Delays

Rescheduling conflicts 

As we have much to celebrate when it comes to gaming in this fine year, so too do we have cause to mourn; for that which was once on our doorstep has been shoved back into obscurity. Such is the consequence of 'delays'. That which was imminent becomes far, and that which is immediate is then immaterial. And we'd all be liars were we to insist that the wounds don't sting a little each time our upcoming hype trains take an unscheduled hiatus. Yet it's generally accepted etiquette nowadays to be understanding and patient in times such as these, as most tend to evoke that old Miyamoto Quote that I abuse worse than a Jamaican dominoes set. "A delayed game is eventually good but a rushed game is forever bad." What's that? Nintendo Life say the quote was never coined by him and instead belongs to some dude called Jason Schreiber? Look, Nintendo Life- no one's looking to have you ruin their fun, 'kay? I'm going to carry on attributing it to industry legend Shigeru Miyamoto and we'll hear nothing more about it!

Yet recently, with the sheer amount of game delays that just seem to pour out of the industry with every new release, sometimes I can't help but slip out of that meditative stoicism, stamp my feet a little and say: "what is going on?" It seems like the only games which come out when they say they're going to anymore are the uninspired yearly reiteration franchises; and it's so far in their best interest that they don't miss their own deadlines that they're willing to release cobbled together yawn generators rather than push back a release by even a couple of days. But with Breath of the Wild 2 being delayed, Baldur's Gate III being delayed, God of War: Ragnarok delayed twice; one starts asking questions like: is there any big game which hasn't been delayed?

Now of course one must be attentive of the times we live in. And of course with work at home and all the disruptions that has manifested in the industry over the past couple of years, there's going to be some hold-ups in the production line. And of course no one is going to gripe on the STALKER 2 devs for pushing that game into indefinite holding on account of the simply sickening disaster their home country is being forcibly subjected to currently. But this pattern of developers announcing big games and then changing course, sometimes at the last minute, hasn't been unique to these last two years either. It's almost an expectation that the industry has adopted in the last console age that has just carried itself on to this one. And I wish to speculate on why that is and could be.

The first time I really was shocked by a delay, it was all the back in 2012 with the bait-and-switch of Grand Theft Auto V which was surprise pushed back half a year. That was easily the biggest game of the year, what would go on to become an industry definer, just getting casually punted into next year on the verge of release. And by 'verge' I'm perhaps talking a couple of months out, but that's still  dangerously close to pull something like this. And whatsomore, given how long the delay was for, it almost seems like this was a decision that had been already pre-made. If I want to give the company the benefit of the doubt, I suppose I could try and interpret this as Rockstar's moment of integrity crisis; maybe they were behind on the project right up until the last 10 weeks and had to really sit down and ask themselves whether it was better to release a broken game today or delay out of their financial year. A crisis of faiths that lasted a little too long, perhaps; but one which ultimately scoured us a 10/10 masterpiece. (If only more modern titles would have learned from such a decision.)

On the other end of the spectrum we have the Cyberpunk delay. Not the first half dozen, but the delay which pushed the game from April of the year so that it would drop into the late Autumnal drifts- all on the eve of freakin' March! That's- just insane. They definitely had made that decision weeks beforehand and were too cowardly to let everyone down at once. Whatsmore, given the pathetically broken state the game ended up launching in anyway, one can just imagine the disaster which everyone in the team was staring at in March. Perhaps, and this is very much speculation, they looked at the state of the game back then and realised that they had utterly failed in making the game they wanted to, but figured the next six months could work to polish it into a fine game in it's own right.

What really gets to me is the way that I knew this delay was coming, it was obvious. Why? Because there was no marketing material whatsoever to even advertise this thing in the leading months. They weren't even getting TV spots yet, let alone the extended gameplay previews that I, and others, were expecting. Of course CDPR would end up going overboard, spending months hyping the dream of a game which at that point they had to mostly all know was going to disappoint; but at least at that point the name of the game was getting out there. Who were they fooling that April ever was looking like a release vector? I doubt they even prepared a single marketing graphic for that fake date. And yet, inexplicably, they maintained the false hood until the last possible moment! Bizarre.

Breath of the Wild 2, I don't even know the title yet, was delayed out of 2022, and that's something we're all trying to get to terms with. This game has been an enigma upon enigmas, with but a couple intentionally detail sparse trailers to feed us vague dregs about what this title might contain. Heck, it was only during this delay announcement that we got to even see the Master Sword for the first time in order to spot how mangled and broken it was. We hadn't even seen that series stable in the regular marketing yet! Yet this is a more understandable and forgivable delay. Made nearly an entire half year before the prospective release, not too many more months thrown on top, and clearly just a question of needing more polish time. No one is so wound up that they can't forgive a first delay like that.

When you're on your third delay, however; people can get disgruntled. Baldur's Gate III has been rubbing nerves with it's latest delay out of 2022, and it's pretty easy to see why. This title has been in early access for a year and a half, and though this is obviously the biggest project that Larian has ever worked on, one might start to question whether or not this undertaking might have been bigger than they anticipated. I love getting little teases into the gameplay, UI and classes of the main game; of course I do, but I'd much more love a complete and polished adventure to go through which doesn't leave me blue-balled before the wrap up of act 1. Delays have come timely, and kept a respectful distance, but they've also been grating after all of this time in active development. One has to wonder how drastically Early Access is holding things up and whether the game would have been better off without this period! Not having played the full thing, no one outside of their offices can really say yet.

Personally, I can take the wait. I think there's too many big games flying this way and that any given day and a little bit of spacing things out isn't going to kill us. But by that same merit, making dates is a promise and breaking that promise kind of sucks. It hurts my trust in the product and the company handling it, as I'm forced to ask if literally anyone has a good handling on the project and the work going into it. (I'm still wondering if Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 is happening. That game is literally as old as this blog, please don't let me outlive the first game I spoke about here!) Maybe we'd all be better off if developers waited a bit longer, for the project to be a bit more fully formed, before slapping dates and getting hopes up. Else we all end up like that one guy who booked his holidays off-work time for the Cyberpunk release under the explicit promise by the Cyberpunk marketing team that the game would hit it's current release, only for a delay. (It made for a funny tweet, but please let's not make that a habit.)

Ashes of creation looks good: I was wrong

Humble pie served

When you tell me you've got the best video game ever in the world bar none; something so good it's going to do my taxes and write my dissertation, my first instinct is to shake my head and go 'nuh uh'! To self psychoanalyse for a second, I suspect that's due to my defensive pessimism I've trained myself to habitualise in the face of hope. Too many times have I had expectations popped, too often has the 'too good to be true' train proved to be exactly what it says on the sidecar. And no matter how many people scream at me that this is the real deal, unless the trailers themselves have managed to spark that fire inside me, no one else can. I'll take it from the source and not a soul else. A lesson I learnt well from Cyberpunk; a game I was in no way interested in until the play-by-play breakdown of the gameplay walkthrough by Yongyea. (Not that I blame him for the state that game turned out as, but without his video I would have let the entire game pass me by until launch and been a lot happier for it. No shade. Just fact.)

But every now and then I have to hold up my hands and admit that not every ambitious project out there is a scam looking to snatch away your first house, cars and pets in the grift of the century. Sure, a lot of them are that; especially now in the age of ScamFT's, but a general brush stroke always colours too far. If I play the curmudgeon about everything, all the time, then I'd be a right bore to be around. Besides, I'm certainly not good at it anyway. I wouldn't have bought Baldur's Gate 3 if I was a total unbeliever in hype as I'm led myself to believe. And yeah, that game is certainly taking it's sweet time; but I don't think of it as some sort of scam project! So it's with that same olive branch that I offer my apologies to Ashes of Creation. A game which has defied my very low expectations time and time again, and not materialised as the scam vapourware project I believed it to be in my very bones. I don't know if I've ever made such an accusation out loud on this blog (I've done a blog once every day for the past three years, I've no clue of half the crap that's on here.) but if I have, then I apologise. I was wrong.

Ashes of Creation is a prospective MMORPG, to throw on the pile of wannabe MMOs announced every other year. That might have fed into my prejudice; too many clueless development studios absolutely underestimate the amount of work that goes into making, let alone maintaining, a proper MMO and just launch themselves at it with blind gusto. They hear about the relatively meagre team who put together WOW and think "Huh, we can match that no problem!", disregarding the veteran talents on that original team, the effort it took to bring out a title to stand opposite Ultima Online, and the sparseness of the MMO genre, and the gaming industry in general, back then. All of those traps trick too many hopefuls in the planning stage and I assumed Ashes of Creation to be more tinder for the pile. I no longer think that. Ashes might just be a serious MMO coming out to play one day.

The big draw of this MMO over the others that litter the current market is the way in which the world is shaped by the player, and I would say "stop me if you've heard this before"; but then we'd end up getting literally nowhere, now wouldn't we?" This is the sort of idea where players decide the landscape of the world, build their own towns, manage the economy. More so then what you'd see out of current active MMOs, something almost akin to complete player world simulation. At least that's the idea. Typically games like this stop short of total player controlled world simulation because at that point everything becomes too much work and you lose the potential casual crowd. But I've seen this sort of 'build and make your mark on the world' thing reiterated again and again since Archeage, and everytime it amounts to a pay-to-win power charge fuelled by ill-thought out idealism. Will this be any different? Perhaps. But I'm not holding my breath or anything.

