Thoughts after E3: WiiU

WiiU

Once upon a time I loved Nintendo games. When I think 'beloved nostalgic video game' the first games to come to mind are Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Pokemon Red and Link's Awakening. Those were the days. But then the next generation came along and suddenly there were three choices now: Xbox, Gamecube and PS2. I didn't really know where to go from there. I looked at the Nintendo Gamecube because Nintendo was all I'd ever known and it had been great so far. The console looked stupid, the controller looked stupid and there weren't any games that interested me. It's hard for me to know if at that point I grew out of Nintendo or Nintendo grew out of me. The continuation of my favorite games/franchises just didn't look appealing to me at all. Toon Link in Wind Waker looks like shit. Mario Sunshine is about washing things. For some reason, the fanboy parasite that had been implanted in my brain never flourished. I couldn't just buy a game simply because it had Mario or Link in it. Both of those games are fun... probably. But they look stupid/ugly so I don't want to play them. And that has been all I've thought about Nintendo since. The console looks stupid, the controller looks stupid and there aren't any games that interest me is exactly what I thought about the Gamecube, exactly what I thought about the Wii and exactly what I think about the WiiU.
 
Nintendo didn't do a big flashy press conference at E3 this year because they're idiots. They have a bad system launch with a weak line-up of games followed by mass confusion. Then a chance to set everyone straight arises with E3 and what do they do? Avoid the big stage. Yes, that will surely work things out. Good thinking, Nintendo. But I guess they didn't really have anything to show. They did some smaller Nintendo Direct thingies where they unveiled... a slough of underwhelming and predictable games everyone had already seen.
 
OH MY GOD! The WiiU is going to have Mario and Zelda on it? STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES! I guess I should just be impressed that it's going to get ANY games at all... even though it's not any time soon. You know what got people really excited? Megaman being confirmed in the new Super Smash Brothers about ten years too late. What's the matter? Did you finally run out of Mario characters so you have to resort to putting something of substance in now? This really shows how overrated and blown out of proportion SSB has become because people literally hang on Nintendo's every word when they're making a roster. Every time another character is confirmed, it generates as much if not more hype than if they announced a new game starring that character. It's just one big circle jerk and it's so pathetic that people shit themselves over this. I need to get a WiiU because Megaman is going to be on the roster of a game coming out in a year. Does that make any sense to you? Well it does if you're a retarded fanboy. 

Why does Megaman look like a dwarf toddler? Isn't Megaman a... man? His N64 model looked better than this... And they still don't have Simon Belmont. It's like there was some kind of renaissance where they went through all their characters, (Megaman is Capcom but whatever,) and made them all look like shit for every game then on. They've zeroed in on the uncanny valley. I seriously just hate their style now because they can't seem to make anything that doesn't look stupid, ugly, infantile, or possesses even a shred of dignity except for maybe Metroid... which they didn't show.

Back when I enjoyed playing Nintendo games THEY DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THIS! You can not tell me that this shit is meant for anyone mentally past the age of five. And if you are not absolutely sick of Mario by now, you are either too young to have gotten bored yet or you have a mental disorder.

Things that weren't Mario and Zelda included Bayonetta 2. A WiiU exclusive sequel that shouldn't exist to a game that was fucking stupid. The combat was top notch but everything else about it was fucking stupid. I know because I own it. The game sold bad and didn't make enough profit to spawn a sequel. Everything was exactly how it should be but then Nintendo decided for whatever reason, (probably because it's stupid and Bayonetta is repulsive,) that it was worth picking up.
 
You know what would have been interesting? Something actually new and refreshing made by Nintendo or just something unexpected. Nintendo unfortunately owns the rights to Fatal Frame now. They could theoretically make a Fatal Frame game where you use the stupid tablet controller as the viewfinder of the camera. Wouldn't that be something? No, it wouldn't because it's not Mario or Zelda.
 
I think I've finally figured out what Nintendo is doing and it kind of disturbs me. They're crippling themselves and it's on purpose. They're narrowing their scope to a critically small range to pinpoint a niche market of players... their own fans. Nintendo superfans. Yes, they're targeting people that are already brainwashed and loyal to their company. They cut out the rest of the potential market by not doing a press conference and they're pigeonholing their games by bailing out all of the third party developers and not focusing on any big new IPs. At this rate, the WiiU is just going to be a one trick pony Mario and Zelda box for their mindless fans that lack the capacity to care about anything else. If Sony's PS4 only had Infamous, God of War, Resistance, Little Big Planet, Uncharted and WipEout games, that would get pretty fucking stale and boring but it looks as thought that's what Nintendo is shooting for. 

Assuming Xbox One stays delusional, this generation is only going to be one and a half consoles: The WiiU with only Nintendo Games and the PS4 with literally EVERYTHING else. Their presence at E3 consisted entirely of remakes, sequels and rehashes. Nintendo is the new Apple, once great but now stagnant and bricking itself into a corner with its cult of slaves.

