Halloween 2015

My jack-o-lantern creations for this year include Cheshire Cat from American McGee's Alice (on half craft pumpkin) and the Dead Hand miniboss from Zelda: Ocarina of Time (traditional pumpkin.)

Ju-On The Grudge: Haunted House Simulator

Ju-on on the Wii is as you would expect, a game based on the J-horror movie Ju-on, or better known in the US, “The Grudge.” Not sure why both the original Japanese title and its English translation made it into the game title. I guess they wanted to make sure everyone knew what it was. Anyway, it’s a first person “haunted house simulator” divided up into five short episodes making it a pretty damn short game. In each episode, you take on the role of a different person, (all in the same family being tormented by Ju-on,) who has to solve simple puzzles in an environment where the lights don’t work even though the elevator does. Meanwhile, creepy phenomena happen around you.

Sometimes you’ll have a face to face encounter with the grudge. Typically when this happens, it takes the form of a quick time event with arrows prompting you to wave the wiimote different directions. If you fail a single prompt, you die and have to start over from the begining of the episode. There’s also ones where you hide and have to keep the wiimote cursor within a shrinking/moving ring. The most difficult QTE’s are always toward the end of the episode which is just great in a one shot no checkpoints game when the complicated deadly thing is at the end. Oh boy, I know that the more times I have to go through a gauntlet of the same exact scripted events that I’ve already seen, the more scary and entertaining it gets.

When I first started this game, I automatically connected the nunchuck, expecting to be using the joystick for moving but no. The only thing you use is the wiimote, waving it around to steer, (aim the flashlight,) and the directional pad to move. Goody, directional pad in a 3D game. My fave. It works okay. Not great. Still doesn’t have shit on a conventional controller with dual sticks and you’ll still occasionally find yourself spinning around and looking at the floor for no apparent reason. The character walks excruciatingly slow. I guess this is to control the pacing of the episodes but it’s so annoying. Sometimes a noise will happen or something presumably appears out of my field of vision with a sting and I’ll just keep plodding along like nothing happened because it’s too much of a pain in the ass to turn around and look. It’ll probably be gone by then anyway.

At the end of a chapter, or when you die, you get a rating of how you did. There are two meters, the fear meter and the sissy meter. The completely optional objective is to keep them as low as possible. I don’t think you get anything for doing good but the game berates you if you do bad. This is an interesting idea. Too bad the way it’s implemented makes it completely dumbfuck inaccurate. The sissy meter as far as I can discern just measures time spent in the episode. I guess the idea is that a sissy goes through a haunted house slowly. But in practice in the game it mostly means that if you explore or get stuck for a while, it translates to you’re a sissy. That’s not even taking into account how incredibly slow your character moves to begin with. I like exploring. I want to be able to see all of the scares and find all of the secret items. Was that not more or less the point of it all? If that means a jaded horrorphile like me is a sissy, then fine. The scare meter has to do with your reactions to quick time events. I don’t panic during these. I’m always as accurate to the best of my ability, unaffected by anything happening on screen unless it’s visually interfering with the prompts. I do it quickly and precisely but with exaggerated gestures. I do this because there is a lot of prompts on screen and/or I don’t have faith in the functionality of the wiimote. If I appear panicky, it’s because I don’t want to do the level over again, you know, just like in every single other QTE that exists regardless of horror elements. So the game gives you a low score for taking too long when they made your character walk super slow and it gives you a low score when you flail around with a controller that is designed to be used by flailing around. Fucking brilliant, guys! The scientific community needs to be alerted of this new method of fear analysis! We’re on the cusp of a fucking paradigm shift here!

Oh and nice mirrored/reused textures too you lazy bastards.

I did get a good score once. It works like this: knowing exactly where to go and what to do essentially gives you a low sissy score. Being apathetic toward failure and death during QTE’s gives you a low scare score. If that sounds like the perfect storm of fun, this is the game for you.

Ironically this is actually one of the least scary "scary games" I've ever played. It has the potential but I think the mechanics and the presentation kind of kill it. It's very linear almost to the point of being on-rails, (if you could go back and forth on the rails. But I guess if you were really trying to simulate a haunted house, it would be linear.) The events are all scripted and you know which ones can kill you and which ones can't. Any deadly encounters are all settled on reactionary time instead of your combat or escape abilities. There is no sense of increased vulnerability like there is with a life gauge or dwindling supplies... unless you count batteries but that's much to simplistic.

Finding batteries around in the levels is necessary to progress. Think of it as life support. If you run out, you die. Typically the hardest thing is finding that second battery in the short time you get before your first one runs out. After that it’s usually not an issue if you keep your eyes open.

Episode four is the hardest. It has you play as a security guard at a mannequin research facility where scientists are making strides in the field of creepy mannequin placement in dark buildings. The power got shut off by something weird on the security monitor. You’re supposed to go to the breaker room and switch it back on but you can’t get in without the three number door code which you have to find in three pieces scattered around the building. Why the hell do I not just know the code? If one person in the building is going to know the code for the door, it’s the damn security guard. I was also disappointed that I wasn’t able to put in the code manually. If you have two out of three numbers and you know the order, you can easily guess the third by trial and error… if you can do it manually. The final QTE is just nuts and I failed it several times. Even after I passed it, I still wasn’t sure how I did it because it was not an effort of the conscious mind. Something else took over.

Everyone dies at the end of their episode but you are required to pass the final QTE just so you can live another five seconds and accomplish nothing further. Why do I have to start over if I die? What is the ultimate difference if I die now versus five seconds from now? Or hell, why not just die at the beginning of the stage? Then you should get a game over screen and the next episode is unlocked. Nothing matters. It makes no difference except maybe in the final episode.