Still, this is an apology tour and so I'm going to stick to my apology. First step of which comes in admitting; this team aren't hacks. They know what they're doing, and this was made abundantly clear in the character creator showcase recently which blew my meagre expectations right the heck out of the fishtank. You can talk all you want about grand ideas for what the world is going to be, even shown decently rendered landscapes are only somewhat comforting, there are plenty of great landscape tools out there and assets from stores that can look brilliant when shot in the right way. But a full showcase of a detailed and powerful character customizer? That doesn't just fall out of anyone's ears into the laps of Kickstarter investors. Pulling that off takes knowhow and talent. And I'm both impressed and humbled.

"Wait. A character creator made you change your tune?" Yes, and I stand by it. This really is one of the coolest character creators I've ever seen for an MMO, which in itself is enough to make me a little suspicious, but at least I have to admit that programming talent is present here! Typically MMOs have these very low-maintenance character generators in order to make it easier to render so many individual character models in the same area rapidly. If everyone is only using the bare basic model with a few extras stuck on, you don't need to worry about dedicating too many loading resources in big public hubs or massive competitive bouts. Of course, that's also something of an antiquated concern given the vast progression of technology, but even modern games like Destiny, a supposed MMO, still maintain about 5 preset faces as it's entire character generator, so this prejudice holds some vague merit.

But in this brief demonstration I watched the team slap together a really good impression of Asmongold, as well as flurry through a stable of distinct looking faces with totally different structure and composition. We saw their free-form tattoo system, which mimics the placement of decals on Car games; and fits so well here you might even wonder why no one has tried something like this before. And we even caught a glimpse of the face blender, which is criminally under-replicated in the character creator meta despite how helpful it is in allowing people to quickly and easily make unique and interesting character faces without dedicating hours. I mean sure, I'll be the guy who spends hours tweaking all the small things regardless, but having the choice of just blending two presets together until I get something I like is nice. Systems like these are all about options.

So yes, that is the story about how a character creator totally shifted my view on an upcoming game and made me a believer, if not a fan. Yeah, I still don't like games like these. But I'm going to pay attention to what this game puts out in the future to see if it might be the exception and win me over despite the general failings of the genre, because I'm ever eager and willing to be proven wrong about games I'm bad at. (Though sometimes I do need help getting over the finishing line. Turns out just downloading the Homeworld games hasn't given me the strength to endure them past the extended tutorials, for example.) Now if only more Kickstarter projects actually turned into something that looks half as good as this does, we'd be able to adopt a lot less pessimism across this industry as a whole; and wouldn't that be nice?

Axie Infinity: NFT's posterchild

 Wow, 'The Entwined Future of Gaming and financial freedom' kinda sucks.

I'm always ragging on the NFT scene, and it's typically for good reason. I didn't just wake up one day, throw a dart at a wall and decide this was going to be the movement that I hated for the foreseeable future, rather I found the concept to be silly and then stumbled upon example after example of bad actors scamming the heck out of silly investors with it. Of course I'm going to develop something of an adversity towards them given the sheer amount of rug pulls they've become synonymous with; heck, I've learned the definition of a boat load of scam-terms due to the proliferation of NFTs alone. But, indeed, not every single NFT project out there is a born and bread scam. Bored Ape Yacht club isn't a scam, it's just terrible art getting undeserved value because of it's association to the speculative market. And Axie Infinity is, too, an honest to goodness NFT game with all the bells and whistles!

There is no joke to this set-up; this is an real breathing game that incorporates NFTs into it's gameplay structure and actually exists as a feature semi-complete and playable product, which might just make it one of a kind amongst the sea of discarded startups which litter this topic. And the game itself is actually- well it's fine. It's sort of like a Pokemon style game of collecting this little monsters but then there's a deck builder element thrown in there as well. It doesn't quite look like something on the same level as 'Slay the Spire', or even 'Guild of Dungeoneering'; but it looks like a professionally polished and dusted project. And I know that shouldn't be something I'm so aghast by, but you've seen this subdivision of the industry; you know the total tosh they try to pull; anything that looks passable is a godsend. So good job there.

But trust me when I say that as much it may look like it, I'm not hear today to celebrate mediocrity; besides this entire blog is like a golden-plated monument to the great god of 'average' as it is. No, I'm here to unfortunately inform you that even in the throes of 'mostly decent' and 'this isn't half bad', we've got ourselves yet another controversy that has cost its customers dearly, through one of the single biggest wire heists ever pulled; only possible because of our platform's friendly little sojourn with all things cryptocurrency. Yes, it seems that even with the best intentions in mind the gods of Karma won't let an NFT project lie, or as 'best' as one's intentions could be when devising a game with shoved in NFT features that add nothing unique to the actual gameplay and more just nakedly highlights the developer's key-most goal: praying this speculative market turns into a runaway success story.

As the lovely reporters over at TheVerge have summarised it: Axie's operator 'Sky Mavis' got blasted for 600 million, and it was kinda their fault. Now from what little I could parse with my little pea brain, it seems that the hacker managed to slide into the transfer bridge between Axie and their various cryptocurrency platforms entirely unnoticed thanks to a sort of secondary crypto-market that Axie setup called Ronin in order to circumvent high gas fees for their customers. As this secondary market wasn't actually moving money but rather representative tokens of money, our exploiter was able to silently siphon off funds through that backdoor connection without anyone realising for six days; although the only reason this was possible is because Sky Mavis relaxed security back in December whilst the game was blowing up and forgot to purge their code strings once the surge had calmed down. People flew to the game with such ferocity that it became some folk's full time job, and Sky Mavis couldn't possible live with themselves if they didn't open some shortcuts to take advantage of a gig like that! (Oh, and don't go filing your own resignation just yet: the economy of the Axie Infinity is shockingly similar to the real world in that rich rule the roost and everyone else scrapes by to survive.) And so from the height of pride, do the mighty fall.

It marks a huge blow to those cheerleaders of the play-to-earn concept, showing us that no literally no facet of this movement has clean hands. Either you're dealing with scammer or incompetents, and I'm still trying to figure out which side Ubisoft is currently sitting on. (I picture them teetering between the two.) The folks in charge seem to want to brush this beside them, essentially chalking it up to a roadbump in their journey of revolution; you know, the way you take a roadbump and a $600 million note just falls out your pocket. What makes things even more dire is that for better or for worse there were people who dedicated their livelihoods to the income generated in this game, and as Axie scrambles to reimburse those afflicted, these people are in a turmoil trying to figure out what to do to make ends meet. Such is the responsibility that play-to-earn concepts assume with their very being, one which I know very few are honestly willing and ready to adopt.

And though I've gone a big way to calling Axie Infinity 'not a scam', I must admit to talking a little bit out the side of mouth. I wanted to soften the image that I was about to shatter before your eyes with my sledgehammer, whilst the truth is a little more murky then that. I'd categorise this game under the same sort of umbrella as Earth 2 or Star Citizen; in that none of these projects are spearheaded with the intention to scam in mind, but through mismanagement, incompetence, or short-sightedness, it sort of falls into the category anyway. For Axie Infinity, the problem is frightening simple: the characters of the game are sold on a speculation market; which makes their primary purpose to be sold onward to make money. There are ways to generate funds through playing the actual game, but that hasn't been genuinely profitable since just after launch; nowadays the only way to turn a profit is to quickly flip an Axie and then get out of the game. Of course, you need people to buy that 'Axie' who then wants to sell it on to someone else. So the game needs to keep drawing in new player/buyers in order for the existing players to be able to make their investment worthwhile by selling on their Axie's and everyone is just praying they're not the last one holding the bag and- wait, why does this sound so familiar? Could it be because I just described a Ponzi Scheme?

I genuinely think that every two-bit wannabe economist who has stumbled upon a Ponzi scheme absolutely believes themselves to be a trend setter who has revolutionised finance with this 'unique, new concept' of financial hot potato. Only to find out that it's not only older than sin, but also decently illegal. And for the moment Axie Infinity, maybe despite itself, slides directly into that niche as the actual lukewarm game being presented here falls second to the potential for money making that draws the majority of this game's crowd. Further proof, if ever it were needed, that NFT games aren't made for gamers; they're made for investors. Of course, the slightly askew angle of the whole 'game with cryptocurrency' idea is certainly going to obfuscate Sky Maven's potentially unintentional grift from the dinosaurs over in the financial affairs office, so maybe they'll get away with it. (The scallywags.)

But not to worry about all of this turmoil and torment which has been drummed up around this NFT game of late, because the developers have the sure-fire solution to making things better for everyone: they released another game. This one's free! Okay, to be absolutely fair, it would seem that this is something they were already working on and it's just unfortunate timing that this new project was announced during the clean-up period from their historic heist- but my god does it make for skewered optics. ('Dev loses 600 Million in player's money, uses the reimbursements checks to launch a new game' The headlines write themselves.) And so the great green hope of the NFT space turns out to be decently broken in it's own way, and the search for the one true blockchain game to usher in the WEB3 future goes on. Will it materialise before the trend fizzles out and dies? I certainly think not, however... I've seen enough Anime to know that we need to wait at least 100 exact years since the term NFT was first coined before we count them properly out. (It's only fair.)

Ghost Recon Breakpoint is dead

 Alas, poor Nomad.