Thoughts after E3: Playstation 4

Playstation 4

Sony had a gigantic leg up in E3 in that they went after Microsoft's Chernobyl of a presentation and really that was all that they needed. They came out and said "We won't be doing any of that bullshit that Microsoft is doing" and everyone's like "I'll take ten PS4s, please." Other than that, the PS4 looks... okay... except that they'll be charging for online now. I think just for multiplayer. I'm not a big multiplayer guy so whatever. It's still stupid though. Why does it cost to play multiplayer on a console but it's free on a PC? Are console's just assholes? Probably.
 
For the longest time, Sony didn't say anything about the actual PS4 console, just the controller which I don't give a shit about. It's a controller. That's like if a car company was unveiling a new car and all they talked about was the fucking steering wheel. If this wasn't the video game apocalypse, the PS4 would probably be considered decent/okay but since the standards have been drastically lowered, people went ape shit fanatical over features that we've had forever. We just took them for granted until they were finally jeopardized by Microsoft. These are just simple things that Sony wouldn't have even mentioned if Microsoft hadn't made them a huge deal. But they DID make them a huge deal and suddenly those simple things became a pivotal selling point. Sony did say that the emphasis would be on games which people liked. Well no shit, it's a game console. But it's not like they brought out a game or added some kind of groundbreaking innovation that got everyone excited. They just weren't insufferable scumbags.
 
Microsoft: Our new system stabs you in the face when you pick up the controller.
 
Sony: Our new system DOESN'T stab you in the face when you pick up the controller.
 
Audience: *deafening cheers*
 
We're seriously all on board with Sony just for doing the same old and not raping us but also because they told Microsoft to go fuck themselves. And I have to say, good for them. I really missed the Sega/Nintendo slur campaigns of the 90's. No one really wants to rock the boat anymore but when your opponent digs a hole that deep and you know everyone hates them, how can you resist? Sony at E3 was exactly like the scene at the end of Oh Brother Where Art Thou where the governor campaign subplot is resolved. The new candidate goes on stage interrupting everyone's fun, says he's a member of a KKK lynch mob and proclaims that fun is now over. After he gets booed and yanked off stage, the incumbent takes the mic and says, "Wow, that guy's a real dick. Bring the fun back out. Fun for all!" After that, it's just in the bag. So there you go, the prize for least shitty-looking new console goes to the PS4... because they weren't insufferable scumbags.

Thoughts after E3: Xbox One

I've wanted to say something about all the next gen consoles just like I did for the last generation of consoles but I wanted to wait for E3 before I did it. After seeing Microsoft and Nintendo's hands, the coming E3 was something that I beheld with horror, a great juggernaut on the horizon. The destroyer of worlds. This is it, I thought. This is the end of video games. At least I have a giant backlog of games from a less shitty time, a simple time where consoles actually played games and didn't try to sell you Doritos. A time where you could own a game like you could own a movie or a car or a hammer. Oh, what we once had...

 

Xbox One

Does this really require any discussion at all? It's a cable box with the design language of the 1970's, only lacking the faux wood paneling. It costs the most out of the three consoles by $100. It's Kinect mandatory. It doesn't support used games. It has a DRM policy that requires it to have not only an internet connection but a paid subscription to Xbox LIVE or it locks you out. It watches you masturbate, reports you to HUAAC as a terrorist, rapes your dog and sets fire to your house. Yes, that's correct, It was designed by blind aliens that live in a cave. You would have to be completely fucking delusional to think people would want this.
 
Even after seeing what happened with Sim City's always online DRM disaster, Microsoft still thought it could pull off an entire console that does this. Perhaps it was too late to alter course at that point but it doesn't matter because you shouldn't have to learn this from example. Do some critical thinking and USE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN. What is the point of requiring online checks? It's to make piracy more difficult. So who does it benefit? Ultimately no one. It can only be at best for the consumer not a hindrance and at worst, it makes the system unplayable. For the company that makes the system it makes less people want to buy from them. It's a feature that only has negative effects that outweigh whatever 'good' it was intended to do. There's a Confucius quote for this; "Never use a cannon to kill a fly." You can't stop piracy. In trying to kill the unkillable fly, you just destroy everything around it. If you have to stop piracy so bad, then don't make games, because that is the only way. No one will be playing them anyway.
 
The no used games thing is really all they need to say to get me to not care about the new Xbox. Probably around 80% of my games are used because new games have an overblown price tag and I don't believe in digital copies. They're trying to strip away every basic freedom that players have enjoyed since day one of the first home console. Imagine if in the next election, one of the candidates said "If I become president, I will abolish the constitution. There will be no freedom of speech, no right to a trial or any of those other things that the government and law enforcement find annoying or difficult to deal with." Would you vote for them?
 
No, you know what? These aren't basic rights of people that play video games, they're basic rights of consumers in general. Right now you can go into your public library and borrow any number of intellectual properties in every medium including movies, books and music and enjoy them for free. But woe betide anyone trying to pull that shit with a video game, our most time honored and sacred of art forms. A new video game costs 2-3 times more than a new movie which has a comparable budget. Game publishers like EA essentially don't want you to be able to own their products, making greedy corporations like the MPAA and RIAA look like Santa Claus by comparison. Like I said in the beginning, a game should be just as easy to buy, use, loan and sell as a hammer. It's not magical. It's not the Second Coming of Christ. It's just a fucking product like every other product in the world. This holier than thou bullshit that video games have needs to stop but it won't. Why? It's all because we, (and by 'we' I really mean all you dumbasses out there,) allow it to continue by preordering and buying their shit at day one for $60. Then you buy all the day one DLC for it. Four hours later you're trading it in for $2 toward the next over-priced and over-hyped piece of shit.
 
