Remastering the remaster

 Keep polishing and you'll burn a whole through the disc.

There are certain games throughout history that have a very important impact on the artistry of video game development for how innovative, polished, or creative that they are. Glittering jewels of their time that transcend the rough confines of week-one release metrics and review aggregates and go on to become legends in their own right, regardless to the opinion of the day. Critics were somewhat lukewarm on 'Fallout: New Vegas' back when it first released, calling it "More of the same" and punishing it severely for the many bugs that the base package launched with; only for New Vegas to go on and be regarded as the single best game in the franchise even now to this day. Why? Because that game nailed the concept of what Fallout was supposed to be in a way that resonated with an audience who understood Fallout better than the critics did. New Vegas remains in perpetuity within our hearts for that reason. Do you know what we don't need in order to continue loving that game? A bloody remaster!

Yet in the world we live in today, it seems that every single publisher is possessed by this errant fancy that the success stories of yesteryear just vanish into the ether unless they get touched up by some up-and-coming studio, slapped with a more expensive price tag than what they original launched with, and ported to modern day hardware. Now in one sense; yes, I think it's very cool that smaller studios have a new avenue to cut their teeth, more players in the big leagues is good for the overall health of the industry without doubt- but good lord is this remaster problem getting out of control. Are we going to remaster every single big release for the next generation because backward compatibility isn't exploitable enough? Is that what we're doing, Sony? Because let's be honest with on another; this here is mostly a problem with the way that Sony wants to do their business!

We've got the Sony Remake for The Last of Us Part 1 which is a remake only in the strictest technicality because they made it on a new engine, The Uncharted Remastered collection and now, to throw atop the dung heap, a remaster of 'Horizon: Zero Dawn'. Why? What even is a remaster? Well typical definition would be a sprucing up of visual fidelity through way of lighting improvements, texture resolution, maybe even rendering techniques, all to make the product look better. But with art there really isn't anything as simple and objective as looking better, now is there? The remaster of Final Fantasy X back in the day sparked up some conversation about the philosophy of remasterings as it bought textures into sharper focus, but robbed the intention out of some of the original art. A sprawling bazar of goods who's background shelves would melt into the haze of the middle-distance became a simple shop with products that stretched a bit back until it hit that clearly defined wall back there. THe Last of Us Part 1 Remake noticeably brings down the colour saturation of the original to the levels of the sequel, despite that colour palette better fitting a story like Part II, rather than the more deceptively hopeful narrative of Part I. It's not always quite so cut-and-dry.

And then we have the real reason that remasters are even mounted, the politics and financial incentives bubbling behind the scenes driven by people who just want to make their extra buck off a game they don't have to make from scratch. I get it, creating something from nothing is very difficult and not even worth it when you can work off of what's there; but when you're already on your third rerelease after 10 years there really has to be a point at which someone stops you from making a fool of yourself. In a time where money is becoming tighter and games are, inexplicably, forcing themselves to be more expensive; it really is getting a little insulting to see our back catalogues exhumed from their gentle graves and shoved back onto our store shelves with a bit of lipstick slapped on top. The Switch release of Skyrim Anniversary Edition is shaping up as $70 for god's sake! That game came out 11 years ago! This kind of exploitation, at a painful financial time around the world, should be criminal! 

But I'm dancing around the stars to rant at the cosmos; let me bring this down to the catalyst of my little aneurysm; the recently announced, and thus lamentably upcoming, remaster of 'Horizon: Zero Dawn'. Guerrilla Games' epic game about a post-apocalyptic new age sci-fi fantasy story with robot dinosaurs. A triumph of overly-elaborate and complex visual design matched with spectacular animation and character models, in it's time Horizon was the belle of the visual ball. It was a must-have PlayStation exclusive game that Sony wanted people to know about in their lull between Uncharted releases, and it proved successful enough to warrant a sequel that would be released several years later. Oh, and the thing actually made it's way to PC a few years back. It's a game that lived it's life... and then faded from the pop culture sphere.

I'm not saying that people forgot about the game... actually, yes that is what I'm saying. Not long after Horizon got it's fame and appreciation people moved on entirely from the game for some reason and denied it a formative position in the pantheon of game development. Now why would that... oh right, it launched the same week as Breath of the Wild. So in that sense I can understand why the developers felt that they were robbed of the limelight; no one would allow them to push their release out of the way of a Zelda game, and they themselves could probably never have guessed just how much of a world changer that game would be. Zero Dawn would have certainly scored a more favourable spot in history had it just had a little room to release. But it's no big failure, afterall they got a sequel earlier this year that... launched the same week as Elden Ring? (I'm sorry, are these people trying to sabotage themselves?)

By definition of what's 'fair' and 'deserved'; it's probably right to say that the Horizon games got screwed by their releases and deserved better; but does that mean we need to literally rerelease the things? With a remaster that'll probably cost $70 for work that does not, in any way, justify that price tag? Uhh... no, that's pretty much where I draw the line. All the lost fame that Horizon missed out on has slowly been sucked up over the years of exposure to the Internet. Perhaps not as explosively as the team would have liked, but slow recognition is better than none. Not only did Horizon have it's time to shine, it also already lived it's life as the best looking game of it's time, just as it's sequel did and is still doing now. (I'm pretty sure no game currently is better looking than it.) Sprucing it up again just feels like a child star chasing their lost moment in the spotlight. It's all just a little sad.

The only element of this I'm not upset by is the idea of these games over-riding the number of new games that could be coming our way, because contrary to popular belief, most of these remasters aren't manned by the core team. Can you imagine how insulting they would find that? Being asked to remake their own game again? No, it's new development teams that handle this stuff and I say 'good for them.' I just think this is getting a bit behind 'celebrating' and falling into 'exploitative' territory. Who was asking for a Zero Dawn Remaster? No, really! Can the culprit please step forward? They cannot, because they do not exist. I think Remasters should belong to those special few games that deserve to immortalise their place in history by another go around in the spotlight. Zero Dawn in not such a game, and I don't think I'll ever be proved otherwise. (Heck, a rerelease is just going to make the already middling combat feel even more dated.)

The Death that was never Stranded

From Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For Hate's sake; I spit my last breath at thee!

As the immolation of Google Stadia for all the world to see has gone underway, information about the truly disastrous state of the service has begun to permeate throughout the industry. Some of it is reiterations upon points we already knew well as the service was choking itself out, some it is is new contextualisation from partner studios who find themselves no longer bound by the rope called 'professional courtesy'. And from that I have been struck with a small sense of 'Well what did you expect' after the clapback of many smaller studios who have grumpily lambasted a jeering public for not thinking about the monetary deals they were relying on before all this took place. Now I respect and sympathise with the financially affected; but you were literally feeding off a volatile dung heap that was burning up publicly for all the world to see. They shuttered their in-house studios, announced they were stepping away from active development on the platform and then started lagging behind on new release lists. If after all of that you, as a company, were still putting all your eggs into their basket; there's a point at which you have to accept a bit of the blame for your own misfortunes.

But not all of the new information coming out has been about the present deals being scrapped, or the fact that employees were, as I speculated in the moment, told of this shut down mere moments before the rest of the world. (Business partners were informed with the rest of the world.) We've also heard about companies with exclusive Stadia products, now scrambling to get a port together before their game becomes lost media. (Which I hope they do. I heard good things about that Gylt, I'd be interested to check it out.) And also projects that were proposed to be developed and owned exclusively by Stadia which never came to fruition. Not only do these serve as interesting and curious 'what could have been', but some even stretch into revealing exactly what sort of crazy power trip that Stadia was on leading them directly off the cliff they ended up crashing down.

I'm talking, of course, about their collaboration with Kojima. Now we all knew that Google Stadia's team had met with Kojima and there was absolutely nothing weird or questionable about that state of affairs. Stadia represented a very noticeable technological step forward with streaming technology and Kojima has always prided himself with working close to that expanding forefront; so of course he would pop into the studio at least once in it's short life. What we didn't know until now was how that trip was not just a social call with a tour stitched onto the side. Apparently Kojima came with a proposition, one that Google were initially receptive to. He, in the wind-down after the Death Stranding development, was proposing some sort of Stadia exclusive follow-up game that would have been a single-player-only title. Talk about a system pusher! A Kojima exclusive title? That must have been a godsend to these executives... right?

