Irish Coffee, April 23rd, 2013

I'm back! Last week was kind of... Well, it was kind of rough for everybody everywhere. Seemed like the world was coming apart, and I didn't really have game writing in me. I do, after all, love games enough to be really fucking angry at them half of the time, and anger was just not on the menu last week. Just a kind of thin veneer of sad. Not even depression, just sad (no, not sadness either). That said, regular service resumes today. Oh, and I made this ridiculous video as an editing exercise. The video project is coming, I swear, and it will be funny. Also, an article on The Man, The Myth, The Legend: Shinji Mikami.

Thank god for Guacamelee. After a number of a AAA titles that barely ruffled my feathers, a fifteen dollar indie game again proves that budgets don’t matter, and that gaming’s greatest pleasures can be had when we dial it back, and just have fun with the damn things.

Oh... Oh no. I think I’m turning into a game hipster. All these indies I’m so in love with: Journey, Super Meat Boy, The Unfinished Swan. That’s how it starts. Next thing you know I’ll be deriding AAA titles in my Ninja Turtle beanie while I take duck-face-self-shots of myself drinking craft beer.

NOOOO!!!

It’s too late. This is the only fate for the jaded gamer. Or maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe the whole term “hipster” is just a recycled pop culture phrase from the 1930s, used as a catch-all to describe a particular set of interests. A set of interests that were never meant to be exposed to the harsh light of popularity, but have been adopted en masse by a world that uses the internet to find the best of everything. Maybe judging someone by something as shallow the content of their game collection, alcohol preference, or clothing choices isn’t going to result in an accurate representation of who they are as a person. Or maybe Allagash tastes better than Budweiser, Journey’s a better game than Bioshock Infinite, and fuck you I love my Ninja Turtle beanie.

But back to Guacamelee before I go any further off the rails. First, the small talk: Created by Drinkbox Studios, Guacamelee is a wonderfully executed Metroidvania game with extremely tight controls, a hybrid beat-em-up fight system, a well realized (if quirky) artistic style, and all the inside jokes and references expected of an independent game. (Independent games are, after all, by the fans for the fans.) Taking the role of a Juan the Luchador out to rescue The Princess from The World of the Damned, you’ll take great pleasure in body slamming skeletons with a move list the length of which normally isn’t found on this side of Final Fight. If you’re not a fan of the genre, then no need to apply, but if you are, this is best representation released in quite some time.

This is a tame screenshot. Very tame.

The sense of satisfaction and palpable sense of character control are really tying this one together. Without spoiling anything, once you’ve unlocked all of Juan the Luchador’s abilities, you’ll chain together some pretty epic combos with nothing short of a mile wide grin on your face. Buy Guacamelee, body slam some skeletons.

I’ve been thinking about something lately in reference to AAA titles, and maybe I’m wrong, but: All the flash and quicktime events and predictability are making the titles that are supposed to be the most immersive into the least immersive. I can categorically say that I felt more a part of Guacamelee’s Mexican inspired backdrop than I felt a part of Columbia in Bioshock: Infinite, or whatever-the-fuck the name of the island was in Tomb Raider. (For those keeping score, that’s one AAA title I didn’t like and one I did.)

It’s not that Guacamelee is doing anything that’s completely new itself, but there’s something about the average AAA title that’s just... Soulless, I suppose. I just feel detached from what’s happening in front of me. And while those games do give me “Holy fuck, that was badass,” moments, that’s about all they do. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Immersion is everything, and I don’t think the modern AAA title is all that immersive. They’re certainly not as immersive as a silly Metroidvania game that has more dick jokes in it than my average blog.

That idea’s not fully formed yet, I know. I have a question, but not an answer. I’ll be sure to tell you when I do.

Irish Coffee, April 18th, 2013

A week from tomorrow, and I'm heading down to Daufuskie Island (where I grew up) for 48 hours of top shelf chill time. And I need it. The monotony of my daily routine is starting to get the better of me. I've been writing, on average, 50k words a week like some sort of god damn...uhh... writing machine... Hey, I never said they were good words. See you tomorrow!