In order to unlock episode five, (the final episode,) you must collect all of the torn pieces to all of the secret paper documents scattered throughout the levels. What did I say before? I want to collect all of the pieces? Well not now that I have to do it to finish the game. Now it’s tedious and boring.

I got stuck on episode five during the cat event. (Think Neo dodging bullets from agents but instead of shooting bullets, they’re throwing cats.) I couldn’t figure out the final gesture so I kept failing it. For the longest time, I thought it was just up but it’s actually thrust as in thrust the controller at the screen. Oh, sorry. I was confused because the arrow wasn’t three-dimensionally pointing through the screen. My first question is why is the arrow placed near the top of the screen where up always goes instead of in the middle where it could carve out it’s own niche? My second question is why don’t you establish what the gestures are before hand so that people can recognize them on screen? Up to this point in the game, I had gotten by with just the four movements on a two dimensional plane, up, down, left and right and those didn’t need explanations but when you pull this shit out of thin air, it’s confusing. It makes no sense to introduce two new gestures at the very end of the game.

Anyone else think Grudge Girl looks cute, like in some of the parts where she just grabs your arm? No? Okay…

It’s hard not to compare Ju-on to Calling since they have many similarities. I can say without a doubt though that Ju-on succeeds in being better than Calling. That’s not saying much since Calling holds the distinction of being the worst game I’ve ever played released on a major console. Ju-on can beat Calling simply by virtue of being a shorter game.

Shadow Man

Shadow Man is odd. It’s a 3D platformer that has a Voodoo motif so it at least gets originality points. Actually it’s based on the comic book series of the same name but it’s still different from anything you’ve played. The plot is that the antagonist, Legion is creating an enormous facility in hell called Asylum. In it he plans to house the most vile souls all in one place to feed off of their energy and use it to bring about the apocalypse. At the center of the whole thing is Legion and five serial killers including Jack the Ripper and someone called the Lizard King… not Jim Morrison.

The vast majority of the game takes place in Deadside which is basically hell. The landscape is barren and flowing with blood and lava. Everything is a shade of brown or grey. Some of the doors look like assholes. If you’re lucky, you’ll see something with an extremely muted monochromatic pallet. All and all, it looks pretty fucking boring, (especially the overworld,) but isn’t that pretty much representative of most Playstation games from that era, (even though this game was on all major platforms of the day.) Playstation had better sound and visual capabilities than the N64 but N64 games in general were more interesting to look at because Nintendo dared to use fucking colors. The lack of color is one thing but then there’s also the areas within Asylum that have all this machinery and just an incessant racket and droning of infernal mechanisms and hissing steam and pistons. This shit is making my brain go numb.

So you go around collecting dark souls which, at specific amounts, increase your voodoo power and allow you to open doors to new items and areas. There are 120 dark souls all together. So how many do you need to get to beat the game? I swear if you say 120, I will fucking cut you. There is nothing worse than a mandatory collectathon. Just ask Jet Force Gemini. Luckily no, you do not need to embark on a completionist’s journey to beat the game. You only need about 90 but there are still places in the game you can’t go until you get all 120 of them which leaves me to speculate if maybe you get to go up on top of Asylum and meet zombie Yoshi if you do it.

The gatekeeper at the entrance of hell is Jaunty, a snake with a human skull for a head that wears a hat and speaks with an Irish accent. The hell? Where did they come up with this idea? Is it a voodoo thing? I’m honestly so ignorant about voodoo, they could pull a lounge singing mantis made of Rice Krispies Treats out of their ass and I’d be like, huh… must be a voodoo thing. This was actually one of the largest obstacles for me getting into the game. While I value the novelty of the setting and lore and culture, I’m really at odds not knowing anything about it beforehand. You are dealing with a wide assortment of voodoo items and mythos all with… Creole names, I guess. Not any language I speak anyway. Nothing looks familiar either. You can’t just look at something and guess what it does. There are no in game tutorials but there is an in depth manual. However even the manual is questionable.

Gads are special tattoos that allow you to do things like swim in lava or touch hot things. One of the gads called the poinge gad allows you to climb up bloodfalls. In the manual, it just refers to it as the poigne and shows a picture of a claw-like glove saying that it’s a device used to climb bloodfalls. There is no such item in the game. The thing that allows you to climb the bloodfalls is not a physical tool but merely a magical tattoo which grants you that power. Obviously at some point in the game’s production it was planned to be a device because they made a render of it and described it as such but the developers must have changed it to a gad power late in the development and never conferred with the copywriters and print graphics people. Kind of funny.

There are items you can and can’t use in Liveside versus Deadside. In Deadside, your handgun turns into a soul gun that shoots shrieking wraiths and grows with your power. In Liveside, if you die, you go to Deadside. In Deadside if you die, you go to the entrance of the area you’re in. You’re essentially immortal. In Deadside, you can be under lava and blood without needing to breathe. If you’re in Liveside, you can’t hold your breath for longer than about five fucking seconds and then you die instantly. You’re basically just a normal guy while in Liveside. Not being able to use mystical voodoo shit in Liveside kind of makes sense but why in the hell can’t I go tearing ass through Deadside while dual wielding an Uzi and a shotgun? In fact if my handgun turns into a soulgun, why can't my other weapons do the same?

Personally, I never even use the voodoo items aside from the projectile shield. I don’t really know that they provide much of an advantage over the soul gun and with aiming and hit detection as iffy as they are, I might as well just mindlessly spam everything with the soul gun’s infinite ammo versus running down the voodoo meter until it’s empty when I need it for something.