But even you dumbasses have a limit, a limit which was finally found by Microsoft. So congratulations to you. When Microsoft peddled the Xbox One at their reveal and at E3, you didn't stand up and cheer "Yes, Microsoft! Yes! Please sodomize me with your endless and extremely convoluted list of totalitarian rules detailing what I can and can't do with MY games that I purchased. I can't wait to have a device in my home straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel that watches and or listens to everything I say! And I love the added feature of needing to be connected to the internet for no good reason! It's so very useful and not at all a potential stumbling block!" Yes, good job, dumbasses. There may be hope for you yet.

Corpse Party

Corpse Party... What a great name. What the hell kind of game could it possibly be? Obviously from Japan. A Mario Party-like game with zombies? Or like one of those Imagine or Idol M@ster games where you dress up your zombie and teach them to sing by performing rhythm games? I could spend hours trying to guess but that would be moronic because I already know what it is. It's a horror game on the PSP that was localized from Japan recent-ish and only available on the Playstation Network for English speaking players. It's kind of a visual novel and it's kind of not. Most of the dialogue and action scenes are in visual novel form but you also control your character, walking around in real time as a sprite in a top-down view, making it look like a Final Fantasy title on the Super Nintendo. The game dialogue is still spoken in Japanese but the text is translated so it's just like watching something with subtitles.

Skelly tan is ready for her rehearsal!

It all starts with a group of highschool friends preforming a charm ritual which is common slice of life anime bullshit. They somehow botch the ritual and the lot of them gets spirited away to the legendary haunted elementary school which used to stand on the very spot of their own highschool. (Because I haven't had enough of walking around in haunted Japanese schools yet.) Heavenly Host Elementary just happens to be a nexus of overlapping dimensions which the students got scattered throughout. They're essentially in the same place but can't really interact with each other unless they're in the same space. So the goal is to somehow figure out why you're there, regroup with your friends and escape back to reality.

There are five chapters which you unlock as you go and it jumps around to different groups of students. I am really bad with names and faces in life and about twice as bad with names in a foreign language. Even now having played through the whole game about 1.5 times I can't recall with certainty a single character's name.


In the first half of the game you're stuck in pretty much the same area of the school which gets really monotonous. They really needed to dole out the new areas a little more evenly because they're pretty much all crammed into the second half of the game. They didn't even utilize the East wing to it's full potential. Like what the hell was up with the piano and the migrating marble bust?


So you explore looking for people and keys, solving simple puzzles and collecting... student IDs off of dead students you come across? The bodies are from several different schools from junior high and up. At first I thought this aspect was kind of weird like something only a serial killer would do but then I thought about it and realized that these are all missing persons with families. It's not like a serial killer's trophy, it's like grabbing someone's dog tags. Assuming you make it out alive, you have a list of all these missing people who you can confirm as dead. Then I thought about it some more and realized that that would be pointless because if you die in the school, all memory of you is erased from reality. So, no, I was right. It's like a serial killer trophy. What's even weirder is that on the game's title screen there's a catalog of all the IDs you've found with a picture of the body and a cause of death. Reminds me of Tyler Durden's "human sacrifice" wall except less... yeah...


You meet spirits, some of which want to kill you and you have to do something to appease them or just run from them to escape. Occasionally you'll have to make a decision that may affect the ending you get. It's pretty immediate and upfront about letting you know that you made the wrong choice by having someone die. Then it gives you the "wrong ending" game over screen. I don't know about other people but I TRY to get these because there are several different ones and they're interesting. But I think it's stupid that if you make a choice that gets someone killed, it results in a game over when the canon plot itself involves people in your party dying. So only specific people are aloud to die and at the prescribed time. What the hell is the difference? Why is it that when one person dies we have to start over but when another dies we just move on and try to forget? I should be able to finish the game with one person missing an eye and half their arm. That would be awesome. I think the only game I've ever played where you could get playable characters killed and then just keep playing on without them was Fire Emblem.

On the game's status screen you see character avatars in your current party appearing exactly like your typical JRPG and it shows "HP 30/30." This really confused me when I first saw it because it implies that your characters can sustain damage. It makes it look like you can fight enemies in the game. Well, you can't. As it turns out, during the entire game there are only two instances I've found where you can get injured versus get killed instantly, (which is the norm.) One is where there is hazardous stuff on the floor that hurts you if you walk on it. The other is your first encounter with a hostile ghost. So there you go, characters have hit points because... not really any reason. 

