of the past and present, having the player being kidnapped and forced to work alongside other captives in a heist plot to plunder old-world technological secrets for a megalomaniacal former Brotherhood Elder, Elijah; all the while picking through the remains of an old world resort built in vapid reverence to some long-dead starlet and corrupted by vindictive passions and betrayal. Both narratives make use of a very truncated cast of characters to what you might typically expect in a weighty expansion DLC, which allows for adequate exploration into who everyone is and why they fell into Elijah's trap, or for their own dark desires, in the first place. There really is a great cast of characters and personalities here who are forced to work together against their better natures, and the way in which the player interacts with them does, in fact, have a bearing on their endings which makes talking and learning from them significant.

I particularly like Christine, a woman who has had her vocal cords irreparably damaged and thus has to communicate entirely through hand signals that are described in the text boxes and need to be interpreted using the intelligence based stats of the player.  And Dog/God the DID suffering Nightkin whom the player can choose to exploit for his brute strength by evoking the Dog personality, or attempt to repair his broken mind through synthesis and shotgun psychology. Dean Domino always rubbed me the wrong way as a pretentious ass who thinks himself the smartest person in every room, but so he is meant to. He was written to come across like that and he does so perfectly. And learning the story of Sinclair, Dean and Vera presents a glimpse into the exorbitant extremes of the wealth divide in pre-war America that we don't typically get to see in the Fallout universe; and their little three-way gambit of, admittedly rather transparent, lies and deceit makes for a great story in it's own right. (Even if one of the most pivotal parts of that narrative is a tape that has been bugged since the DLC launched and was ever fixed.)

Elder Elijah is, of course, the big focused entity throughout this story, being the chief driving force and antagonist of Dead Money, and his performance as this neurotic tyrant lost in his own world of brute solutions to nuanced situations works wonders to flesh out an interesting figure from the original game's wider lore. Elijah is mentioned in the Brotherhood section of New Vegas, and in fact Veronica herself had a great connection with him when she was growing up, as such Dead Money feels like a great exploration of the New Vegas world by allowing us to follow the journey of this important lore-wrapped character and see the life behind the accounts of others; it slaps flesh on those bones. I only wish there was more of an interaction between the main game and the DLC in that we might just get the chance to at least mention to Veronica that we found her girlfriend. I mean we get to talk all about Elijah but Christine is off the table? What is the Courier supposed to be too stupid to put two and two together or something? 

The actual worldspace of the Sierra Madre is vastly different to anything from Fallout prior thanks to the Latin influenced architecture, as well as the general world makeup of narrow streets and tall buildings creating this sense of being a rat trapped in a plaster-wall maze. Focusing on stealth and a horror-adjacent atmosphere allows Dead Money to have very different pace to the rest of the game which is usually very run-and-gun. You need to be stealthy, pay attention to radio transmitters in the environment that might prematurely set off your explosive collar and scavenge around clouds of deadly erosion clouds for small caches of limited supplies. There's not such a lack of supplies that you'll be going wanting for ammo and dodging hoards like this is Resident Evil 1, but there's just enough scarcity to make you conscious of what supplies you do spend in each fight, feeding into the background idea of survival that the team wanted to highlight.

All that is a bit undercut, however, by that whole 'cloud of death' thing which hangs over the villa. So this cloud is all over the shop, as in whenever you're outside your subject to its effects, and that effect is the player losing health periodically. The drain is slow, but it's present enough to make the player constantly feel like they're on a clock and need to be speeding about even when every other element of this DLC's design is telling you to slow down and sneak around. Now I'm lucky enough to never have been effected by this simply because every time I've entered Dead Money it was after getting the expensive Monocyte Cell Breeder Sub Dermal implant which provides a passive health regen effect that actually perfectly counteracts the cloud drain. (In essence, the cloud just nullifies my passive regen.) But that shouldn't be a requirement for playing the mod. I'm not entirely sure what sort of environment the poison air was supposed to create for Dead Money, but It did not gel with the rest of the mod whatever they intended for. 

The climax of Dead Money is, for me, iconic as one of those moments you always go back to when remembering your own playthrough, both for the achievement of the designers in making a great set-piece stand-off against a character built up both in the main game and throughout this DLC; (their ties to the lore makes the encounter that much better) and the novelty of the community coming together to totally undermine the thematic message. The copious amounts of wealth stuffed at the end of the Sierra Madre vault is supposed to be left behind, as the resolution of the narrative preaches the virtues of letting go, letting go of revenge, of destructive ambitions and of consuming greed; showing you well the consequences of those that ride those dark attribute to the bitter grave. But in comes the community with the 'but I mean, if you're clever about it, you an totally tiptoe around the automatic detection markers get all those gold bars.' I always love those moments when the artists are leapfrogged by their fans.

And the final note of Dead Money not only features on of my favourite monologues of the franchise, one which I have parodied multiple times on this blog, but also the pilot spark for my obsession with the DLC series of New Vegas in all of those 'hints of the future' slides. It really was risky for the team to advertise their next adventure within the endings to this DLC, and it's something they do a lot more subtly in proceeding DLCs, but I think the payoff was like a wildfire amidst the community. Everyone loves to feel like their story is building to somewhere important and being given free reign to speculate is like feeding fans a clove of catnip; they go wild for those opportunities! The choice to present the future of the DLC series as 'The battle of the Divide' was a genius use of folktale presentation that imbued mythical reverence on the character of the Courier, elevating their story to legend. I credit this alone to the reason why The Courier is such a fan favourite character among all the Fallout protagonists, we got to hear and then play out the path of his living legend.

Dead Money has it's obvious drawbacks when it comes to honestly ill-conceived gameplay design choices, but aside from that I honestly think this DLC is still a shining example to the whole expansion content practise. It changed up the flow of gameplay significantly enough to make the player shift up playstyles they'd have tackled everything else in the game with, it presented an environment that was designed and shaped unlike anything else in the game, it gave us a great and varied cast of characters with intertwined and effective narratives that feature multiple endings and it departed on an exciting wistful note for the future. My only real regret is the fact that upon finishing the DLC there's no way to revisit the Sierra Madre, which makes getting all the collectibles and finishing everything available on the first run a sort of necessary ritual I have to go through each time I play. For all that in consideration, I would give the Dead Money expansion a B- Grade in my arbitrary marking system, with a recommendation seal of course, but everything associated with New Vegas gets my recommendation so that much is as given. I think it's reputation is a little unearned in it's ferocity and it still stands as a great example of Fallout content to this day. Everyone should play Dead Money at least once.