Ok Sega, what the fuck? To you, years of flogging Sonic’s long-dead corpse in hope of another ring popping out seems like a completely reasonable business practice. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, I can’t get my hands on a remake of the best series Genesis ever created: Streets of Rage. Oh, it’s not, you say? Just watch the opening sequence from SoR 1.

How does that not make you want to kick ass? Start screen and you’re already pumped like Vin Diesel.  Yeah! Rage! Gonna fuckin punch somebody! And you do. Oh yes, you do...

God dammit that was awesome. Balletic. Visceral... Pwn-...uhh, -tacular. Leave me alone, it's been a long week. 

Lately, I’ve been consumed almost exclusively with thoughts of quality gameplay. While it’s no secret that I wasn’t the biggest fan of the gameplay in Bioshock: Infinite, the world seems to have forgiven its sins. I haven’t. I’ll never forgive, Irrational. I’ll never forget.

I must need more coffee.

I just don’t understand what happened, exactly. For some reason I can turn on a Genesis beat-em-up that’s more than twenty years old and have a greater sense of impacting the game world than I do when I play Bioshock Infinite, or Kane and Lynch, or Fallout. Yes I’m lumping those three together. This is a discussion about gameplay. Don’t hurt me.

Taking it back even further, and the bad guys in fucking Double Dragon for NES reacted when I punched them. I drill a baddie in the chest with a machine gun in Bioshock Infinite or set him on fire and he seems not to give a shit until the moment all of his hit points vanish. This tangibility, this conveyance of task is fucking mission critical for immersion, and if games are going to tell the stories of the future, immersion’s an important aspect of achieving that goal. 

How is a game more immersive than a film if there is no gameplay? How does it bring anything new to the table? How are games going to be better than film? And yes, that's a question we should be asking ourselves. They'll always be two completely distinct experiences, but until games are as respected as film is, the goal shouldn't be "let's be the movies," it should be "let's tell better stories than they do in ways that they can't." Bioshock Infinite doesn't do this. It's not the future of storytelling. 

And it’s not just Bioshock Infinite. I’m just using it as a proxy for a myriad of games out there that don’t appeal to me. I am a gamer, and I like the gameplay in the video games I play to be a satisfying, entertaining experiences, not the afterthought to a story that could have been told on a movie screen or in the pages of a book. 

If the purpose of the action is just to fill space between one story element and another, why not just skip the action altogether? Why not make a movie?

Irish Coffee, April 17th, 2013

Sorry there wasn’t a blog post yesterday folks (or any word from me for that matter). I had the events in Boston on my mind, wouldn’t have been able to write without mentioning it, and didn’t want to mention it on a comedy(?)-gaming blog. So I didn’t. And honestly, there wasn’t much to write about in the way of gaming news yesterday. Nor is there today, it would seem. 

Oh, before we go any further, I'm completely aware of this morning's Nintendo Direct and Link to the Past 2. I just don't care. How is this a big deal? More rehash. Another tasteless cash grab that insults the original game by putting it on a gimmicky portable. Fuck you Nintendo, the WiiU is bad and you should feel bad. Moving on.

I know these blog posts are usually topical, but there honestly aren’t any topics to discuss. Not one stitch of gaming news out there that would make anyone react with more than a “meh.” Oh, look, Ace Attorney 5 has a release date. I don’t even know what the fuck that is. I’m assuming it’s the japanese DS game with the screaming anime attorney, but I could be wrong. Don’t care if I am, either.

Boooorred. I’m so bloody bored. I’m like Sherlock between cases, just not as smart or handsome. I am cranking away at my first video project ever, and it’s going well, but no one warned me how tedious video editing can be. They should’ve called it digital crochet. I should come up with some better analogies.

Oh, there is this live action Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon video released in anticipation of the game’s launch on May 1st, and it’s fairly amusing.