Wet your cloth of mourning upon your crown and lay on it on the ceremonial cradle, then in your grief ascribe that which will be your last words to Breakpoint, for I fear it has passed our realm to the otherside of The Dream. Though difficult and fraught it's life, ever did the Breakpoint cling it to it's faithful, assured in their loyalty to a visage tarnished. But twisted and broken as that body was, not perseverance, not faith, nor an ill-timed, and likely ill-intentioned, NFT transfusion, could fix its beaten form. A teachable lesson to us all that love can only carry us but a part of the way, and sometimes there truly is nothing more our bony mortal hands can do. So as it was born, so shall it depart; Breakpoint, in ignominy. Its being now here interred, to monument another paved stone on Ubisoft's path to utterly and totally destroy the legacy of the late Tom Clancy.

Yes, you interpreted my Blasphemous-addled words appropriately; Ghost Recon Breakpoint is leaving the cycle of updates that had kept it somewhere approaching a 'live service' for so many years; thus officially killing the game's future. This gives it roughly the same amount of life under a support structure that Wildlands enjoyed, and yet somehow this one feels more dismissive; even pitiful, in comparison. I suspect that feeling comes from the way that Ghost Recon Wildlands managed to squeak out two whole DLC campaigns and even something of a positive reputation before it went out. Also, Wildlands left us with absolutely zero downtime due to the fact it was supported directly up until Breakpoint launched, with the last update even containing a special mission thread which acted as a direct prequel to Breakpoint. (Which in itself is a little odd given that it implies that Nomad's team was active in Bolivia for a full three years after they canonically defeated the cartel, and for no particular reason. Don't those people have families to go home to?) Breakpoint, on the otherhand, leaves us a pariah.

We know for the moment that a new Ghost Recon game is indeed in development, with Kotaku managing to nab the project codename as 'Over'. (Which happens to coincide with an NVidia leak from a while back, so double confirmation.) But whether or not that game is due to be announced this year, it won't get it's red carpet debut filed away at the end of Breakpoint's life cycle which is a shame because I thought that was the literally coolest use of this 'Live service' mania that we've seen so far. I mean sure, Borderlands 2 actually did the exact same thing and with a DLC pack that was considerably more substantial than Wildland's... but Borderlands 2 was kind of a Live service too if you think about the way it was supported. Kinda... sort of... In fact, I'd say Borderlands 2 was the first Live service! I'm getting off track- my point is that Ghost Recon fans are going to be dry for at the very least a few months, and it's a shame things have to end this way.

Breakpoint had a rough start; I think that's something we can all agree with. After a year of marketing which I considered to be decently successful, (They fooled me at least) the game launched to largely scathing reviews that picked apart the story, the gameplay loop, the content stretch and, most lamentably, the crappy attempt at recreating a looter-shooter here. Yeah, for some asinine reason (>Cough< Because Destiny nets 500 Million a year >Cough<) the team decided to throw random stats and levels for conventional firearms when it made no sense within the context, ("Why does this M4 shoot harder than that M4?") lacked meaningful depth that such a system demands, (like set bonuses and transformative specified keywords) and proved so detrimental to the core experience, that the team themselves had to cobble together a looter-free mode in the game post-launch for everyone's sanity.

And then there was the microtransaction store. There's this trend going around that some of the more nefarious studios have been pulling, and if your game is spotted with your hand in this cookie jar, it's my humble opinion that you and your game is automatically branded the worst and should be disparaged for the rest of it's active life cycle. I'm talking the art of creating a microtransaction store with pay-to-win crap and then disabling it for the first few weeks of play so that all the reviews won't spot it and factor it into their scores, before slapping it on and hoping to ride the backlash wave unscathed. I cannot convey how utterly disgusting I find that- it's beyond blatantly bonkers, it's downright consumer hostile. I despise games who do this, and of course Breakpoint can count itself upon that thankfully lean list.

All of that crippled this game at it's launch, and the unlucky team who was saddled with keeping this heaving beast breathing were up against a wall with their trousers down. But they stuck with the job, and with a lot of updates and patches, some good some bad, they desperately managed to claw back some vague respect from the community. The Breakpoint community wasn't exactly thriving, and it never would be after the dog's dinner that Ubisoft made of the launch month, (Great job Yves, you bumbling buffoon) but they'd reached a point of mutual respect with those that remained. And then Ubisoft reared it's moronic head around the door to ruin everything through turning Breakpoint into their NFT guinea pig.

You have to understand something here for a second. The relationship between Tom Clancy fans and Ubisoft proper isn't fraught- it's totally cut. TC fans pretty much equate Ubisoft to the devil when considering their handling of Tom Clancy's brand, for the way that they keep trying to prostitute out his name for an easy buck on their terrible cash grab wastes of space. You've got their Fortnite clone, Tom Clancy's Frontline, (received so badly it's beta was delayed) Tom Clancy's XDefiant, (ridiculed until they removed Tom Clancy from the title completely) and you've got the new Splinter Cell. (A disaster waiting to launch, we all know in our souls.) What I'm trying to say is that we are pretty much enemies of one another at this point, and so you'd have thought it would be in Ubisoft's best interest to reach across the isle. But instead they threw Molotov's over that bar.

Bastardizing Breakpoint into an NFT shill game is literally the only thing in Ubisoft's power they could have done to hurt their game's reputation more than the whole 'hiding the premium store' debacle. It's as though they were actively trying to find the worst idea they could think of in order to sink Breakpoint even worse than it already was; to drive the game to and past it's own breakpoint. No one, not even the developers of the game, could understand what Ubisoft was thinking with this strategy, because if they wanted to try something bold and new, you'd have thought they'd put a new game out. Instead they took a practice that the whole world hates and threw in a game that was battered already. I honestly, truly, do believe that someone high up at Ubisoft had a bad experience with Tom Clancy once and has dedicated his career to ensuring the TC name is little more than mud in the industry. And knowing what we know about the gutterslime that patrol Ubisoft head offices; I think that's a pretty plausible theory, honestly.

Today the heads of Ubisoft have won. Breakpoint is to be discontinued and seen off unceremoniously so that efforts can move to how the team are going to ruin the next Ghost Recon title. And you know what? I never even got the chance to buy Breakpoint. I, and many others, who loved Wildlands for it's extremely flawed package; avoided this game like the plague and like that chance encounter you let slip by, now it's all just too little too late. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your Songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on aroar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chap fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.

How to realise you're the bad guy of a YA adventure novel

 "None shall oppose my >Insert megalomaniacal plan here<!"

A very important distinction that we must make some point in our lives. Else we'll forever be the clueless rube wondering about with the world burning around us pondering "Did I do that"? And you might think it simple, a straight forward case of checking your 'to-do' list and seeing if 'rule like a tyrannical despot' is listed on there but oh boy would you be wrong in that lofty assumption! Take for instance, one man who believes himself to be a visionary industrialist poised to revolutionise not just entertainment, but the individual-machine relationship forever more. This man's name is Shane Isaac, and to get an idea of who this fella is, let me just list his Linkedin self descriptors: 'Futurist, creator, gamer, technophile and believer in diversifying the global distribution of wealth'. Firstly, you know there's a problem when the tag 'gamer' isn't the cringiest thing you can describe yourself as. Secondly, doesn't that last bit rub you the wrong way like it does me? I mean I know I get flowery here and there, chuck in an extra adjective or two, but it's done consciously, I have intent when I get verbose. The use of 'diversifying' just teeters a bit too much into redundancy, it's big for the sake of being big; there's no intent to it. And believe it or not, those two observations sum up our man pretty well.

Shane is known for his newest project, his only project of note, Earth 2. That's right, those who have heard of it, and welcome, those lucky enough to avoid but not lucky enough to also avoid this blog. Earth 2, the totally ground-breaking and unique project to- drumroll please... create the Metaverse! (Wait, why are you all booing?) Yes, one would have to embody every characteristic of the egotistic to declare themselves the leading mind behind the metaverse; although we've discussed before how misleading the narrative of the title 'the metaverse' can be, so I'm assuming Shane knows better and is just using that label for marketing purposes. What is he actually making? What is Earth 2? Well, it's kind of like NFTs without the blockchain stuff. You know all that Landrush garbage I bemoan everytime we're talking about an NFT project? The thing where people buy virtual plots of land in hopes of flipping them for a profit when the full game launches? (And it never does.) Earth 2 might not be the origin of that idea, per se; but they've certainly gone a long way to popularise the idea in this current NFT wave.

As one might imagine, Earth 2 is pawning off pictures of our glorious earth as NFTs without the Non-Fungible part. But don't worry; the blockchain stuff will come later, he promises, as soon as they're done with the game. Oh but there's a game too! Of course, and its... well, to be honest I don't know what this game is. Nobody does. Because Shane doesn't want to tell us. We know that it'll contain the detail of Red Dead Redemption 2, (already a bit of a dated claim. Might want to update that to 'Horizon: Forbidden West', young Chris-Roberts-in-training.) a vastly bigger worldspace than any traditional game can handle and... I dunno, I guess the game has mineable minerals? We know there'll be minerals. So I guess this is a start-from-nothing MMO? Like Dreamworld? Whatever happened to Dreamworld again... Oh yeah, that's right! It launched to a horrendously terrible asset-flip nightmare the likes of which I could even outperform. And then Youtuber Callum Upton took a provocation to create his own parody game called NightmareWorld in order to mock the piss-poor efforts of the cash-grabbing 'dev team'. If you can even call a group that put something like that together a 'dev team'. (Hmm, I went into a lot of detail on that seemingly unimportant diatribe. I wonder if it will come back into play later?)

