Zombie Survival clones

 When there's no more room in hell, the survival games will walk across Steam new Releases...

Yet again a new zombie game has entered the crowded pantheon of it's peers and distinguished itself soundly as a product of quality and inspiration, and once again it's a title from the tenured Resident Evil franchise. But, surprisingly, it's not a zombie game created in the most popular moulds of this genre. As one might expect from the highest regarded zombie franchise in the world. Rather, being action adventure story-based games, RE is actually an anomaly on the board of zombie games, most of which focus themselves towards the tried and true method of the 'survival' formula. Those of us who have been around this industry for a while remember the days when every single popular game for a few months had some sort of tacked-on zombie component. And 'The Day Before' developers probably never grew out of that period with the rest of us.

Now, straight away it's probably fair to let you all know my feelings on Survival games. I don't like them. No sir, they are not my friend and I have nothing positive to report about their contents or presentations because I think the entire genre is guided by lose assumptions more than heavily explored rules. I think survival games struggle with resource management issues that get in the way of having fun instead of providing examples to heighten it- and I think the spate of Zombie games with survival elements are what helped make the genre into such a cliché. Because let's be honest... zombie games aren't really all that 'high brow' are they? They all demand a single type of enemy usually, with very basic 'chase and kill' AI packages and an uninspired, typically sporadic, spawning algorithm. It ain't rocket science.

But to be fair, those games that did manage to last for a while and make something of themselves during the 'fad' ages do so because they had something special to do with their take on the formula. I think the only one which still has a presence today and didn't do anything intensely unique to stand out was probably '7 Days To Die', which boasted the gimmick of being hunted by particularly big hoards on the seventh day of every week. Of course, the game also grew it's aesthetic of 'slightly more realistic-looking Minecraft' with the robust building and crafting and the seemingly biome-based world generation; but in it's heart it was just another survival zombie game like all the others. 7 Days was just an earnest effort that it's team stuck with, rather than a flash in the pan idea that was abandoned before the week was out, like all the others.

One such title with a bit more meat to it's bones in the creativity department would be 'Project Zomboid', which refocused the idea of a zombie survival game by bringing players out to an isometric perspective and focusing on the minutiae of survival. Securing clean sources of water, cleaning cuts, managing colds. The motto of the game was 'This is how you die', and indeed the game was almost an instructional leaflet on all the ways a real life apocalypse could kill you, on top of the zombies roaming the land. Never the prettiest of games, Zomboid always impressed with the complexity of it's gameplay opportunities that fed into the 'story generating' ambiance that a game like this really need in order to stand out from the rest and make an impact. You can tell stories of survival in this game that no other survival game can spawn, and that in itself makes for a special experience.

I've always regarded 'State of Decay' as the 'polished' version of all those Steam dumpster fed zombie survival games that littered the survival age. Built in conjunction with Microsoft, as an Xbox console exclusive- State of Decay 1 bore itself on a promise of generated tales of survival and community management from the ground level. Kind of like playing your own season of the Walking Dead- you would pick the place of your base, scavenge for the right supplies to build the right facilities and deal with the threats that slowly built up around your door. Now State of Decay 2 was really the game that lived up to that promise, but both games in my mind still suffer from a very linear progression of gameplay. Most bases are just the same in all but location (2 added a little more functional variety, but not tons) community interaction doesn't drip with much flavour; but the idea of what these games wanted to be did propel it's community to smother over it's flaws. I think we're all just crossing our fingers and hoping that State of Decay 3 finally meets the dream we've all had.

And of course, there's the father of it all: DayZ. A mod for a popular realism based military tactical shooter game, DayZ would evolve into it's very own entity after experiencing a meteoric rise to success that eclipsed the original product. Standalone DayZ of today is a zombie survival experience renowned for its pretty much boundless PVP interaction in a huge world where everyone is hostile and your interactions with the everyman is always dynamic. Of course, at it's heart DayZ is just a PVP arena game with zombies and a ungainly huge map to shoot each other in. There's not really any objective to the game, and it's telling how the greatest evolution of this formula, the extraction shooter, (or perhaps even the BattleRoyale genre, at least in gameplay style) totally removed the zombies altogether. Some say that DayZ never quite figured out how to get it's zombies right, either making them too tough or too pathetic.

Who out there remembers RUST? The popular survival title about being a modern day cave man literally building their world from wood and rock. Well few people who know of that remember the days when it was original yet another zombie survival title! That's right, the wolves and bears of the land were briefly uninspired zombie models before the devs revealed just how primitive game zombies are by literally replacing them with equally as mindless animal counterparts. Oh, and then there's UNTURNED; another PVP tipped zombie survival game but with adorably retro-style block style characters and much more palette-able roam maps. And then there's- ah but we could be doing this forever, couldn't we?

You get my point, right? These types of games were a disease much more virulent and far-spreading than the zombie plagues they propose to depict, but in their absence I can't help but feel a tinge of irrational sentimentality towards that age. It was a particularly homogeneous time in game development, where dozens upon dozens of tiny studios were reiterating on the exact same ideas and concepts, making the exact same tiny breakthroughs and creating almost the exact same games, that the standout titles really felt like gladiatorial victories surviving a royale rumble of competitors. Like Mario surviving an age that forgot 'Gex the Gecko'. Still, I'd argue that between the every loved modern Resident Evil series and the really fun-seeming upcoming Dead Island 2- we're all in a much better place than we were with zombies 10 years ago.  Also, Happy Birthday me, I guess.

Is console gaming ever going to evolve?

 That's feeling like a solid- 'no', right now.

Console gaming is forever improving and reiterating upon itself thanks to the push to improve hardware that each manufacturer is drawn to by merit of their competition. Unless your name is Nintendo. They... they don't care about their hardware. The whole eight-year cycle that consoles go through is actually increadibly slow considering how often tech improves and changes, what with maximum processing power doubling every year, but that does mean every new iteration of a console has the potential to be a huge step forward in capability; which is typically why these huge companies end up selling at loss from cramming all the latest boards and cards in their power house machines and make up the change on the otherside through leeching customers for subscriptions or first-party high quality games. It's also why all those start-up companies that want to make their own competitive consoles really don't have a chance to compete before they've even started planning; what kind of start-up can eat those same sorts of production costs? Not one lacking a vast portfolio of investor's, that's for sure.

Yet some surprising how, despite this procession of new console iterations that are constantly being pushed out of the door, it always feels like console gaming is holding back the potential of the industry from where it could be. As if the hardware limitations are the shackles around the ankles of developers trying to redefine genre's but having to play by the rules of rendering available to them for fear of getting into another 'Cyberpunk 2077' situation where no one can play their damn game for half a year without a supercomputer attached to their rigs. Even this current generation of stupidly expensive glowing trite consoles somehow has it's teething problems when it comes to what should be the basic requirement of modern gaming- getting it's software to run at a consistent 60 frames per second. Not even 120- but just bog standard smooth 60. So what's going on?

Already we've had a plethora of miffed reactions to Arkane's vampire shooter game, but no so more when it was revealed that Redfall was going to be launching on Xbox without a 60fps mode at all. Two play modes, neither are smooth enough to match modern day gaming standards. And it's not as though the game is incapable of reaching 60 frames, considering Arkane have already promised a post-game patch adding in such a mode. Such really does demonstrate the order of prioritisation considered by modern day developers, who consider their games done and fully shippable before they can achieve a descent framerate for a console crowd. 60 frames, in their mind, is a bonus that such a crowd should be lucky and thankful to receive. A perception we should be very familiar with after the similar situation with Arkham Knights. 

Modern consoles seem to have standardised the concept of 'Performance modes' which are versions of the game where the higher graphics settings are automatically down-tweaked in order to reach the best possible performance. (A practice that just about any PC gamer out there is probably more than familiar with.) But this does betray the gulf of separation between getting the most visual appeal out of your games and making them play to the highest quality; such that previously unheard of graphic options are not available to console players! That's how impossible it is to combine these two extremes of performance with console technology! I'm not sure about you but personally I can't help but find that to be a depressing middle ground.

We're currently in an age of gaming dominated by computer component superiority, during a recession of said computer components. Of course it's nowhere near as bad as it was, thanks to the collapse of the crypto market killing off the desire for people to seize up graphics cards for mining purposes; but the greed-driven arm of industry has firmly stamped it's foot down on the basics of market negotiations. The last few years of gaming computer components have gotten prohibitively expensive for causal gamers and there's no possible chance of these components becoming more affordable with time, as was usually the case with literally everything else in the world. Meaning that at it's current trajectory, high level computer gaming is only going to become more and more elitist with less people being able to fully enjoy them without spending a ridiculous amount off the bat to get started. Which sucks.