What you've got to always bear in mind with Stadia, is that even though everything is coming out right now about their trials and tribulations, little is true about their performance now which wasn't true at launch. Stadia isn't one of those ideas that sporadically picked up momentum a few years into their life, they launched with low download numbers that all the world could follow and laugh at them for due to their partner Stadia App which was a requirement to use the software. It wasn't long at all before the Stadia team were confronting themselves with the fact that they didn't have the numbers to subsidise the investment that daddy Google was putting into them, so even whilst they were making big moves of bringing in development talent to work on in-house games, those prospects were founded on borrowed time. We only realised how much time that was in the past week. As such, this initial deal with Kojima was just as tenuous.

Still, a deal was made, and Kojima went off to build some early development mock-ups of what this Death Stranding follow-up would look like. As far we can tell from very early reports, it would have been an interesting departure from an already vividly surreal game at least in raw concept, for the signature Strand-type interconnected world-building system would have been absent from the game. A stark omission given conceptually central to the themes of reaching out and connecting with others to become stronger and more capable, which informs so much of the design decisions and lore of Death Stranding. Honestly, I'm interested to see what side of Death Stranding's fallen America would be explored in a game devoid of the interconnectivity aspect; perhaps another overall theme would take hold?

Whatever the case, we'll never find out because the second that Kojima productions put together their first mock-up and displayed it for Stadia, the fools cancelled it. Why? Because the game was single player and, you guessed it: They didn't think that single player games have a market anymore. (You really can't make this up.) And the kicker? The big final word on canning the product came from Phil Harrison himself; the worm at the centre of the company who has been failing upwards his entire career. An absolute leech on society emblematic of everything wrong with the corporate mentality and advancement through connection instead of merit and passion. People like Phil are the kind who'll serve their world best once they reach retirement age and get the hell out of everyone's way, because he's been worse than useless in every single position he's ever held in his career.

Let me try and convey how annoying this is. Stadia was missing so many things which ultimately led to their downfall, chief of which was any sort of commitment to what they were doing.  The money they threw around was never theirs, but over-investments from their parent company which these idiots squandered on overpricing ports; creating a platform with only a handful of exclusives, all of which were indie games. They created a platform powerful enough to run games stronger than anything else on the market today, and they did precisely bugger all with that potential. And here was Kojima, willing to give them an exclusive that they didn't even need to build a team to create. A legendary name, with a die hard audience, and they let him slip between their fingers because his game wasn't a Fortnite or a Warzone or a New Worlds; something online that they could monetise. This man would have bought them a mass in adoption rate by his mere presence on their line-up; and instead they shed themselves of that visionary like he was a plague. Again; the company was run by idiots.

This was before Stadia would go ahead to purchase a bunch of small studios that they'd keep on payroll for less than a year before dissolving them and then trying to fold those employees into weird positions across Google that none of them signed up for. All of those developers and artists had no place in a company like Google, but Stadia didn't care because they didn't understand the medium they were muscling into and absolutely never would. Maybe the better future is the one were Kojima never made his Death Stranding title, because the absolute incompetence of Stadia would killed the platform anyway and then his game would have just become lost media until tech powerful enough to run it on home computers became publicly accessible; in about 2035. And maybe this is just another reason why Google are hands-down the worst innovators on the Internet that they practically run. Oh, and some suit needs to retire Phil Harrison from this industry; for everyone's sake.

OverWatch 2 is kind of rough right now

 You don't think! You never figured out how to think, did you Blizzard?

Is there such a thing as a 'good' video game release anymore? You know, the sort of release where a big and connected video game company with the resources and 'on-hand-staff' to really know better turns around and actually anticipates the upcoming difficulties with the upcoming launch they've been planning for the last four years at least? A launch where basic teething troubles and hang-ups are resolved before the doors to the player base is opened up and everyone has to sit on their hands for the next three weeks for the developers to be told over and over the basic elements of their own launch that they screwed up? Is that even a possibility in the market of video games today ruled by developers and publishers so obsessed with squeezing as much money out of the gameplay loop as possible that they can't even be bothered to ensure the bloody thing plays as intended first? Because after Overwatch 2, I'm dubious...

Last time I talked about Overwatch was in criticism of a fundamental and serious change to the way that heroes (literally the second half of this sub genre's tag!) were obtained. A switch-up that was revealed mere days before a release that has been on Blizzard's docket for nearly four years and only revealed through a leak that the team later went on to confirm. And if you're curious if the Overwatch 2 team has become yet another contingent of Blizzard that have, in recent years, totally lost touch with their audience; hear this: The game director came out and claimed that locking Heroes behind the season pass is 'no big deal' because 'most players never switch out characters mid-game, they just pick who their comfortable with and stick to it'. Oh yeah? And how the hell are they supposed to get comfortable with a character they can't play around with, Blizzard? Besides that point... I switch up my character mid game, and I'm sure some other players do to! Do we not matter because we're not the large consensus anymore, Blizzard? Are we just errant scum against the grain? I understand that it's impossible to make a change that pleases everyone, but waving away the effected like they don't exist is callously small minded!

And it's a redundant take anyway because; behold the contradiction, Overwatch 2 literally changed the way that Ultimate is carried over between mid-switch characters in order to incentivise switching. So what the hell point is begging to be made here? And that's just the problem for people who have managed to get into the game which is, sad to say, nowhere near the majority due to the plethora of log-in issues. The first big issue isn't exactly Blizzard's fault, because some group of asshats thought it fair and funny to strike the Overwatch 2 launch with a DDOS attack, turning a launch already plagued by painfully long queues into a minefield of disconnecting and being kicked to the back of that queue even if you do get in the thing. But I wish I could say that was the only issue plaguing people.

The other is a funnelling problem leading to those queues. Not only is this a highly anticipated game with absolutely no barrier to entry, encouraging everyone and their recently deceased grandmother to try and log into the thing at the same time; but the team made the inspired choice to kill servers for Overwatch 1 at the same time, meaning that people are forced to run to the gates of Overwatch 2, only to find them inundated with applicants in the tens of thousands. If you want to play Overwatch 2; just don't. You're gonna have to wait till the hype dies down because there's no way through those doors otherwise. Another inspired self-imposed checkmate by the absolute galaxy brain morons running the Blizzard gaming division. How they manage to dress themselves in the morning, no one knows.

What could be worse? How about their 'inspired' method for cutting down on cheaters? Get this; new accounts to Overwatch are subjected to a five match grace period that people have to go through in order to access the full game, meaning that banned players will have a headache jumping back into the game. That's actually not a terrible idea. It's also a chance for new people to become a bit familiar with the game through a guided tutorial, but part of the intrinsic charm of the original Overwatch was that each character was built intuitively enough to be casually played by anyone before the complexities of the gamestyle dawned upon them. The original didn't need a tutorial; throwing one in kind of feels like the new team just throwing up their hands and pre-emptively giving up on matching the quality of design that the original prided itself on. Whatever, it's mostly there to slow down cheaters, how could they screw this up?

How about with their second verification method to cut down on cheaters? Blizzard accounts that sign up for Overwatch 2 need to link a phone number in order to activate their account, and Blizzard have blocked non-contract phones so that they can cut down on easy to acquire dummy phone numbers for cheaters. Are you seeing the problem here? Beside the concern of giving your number to a company who is absolutely going to sell it within a year, there are actually a number of people in the world who have very legitimate reasons for not having a phone contract. One such reason being because they can't afford to maintain one. Hundreds of reports flooded in from people complaining that Blizzard is literally poor-shaming people out of being able to play their free-to-play game for no good reason whatsoever. And I mean no good reason, because get this; they screwed up this feature too!

It appears that instead of creating a greenlist of phone providers they'll accept a phone number from, they created a blacklist of companies they'll block from, which means that phone's from abroad using a provider that Blizzard doesn't know about can be non-contract and the Blizzard team won't ever know. Whatsmore, any future secretive phone provider that pops up can slip around Blizzard's crappy detection system requiring active updates by the team to maintain a protective net that is too zealous in the first place. I would call it astounding that Blizzard could screw up implementation this badly, but that would imply this in any way surprises me, and it doesn't. This keeps perfectly in line with the company that Blizzard has become.