Way too often it seems that the game cheats you out of rendered images that you should be seeing when something is happening in the game. The screen turns black except for the dialogue box and it's suddenly reduced to a text game or a choose your own adventure book where you're literally just reading a description of what is going on. There is a time and place for books. If you're watching a subtitled kung-fu movie it is not okay for the screen to just go black during a fight scene and leave you reading a description with nothing else to see. It is a disservice to the medium. It's called a "visual novel" because it's fucking VISUAL. Every time this happens all I can think about afterwards is wow, that scene would have been a lot better with some actual illustrations or even just the sprites or even just ANYTHING but a blank screen!


As you progress, you notice that dialogue and exposition seem to be slowly nudging gameplay out of the door. Then you get to chapter five and find that it's a car door and gameplay has been officially shoved into the road and backed over a couple of times to make certain it's dead. You can't take two steps anymore without a fifty line conversation. Shut up. Shut up. Oh my God, SHUT UP! This is the problem with making it a hybrid puzzle/visual novel game. You see the puzzle part and naturally that's what you want to do because it's more engaging but they keep slapping your hands away and hiding it behind their back. No, no! Finish your incredibly thick and tedious dialogue first and maybe we'll let you lick the gameplay spatula later. Nearly the first hour of chapter five is talking with no significant break in between whatsoever.  



Playing with no walkthrough, I got the Groundhog Day ending which is obviously bad so I needed to change something to get the true ending of the game because I require validation for my efforts. But for the first time I didn't know what I did wrong because it wasn't made immediately evident like the other times. Well in short... everything. I needed to start over from the beginning of the chapter because my three separate saves didn't stretch back far enough to salvage it. Fantastic. On top of that, I need to experience about another hour of exposition. Find all the notes, talk to crazy dead bitch 1, get the statue to open the infirmary, listen to crazy dead bitch 2, meet crazy dead bitch 3, chant this many times, give her this and this but not these, go backwards through the maze, escape the building before time runs out. Holy shit. It's easier to swim to the moon than it is to get out of Heavenly Host. This place just has to be filled with the most pedantic and anal retentive ghosts ever. And ultimately when you think about it the whole reason anyone comes here is because they do the ritual wrong which in this case constituted repeating the chant the wrong number of times. That's it. That was enough to piss off the ghosts. Escaping is like going into the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle. If you blink funny, then you're fucking dead. 


During the last dialogue of the game in where we remember our dead peers who all died horribly and who's existence was completely erased from reality except in the memories of the survivors, one of those generic tie-in J-pop singles begins to play. You know, the ones they tend to play in romantic slice of life anime where the MC and the love interest have a moment and the writers scramble to finish the relationship development that they forgot to do over the next three minutes before stopping just short of any sort of resolution? One of those. Except they also seem to play them any time they can get away with too, including this time. Sappy upbeat J-pop! Good for graduations, weddings, fight scenes, and funerals! 

If I had made this game the end credits would have a blooper reel like in the first Silent Hill game and it would be set to Oingo Boingo's Dead Man's Party because it's just so obvious.

♫ I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go~

Do do do do do do do do do do do dooooo ♫

Calling

The strangely named 'Calling' is a first-person horror adventure game. While Silent Hill is a Japanese take on western/American horror, Calling is just straight up J-horror, drawing material from movies like The Grudge and One Missed Call. It has that one prominent but bizarre element of J-horror where technology is some kind of medium between the living world and the dead. That video you're not supposed to watch, that website you're not supposed to go on or that phone you're not supposed to answer because bad shit will go down if you do.

In Calling it's a website forum with the people on it connected in some way. They've all been spirited away to some Limbo region called the "mnemonic abyss." There are many locations in the abyss but the only way you can get around from one to another is teleporting with a cell phone that has absolutely no effect or animation aside from fading to black. The phone doesn't go with you so at each location, you need to ultimately find a phone and a cell number that corresponds with a location. 

The game is only on the Wii and it only supports the Wii remote... Goody. Going into Calling, it's hard to not know how bad the game is and here they are starting it with one foot in the grave by not allowing you to use an actual controller. You basically control the flashlight with your movement. If you're lucky, your view pans the direction the Wii remote cursor is aimed when at the edge of the screen. If you're not lucky, you're stuck looking at the ceiling or ramming straight ahead into a wall until you can quick-turn or waggle spasticly out of it like you're trying to fix a stuck roller-ball mouse.

Dead Space is a the golden standard of jump scare abuse. It delivers probably 95% of its "scary" this way. Hence why the games fail to be scary. I thought this was the lowest form of fear delivery in movies/games. But it turns out that it's not. Calling has lowered the limbo bar. On occasion, particularly when you unpause the game, something will flash or shoot across the screen like a scary face or... some kind up tumbleweed hairball, (I can't figure out what the hell it is!) Dead Space has one thing going for its jump scares and that is that Necromorphs jumping out at you actually pose a threat. This however is just random visual shit flying around in front of you which is tantamount to someone just out of sight dangling a grocery bag ghost in front of you with a fishing pole and going WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO~! It's grade school haunted house quality and there is no context or reason for it to be happening. This is as cheap as it gets.