Which kind of makes it seem like I'm praising the idea of throttling the development of software industry-wide to fit the confines of the console market's hardware... and yeah, I kind of am. Left to their own devices, the wild arms of development would probably see a wild variety in the styles of games developed; with some built to cater for the highest end computers of all and some, probably those made by big companies with an interest in actually making money, would try to match the general wave of tech. But there would be a distinction. We would have more games like Crisis, out there; optimised so badly that computers 10 years on from it's release couldn't run the thing in max settings. With the kiddie gloves of the console industry to base it's advancements around, software can be standardised to reach the most people, keeping the gaming community together and allowing it to grow as a unit. See- stronger isn't always better for everyone.

Of course, it's only ever comparative. Consoles will never be able to match what PC's can do at anypoint in their lifespan. The time it takes to design and mass-produce any sort of console to the market is enough time for a whole new series of graphics cards to be released, meaning that anyone looking for top-of-the-line in the console market is always, even on the launch day, going to be at least one generation behind. Every year that divide widens until the breaking point where games physically cannot improve anymore and a new generation has to begin. PC builds have that inherit upgradable superiority about them and there's no real way of matching that in a standardised level- unless we do something with consoles that no company has been able to manage before.

I've said it before but STADIA was it's own reaper, because the ground it walked on was solid enough in concept. A 'console' that really just connects to a top-of-the-line mega console that really runs the games is pretty much the only way that the console generation could ever reach the heights of PC- and that's evident in the way that Microsoft and Sony are both committing efforts to realising their own game streaming platforms. Honestly, the future of console gaming is probably going to be in the cloud, and when that happens it's going to be a total shift in fortunes as the market of computer upgrade parts will be the limiter of software development. Console gamers will surpass anything the PC market can feasibly reach- and the elitism will switch like a light switch because everyone has to be looking down on someone. Bliss.

The Almighty Casual Audience

 In the land of the blind

You and I, we don't matter. When it comes down to the creation of entertainment, both in gaming and in film, it's perhaps the strangest contrast of all that the actual beliefs and preferences of the fans who flocked to the content in the first place is actually a secondary consideration in the equation of what makes a worthwhile production. Of course, the evaluation of 'worthwhile' in this instance is being conducted almost exclusively by the powers that be over at the the corporate level of TV studios or production companies, by their word is hardly a passing breeze, now isn't it. The holders of the purse strings, from who's lips entire projects are born and die, don't care one iota about what the ready built fanbase feel and think when it comes to their products- doesn't that seem like the strangest oxymoron when it comes to business? And yet- it almost makes sense.

The itchy trigger fingers are always focused on a much more volatile and hard-to-please crowd, but one which is always immensely bigger by comparison. That amorphous and inherently indistinct entity known as 'The Casual Audience' will always be itself a larger cut of potentiality than the die-hard fans of any given product- because as there is one person who will dedicate themselves to a certain franchise with a zealous energy, there's ten thousand more who couldn't care less unless it makes a big song and dance to win them over. Cult-like fans are a known and conquered entity- even when they raise a fuss there's a good chance they'll stick around and spend their money anyway, just to be closer to the thing that they love. But the casual audience? They need to be cajoled and courted, seduced and sequestered- you have to win over the casual audience in order to see the levels of success that companies grow all hot and bothered for in today's world.

That's the reason why, so often, you'll see a game or TV show in it's production stages veer off in a direction that nobody is a fan of- and being passionate and vocal amateur critics that we are- that will be something we let them know about. But it's so very rare that the big productions will ever act upon the free audience feedback they've been given in any meaningful manner- take 'Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League', for example. Recently that game had itself a painfully rough reveal event where everything about the game from it's core gameplay to the very structure of the game as a mission-based live service was called into question after a slaughtering of fan opinions in every which way. Rocksteady did respond, but only by delaying it over a half a year into 2024. Not in order to change any of the issues that fans had, but to ensure the game is as polished of an entity as it's going to possibly be.

Now of course, the game is too far along at this point for a change in direction and Rocksteady can hardly afford to scrap a nearly completed game, but doubling down on the things that people hate is asinine, isn't it? Well, the fan reactions basically told Rocksteady that they absolutely cannot rely on the fandom they've built up over the years to provide free positive marketing as a shield for any shortcomings that 'Suicide Squad' might have in their pursuit to push the game onto a bigger, more casual, audience. This delay for polishing sake is basically their way of shifting tactic to making sure the product they've built, however rotten, is as far beyond basic reproach as humanely possible- for the chance of bypassing the fans altogether and securing those precious 'new playerbase' figures. That alone is why Live Services will never, and can never, die.

In fact, it's the reaction of the casual audience which has greatly shaken the recent One Piece adaptation to it's core after test screenings were so poor- woah wait one second... there's a One Piece adaptation? As in, 'live action'? And it's made by Netflix? How many times do you have to screw up live-adapting Anime before the primordial truth dawns that highly fluid and expressive animations don't translate well into live action? Dragon Ball Evolution took bunches of setbacks to try and make their own version under budget and still made a trainwreck so bad that Dragon Ball had to revive itself to wash the taste of that movie out of everyone's mouth, Cowboy Bepop was a mockery of everything that made the original a timeless, stylish classic and Death Note... Actually I never saw Death Note, because it's reputation precedes it.

But I'm getting off track- Netflix wanted to make an adaptation, and by all accounts they very much did. Never mind that the actual main character of the show has the ability to distort his body like rubber, which conceptually would look like trash in live action- but who am I to tell a spade it's a spade? Netflix were so aboard this ship that they had real giant versions of the cartoonish pirate vessels from the show built- which is unironically increadibly cool and makes me wish that kind of effort went into more current shows. But apparently that effort didn't make it to the CGI department, because by all accounts what Netflix is planning to serve up is utterly trash, at least to the palette of a test audience. They don't like the visuals and they find the story utterly nonsensical, which is the breaking point for Netflix.

Of course, any fan of the Anime (or even the Manga, I guess) would know exactly what's going on at all times, but this isn't a show with the fan's interests to heart. In fact, I doubt any adaptation of a foreign film or show is done with the original audience to mind. The upcoming, missing the point, adaptation of 'Squid Game'? The all-American 'Parasite' we've been threatened with over the past few years? Largely vapid attempts to copy the success of those shows and transport them over to a group of people too lazy to read subtitles. And I say that disparagingly, but there is a giant market of people who don't engage with foreign language content because they don't like to read subtitles and the dub is atrocious. Or they just don't feel comfortable if the people on TV aren't speaking the same language as them. That could be a factor too.

Which is why, as bizarre as it really sounds, the fan base are never really the target demographic when it comes to the release of practically anything. Always, the intention is never to satiate the hungry, but to expand their numbers by getting in new fans. That's why sequels always have to be bigger, louder, with bigger stakes and a younger cast. Making stories that start, continue and end with the pace of the narrative, died with the release of Jaws 2. If you're not telling everybody at work about the cool new show you're watching and converting them into active fans, you're a lazy fan and these studios hate you for it. And seeing as how the executive branch of games literally grew out of TV show business, that's the way it is for games as well. How delightfully myopic! 

Too real?

 Re-record

Some conversations never really end but are actually recycled in the grand tumble dryer which we call the debate of culture. Come to the conclusion and reach the point you stood on twenty years ago and you may find that staunch field being challenged all these years later when the landscape is new but the question is the same. When Mortal Kombat first rocketed on the scene with a blood-splattered uppercut, the pearl clutchers in the world wailed about how realistic is was- claiming that the game blurred the lines between reality and fiction so much it would desensitise people to the concepts of violence and brutality. The same rough talking points were brought up again with the rise of Grand Theft Auto as a powerhouse game. Then again with Call of Duty. And now once more with the, as of yet still unreleased, 'Unrecord'.

You've probably already seen the footage, or guessed that gaming would be heading this way eventually, but with the release of Unreal Engine 5 the availability of movie-studio level graphical quality has fallen into the hands of literally everybody. To the point where we're already seeing absolute trash-tier Steam dumpster games with the fidelity of high quality AAA releases at least in looks. It's a skin deep mask, but enough to give the average viewer a pause to double check what they're actually looking at. And those are products by Devs who know next to nothing about what it is they're even doing with the software. So what about developers who actually do know how to manipulate the Unreal Engine software to create something interesting and unique? What about a team that could already create impressive visuals through development software? What could they do with the sheer power of Unreal Engine 5 at their fingertips? Well it seems them can make people question reality.

To be honest, I actually know next to nothing about the developers behind the early gameplay teaser footage currently known as 'Unrecord'. All I know is that they use the handle 'DRAMA', and that the footage they put out is so realistic it makes that industry standard tech-demo games we're due at the start of every console generation blush. It's simply a first person shooter, from the prospective of a body cam, through a standard abandoned building setting- but by god does that aesthetic simmer with authenticity! The streaks of unintelligible graffiti, the heaps of unidentifiable clutter, the poking ribbons of light- you would be mistaken for believing this was a real dive into a turned-over crack den. And then when you see the action... if you ever need proof about the power of movement in animation, look no further than this gameplay footage.