The special thing about Earth 2, and the reason why I think it's succeeded in grabbing so many hearts and minds; is that the creator absolutely refuses to share a single real detail about the game, so the heart can come up with it's own, perfect, game. Everyone can look into the colourless, shapeless, putty that is this concept and just reach in and morph their ideal life sim, or RPG, or adventure game. With a title like Earth 2, and the way in which Shane has framed the thing on certain occasions when he's let the yawn-inducing technobabble mask slip for a little bit, leads me to believe he sees a vision of some sort of social hub similar to Second Life. Only his idea is grander and further reaching, because of course. He wants to encompass the whole world in a digital landscape of virtual ownership and play-to-earn finance. He wants to be the architect behind our very own Matrix experience. If only the naysayers would put behind all logic and deductive reasoning so they would blindly believe and follow him! Then he'd already be halfway there!

Indeed, Shane here seems far more interested in the machinations of nay-sayers who look at the size of his project, assess his relative skill and lack of progress, compound the potential for squeezing money out of people and thus scrutinize this project. These people incense him, they upset him, and none more so than the Youtubers with reach who natter on about his project in a couple of videos every few months or so. He has called them every name he can get away with on a monitored social platform, calling them hacks, uniformed, and members of a secretive shadow cabal hired by owners of an Earth 2 competitor that didn't even exist when Earth 2 was announced, and dedicated to trying to destroy his project with weaponised doubt and fear. I'm not kidding about that last one, Shane has real 'main character' syndrome bubbling under the surface, it would seem.

And all this came to a head when, after a rare showcase of actual in-engine footage of what this Earth 2 thing is supposed to be, one Youtuber chose to ridicule the supposed technical prowess of what was being shown. This Youtuber commented that they themselves could do a better job, and that was just one step too far for Shane. Mr Issac flew into a rage, shook about crying for 5 hours, and after he managed to calm himself down; took to challenging this Youtuber online to put their money where their mouth was. He challenged them to make a product with some very specific specifications, most of which hadn't even been criticised by this Youtuber, in a week with a hefty cash incentive if this Youtuber delivered. Yes, because like an actual super villain, Shane wrote fail conditions for himself into the challenge that he issued, rather than just say something benign like "Well you make the whole game then!" (This guy thinks he's The Riddler, I swear.) And this Youtuber he challenged? The rube he would embarrass for their lack of ability to deliver once they shied away from the task? It was Callum Upton. One of the only Youtubers shown to have the talent and gumption to actually put his money where his mouth is with Nightmare World. Yeah... I don't know if Shane thought this through...

You know, maybe he did. He was just so sure that his various offhanded parameters for the challenge would never be met by the- huh, Callum did them? All of them? Huh. Well at least Shane wasn't a total crybaby about this and, upon seeing the update posts that Callum was putting out as he worked, changed the goal posts. (Oh wait he did. Shane did do that!) Now put yourself in the shoes of an average observer, as if you aren't already. So this egoist CEO of a unrealistically ambitious company issues a challenge to a lowly independent to match his talents, only to balk when this indie dev does exactly that and then tries to change the win conditions so that he doesn't have to part with the reward money. I'm sorry; that's just makes this CEO a plainly written YA adventure novel villain. And don't take my word for it, dabber Youtuber JoshStrifeHayes coined that very label himself. And more to the point, doesn't this whole situation just make one wonder what exactly a financial ride with Shane Issacs entails? Because that's what this is all about at the end of the day, you read the part of Issac's manifesto about 'diversifying financial freedom' or whatever; the guy is trying to make his early buyers rich. But when he demonstrates himself to be this petty, picking fights with people who criticize his work from an observer's perch, one might wonder if this is the brain they really want in charge of making them money. 

At the end of the day, this is just a microcosm of the whole speculative investment metaversal trend we're seeing touch our industry. Ill planned and shaky, prone to emotional outbursts to cover up the lack of professionalism, and slathered with an unremovable, permanent layer of egg-on-the-face. Whether Earth 2 is a scam or just a guy who really overestimates his own abilities going to bat for himself, the project is a rudderless ship, kicked off from Southampton with the promise of transatlantic opulence, and steered directly into iceberg waters by a truly clueless captain. As with any project like this (>cough< Star Citizen >cough<) the involved are far too invested to critically assess themselves and when it all falls apart around them and they're left penniless and gameless, they'll point the fingers at everyone around them and cry "Why would FUD pushers do this?" And perhaps some, the truly enlightened out there, will be struck with the diamond insight to look objectively and ask; "Wait, was I the idiot?"  

Chaos is here

 And most wish it wasn't, apparently

Lo and behold, after hardly believing it to even be a real game: Final Fantasy: Stranger unto Paradise- around of Paradise- inside of- whatever that stupid title is supposed to be- has landed! And can I just say that no one is more ecstatic than I? Not that I'm actually sitting around looking forward to a game from the guys who inflicted Nioh upon me, (I still haven't recovered from that game) but more that I'm tentatively anticipatory for the meme potential of this utter writing travesty. Intentional travesty, as far as I can tell; there's no way you write characters with lines like these unintentionally, but it stands as perfect mocking fuel whatever the guiding heart behind the words. If Metal Gear Rising Revengence can prove so transcendent that even now, nine years later, we're still memeing on it; then I think Jack's Mad Chaos Murder Bender can certainly squeeze out a couple of years of thigh slappers.

And before we set off on the wrong foot here, I think it's important to say that I do acknowledge that Stranger beneath Paradise has managed to score some positive impressions when it comes to raw gameplay. Much as I would expect them to, coming from a studio who once put together the Nioh games which play fantastically. (my gripes with that game don't touch the raw gameplay at all.) I mean, it only makes sense that Team Ninja are going to bring their considerable talents with them wherever they go, so that even a title which is bumrushed into a Final Fantasy game by the excitable lunatics at Square Enix will hold some basic merit to it. Could you imagine a studio renowned for their action gameplay putting out a title that totally sucks in gameplay, presentation and playability? That would be crazy, it would- well, I guess that would be Platinum Game's Babylon's Fall, now wouldn't it? Huh... (It didn't have to be that way...)

Speaking of, can we talk about how weird it is that this game started off as a completely original brand which got twisted into this new 'Final Fantasy: Origins' franchise? I know that's not exactly unique on the landscape of maintaining game franchises, but it's still weird to hear about it happening. Like how the original concept for Resident Evil 4 ventured so far away from the series' routes that the team just got permission to branch off and rebrand the game as Devil May Cry. Isn't that wild? (You're thinking about how similar Dante and Leon Kennedy look right now, aren't you?) But there's something especially weird about this happening for a title which is supposed to reimagine the origin of the entire Final Fantasy brand. Providing context to an originally bare bones game so that new avenues of lore can be explored; it really sounds like the sort of thing you'd expect to be expressly commissioned and watched over by the series arbiters like a thirty eyed Malboro. But then again, I guess people do tend to play it somewhat loose around the FF titles nowadays; given that they've let FF7's remake bloat up into an unwieldly 10 year project.

Paradisiacal Strangers, on the otherhand, is just one kick ass action game with tons of monster dungeon delving, some cool class systems, (called Jobs. Yes, they bought back Jobs) and customisation so that we can make our generic-looking protagonist man slightly less or more generic-looking, depending on how we're feeling that morning. There are enemy types here that are indicative of classic Final Fantasy monsters, which still fills me with that sense of excited wonderment I felt back when they were doing that same thing with Final Fantasy XV; yet here they look and feel even more robust. On it's face, this has everything it needs to be an absolute rocking Final Fantasy game which successfully boots the franchise into the action genre which it has never truly thrived in before. From this vantage point, it's only a matter of time before the inevitable Final Fantasy Soulslike is made. Piano version of One Winged Angel? Yes please! But I guess this isn't a just world.

At it's launch Paradise Falling Strangers ranked on the list of top 5 worst selling Final Fantasy spin-offs of all time; and when you consider that there are over 50 Final Fantasy games and only around 20 of them are mainlines (including sequels like Final Fantasy XIII-2) that is an absolutely damning slap in the face. The only Final Fantasy games which have sold worse are those three Chocobo Spin-off games that I only just discovered existed when reading up for that Chocobo GP blog. (Kind of makes me want to play them now. They're like lost FF gems. Assuming they're any good.) Whilst 'Theatrhythm Final Fantasy',  'World of Final Fantasy' and 'Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy in Itadaki Street Portable' rank higher. (No word on how the Kingdom Hearts franchise fairs up, nor my arch nemesis: 'Chain of Memories'. >Blearg< I spit on that name!) Now to be fair these are numbers coming from Japan because America and some other western territories don't release sales numbers, and one might point out that Dragon Quest typically outsells Final Fantasy in Japan anyway. (I will not make any sweeping statements about an entire country's taste for RPGs based on that knowledge, but know that I'm thinking about it.) But it's rare to see any major discrepancies with sales figures across seas when we're talking about a JRPG; so indications point to this being a bit of a major flop. But why?

If I had to point fingers, and for the sake of this blog let's presume that I do; I'm going to be honest, that reveal trailer made this game look trash. I know we joke and meme about the amount of times the dude said 'Chaos'; but that single introduction, seething of B-movie cheese, was enough to make the non FF diehards just write this game off as more trite nonsense. Despite the genuine talent behind it, despite the global superbrand printed on the box! And for that first impression to knock off some points, it only teed up the game for another hit once the reviews started coming out and they were less than stellar. The game isn't a disaster title, but it's not anything special worth rushing out for. It's just good enough, which doesn't meet the threshold requisite to wash out the taste of week-old cheese that clings to this game.