Overwatch 2 is what we call a rough launch for a game that is quite literally the exact same product as the first game with one less player and a story mode tacked on. I don't know what Blizzard have been doing for the past 5 years, but it hasn't been strategizing about the complexities of this launch. The coming weeks will show if Blizzard have any soul left and commit to changing some of these laughable moronic choices, or if they're going to go the same way about this as they did with Diablo Immortal and scream "Ha! Gotcha money, we don't need to fix anything now!" and proceed to amend nothing. Personally my hopes aren't very high, as every choice made here could have been avoided with even the slightest degree of empathy with their audience; demonstration that even within their IP created explicitly to promote diversity and representation, total audience alienation had taken firm root. Let act III of a company in self destruct commence...

The Super Mario Bros movie has exposed itself

 Someone cover that thing up!

Video games, most of the time, belong nowhere near the silver screen and any attempt to try and change that is an affront to god. I maintained this when the Halo show was announced all those years ago, and was vindicated when it launched, I tried to look at the potential when the Resident Evil show was announced, only to be punished for my optimism when that launched; and I've felt that way during the entirety of the pre-production for The Last of Us Show, and we'll see how that turns out shortly. There's just a much larger chasm of difference between what makes a piece of interactive media work compared to what makes a tv show work. Almost every conversation in Grand Theft Auto games are stretched out commands with exposition hidden beneath a, sometimes witty, back and forth. That would be terribly boring and uninspired in a TV show, but when brought to a video game that's the perfect balance you're looking for. It's not a matter of inexperienced video game writers being trounced by TV writers (Like I've seen proposed) it's a fundamental different style.

Most traditional media creators stubbornly refuse to acknowledge this divide and it leads to ideas being greenlit that should have never survived in front of a boardroom. How did we get 2 Hitman movies? Incompetence and lack of insight. Why was Uncharted adapted back into a film despite the original concept essentially being Indiana Jones adapted into a game? Incompetence and lack of context. And why are video game adaptations becoming more plentiful in a market already over saturated with adaptations of every kind? Incompetence and a lack of imagination. All of which is my lead up to presenting my utter disdain towards video game to movie adaptions. It will take a very special brand with a very special creator to pull that match off- which brings us to the Super Mario Movie.

Mario... is actually quite a strong choice for adaption. He's universal, iconic, versatile and malleable. Such to the extent that he has already been adapted a bunch of times over the years into everything from TV shows to one increadibly... loud, movie. We've seen live action Mario, 2D animated Mario and now a 3d animated version. All we need is an anime and- oh wait, there was an Anime too! (Silly me.) My point is, when Nintendo turns around and announces they want to make a step into film production and Mario will be the lightning rod; that proposition is able to slip past my natural guard and touch upon my "Huh, maybe this will actually be good..." senses. Because after everything we've been through as a society; isn't it just about time that we get a good Mario movie? Something to wash the taste of the old live action one from our mouths; a taste that somehow returns every time we're even reminded it exists?

But then they partnered with Illumination in order to make that movie and I just don't know how I feel about the whole thing anymore. Out of every current major animation studio making movies, Illumination is the only one not to bring out a single indisputably high quality product. Universal Studios has The Land Before Time, Sony Pictures has Enter the Spider Verse, Pixar has... 95% of it's filmography, and Illumination has... Minions? Sure, Despicable Me was financially big, but not quite an impressive bit of animated film making, and yet that has remained the singular height of their filmography ever since it was released. They know how to make money, no doubt; but when it comes to doing it's movies justice, one might be better served going to literally any one else. So of course Nintendo went straight to the riskiest choice. (N loves to live on the edge!)

Maybe Miyamoto was seduced by the line-up of big name Hollywood actors that Illumination promised for the project like Jack Black as Bowser, Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach and Chris Pratt as... ah, I can't even lie. Chris Pratt was just a bland choice for a character with a memorably iconic Italian voice. And the only time he wasn't given that iconic Italian sound-board, the plumber was granted an equally as iconic New York accent. So what did Chris bring to the role, now that we have an actual real trailer to judge his performance from? Um... he bought nothing. Not a thing. Just like we all knew he would from the second his name was announced, my man just rocked up to the roll with his own voice and hoped that the world wouldn't notice. Jack Black is putting on his best growl for Browser, Keegan-Micheal Key nails Toad so well it isn't even funny. And Chris... phones it in.

I mean, man! After all the time memeing about how lack lustre Chris would be, joking that he'd literally just walk into the booth and do his own voice and hearing Chris himself gloat about how proud he is of the voice they struck... and it's just his own voice with a slight tinge of Manhattan on top. It's just sad, is what it is. As if we didn't need yet another reason why hiring celebrities in animation roles for their star power is a losers game. I wouldn't even mind so much if Chris was just going to voice Mario for a single standalone movie, but we already know that Nintendo are suing for an entire animated cinematic universe resulting in a crossover Super Smash Bros movie, so this is going to be our lead for the duration! (Oh, quick: who is going to be the after credits badguy to tease the extended universe? I think it's probably going to be something boring like Master Hand; but there's a chance they'll tease Ganon. My utmost dream, however, would be a Sephiroth tease.)

And of course there's going to be those absolute fart-sniffing pretentious dorks out there who cram on about "Why do you care? It's a kid's movie! There are more important things going on in the world!" Yes, by all means make wild allusions and evaluations to pump up your own self worth, whatever helps you sleep at night. But I'm going to rant on about lacking effort and commitment anyway. Some have pointed to the other trailer dubs and noted how the French Dub for Mario actually pays homage to Charles Martinet whilst toning down the wackiness so it'll fit in a movie where the man has to hold conversation. So there is a balance that could have been struck without slipping into potentially offensive Italian stereotype territory. It's a balance of how much you put into the performance. And apparently Chris was just feeling like a half-hearted New Yorker for this one. 

Apart from that obvious flat note, the movie looks visually fantastic and even Mario himself doesn't look too bad. He'll take some getting used to, but I absolutely understand why certain visual features needed to be toned down for a greater range of emotion. (Don't know why they gave the shirt under his dungarees a collar though. That's an odd choice.) With Nintendo hyper vigilant of letting anyone mess with their golden boy after the last film disaster, there's a chance that the Nintendo axe will spur Illumination to really put effort into making this a good movie. And when they aren't being relied on to conjure up designs or world building; there becomes a chance for this to feel like a visual treat. Is this going to be the slamdunk master piece that propels a cinematic universe? No. But am I going to watch it with high, but not soaring, hopes? Absolutely. If anything my hope is that everyone around Chris cared enough to actually act. That would be nice, wouldn't it? Some acting...

Just give up on Skull and Bones already!

Where did all the magic go?

What are we doing, Ubisoft? Are we just going around in circles at this point? If a normal, sensible, developer turned around and told me that their game needed an extra 3 months in the oven to really be perfected I wouldn't even think it worthy of an update beyond mentioning the shift in expectations now that the upcoming slate of releases is different. Because that's normal, sensible almost; to realise that the first impression is the most important and your team could do with an extra little stretch of concerted work effort to slap on that final sheen before game-time. I actually respect the heck out of that; game developers having the foresight to spot how a extra few months can put on those final few finishing flourishes are becoming rare in a world coming to be ruled by deadlines and release windows. But when that very same game has been kicking around the studio for nearly ten years now... I get a bit fed up. Just rip off the bandage, why don't you? Let us all know how this is going to inevitably suck, please don't make us wait anymore; I don't care if code strings are hanging off the input menu strong enough to slip us into the backrooms; we know how this is going to go so what's with all the pageantry?

Because let's call that spade exactly what it is; any game that crosses the eight year mark of development is a calamity just waiting to be released on an unsuspecting world. Just look at Duke Nukem Forever; a game so dated it had to be wheeled on in front of the masses like Hector Salamanca! Beyond Good and Evil 2 is so delayed that the studio are too scared to even show us the state that mess is in! The only games that have managed to come out with something decent to show for it would be the 10 year development of Final Fantasy XV; which somehow still ended up feeling like it had a rushed second half of the game and Cyberpunk 2077; who's many faults are very well documented, not least of all by me. There comes a point where the lack of direction is so prevalent and rank that nothing short of a total reboot and reassessment of what it is you even want to do with the idea is going to resolve the development hell. And I think that is literally the one step that no one in Ubisoft has brave enough to take.

I mean, come on: Who is this game even going to be for? Once upon a time it could have been for fans of the pirate ship combat portions of Assassin's Creed Black Flag (even though the actual cinematic scope of the action was better realised in Assassin's Creed III) but after several games of that same ship combat somehow worming it's way into every possible time period the time that Ubisoft could think of, I think it's safe to say that Assassin's fans have grown bored with the concept. Those who want to live the fantasy of being a pirate are going find themselves hitting up against a wall once they realise that this pirate game features none of the swash buckling and all of the delegation of being a pirate captain. (So we don't even get to swing a sword? Not even in private?) And people just interested in exploring the famous Caribbean seas renowned for being the stage of that mythical golden era of piracy... sorry, this game is set in the Indian Ocean. So yeah...