From the jostle of the camera to sell the illusion of a body cam to the humanoid fumble of the hand movements, flawed enough to feel real but complex enough to be the hands of a professional. Then there's the subtle work- the lack of perfect centering better matching the aesthetic and the near-professional level sound effects which shun the bombastic and satisfying blasting rattles of traditional game firearms for something more muted, and fittingly, realistic sounding. Honestly, at first glance it all looks like the live feed of someone's grim snuff film. The developers had to release another video showing the manipulation of the game space to prove it wasn't just a live recording they added effects to in order to make feel like a game. And now we've teased reaching this point, maybe it's time to open up that old 'is this too real?' debate.

In times past it's been a damn near ridiculous proposition; affixed to games like Fallout where the entire human race is made up of potato-faced people, or Mortal Kombat- where human skin consists of 90% blood squips and strangely clean science-classroom-skeleton-grade anatomy.  Even classic movies like 'Evil Dead' were victimised under such a belief in the era of the 'video nasties', wherein for UK distributors such productions were banned from releasing. Which, of course, made them sought-after and popular films through merit of the, as of yet un-coined, 'Streisand effect'. And the fear is always the same: That the moral integrity of the viewers could be at risk of being corrupted by the disgraceful immorality of the 'art' in the way that it blurs the line between reality and fiction.

Now the question of whether art can be powerful enough to make someone who was otherwise moralistic and upstanding fall from grace and become a serial killer is an utterly ridiculous proposition by my reckoning, I'm personally more interested by the effect that media can have on the individual in a more quiet sense. Some of my favourite games of all times are one's that have moved me or shifted my perspective on life to look on situations I've been in with entirely new eyes; media that has altered me in small internal manners. I know art can do that, and I think a great game needs to do that. So with those eyes, what effect might a hyper-real first person shooter that seems so real your mind can't tell the difference do for someone? Desensitisation is very real, and though I don't think a normal person will become a mass shooter from playing a game like this, I could certainly see a young developing mind who grows up on games of this visual calibre in the future becoming just that little bit desensitised to seeing footage of real combat in warzones on the news. Heck, the US military are getting desperate: how long before they start producing games like this for recruitment purposes. (Who's to say this game isn't funded by them already? 'DRAMA' seems pretty mysterious.)

Of course when you start throwing around ideas like this then the natural next question becomes 'What exactly are you proposing to do about it?', which is where things become tricky. People are already reporting how the footage of this 'Unrecord' makes them a little uncomfortable to see, which could just be a general unfamiliarity to this new level of interactive fidelity, or a genuine sign that we may be scrapping our faces on the edge of that unreal valley. But banning, or even restricting, games like this for what their software is capable of producing is a vast chasm of a pitfall. Banning art is never the way to go, and censoring art is a delicate balance that is very rarely handled with grace in our modern age. Just ask Sony with it's insane over-corrections in recent years, or the Roald Dahl estate with rewriting his old books. (Poorly.) Mediation must meet and accord with sensitivity.

To my mind, Unrecord is still a demo for a game that might never be made. And what Unrecord even depicts is clearly geared in such a way to be realistic. The bodycam perspective alone does a lot of the heavy lifting to train the eye to believe the footage, remove that and the game will lose a heavy layer of it's believability right there. Additionally, at no point do we see an actual person because character models are a whole other kettle of fish to get looking genuine. When we see games crossing that barrier, that will be the point to start panicking. What we've seen here today is a gentle nudge that games will get to a point of graphical perfection, where a game looks as true to life as the world around you, and preparing for that eventuality will help make us less headlamp-struck in the moment. Plus, if you think this is the scary part of evolving tech- just wait until adaptive learning AI with Speech generators get coded into games so that enemy NPCs can start cussing you out with highly targeted jabs mid-fight to knock you off your game. I'm telling you, the future be wilding!

A line crossed.

 A playerbase scorned

There seems to be an accepted scale of severity when it comes to dealing with those games that demand monetary tribute from it's players. First of, yes- we've passed through the fact that certain games feel the need to be constantly supplied with funds to in order cover the terrible incurred costs of server maintenance, (that was sarcasm) but live service titles tend to get a bit more leeway because at least those recurrent funds appear to be actually going somewhere. Free-to-play live service games almost get a free pass to nickel and dime as much as they want, simply because they wave you in at the door with a free sample to get you hopelessly hooked before begging you for spare change out of your pocket. No quite the classic dealer-grift, but you can see where these companies developed their inspiration at least. But no platform exists without it's limits.

Once upon a time we used to be decently okay with the idea of subscription models for games that allow for a regular paycheck to be fed into the development studio in exchange for unfettered access to everything that online experience had to offer. There was no case of blocking off content for the most generous players or sinking more effort into paid content whilst giving free players the table scraps- in some ways this was the most universally fair system. However, today these ideals are looked on as relics of the past, probably due to the fact that people are a little bit more aware of the ways they're wasting money these days, and how much time in your favourite online game goes wasted? I don't want to spend a monthly subscription for a game I only get to play a few hours each weekend! What kind of value proposition is that? Still- with the directions we veer off into nowadays, I'm starting to miss that standard...

Because as you may have heard, the free-to-play online COD platform, Warzone, has recently been fingered as the latest company to push it's way past the line of decency in it's attempt to rake in that microtransaction revenue money. Whilst other games of this style are happy selling cosmetics and colour-kits to keep it's lights on, COD have unveiled preliminary bundles with skins that have actual effects in the game. Paid-for skins that will grant extra weapon slots or a free UAV on spawn. These effects are specifically for the DMZ game mode, which appears to be a Tarkov inspired take on the Warzone formula- which in itself highlights the disparity even more between the relatively level playing field that veteran tittle offers and the skewered version of that same kind of play space COD is proposing to thrust upon the world with avarice blinding it's eyes.

You see, this is what is know of as 'Pay to win'. Systems of classism within the player community reinforced by who pays and who doesn't is only worsened when you start making paid content actually significantly effect the playing of the game. Any sort of extra advantage you can pay hard real-world money for spits in the face of fair competition that lies in the bones of any PVP game. And Warzone already skirted that line for years, with certain skins that were objectively harder to see then the base model thanks to camouflage patterns or ghillie aesthetics- but this pushes way beyond even that. It is a pollutant to enter into the gaming ecosystem and a line past which even the most insanely avarice companies in the world typically know not to cross. Ubisoft happily would, but who in their right mind lives their life to the standard of freakin' Ubisoft? I mean, come on!

We've been almost exactly here before, in the whole 'Power card' 'lootbox' debacle that ended up forever tainting the legacy of Star Wars Battlefront 2 when EA thought it oh-so-clever to sell their upgrade path improvements in randomly stocked digital crates. Of course, by the very nature of the idea that was a good percentage worse, because in a competitive game those bonuses are a world of difference between winning or losing- but the principle stems from the same short-sighted place. The entire concept of a game is a special magic box within which everything you do is removed from consequence to everything outside of that box. I'm talking fundamental game design philosophy here. Philosophy that EA, and now Actvision, are wantonly violating with hair-brained polices!

And why do we get so irate about these systems? Is it because we're all cheapskates who shudder at the prospect of paying an uncapped amount of small transactions in the hope of being competitive with other players? Well that's certainly a factor for me, but this does run deeper than that. All of the most successful competitive games which still persist in today's ecosystem, Counterstrike Global Offensive, League of Legends, Apex Legends- all of them feature non gameplay affecting cosmetics that can be purchased with real money. Because when you place gameplay power under a price tag you enter into a whole new economy of weight which influences how every system is then presented to the player. We've not got a competitive multiplayer game which has sold itself fully enough to this devil for comparison yet, but we do have examples from other genres.

Diablo Immortal famously sells chances to obtain it's highest gear under differing 'rift token' accessories that straight up prevents non-paying players from even attempting to roll some of the best gear in the game. What happened to that game? It became a social pariah and it's player base shrivelled up to a small, albeit loyal, contingent of glorified paypiggies. And on an even grander scale- Star Citizen pre-sells it's grandest and newest ships for thousands of dollars before the game is even built, essentially creating a broken economy of progression before the final product has even been stuck together. Some people are going to load into the final game at the end of the progression chain, with nothing left to grind for, others are going to start hopelessly small in comparison with no hope of ever catching up thanks to the nature of the set-up.