Delay your game

 This one simple trick will solve 90% of broken games! Publishers hate it!

Is your game shaping up to be a bit of a disappointment, or even an outright humanitarian disaster the likes of which could sink the income of a third world country? Are you beyond the help of 6 or so months of touch ups, but are clutching to the vague promise of 'this does not represent the final game' as though it's a study chunk of flotsam you can ride out of any and all troubled waters? Has your fanbase taken a look at the work you've been doing, turned around and said "This looks bad, I don't want to play this."? What can one do in such a scenario, heading towards the lips of a waterfall with no embankment to save them? Well, you could grab ahold of that jousting rod of saviour that's constantly jabbed in your face at all times, and delay the game. That's right! Just take a critical assessment and say "This could use an extra year in the oven and we've evolved enough as a society that the public are going to be okay with that, and once I tell investors how much more they stand to gain with the release of a finished product; they'll be okay with it too. So what's actually stopping me?"

I think too many developers lock themselves in on a deathmatch to a disappointing release even when every sign on the walls, on the their palms, in the blinking and glittering of the Stars themselves, prophesises a catastrophe. It doesn't get much more blatant then uploading that all important 'first look' trailer less than half a year until launch and facing the resounding feedback of "This isn't good and you can't fix this by the release date you've offered". As a triple A studio, or at least a studio with triple A backing; there really shouldn't be a point where such a proclamation doesn't offer itself as a life line to get you out of bother. You can afford to delay the release, you can afford to get better talent to spruce up the wanting areas, you can afford to act upon criticism before the release of the game in order to shore up those chances of success; you just need to have the humility to recognise a brick thrown at your presentation as a clear indication that things aren't going to plan.

 

First I'll call to the stand 'Gotham Knights', to serve as a relevant witness that some games just aren't there yet. Gotham Knights had it's first extended gameplay trailer since the reveal just recently and the feedback was decently unanimous; widespread mocking and condemnation. Although this game itself isn't a direct sequel to the Arkham games and I don't even think the same team is working on it (That team is handling 'Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League') there's no doubt that this new team are trying to springboard off the Arkham success in order to launch their title. It's called 'Gotham Knights' for goodness sake, they knew what they were doing! But when you piggyback off another brand for recognition, that springboard becomes a static state for comparison, and if you end up looking wanting people are going to crucify you for it.

The Arkham games were triumphs of storytelling, of combat action gameplay, of exploration and of visual design. Gotham Knights looks good so far, and the story they're stealing from is said to be a good one, but everything else is up in the air. The combat and exploration doesn't hold up to a game from over half a decade prior, and that should be something you'd be ashamed of. The animations don't flow as well, the movement is clunky, certain characters have slow and wanting movement suites, the enemies don't have complimentary diversity to them, the world navigation is ugly and disconnected from the makeup of the world layout- it's just a unfocused jack of a few trades and master of absolutely nothing so far. It needs a delay to polish up the gameplay significantly, and we're past the point of saying 'Oh well they've already done the movement and general feel of combat so there's only so much the team can do.' No, that's not good enough anymore. There's way too much choice of games to play for a triple A title to rest on the 'this is the way things are, take it or leave it' bed it's made for itself. Delay, rework; rip out the animation framework and start from scratch if you have to; otherwise this coming downfall will be your fault alone.

Cyberpunk 2077 is apparently living rent-free in my head, but so it should when it exists as such a prime example of why delays can be helpful. Now Cyberpunk never had the possibility of living up to it's own embarrassingly high expectations. It set itself up to fail, that much is a given. But the product we got could have least have arrived with some polish if CDPR had gone the highroad and delivered the game 'when it was ready' like they posited all those years ago with all the gall of a proud pelican with crossed talons behind it's back. Fast forward all these months later and CDPR have just about managed to squeeze the thing into semi-working shape, and now it seems their extended DLC plans have had to be scrapped in favour of a single questline DLC which will be the last project on that engine before they switch to Unreal entirely. (unless they remake Cyberpunk entirely in Unreal, that means fans are only getting the one DLC.) Now perhaps the broken early launch was strategic in order to give CDPR a problem it could 'fix' whilst conveniently forgetting how the breadth of the game they promised isn't even possible with the tools at their disposal, but I'm no conspiracy theorist so I'm just going to chalk this up to bad management who don't know when to pull the breaks on the hype trains.

Sonic Frontiers presents itself as another very topical example of exactly what I'm talking about here. A game that very much is not even approaching it's ready state and yet is due to land before the end of the year. It shouldn't, it isn't ready. Everyone can see that. But does Sega acknowledge our scepticism? Hell no, they throw more fuel on the fire whilst the community stands there aghast waiting for someone to do something. This is an opportunity to totally rewrite the Sonic landscape and create a new era of the franchise. Now it's pretty obvious from what we've seen that Sonic Team lack a game director imaginative and/or competent enough to actually go that distance, but at the second place prize would be an alright enough game that we can waste some time with; and what we're seeing right now isn't even going to scratch at that. Sonic Frontiers needs a miracle, and miracles take time to conjure, time which can be earnt with a delay.

And it's not as though delays are unheard of in the modern triple A space. Halo Infinite was a game that looked rough as all heck when it was first revealed to the public in a congested gameplay snippet and you know what- the team actually acknowledged the roughness of the game and went back to the drawing board. What they came back with was a Halo good enough to be considered the best of the current era of Halo games, which maybe doesn't mean all that much since there really isn't that much stiff competition to the title; but it's an accolade nonetheless. And whatsmore it proves that delays do happen and they can work! Starfield is also getting delayed as it was apparently heading for a disaster, and we don't yet know the outcome of that push back but we can safely say that whatever we eventually get is going to be better than what we would have had.

There simply is just no sensible reason to zoom into a rush job in the modern age of game development, not when the market is as flush with competent alternatives to literally every genre of game in existence. Fumble up on your face and people won't stick around to see the trainwreck, they'll move onto the next game which stuck their landing. Timing a release is important, no doubt; but we're past the age when releasing a mess and nursing it to working condition is a viable avenue to success. It's time consuming, reputation destroying and isn't even a guaranteed success. (Remember Anthem's execution) So game companies need to normalise the practise of delaying their games when it's needed, taking the time where they can and dropping the best possible first day product they can muster. Just like how I delayed dropping that Miyamoto quote which is apparently misattributed. (I have the restraint of several saints.) 