For voodoo weapons You have the asson which shoots fire, the baton which shoots fire, the flambeau which shoots fire, the calabash which explodes and shoots fire and the marteau which is a jawbone… that shoots fire. Can you say redundant? Most of these things have an alternate purpose to interact with specific things in the environment. The asson, however, is completely pointless. It does nothing that the other things can’t do. One of the many barriers opened with specific items you’ll find around is the bloody sheet which you have to open by burning with the flambeau. Seriously? I have five fucking weapons that make fire and only one of them is acceptable to use to burn something? Not to mention that I could easily get through a sheet with a non voodoo operated pocket knife. Hell, maybe even a stiff breeze would be enough to do it in. The gads, except for the climbing one, all have to do with fire as well, touching hot things with your hands, walking on embers and even swimming in lava. You would think that once you have all of those abilities, fire hazards in general would be pretty much irrelevant but no. I can be submerged in molten rock but a flame the size of a campfire still hurts me. Dumb.

It could be that I’m playing the Playstation version of the game using the backwards compatibility of the PS3 but the engine and animations will shit the bed on a regular basis, leaving me frozen in place while in combat but that’s okay because it probably happens twice as often to enemies. Sometimes I’ll get frozen in a specific pose but will still be able to move or rather slide across the ground. My favorite is the mid stride freeze because it looks like you’re doing Gumby’s one-footed slide when you move.

Enemies without projectiles almost never hurt you. They may come flail at you but rarely do they actually manage to hit you. They pose nearly zero threat. They are basically just there to annoy you. Ninety-five percent of the time you die it’s because you fell in lava… and didn’t have gads.

Ignoring the hub, the levels are divided into three different types, temples, thematic places within Asylum and places in the living world. The temples all supposedly have themes like fire and life but those names would be equally relevant if they were assigned randomly. Hell, the fire temple has less fire in it than virtually any other temple. All of these places are formulaically designed to piss you off. Every one of them has a special spot with a particularly long and tedious platforming segment over instant death lava. If you make one mistake, (or the platforming is just shit,) you die and go back to the beginning of the temple. You will do every segment enough times to perform it flawlessly or quit the game. That’s the deal. There is actually one spot in the Blood Temple where in the middle of platforming, you have to jump and hang on a ledge which is iffy at any time but this particular ledge is the only curved one in the game and I guess was too much for them to figure out how to code because it’s glitched, making you let go or even float off to your death before getting in position to jump off. I figured this out in only two wasted trials but it could potentially ruin someone’s week if they don’t catch it. Luckily, the place you are supposed to jump to next is close enough to circumvent the ledge if you line it up perfectly despite the shitty camera.

The hub world and overall layout of the maps in the game is some of the most confusing I’ve ever seen. It all just seems to be one circuitous path fractally branching out into infinity. The doors which line your path require various amounts of voodoo power to open, (AKA certain amounts of dark souls,) so it’s like advancing in Mario 64 with more stars or Banjo Kazooie with more jiggies. The doors could lead to anything from a level to an important item to just more path. There are no maps at all which means you basically need to memorize all of it but you may not even discover all of it. The first time I went to the Temple of Life, I thought I had cleared it out to the best of my ability. It wasn’t until I went back and really scoured the area that I found a tiny obscure hole which lead to… the temple. Yeah, I hadn’t even been to the damn temple yet. That was just the surrounding area. All levels are like that. You’ll think you’ve explored nearly all of it and then you find a hole after looking for an hour and find out that was just the tip of the iceberg in a confusing labyrinth of a dungeon.        

There is a lot of backtracking to places which you couldn’t open or things that you couldn’t use before which is horrible. Hey, remember that one thing in that one spot in that one area you passed by eight hours ago? No. No, I don’t and you should feel ashamed for even suggesting that someone might. Still not as shitty as Banjo Tooie though. Is it too much to ask that I can just go into an area and do it and then forget about it and move on?

The pacing of the game kind of sucks. The first 80% of the game is just spent running around wherever, amassing dark souls and collecting the three objects for the eclipse ritual which makes the world dark so that you can use your powers in the living world. Then you do what is practically a boss rush of five serial killers before getting to fight Legion. I mentioned that one of these guys is Jack the Ripper but I don’t know any of these other guys who seem to be just contemporary murderers locked up in present day Gardelle Prison. I thought these were supposed to be like supreme dark souls or something. How is it that they all not only all occupy the same time period but the same country and prison? Seems like a huge cop out. You already used one historical figure. Why not use Pol Pot or Caligula or Vlad the Impaler or Dr. Mengele? The Zodiac Killer. He was also a serial killer that was never caught just like Jack. The list of dark souls in the world is not short. Give it more relevance like the boss fights in Clive Barker’s Jericho. That would be a lot more interesting.

Respectively Deadside and Liveside are also the parts where you collect voodoo weapons versus real world guns which only happens at the end of the game. Consolidating everything together in big chunks like this feels unnatural and really burns you out. Imagine playing a Zelda game and doing nothing but running around in between dungeons with no clear or immediate motivation until you reach the end of the game where you fight all the bosses. Also nearly all of the cut scenes of exposition and plot development are dialogue with Jaunty or Nettie which you have to go seek out to see. Some people don’t give a shit about cut scenes but I do, especially when I don’t know what the fuck is going on most of the time but I don’t want to have to continually go visiting characters, hoping they have something new to say. Now that I’m thinking about it, if this game was made today they would likely solve the lack of exposition and the gameplay cluelessness by having Jaunty hide in your pants to go with you or be a voice in your head to explain shit which would essentially make him Atlas from Bioshock. Slashers! Give ‘em the one two paunch! Shoot ‘em and… shoot ‘em some more.

Things that made this game stand out, aside from the setting, were having a black protagonist and his dialogues and monologues. Every time you enter a new area, Shadow Man gives you a personal account of his thoughts and fears whilst reacting to his wretched surroundings and what comes out is as hauntingly visceral as James Earl Jones reading excerpts from Dante’s Inferno. Then there is the flip side where Shadow Man talks shit to every boss he comes across which is equally entertaining.