As it turns out- anti consumer practices tend to test poorly on, you know, the audience. That special line of decency exists to maintain the thin façade of respect between us and them; and when it's trodden on, even in the smallest of ways- a backlash isn't just justified, it's nigh-on duty bound! Experience has taught us well how these are boundaries written in sand, easily shifting, and without the most vigorous 'watch-dogging', liberties will be taken as they've been taken in the past. Let this indiscretion go and tomorrow's will be worse. Outfit buffs today will be purchaseable ammo care drops mid-game in a month from now; and early start UAV's absolutely will become consumable tactical nukes in a year or two down the line. Nerfs aren't good enough- this needs to be ripped out at the stem!

NPCs, AI...

 And we

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the vapid mind of one of those NPCs you see strolling the streets of Los Santos, or holed up in the Inn during the worst storm nights over in Skyrim- or even what bounces around the heads of every character you aren't currently controlling in the Sims? Probably not, because the directions of AI NPCs has been a talking point in video game marketing for a good many years now whenever developers want to hype up all the effort that went into making their game as 'intelligent' as possible. The GTA NPCs are placed dynamically as you travel about, given appropriate AI packages depending on where they are in location on the map and what that specific NPC would be feasibly doing (i.e.  Mountain climbers will be Map Navigating, whilst beach folk will be relaxing on the sand.) Skyrim NPCs follow specific daily AI packages weaved to simulate a daily cycle of waking up, doing their important tasks for the day and then going back to sleep in their beds. And the Sims operate in the same way only with a basic AI that allows them to react to stimulae that the player feeds them.

It's all very heavily catered and orchestrated by the system designers, because games have yet to reach that state of development where they slide off the gangly rails and become free to slot in rampant learning AI that does whatever it wants. Most games would fall apart in a matter of a week under that sort of unfiltered access. Still, it's the job of NPC programmers to create the illusion of a breathing world in order to heighten player's immersion with the world, which in turn will help sell the story, or the action or pretty much whatever it is that needs to be fed to the player to make the game work. AI NPC work is a recipie of subtlety and balance. Nothing sticks out quite like a world with utterly braindead AI who refuse to function in way that we see as 'normal' or 'logical' for the human observer.

But personally, I can't fully shake from my mind the idea of a fully autonomous AI NPC controlled world as being that perfect endgame for the development of non player characters. Think about it- a world where the characters think and react and learn from what you do so that they can act on that information later. If you threaten an NPC with a gun one day, they'll spread that information and people avoid that part of the city for fear of what will happen to them. Or assault one shop keeper and they'll remember you the next time you come in. Currently such systems can be feigned through heavily scripted reaction scripts which you'll find in more extravagant open world titles. To push it that one step further all you need to do is map out a list of actions within an AI's range, throw a learning algorithm on the thing and call it a day! What a world that would be..

Of course, the toss-up would probably be system performance hits. Even with the basic puppets we have in most games today, the sheer power it takes to render those little guided AI silly-string people often grates most games down to a crawl. Drive around Night City in Cyberpunk and unless you're rocking those several thousand dollar systems you'll notice whenever you cross a congested part of the city. (What few there actually are, that is. Night City is surprisingly sparse outside of the centre city, I've noticed.) Perhaps we're not yet at the point of hardware where games can keep the AI minds of NPC's constantly evolving, taking on new information and forgetting irrelevant stuff, all around the core player's game. Unless... heck, that could have made for a revolutionary Stadia game if Google had anything resembling a back-bone in their bodies.

What if I told you, however, that there's an hidden hour between days called the "Dark Hour" wherein- wait, what were we talking about? Ahem- what I meant to say was: What if I told you that these suppositions about AI powered NPCs no longer exist purely within the imaginaries of our spongey minds! And we thank the overpaid and underworked researchers at Standford University for this, through their research paper entitled "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviour" Always it's the Standford peeps that go on this bizarre little escapades pushing certain questions that no one really wanted to go ahead and answer, and everyone knows and then getting a good ear-worm into the news. Could still use some help naming the things, though.

Explained in laymen's terms from the perspective of another laymen (look up the paper yourself for a detailed analysis) what we have here is a simple world of sprites and characters imbued with life through an AI architecture, giving the algorithms necessary tools to learn new pieces of information. The set is actually very similar to how Bethesda handle their open worlds, with NPCs being given daily routines to wake up, do their necessaries, go back home and- if they get to that point- even throw parties. (So this is what Sims get up to when I'm not there turning them into abject monsters on society.) The researchers powered up their NPCs, or 'Agents, with personalities' and set them off to play about their lives.

And just like the spongey human race, these Agents pretty much immediately fell to gossiping and spreading rumours like wildfires and having very basic conversations back and forth as powered by an AI speech algorithm in a vein similar to ChatGPT. It's basic, but it's a very interesting look into the way that these separate agents interact with one another in a manner that appears vaguely life-like until you actually read the contents of these conversations and die of synthetic boredom. But you know that isn't going to stop an inherent idea thief like Ubisoft, who are absolutely in the process of building the next Watch_Dogs game entirely around that singular idea, with the rest of the actual gameplay loop being an absolute after thought they don't even consider until the final 6 months, resulting in another absolute disaster of a game. I swear, I'm like the Ubisoft whisperer; I'm in their heads!

Though the paper was more interested in the generative models of AI, displaying their ability to create something arguably similar to personally driven intent when given enough stimuli- obviously my interest starts and stops at the gaming application. I can't imagine big epic fantasy stories like Skyrim or Starfield benefitting much- but The Sims? Heck, half the problem with those games of late has been how robotic all the non players feel- give them the opportunity to act like other players and you'll add a whole new dimension to the world. Heck, you could turn The Sims into a competitive race for success with enough tweaking - just build The Sims 5 with an AI backbone like this and the sky is the limit! Finally, an AI story that doesn't sound like the end of the world embodied! (About time...)

Deconstructing the player

 And reconstructing the world

The 'Avatar' is the traditional means by which a player interacts with a game, but the types of avatar's that exist, alongside the absence of one all together, number in the dozens. Typically, when we really take a step back and look at the grand picture, it's the way that we players are able to interact through our Avatar's which determines the genre of the game. Create any sort of world you want, built on whatever themes, or historical significance, you can fathom; but stick the camera above the player at an angle and you'll be typically looking at an ARPG. Throw it in their head and you're looking at a First Person Adventure game, give them a gun and it's a first person shooter. Throw them into the sky and give them dozens of NPCs to play around and it's a 'God Game'. Any genre starts and is built around the player and the experience you want to inflict them with.

When I was more of a Horror Game lover, I remember being somewhat fascinated with the divide that genre has when it comes to the way it treats it's players. Most horror games are first person, obviously because they want to place the player in the shoes of the unnerving situation so they lose themselves to the fiction of it and are more likely to be scared; (and high quality 3D models are hard to make, that too.) but there is a fundamental distinct between styles of Horror game that, to this day, I don't think has a name. I'm talking the types of horror game where your main interaction with the world is how you hide away from monsters and the stalking horrors, and the other type of horror game where you fight back, usually whilst managing supplies and ammo, thus adding on tension not present in usual 'shoot 'em up' first person games.

Obviously the vulnerability of the player is several worlds apart between those two different styles of approaching the player in what is ostensibly the same genre. In the former example you play the victim, forever at the whim of the experience and the centre of an almost passive procession of emotional manipulation. For the latter style the player typically starts off as a victim, but has the chance to change that power dynamic slowly through the game by becoming more proficient, earning more tools, and becoming familiar with the way the world works. Think the difference between a game like 'Outlast', where you run around finding batteries so you can avoid the scary men in the dark, and 'Resident Evil' where you're always fighting back and getting to the point where you win out on top of whatever horror of the night dares threaten you.

But then there are games when there is no player avatar at all, and the player is more a suggestion of a role- the aforementioned 'god game'. In this style of game the player is not usually the subject of directed manipulation, but rather given the tools of the manipulator. (Or rather, the illusion of those tools. Actually asking players to code the game would be a little much.) Maybe you take charge of a faceless 'city council' who dictates the layout of city blocks, or the entirety of a race as they evolve throughout history, or even the elements themselves! These are games all about control and freedom, and breaking players out of the fleshy bodies of a singular avatar is the first step to realising that sensation of total, unfettered, control.

In some games the player acts as something of a possessor, inhabiting the shell of a character who already lives within the world they exist, with a personality and goals- for which the player merely acts as 'puppeteer'. Of course, this is the traditional way that action games operate, and adventure titles, giving the player a titular 'character' to play as rather than a blank slate for them to inhabit. Of course, there's always an inherit degree of immersion between the player and their avatar in any game, and even the most vocal and loud-personality character is going to be built to fit into that space somewhat. Some Avatar's are designed to take advantage of that immersion, providing a slate that isn't entirely blank, for the player to write in the blurb. I'm talking about heroes like Master Chief, who is very clear about his goals, but didn't really talk about his moment-to-moment thoughts and motivations until the later titles by 343. (You know, around about the time that 343 decided to make him an ultra special 'chosen one'. Sigh...)