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

 There are no strings on me

Spain. It was Spain, I'm a dumbo. Let that be a lesson to everyone not to trust me when it comes to identifying the visual culture of a new video game world. I think Spanish is Italian; I'm a failure in the eyes of visual art design. And picking 'Spain' makes so much more sense too. In Game Freak's journey to map out the entirety of the human world within the Pokémon universe the team have already done England and France, it's only natural they hit on Spain and maybe even Germany next time. (What's the DLC going to be, I wonder? Catalonia?) But, of course, we musn't forget that when the time comes for the inevitable mainline Pokémon (MMO?) in Russia, the frozen northern wastes must be known as Siberia. They cannot change it. They can't 'Pokémon' it up. They've backed themselves into a corner. We will never forget Game Freak's explicit screw-up in naming Siberia; there's no taking it back now; buddy!

So Pokémon is flying back at us with a full new era of legendaries, professors, rivals and a thinly veiled marketing ploy to sell twice as many games that we all just seem to accept now because it's the way that Pokémon have always done it and I guess always will. Seriously, it's become more than a little weird that the whole 'dual game' thing still holds any water, and now we've getting to the point where certain characters are becoming version specific. Sword and Shield had two Gym trainers that switched up completely depending on your copy of the game and Scarlet and Violet is going to shove two impressive young professors in our face that are thematically dressed around what I can only assume is the alchemically-linked theme of this era; past and present. Sada is the female professor with her rural barbaric garb under her lab coat and Turo is the male professor with his futuristic torn-style shirt. Apparently Sada is derided for 'Pasada' which is Spanish for Past whilst 'Turo' is from 'Futuro' which is self explanatory.

This theme of 'past and future' bleeds into the designs of the legendary Pokémon themselves which appear to be these different breeds of gecko lizards. Koraidon, the fire dragon from Scarlet, boasts big plumes and large flowing eyebrows, somewhat indicative of old mythical Chinese Wyverns, whereas Violet's Miraidon, the water dragon, doesn't even have legs, but rather two jet engines that compliment the lighting wisps of hair and neon chest highlights. (I suspect this may be a mythical tri-type legendary, Electric, Water, Dragon; which would make it absolutely busted for competitive play what with all those resistances!) We can't say whether or not this is going to tie in which some sort of time influencing story, perhaps wherein we even travel to the distant past, but we'll certainly get to explore the concepts of looking behind and ahead in our story. Similar to the depiction of the roman god Janus, to look back and forth to inform the present, I'm sure there's some sort of alchemical context mixed in there somewhere.

And perhaps in a meta sense that reflects on the spirit of the game itself, keeping the traditionalist Pokémon set-up of young kid going on an adventure around their home country, and mixing it with the future that the series is heading for; open world and multiple players! Leading off from Legends, we're going to be able to explore this new map with little to no overarching restrictions on how we traverse the land and how we position our camera; which sounds a little embarrassing to get all giddy about in 2022, but us Pokémon fans take whatever wins we can score. There's also apparently going to be proper 4 person co-op which seems to allow players to explore the game world independently from one another and meet up in order to, presumably, battle their finds against each other. There's no word yet on what actual functionality this will provide. Is the game built to accommodate four people and will the narrative actually recognise them or is this just a lazy feature to slap on to the box? Do the four players join another game or just sync their game world up with three others? So many variables and you can take none of them for granted when dealing with the traditionally backwards developers at Nintendo. (I think you really have to strain yourself to call Nintendo the 'best game company' in the world, what with how they hold themselves and their partners back so often.)

These are all great steps for a Pokémon game but there are still considerable more considerations I need for a truly next generational experience that needs to be met. For one, I hope that Game Freak have learnt from their experiences with the Isle of Armor and know that they need to create recurrent content that validates all the play space. Give players a reason to travel up and down the open world throughout all their playtime, rather than just funnel themselves where all the newer levels are as has been typical for their Pokémon games in the past. They could have different breeds of Pokémon move across the map with time of day or year, or throw in collectable nodes that respawn periodically and are placed all across the map. Those are basic requirements and there really should be more reasons to visit this whole map with the same enthusiasm at level 1 that I do when all my team are level 100.

The frame of the narrative should reflect this open world design philosophy too. The old school set-up of 'child travels from gym to gym to beat them all' works fine with the old design, but it needs to be cut short here. I propose there needs to be a central institution which calls the player back to it regularly such as a school or academy, and major boss events are either held there or get dynamically introduced across the world. The mystery of discovering the secret of some powerful new creature is far more alluring than 'kid wants to become the champion' anime plotline we've seen recycled from the past two and a half decades; so Legends Arceus really needs to rub itself off here on the new game. I'd love to have a cast of characters I get to know beyond their one character trait and the static element they've decided to base their entire life philosophy around.

That's about the high and low of what we need from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, although if I were to throw in my own two cents I think a cameo wouldn't hurt that much. We saw Sonia become a travelling professor at the end of Sword and Shield, it would be cool to have her show up in this land to study these new powerful legendaries, give these games some narrative consistency to them without turning them into some sort of Marvel property wherein you have to watch years worth of back content to know what's going on. World building works better when it's culminative in my experience. Scarlet and Violet doesn't necessarily have it's work cut out for it, and there's still some evidence that this game might fall flat on it's face and has been destined to from the start, but it's hardly the Pokémon spirit to be a pessimist, now is it? Welcome to the fold, Gen 9; here's hoping you're everything you need to be. 

Theory begging

 Please sir, can you theorise some more?

There is an undeniable allure about having your game be subverted into theory fodder by a growing community of speculatives. (That's 'speculative thinkers' mind you, not 'speculative investor', we've enough NFT garbage in our industry already thanks very much!) Once people start making theories, that's the tug of the line you're looking for to know your bait is good and hooked, now you just need to reel it in as the hoards of hungry pseudo-intellectuals grope at your feed like guppy fish. And isn't that what an aspiring developer wants most in life? Hoards of ravenous fans who feed off their every morsel with wordless devotion? I mean I think that's desirable given the compunction of many talented new indie developers to establish themselves as the next Fnaf, ("Capital Letters" "Big News Story") if not in 'gameplay' than in 'public perception' so that they may one day aspire to that holiest of holies; a MatPat GameTheory video.