The creepiest part in the game, (at least for me,) was the reanimated headless bodies of the prisoners in Gardelle. They remind me of the headcrab victims in Half-Life. My biggest gripe is the freezing, which might have everything to do with the PS3's virtual console, but the bland environments is a close second. I guess this game did well enough to spawn a sequel on the PS2. Maybe if it's cheap, I'll get it.

Nintendo's E3 Misadventures Part 2

Okay, so Mario Tennis: Ultimate Smash on the WeYou  got mixed reactions but the important thing is that many people expressed displeasure with it which is totally understandable to me. It’s another fucking Mario Tennis game. Even if you insert Mario characters, how much enjoyment can you derive from literally just hitting a ball back and forth? Not a full price stand alone title. Not something to announce on the big stage in E3.

Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival for the WeeOoo was announced and for a very brief moment: Animal Crossing fans were on cloud nine. Moment’s later, they crashed through the Earth’s crust and into the seventh circle of hell. The game is not a new proper AC game. It’s an AC multiplayer Mario Party like game with only a mind-numbing board game and no minigames to offer. It also requires the purchasing of amiibos to play.

So what are amiibos? You’ve undoubtedly already seen them shitting up real estate in Gamestop and the electronics section of your local big box store. They’re those little plastic figurines of popular Nintendo characters that came out shortly after Smash 4 that can also be scanned with you're tablet controller to unlock various compatible game content. Back then, I tried for the longest time to figure out what exactly they were for. They just seemed so ill conceived with no solid focus. When they came out, they were sold as an unlockable AI companion in Smash that you could train with and which learns from you. So like something extremely trivial that should have been included in the game. “No, no,” cry the Nintendo slaves, “It’s okay that it unlocks trivial shit because it’s mostly just a nice figurine of your favorite characters for your shelf.” But why have game content that's only unlockable by a stupid $13 Happy Meal toy? “It’s just a bonus that comes with the figurine because Nintendo loves us,” argues the Nintendo zealot. Again, why have game content that's only locked on disk by a stupid $13 Happy Meal toy? Why have it in video games at all? What does it add to the experience to chop up a game into pieces which are then sold separately for obscene markup when you add it all together? If I want a video game, I'll buy a video game. If I want a toy, I'll buy a toy. I don't want to buy a toy if I want a video game. They don't need to be arbitrarily paired.

Nintendo didn't even fucking know what amiibos did when they made them. They just kind of did this extremely esoteric thing but they were mostly just figurines. But it didn’t really matter what they did because Nintendo characters being a masturbatory fetish for thirty-something manchildren meant that they flew off of the shelves like guns before a second amendment repeal. They were a blown out of proportion massive hit for no other reason than NINTENDO CHARACTERS! The vast majority of Nintendo characters aren’t well written and have no personalities to speak of which means they are liked not because of who they are but merely because of which game they represent. Or maybe they just like how they look. Amiibos were so popular that scalpers started buying them up and reselling them to FUCKING IMBECILES for enormous markup. This combined with Nintendo’s artificial scarcity / limited runs made it extremely difficult for brainless Nintendo consumers to get their hands on them without spending a small fortune. This should honestly be considered as exploitation of the mentally ill.

This is like the Beanie Babies cancer epidemic 2.0. The scalping thing wouldn’t be so pervasive if A: the dumbass consumers refused to buy from scalpers, thereby not sustaining demand and making scalping not profitable and B: Nintendo stepped in and actually took action in order to get more amiibos to their fans. Since both the company and the end user are morons, nothing has changed and it just seems to be spiraling out of control with amiibos' ever-growing ubiquity.

Amiibos’ popularity helped them grow their demonic roots into more and more games, slowly becoming increasingly “important” with unlocking more content in each new title. Then E3 2015 comes. Please note the word “Amiibo” is actually in the title of this game. The game has actually become a showcase for plastic figurines. You absolutely need the physical amiibo characters in order to unlock them from the game disk and play the game. The game is useless without them. (From my perspective, it’s still a shitty, useless game no matter how you serve it up.) You buy the game and then you buy the ability to play it by purchasing stupid toys. AMIIBOS SHOULD BE MERCHANDISE AND NOT VIDEO GAMES. That slippery slope of more and more video game content getting locked behind amiibos that you Nintendo kool aid drinkers were so quick to dismiss as baseless naysaying has become manifest and reared its ugly head. I hope you’re fucking happy. You dug your grave. You people voted for Hubert Humphrey and you bought amiibos! You encouraged scalpers. You encouraged Nintendo to entertain this asinine and quite frankly irrelevant and highly detrimental practice for video games. If I still gave a shit about Nintendo, I would be so fucking pissed at you. Instead I'll just express my disgust and disappointment with you as a fellow human being.

The spurned hatred of this game by fans compacted with it only being on the WiiU and its requirement for purchasing amiibos that will be commercially unavailable from being scalped like a motherfucker, means this will be the lowest selling video game in recent memory.

The amiibo thing was an issue here but the biggest problem was that big AC fans that have been waiting patiently for a new real installment, only saw Nintendo giving them the finger while blowing raspberries. Oh, you want a new Animal Crossing game? Here, have the shittiest board game imaginable locked behind a $30+ paywall. Hahaha! To be fair though, I don’t think Nintendo did it on purpose. They are too fucking oblivious to make an informed decision based on anything physically happening outside of the walls of their headquarters that isn’t based on ROI feedback. They're basically just making games alone in a cave and then handing them out through a slot in a door.