At some point you really need to just throw away all of this tip-toeing around the crux of the matter and really confront the issue; what the hell is Skull and Bones even still on the Ubisoft docket for? I mean sure, we're talking about a company that is absolutely petrified of the concept of doing something new and/or different with their games and so an idea that literally just recycles systems they've already made must sound like heaven to the team. But at some point there's got to be a cost-versus-reward write up. There's no way that Skull and Bones is going to do well enough to recoup the development cost, both in money and wrapped up man-power, over it's near decade of development, unless the game becomes a world wide mega hit. And I hate to say it to Ubisoft's face: This is not going to be a world wide mega hit.

The game had the slight attention of those interested in that sort of mythos a while ago back when there was a heart of the fantastical and fictional world of sea exploration beating at the center of this project. But since then Skull and Bones has been rebooted so many times that the product being worked on today looks to be entirely exorcized of all that mythical intrigue by the root. Some have even moaned about the visual design of the ships themselves too, which seem to have leaned closer towards historical accuracy over visual pleasantries in an odd send-up to the historical obsession of Assassin's Creed. Ubisoft doesn't need another pseudo-historical game franchise; they need something new and interesting that takes some damn risks!

Usually these are rhetorical cries to the heavens that go unanswered by studios allergic to ever being upfront and honest, but today there appears to genuinely be a solution to the riddle: why hasn't this game be canned? According to a senior editor at Kotaku; the lion share of development is being done at Ubisoft Singapore for a very specific reason. Ubisoft has a subsidy agreement with the Singapore government that mandates the development and release of some sort of product to justify the grant. That's right, Ubisoft literally have no choice but to push a game that has ignited no one's hearts and which is, in the long run, probably going to cost them a red line on their balance sheet once this is all said and done. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!)

It just goes to show you the funny and weird side of game development that we never quite hear much about once it gets swept into the broad catch-all curtain of 'board room politics'. I imagine Ubisoft were initially quite chuffed to have the Singaporean government dish out their development costs; only to be saddled with this disease of a project for a decade whilst the team desperately figure out what they want to do with it. Reports from devs who have left that game and company evoke images of Anthem to my mind. Unclear visions that shift with the winds, prolonged development periods wherein teams don't know what the hell they're doing, heel-turn choices made on a dime upending work; this is your perfect blueprint of a development hell cycle.

But we're reaching the very end of the line at this point. There's only so far that Ubisoft can push it back, and whilst recent impressions have rather predictably come up very lukewarm on the game, at least they'll be able to offload this wart on their active development slate so they can someday move onto that next wart: BGE2. It does seem that they are actually hopeful to make a little bit of money off the thing for their trouble, else they wouldn't have pulled this whole delay in order to push themselves away from the launch of God of War Ragnarok, which would have been the next day with their initial release date. Who knows; maybe Ubisoft really will prove us all wrong and revolutionise the industry with their embarrassingly audience-less ship fighting pirate-kinda game. But I've been watching the trend of the gaming market enough to be able to guess... this game is heading the way of Babylon's Fall. (I bet it'll last a least a year longer before the servers get pulled.) 

Jojo All-Star Battle R

 R-r-r-r-r-r-r-raise?

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is obviously a brand I've talked about quite a bit on this platform, for the obvious reason that I'm in love with the anime and I think it's a truly fantastic series with great designs, great humour, incredible music and intelligent action. It puts most of the biggest and best action related shows on Western TV to shame, with gusto. But I've gone several weeks without even mentioning the fact that a brand new Jojo had released! What's up with that? (Or to be more specific, a re-release of a old Jojo fighting game that has seen some improvements here and there.) Well that was because I really wanted to sit back and see how it was received by the competitive fighting community, of which I am not actually a part. I wanted to see how everyone reacted to the improvements made towards netcode and all the wiggly bits that casual fighting game players know nothing about to judge how well the team improved upon the original game, as well as to see the sort of traction this game would pick up now that Jojo is currently bigger than it ever has been. (Despite the very best efforts of Netflix to sink the series.) And I'm landed somewhere in the middle.

For one the game has no Rollback Netcode in it whatsoever, which as far as I understand it means that the game is subject to poor connectivity issues making the better connected side have an advantage over the other. Rollback Netcode, as far as I understand it, makes sure that the game will recognise when a connection isn't the strongest and rollback to a period of mutual stability so that one side is never wailing on the other with no possible retaliation. It's rather baseline standard in modern fighting games as connection shortages can happen even in most modern cities of today, 5G ain't as wide spread and adopted as everyone wants to believe. Not having that is a major blow to the accessibility of what is otherwise a really easy to pick up and play fighting game for everyone and whoever didn't want to put the effort in might just find their prospects of the game hampered by their own laziness.

And another incidental problem that I've noticed which should be absolutely unthinkable in any fighting game from any age, is that rage quitting robs the enemy of a win. That's right, you can rage quite out of any fight and it won't count as a win for the enemy. It won't be a loss either, but that's a supremely petty tool you're putting in the hands of losers that are absolutely going to abuse with that. It's galling to think no one at any point in development bought up that possibility, and even more so that this is a freakin' remaster where the possibility still was not addressed. That's... actually quite a shame. I say this as a raving fan of Jojo; the team really should have done better by this franchise in the raw fundamentals of what a fighting game needs to facilitate. This is not Gang-star...

But putting aside where the game falls short, how about we look at what it does well? Bringing the character rooster up to 50 with ten new characters, changing the 3d models to fit closer with the anime run and, curiously, recasting the voice talent of the game to match the actors from that anime. I say 'curiously' because this led to rewordings of all salient lines related to old cast members, such as the back and forths that Joseph used to do. And if you don't know why that is important: Joseph had a back and forth with every character in the game, meaning that this rerecording also effect Funny Valentine and characters from his part even though Part 7 is probably still years out from being made at this point. They also removed and replaced the Story Mode, with the only shame being that they didn't turn around and try to do an 'Eyes over Heaven' style unique story to replace it. That would have been dope. Maybe we'd have got to see what King Crimson Requiem would have been or something easy as fan service-y.

Jojo as a brand lends itself increadibly naturally to the concept of being a fighting game, both thematically and practically. Thematically this franchise is literally a string of boss fights one after the other; yes, in every Part except for the first one those fights are typically solved through intelligence rather than brawn, but if you translate the Jojo formula over to gaming then a fighting game or a beat-em up like 'Gio Gio's Bizarre Adventure' the game is really the only option available to you. (Yes, I am aware of the existence of two fan made Jojo RPG games, as wall as a TTRPG that was never localised outside of Japan. I'm choosing to ignore them for now.) As for practicality, the world of Stands is already divided by strength, speed and, most importantly, range. Jojo fans are primed to instinctively understand how characters use their Stands before they even play them, thanks to the developers sticking closely to the general rule of use for adapted Stands. Close range stands have in-your-face movesets, long range stands dominate from a distance; it's a match made in heaven. (No pun intended.)

And that gameplay has actually been heightened by this re-release which actually fixed some of the fundamental issues of how the original played because yes... there were some problems that impeded the gameplay. For one there was a stamina system which was created to try and balance some of the Stand Abilities but just ended up being a hassle to maintain. That was scrapped and thrown off into the bin where it belonged. And for two there were some air attacks that were missing for characters. Essentially what the team were trying to do was bring the gameplay up to scratch with contemporary fighters, and if only there was a concerted effort to make sure the back-end also lived up to that promise, we'd have a real contender on our hands!

Jojo has such huge potential in the world of gaming that I think just goes so underutilised. Personally I think that if a studio had the willingness to sit down and create a truly visually appealing 3D anime style of animation (which is definitely totally possible, just look at the Persona games) that could be used as the foundation of a video game retelling of the entire Jojo saga. It wouldn't be too crazy of a concept either; just a gamified retelling of the events of the manga with more action-tipped showdown scenes that end is contests of marshal brawn rather than wits. It would be a great opportunity to explore some more clever ways that under appreciated Stands could be used as well. Some of the idle ideas I've personally had for a Mista Versus Kraftwerk boss fight are just wild. And a huge Maelstrom version of the Dark Blue Moon fight with Jotaro? I'm telling you, a strung together collection of distinctly dynamic and interactive boss fights that get progressively more creative and challenging would fit this brand perfectly.