MatPat made a video himself talking about this phenomena and the effect it has on budding indie game development, as well as asking the question of whether or not the pursuit of theories was ruining games themselves. I don't necessarily agree with a lot of the higher philosophies of MatPat, I think his occupationally relevant mathematics-tipped viewpoint gives him a tendency to whittle down complex webs of modern internet trends into a numbers game, which is a necessary measure for quantification no doubt, but when he feeds that sort of osteoporotic backbone into a solution using reductionist hypothesis honing rhetoric, it becomes easy to lose the big picture under the rigidity of his peculiar branch of 'The scientific process'. But here I must agree; I think the pull of theory crafting has influenced, if not ruined, a large swathe of the better indie developers out there and whatsmore we can see this evidence nakedly on the products themselves. I've seen it more and more with each passing fad horror game, and here are some examples.

Now that Poppy's Playtime has meandered into it's second episode, we can really start to see this model of game development take hold. Because afterall, Poppy is an official hit now! It shifts merchandise and everything! But the actual gameplay here is little more than a walking adventure with a smattering of insultingly simplistic logistics puzzles, some admittedly nice animations and maybe a chase section at some point. A 'one and done' sort of affair. If they want the game to have 'staying power', it needs to feel like there's depth beyond the slightly lack lustre gameplay spread. And so comes the NFT lore bits that drums up controversy and disgust all to apparently tease the nothing-burger tip that 'Mommy is coming'. (She's literally the monster if Chapter 2; that's hardly a smoking gun.) But I even see the obvious hints of this narrative lean in the episode itself.

As if in direct answer to the lack of compelling narrative present in the first episode, Poppy Playtime has a few videos that just spell out relevant lore in a documentarian fashion. (Because you know, all those toy companies out there just love self-producing autobiographies on their boring founders. It happens all the time.) One video in particular announced and then blurs the face of the sole creator. Why? What does that achieve? I mean it creates mystery around what this enigmatic and important figure in the poppy universe looks like; but when is there an actual video within the game's universe that has been specifically edited to blur out the face of the creator? Just lying on the floor in an abandoned toy shop? It's a mystery, no doubt; some might even considering it a fascinating conundrum; if it wasn't for the fact that we know there is no sensible reason. At the end of the day it's a mystery hook, fed on a line to the community. It feels blatant and uninspired, which in turn makes it less appealing and un-immersive. The same with the line-up of tunnels all leading to various workplaces and all labelled with the name of the managers they belong to. All except one who's words have been knocked off the wall and lay scattered on the floor. You can just hear the developer going "Look at this one! Go one, pick up the words and arrange them! I wonder if it spells out 'Cassidy'... names are exciting, aren't they?" The desire is there, but the passion feels borrowed.

Hello Neighbour is perhaps the most eyewatering example of this phenomena, in that we all know the sins of the developers as it was splayed to on social media for everyone to see. This is a game that began life with an interesting premise of an evolving AI pursuant but lost itself to vague symbolic imagery with the most cookie-cutter pay-off imaginable come release. All because MatPat made a theory video in its early Alpha days and that influx of critical observation totally overhauled the purpose behind development. We even saw some shameful moments where a certain member of the team was literally tweeting at MatPat trying to goad him into making another theory fodder video, all to justify their whisky washy 'mystery' building meta goals. All as the raw gameplay which original caught fan's attention seemed to slip to the wayside and end up feeling pretty unpolished. I'd argue theories did kill that game.

And theories may been behind the success of Bendy and the Ink Machine, if a lot of it's jank and inconsistencies. (It did pretty well despite it's significant content lacking hang-ups in the content of the game beyond being an interactive walk-around.) The development team here actually listened heavily to the feedback of their audience to not only work on elements that people thought the game was missing, but to literally tell the team what to put into the episodes inbetween. These developers went in with an idea of how their adventure would start and how it would end, and the people filled in the blanks inbetween by falling in love with Alice Angel one episode, or writing fan theories about Boris in another episode. There's nothing inherently wrong this approach to storytelling, in fact I practise it myself and so I'm inclined to defend it. But the whole 'crowd sourcing for direction' thing might be a better idea on paper. The whole meta narrative of Joey Drew's life story falls entirely to the wayside in the middle episodes so that we fall into 'fan fiction feeling' side adventures with these bizarre and not entirely developed characters which doesn't really feel like it contributes to the themes or narrative by the end of the story. The entire breadth of the game feels like a diversion because theories and fan demands pulled it around a bit with seemingly no central director. (Even though I know the game did have a director! What was he doing?) Taking ideas for you game is fine, in fact I'd say it's great; but crowd sourcing filler for your narrative is how you get... well 'Bendy'; a game that feels like a fan-rewriting of Undertale. (A prospect I shiver to even imagine.)

Lastly we have FNAF Security Breach, and this is an example I more leave to MatPat's observations to justify. It's fairly obvious to see that Security Breach was something of a rush job, from the copious numbers of bugs skittering across it's metal frame to the abrupt cartoon panel epilogue adorning all but the truest of true endings. Matt has a hypothesis for why that could be which he shared in his video on the topic, and it really does make some sense. In the lead up to Security Breach there was a great influx of theorists across the Internet speculating on what the story may hold, and they came up with several realistic theorems as to who certain characters would be, where their roles would lead them and even how the game itself would wrap up. A lot of these theories were based on logical and satisfying narrative progression, and thus the conclusions they drew were not only logical; a lot of them felt like best case scenario depictions of where Security Breach could take FNAF. Matt seems to think that this spooked Steel Wool Studios, who want so desperate to own their story and surprise their audience, which led to the narrative being kept liquid until the last possible moment of development, resulting in a final game that feels disjointed and ill-fitting towards it's own narrative. FNAF VR spent a whole game telling the story of Vanessa becoming the Bunny-killer Vanny, only for Security Breach to half-heartedly throw a twist ending where they aren't the same person but instead... two completely identical blonde women? Pretty much every ending has this logical progression that feels ripped out to fit in a surprise reveal that doesn't really make sense, to the extent that even the canonical ending kind of falls flat. Oh, this whole complex it built on-top of Fazbear Frights? And Afton is burnt to death again? The "I always come back!" guy? The one who has been burnt to death twice beforehand? Something tells me he ain't gone. Just a hunch.

There is nothing wrong with inspiring an audience to such a degree that they want to theories on your work and interact with it in a meaningful way, but I think when you start to let that influence what it is you're creating it threatens to infect and sometimes sully the creative process unless you're very disciplined with yourself. Loyalty should always lie first and foremost to the piece of art itself, above even the fans that have attached themselves to it, and if you respect what you're working on and the audience you've developed you own it to stay that course. Theory begging is not only kind of cringe-worthy, it's sometimes a detriment to the entire creative process that poisons once great ideas for the wrong reasons of being more talked about instead being a talk-worthy product to begin with. 