Role playing games boast a very special relationship between the player and their avatar, where they become the person they control (perspective irrelevant) to such an extent where they help actually design that character to some extent. Maybe you'll pick their looks, decide how their skills blossom, choose what choices they make in the story. These are the relationships where the barrier between what the player wants and what the character wants is made so thin as to be imperceptible, so that 'ideally' the player never loses that suit of immersion connecting them with the heart of the player character. Role Playing games thrive best with the cooperation of the player to buy into their fiction, immersion with their world and believing themselves to be the avatar they control.

And there are also the games where the avatar is a cast of characters that we choose from. In fighting games, racing games, or competitive multiplayer games- the player has a slew of distinct defined and designed avatar's that they slip into the skin of and play as. Whether it's a Nintendo character in Super Smash Bros., a Warner Bros. alumni in 'Multiversus' or a member of 'Overwatch'- the character's themselves are icons, pre-existing and defined, with the player merely controlling them for their talents, usually for short bursts at a time. Like stepping into the skin of a celebrity who is famous for doing a certain thing and acts a certain way, you borrow their mannerisms and their talent, but you aren't taking their talents and fame for your own.

The very concept of an avatar is so essential to the fundamentals of game design that we don't even think about it anymore whenever we engage with a new game. Whereas once there was a cognitive connection that any person had to make when starting a game, figuring out which one of these squares was controllable in Pong, nowadays it's become the breathing heart of design to make that process so utterly intuitive that the player knows what they're getting before they load the game up on their system. Of course, it is the most simple and intrinsic parts of any craft that seem the most immutable, until someone comes along and reinvents the wheel before your very eyes, redefining what you thought a game even was.

I think the next stage of transcendent game design lies in meddling with these fundamentals and reconstructing them, but by pure merit of being fundamentals, the very conception of such a 'meddling' seems like a nearly impenetrable subject. There's a reason why I'm discussing this topic in abstract indirects, you can't really define coming up with a whole new way of looking at the already defined. But what I do think is that in the years to come, as systems become more powerful and some of these superstar 'auteur' developers become ever more unshackled by corporate bounds, we're going to start getting games that push the concept of gaming in directions we can conceive of today and those we never even thought of. And then maybe we too can, finally, be Strand-like.

The Last of Us show was...

Better than I expected! 

Obviously, this is going to contain spoilers for The Last of Us as a show and as a video game, and I will touch a tiny bit on the second series without going into giant spoilers: But bear that in mind. So it's been over for a while now and I think people have really had their chance to digest all that The Last of Us was in it's body; and I have to come away and compile my own thoughts here today in order to unwind from it all, because that's just the way that I am. Whereas I have had my ups and downs with where I think this show has gone, given the overall quality of the efforts of the team those peaks and valleys have been more like tiny bumps atop a giant sloping rollercoaster. By and large The Last of Us was the highest quality video game TV show that has ever existed and all over game-to-TV projects have been put on notice because of it's greatness. But it wasn't perfect, nothing ever is.

First of all, it must be said that although I originally had some scant reservations about the choices made in casting, everyone pretty much lived up to exactly who they needed to be- I was also a huge fan of the two cameo's from Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson's unexpected cameo's in the final few episodes; as well as the restraint of the show runner to make them characters that could have easily been brushed aside instead of central plot points. Okay... Ashley did literally play the mother of her own character, (and did so using her 'Ellie' voice, which was a weird choice) but it was a role that could have feasibly been played by anyone, they just happened to make it her. It could have undermined the show, but instead it really played to what this show gets right most of the time- it's respect for the source material.

I don't know if any other video game adaptation has had nearly as much respect for the product it came from as The Last of Us did. Halo was famously led by people who were staunchly proud that they never played the games, or spoke to anyone who did, Resident Evil could have been based off a poster for one of the games for all it had to do with any of them- but The Last of Us had showrunners who weren't embarrassed of where they came from. In several key moments of the show you'll have lines borrowed directly from the game, as well as scene compositions and in one instance an entire third person sequence from the back seat of Joel's truck. It's performed tastefully, such that only one familiar with the games would notice. It's a great way of actually keeping the good graces of that core audience you inherit everytime you adapt a story. (Maybe that will be a lesson to all those copycat adaptors who are sure to come.)

And what's more, in the instances where the show decided to do it's own thing; I think a lot of the additions were either great or better than anything the game had created in it's place! I think that the episode which told the story of Bill is probably the show's best, encapsulating the theme of the first series and the heart of the show in general- showing us the history of the character and breathing more life into him than was ever present in the game, all without actually pushing the events of the story along for more than an introduction and a finale. By most traditional standards of storytelling that would be considered 'filler'; but the wreath of emotional importance, as well as the dark tie with the ending choices, really made it a standout must-watch!

Some concerns I had at the beginning of the show was how Joel's depiction was going to be handled, as a character he really did exist as gaming's answer to 'ludonarrative dissonance'; where dissociation and 'rampant murder' really ended up setting the man on the path to do all he does for the finale sequence. And yet... there was a softness to his character that extended beyond his relationship with Ellie. In the games that is his saving grace, his light in the darkness he holds on to in order to justify the person that he is and the things he's done. In the show, without that connection of actually being Joel, more effort was put in to show the human side of Joel. His panic attacks and his injury- all weaknesses that softened the edges of who he was, but which came at a bit of a cost.

The final action sequence, where Joel turns on the fire-flies, sat odd both with me and those I've asked who never played the games. For them they felt they weren't adequately fed the information for what he does to be believable, thus there was an aura of alienation. For me, I just didn't believe the same man who struggled to fight for his life against a trio of bum hicks a couple of episodes before just wiped out an entire hospital of armed rebel insurgents. I mean the guy is brutal- but I never got the sense he was that one-man army who could take on the world if he wanted. The Last of Us as a game didn't need to justify that aspect of Joel, by natural extension of being the player- anything he could feasibly do was in the hands of the player's own skill- but the show was left a little naked without that dressing and didn't quite hit it's notes in the final moment.

And then there was the episode with Kathleen. Already, in a show that was struggling for episodes, planting an entire episode as being dedicated to introducing a plot thread that was going to be resolved in the immediate next episode was a bit scandalous. Making that whole episode a thematic division of the original vision of the series, however, causes a schism that I cannot justify. As all the rest of the show seems to have no problem understanding, the thematic heart of 'The Last of Us' is based around love. Every major plotpoint comes back to love, Riley and Ellie, Joel and Ellie, Bill and Frank, David and... well you see... David has a weird relationship with his emotions, we don't need to get into that. But Kathleen... all she represented was hate. Hate fuelled vengeance, as the show itself admits rather plainly. Which would be fine, colliding the concepts of love and hate as sides of the same coin- but that is literally was Chapter 2 is supposed to explore. What's the point of throwing her out of order and placing a hate-themed story point in the first series? It was a time waster, and a ill-fitting chapter altogether.

However, that is merely one blemish on an overall incredible product that managed to tell the vast story of The Last of Us pretty well in only 9 episodes and only feeling slightly rushed. Ellie could have done with a little more characterisation in the middle episodes so she doesn't feel as bizarrely rude to everyone she first meets, and there could have been a few more Clickers... at all. After the Kathleen episode there was literally not a single one, just boring old infected- and who cares about them, right? Overall, the show was a great adaptation of a classic masterpiece of a video game, and whilst I don't think it's quite replaced the game as the definitive rendition of the story, it has justified in my mind it's own right to exist as a piece of media. For now. I don't rate shows on this blog, so I can only say that I hope the team live up to this example in Season 2 which I guess will be as soon as Bella Ramsey's injected growth hormones start to kick in?

Reviewers and Marketing

An unholy union.

We all have that one IGN opinion, don't we? Our exasperated reaction to what has to be one of the largest, yet most clowned on, official gaming publications in the entire industry. And the world, for that matter. IGN has one of the biggest chunks of online gaming presence, they're first fiddle to just about every single premiere on the market, they cover TV shows and movies at the same time, and they're perhaps one of the only stable career choices a gaming journalist can hope to make. But games journalists are already a questionable breed of people, now aren't they? For their debateable relevance and job performance standards, as well as their seemingly obvious lack of passion for their chosen vocation which always seems to bleed out in bitter and resentful articles that seem to drunkenly lash out in every direction without rhythm or reason. So what happens when you bring a whole collective of journalists together into one connected group? Pandemonium.