Eyes of Heaven is the next game I have my eyes on to be ported to the modern world, especially since that game has it's own narrative and version of Dio's Stand that I just need to see bought into glorious HD. (It's printed with Dio's name all over it's face; for no discernible reason!) I just really wish that these remasterers would spend a bit more time nailing the fundamentals for games like these, as there really is no reason why even a dated fighting game can't be bought up to modern standards. Fighting game mechanics don't age like other genres do, this could have been the revival to exemplify that as a sore part of the Jojo arc of fandom. Man, I'll never understand why these people don't listen to the sage advice of storied and studied Jojo historian and life-long fan, Mike Ehrmantraut: No half measures, Waltuh...

SCP in Gaming

 Secure. Contain. Propagate.

Horror in video games is a very natural fit when it comes to video game adaptations due to the very interactive nature of the medium which can, when properly utilised, magnify the horror on screen to vivid degrees. It also fits very well into the indie scene thanks to the fact that the inherently homebrew aesthetic makes for a nice substitute for the home brew 'video nasties' scene that was popular in horror movies during the early days of film ratings. You can really reach beyond the confines of what the player knows to be a game when you're just some sketchy program they downloaded off the web which Window Defenders tried to tell you to destroy, and some games really take advantage of this with some great meta Easter eggs here and there and others are a lot more traditional; but I think a healthy layer of jank helps every horror game to some degree.

And the home-brew approach to horror fits perfectly in line with the lauded SCP series, which is a collaborative collective of creepy and vaguely interconnected internet horror stories featuring a plethora of home-brew cryptids and bizarreries. I actually went through a phase in the past of trying to go through as many of the SCP stories as I could to rate the one's I liked, but after several weeks of being unable to get past the dozens of iterations of SCP 001; I just let that one sink into the abyss. It was fun at the time, however. (Maybe I'll pick it back up one day.) SCP has that sense of rough and homebrew despite the uniform aesthetic of the 'SCP Foundation' as it's backbone, as that's just a natural feeling you'll get from a story written by some many different and interesting minds. So you can see the parallel I'm drawing here, the real question is; how has SCP and gaming intersected over the years?

The first SCP game I ever became aware of, and arguably one of the grandfathers of video game indie horror in general, is 'SCP-087 B'. The game. It's name is in reference to the anomalous entity that stalks the halls of the famous SCP-087, otherwise known as the endless staircase. Essentially this anomaly plays out how it sounds, it is a building that, when entered alone, represents an endless descending staircase leading nowhere. If more than one person enters it becomes a small room without any stairs whatsoever. The trick with the staircase is that the further down someone goes the less likely it becomes they'll ever be able to return, and with no radio contact it's impossible to determine what dangers and horrors might have befallen them down in the utmost pits of hell. So you can imagine how making a game of that is going to be a bit interesting.

The game utilises that rather simple premise of going ever downwards to mix tensions and mystery along with the act of having the player move forward toward their own danger; playing on the fear of not wanting to move but having little choice. As you get deeper you'll face more and more dangers that threaten to kill and place you back at the start, all of which seem to play on the idea of things you'll never clearly see. A hole in the wall that will kill those who look into it, a charging shadowy figure with a ghost white mask that glares angrily out of the darkness, or the distorted gruff whine of some glowing creatures that periodically demands "Don't look at me!" A lot of horror games lose their edge the first time the player dies and faces the horror, by hiding that horror 'SCP-087 B' manages to stretch that moment for much longer.

In the more well known department, we have the absolute classic SCP game known as 'Containment Breach', which simulates about as many SCPs as the creators could find a gameplay angle for. Simulating the experience of a total breakdown down of security procedures that has led to just about every single anomalous entity breaking out of their holding at once and utterly destroying a facility. The player is a D-Class nobody who is just trying to survive in a building writhe with murderous entities more than happy to kill him in creative and horrifying ways, whilst all that the player character has to defend themselves is the ability to blink on command. This game really was a mastery of lore and gameplay implementation that served as a great crash course introduction to many of the most popular SCPs still recognised to this day.

Most famously you have 173, the weeping angel SCP who moves whenever it's not being directly looked at. But there's also the Shy Guy, 096, who will rip through any door in order to murder you if you look at his face. Even through a security monitor. A book of diseases that, should you read it, gives you every disease that you read. A bowl of sweets that instantly murder anyone foolish enough to take more than the sign allows. A wall-walking shadow man called 'Radical Larry' who teleports you to a deathly parkour route. A 19th Century Plague Doctor who goes around inflicting every ailment known to man by his mere touch in order to save the recipient from 'The Pestilence'. Just about any cool/scary SCP you can think of is wrapped up in this one indie swan song dedicated to the SCP brand.

And then there's Secret Laboratory; which is a asymmetric Multiplayer SCP game where you play as either a squishy human of various alignments or a deadly SCP of obvious alignment and then try to achieve whatever goal you need to do before the match ends. Typically that's either: try to stay alive or try to unalive all the humans, respectively. Rather than a competitive Multiplayer game, Secret Laboratory is more of a party game where you can take advantage of being a supremely overpowered anomalous entity in order to torment and harass your friends as they try and make it to an exit as desperately as they can. A very classic concept bought to surprisingly decent life by this game, albeit after a very long time.

The SCP font of lore marks a well of endless creativity to be drawn from, so I honestly find it quiet surprising there aren't more games baring it's brand. There are some extra titles around those I've listed, but these are really the notable ones unless you consider Containment Breach Multiplayer and Containment Breach Unity Remake as entries worthy of separate paragraphs. (I did not.) I suspect that might be due to the SCP licence which, I believe, forbids any project under the SCP name from monetising itself; but you'd still think they'd be some more crazed developers out there who just sporadically reads one of these incredible stories and just has to make a game about it; payment be damned. Still, when someone is in it to make an SCP game, it tends to be a very special and rich experience and if the consequence of that quality is scarcity, then I'd say the drought is worth it.

The second chance

 Sweet dreams are made of these...

"You only get one chance to make a first impression"; that's how the saying goes, doesn't it? One shot to seize everything you ever wanted and all of that nonsense, implying you know what it is that you wanted beforehand, which is an expression that just exemplifies the absolute rarity of this concept that we call 'Second Chances'. Ask your daily person walking the street and they'll probably tell you, if they're speaking from the heart and not just trying to be straight shooter, that second chances don't exist and cannot in the world as we made it. A world of 'self empowerment' and 'seize what you want' revolves around us, with little pity for those that don't slide into that hyper-specific model; you make a mistake and that world just moves on past you and doesn't so much as blink as you slip between the cracks. And that is exactly what Cyberpunk did when it launched, it slipped between the cracks... after scouring a stupid amount of initial sales but still, it should have been more.

The Cyberpunk we were sold was a literal shoe in for 'game of the year'; people were joking about how relieved every game within the same year as their initial announcement must have been when CDPR first delayed the release date, knowing that would be the only way their marketing money wouldn't go to total waste and they might even get an award. I feel physical and spiritual pain whenever I think about the oodles of artists from all walks that we got to see express their exuberance about being involved in the project, to think how it all panned out just makes my heart sink. There's nothing more depressing than that feeling of hope before the disappointment. And even today it sort of feels like their vast efforts were squandered. But not, it would seem, at the cost of Cyberpunk's life. Because lookie there; Cyberpunk has seen a massive resurgence in popularity to purely ridiculous levels just as it was approaching the end of it's support cycle thanks to Edgerunners.

The Edgerunners Anime was announced all the way back during the lead-up to the main game, but by then the thing was so early in development it was clear we shouldn't really be bating our breath for something we might not have seen for months to years yet. (It turned out to be years.) The buzz was very real for the show even in that first reveal, however, which is probably indicative of the huge cross over between fans of games like Cyberpunk, high action punky Role Playing style games, and Shonen Anime lovers. An intersection which has influenced gaming before, I might add, such as inspiring the whole conceptual style of 'Star Wars: The Force Unleashed'. (Yep, Starkiller is an Anime protagonist. Makes sense when you think about it.) Personally I was just in it for the game and anything outside of that was a non-entity to my tunnel-vision; which makes oh so deliciously ironic that now, in 2022; that Anime might just be the most consistently quality thing to come out of the 2077 franchise.