How to fix Sonic Frontiers

 SOS. Save Our Sonic

We've seen the highs and lows of it. Sonic Frontiers is coming before the end of the year and I don't think there's a single sane person on the planet who thinks it's ready and waiting to hit that release window. I maintain that the entire thing needs to be fundamentally reworked at a core level, but its all well and good just saying that, but what about actually discussing what needs to be reworked and establishing the standards that it has to meet? Be constructive with our criticism. Because at the end of the day I want Sonic Frontiers to be good. We all want a great Sonic game which pushes forward the franchise; so ranting and raving helps nobody. Although with that in mind it doesn't hurt to remind Sega just how unfinished this game looks so they remember how badly it needs to be delayed. Because it does and they really need to know that.

The big stand out problem which strikes down everyone's first impression is the World that this game is set in. The Frontier we're looking at here is empty, lacking in visual flair and seemingly totally lacking in intent. We can see that there are no real landmarks in the places we've seen so far, just hills and embankments with parkour objects slapped on top of them to really hammer home this sense of 'tech demo'. (My brother theorizes that this could all be a tutorial space, but that just makes it a really lazy tutorial anyway.) For some reason the team went for a realistic visual style which means muted green grass and generally plain terrain only split up by their garish additional robot designs that are also monochromatic and not fun to look at. Fixing the world is going to start by addressing these three issues.

Firstly, the world needs to be redesigned with a purpose and intent behind design that can influence all the rest of the development. If, for example, they wanted to make a place for Sonic to show off his speed they could have wide flat racing spaces with environmental frills in order to wow the eye and keep it busy, such as active grass deformation, puddles of explosively reactive water physics and galleries of exciting surrounding hills and mountains. Exploration themed world design would demand varied and distinct areas to break up the world and encourage the wandering eye, maybe with obstacles erected in the way of obvious sight lines so players have to travel and move to come to grasps with what they've got in front of them to explore. The visual style may be set but the team could take a bit more creative licence with the colour palettes they're working with to at least give the grass hills that classic neon deep green from the original Sonic games, just to introduce some recognisable visual flairs. They could also go the extra step to incorporate some of that geometric patchy grass texture that Sonic has rocked up until now.  

The animations that Frontiers is rocking has been another huge point of contention for the fact that they look to be lacking in many of the finer points that really differentiate an indie product from a triple A offering. For one, Sonic has no variation animation related to the speed at which he is moving when he's not running. That is to say, although he can walk slower depending on how the player pushes their movement stick, his walking animation is static, so Sonic can end up animating his walk pattern in a speed faster than he is actually moving creating an illusion similar to moon walking. Plus some of his transition animations, from jumping to running and attacking to manoeuvring, seem jittery and lack fluidity. (Although that's just extra polish anyway. I wouldn't throw away a game just because it's transitory animations aren't perfect.)

Then we have the combat which is a tale of both hope and trepidation. Sonic has languished in this hell of 'lock on and dash' gameplay for so long that the Sonic Team didn't even bother to program enemy attack patterns in Forces. This is not the case for Frontiers and enemies do indeed attack, albeit not in any aggressive patterns. I'm not asking for Souls-level of attack and reaction gameplay here, but these robots look to be largely static for extended periods of time before uttering a single attack and then going dormant for several seconds. It's not very intimidating. The boss fight at least looked cool, what with the impressive scale of the robot and the seemingly couple of avenues to beating him which I appreciated. I also like how scaling him became more difficult each time you broke one of his conduit-things, and to which that design philosophy made its way into the trash mobs a little more. Give them some dynamism so that they're fun to fight, make them more aggressive and perhaps throw in a little more colour to their otherwise monotone designs.

But what we fight is only as important as the tools we have to fight it, and I'm giddy to say that Frontiers has a combat system, even if it's incredibly rudimentary. The tracing and feedback speed move is okay, if a little slow; but it's just a shame that Sonic Team don't appear to be doing anything with the actual momentum of Sonic to be used in combat. Can we not roll up into a ball and crash into enemies anymore, or are they just neglecting to show that? Plus, are there going to be any enemies that actually match the blue blur's speed or is this going to a case of slow, plodding enemies that we tear apart like silly putty akin to Sonic Adventure enemies? And I have to mention that vortex tornado move which for some reason spins Sonic around upside down, that looks silly, and the special lock-on chain-dash move which appears to teleport Sonic several yards back from his target before executing, which is a really jarring way to set up an attack. (Or at least I think the move does that. Either it teleports you or the editor for the combat trailer really wanted to make it look like it does with several jump cuts every time that move activated.)

And behind it all we have to work on the purpose of the game and it's world. Why are we making this open world Sonic game a reality and how can the team put their efforts toward achieving that purpose? Do we want to put players in the shoes of playing Sonic in his daily life? Probably not given the far-cry-from-normalcy setting of the game. Do we want to put players in a position of wonder in a mysterious world with Sonic's repertoire at their disposal to explore at their own pace? That feels closer to the mark. In that case effort should be invested in feeding the desire of discovery and mystery. Far off landmarks that have a functional challenge to them, whether that be a scaling platforming challenge or a puzzle, inspire that call to adventure. (Which means that the pop-in really needs to be worked on.) And creating a sense of functional believability to the layout of the world gives the player the impression that there is intention and purpose to this world that can be discovered. Which is why we take half pipes and platforms and attach them to facilities and world landmarks, so that these navigation tools exist outside the sole context of "Sonic can jump on this in order to get somewhere." That last trick is the anvil around Frontier's world design holding it back, and once that design philosophy is totally banished we can start to look upon this gameplay as an indicator of an actual finished product.

I've heard some claim that the Frontiers footage is an alpha build and everyone is wrong to judge their opinions on the game from the footage, but I challenge that for two reasons. One, yes it's an old build of the game but the thing launches before 2023, this game needs an identity to be visible in it's world and presentation more than a handful of months out, and two, this is the footage that Sega themselves put out to showcase the viability of this game. They slapped this tech demo for the public in the hopes that this would sell the dream of their game, in the knowledge that this would likely be the first and last chunk of gameplay footage put out before launch. Sega thinks this is a strong foot forward, they need to be told explicitly why that is not the case and the more ideas to fixing this game up that we give them, the better the chance that Frontiers can be delayed and reworked into the rough gem we know it can be. Let's do our best to save Sonic.

The Seth Green Files

All my apes... gone...