There are actually a few subtle ghosts in the game that you might not even notice if you're not looking for them. The head sticking out of the water in the bathtub was a good one. In the hospital, you can see pacing ghost feet underneath a curtain in one of the rooms. You're character will only say something about how a bed is stored in there when you try to interact. That really bothers me. You'll comment on the stupid broken vending machine or the state of a potted plant but not the ghost feet?

You play as four different characters who have different stories intertwining. I like how you can't crouch, run or quick-turn as the old woman. Actually I don't because those are the only tools I have to make gameplay almost tolerable. Other than that, it's just walk and waggle to shake off ghosts. There's a fear meter that changes color. You die when it gets to solid red which never happened to me. I only died in instant death scenarios.

The voice acting is terrible which is awesome. I'm serious when I say that. I love bad voice acting and I don't know why. The characters say all of their lines awkwardly slow and deliberate like they're reading them for the first time and they're scribbled in terrible handwriting. The great thing about Calling is that you'll get calls on your phone and you'll answer them by putting the Wii remote to your ear. Then you hear a spooky voice that sounds like your dad hamming it up at the punchline of his ghost story with a flashlight glowing under his chin. THE KILLER WAS IN THE BACK SEAT/UPSTAIRS/ME! Entertains me to no end. If you've ever played the first Echo Night game, it's very similar in voice acting quality... and graphics for that matter. Actually both of those games are similar in a lot of respects. In fact, right now you're probably a little confused about that screen cap, wondering if it's actually from Calling. The biggest difference between the two is that I thought Echo Night was awesome. 


There's a part when you first enter the school on the 4th floor where you get a creepy call from someone that says you have their phone and they're coming to get it. They call you back momentarily to say they're on the 1st floor. Then they call to say they're on the 2nd floor and then the third floor. Oh shit! They're coming! What do I do? When the call came again, presumably to say "Look behind you," I wasn't fast enough and the call went away. Then nothing happened. I was kind of disappointed because I wanted to see where they were going with this but the weird thing was that by the way this sequence played out, it inadvertently gave the illusion that I actually stopped them from reaching me by failing to answer their call. It got me thinking, what if answering the phone actually WAS bad and it caused bad things to happen sometimes? You don't want to pick it up but at the same time you are compelled to pick it up to hear what happens next or maybe it's even mandatory for some puzzles. But you don't know if the call you're answering is a key to a puzzle or a prediction about the death of your friend.

Speaking of puzzles, there are hardly any. I played for about two hours before I saw anything that qualified as a puzzle. It's just a whole lot of wandering around, occasionally fending off ghosts, with rarely any clear objective or direction, almost waiting for shit to happen. You'll trigger events, (mostly jump scares,) and you'll often have to follow a ghost or a cat to the next whatever.

In some places you're flashlight goes out because the batteries died and you have to find some batteries or matches and light a candle so that you can see. Except you can still see fine, it's just a little darker. You can go about business as usual until you try to interact with things and then your character goes DUHHHHHHH, IT TOO DARK! EYES NO WORK! Well I can see fine, I don't know what YOU'RE problem is. Ignoring how stupid that is, there's also the fact that you should just be able to use your damn cell phone screen for light which would make the whole candle search pointless.

The no clear direction thing is particularly bad when you're in huge places like the hospital and school. You have four floors and keep looking in rooms, each one of them identical to the last one with identical furniture that's filled/covered with identical items arranged identically. They seriously modeled one of about a dozen different things and then copied each one 200 times and scattered them around. On top of that, everything looks grey and washed out. You have to look at the map every 15 seconds or you get confused. It's like the scrolling infinite background in a Hanna Barbera cartoon. There are many extraneous rooms with no purpose and almost every object that has a door is searchable and contains 1-8 separate compartments you can manually open and inspect and there's never anything to find in ANY OF THEM. I keep opening those stupid utility lockers only to find the exact same bucket, broom, dust pan and three rags posed in the exact same arrangement every single time.

Players need boundaries! Why the hell would they design it this way? It's like some kind of cruel joke, like a Where's Waldo book with no Waldo in it. This game would turn you loose in a 100 room mansion and tell you to go apeshit when only two of the rooms are actually pertinent to the progression of the game.

Almost all of the time, the only thing that you'll ever find inside anything is something scrawled in white kanji. I don't know about other English speaking people playing a game that's in English but I can't read kanji so it might as well be scribbles. Why couldn't they just translate it or even take it out? It makes me wonder if in the Japanese release of Dead Space they left "CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS" in English. Wouldn't that be a bitch? I bet they did.

Looking at a walkthrough on the internet, I found that a lot of the kanji is actually passwords. You see as you play, you can actually find keys pried out of a phone laying around with more unidentifiable characters on them. If you collect enough of them you can put them back in the phone and use them to enter some of these sequences in to unlock bonus stuff. That's nice... Except that I still can't fucking read Japanese. Did they just forget about this aspect of the game when they released it in North America?