The other event that proved to be severely inflammatory was the showing of Metroid Prime: Federation Force and some sort of blaster ball soccer drivel. They’re for the 3DS and feature little deformed chibi Federation guys who look like Playskool toys. From the outside looking in, it’s just the same innocuous shovelware spinoff stuff shit out by Nintendo on a monthly basis. Nothing of note here. But Prime fans who haven't seen a Prime game in eight years, because it's been finalized as a self-contained trilogy, and would be elated with a surprise new installment or just a Prime-like game, weren't emotionally prepared to see this. It’s actually been five years since the last Metroid title, period which I believe was the infamously despised Other M, so everyone was already bitter and starved to see a new kickass Metroid game. This was not what they were waiting for. This offering communicated to fans that Nintendo doesn’t give a fuck about what they want and instead of just making the tried and true real game they’ve been waiting for, spent time and many resources developing something they never asked for and then slapped the name Metroid Prime on it, similarly to the AC Amiibo garbage. There is actually a petition to get this game cancelled. The coldest reality is that there will be no real Metroid on the U either and the wait continues.

Watch this guy’s face the very second “Metroid Prime” flies up on screen in the E3 trailer. That’s the look of a man who has died inside.

Some might argue that these fans are whiny, entitled little bitches and Nintendo should have the freedom to piss their own money away on their infantile fantasy ventures but it’s been EIGHT YEARS or at least FIVE YEARS after a shitty game. You don't seem to have any issues creating a new DS iteration every couple of months. Is that where all of your manpower is being siphoned to? There is no excuse to not hear these people and throw them a fucking bone in that time. Like it or not, Nintendo, like all businesses, is in a position where they can’t just do whatever the hell they want with their IPs and have everyone be happy with it. If they want to survive as a business, they have to know what their fanatical consumers want and produce it for them instead of hanging them out to dry, or worse, taunting them purposefully or in a ludicrously unintentional manner. In the eyes of a fan, they just performed a silly ventriloquist act with Prime’s corpse. Leaving it alone in its casket would have been preferable. Imagine if Valve Announced Half-Life 3 and then added that it was going to be a Space Invaders clone where you shoot headcrabs only for Android and iOS. You don’t do that shit. Nintendo CAN continue with it’s own moronic, waste of time and resources, projects but only within franchises that receive adequate attention with proper games. You want to keep pulling that stupid shit, give them a substantial game to chew on first and they'll be a lot more receptive. Or just don't call it "Metroid" but ESPECIALLY not "Metroid Prime."

If you look up the E3 trailers for Federation Force and Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, you’ll see that they both have about an 80% disapproval rating. Tennis is about 50/50. That’s incredible. It’s almost like people actually stopped for a minute and thought about it. Wait a minute. They’re not even trying. They’re just slapping established franchise names on minigames. They’re not going to give us anything substantial for the WiiU.

Apparently some big titles will be held until Nintendo’s next Console codenamed the “NX” which, knowing Nintendo, will likely end up being called something about as tactful as the “Nintendo Piipii Pu.” Kind of ominously, Zelda U was never mentioned which probably just means that it's out of the release time-frame scope which they were talking within but still, that would have been something meaningful to people. Intelligent people are questioning this apparent abandonment of the WiiU by Nintendo. Idiots are sucking their thumbs and rocking back and forth in the corner, chanting, “The NX is coming. The NX is coming. Everything is fine. The games are coming on the NX. I am fully prepared to invest in another Nintendo console.”

The backlash happening now is the result of a long buildup of silent suffering and waiting and hoping that Nintendo will momentarily cease jerking themselves off for two minutes and pull through this time and fans have finally snapped. Nintendo doesn’t know what time period they are in. They don’t know what the video game market is like. They don’t know what current trends are. They don’t know who their customers are. They don’t know why people like their games. They don’t know what their fans want. They don’t stand up to help them when they are victimized while trying to obtain their products... until very recently when they upped production. They’re at a crossroads now. They lost core gamers when they made the Wii. They lost the casual gamers from that when mobile games became big. They failed to establish relevance with the next generation of gamers and the next one after that. The people they have now in their console market, whether they know it or not, are mostly older die hard fans of their older franchises that linger mostly because of that mental photo of the joy that they experienced with those characters when they were young and here you are, denying them that. If you do anything to drive off those people, who do you have left, Nintendo? Not even scalpers.     

Nintendo's E3 Misadventures Part 1

I don’t really care about current events involving video games or even current video games to a large extent. If you hadn’t noticed, this place isn’t exactly a hotbed of up to the minute news and reviews and that’s exactly how I like it. The only reason I pay attention to E3 at all is because I enjoy watching a bunch of out of touch suits fumble around as they try to connect with gamers in a meaningful way that will get them interested in their products, in the same way a bird might try to sell bird nests to some fish. To put it matter-of-factly, I like watching them fail. I don’t even care who it is failing. Every year delivers something substantially stupid or some royal screw-up. Last year, Microsoft stole the show by announcing that they wanted to rape everyone within a ten yard radius of an Xbox One. This year, they relinquished their title of Most Fucked E3 Presentation to Nintendo.  

First a list of one thing that I liked from each console just to soften the blow.

Sony: The Last Guardian… even though that bird aye aye thing is really ugly.

Microsoft: Rare Replay… but then I see Banjo & Kazooie’s Nuts & Bolts model on the cover, ALERT: FOREIGN CONTAMINANT

Nintendo: Star Fox: Zero… Amazing! I can’t believe the N64 is getting a new game!

I don’t want to believe that I purposefully victimize Nintendo but they make it so damn easy and to be honest, with all the garbage they’ve pulled as of late, they deserve it. Their long record of incompetent business decisions and failure to adapt to the real game industry somehow never seems to phase them. They’re like Inspector Gadget or Mr. fucking Magoo. They keep doing stupid shit, completely oblivious to their environment and they continue to survive on sporadic bursts of dumb luck and even dumber consumers. Not this time. This is where the pendulum finally swings back. Mr. Magoo just got hit by a truck.