And that is despite that raw meme value which is no doubt responsible for at least a few impulsive purchases. I mean that one scene alone of seeing Jack let someone pour her heart out to him before dead-beat responding "Bulls***" pumping a Limp Bizkit song through his headphones and storming off moodily is pure gold. And if I told you that scene is literally indicative of Jack's attitude for a good half of this game's scenes, tell me that doesn't make you at least a bit curious as to what this game is about! But clearly that's value we expect to pay off for the brand in the far future, because it's not making dividends anyday soon. Not only is this sad, but it's confusing. How did the Nioh guys make something so reportedly bland? Is this a self fulfilling prophecy of people who went in expecting the game to be bad and thus have brainwashed themselves into thinking that it is? Or is this Square Enix leaning on the team to keep to the 'mostly disappointing' standards that Square have been confusingly maintaining for the past year?

So we have ourselves an unfortunate dud that just makes us want to exclaim "Bullsh***" and play our edgy rock music as we storm out of the death castle. And can I just say what a loss for everyone this is? With this failure it might mark the end of the budding Final Fantasy Origin's subseries before it even had a chance to shine. Which means we're not going to get that Final Fantasy VII origins game featuring Zack that you just know Tetsuya Nomura was rubbing his hands for since the word go. (The freak.) Or that potential FF XIII origins game, where they'd finally have a chance to execute that ultra ambitious Fabula Nova Crystallis crossover they were building up all those years ago. (I just wanted to see Noctis from XV face-off against his pretty boy clone Ace from Type-0 whilst Lighting cosplays as 2B or whatever the heck 'Lighting Returns' was supposed to be about.) What a loss this world has endured.

Company's don't care about players, 2022 edition

And everyone claps

Your favourite game company doesn't care about you. That seems like a fairly sensible and acceptable statement to make by most people's standards, of course they don't care about us- they have themselves to worry about. This is a silent and selfish world, everyone's out for themselves, it would honestly be anomalous if a development company suddenly started to care about the well being of their audience just because we squeezed out money for them. But what if I told you that for some developers it goes a step beyond that? They harbour not just apathy, but disgust. Genuine and acute disliking; all for those they claim to be creating entertainment for. And that might seem like a stretch and perhaps a somewhat unfair extrapolation, but the revelations of early 2022 certainly do paint that exact picture nice and clearly for us all.

There have been several iterations of brand new schemes and meddlings that various gaming companies have lauded in the past few weeks, few of which truly push forward our lovely little medium of gaming in any way that will improve, you know; the games. Instead, we're looking at new ways we can pump up the coffers of our favourite development giant in the hopes that- gee I don't know, maybe that trickle-down economics will finally kick-in after all this time? One of the most embarrassing of which has been the whole 'live service model' which has bitten companies in the ass so many times, but still they insist it's the future. Releasing a bad game and telling us it's good but give them 10 years to make it good is wearing a little thin, but don't just my opinion for it. Lets look at Babylon's Fall. That's a game which looked pretty bad, even with big names like Square Enix in the producer's chair and Platinum Games suffering the developer's whip. But worry not for how it looks, because it is a live service! Everything is subject to be improved, the beginning is not the destination, yadda yadda yadda... How did that work out for them? Well the game is currently looking at a player peak on Steam of just shy of 1,200 players. And a average of around 300 at this current moment. Hmm... okay but what about the free demo they put out? Average of 30 players... Yikes, there really is no spinning that one, huh? I guess players want good games. Weird.

But that's just one scheme. Recently I've noticed an influx in subscription mania setting in as game companies get all hot and bothered about the prospect of shackling us all to unending repeating payments. Seems fair enough. The only thing being that they can't really figure out the point at which they make the subscriptions worthwhile. You know, something I'd actually want to dish out some coins for. Take Rockstar: (I wish someone would...) they want us to pay for a subscription to GTA Online. Yes, the very same GTA Online which as been around since 2014. Now it has a special plus subscription with exclusive apartments and cars and- I'm sorry did we all do something wrong to you, Rockstar? Did we all collective kick out your windows in a past life and this is your way of 'getting back' at the world? It's just that, as far as I can recall, GTA Online makes hundreds of millions each and every year. It's paying itself off by the truckload. Yet they need a new revenue stream out of it? Why? How does an 'aura of exclusivity' provide value to your favourite cash cow? Needless to say this was mocked to the high heavens. And even more needless to say it'll go through anyway. Because Rockstar doesn't care what you think, because the players don't matter. 

Oh and what's this? Call of Duty is apparently flirting with a subscription model in the near future and just what are we even doing anymore? Why have our development studios dedicated their lives and souls to whittling down the product but upping the cost on consumers? Haven't they already decided to try and ramp up the base purchase price by £10 this generation? Isn't that enough screwing about? How about blaming this all on stagnant inflation, whilst simultaneously dusting off their 100 dollar special edition versions and asking why we look so insulted? So say that COD gets a subscription service; what does that offer? A recurrent COD experience? We've already got that, it's called Warzone. Or is this going to be Warzone 2? Or maybe just exclusive bonuses for Warzone? What about the core package on offer has been improved in order to justify a recurrent price over a flat buy in. And if the answer is 'nothing', then why are we allowing this to happen?

Of course, I've just been dancing around the true Dark Horse of this whole affair. The villainous plague infesting the minds of overwise sane business men across all industries, the dreaded letters: NFT. I know that the Ubisoft debacle was technically last year, but some of their responses were made this year and I just can't forget about them so easily. Making NFT helmets in Breakpoint, an already dying game, in order to ensure it would become toxic to any prospective newcomers? Paying bonuses in NFTS to your employees? Committing to an NFT powered future, despite the fact that only a fraction of a percentage of cryptocurrency users even partake in the scam-ridden practice? Talk about a neon self-waving red flag and several halves. It's like a litmus test to see which developers still have normal pupils in their heads and which have had their sights surgically replaced with comical dollar signs; because no rational, clear seeing business focused individual could look at the numbers around NFT and see that as the incoming wave of the future.

And nowadays it doesn't even have to be an established video game giant who slides down this path. The grift is so ubiquitous with the industry that people are approaching games industry careers with it in mind. Just take Dr Disrespect's idea which has itself a hair brained, NFT fuelled scheme to try and suck money out of potential fans before the game is even made under some guise that 'everyone is an investor'. And absolutely not just a way for Dr D to abscond with funds from people too poor and dumb to successfully sue him. Forget that gaffe of accidentally nicking one of Cyberpunk 2077's screenshots; the very concept of his company is a worse plague on the industry. He's asking from funding in order to hire the development talent! How can you start a game studio that doesn't even have the development staff until after it gets money from it's customers? Revolutionary? Perhaps. The most suspicious framework for a development studio ever? Absolutely.  

So then with all these backhanded scowls shooting back and forth across the industry, one must ask; what does it take for a company to actually appear to value it's fans in todays age? Is there such thing as a games company that doesn't take advantage of their audience? Well I'd argue there are some, but they're becoming fewer. We just need a company who is communicative about changes which the public need to know about, who focus on making a game worthy of the monetisation strategies they intend to implement first, before putting the game out. A company that respects their audience's time, and who isn't asking them to commit 12 hours a day for several concerted weeks in order to get the most out of the game. Oh, and a company that doesn't try to sell their entire fanbase down a fad speculative investment scheme would be kind of nice. I'd certainly like that last one!

In conclusion, the video game industry is fraught with deciding what it even wants to be to the people it caters too nowadays. The entire medium has rocketed forward in the past forty years, moulding and shifting its core structure to rocket in line with traditional media and now it's slipping past itself into something unrecognisable. There are still people making great games for reasonable asking prices and solid returns; but they're starting to feel like the fringe old school against a wave of anti-consumerist bile. Up until now it's been one or two schemes that the big boys in the industry have rallied behind, pushing the big one forward whilst sneaking the smaller one into games at the same time so that the big one draws all the ire. But now the approach is scattergun and I don't know where all this is heading. All I can say is that gaming looks to a potentially drastic landscape in three years time. 

WTF is Project Makeover?

 A mistake

What is it with me and stumbling across a really weird, borderline perverted, game in the Youtube suggestions and just researching the heck out of it? Why can't I just be a normal person, shake my head and purge this thing from my mind? Where do I get off thinking myself the singular authority on deciding what has a reason to exist and what doesn't through my insipid investigations and judgements? When will the day come that I reach the inner peace to let the fetish games exist in their obscurity, the day that I'll grow to be accepting of all grossly uncomfortable titles. And how can I safety do all the research in this blog without anyone knowing about it? Incognito mode keeps it off my history bar but I don't even want my ISP knowing about this. No one can know what it is that I have done! Phew. Have I got it out of my system? Released all those demons that were building up? Good- now let me introduce to those out there lucky enough to have missed it: The absolute state of modern mobile games.

Now if you're like me than you'll have come from an age where mobile games had only just slipped out of that experimental phase where everyone was trying to squeeze more content out of their flip-phone's OS than a handheld console (and failing miserably) and just graced the days where Smartphones became powerful enough to host real games, but are rarely fortunate enough to have any made for them. That isn't to say that there isn't a stupidly huge selection of games to download onto your phone, just that the number of them with even the slightest amount of original design thought put into their construction equals easily less than a percent of the larger mobile library. When I swore off of mobile games, every game was a kingdom builder pseudo-MMO with the exact same progression trees, building archetypes, 'tactical depth', narrative complexity (or heavy lack thereof) and, of course, store front to offset the obnoxious time gating. I even went online and found the template to make my own of these games, it was on the first page of Google. And it's not even as though this model was unique to mobile games, I remember a cowboy themed browser one I used to play back when I was truly hopeless with my freetime.