Imagine for a second that there is no internet and no walkthroughs and you're an average American punishing yourself with Calling and wanting to unlock gallery stuff. Because the codes you have to enter have eight characters, the chances that you are missing one of those characters is very high. So to be able to enter any codes at all you need to find about 80% of the phone keys or you might as well have none of the phone keys. The keys themselves are super tiny and can be anywhere. Some of them even only show up in the dark. (I didn't even know you could turn off your light until around the end of the game.) Then you need the codes. The codes are also hidden all around too. And they're written in Japanese and they're not just numbers. They're actually all characters for zodiac animals. If you see one of these collections of squiggles and scratches which are often pixelated, you'll have to write it down and hope that what you wrote resembles what's on the keys because you have no idea what you're writing. Now what are the odds that all of these variables will line up correctly? You're not unlocking jack shit.  

For a game set in the mnemonic abyss with ghosts and teleportation phones, it mirrors the mundane of reality a little too closely. Think about if you went to a school at night when it's closed and no one's there. It would be dark and you'd need a flashlight. There wouldn't be any puzzles to solve. You could go in all the rooms and look in all the closets and all around you you'd find everyday items that are in no way interesting. That's basically what this is except sometimes there's a ghost. You're ultimately just wandering around in the dark in an excruciatingly ordinary and boring place with no secrets.

At the end of the school level, you get trapped in a room with three ghosts that are attacking you. You're supposed to look at this scribbled phone number on a desk and then call it on your phone to teleport away to the next area. They attack about every four seconds. In that amount of time you have to open up your phone, punch in the 10 digit number and hit send. (I hate calling phone numbers in this game as it is WITHOUT distraction because of how awkward and tedious it is.) If you don't accomplish this before they grab you, you have to fend them off and start over, because as we all know, mobile phones don't have the capability to not erase the number that you're putting in if you momentarily pause to think about it. That's like some kind of crazy sci-fi technology that we just haven't figured out yet like time travel or functioning home computer printers. And don't forget that you have to read and memorize the number before you can even attempt to do that. Just trying to LOOK at the number on the table can be impossible if the cursor gets stuck as it has a tendency to do. I tried to dial this number 15-20 times and I could not fucking do it. My thumb was not fast enough. It wasn't until I used both hands on the controller that I could finally do it. And here we see another fundamental flaw with the Wii remote.

At the end of the game, you get a bad ending and then you get the feeling that it was really short and yet took an eternity at the same time. When the title screen comes up after the credits, there's a new game+ option. Now what could this possibly mean in a game where you have no weapons, items or abilities. Well it means that you now have access to the bonus chapters and can experience the "full story." WELL HALE-FUCKING-LUJA! I just knuckled down and grinded my way through the most boring video game I've ever played in my life, (and I've played Borderlands,)  and now you're telling me that I didn't actually complete it? That was the fake game. You took a shitty game and removed significant parts from it and then made me play the fake game first with the bad ending instead of just putting the most complete game up front. This is like making someone eat 20 ice cream cones before you give them the actual ice cream. No one's going to stick around long enough to get the ice cream. If you had just given them the ice cream from square one, perhaps it's still mediocre ice cream, but they still had the best experience that it was possible to have and they hate you less. What kind of dumbass is going to go back for more after all that?

So after starting a new game plus and playing the first new chapter, I realized that this is actually significantly better than the regular game. You play as the one character that you saw before but never played as, Makoto. All of the areas you go to are interesting and small versus gigantic and empty/bland as hell. You also have a note book for phone numbers which you can pull out and read while dialing a number.  See, this is what I'm talking about. The game designers had a solution for a shitty problem and they purposefully left it out of the first playthrough because they're assholes. It's completely idiotic.

The story makes more sense and all around flows better. For the first time it actually feels like a game. You should have just played as this guy the whole time. But in general it's soul-crushing, mind-numbing and will suck the life out of you with its blandness. If video games were food, this one would be a STALE rice cake. 

What's in a name: WiiU

Nintendo recently launched a brand new game console called the WiiU. I know this probably comes as quite a surprise to you seeing as how Nintendo apparently wants to keep it a secret. Needless to say it did mediocre in launch sales. There are many factors that people suspect in this equation of failure; the small cluster of games the device has, most of which are ports of games that everyone has already played, few and dwindling supply of third party developers tagging along or their 'accidental' target market of casual gamers wandering away during the advent of addictive and easily accessible phone and tablet games. But the most glaring and weighty fuckup (that is completely Nintendo's doing) is that no one knows that the WiiU even exists and if they do know about it, they don't know what the hell it is. They think it's a new expensive controller for the Wii.

Everyone knows 'Wii' was a stupid name. If you disagree, you're wrong. Sorry. What the fuck is a Wii? The word 'we' already exists. Maybe it's more like 'wee' as in 'Wee! I'm having fun!' or wee as in small or piss or penis. I really don't get how it can be the name of a product. Next generation rolls around and they decide to keep the terrible name 'Wii' and put an irrelevant letter at the end of it. 'WiiU' is still not a name. In fact it doesn't even resemble a word anymore. It's an onomatopoeia. It's the sound that Patrick Star makes when he's imitating a siren. I think I see what they were going for. It's like 'We' and 'You' put together... and... it's still stupid. It might as well be WiiTHEY or WiiBeepBoop.