Everything seemed to be going fine or at least mediocre for Nintendo until what was expected to be their big presentation on the final day of E3. Ryu is in Super Smash Bros. 4 for some reason. Are people still talking about that shit? How long has that game been out now? The addition of a character to an already decent sized roster will never be something worthy of hype or even an E3 announcement, especially when it’s just another fighting game character you’ve already played as in seven different Streetfighter titles.

Anyway, Nintendo spent an inordinately long time talking about Yoshi’s Wooly World which is a game that is coming out in like a week and everyone is already well aware of so basically they just pissed away 10 minutes of E3 prime time. A big focus for them seems to be connectivity with amiibos here, which I will talk about in detail later. They are seriously touting the feature of unlocking shitty little character costumes for Yoshi with Amiibos as a primary component of the game. I’m not just throwing that word around either. A lot of the costumes really do look shitty. Humanoid characters don’t translate very well to Yoshi’s ugly bulbous frame. 

They end up putting the face on his nose in some cases. For the Mario costume, he gets this stupid ass mustache wrapping around his nose and a face reminiscent of an FAS victim. With the Samus costume, her visor goes on his nose which is nowhere near Yoshi’s eyes. Then he has an armored diaper for some reason. 

What the hell is the point of this? If you’re going to make a character inspired costume, then do it and actually think about what you’re doing. This looks bad and it makes no sense so don’t do it or it comes across as trying to shoehorn unnecessary shit into the game, which is exactly what it is. Many of these don’t look like designed costumes adapted to Yoshi. It looks more like you shrink wrapped a picture of a character around Yoshi and then called it good however it ended up. Try putting a little bit of fucking effort into it.

And on a side note the current character model for Yoshi looks terrible. His face is literally made up of primitive geometric volumes stuck together. It appears as extremely lazy design because it looks like there was no finessing or second draft or maybe that you had technical limitations that only allowed you to render basic forms. If you remove his eyes, his nose is bigger than his fucking head.

They also talked about Skylanders with Amiibos which is just gilding the lily. Oh, Nintendo. You’re so naive. For some reason you still believe that it’s 1994 and children are interested in your home consoles and don’t prefer things like Call of Duty and Halo. In reality you’re making products for a nonexistent child demographic that are actually being consumed by thirty-year-old men which is disturbingly similar to the MLP brony phenomenon.

Nintendo also talked about Mario Maker which is a game where you can create your own Mario levels using a variety of old school Mario assets. You can also play user created content. It’s kind of like Little Big Planet but with no professionally built story mode and like a fifth of the creative possibilities and honestly doesn’t look as fun. But I’m betting building stuff is going to be a hell of a lot easier with the tablet controller. It’s interesting but not enough to be a full priced stand alone game. The only playable content as far as I know is going to be user created which is always going to be 99% shit in any community. Oh and don’t forget the amiibo connectivity!

They didn’t say anything about the new Fatal Frame game which I believe is getting localized in the States. Last E3, I complained that they should be utilizing their rights to the franchise with the capabilities of their ill used tablet controller. They actually did it… in Japan. I don’t know anything about it or whether they integrated it well with the tablet but hey, it’s theoretically a step in the right direction.

Those are the things I recall that probably only I took issue with. Many Nintendo fans would lap that shit up, no questions asked like usual. But now we move on to the powder keg. These are the things that were so atrocious and despicable, so sacrilegious and demoralizing, that they actually snapped some fans, (the one’s intelligent enough to retain their independent thought,) out of their ether-like nostalgia haze long enough to express disdain for something with a Nintendo label on it.

Final Fantasy Tactics: TWotL

This game. Let me tell you about this game and how it has a monopoly on bullshit. 

Final Fantasy Tactics is the second turn based strategy game in the Final Fantasy franchise… I think. I really can’t be expected to keep straight however many hundreds of FF games there are at this point in time. Of all the franchises to have the word “final” in them, it has to be this one.

The plot is a Final Fantasy plot. Really, what more do you need? You know how it goes. The game is in isometric perspective on a square/cube grid where you move your characters around spaces like on a chess board and then tell them to take an action. Depending on what kind of battle you’re in, objectives range from beat this one person to win, beat all of them to win and/or don’t kill this guy or you lose. There are random battles but unless you’re grinding, you’ll mostly be in story related battles.

There are many branching class options for characters to train as, some of them more useful than others. Seriously now, when do white mages become useful? They're just fucking cannon fodder. They'll likely be oneshot killed five turns into a scenario because they're so physically weak. The stuff that they can do is theoretically useful but completely unfeasible in practice because they’re so severely impotent. After a certain amount of time played in the game, their healing abilities aren't worth shit because they don't increase in power at a reasonable rate with the character’s level. If I was playing a conventional FF title, this would be comparable to being stuck using the weak small potions after thirty hours in. As for using buffs and status ailment healing spells, pick one of the following issues that will negate anything you try: it missed, you are immediately targeted and killed before casting, it was blocked, your teammates had to break up and move out of the area of effect before casting, it missed, your teammates are standing on tiles with 1% inclines or other minuscule differences that disrupt the spell's area of effect, it missed or it missed. You cart out your white mage to a battle in order to level them up but then all their spells fail or they spend the whole battle unconscious, so they never gain any experience. Unlike many JRPGs, characters don’t get any experience whatsoever from standing in the background with their thumb up their ass. A character has to successfully cast a spell or hit someone in order to get EXP. I have to send my white mage off on errands to get any. It’s like when you have a shit pokemon. You dump your metapod or abra off at the sitter and say bye. See you when you’re not shit. Only a white mage is never not shit. Mine knows most of his spells but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re all inert when handled by an incompetent waif.