But that’s hardly news. And I’m consistently terrified by the lack perspective shown by 90s kids toward the 80s. I suppose that explains why they’re all wearing 80s clothes. They don’t realize how horrible it was the first time around... And why the fuck is youtube encouraging this shit with “VHS mode” on their videos? I... just... huh? 

We’ve spent all these years, clawing our way to 3D/HD video, only to optionally go back to low-def as a novelty? Is the world so lacking in substance that the concept of VHS seems a rich experience? Cuz it fucking wasn't. There's is NO REASON TO BE NOSTALGIC HERE! Turn back!

Do you kids have any idea how hard it was to masturbate to a blurry VHS pause screen? Do you? Cuz it was fucking annoying. Especially if you had a VCR that stopped the video after being paused for five minutes. So, twenty minutes for a blur-free boob-pause, and five minutes to finish up. Fucking horrible. If you want to relive the 80s so badly, buy a shitty Zach Morris phone that barely gets any reception, go to a store to buy your media, masturbate to pictures on parchment, and watch everything in low definition. Do that and I won’t punch you for wearing leg warmers.

I’ll try to think of any interesting topic for tomorrow morning. More interesting than fapping, I mean.

Irish Coffee, April 15th, 2013

Good Monday, everyone! My cell phone battery died after I hit "snooze" this morning and I slept an hour late. So the blog's an hour late. My apologies. I don't know if you noticed this, but after Satuday's blog on Road Redemption, a member of the dev team left a comment. Yet another reason to love indie gaming. Community involvement. There isn't a whole lot of gaming news out there today for me to comment on, but a lucky few have Oculus Rift dev kits in their hands, and they've started uploading...

Well this is sad, and pathetic, but I’ve spent my whole morning with my eyes crossed, watching YouTube videos of people gaming with the Oculus Rift. The dev kits have arrived, it seems, and the tubes are lighting up with gameplay demos. Here, for example is a demo of Mirror’s Edge on the Rift, complete with the dual screen I’m becoming far too familiar with.

Remember those Magic Eye books from the 90s? If you cross your eyes in just such a way, the above video will display three screens, not two, and the center image will be in 3-D. Then you’ll be me. Staring cross-eyed at a 2-D screen that suddenly feels ancient, dried drool on the edge of your mouth, wishing to god that you had your head inside of a proper VR headset. And so it will go, until you find yourself on the Oculus Rift website trying to bargain with the logical part of your brain, attempting to warrant a $300 dev kit while knowing little to nothing about game development. Then you’ll be sad, and return to YouTube, and spend another two hours cross-eyed, now considering whether it’s reasonable to duct tape your laptop to your face. 

As a person that grew up in the 90s, the dream of VR was always promised, never delivered. Nearly every month, in some lost corner of the news page in my favorite game magazine, a picture of a person, ear-to-ear grin applied liberally to their face, head strapped into what we all thought - nay, knew - was the future of gaming. It felt so close. Then the god damn fucking Virtual Boy came out and reality took our dream out back and beat it to death for its wallet. 

Shown: The 90s.

I do have one positive memory of VR from my youth, and it was at this moment I realized that the dream was not only possible, but necessary for the future of gaming. I was at Epcot center for my 12th birthday. My mom didn’t have a ton of money, but she got together what she could, as I was a kid and desperately wanted to go to Disney World. While there, we stood in line for one of those boring “behind the scenes of Disney World” tours, in an effort to get out of the crushing heat of a Floridian May.

While in line, random people were selected for something, I didn’t know for what and didn’t care. Until I heard someone ask “What are we doing?” To which the tour girl said “We want you to participate in a VR demonstration.” At this time, according to my mother, I “started wailing and acting like I’d been shot.” This continued until a middle aged woman said “you can go in my place, I don’t really care.” Suddenly I was exorcised of whatever demon had possessed me. I was in.

Inside, they sat me down on what looked like a black motorcycle seat with a u-shaped flight stick on the front of it (pretty much exactly what you’d see in the cockpit of an airplane.) Then it happened. They lowered the giant black headset on to me, and I was flying a magic carpet around Agrabah. 