The worst thing about the name is the ambiguity. It means nothing... That's not entirely true. The most important part of the name 'WiiU' is 'Wii' as in the previous console which was very successful. If you want to have a successful followup console, it might be a smart move to associate it with the prior, already established and already successful, console. Unfortunately the 'U' part of the name doesn't do it's job at indicating that this is a new Nintendo console.

When You name a new console, It goes (company name,) (console name,) (number/version;) i.e. Microsoft Xbox 360 or Nintendo 64. There was only one 64 so it never needed any version indicator. Look at Playstation, (the best example,) it has PS, PS2, PS3 and soon PS4 like movie sequels. Although a rather boring naming convention, there's no bullshit and people know what the fuck is going on when the number at the end of the name increases by one. There are of course exceptions like the Super Nintendo Entertainment System but you know what, I think adding the word super in front of anything lets you know it's new and different.

So why can Microsoft call their second Xbox an irrelevant name like '360' and Nintendo can't call their second Wii a 'U?' Well, Microsoft actually told people about it for one. But ignoring that, you have to look back at the Wii and the accessories piled high around it. The console is easily the most accessorized gaming device ever times ten. There are Wii Sports things like bats, rackets and golf clubs. There's the balance board. There are handguns, shotguns and crossbows. Then there's the Wii Wheel, Wii remote and Wii Plus. I just looked it up and it's incomprehensible. Is all this shit real? It was actually manufactured and sold in stores?

There are so many Wii tea cozies and Wii dialysis machines flying around, how is anyone supposed to pick out something called a 'WiiU?' It's easy to dismiss any random product with Wii as a prefix as just some accessory for the Wii or one of its games. In context with the rules that Nintendo has established, the name 'WiiU' means that the product is a U. It's a U made for the Wii. This is why people are literally thinking like this:



Should we get one of those new U controllers for the Wii? Never mind. It's $300. That's ridiculous.

Nintendo keeps up their tradition of slapping the console name on every game they can get away with. Remember Wave Race 64, Doom 64, Quest 64, etc? That was stupid and unnecessary but at least it was consistent. Now with the letter U as the focus things are just going to devolve further into a giant muddled punfest clusterfuck.

Look at Wii Fit U. Why isn't it WiiU Fit? The original Wii Fit was of course on the Wii. They failed to give the game any sort of identity and Instead attached Wii to it, you know, so that consumers won't get confused and think that the game is for the Gamecube or the Genesis. The problem now is that the sequel game isn't on the Wii. It's on the WiiU. So it actually has two consol names in the name now but it looks like they just stuck the word 'Fit' into the name WiiU. Then there's the problem with the way it sounds: "We fit you." It makes a sentence. A sentence that has nothing to do with anything. A sentence that if you think about it for too long actually begins to sound really creepy in a Silence of the Lambs woman suit sort of way.

So how do you avoid this kind of disaster? Well, here's what you do; give the console a completely new name to distinguish it from the Wii or name it 'Wii2.' Now I know its not punny or annoyingly whimsical or as childish sounding but it gets the point across. This is the new Wii. Better than the old Wii.

Or better yet, you could use these things called 'advertisments' and tell people that the product exists, what it does and why you'd want to buy one.

Bloodrayne

Bloodrayne is an action adventure game with a horror twist. You play as Rayne, a female dahmpir half human/half vampire thing along the lines of Blade. The game is made by Terminal Reality, the same company that made Nocturne. In an interesting side note, The dahmpir character that escorted you in the first mission in Nocturne was essentially proto Rayne They ended up pretty much using her exact character design for the Bloodrayne games. So I guess it could sort of be considered a spinoff of Nocturne. Anyway you play as Rayne who works for a paranormal investigation organization in the 1930's, like in Hellboy or again like in Nocturne.

Looking at the game art, you'd expect Rayne to be wild and slutty. She will make a quip on occasion but for the most part she has a comparable demeanor to Daria from the show on MTV.

The first mission is in Louisiana where there is a strange outbreak of some weird gigantic bug that also seems to be possessing people and turning them into zombies. (This kind of thing happens a lot in Louisiana.) Also the town you are in is completely flooded. This would be kind of cool if you weren't a dahmpir and susceptible to water. What the hell were they thinking? They didn't have ANY other agents that they could have used for this? They specifically send the person that gets hurt by water? What a bunch of assholes.

Getting around is often done by hopping from roof to roof or mausoleum to mausoleum or running on top of phone lines. That phone line running bullshit is awful. You're supposed to be able to just jump on and run but they make it next to impossible to get on. There's no general area around the wires that you can jump into and then automatically snap to the wires. You have to literally jump and land directly on the fucking wire. Once you accomplish this, you're snapped to the wire. But until then you're jumping up and down like a dumbass, probably slowly dying in knee-deep water, desperately trying to get up. Come on! YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TRYING TO DO!