Through your quest, you can meet some people in scenarios and let them join your team. Some can be permanent while others are temporary. Now let’s take a moment to recognize how shitty Rafa is. Rafa and her brother are optional characters that are skyseekers who cast spells but the spells are odd because they have a “random” aspect to them. The first couple of times she appears in a battle, she’s not in your party and you’re supposed to protect her from enemies. This is difficult because she is the stupidest AI in the game and possibly contender for all time, dethroning Natalya from Goldeneye. On top of being reckless, almost to the degree of suicidal, she casts her spells with no regard to the safety of nearby allies. She will include you in the area of effect. She doesn’t care. Back to the “random” spells, they all have a 2 tile radius area of effect, (so a little Swiss Cross or plus sign formation of five tiles.) When you cast it, it does an elemental attack “randomly” between 1-9 times on “random” tiles within that space. It almost never actually does anything. Usually you just get one or two attacks on blank tiles. It’s so shitty so often that it seems to defy statistical reasoning. One time I had three enemies clustered together at close range so I cast it on them. Then I was gobsmacked when the spell hit a total of seven times solely in the two empty tiles, hitting absolutely no one; not even once. That is not fucking random. That is bullshit. If it doesn’t work in that scenario, what scenario does it work in? I actually did a calculation to find out the mathematical odds of missing a 60% shot seven times in a row. There’s, a .016% chance of it happening. It’s statistically insignificant for this scenario...

You know, I saw a perfect baseball game once. I’ve only been to maybe fifteen to twenty MLB games in my life (and a couple of spring training games.) Most of them were to see the Giants. Two or three were to see the A’s. It was complete happenstance that I was there at the Coliseum the day Dallas Braden pitched a perfect game against the Rays. I went with a group of six and not one of them an A’s fan, a mix of Giants, Dodgers and Red Sox people but we just wanted to see cheap close baseball on Mother’s Day and we got way more than we expected. Sadly, there was hardly anyone else in the park to see it. A couple of years later, I traveled down to the Bay Area to see a Giants game in AT&T Park. I was staying in a hotel in the North Bay with my wife, planning to go to the game the next day. That night on TV we watched Matt Cain pitch a perfect game against the Astros in AT&T. Damn! We were one day off. We could have been there. I ended up seeing Barry Zito pitch his signature blowout the next day… Yippee. (I say “signature blowout” even though it wasn’t that bad and he did suspiciously phenomenal that season. If I went back in time before that and told someone that Zito will start the World Series Opener and beat Verlander, they’d think I was nuts.) In well over a century of Major League Baseball, there have only been 23 perfect games and I was lucky enough to see one of them. When I think about how I almost saw two perfect games, it blows my mind. What are the odds of seeing two perfect games in your life? Apparently a lot fucking better than seeing Rafa hit an enemy.

Pretty much all battles in the game feel incredibly scripted because the AI is so robotic and calculating. There is no sort of random factor aside from spells and attacks missing or critical hits and counter attacks. The computer makes the best possible move every single time. Every battle is like Bobby Fischer versus Deep Blue. You make a move. The computer analyzes hundreds of stats and variables, going through flowcharts and algorithms in order to determine the most annoying response. I find this incredibly obnoxious for three reasons. First, the AI comes off as a pedantic tryhard. Second, it’s unrealistic. People, (which is who I’m supposedly fighting a lot of the time,) are not robots. Sometimes they are inefficient or make mistakes. And third, it’s able to do things that not even the player can do. You know what I have to do to make a good move? I have to look at the turn list to see who gets to move in the next five or so turns. I need to know how many turns my action will take. I have to see how far I can move. I have to check my attack range. I have to check what job classes I have equipped. I have to check which skills I’ve actually learned and can use right now. I need to survey the terrain I’m on or am going to. I need to make sure I have a clear line of sight of my target. I need to be aware of whatever threats are in the area such as nearby enemies and their walking and attack ranges. I need to know where and when not to cluster my guys together. I need to be aware of rendering magic spells or other actions that I or an enemy already cast in the area that I’m moving to or away from. I need to figure out which way to face after performing whatever action, to best protect the character. I need to be aware if my character will be in the way of my other characters when they move.

When I tell my dragoon to use jump, I don’t know how many turns it will take for him to come back down and attack. It doesn’t say. I have to just hope that the enemy will still be there when he does. When I move a character toward an enemy to use a ranged attack, I don’t know if the enemy will be in range. The two things it tells you are the walking range of your current location and the attack range of your current location. If you want to know the attack range you’ll have at the tile you’re moving to, then you have to fucking manually count tiles like an asshole to make sure you can reach your enemy from that spot. And even if you do that and don’t make any mistakes, you can still move to the spot and find that the enemy is out of range because of slight elevation differences in the tiles. There’s no undo button for moving, so you basically just wasted a turn. Can I get black magic spells with infinite range? No. Can I get summoners with infinite range and huge areas of effect that conveniently pinpoint only enemies and not allies in that area? No. Can I get archers with infinite range. Can I get an equipment rend attack that does some damage so that when the rend inevitably fails (because I’m the one that performed it,) I didn’t just waste a turn? No. Can the AI have/do/know that? It sure as fuck can. It can have it up and down the line all fucking day. There is most definitely a glass ceiling or a player skill cap. You will never be as good as them.