I thought, hoped, dreamt, that I was done talking about the pan-flash known as NFTs back when it became abundantly clear that it's initial fame was overblown and that small notoriety was drying up like a splayed out crab lying on the Dust Bowl wastes of Death Valley. The rise of NFTs was an illusion, a fiction fed out by desperate and conniving organisations desperate to get their hands on the 'next big thing' before it ever made it to market. That is the great secret behind this major fad of the 2020's, it's not a key to the unlockable potential of humanity, but a pyramid scheme by another name which is quickly running out of new rungs to stick onto the other end. Remember the great conceit of 'you can have money make itself on your behalf', is only every true if it's being undeservedly squeezed out the pockets of someone who can't afford it below you; and ask yourself again if NFTs are the wave for the future that you're so eager to surf.

But no one can really be done forever with a fad like NFTs. Not until that Fad has been strung up and lashed bare, deceit and lies cut from it's bone, so that not even the most delusional can flock to it's bare naked ugliness any longer. And I'm going to stop this line of creative writing before I make myself sound anymore like a modern day Roman Emperor. To be more direct; just when the landscape of these online scam factories felt like they were going quiet, I had to learn that one of my favourite comedians Seth Green was trapped inside their vice-like grip. (I don't agree with e-stalking celebrities online in order to monitor their every errant thought and whim, but I may have to start just to know which fool has slipped down the rabbit hole next time something as dumb as NFTs rears it's head.) Oh, and the thing I'm about to talk about is related to gaming twofold. To a much lesser extent, Green is a figure of some importance in gaming having voiced Joker in Mass Effect; and to the larger argument, some prominent numbskulls believe that the gaming landscape needs our future intrinsically tied to that of NFTs, and every story like this is poison dripped on that narrative.

 When we look at the NFT landscape, there is one collection of packaged and sold generated assets that best encapsulates the entirety of the movement, and it's one of the progenitors of the craze: Bored Ape Yacht Club. A collection of ugly computer generated images stuck together from a selection of 'body part' images amassed at random on a 'rarity curve' and then sold on the blockchain for tens of millions. It is an embarrassingly grotesque collection that has made tech-bros rich and screwed up just about everyone else. And Seth Green tried to get in on the 'Techno Bro' side of that equation just recently. Yes, he was a big Ape head for his time, and he was on his way to become an ambassador for the Monkey JPEGs with the announcement that he was developing and acting in a show that would star his personal Bored Ape, because blurry concepts of 'ownership' and 'IP rights stamped on the blockchain' are intrinsic to the NFT craze and those who try to sell it.

But this turned out to be a prideful height that our poor Mr Green was all but destined to fall from. Because just as with most people who interact with the cursed landscape that is NFTs, Seth Green fell for a stupid phishing site that nabbed ownership of a bunch of his NFTs, one of which being the star of his proposed show. Those stolen assets went on to be bought by some NFT rando, and in a hilarious turn of events this simple act of screw-ups has left Seth Green's show on hold. Because as it is written in the terms of BAYC, one of the main draws of NFTs as a concept, IP rights for each ape are transferred along with ownership of the token tied to the origin of each image. Meaning he who owns the token NFT can make whatever they want with this monkey picture, and the second they pass on that token they pass the rights to be able to make any more. So yes, Seth Green currently has the bones of a show that he no longer owns the rights to distribute. What a crazy, twisted world we live in.

It must be a galling thing to realise, that the very aspect you've hailed to be the saviour of the modern financial world, has led to you being irreparably financially stiffed. Seth's online presence has switched from mind-numbingly brainless tirades into why multimillion dollar companies would be absolutely fine with cutting nobodies on the Blockchain into their earnings because they own a token of a character's likeness. (Even if the IP rights are sound, what studio isn't just going to focus content around the character you own instead of literally generating free income for you?) Now Seth is begging the man who bought his NFTs to come to the negotiating table, implying that his charm and their 'shared interests' will win over the assets, all the while he is trolled and mocked relentlessly by people who used to respect the funny man turned sad public clown. 

And as the News has turned on Seth to mock him, Green has come out to claim that he still has the right of law, and since the NFT was technically stolen the courts would side with him. Unfortunately Seth has either never been inside of a Court room before or is overdosing his few remaining working brain cells with copium because that is not how the American legal system is going to work for him. The stolen asset was sold to someone who, as far as we can tell, had no idea the asset was stolen and unless that can proven otherwise beyond a shadow of a doubt, he legally owns the NFT. And BAYC terms of service explicitly states that the owner of an NFT is the sole IP holder, so Seth has no legal legs to stand on right now. He may try to wave the stick of the courts whist offering the hand of friendship, but currently it looks as though both avenues are falling flat as long as neither come with a healthy payday.

The buyer, who I'm intentionally not naming because they aren't a public figure and thus I have no idea how wantonly litigious they may become when this is all said and done, has ignored Seth's Twitter pleas and instead spoken to news aggregators to act as his third party connect to the comedian. A frustrating, and probably fruitless, power move towards the comedian who just wants to get his show back on track. Without claiming to know any explicit motivations here, our buyer did acquire the Jpeg for around $200,000 in equivalent coin currency, so they probably are looking to make a profit from that sale. He's probably in the strongest position directly here for the time being, because even if Seth uses his time to change the assets of his show to use a different ape, the value of the 'Monkey that got away from Seth Green' is just going to shoot up for the story alone. Our funny man has no leverage here whatsoever.

As sad as it is that this is happening to a man I typically respect, this is a pretty clear lesson in the school of 'play stupid games win stupid prizes'. I can't imagine a man with as much industry knowledge as Seth Green really doesn't understand the true face of the industry he's promoting, which means he's actually trying to get some bag before the market topples and is likely just wantonly dismissing the harm his reckless influencing will have on fans who respect and trust him. I'm sorry but that attitude goes a long way to erasing the respect that shows like Family Guy and Robot Chicken had earnt him in my mind, which makes a karmic bitch slap like this nothing more than a well-deserved clap-back from this author's perspective. I bet the show would have been decent, but the culture behind it wouldn't have been worth the effort. I genuinely hope he doesn't get the Ape back and that this whole debacle forces the man to confront exactly what sort of industry he is wittingly trying to be the poster child for. Grow some self respect back, man.

Sonic's Open Zone

 No way; I can't believe this!