I say 'might' because currently I'm only three episodes in, but people say the series doesn't get any worse from here and I'm inclined to believe them. The visual style of the animation is just delightful, being able to actually place a lot of the scenes geographically thanks to familiarity with the world adds a layer of tangibility to connect the scene with the audience and the side characters are just golden. I mean, one of the reasons I wasn't initially interested even when the promos started showing was because David came across as your prototypical Anime kid with a chip on his shoulder and Alice looked like your punky pixie dream girl. And... yeah, that's pretty much how the show is characterising them so far, but they weave in the tapestry of this fallen and disgraced dystopia so well that you accept their clichés for what they are.

The clichés hardly hurt anything when the Anime looks so beautiful in motion, Good lord you can tell the amount of love and sweat that went into capturing that frenetic energy in every cell of action keeping things feeling fast and loose without losing those solid lines needed to hold the show down for slower and more sombre moments. I also adore the dialogue writing. Not so much in it's content, but in it's style. In dripping in that eighties Cyberpunk lingo which is so distinct from modern language that it's garish, but when provided with such confident consistency you come to buy it as this alternate period's colloquialisms. That can really make a world like this come to life in front of you, just from the use of words like 'Eddies', 'Choom' 'Flatlining' and all that wonderfully colourful intercultural mash-up dialogue. I love it. And apparently my feelings aren't exactly unique considering the near-universal praise that the anime has received.

And with that praise came something very special; a renewal of Interest from the Internet public that good-old CDPR could never have predicted. Cyberpunk 2077 started flying off shelves again and scoring player count numbers in the millions (As in 'over a single million concurrent players' to be precise) as people turned around and finally came around to explore the game they missed because it wasn't worth the asking price. (Okay, maybe that's a little mean. It was probably worth it's asking price but not just to the crowd they originally tried to pawn it to.) Now again, I have been following Cyberpunk very closely and it's still not really the vision we were promised, but it's at least increadibly playable in the modern age, and that has to be worth something. Again Cyberpunk has always been a game that is good, maybe even great in it's best parts, and an 8/10 ain't nothing to scoff at.

This all came so very suddenly that one has to wonder whether or not CDPR has taken to heart the sudden change in fortunes to revise their plan to essentially kill Cyberpunk support before their original vision can be reached. No I don't mean the original pipe dream they sold us on, that game is probably half a decade away and going to be made by a completely different studio who will spend way too much on it and go bankrupt as a result; I'm talking about the quiet promise of matching The Witcher 3's two DLCs. One good and the other game changing. We're getting the allotted 'good' DLC, but the game changer has been put on ice. Although maybe now that Cyberpunk is on the rise again? Unfortunately video game Journalist Paul Tassi has already weighed in on this with his annoying 'logic' and 'facts' to remind us all that games under companies like this are planned out extensively in advance, and CDPR already resigned themselves to moving on so hard that they're literally leaving their proprietary game engine behind after the release of this upcoming DLC. There's not really any coming back from that unfortunately. (Again, unless they totally remake Cyberpunk 2077 from the ground-up in the new engine just to start creating content for it again on that engine.. Which I find doubtful...)

But regardless, it's just nice to see that Cyberpunk 2077 won't quite be going down and out with that totally bitter taste in the gums that it has maintained for quite so long now. Through update after update of 'It's still not quite there yet', and 'its nice but...'  There's a certain level of relief we can all take solace in from the rush of actual goodwill the game is amassing before it sails off into the sunset. At least this means that CDPR will have some recourse to make a Cyberpunk sequel in the future, even if not much of one after all of this mess. I hope they get the chance to come back and bring that multiplayer metagame to life and everything their crazy dreams once bred in their heads; because I've said it before and I'll say it again: that game they thought they had made sounds like a real banger.

The Easter Egg that went too far.

Fetch me their souls...

We all love ourselves a little Easter Egg, don't we? A nod and a wink from the developers to you to remind you that at the end of the day you're still playing a video game and silliness is a given, right? Maybe they'll break the forth wall, maybe they're tell a stupid joke, maybe they'll just reference something from a past game that makes you go: "Huh, that was cool that they did that. I liked that!" And that's all an Easter Egg is supposed to be, a cool little something extra that doesn't get in the way of the core experience that the developers are trying to create. Just something you nod at and acknowledge, and then immediately forget. Like the Skyrim style Iron Helmet you can find encased in glass at the beginning of 'Wolfenstein: Old Blood', the upside-down effect applied on mobs assigned that special name in Minecraft, things of no consequence like that. What an Easter Egg is not supposed to do, is spiral off into it's own reoccurring minigame that spawns a cult-like following of people who don't even really show up for the main game anymore, not when they can pick apart these Easter Eggs.

I remember when I first heard about Nazi Zombie mode of Call of Duty: World at War. "That's really cool" I thought, and thus felt more than justified going around the houses of friends just to play that one zombie map with them when I would never consider doing so for Cod proper because... I mean who wants to play an Online FPS at someone else's house? But Zombies was different, it was trendy, it was cooperative, and it was pretty darn straightforward and simple. Just endless waves of shuffling dead in Nazi uniforms that would try and wear you down wave after wave until they killed you off. Their trick being that the zombies become slightly more powerful until your guns actually can't take them down. It was a fun party time that I think we all enjoyed and certainly didn't expect to see return really ever. Little did we know the seeds of what would become a ten year ongoing narrative were set before the next game was even a glint in Treyarch's eye.

Oh Yeah! Because for whatever reason the developers of this Zombie mode had the seeds of an ongoing story in their head to try and justify this throwaway minigame. Because it's a zombie invasion, so there has to be an explanation; doesn't there? A mystery, with twists and reveals? No. Because at that point what you're doing is twisting up the Easter Egg into something more. Something dangerous. But none of them every cared. Not for a second did they think there would come a point where actual waves of COD fans would show up only to plough the Zombie modes for details. Not a huge number of them perhaps, but a number at all! And that the Zombie mode would then become an expectation of the franchise that needs to be lived up to with each entry to such a point that when the Zombie mode is bad, such as it was in Cod Vanguard, that is a point of genuine criticism! A zombie mode so ubiquitous that the partner studio who handles this franchise, Infinity Ward, got jealous and tried to make their own version called 'Extinction' featuring aliens. But that mode really sucked for some reason. (I just couldn't get into it.)

A video caught my attention on Youtube of someone desperately trying to make the original map of COD Zombies fit into the wider lore of the extensive series of interconnected Lovecraftian zombie modes across the games in some way more significant than just: "This was the first map that the team thought of." And in their ruminations and suppositions I glimpsed a touch of that mania which emanates out of a well drunk deeply and excessively. That rabbit hole you've all put fallen completely down at this point, with no hope of escape. And I thought; "Cod Zombies can't have gotten that wild, can it?" I mean this guy was talking about Elder Gods and multiple Universes and CIA sub divisions and there just ain't no way that COD zombies has facilitated all that through their little survival modes, right? And then I thought about it just a little bit harder.

See I grew off the zombie trend with the rest of the world, and even quicker off the Cod Zombie trend as it became increasingly clearer that these modes weren't exactly being made for the likes of me. Not anymore. Every new map had the basic foundations of what COD Zombies were supposed to be, wrapped over stunningly elaborate Easter Eggs designed to stump internet sleuths with their cryptic nonsensical actions. Whenever I showed up to friends houses to play zombies, it always became a case of "Hold on, let's do the Easter Egg from this tutorial I saw on Youtube" which was always this overly elaborate multi-step process that rewarded some miniscule lore snippet that I could barely understand let alone be satisfied by. I stopped playing the games before they added in actual Easter Egg rewards, but even then I could see that there was a dedicated throng of fans glued to some hyped up meta narrative. So what does that look today?

What if I told you that the current COD zombies narrative consists of a race of primordial extra-dimensional entities known as the Keepers who maintain all of the Aether (existence) from the influence of Dark Aether (the obligatory evil opposite) as it becomes manipulated by an evil offshoot of the keepers known as the Apohticon. Those Apothicon were banished from existence after a war against the two races, with the keepers led by Malcom McDowell, and have spent the millennia since trying to influence the waking world by stretching their influence into reality. Those Apothicon sent elements emanating their influence across the universe and one just happened to land in an American Cowboy town in the middle of nowhere, spawning zombies that kicked off the whole COD Zombies timeline. Oh, and the Keepers call the highest of their order 'Elder Gods' which is where the Lovecraftian influence starts seeping into things. Does that sound sane to you?