The first battle that I got stuck on and had to consult a walkthrough for was the second boss fight with Wiegraf. The first fight was fun because I wagered that I might just have enough power to take him if I went right at him with no regard for my well being or other enemies and I beat him with only one, (almost dead,) character left. When the second boss fight ocurs, you are one on one with him with the main character because you apparently told the rest of your party to wait out in the hall and scratch their asses. One on one in a turn based game always feels awkward. Is this supposed to be an actual battle? Because it feels like we’re a couple of prissy dandies mincing around daintily in a slap fight. When a fight only has two people, it becomes painfully reduced to a one-dimensional affair: attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal. It’s so fucking boring and mind numbingly stupid. And it’s only exacerbated further when Wheat Grass literally blocks and counters half of your attacks. It’s also obvious that this is just jerking off before he inevitably transforms, so what’s the point? Beating him like this doesn’t achieve anything. It’s just busywork. This is one of my most hated Final Fantasy institutions. I HATE transforming bosses. Cut the bullshit and just give me the real deal so we can get this show on the road. Don’t fuck around.

This game also has one of the worst bugs I’ve ever seen in a game. And when I say that, I’m talking about glitches that affect your ability to play the game and not just aesthetics or immersion breaking problems. This one is up there with the unpassable QTE in the PC version of Dead Space 2. If you leave three characters at the sitter- er… send them to do errands, I mean, you typically come back to the same tavern where you took the job after X number of days have passed and collect your rewards and your teammates. However if your teammates happen to be on an errand or uncollected when you progress to the next chapter in the story, the job disappears and the characters become inaccessible. You can not go back to the tavern and recall them or otherwise get them back. THEY ARE FUCKING GONE FOREVER. Not only are they gone, but their spots in your roster remain full and you are not allowed to dismiss them. So your twenty-four slot roster essentially just got downsized to a twenty-one slot roster. That is just… FUCK YOU! How do you make such a horrible, obvious oversight?

I can’t see the enemies or the terrain of the battle scenario before choosing/equipping my team like you can in say Fire Emblem or even Plants Versus Zombies. If it’s my first time attempting the battle, I have no fucking idea what tactic I might want to go with. I’m just throwing darts in the dark.  I also have no clue where in relation to anything else a unit is when I place them on the board. All you get is an arrow which means the enemies will be that way but sometimes that’s not even correct. For a game with “Tactics” in the title, this doesn’t seem to facilitate tactics very fucking well, does it? Guessing is not tactical. And it doesn’t even make sense. How do you not know what the environment looks like that you’re already in? Am I walking around with a fucking blindfold on?  

Random battles happen while traveling and again you can't see anything in the battle before you start. You can't reequip weapons or classes. Just pick and place people. And then deal with whatever the matchup is the best that you can. On top of that, there is no option to flee so you are literally trapped with the given scenario unless you exit the game. That is such bullshit. Realistically, you either need to give the player an out or don't force them to play Russian roulette. You can't expect them to make a bunch of random guesses EVERY SINGLE TIME and then make it work EVERY SINGLE TIME or it’s game over.

I also find it hilarious that so often the enemies you're facing are some nonsensical team of random assholes. Why are a bomb, some geomancers and a flock of birds conspiring together to attack me? At the very least, the animals should be attacking any humans indiscriminately and more likely ANYTHING indiscriminately. But they are literally collaborating to kill just me and my party. And most things, including animals, have the same intelligence as humans so they actually heal and cure each others’ status ailments. A chocobo will go heal some elves that you injured. You'll see a bomb go up to a random summoner and use a weak attack on them to cure them of charm without hurting them too bad. A BOMB does that, a creature named after an inanimate object and which possesses no logical collaborative association with said person. I didn’t even know you could cure charm with an attack until I witnessed this phenomenon. A fucking BOMB taught me this. This crosses the line over into fucking ludicrous. The game goes so, so far out of its way to be a shit to you that it completely abandons logic and reason. You’ve heard of the rule of cool? Where the amount of awesome something is is inversely proportional to the amount of suspension of disbelief it requires from the audience? This is the rule of bullshit where bullshit takes precedence over everything including logic and the laws of nature.

On several occasions you’ll come across some character in trouble and you’ll have to protect them from whoever or it’s game over. A lot of times you’ll start out on the board far away from the character and you’ll need to go join up with them quick before they get the shit beaten out of them. But on multiple occasions I’ve tried to play one of these battles and it was literally impossible to get within range of anyone before the character died. Well that’s real fucking nice. You, without reservation, just made me play a no-win scenario. What was the point of that? If I restarted the same scenario off the same way, It would all happen again in the exact same way. This is because of how the AI works. It always does the best possible move. The only way you can get through this type of problem is to somehow present the enemies with an alternative “better” move which distracts them from the other character. The only thing in your power to try is scramble your party members or formation until you find something that makes them deviate from those calculated actions. Hey guys, look over here! It’s a shitty fucking mage! He’s trying to cast a spell of some sort! You’re not going to to just let him get away with that, are you? It’s so stupid. This game is so flawed and I don’t know if I’ll ever have the constitution to pick it back up again and actually finish it.

There is one thing that I thought was awesome and actually kind of levels the playing field so to speak, (in some scenarios.) I believe it was an ability called “ignore terrain.” Basically it treats any terrain as level ground and takes the same number of moves to cross. Even if it’s something that’s twenty stories high. The downside is that it takes a significant amount of training to learn. I made a couple of my characters learn this when I got stuck on a scenario where archers and long range castors are camped up really high on a cathedral roof. It would take me so long to climb up there that I’d get reamed on the approach and be unable to withstand a fight once at the top. After playing the entire game up to this point in an uphill battle against enemies continuously holed up like little bitches behind their battlements and castles, I finally had something to bring them down to my level. Oh look, I just jumped onto your roof in two turns and started slapping your shit. Not so smug now, are you? If there are two passive abilities that you want every character to have, it’s auto-potion and this.