There is a seismic change flying towards Sonic the Hedgehog's video game world that threatens to rejuvenate the often-derided 3D gameplay of the Sonic series from the past. What started as a fun little gimmick in Sonic Adventure, where these funnily designed stages were put together by a team clearly still figuring out how to make a 3D version of their platformer series work, had depreciated into the Sonic Forces model of level design, where every map is a straight dash across a field of clueless identical robot enemies who don't even approach you and it's genuinely rare for a single level to last longer than two minutes. There was a progress of give or take over the years, as some new features improved the gameplay of 3D Sonic outings and others became a crutch for developers to exploit until not a morsel of player agency remained, (Looking at you 'boost button') but overall the graph of 'quality over the years' has trended downwards, and now it's up to Sonic Frontier to either change all that or become the final plunge off the path to sink all credibility in Sonic Team as competent game makers. (And after Forces I think we're all teetering on that inevitability.)

And it's not even a question right now of whether or not Sonic Team are going to try and challenge themselves to change the fundamentals; they need to do at least that in order to fit the Sonic character within their new vision of the 'Open Zone'. A innocuous phrase that many have taken to believing means that Sonic's next game is going to be entirely open world, but which I personally think is a pretty term to disguise that what we're really getting is probably several unconnected hub-world areas with activities in them; like a slightly grander version of Super Mario 64. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, I think most people would welcome the chance to explore different environments before the lazy deep green hills gets a bit stale and boring, especially given how for the moment that world seems almost entirely featureless aside from the mysterious robotic creatures that Sonic is battling. 

Oh, and I should probably go forward by saying that 'Yes'; I've seen that recent gameplay footage we've been given and have successfully mined it for every bit of content that I can. And just like I hoped, I am really liking what I'm seeing for the barebones of Sonic's gameplay and even the enemies he's having shoved in his face. (At the very least) For instance, the enemy design with this metallic sheen ontop of an impressive scale that hints at the sort of 'mouse versus mountain' perspectives of Shadow of the Colossus, makes me excited. (I don't make a 'perspectives' comparison like that lightly, either.) And though the sliver rounded finish does give me vague PTSD to the utterly boring and uniform soldiers of Infinite's army in Forces, we can already see how this squad are capable of actually attacking the player; which is a significant step-up in my book. Also, I'm curious and excited that we have not seen the telltale design feature of a two spectacles sitting on a moustache in their contruction, which means these might not be Eggman's units in a Sonic game for the first time in... I think ever. I'm pretty sure every robot ever made in the Sonic franchise has been an Eggman creation up until now. God, it would be nice to have another villain to interact with. (Oh, a villain that isn't just Eggman's latest buddy who turns on him in the last act. That storyline is a tiny bit played out.)

Which isn't to say that I'm loving everything I saw in this tease. I mean we've seen that the dash boost is returning again to which I can only groan dejectedly. I understand the reasoning. My problem with the dash boost in the past is that it's always been this button to automatically inject speed into Sonic often-time making him invincible and propelling him through the stage with little effort. It's a button that completely forgoes the build of momentum which is literally the entire gameplay loop of Sonic games! If I don't need to play cleverly, chain up enemies, keep moving and hit the right slopes in order to build up my momentum, and instead I just need to hit a boost button with a bar that refills everytime I boost into rings, meaning it's not too difficult to boost for half a level unmolested; then why does the team need to bother with making intelligent game design with natural opportunities and challenges to navigate through? Answer, they don't and that's how we ended up getting Sonic Forces.

I do like the fact that for the first time ever in Sonic, it appears as though our Hedgehog is smashing into enemies with more than just his thick skull. Indeed, Sonic appears to actually throw kicks and punches when he's in clashing range which adds just that tiny bit more dynamism to the animation repertoire. Also, we've seen a sort of 'tracing' system where Sonic draws a shape around an enemy and they get caught in a feedback vortex which damages them. These are actual combat mechanics that aren't just 'lock on and double press' like usual! You don't understand, this is a revolution in game design for Sonic Team. Actually having gameplay tied around the enemies they place in their levels has been a art lost to them since the 90's; I can only imagine the level of personal and emotional growth the team had to embark on in order to rediscover the fact that player likes fighting the enemies in their levels. Maybe that's why they dropped the ball on the world so much.

When the full gameplay demo launched I think everyone sort of felt a bit of the mysterious excitement deflate when they realised 'Oh; this looks like a tech demo'. I'm not saying that the visuals don't look pretty, of course they do. Just that the world has absolutely no coherent design philosophy to it whatsoever. To compare this to Breath of the Wild is an insult. This literally looks like generic rolling hills 3D printed out of Death Stranding or something with minimalist parkour structures place haphazardly all over the place. Floating platforms here, non-sensical grind rails there, maybe we'll screw around and shove a Ubisoft-style tower to climb over there, I don't know! Do you think the team agonized over sight lines when placing mountains and obstacles? Arranging obscuring elements that challenge the player's curiosity and keeps them wondering what was behind the next corner? Or did they just load up a default space in Unreal Engine and slap together a competent Sonic Actor to run around in it?

It's such a shame because this game looks like the 'great blue hope' of the franchise, rewriting everything we thought we knew about Sonic's 3D outing; only for the whole 'world' part of the open world to be a clear after thought. I don't like to say this, but it honestly feels like Sonic Team are a small group of Indie developers who don't quite understand the basics of game design and have yet to finalize their own fundamentals, and thus are left throwing darts at a wall to see what sticks. I know what it's like to be there, I'm still very much in that position with most of my own endeavours. But I don't charge money for people to gawk at my silly unprofessional fumblings. And thought it seems almost excessively mean to chalk up this whole package as 'unprofessional' just because of how lazy the world is- I mean, the world is one of the most fundamental building blocks of this sort of game. If they can't even properly convey a purpose or intent to how they've built that world, it's hard to support the rest of the game.

Sonic Frontier is an opportunity to change the course of Sonic, and a lot of the elements I'm seeing are on the right track to do just that; but for what we've been presented with right now it's clear that the game isn't there yet. In fact, I think this game not only isn't ready to hit the launch date later this year, but it isn't even in the polishing stage; we need a reworking of huge chunks of this game. Maybe Team Sonic need another team to come in and give them a hand because I'm worried that they don't even see the problem, given that they put together this gameplay reel to show us how proud they were of their work so far. I know I'm always moaning about how the Sonic community retroactively demonises everything, but it's an exaggeration to a genuine quality deficiency in a lot of Sonic properties; we can't have this new face of Sonic start as another clear cut example of this deficiency, we just can't. So for the good of everyone, Sega and Team Sonic; delay your game. Make sure it's good first!