Since then I'm happy to say that by-and-large the medium has changed! Has it gotten much better? No. But at least things are different. Nowadays mobile games jump from a mix of poorly copy the trending games of the hour, which means bad Fortnite clones for days, to making games that are the exact same type as the one I've discovered today. Games that are conceptually simple, but disguise that simplicity beneath a simply bonkers and sometimes oddly perverted ad campaign that just demands you pay attention long enough to find out more. Today that game is Project Makeover, tomorrow it will be another name with that exact same premise. They're a dime a dozen and it's something of a winning formula with the frankly gross amounts of money the lucky ones make. Oh, and I've picked one of the least horny ones from this pool of games, because if I'm opening this can of worms I'd rather sample slowly at my own pace, rather than tip it down the ol' gullet, full chug.

Adverts for Project Makeover go like this, invariably. Some big eyed generic animated brunette is faced with some sort of event or situation in which they feel the need to dress up, from rebounding after finding their generic man animated model cheated on them to- surviving the arctic winds blowing through their wood cabin window in the middle of, presumably, Siberia? (I feel there are other potential problems there than just a need to get dressed up, but that's just me.) Also, bizarrely, the lady always starts with just an unreasonable amount of hair, I'm talking Disney princess discount Rapunzel locks, which sometimes gets lopped off during the, usually unsuccessful, makeover period. These ads are always telling a story, one only transiently linked to the act of actually playing a game. That is their strength, you watch the full ad because some primal part of your brain needs the story's conclusion, and then the ad's narrative prematurely cuts short after the makeover and you're left hankering for more. Maybe enough to actually play the damn thing.

Of course, one of the most jarring takeaways from these ads is that they're never consistent. From Mafia City to Lily's Garden, they vary in narrative, visual presentation and sometimes even in telling you what the heck the game even does. Project Makeover seems to be pretty good at that last point, thankfully, making sure you know it's all about picking an assortment of clothes, hair, and 'solution appliances' (Razor for hairy legs etc.) in order to dress up our 3D lady over here, and there are wrong answers. Only... wait a minute; in some of the ads she isn't actually 3D. Yep, at least one of these adverts has a 2D rendition of the same woman. (Did I mention it's the same woman in every ad? She really has a lot of fashion disasters in her day-to-day.) Another demonstrate a simply ugly 3D animated style that pails in comparison to their peak 3D ads. There are presentational inconsistences here, is what I'm trying to say. And you might be left wondering what else it is that this game has been wavy with.

What about with telling you what the game is even about? What these adverts tell you you're getting is a dress-up makeover game, presumably with these high quality 3D model story inserts here and there giving you the lead-in to the problem and results of your solution. Only, if you've played any of these current waves of mobile games before in your life, you know that's not what you're getting. There is some dress-up, the core character model is indeed 3D, although not exactly high quality, and the bulk of the gameplay is a match 3 tile game. Seriously. The core gameplay loop is actively ignored by all of the trailers, and do you want to know why that is? Because half of these stupid ad-bait mobile games are match 3 tiles games. Either that or city builders. If you lack the questionable talent to rip-off the latest big title from the real games industry, you're pumping out one of these two games and hiding their true nature out of what I can only assume is embarrassment.

With titles like these, it's much more interesting to look at the frankly dishonest marketing behind the game and studio who make it. Heck, on the official Apple page, they still fill up the screenshots with their not-in-the-game quality pre-renders until for the very last three pictures where they have to show the actual game. I assume it must be somewhere in the TOS that gameplay must be presented on the game page, otherwise they wouldn't have even presented that. And what of the people actually behind all of this? Magic Tavern are a development studio who seem to have harboured a heart for high fantasy, given their name and proclaimed mission statement to create "Enchanting worlds and stories." But somehow or another that has led to them making Mobile games over and over, as well as one VR title back in 2016. Somehow the formula of 'make a game which is really just a thin veil for a match three tile game' has been with them almost the whole time, and it has shown them just gross levels of success.

Project Makeover is the tip of a development ship that is emblematic of the mobile industry. It's a shallow as a puddle but draped in obfuscations, misleading ads and a glitzy presentation. By their example it's totally okay to go pilfering the game model of one of the single most profitable games in the world, Candy Crush; slap character's nicked from 101 Dalmatians and just call it a day. And the worst part of it all? It works. It works for Magic Tavern and all the countless other mobile developers who set up grifts like this every other month, because the mobile market holds and enforces absolutely no standards. What is Project Makeover? A basic matching game with a money store attached to it, and don't let their silver tongued marketing convince you otherwise.

Which Star Wars game is also a Star Wars Movie?

 Asking the really pointless questions now!

Star Wars is an antiquated premise on it's face, proceeded by whole genres worth of typical fantasy storytelling to inform the way it holds it's own poise. Yes, we all pretty much have accepted the fact that the original Star Wars is exactly just the 'farmer becomes hero and saves the princess from the castle' archetypal story; yet somehow, through style and confidence, the series has managed to propagate itself into owning a feeling of distinct individuality. Even when that conceptually shouldn't stack up. Still, today we know what Star Wars looks like, we know how it should feel and how it should sound; and a lot of that comes from the masterful work of the various individuals that lent their talents to creating the world and the sound-scape; but at some point that heavy work needs to rest on the shoulders of a familiar core premise. A premise of ragtag heroic types on their way to save the galaxy from some esoteric classically evil threat, usually with magic powers tossed in there.

Star Wars has thrived as a brand over the years, such to the point that me even writing that sentence no doubt elicited an eyeroll and/or clucked tongue for how blindly apparent and obvious it is. Yet from all the vectors of the entertainment world that the franchise now touches, TV, games, books, comics; there's little that actually capture the specific style of what the movies coveted. Which I'd argue is a blessing, to be clear. A series that can only work when emulating it's core set-up to the letter has little in the way of legs to it and would do little to attract the creativity and dreaming that Star Wars does. But still, there are times when all you want is to shut your eyes and picture you're that same age you were when you first saw Star Wars, and relive all those firsts from the wonder that experience gave you. (Or lack thereof. Some people don't like Star Wars; I see you.) And what, I today wonder, could replicate that moment?

Within the world of Star Wars games there are plenty of great examples of games that soar on their own two feet and scoured legions of fans, yet who do so not quite capturing the specific charm that the movies did; rather generating their own. I think one of the best examples of this from the old guard of Star Wars is Dark Empire; a DOOM-like Star Wars title that pits you as a gun slinging smuggler-type against legions of Stormtroopers, Dark Troopers and regularly labyrinthian level design. It has the 16 bit soundtrack that emulates Star Wars, it borrows the classic white skeleton design of the Stormtroopers but you'd be hard pressed calling it a Star Wars movie bought to the controllers. For one I can't recall how significant the narrative is when it comes to the simple idea of good vs evil (it's more of a side-story within the larger narrative) and for two there's a distinct lack of supporting cast, where the lightly dysfunctional family of Star Wars is an underrated, but decently important, vector of that universe.

'Star Wars: The Force Unleashed' is a comparatively modern contender that I think of often when I ponder this topic, and not just for the way that it slots itself into the main narrative of the Star Wars universe with all the grace of a Wookie who just lost a game of chess. There is a decent set-up to the story of the game, the characters you meet and the stakes you face that is so very familiar to the set-up of a Star Wars movie; such to the extent that I think it fits the space very well. Sure, there's perhaps a lack of originality when it comes to the set-up, but honestly 'lacking originality' is a hallmark of movie Star Wars too. There's even a ropey implication of potentially complex relationships even though this is a game and the team absolutely had the time available to make the Juno Eclipse relationship more interesting. You might contest that but then I'd have to counter: is Princess Leia's relationship with Luke and Han even remotely substantial? Really chew on that. Okay, I best move on before this becomes a roast of Star Wars. The Force Unleashed is a great-feeling Star Wars game that mimics the heart of the movies to a point, Force Unleashed 2 losses the charm and suffers by comparison. However, there's a lack of the journey when it comes to the character's evolution. We don't get that journey from the farm to the stars, which is another huge staple. We see where he comes from, sure, but then Starkiller just becomes a badass for the rest of the franchise. Missed opportunity if you ask me.

But now the big one; Knights of the Old Republic. When I thought of this topic, KOTOR was the game that was on my mind. For no more reason than because it's a game that nails everything I've bought up until now, the rag-tag team, the good vs evil plotlines, the zero-to-hero plotline; but then they kicked it up a notch with The Empire stakes: They told a twist. And it was such a good one too. A dark mirror of the Empire Strikes Back twist, but one which rewrites the narrative in a totally different, and arguably more transformative, way. To be completely fair, both twists work their best in their respective medium, as the distance from the revelation during Empire allows for the audience to exploit their privileged position to review what they'd been told and follow the clues, whereas for KOTOR the twist rearranges your position on everything you've done and achieved up until that point. Contrasting is difficult. Regardless, KOTOR works great for capturing that Star Wars movie feel and in fact I consider it perhaps the golden example of that very boon.