But IGN is much bigger than it's reviewing arm; heck it's an entire media empire at this point! Chock full of reaction-opinion content, watch along parties for all major gaming events, and press coverage out the wazoo; ensuring they can buff up their own viewership by feeding off the marketing campaigns of all other games. And I mean all other; they don't seem to care who gives them money, as long as they bring the potential for an audience along with them. I don't quite know what kind of parasite this makes IGN, but not a particularly fun one to follow. I bet most games industry people watch IGN these days without being fans, because that's just what you are supposed to do in order to keep abreast with the industry moves. IGN are the one's who made it this way, and they lorde it out on top of their pack for a reason.

Of course, IGN are by no means the only such publication; their example has spawned a cadre of identical eye-brow raising 'experts' who formulate their actionable opinions on the products they review by merit of wavy talents. It's not as if anyone is saying you need to be a gaming expert in order to pen a review, but perhaps getting people who actually like games would be a decent start- but alas we are doomed to suffer a reality where the industry is beset by absolute heels from every turn. Imagine if all movie critics absolutely could not stand the theatre, or watching long-form media- it's that level of insanity over here in gaming and we see this ugly truth reflected out of the dull empty-hearted articles pouring out of mainstream outlets with disappointment after disappointment.

Who remembers the Cuphead debacle from Gamesbeat? The situation in which an early player of the game's tutorial found themselves utterly incapable of pushing through the tutorial level of the game because it required them to jump atop a platform. Now to be absolutely fair to Gamesbeat, they had good humour about this. The player in question was no fan of platformers, they kind of set him up to fail by throwing it at him in the first place, and the video was uploaded as a kind of group shamefest for everyone to laugh along with. I hope the player was laughing as well. But I'm afraid to say that even though this particular video was made with the joke to mind, the perception it reinforces about the competency of video game reviewers is no illusion.

I mean, Ploygon's legendarily embarrassing footage of a player attempting DOOM's intro so pathetically it seems they've never even touched a First Person Shooter before is spectacle enough. The footage is bad, with the player standing still and getting mauled, seemingly unable to aim and move at the same time, and missing point-blank shots it should be honestly impossible to screw up on. And there really isn't a punch line to this one. This was footage that Ploygon shot and for some reason didn't immediately delete upon review; this one made it out to the public. And the message it sent: Yeah, our reviewers aren't really hobbyists for the games that they play... but, oh well- right? It certainly painted an aura of mistrust next time around when DOOM Eternal started getting critics grumbling about it's alleged difficulty.

And whilst we're doing the round trip, why not land at Gamespot's door for a spell? That's right, you didn't think I'd miss an opportunity to talk about the Miles Morales review, did you? A classic review, full of vigor, wherein the reviewer seems to struggle to come up with things to say about a game which was essentially just a bloated out DLC pack for the original Spiderman. (Not to knock the quality of Miles Morales, but we should call a spade a spade when we see it.) During which we got gifted the gloriously bizarre sentence "The way he leaps off of buildings and flips backwards to face the camera is full of the exaggerated swagger of a black teen, I get goosebumps everytime I see it." Which is just an objectively insane sentiment. That Gamespot thought an adequate defence for that statement was to go "Actually- the guy who wrote that review was black!"- is laughable.

Which brings me around to the latest kerfuffle; IGN's contribution to the shaky train that is the Redfall marketing. The game hasn't had a great go of it's reveals, with battles with the public over apt comparisons to the general vibe that this game doesn't feel as fresh and different as some of Arkane's other outings. Perhaps they thought giving people the chance to play the game and get that footage out would waive some concerns, and for some of the smaller creators the output of gameplay was soothing. The game does look pretty fun. But for the biggest of the outlets, IGN... woah, those guys are experts at not being experts. The gameplay is painful, just slightly better than the DOOM footage in that I believe this guy has played First Person Shooters before- but he just doesn't enjoy them in the slightest.

For a marketing video to score badly with the public is already a big kick to the ego, but for the reason of that disdain to not be the game itself but the people playing it... well, that's certainly raising questions about the worth of lukewarm platforms like IGN when it comes to supporting the game industry they leech off to survive. Compare that with grass-routes creators, like the 2.2 million viewed video of the ID Software team meeting up with huge DOOM fan Markiplier and having him rock out the game at it's highest difficulty setting whilst talking about how important the game was to him growing up- that's the kind of stuff that turns heads. Yeah, I didn't intend to make another blog basically saying "Trad media sucks" but here we are... guess it's a sentiment that writes itself, huh?

The fog of lies deepens

Corner of Memory

Having just finished Persona 4 Golden after roughly two years since I first picked it up, I'm off on a little bit of a binge of seeking out the obfuscated truths within the world. Which is a very apt topic when we look about the world of today as the vines of mistruths grow thicker, tightening around all of us. I wouldn't be surprised at this rate if Persona 6 doesn't end up being a tie-in direct sequel to Persona 4, as the world seems absolutely prime to facilitate it. What with all the lie-driven facets of media, both in the serious world and the irreverent one we inhabit, and the broadening tools for the aspiring liar to exploit practically falling at their finger tips, digging our way to the innermost truths is becoming more and more of a skill. I've done all I can to be on the ball myself, but how do you teach someone new coming into this world what's real and what's not? What value do those terms even have in a world where both are used as tangible and actionable currency? When is Persona 6 coming and why don't I have it yet? All pertinent questions.

Of course this is yet another topic that veers it's way towards the tools of misinformation, which unfortunately isn't a giant submarine with a giant server farm that mechanically filters all the world's flow of information in order to spit out altered results that subtly manipulates humanity into developing the way that a shadowy cabal of war-era elitists want. Although given the rise of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, I'm beginning to think that such a world isn't exactly far off. (We just need someone entrepreneuring enough, with near limitless funds who is a closet wierdo and a rapid Hideo Kojima fan- wait... someone check on Elon Musk right now!) Given that these tools have been thrust into the hands of the everyday man, one would be forgiven for believing this is the downfall of truth and trustworthiness within society, which is a bit of a hyperbole to be honest- but one can't deny the fact that AI is certainly having a serious part to play in the pollution of the Shadow World within Humanity's heart.

With Search Engines and lazy customer support centres adopting writing algorithms into their daily operation, we've been able to see the breakdown of reliability across already shaky infrastructure. Bing, for instance, showed off how their new AI search assistant will confidently pull it's data from any old source on the Internet it can find, irregardless of corroborating evidence or stronger differing facts. Only the AI picks these half-truths and straight lies out and presents them without the alternatives that a faceless search engine would- essentially thrusting the onus of discovering the truth onto the searcher who, most of the time, isn't a trained journalist who does this regularly. And the rise of AI image generation has led to tons of paid art boards being flooded with low effort, easily identifiable, computer composites that lazy creator's charge pretty pennies for- covering up the true heartfelt passion of the traditional artist hidden underneath.

But of course, this culture spreads back a little further, doesn't it? Who remembers that leak for 'Spiderman: No Way Home', showing off Andrew Garfield way before his inclusion with the project was a known definite. (I mean we all kind of knew, but we didn't know yet) Mr Garfield, thinking quick on his feet, thrust the excuse onto the image generation boogey-man of the day- Deepfake tech. And for the moment it was a convincing misdirect. Deepfake technology is capable of compositing images together to startlingly realistic ends, such to the point where rumours persist Russia employed deepfake videos of Zelenskyy surrendering Ukraine at the beginning of their conflict as a befuddlement tactic. Now for the moment there are still lighting and movement giveaways that the human eye is capable of detecting; but the tech is improving so fast that for the Spiderman lie at least, there was a genuine moment where the Internet wondered if they were being misled or if they were, indeed, looking at the single most impressive Deepfake ever made. That is scary.

Of course Deepfake tech has slightly more, just as eyebrow raising, applications; such as when specialised adult sites starting using it for their own goals. Already questionable until a site which targeted popular internet personalities, without their consent, came roaring into the forefront of news very recently. With tech like this, suddenly our own likenesses can be turned into algorithms and formatted without anyone being the wiser. For the moment it requires a steady stream of face pictures from various angles in order to make a convincing composite, but how many pictures of your face exist online already? Really? Check your Instagram, or your Twitter; you may have the tools to be made into the next AI fabricated storyline already out in the ether without even realising it!

Which brings me back around to the story which inspired all this pontification to begin with, and believe it or not this actually comes back around to Persona! (I know!) Because as ATLUS stubbornly refuses to let anyone in on the details of their next mainline, non gatcha, entry to their beloved universe; stories have started to pour out on their own. Some speculation, some outright confident fabrications, and one in particular an apparent leak. Maybe you've seen it, a five second snippet of what looks to be a high-poly remake of Persona 3, or one of Persona 3's main characters at least, casting 'Myriad Arrows'. (I think.) It's a frenetic looking scene, much more so than the footage of Phantom X we've already seen, leading people to believe that this is the very first look we're received of a full blown Persona 3 remake on the horizon.