The game offers you a handful of different control schemes including a left-handed one and a first person one... and they are all complete shit. I think the first one I tried was the one that allowed you to strafe because I like strafing. I quickly decided it was extremely awkward and chose the scheme that was as close as I could get to normal. Now get this; the left joystick moves Rayne forward and back. Left and right makes her rotate, (while standing still.) They replicated exactly how a directional pad works using a joystick. I don't even know where to begin. Directional pads have no place in 3D games unless it's for a menu screen. Moving with them is stiff and tedious. That kind of shit should have been abolished in the prior console generation. If you have a joystick, why would you make it work like a directional pad? It should work like a fucking joystick. That's why you have a joystick as opposed to a directional pad. If I wanted to use the directional pad, I'd use the directional pad. Imagine if someone made a mouse that worked like arrow keys. It could only move in one linear X or Y direction at a time. It doesn't make any sense. The other joystick, (the right one,) is used only for camera pitch, (looking up or down.) That's it. This is also completely wrong. When you rotate Rayne with the left stick, the camera stays behind her and turns as well. So you basically have half of the camera controls on one stick and half on the other and then you have back, forward and rotate. Why can't it just be push left stick, go that direction, push right stick, camera pans that direction like every other fucking game that exists? The funny thing is that even though I knew the right stick only went up and down, I caught myself trying to pan the camera around with it. Even by the end of the game, I was still doing it.

Rayne's combat is divided into guns and her signature arm blade things. The guns are duel wielded, always paired by strength. You can also carry a couple of incendiary devices and one special weapon which is like a light machine gun or RPG. Guns are decent but you run out of ammo pretty quick, especially the special weapons. Am I shooting three bullets at once or something?

The blades are just... They suck. Combat with them is severely unsatisfying. You press a single button for a blade attack more or less of Rayne's choosing and that's about it. Keep mashing that button until whatever you're fighting dies. The blades also lack any real sense of impact. It feels like you're just slapping people around with a foam pool noodle until their appendages fall off. They don't do nearly as much damage as they realistically should, either. What's a good amount of strikes from a short sword that an ordinary non-armored man should be able to take before they are dispatched? Like 1-3 maybe? Sometimes it seems like they can take a dozen. Then there's the assholes that can block your attacks indefinitely with their gun. I could jump around them and try to find an opening but I like just using guns when it happens. Block this, bitch!

There's also a harpoon that you can use that works exactly like Scorpion's harpoon. You can use it to pull an enemy to you and suck their blood. Blood sucking is the only thing that heals you. Sometimes you'll need to do it while in combat. Luckily you can use your victim as a shield while you do it so that's cool.

You have a blood meter which is like your devil trigger, overdrive or whatever you want to call it. You can activate it when it's full and your attacks do 5X damage. I deactivate it ASAP to keep the meter as close to full as possible all the time because you never know when you're going to step into a barracks or a mess hall with 20 fucking nazis in it.

When I beat the first boss, Colonel Klink came and stole the knife relic that I found inside it. Then suddenly the next chapter started and I was in a military base in Nazi Germany. What the hell just happened? Why am I here? There was absolutely no transition. At first I thought it was a flashback for some reason. Then I thought it was a completely unrelated mission, (like how Nocturne had four totally different/separate missions.) It wasn't until I completed chapter two that I realized that this was a continuation and I was in for a long mind-numbing drag-out of essentially killing the same two types of nazis for the rest of the game.

The levels are huge. Probably about 40% of the areas you don't even need to go through. There's just a ton of extraneous places. You can get lost in them for days, (even while using your spidey sense.) The whole objective is to assassinate a bunch of high ranking nazi officials. There are like 20 of them. You get a big photo list that you check off as you go. When I first saw the list, all I could feel was dismay. There are so many targets and the place is so big and the combat is so repetitive and so boring. The whole thing is just a giant load of drudgery.

On top all that, there are no checkpoints in the game and quite often you will find that save points are too far apart. You only get to save in between areas. So wander around a giant facility, kill three minibosses and however many waves of grunts that appear without dying or you start at the beginning of the area. I think I tried the first area of the second chapter around five times with nothing to show for it. This was when I started using the ingame cheat codes. If I died, I'd turn on godmode, go back to where I was, turn it off and pretend it never happened. Typically, I'm no cheater, nor am I a candy ass. I beat Shinobi for PS2 on hard mode and that is one of the most cruel games I've ever played. It also has no checkpoints. Even though it is completely sadistic and unfair, it's still fun to play. Bloodrayne doesn't feel rewarding and it doesn't feel fun, so fuck it. I'm sorry but I'm not engaged enough to keep repeating the area indefinitely until I can cross a mine field while three assholes take potshots at me with rocket launchers, defeat a large mech unit, run across a long exploding bridge and then defeat a colonel surrounded by soldiers wearing jetpacks in a single go. (NOT A HYPERBOLE)

Then there are times where you're critically low on health and need to feed so you're looking for victims but all of the enemies use guns so it's impossible to get within range of them without dying. So you're sneaking around every corner like a little bitch because you're so scared that someone will oneshot you and the half hour you've invested into the level will be erased.

The only time I didn't use the cheats, excluding the first chapter, was for bosses because they actually had the decency to make bosses checkpoints.

After two solid chapters of hunting down specific nazi targets in giant military bases. I thought the game was over. I got to see a cut scene with lots of blood and dismemberment. It was hands down the best thing in the game next to the Siegfried and Roy twins. Then chapter four started and I got to see the new list of targets.
.................FUCK!