That's what happens when you try to write a back story to something as stupid as nazi zombies, but then actually turn around and do a good job of it. I can't lie, the extent of the lore that the zombies mode has is damn impressive and intricate; I only wish it wasn't all tucked behind miniscule snippets of lore you have to uncover and put together like you're researching a dissertation on alien philosophy. Mixing the supernatural with high cosmic fantasy is a bold step for a horror game to take but considering the hoards of loyal fans this mode of COD alone has maintained, I've thinking they've done a damn fine job of it. It's gotten so wild now that the latest COD Vanguard zombies, in way of making up for the truly lacklustre zombie mode it launched with, included a gargantuan colossus boss fight against a Lord of the Dark Aether, and no one batted an eye and thought of it as a strange addition to zombies. (Although, to my understanding this and the last COD zombies entry established a brand new timeline for COD zombies so I'm not sure if this fits in with all that insane lore I just discussed. God this is giving me a headache...)  

I often hear some on-the-sidelines COD fans wish that Activision would just put together a pack of every COD Campaign together and sell that to get fan's attention. But honestly I would much prefer a zombies stand alone game that just mashed together all of the zombie content so I can play it all without having to source a copy of World at War behind the mummified remains of a bombed out Blockbusters. Few games match the commitment to puzzle solving that Treyarch does and even if it's just to see the sights whilst jumping across all the historical zombie backdrops, I think there's a very special COD journey wrapped up totally separate from the main game. COD Zombies went too far; it became a whole other game in and of itself. And I think we're all better for it.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas Review (The Original)

All you had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!

Nearly a full year ago I began my journey of replaying the entirety of the 3D era Grand Theft Auto games in protest of the godawful 'Definitive editions', as well as in celebration to the original's shining greatness. That was an exploration into nostalgia and fond memories cut a little short by my rather sudden obsession with clearing the Master Chief collection which over-road my little GTA series not long after I got done with Vice City. But in truth there was actually a couple of reasons why I just wasn't in the right headspace to review San Andreas at that time. For one I was really replaying the GTA games that I didn't remember quite so well to remind myself what was good about them, and San Andreas has been such a constant presence in my life that I really didn't feel like I needed the reminder. For two, I was planning the next game I reviewed to be Bully, but I couldn't figure out how to get the controller working with it and I refused to play that game with a keypad. (As it turns out, the solution was remarkably simple and built into the ingame menu.) And for three, San Andreas is just a damn hefty game to get through. I didn't know if I wanted to go through the entire game just to review it here.

But after a year of faffing about I feel like it's time to put a capstone on this review trifecta for no other reason than it will free me up to do literally anything else with my freetime. (Having this hanging over me has been a weight on the ol' psyche.) Plus, with the renewed interest in the Grand Theft Auto franchise following the blow-out leaking of VI (Take-Two have finally managed to scrub that footage off the front page of Youtube. Only took them a month.) the impetus is there to drive me to complete this game and explore the wider evolution of GTA. If not to 100% completion, at least far enough to recall what that core experience was like and impart it outwards in this here review. Who knows, maybe my years of growth would have altered my tastes so much as to no longer like the crude style of GTA's sardonic depiction of 1990's LA. (Spoilers: they haven't.)

At the time I remember thinking of San Andreas as the magnum opus of everything that Rockstar was trying to do with III and Vice City, and even now I still feel that way. Everything about the gameplay loop of what makes a GTA game great, the city simulation, dynamic-feeling world interaction and penchant to cause chaos is in a whole different league in San Andreas than it was in Vice City. Back for Vice City, all of those factors felt constrained in a limiting sandbox. The world, it's inhabitants and it's life were dictated by the tightly wound rules of the developers, NPCs act how their told, Traffics turns were it's told, the world turns as it's told to turn. And whilst systematically the same has to be true of San Andreas, back then and now it feels like some wild poltergeist slipped into San Andreas' formula and breathed a genuine soul into the world simulation. Back in the day I remember seeing a stunt plane crash right in the middle of a residential neighbourhood with no interaction whatsoever from me, recently I saw a Police car fall straight down, out of the sky, into the ground and explode. There were no high surfaces nearby, the thing literally dropped from heaven. I cannot convey the amount of charm such insanity breathes into the world you're running around in except through offering the largely empty platitude of : San Andreas' world simulation feels like a world that keeps turning after you put down your controller; and that makes it all the more fun to turn it upside down everytime you pick it up.

In terms of design, the map of San Andreas is still compared to modern open world games today. Not so much in comparison of size, because SA's map is actually rather small compared to most modern open world games, but in the manner of how that space it utilised to convey the impression of vast distance. San Andreas features such variety across it's three main cities, from the suburban LA streets of Los Santos to the hilly mountains underneath 'San Francisco-inspired' San Fierro to the rocky desert sands surrounding the Las Vegas parody, Las Venturas. Crossing these biomes as they naturally flow into one another, broken only by cities, bridges and that beloved fog effect, feels like a cross-country trip from the middle-state hick towns to the metropolitan West Coast tourist traps. All in a map that is dwarfed by the likes of most every game today. Yet this is the example people keep coming back to, because Rockstar did it so right this one time. Behold the power of intelligent art design!

The basic gameplay of San Andreas marks the point at which Rockstar finally managed to develop their little open world crime spree game to actually feel intuitive to play. Free aim and lock on naturally flow in and out of each other so you can fire how you want, crouching and rolling adds versatility to positioning even without a cover system. The RPG elements wrapped into your specific gun proficiency encourages the player to pick favourites, but also experiment with other weapons to bring their skill bar high on their entire arsenal. Carl can actually swim, making huge swathes of the map a whole lot less dangerous to traverse. You've got stamina based sprinting, eating and gaining muscle mass and/or fat, 'girlfriends' to maintain and keep happy for special benefits; this is that evolution pinnacle point where everything GTA bought to the player's arsenal coalesced into a gameplay experience where the player felt free in how they wanted to play and weren't wrestling with controls that sometimes don't feel like they want work with you or a world simulation that falls a little flat when you poke at it. Again, a breathing and tangible and insane open world is the legacy of San Andreas. 

Vehicle controls are improved on, obviously as being one of the key tenets of Grand Theft Auto, and whilst the 'driving proficiencies' skill level don't provide quite as tangible benefits as some of the other skill tress; (falling off your bike is something you want to not be thinking about, so the less you do it the better) the skill-dependant races and Derbies lit up across the map provide enough incentive to want to improve your driving game. And the various vehicle schools, whilst frustrating at times, are great benchmarks for improvement that can bring clumsy drivers to a point of genuine skill. I know because I used to be one of those insanely clumsy drivers back when I played GTA SA for the first time all those years ago, and this was the game which taught me, through fire, how to handle the Grand Theft Auto driving mechanics. Hiding an in-depth and complete driving  tutorial as an in-game obstacle course that both celebrates all of the improvements to the driving simulation and teaches you how to exploit them is just another genius bit of game design from the company who wrote the patent on smart game development ideas.

In narrative, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas lays out the story of a gangster from the hoods of Los Santos embarking on an adventure of gang warfare that expands out into an struggle against corrupt cops, Vietnamese gangsters who use Japanese-style Katanas for some reason, mafia run casinos and even a bit of intergovernmental conspiracy. (Although you're, very intentionally, not really integrated too much into the specifics of that plotline to avoid the narrative slipping into 'spy-action' territory.) As opposed to some of the earlier GTAs (specifically 3) where it can kind of feel like you're passing through these sectors of criminality in order to tick off their appearance on some overarching list of criminal representation, San Andreas is big enough for the player to take their time getting into the gritty of each seedy underworld and learning the distinction between each one. Of course, these are very surface level distinctions, in gameplay just about every enemy acts in the exact same way just as they've done through GTA history, but in the narrative you really tackle every grift the devs could think of, so that when you're out on the otherside it really feels like the whole West Coast is beneath your foot. (With the exception of the Mafia. Even if I know that Salvatore Leone couldn't die, because his appearance was a cameo anyway.)