Now I don't believe any outlet has confirmed the footage, but they have talked about a Persona 3 remake being apparently in development for several years now: which creates a dilemma. If this information was already publicly accessible, who's to say that what we're seeing here isn't the high quality animation of a fan imaging what a Persona 3 Remake would be using the tools available to them? Think about it, the Internet if full of talented individuals who can create incredible 3d and 2d animation without the tools and staff of a major studio. Just within the past couple of weeks we've seen the debut of an incredible looking animated pilot on Youtube with 'Lackadaisy'; is a 5 second snippet of a Persona game really beyond the realms of fabricated possibility?

We've reached the very special point in life where it seems nothing is true and everything is permitted, for the tools of reality have been passed into the hands of everyone. But in a world where an convenient lie is certainly more palatable than a rough truth, who's going to opt to see the ugliness of reality in the eye? 'A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has put on it's pants', posited Mark Twain, but I rebut that the real problem of today is the fact that lies and truth move at the same speed and wear the same pants. You no longer need to find minute reporting suspicious and even verified reporting can turn out being wrong down the line. If Izanami-no-Okami truly believed she would return to the world when she was wished for in men's hearts, well I'd say it's looking like she's prepped for a round two!

Where's next for Resident Evil?

 What is that chill running up my spine?

So I said it before and I stand by it: The decision to remake Resident Evil 4 probably wasn't one of the best one's that Capcom could have ever made in their pursuit of revivifying the Resident Evil franchise. Now, I'll be honest that they did actually surprise me in what they put together, not that it was quality- I think we're at a point where the RE Team put out consistent enough quality products for us never to doubt their abilities there- but that it was toned down from the campiness that made the game work. RE4 retains some of the ingredients of that campiness, but swirled into the broth of much more serious machinations which make this Resident Evil revival more tense and threatening- the result being a product that sometimes doesn't know what it wants to be. Still fantastic, but tonally confused, shall we say? Which was what I was worried about.

But if I'm going to be totally honest with you- there was never any doubt in my mind that RE was going to hit 4; but just as with Mass Effect Andromeda, my actual complaint was simply that we weren't ready yet to receive such a game. Mass Effect Andromeda attempted to be the next generation's answer to what Mass Effect was for us, but the team failed to wait enough time for the dust to settle and for Mass Effect to become a lusted after commodity once again. (They failed on a bunch of other regards as well, but that's not the comparative point today.) Resident Evil gave itself a lot more time before diving into their 'remake' series, but they're speeding across Resident Evil history at a break neck pace which is destined to leave this sub-series drying up in no time.

I know that the Japanese gaming industry has this peculiar image of a 'healthy franchise' being one that outputs a new entry every single year, but Ubisoft as an entity exists as a living cautionary tale as to why that is not necessarily the case. Squeeze yourself for that kind of content output and you'll end up totally without ideas and inspiration until you have to suck everything you have out of work and ideas of your competitors; turning your once high-level competitive company into an industry complicit joke. Just look at Gamefreak with their Pokémon game output, for an example that might be a little closer to home for Capcom. Those games tried to turn up the ambition dial by a few scant notches and it threw development into an utter turmoil; because the developers don't have the room to be experimental in what they do, stifling the possibility for creativity.

I fear that with the procession march towards the Resident Evil Remake franchise, we're heading towards another dark period for the Resident Evil franchise when the creatives in charge just run out of ideas for what they're planning. And with the rate we're going, ironically enough, I'm actually expecting this to occur most aptly at the exact same place it did last time - with the launch of Resident Evil 6. You know, the game that lacked any core direction thanks to pulling minds everywhere, leading to a game that wanted to be a traditional horror game, a Call of Duty competitor (seriously), and a anime-style beat-em-up game at the same time. (I will never understand what Jake's chapters were supposed to be.) All this is occurring whilst there are still valid opportunities for Capcom to slow their role and explore other aspects of the Resident Evil franchise for remake potential whilst they buy some breathing room for themselves.

There is little sense to be made out of the callous decision to utterly skip by 'Code Veronica', the connective tissue between Resident Evil 2,3 and 5, except to perhaps imply that the team somehow couldn't think of a good enough way to make a Code Veronica remake feel different. But dammit, these developers weren't above making Resident Evil 3 an underpowered sequel- so what's the matter with Code Veronica? Or heck, how about a remake of Resident Evil 0; itself already an experiment in controlling multiple protagonists for problem solving- are you telling me a modern team couldn't figure out something special to do with a premise like that? The series has it's options, Capcom just aren't in the mood to go and take them!

Oh, and did I mention the fact that we still haven't got a modern day RE engine remake of Resident Evil 1? The freakin' original! All these new fans to the Resident Evil mythos, drunk on the sheen and polish of this serious yet spectacular renewal of the old faithful franchise, have to start their explorations at 2. Only really having the HD Remaster of the 2001 Remake to connect the dots and that... well, that game really doesn't live up to the hype of the newest games anymore- for obvious reasons. By this point I really do think the ship has sailed- there's no way the team could go back and make a Resident Evil 1 port without it being a let down from where the remake games currently already are- unless Capcom went totally nutso with it and made the game a First Person true survival reimagining of that first game. That might be cool.

But where are we headed instead? To Resident Evil 5? Really? I don't think that's a location any fan is ecstatic to be heading, given the fact that Chris Redfield's African expedition wasn't really chockful of anything revolutionary for the franchise except... black people? Nah, Resident Evil 2 already had Marvin- guess that leaves 5 with nothing at all... Okay, I guess 5 did bring us the Matrix rip-off edition of Albert Wesker, and all the hilarity that ensued consequentially, but it also primed the series for it's greatest mistep yet- that of RE6. If I'm being absolutely honest right now- I actually think a Resident Evil 5 Remake shouldn't exist. What the team should do instead, is make a totally distinct sequel to the RE titles they've been making. Resident Evil 5 in name, but with a different story, setting, characters, and a vibe better fitting the level of quality the franchise has defined itself to stand for. That, is how Resident Evil keeps fresh.

Because really, what is the alternative? I've said it before but I'm deadly serious- under the current trajectory we're looking at Resident Evil 10 Remake being announced before Resident Evil 10 is, this is an unsustainable model. Unless the team manage to neatly combine the new vibe of Resident Evil with the remake franchise, overlapping series' is an inevitability. Look, I'm not asking for much-just give us an entirely new Resident Evil timeline of games that focuses on what we love and entirely sidesteps the deviation into abject insanity that this franchise would love to sorely forget. Is that too much to ask for? Knowing Capcom at this point- yes it  is. Guess we can regroup here after the release of Resident Evil 5 Remake, at which point we can really begin panicking about what is, at the point, around the next bend. 

Are the handheld wars starting up again?

 I hear the war horns already.

Just the other day my brother randomly asks me if I think Sony will ever get back into the handheld's game, whilst I was remarking on the fruitful life of the Playstation Portable. I had one of those back in the day, and in the absence of any other console that little piece of plastic was the absolute light of my life- the cornerstone of my busy little day. I couldn't imagine any extended break away from schoolwork without whipping out that badboy and getting lost in a compressed adventure and hardware so stressed I could hear the machine frantically whirling to keep up with me in the back of the little buddy. But in my hubris, I thought on those as days of the past and handwaved away the possibilities. "No" I said, literally 10 minutes before the next Playstation handheld was revealed on my feed apparently due to hit later this year. So much for all this 'industry watching' that I do...

Now we have the pearl white visage of the 'Q Lite' looming on the horizon, a codenamed, highly secretive, model for Sony's aspiring handheld efforts they've written up to jab back at the overbearing dominance of the Nintendo Switch for that market. The unfettered dominance that the Switch has enjoyed, hardly marred at all by the decidedly more niche Steam Deck, (thanks to the wildly different audience) seems all but geared for a competitor to light things on fire. For a time it felt as if the Handheld world was being slowly wrung dry with DS after 3DS after WII U- (Even though that last one wasn't technically a handheld... I think) but the Switch reminded everyone how useful it can be to have quality games in the palm of your hand, as long as the console can run them.

Coincidentally enough I was brought back to the first PlayStation handheld which found any mainstream success, the PSP, by a totally unrelated incident. I just finished Persona 4 Golden and though I had previously vowed to move onto Persona 5 after my over half a decade wait- I wanted that shining beacon on my horizon for a little while longer, so I impulsively brought Persona 3's Steam port instead. And what has been my reward thus far? A port of a PSP port that was once gutted down thanks to the limitations of the PSP hardware- jettisoning me back to the age when I was an avid PSP player who regularly endured lower-rent versions of popular games thanks to the weakness of the overheating piece of plastic in my lap. Which is to say, I'm a little miffed. 