I can’t stress enough that not only was I controlling the carpet, but that whatever that VR was did not become the magic carpet VR ride now found at Disney World. Nor can I find anything that even resembles a screen shot of it. But I will tell you this: That was one of, if not the most, important gaming experiences of my life. And now, the Oculus Rift is almost in my hands, and the anticipation is driving me to strange behavior. Behavior like staring cross-eyed at YouTube videos for hours at a time.

If everything we’ve been hearing about the Oculus Rift is true, then VR is not only going to be a reality soon, but will function better than anyone has ever dreamed. The world is finally going to deliver on a promise it made me when I was ten years old.

And they better hurry up. This laptop is fucking killing my neck.

Irish Coffee, April 13th, 2013

Promise kept! Little short today, but rife with videos, so prep your short attention spans. Absolutely gorgeous day in Charleston, and I'm going to get out of the house if it kills me. And, considering the intensity of the summer sun and my pasty French/Irish countenance, it just might. There shan't be a post tomorrow, but I shall return Monday morning. Oh, and if you haven't, check out my latest contribution to VentureBeat. TO ARMS! (Sorry, I watched The Hobbit last night.)

Sit on your hands and wait. Maybe, if you’re lucky enough, the gods on mount Gamelympus will smile upon you, and release a reboot of your favorite franchise. That was a fact of life for starry-eyed gamers as few as five years ago, but is no longer the case. Major developers and publishers, you’re officially on notice. If you don’t give us what we want, we’ll take matters into our own hands. Case in point:

That’s right, a new school Road Rash with all the trimmings. Just watching the forty-five seconds of gameplay from the beginning of their Kickstarter video put me at half mast. It seems I wasn’t alone in my cries for a reboot of this deserving franchise. I watched in horror as undeserving IP was given the new-gen treatment, all the while wondering why no one was willing to scoop up the giant pile of money that could be had with something as simple as an HD re-release of the Genesis classic.

And, for once, there’s a Kickstarter project to which I will contribute my hard earned dollars. Look out gaming world, there will be a character named Ned or Mr. Ned or King Nedrick in Road Redemption (though they really could have spent a little more time on that title). Duke Nedrick? I'm open to suggestions.

But more important than the half role of quarters in my pocket or the fact that a deserving concept is being rebooted, is the fact that Road Redemption perfectly represents the changing landscape of game publication. Designers no longer limited by platform or technology are creating the games that they want to create and that gamers actually want to play. And Road Redemption looks pretty damn good in spite of its lack of AAA money. It’s certainly no Battlefield 4, but it doesn’t need to be. All the elements of Road Rash are present and accounted for, as are the technological advancements to improve core gameplay.

The road looks pretty rough for major game developers and publishers (see what I did there?). They can scoop up indie studios all day, but in the gaming world of 2013 new developers are cropping up like weeds. Rend one from the ground and two more appear in its place. And let’s not forget about the modding community.

That is a multiplayer test of Sleeping Dogs for PC, a game that fans (myself included) thought was deserving of a multiplayer mode. So they made one. 

Gamers are crafting the future of gaming, and that’s fucking awesome. And if all of this was too upbeat for your Saturday morning, you have to understand where I’m coming from. Summer has arrived in Charleston, SC.

BRING IT, DAYSTAR!

Heyo!

Edit: I wrote a thing for gamesbeat! You can find it here. If you just can't get enough of MrNed. Who can?

Sorry, everybody, I've been a bad blogger this week. Allow me to explain:

I'm presently working on a video project and it has completely consumed my time and my brain, because it turns out these things are really fucking hard... I mean difficult. Get your mind out of the gutter.

I now have a great deal more respect for people like EgoRaptor and AngryVideoGameNerd.

My days have been a blur of enormous file sizes, cropped videos, crash courses in audio editing, and bolstering of my After Effects kung-fu. Even after writing a script, it's still difficult to work out the order in which things are to proceed. As in: where do reaction clips go, etc. So, yeah, this shit is no joke. A little project that I thought would take me a few days is now looking like it's going to run about two weeks.