The only part which I think severely lets the general package down is the structure of the missions, which I think takes far too long to evolve into anything approaching complexity. Throughout the early game you're being presented with extremely straightforward missions with one or two objectives tied to a simple format, by the mid game that hasn't changed and it's not really until the set-piece endgame moments like the Mansion Raid, Casino Heist and final mission that we get these more involving missions with multiple layers that stretch beyond that basic premise of 'Go here and do the objective, great job mission complete'. This makes a lot of the smaller mid-game missions feel almost like side content that get forgotten about as soon as you're done with them. Perhaps there was a little bit of 'quantity over quality' buzzing around the mission dev department. At least those final few missions were fun.

Talking about the quality of the voice cast almost seems like a waste of time because you merely need to look at the names of the cast to know exactly the level of performances San Andreas has in store. One of the main villains is played by Samuel L Jackson, for goodness sake; there really was no expense spared. But in terms of writing; Rockstar did a perfect job nailing the colloquiums and verbiage of this sort of world in a way that is both entertaining and natural, almost in stark contrast to what another gangster-themed game, Saints Row, has recently done. Would I go so far as to say this is an improvement over the great job that Vice City does? I think it's ultimately a question of taste; I prefer this style of dialogue and story to the mafia/Scarface themes of Vice City and so I like this game's dialogue more, but in terms of quality I'd argue both are as good as each other. Prime quality voice acting, as Rockstar always demands.

Oh and lastly I want to mention the endgame state which I think was, at least to some degree, designed to be a direct foil to GTA 3's endgame state. The narrative of GTA 3 made it so that every gang wanted to kill Claude, ultimately making free roaming post the main story next to impossible in highly concentrated gang areas thanks to how quickly you'd get shot to pieces. San Andreas has an entire riot phase of the city which is meant to mimic the LA riots. San Andreas focuses more on depicting general chaos between citizens by making the AI hostile to one another, putting a smoke effect over some buildings, depopulating cars that aren't police cars on the streets and making those that do spawn close to exploding, and throwing in a unique animation or two of citizens running down the street holding a TV. Free roaming through all of that is pretty miserable, thanks to the constant chaos, but it's used as a back drop for the narrative that is entirely reversed by the end of the game. Meaning that unlike GTA 3, you can still go around in your completed save and enjoy the game world without being gun downed the second you enter Leone controlled territory. I appreciate that.

San Andreas is a piece of my childhood and always will be, a guilty pleasure I remember waking up in the wee hours of the night to play just a little bit of before anyone could spot me. So I'm going to be biased towards the thing, that's just how it works. But even with that bias, I think it's hard not to see that for the 3D era of GTA, San Andreas is the perfected state of everything the company were trying to achieve with their open world efforts. Everything felt improved and remade to such a standard that it fit together in a seamless package of moving parts so intricate that the untrained eye never even sees the inside of the clock in motion; a standard which Open World games have been required to meet ever since or face being labelled 'dated'. It's my favourite of this era, and still close to my favourite Rockstar game ever made, which is why a nostalgia driven grade of A should surprise nobody. If you can swallow 2005 graphics, the game still functionally holds up to tell a fun gangster story across a sprawling open world that breathed before we even knew what that style of open world even meant. A benchmark in the history of games, that I still heartily recommend.

Stadia has died

 The Stadia is dead, long live the rest of the Industry!

Oh, there it is! You know, I actually thought I had another twelve months ahead of me before I would have cause to talk about Google Stadia again but as it turns out the big G were just waiting to pull the plug for so long that they didn't even tell their internal teams. I'm being serious, Stadia literally just unveiled their brand new UI layout the very same day that management turned around and declared the service would be shutting down in January 2023. Although I'm assuming this decision had been made quite some time ago from the way that literally every triple A game that was announced this year just sort of forgot to include Stadia on their line-up of upcoming platforms. Of course, if you're one of the common sense gamers out in the world with any sort of knowledge in how Googles 'side projects' always end, you knew from the beginning that this was going to happen because despite being under the biggest conglomerate megacorp in the world right now, Google is the quintessential embodiment of the guy who starts things and never finishes them.

There's a whole website out there dedicated to detailing the graveyard of services started and killed off by Google because the implementation was poor, the idea was bad, and Google don't know how to turn their ideas around and make them good. If they hadn't managed to stumble into establishing the biggest Search Engine in the world, these executives and idea creators would be lucky to be flogging vintage vinyl's from the parking lot of a HMV. They're passionless, innovation dry, clueless, moronic simpletons without a glimmer of the effort and sacrifice requisite to establish oneself as a staple of an already defined industry. Epic Games, for every mistake they've made, know how to keep people coming back to them on a daily loop with their Free Games offer and agonisingly slow paced system improvements along with the odd, painful, game exclusive. Google thinks if they just throw money at their new studio it'll figure it out eventually. But not too much money; gotta keep 'em sweating!

Google is going to try and twist perceptions and declare themselves successful pioneers who revolutionised the world of streaming games before they fell upon their own sword, and in the team's defence they did popularise the concept to the world, as well as sour most of that world on the idea by presenting the least favourable customer service program ever. But Microsoft and Nvidia had already been making their own streaming systems before Google, and theirs are going to continue after Stadia is buried and in the ground, so who's the real trailblazers here and who is the lighting thief, stumbling into the party that was already starting up and declaring themselves the host? Make no mistake at any point of this, not only did Google change nothing in the industry's trajectory, they also achieved nothing to carve out a place for themselves. Don't listen to their silver-tongued backwards speak they're already cooking up for investors: this was a failure.

And the team have all but admitted it in the most backhanded and disowning manner possible. Apparently the adoption of the console hasn't been quite what they expected, but they also claim that the current global financial downturn is responsible for the shuttering of doors. Oh, is that the case? Now how does that make sense when Stadia launched in November 2019; before the pandemic? That was an entire year and some generous change that their platform existed as a route for people staying at home to play games, which so many of them did, and yet through all of that Stadia couldn't secure a reliable enough user base to subsidise the first economic hiccup? Sounds like the company had no legs to stand on even if you do believe their misdirection and don't just conclude that their business model lacked the wide spread appeal they like to pretend it had.

Oh, and if we're talking about causes of the platform's failure; how about the absolute idiocy of the people buying game ports? These absolute gibbering morons were going around paying tens of millions per game, presumably under the stipulation of streaming exclusivity but what exactly is that worth? Stadia themselves knew the streaming landscape was sparse as it was, there wasn't much of a competitive audience to steal from with such deals. But game's companies would certainly be more than willing to happily take advantage of vastly over-estimated deals offered by the rubes of this equation, because why not? Get that bag from people who own so much money it's value is meaningless to them. It's a victimless heist! 

How about the failure of Stadia to provide the minimum 100 games per year that they promised, probably because they were too busy overspending on years old triple A games instead of spending wisely were it would have mattered? Or, as Eurogamer deftly put it, proposing ownership prices in a platform that didn't feel like ownership? (Nicely phrased; I guess that's why they're the professionals) Maybe, at some point, their failure to accrue a sustainable audience was more down to any of those factors instead of the phantoms they went to set up in order to pretend that their conduct was entirely blameless in this mess-up. But I'm just spit-balling here; who could possible say why yet another Google start-up has winded up in the graveyard.

Everyone said that this would happen, which is why investing money, or time, was a fools game that we wanted to stay away from. Google are committing to refunding games, but the form that will take is unclear for the moment. The Stadia Reddit (as gloomy as you would except) seem to have proposed the dystopian ending where those refunds come in Google store credit. A truly depressing and insulting conclusion if it does go that way, but oh-so fitting for the comedy of errors that is Stadia. But even with those refunds, there's no getting back that lost time investment for save games and Stadia-only online accounts. There's potential for a fix around getting back save data for single player games to be ported over to a more normal version of that same game, but online games are a wash. Oh, and the Stadia controller doesn't work on anything other than Stadia for the moment. A firmware update really needs to free that up.

Google Stadia is the disaster that all the world saw coming and no one should really be surprised by. And if there's anyone I feel the least sorry for in all of this, even if they're the most negatively effected, it's the bloody mindless Stadia stans. For years they shoved their arses up at the world and declared us backwards haters with no idea what we're talking about, pointing to the infrastructure of Stadia and asking how any company could screw that up. And we would just point to every other thing Google has screwed up and said "Don't let them do that to you." Now they've lost their avenue to the gaming world and we're supposed to feel sorry for them? Well I don't. All my emotion is wrapped feeling exasperated at Google for wasting everyone's time again and Phil Harrison for screwing up PS3, Xbox One and now Stadia with his mismanagement. This guy can't keep failing upwards; he can't keep getting away with it!