Which brings me now to KOTOR 2. Ignoring the obvious issues with unfinished content, because that's neither here nor there for this introspection; do I believe it matches KOTOR's movie-spirit? I do not. Of course the core fundamentals are there, it's a world hopping party-based adventure that actually brings an even more ragtag group on a journey through the stars. As I've argued before, I'd even say that KOTOR 2 is actually written better than KOTOR 1 in many respects, and if we were to line it up to a movie I think it would saddle up nicely with The Empire Strikes Back in terms of tone. However there is a certain lack of that base, fundamental 'good vs evil' heart to the narrative. It's still hovering around the story in the background, but KOTOR 2 plays around with ambiguity and specific motivation more, which might make it a more engrossing narrative but also pulls it away from Star Wars as the movies know it. Also, my god those beginning few hours are slow!

Which brings me to my pinnacle, the one game which I believe, at this present moment in time, is the most like to the experience of a Star Wars movie. And, to my surprise, I think it's Jedi Fallen Order. This is a game that neatly slides itself into the galaxy with a Jedi Padawan coming to grips with a world that doesn't need Jedi anymore until he's accidentally dragged into the chase once more. Conceptually very similar to KOTOR 2 but a lot less complex in it's face, and it also brings together all the cast of companions in a way that doesn't feel icky; which KOTOR 2 rather proudly goes the opposite way from. It takes us across the galaxy, introduces a ragtag cast and, rather distinctly from every other game on this list, it rather purposefully leaves itself open at the end for a potential trilogy. Events are wrapped up, but further journeys obviously await. Just like any good trilogy bait should do. Thus, the award for most movie-like Star Wars game has to go to Fallen Order, thus in the absence of a good and present movie series; these will be the games that will fill my blockbuster Star Wars hopes. 

Is E3 Dead?

 Probably

In 1995, Erik Earling Easterburn successfully identified a huge and enticing gap in the technology market. For years beforehand the Consumer Electronic Show (1964-today) and the European Trade Computer Show (1988-2004) were the two trade shows that dominated everything to do with electronics in entertainment. But Erik knew there was untapped potential due to burst forth from the rush of modern, constantly reiterating, technologies. Having had apprenticed under technological giants like Cave Johnson and co-dormed with visionaries like Miles Dyson, Erik had the process of rapidly progressing technological niches printed onto his frontal cortex; he knew the coming expanded diversification of technology fields would warrant specialised trade shows in each sector, and he wanted to be the man to snatch up the, currently still infantile, video gaming branch of tech.

 Reaching out to anyone in this fresh industry who would pick up the phone, partnered and financed with his well-connected sister, Eunice Sarah Allistar, (Nee Easterburn) they managed to get the big studios they needed, as well as a huge venue in the Los Angeles Convention Centre, to host the worlds very first tradeshow dedicated solely to video games and displaying the best and brightest of the industry. Just in time for powerhouse classics to feature on the very first show floor, like that years' 'Knuckles Chaotix', 'Garfield: Caught in the act', 'DOOM' but not that DOOM- the SNES version, 'Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure'- which is the fourth Pitfall game. Because of course they made four. 'Ecco Jr.', this one's still a dolphin. And 'White Men Can't Jump', which I thought was a movie, but what do I know? All games destined to be absolute classics we all talk about today with excitable reverence. All bought together by an unbreakable brother-sister team, sealed in a convention baring the abbreviated name of the creator. Erik Earling Easterburn: E3.

What a beautiful story; and one you won't find on Wiki, Youtube, or literally any other source on the known web apart from here. Hmm, how do I know it then? What's my source? Well, Jack: My source is that I made it the F*** up. That's right it's all bull. I fooled you. Our writers came up with that one. Not this time. (A similar incident did occur for the speed-eating champion of Scranton Pennsylvania however, Chalupa division.) I know that's nakedly and unashamedly dishonest, but I thought a wink and a joke would be the best way to break the news that the ol' parents may be getting a divorce. That's right, Jimmy; the ESA and E3 can no longer stand to be in the same room as each other, let alone wake up each and every morning opposite someone that they hate. That's why as of a couple days ago, the E3 conference 2022 was cancelled, physical and digital event, leaving us hanging around in another year of abject turmoil as we sit around wondering "Who's going to get the kids."

It's no secret that this pandemic has screwed the ever loving life out of the E3 expos. Ever since 2020 they haven't been allowed to do a proper in person show, and 2021 featured a digital show so bad that I still have nightmares that I'm trapped on a movie set with Randy Pitchford who keeps almost showing me things from the Borderlands Movie before cutting the camera away at the last second. True hell. Only for that show to be outperformed by Playstation's several online events later that year, Xbox's own event, Nintendo's own event; practically everyone and their fish could hold more compelling video-game related reveal events that don't have to rely on painful bloat or ludicrously overinflated host time slots. Let the PC Gaming Show and it's notoriously overinvolved skits be the lightning rod for why this style of presentation is so utterly behind us. If nothing else we can celebrate that we won't have to deal with another 3 minute mirthless banter between two chemically insoluble 'comedic' hosts and their soul-killing robot mascot. If I had to endure another- huh? The PC Gaming Show is still happening despite the lack of an E3? Well crap. Why even cancel it then?

Of course, it's not just the cringe; the trade show has lost interest with the market as people have grown so used to a world built for instant gratification, and strayed so far from pre-scheduled time-stealing broadcasts that a belated, twisted trade expo like E3 seems archaic. And if the audience doesn't want to put up with the fuss around E3 anymore, then you can bet that the developers and publisher don't want to either. I'm sure you don't need to convince them at all to pull back on the multimillion dollar investment it takes to rent out a convention slot at the LA centre during E3. An expense that Devolver Digital pretty much dedicated it's entire E3 presence to mocking over the past decade. The ESA don't have their stranglehold over the year of game announcements anymore, and this sudden cancellation shows that they're feeling it.

I say this because whilst this might feel very sudden for us, those with their ears in the right places report that this storm has been brewing for a long while. Those typically in charge of reaching out to the ESA for events like these noticed all the way back in December that they weren't receiving any correspondence, and had assumed themselves that the show was off. Which collides with the ESA's stated reason for the show being cancelled: due to the emergence of the Omicron variant. We weren't even that far down the Greek alphabet by December! So true to their embarrassing form, the ESA have made big moves and lied about them to the public for no good reason. Unless to hide the palpable lack of power they've adopted in the past year, but that was going to come out anyway. Lying about it just makes them look pathetic and dishonest.

And the public reaction to this? Well it seems to be pretty widespread relief and/or mocking. Oh, and a initial hurdle of disbelief as this news was officially revealed on freakin' April Fools day; what were they thinking? Just as with 2020 the conversation has turned to suppositions about whether or not we need E3, with the added ammunition of now we've already had these debates, followed by a pretty trashy online E3 just last year to sour perceptions further. Meanwhile the huge game reveals: The gameplay drop for Elden Ring, the Knights of the Old Republic Remake, and the delay of Breath of the Wild 2, happened either around this show, with independent articles that reached just as far as E3 would have, or during Geoff Keighley's game award; which is proving to be the Oscars of gaming. (With less flinging meat.) Oh, and Geoff quietly praised the cancellation with a smiley face Tweet and the confirmation that Summer Games Fest is happy and eager to take it's place.

So we have an E3-less world coming up ahead of us, and though the ESA promises to the high heavens that it'll be back in 2023; one has to ask "What's the point?" Companies don't need you, the audience can't stand you, industry veterans mock your misfortunes, more and more it's feeling like the sun has set on the ESA's cash cow and their bitterness refuses to accept that. Like Colonel Volgin pushing his bullet-riddled burned body past the point of certain death because he promised to us all "It isn't over yet!" Well maybe it is. Maybe it ended 2 years ago. Maybe all this flailing and gasping is for naught and nobody is going to turn up to your crappy house party this time next year. And maybe the dream that Erik Earling Easterburn dreamt all those years ago has finally run it's course... Wait, I made that up. Dammit; what are we talking about again?

F&F Crossroads: To be delisted

A loss in the family

Movie tie in games are a rare breed, and until a while ago I'd have straight-up called them extinct. And there's a damn good reason for that; making a movie doesn't take nearly as long as making a video game, and trying to synch up those two processes in order to capitalise on marketing is damn near asinine. You could take the finest, most accomplished development studio in the world to task and they would struggle to put out a decent game by the time the movie comes in that tiny development window. The only developer who could put something together is maybe Obsidian, if they had prep time. But for the most part this practice was a disaster generator, spitting out low effort travesty after low effort travesty. (For some reason I always think back to those early Marvel movie games most; god those make my spine shrivel in anguish.)

As such, it's with the utmost dread that I saw the announcement of 'Fast and Furious: Crossroads', the video game tie-in giddily promoted by Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel at a lowly E3 conference an age ago. And only half of that disgust spawned from the expectation of what movie tie in games are, the other came from the fidelity of the trailer we saw which, to be frank; was somewhat insulting. For BANDI NAMCO to greenlight something which look like it melted inside of a PS3 before it hit our screens is just a damning indictment for how little they think of their customers. If the developer couldn't match the basic visual fidelity of the console generation they were making for, at the tail end of that generation, no less; then maybe they shouldn't have tried to go for a realism art direction. Heck, they could have made this game in a Fortnite cartoon style and people would have respected it more. I ain't a graphics hound, but everyone's gotta have standards.