PSP has a lot of quality of life features to turn the actual gameplay into something resembling a modern day RPG, but it sacrifices a heck of a lot to do so. All the animated 2D Cutscenes are gone, and all open world navigation is reduced to static screenshots and menus; it's all rather depressing. And it reminds me of the hilariously scaled back version of the Transformers console game we had, which felt like a budget mobile title instead of a licenced product. That, I think, was the PSPs rope around it's neck, which only grew tighter as the company fattened up on profits. The console sold like wildfire, but the ever improving standard of the industry made the PSP platform impossible to develop for before too long- cutting off the lifespan of the console before it could bloat to DS lengths.

Of course Sony had it's sequel ready to pick up, the surprisingly powerful PSVita which would have absolutely revived the handheld scene had it managed to see the same success as it's younger brother. Unfortunately, the higher specs ended up being a problem for development just as much as the restrictive specs were for the old console; which meant fewer games could be developed to support the Vita. Additionally, marketing dropped the ball resulting in a lower adoption rate than Sony had hoped for and paving the way for the console to go forgotten about by all but the most niche developers until support was killed for good once Sony did an inventory and remembered they were still paying for server support. (I'm sure they saved a whole 20 dollars a month by cutting that off- what big spenders they are!)

As you can imagine, that whole debacle left something of a bad taste in the mouths of handheld fans, and for pretty good reason. Those who bought the bullet with the Vita found themselves happy with a genuinely powerful console that was treated to high quality first party exclusives when it first dropped and was fresh. It also got Assassin's Creed Liberation, but we don't need to talk about that. These people were believers and zealots in the Vita project, and maintain to this day that Sony were never invested enough in the platform to guarantee it's success; so why would that same crop of people be suddenly won over by this new handheld prospect all of these long years later? Well, seeing the already lukewarm reaction to it- I'm guessing there is no reason and the gloves are off with a mistrustful public against an optimistic corp that promises 'this time will be the time'!

But let us not forget the fact that Sony already launched a new console- kind of- this year. The PSVR 2 headset launched almost entirely devoid of any sort of killer app to sell the thing, demanding a heavy price tag for an unnecessary piece of tag-on hardware. Of course, now the platform is out there, so to speak, and so now we just need to wait for an aspiring world changer to take advantage of that opportunity, but on the books the lower sales of the VR2 just doesn't look very good. Remember, corporate offices, and headline browsers for that matter, don't care about the quality of the figures, only the quantity. This crop of VR users have themselves something of a closed and relatively small community until the hype picks up (and the prices drop a little) so hopefully they can remain committed to the device long enough to see that dawn. 

Sometime, and the time may be fast approaching, Sony and Nintendo will meet on the battlefield of destiny, on the cusp of the darkest hour betwixt dusk and dawn, to wrestle once more for supremacy. Nintendo has the tenure, and the headstart in establishment- but already the Switch is threatening to become long-toothed and Nintendo are too scared to replace it for fear of shattering their good thing like they did with the Wii U. Sony, on the otherhand, will carry the best of the best in minature hardware, and I have a feeling they're going to want to hit the ground running with launch title blockbusters. So who will win; the staple or the upstart? Find out on the next episode of- Handheld Ball Budokai Z Remix Master-class Recooked-and-repasted Ultimate Edition 365 and a half Days!

The unspoken potential of Simulator Games

 baa baa black sheep.

There's a disease that travels often around the Steam new releases, and it's the low effort trash titles made by developers who, more often than not, spot a very simple 'make a game' tutorial and then turn around and try to sell that prototype game. It's a dishonest practice that pollutes the ecosystem for actual up and coming developers who have to try and stand out from the deluge with their efforts, which is obviously far easier said than done. The most common of these low effort, stocking filler steam titles are known as 'Simulator Games', a pithy catch-all to encompass a style of game that attempts to emulate some activity, typical a mundane and boring one, with the appropriate sterile specificity that the simulator genre demands of it's ilk. But all too often that description is merely a smokescreen for what turns out to be little more than a grift of a product.

You'll play a flight simulator and expect to come out of it with a basic understanding of the real elements that a pilot must take into consideration, hence earning the title of 'Simulator'. But what about 'grass simulator'? What inner truth about the life and growth of common garden variety grass does such a game possibly have to elucidate it's audience on? Simply nothing, and that is the sad and honest truth about it all. You'll see these games resplendent with #market store' assets and pre-built play areas that offer nothing in the way of unique gameplay opportunities or intuitive fun. They are meant as jokes. But jokes that cost money to take part in do sort of stumble on the landing, more often that not. Yes, I certainly think the spirit of comedy is kind of smothered beneath that avaricious veneer these projects usually display.

But that doesn't have to be the rule, now does it? Of course not; the very genre of 'simulator game', even one made without a serious face or big budget team, can still offer us something of value. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the very idea of making a simulator game as one's virginal development outing can, should you approach it with the correct attitude, be an invaluable exercise in the practices demanded for making a proper engaging product. Because at it's heart, a Simulator game gives us the opportunity to explore a single topic to an exhaustive degree, pushing all systems to imbuing a single experience to the player and teaching us what concepts can be easily gamified and what concepts are best left idle and to our imagination. Treated correctly, there can be solid Simulator game experiences.

And I think the solid one's tend to float above the refuse and last around to give us some small impact, a notable ripple, in the vast sea of Steam new releases. Take 'Thief Simulator' for example, a tongue-in-cheek small game about exactly what it says on the tin, being a window-breaking thief who takes on jobs nicking TVs and beating up toilets for chump change. It's a simple project with a surprising amount of systems at play. Different lockpicking minigames depending on what level of lock you're working on, slight variances in job objective so that you're not always stealing the same stuff from the same houses, and even some vague simulation of 'casing' and performing 'stake outs'; concepts that most big budget stealth focused titles happily swing by for fear of slowing down the gameplay cycle too much. Altogether, Thief simulator is a pretty fairly descent title with a lot more thought put behind it than one might expect with that name; providing a worthwhile experience for the price point asked.

Another title which surprised me with it's effort, was 'Weed Shop', of the eponymous 'Weed Shop' franchise. Now being such a 'complex' concept, it of course took the developers three full tries to get to the real heart of what it's like to run a weed shop empire, but I have to give it to the creators- when the time came they really did nail the end product! Weed Shop is an irreverent simulator title that lays out progression paths from securing customers and growing the storefront, to improving the quality  of the product and establishing supply routes, to crazy minigames fuelled by high stupors and running circles around gang-banging local dealers looking to keep you out of their territory with their guns. It's really a very solid title, even if the late stages get lost in those annoying time gates that I've spoken about recently. What is actually there to play around with is seriously worth commending on it's own. I'm genuinely excited to see what Weed Shop 4 has in store.

Of course, I cannot in good faith cover such a topic without recalling the deadbeat father of this entire movement of development: Goat Simulator. I've never been quiet about my dislike for the franchise and it's 'randomness = funny' mentality when creating jokes, but I'd be a fool to disregard their years of successful development and the impact it's had on the zeitgeist of gamers. Goat Simulator is built on ragdoll mechanics and refence humour from the ground up, revelling less in intricate systems attempting to conjure the spirit of... being a goat, I guess- and more on telling as many slapstick jokes as possible. It is whole hearted in it's efforts, and that's where the appeal comes for those who like that style of humour; which just goes to highlight how commitment is really the key to making these games work. Stick to the theme and heart of the idea and someone is going to appreciate the effort.

But there is a new pretender to the title of 'greatest simulator', and it's certainly an unexpected hero. Largely because this is a simulator in more of a serious sense, attempting to somewhat properly depict the act in question, but I guess it's the process itself which just proved so appealing to the general consumer enough for the game to become an unexpected smash hit and gaming cultural icon. Of course I'm talking about 'Powerwash simulator', the game which took the world by storm with the simple act of washing down dirty building, parks and vehicles with pressurised hoses. It's blown up into something of a phenom, spawning endless updates and collaboration DLCs to the point we're at now where you can finish up cleaning the gutters of the Croft Manor on your way to sparkling up Cloud's bike in Midgar. A totally bizarre success story for a game that simply lived off people's heartfelt desire to make things look clean.

See, Simulator Games can be something of an acquired taste. In premise usually asking you to forgo the usual trappings of a rounded video game, from plot, theme and purpose, and instead find fulfilment in the simple process of completing the listed objective. But when made right, a simulator game can really capitalise on the innate pleasure of developing a chosen vocation, or simply have fun creating exaggerations on an otherwise sterile subject matter. And I argue that Simulator game creation can be a stepping stone on the path to making full fledged and whole hearted games for the experimental developers out there. You just have to go dumpster diving through all the refuse of the rip-off games to find those gems under it all, but when you find that something special it can be just as rewarding as anything else you'll find on the mixed bag which is the Steam marketplace.