Diablo Immortal has arrived

 It's Morbing time

Have you ever been introduced to something, a game, a movie, a person, and known instantly from the very first moment exactly where this relationship between you is going? I'm not talking a 'love at first sight' sort of thing, no I mean rather the opposite. I mean you know from the very first word that you two are going to bitterly clash until there's nothing but hatred and anger shared between the two of your totally incompatible personalities? How about a situation where you've felt that exact friction only to be proven completely and utterly false as something magical and special blossoms from fields you'd thought initially barren? Diablo Immortal falls into one of those two camps. Can you guess which one? Shocker, it's the "We knew it would be a disgrace to the brand and company and that is exactly what it is." What, do you guys at Blizzard not have integrity or something?

Diablo Immortal is an attempt by Blizzard to move their popular ARPG property, the Diablo series, onto the mobile market in order to cater to the plethora of mobile addicted players in China and Japan. If you want to be an optimist you could say that this is a Diablo game made for our Eastern Asian brothers that is trying to clue them in on something we already love over here, although you'd have to be almost reductively optimistic not to acknowledge the ways in which Blizzard is trying to actively exploit their platform of choice in order to squeeze bucks out of them. Because you see, despite the pedigree of the name attached to this product, despite the months of press junkets where the Diablo development team have promised that this game is going to rewrite what we expect from mobile games and has as big of a development team working on it as Diablo 3 and 4, (that's just sad if it's true) this is a blatant cash-grap, yo!

At least it's not a lazy one. I mean, the way in which they try and squeeze money out of everyone is lazy, tired and uninventive; but the actual quality of the mobile gameplay in question here is decent. It's not the world's best ARPG by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't find the early story to be any type of engaging or interesting, but the core ARPG experience of killing things is fun enough. Would I choose to play Immortal over Diablo 3? Not currently. But then I am early game, maybe the endgame is some super wild amazing feast of chaos and I just need to spend a couple of hundred real life currency on in order to boost my way to the great content. Oh, did I say money boosting? Yeah, this game has it's pay-to-win elements which is obscured behind distanced 'fake' currency and upgrade percentage chances that has the option to eat up premium currency. (That's how you sneak all the chance based money generating fun of Lootboxes without bringing the inherent backlash that Lootboxes come with. Class.)

What gets me is I thought Diablo Immortal had come out years ago and just faded from the public consciousness super quickly, but I guess Wyatt Cheng took the verbal tongue lashing he got at the Blizzcon reveal to heart and crawled under that rock he spawned from in order to wait out the backlash. Of course his absence and this game's gave the time for emotions to cool into a simmer, but it also gave us a chance to see more stolen snippets of Wyatt, such as that one screenshot of him presenting the pay-to-win equipment reinforcing systems to a board of, what I can only assume are, NetEase employees. Leaving no one in any doubt for ages exactly what this game was about and who it was being made for. People were sharpening their pitchforks for this game for a long time in advance and now they're ready to cut it to ribbons. Of course, Wyatt and his Diablo don't give two handshakes and a wink about the actual Blizzard and Diablo fans; they're out for them casuals, baby!

It's at the heart of the gameplay loop, a regular stream of unimposing simple combat encounters that inundate the player with levels and loot at a quick pace to get new casual players, unfamiliar to ARPGs, thinking "Wow, I'm progressing really quickly and having fun", so that as the later levels kick in and the experience starts to hit against that inevitable wall, these same players are incentivised and encouraged to stick around and push themselves up against that wall, typically a pay wall in this instance, in order to relive some of that power fantasy fun they had at the beginning of their playthrough. Gear becomes outpaced by hoards of trash mobs, forcing players to fall back on the monetised-to-hell upgrade systems or to grind side content during which they are assaulted with pop-ups trying to sell them extra completion loot for some real money fee. I completed the damn dungeon, why not just give me all the loot! It's not as though dungeon loot isn't going to depreciate within a level or two, why flog extra units on the side? Because it's a way to get the casual player to make that all-important first purchase, because once they're in the door it's oh so much easier to lock them into the loop of recurrent purchases. 

But there are other points of contention beyond the monetisation that has people dubious about Diablo Immortal, one of which being the mysterious and so-far unutilised files in the game folder that make explicit mention of facial recognition. This isn't just laymen misunderstanding of file naming conventions, either; the community manager responded to one concerned Tweet highlighting it with the excuse that their team was at one point looking to have the ingame character's facial expressions match the player's face but they scrapped the system for not meeting their quality standards. An alright explanation, but it rings a little odd, doesn't it? You wanted facial match-up tech in your uninspired casual mobile game? Seems like a strangely innovative tech angle totally not-in line with all the other middle-of-the-road and unambitious design decisions for the game. Also, what use is matched facial expression in an APRG? A zoomed-out top down game where you can't see your character's face? Surely they can't be talking about the character portrait, because that portrait can't even be customised to the player's liking beyond picking the class featured. I can't say for sure, but I think they're lying to our faces.

Of all of this I think the most galling knowledge is what I mentioned earlier; how the team working on this game is apparently 1:1 comparable to Diablo 4's in size, if not in ambition. Blizzard truly value this game as much as they do their core franchise, and you can bet your bottom dollar that renewed intrest in the mobile markets comes directly from the success of an actual innovative little free-to-play game called Genshin Impact. Another game which wears it's monetisation on it's sleeve but slathers so much content which can be enjoyed totally for free that people just let it slide. Can Diablo Immortal slither it's way into a similar position with it's content proposal? With some finesse, but after all the garish tactics being shoved in our face and artificial difficulty pseudo-paywalls being erected, I don't think this development team knows what 'Finesse' is. I wonder what the team at Diablo 4 are doing to differentiate that game from Immortal, or if the mandate is for all Blizzard games to follow this formula into the future in the blind hope that one strikes it big. I'm being alarmist, perhaps; but not unrealistically so, and that's the problem. 

Diablo Immortal presented itself as the game that would rewrite our preconceived notions on what a mobile game is, greedy, exploitative and low effort; when it ended up pretty much sliding into the perfect ballpark for two out of three of those tags. The problem is that the accolade for 'so good it's allowed to nickel and dime' was given out two years ago and Blizzard lacks the talent and passion to steal that podium position for the folks at MiHiYo. What we're left with is a decent stop-gap ARPG for people who can't afford a mainline Diablo game, but is it really any better than 'Path of Exile'? I guess if you have to play a CRPG on your phone, than Diablo Immortal and all of it's ugliness is your only choice; that's about as glowing of an endorsement as I can lay on Immortal's door. Let's hope this whole experience doesn't end up being prophetic towards the eventual state of Diablo 4, eh.