But so what; the game looked bad. So does Kenshi, but I still love that tough-as-nails little bugger more than most modern day AAAs. What about Crossroa- oh I can't even pretend, the gameplay was even worse than the visuals. Hands down. A car game based on a franchise that had long since forsaken it's racing routes, Crossroads tried to marry godawful car physics, bad driving controls, and linear narrative action. Yes, you're essentially driving your way through a linear action title; which is a concept I'd never even thought possible before just now, and it frankly horrifies me to even consider. This game is made up of short missions wherein you stick to narrow single-file roads and ever-forward objectives, whilst the facsimile of a broad desert or large town is broadcasted five feet from you, protected by an invisible war. It's wild. As though two very different games collided in the planning room between what the developers wanted and what the studio demanded in order to conceive something horrid, and accidentally antiquated.

It's hard to convey the feeling of playing a driving game where you follow a single objective for risk of mission failing. I know I'm hampering on about this, but you need to understand how even at a fundamentally base level; this game is flawed. Even if the cars didn't handle as though their gears were made of silly putty, why would you want to play through what is essentially an on-the-rails driver? I can't think of another driving focused game that would even dare put out something like this and call it a full price worthy game! I'm not even just talking about the Forza games which put this to shocking shame either; I'm talking games like The Getaway, heck the Driver games. This is 'Ride to Hell' levels of railroading. But at least I can say this game looks and plays better than that one did. Whatever miniscule praise that constitutes as. 

The game looked bad, it played bad, it also sounded bad. The actors, lots of whom were either actors from the movies or other high profile actors from across the industry, sound like they couldn't be bothered with the material either. Which I can only attribute to the wild phenomena where a ramshackle operation has the ability to inexplicably infect the talents of the people even passingly involved. It was also written poorly. With the narrative being nigh-on nonsensical even for a Fast and Furious plot. I wish I could break it all down for you, but to be honest I've forgotten literally every character's name, let alone their motivations, so you're going to have to either take my word on that or take the plunge and play the thing for yourself. Of course, if you choose the latter; you better hurry that up.

I say that because as of this week it has become clear that Crossroads is on the offramp, as the publishers are looking to pull the thing from sale entirely! (Did you like that basic car pun? I'm proud of it.) In a shocking move, it has recently been announced that the PlayStation store will be delisting Crossroads next month on April 29th, as reported by several publications who are crazy enough to have eyes on the official studio page. (Seriously, who's actively keeping up with what these guys are doing?) Now we've all seen bad games before, even pitiful ones; but how often do we have a game so bad that the developers have decided it's more sensible to remove it from publication than to just let it sit around in hopes it snares in the odd mistaken purchase every blue moon or so. This says one thing very clearly to me; this tells me that the studio are embarrassed by this game. As so they should be. 

Having this sitting on storefronts is like a ready-made advertisement why your studio shouldn't be hired for anymore jobs, so I can absolute understand, and even sympathise, with the play at revisionism. Bury the past. Kill it, if you have to. Still, that game preservationist within me does wince whenever something like this goes down. Same as it does for the Top Gear game once released by Amazon Game Studios which may have been trash, but existed as the only game ever made in which you could play as two Jeremy Clarkson's in the same race. ("Now with double producer punching action!") Maybe they just didn't want to have server upkeep fees wasted on a game that actually no one in their right mind would ever want to buy. Yeah, let's say this was for the good of the people. Spin this into a positive; that's the way it's done!

But whatever misgivings we have about a game being killed, what has been decided has been decided, and I can't really imagine anyone mounting some sort of impassioned plea to save this game from the chopping block. Even for the meme potential; it's just not worth it. Fast and Furious lived a quarter mile at a time, and now that gas prices are up it can't afford to truck along any longer, and behind it leaves a legacy where it's okay to completely clean up after you've taken a dump on the gaming world to pretend that it was never there to begin with. My thoughts go out to Vin Diesel, who seemed to really believe in this game for whatever twisted reason (Even if he couldn't be bothered to bring that excitement to the voice recording booth) and my eye turns to all the shovelware crap on Steam, wondering when they'll grow the humility to remove themselves from the world's presence.

Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed

 Stirring spirits.

I'm about to sin right now, right here for everyone to read. I don't care for Ghostbusters. Never did. I mean I don't think they were bad movies by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think they're pinnacles of entertainment worthy of coming back to time and time again for nearing on forty years now. The first film was fine, as was the second, but I don't understand what would have been so terrible about leaving it at that. A funny movie about exterminators who capture ghosts which they turns into their business model. Good joke, it stood up until the credits. I never understood why there were no less than two cartoons made for the concept, nor two revival movies made decades later. But they were, indeed, made and to this day Ghostbuster fans still regularly gobble up near every bit of trivia and lore they can around what I see to be a paper-thin world, all for the hopes of propagating this piece of mid-eighties cheese into perpetuity.

But I can't deny the success the brand has seen, nor the apparent fanbase it has managed to drum up. Aforementioned spin-off cartoons that were actually pretty good, some games that really set the fanbase ablaze, a few that didn't, and a Ghostbusters VR title that was such a flop that the team just cancelled all content for it so quietly that I can't find a single news article noting its absence. They just stopped releasing the promised 'several' episodes after number 2 and just walked away. And now, hardly a wink after the last movie, we have yet another Ghostbuster video game to stir up the old fanbase from their retirement homes because 'Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed' was surprise announced and it's a- it's a asymmetrical multiplayer title? Oh no... that could be bad.

Now to be clear, asymmetrical multiplayer isn't a guaranteed recipe for disaster by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact the genre has something of a dedicated and loyal fanbase that are all currently taking turns to fund the development of Dead by Daylight. Sometimes they find other games to keep them busy for a week or two, but they'll be back to DBD before the month's out. Truly that game managed to find its indie footing when sure-fire, multimillion dollar, too-big-to-fail, 'Evolve' let the ball drop. Surely there's some space in there between abject failure of 'Evolve' and the typical flash-in-the-pan DBD distractor where another title can rule the roost at least for a little while. At least that's what Austin-based developer IllFonic is hoping for.

If you think that you recognise that name then it's probably for good reason. Illfonics didn't just pop up out of the ground and, somewhat encouragingly, this isn't their first rodeo with working on an asymmetrical multiplayer game. They worked on the Friday the 13th Videogame which helped launch a wave of indie horror asymmetrical games forever more. Quite a simple game on the face of it, but igneous in it's premise. We'd all seen the idiot survivors in these horror movies make nonsensical, near-suicidal, choices, so why not try and find out exactly how well we'd do in those shoes making those decisions? It came with considerable degrees of jank, both in server stability and plain gameplay balancing, but that ruggedness carried an approachable charm to it that a polished competitive game of this genre, like DBD, just doesn't. Horror is perhaps the only genre in entertainment that can successfully and consistently pull off the jank-look.

Of course the goodtimes couldn't last forever and following a lawsuit IllFonics were forced to drop the game to search for greener pastures. Still that's quite some Venn diagram crossover for this current Ghostbuster project, isn't it? An asymmetrical and a horror game: It's like they were priming up for a Ghostbuster's game all this time. (Not that Ghostbusters is really a horror franchise, so to speak. But ghosts and horror are adjacent to one another, I suppose.) I wonder if they have any other priors that might clue us into their development prowess. Let's see here- they also made... oh no. They made 'Predator: Hunting Grounds'. Talk about a swing and a colossal miss! That was a game which took the rough charm of that last game and totally lost it in abjectly awful balancing, an uncommitted and boring play loop, and a raw gameplay spread that made the hands weep for even the days of Wii FPS games. And yes, I played a great many Wii FPS', I know how bad they all felt. If I'm thinking back fondly on the days of trying for prestige on COD 4 for Wii (No I didn't get there, but I was painfully close) then you know you've screwed up somewhere along the way.

Which pretty much sums up the potential I feel that a Ghostbusters asymmetrical game could have, between those two priors. Either we're looking at an abject disaster or a small hit briefly noticed and quickly lost to the abyss of copycats or more stable genre tentpoles. This subgenre of competitive multiplayer games might not be quiet as oversaturated as some others, but that's just because these sorts of titles have a limited shelf life and an initial appeal that doesn't lend itself well to sustained and continuous play. When you accept that baseline, and then reflect on the value that the Ghostbusters brand in particular lends to this franchise, then the dream slowly starts to unravel and you see why games like this don't particularly appeal to people like me. I like investing in online games with a journey ahead of it, and I don't see that journey in Spirits Unleashed.

All the ingredients are there however. The game touts the ability to create your own Ghostbuster, interact with two out of the original cast for their vendor abilities, and will have basic ghost hunting gameplay. I doubt those hunts will match the unburnished ruggedness of a popular ghost hunter like Phasmophobia, but tracking down spectres is inherently a formula that can hold some unique challenge from spook to spook, depending on how creative the team is with their rooster. The art style has this cartoony false-life look to it that fits the soft-edge horror that Ghostbusters encompasses. But it all lacks that spark of something special, that promise of something greater, that hook to feed the ravenous hunger of the online addict. It just feels so incredibly insubstantial.

Yet all I say must be consumed with the requisite amount of salt. I am no Ghostbusters fan and the last asymmetrical multiplayer game I played was, in fact, Evolve. (I got a little too good at being the monster in that game. No one should play Evolve that much.) Still, I am someone who observes the medium well enough to be able to predict the life and death of games like these with a decently high hit-rate when it comes to accuracy. Is this the Ghostbuster game that fans have been rubbing their hands together for? Perhaps, although the response certainly doesn't seem so excited as to imply that. Most likely this will last the breadth of a summer fling, come and go in space of a quarter rotation and never be thought of again. Hey, at the very least I expect the thing to be more supported than that abominable VR title.