But I think it will be worth it. While there's always the danger of spreading oneself too thin, I've always liked the idea of doing a project like this, and I really need to get it out of my system. So I'm gonna. As penance for only posting two real blogs this week, I'll throw one up (that was intentional) tomorrow morning. That is if my girlfriend doesn't decide that we need to "get out of the house." Whatever the hell that means.

The Day Star frightens me.

Irish Coffee, April 10th, 2013

Ok, I had to get this out. It was tearing me up inside. The entire gaming world is fawning over Bioshock Infinite, and well...

I didn’t like Bioshock Infinite.

Everybody keeps talking about all this “new” stuff it did. Am I just that thick? What exactly did Infinite do that was new and interesting, or is there some sort of tacit agreement with Irrational Games that I’m unaware of, and they send a hit squad to your house if you don’t repeat the PR verbiage? It’s a shooter (and everyone seems capable of admitting that it’s not very good at that job), set in a very pretty place, with powers very similar to those in the last two Bioshock titles, and a twist ending that’s designed to make people feel dumb if they don’t get it when in fact it doesn’t make any damn sense anyway. Sorry, but Infinite just bored the piss out of me.

Sorry, Lizzy, this only gets worse.

I loved Bioshock 1, played all of an hour of Bioshock 2 because it was retread, and must have finished Infinite because I’m a masochist. Yet the whole world keeps talking about it like it's gaming's second coming. Please, somebody, help me out here.

If I say Bioshock Infinite is a bad game, I’m the idiot. Why the hell is that? Because it’s a boring game with dead backgrounds, gameplay that feels more turned based than anything else, a floating city that does very little to convey that it’s floating, and a rehashed (and paired down, for some fucked up reason) version of a combat mechanic from Bioshock, which has been out for six years and is a far better game in nearly every respect? Is it fun to shoot at bad guys that don't react to gunshot wounds for hours at a time for the privilege of experiences an awkwardly scripted cut scene?

Yet Infinite gets amazing reviews... Why? Because they “tried something new.” Everybody keeps fucking saying that, but what exactly did they try that was new? Anybody? Please someone tell me, because the reviews don’t. They just leave it there. Bullshit, they tried something new. It’s Bioshock on a floating city. Bioshock did some new things, Bioshock Infinite doesn’t.

Does ambition preclude fair assessment of the end product? What the fuck did Infinite actually do so well? Everyone keeps saying that Columbia’s "brilliantly realized," but it’s just fucking not. It’s inhabitants barely say a word, don’t move (how long will that paperboy wave his product in my face? Until time rends itself from the universe?), and fucking vanish when combat begins. They don’t run away, they vanish. Do mothers carry their children on the skyrails? Did I miss that explanation? Why can’t I talk to anyone or buy anything, or in any way interact with this big, pretty, city they spent so much time designing? The whole of Columbia feels like the Wounded Knee exhibit from the end of act one, or a movie set from a spaghetti western.

Oh, they must be talking about the plot. The over-the-top, cheese dripping swill the likes of which I haven’t seen outside of a Lifetime movie. Other games have had better plots, or at least similar plots as far as their means of conveyance and execution, so it can’t be that.

So... Skyhooks?

But I would still be “wrong” if I wrote a bad review for it. Why? Because it was expensive to produce? Because everyone on the development team tried so hard? Has the real world started handing out fucking achievement ribbons? Do we now reward mere effort like the judges of a fifth grade science fair? I blame metacritic.

I don’t have a problem with a lot of what Infinite does, but it certainly isn’t new, it certainly isn’t innovative, and it certainly isn't blowing up any skirts in the gameplay department. I felt bored and unsatisfied every second of the Infinite experience. I’m playing Journey and Tomb Raider again to get the taste out of my mouth. Maybe a bit of Far Cry 3 or Bioshock 1. Y’know, good video games.

Really liked Elizabeth, though. 5.5/10

Doesn't make any sense to me, either.