2016 - Year of Sonic - Year in review

Usual caveats and ranking and caveats to ranking apply. All of this is subjective, these are my reviews, if you think as I do you'll agree. But you don't, so here's how the system generally breaks down;

A - A game I would recommend to people who don't like a genre, something good enough for people generally against it to try. These are the games I think you should definitely look into. This isn't a ranking like "10/10" or "four and a half stars, delivered pizza to my house, performed sexual favors and then changed the oil on my car", this is evaluating games subjectively, from my perspective, who I'd recommend them to. Which is the point of reviewing, to me, anyway.

And these are the games where I'd say "More than the usual". Mind you, I don't mean you should move hard outside you genre just to force yourself to try them. If you hate shooters, it's unlikely an A-rank game is going to redefine how you look at them. Look for them on sale and the like. These are games in X genre that appeal to people who don't usually like X genre.

B - Being games are excellent examples of their genre, but don't stand outside their genre. You have to be interested, at least a little, in playing this sort of game. They have to be your jam.  That's not to say a B rank game is necessarily more or less fun than an A rank game, as frankly, I had the most fun with a B rank game this year. This is more that it tends to be a little more bogged down in genre conventions and you need to be keen on how it works.

C - Games that you need to want to play the genre to want to play. Essentially, if B rank games are games where if you like ARPGs you'll like them, C rank games are ones where you need to be in the mood for the genre to like them. If you're not feeling it, well, you probably won't feel it.

D - Games I feel personally won't appeal to most people even within those that like the genre. That's not to say D rank games are all unplayable, or even that they're all garbage. Just that I'm not sure even if you were in the mood you'd be up for these.

E - Games I never finish reviewing, so they don't go on this list. There's about 10-20 games a year that fall into this category.

Also, this is a listing of games I reviewed this year, very few of which are ever actually from a given year. This is a guide to going through Steam sales and picking out stuff you might have missed at a low price, not a guide to the latest and greatest. I'm not even suggesting you buy these games this year.

I generally tend to lean toward lowering the ranking of games that are more difficult. As I said, this is about recommending games, and "difficult" is something of a subgenre. I've never met a "tuned to be difficult game" I would actually say I would recommend to anyone to pick up and try. There's lots of good ones, but the harder you tune a game, the less people who can play it and enjoy it.

The Gap: There's a four month gap in my reviews this year, which often happens around March, but went kinda wild this time. Basically, I played Serious Sam 3 - which I hated - Arkelash Legacy - which was disappointing - and spent like fifty hours dicking around with Skyrim but never actually finished it. Also Phantasy Star 2, which I think I eventually reviewed but who cares.

Snore me out the door: Super Cyborg

The game is hard is not an excuse for lazy design.

Super Cyborg is a pixeled "homage" and by homage I mean clone of NES Contra games. The visuals are really good, with lots of variety and truly horrifying imagery. The monster design is garish and absurd, looking biological, alien and monstrous all at once and sometimes in ways you don't even recognize until you look at them longer. Then the music is really good, and the game feels good in motion. The menu screen looks great as the music fires up. You're pumped. This is going to be great!

What could go wrong? Everything. Everything could go wrong. A speed run of the game is about twenty minutes long, it has that little real content. Obviously learning the game should take a lot longer than that, but the game doesn't try to make you "learn" in a way where you "get better".

Super Cyborg is built around two core axioms for difficulty: Pattern memorization and situational unfairness. The first one is what I meant by never getting better. You don't get better at Super Cyborg, you just learn the patterns and whereabouts of all of the things that kill you. Which is everything. This leads partially to the second axiom: The game puts you in spots where enemies can jump on you or otherwise attack you and you have to struggle to fight back. I mean incredibly stupid stuff like you're going up a slope, and your gun doesn't shoot up the slope, so you can't hit enemies casually walking down toward you. They just amble toward you, not a care in the world. Unless you have the spread gun ... Which we'll get to discussing in a moment. NES era design just feels like surrealism in this day and age. Instead of feeling like a bad ass, you're flailing around, until you memorize the spots you need to be, though sometimes there are no spots and you're just not supposed to be in X spot with Y gun so whoops u ded.

Oh, and most of the weapons are garbage, and you lose your weapon when you die, so if you die just start over and get the good gun again. Since without Spread, you can't hit most enemies. So you end up spending additional time hitting the re-start button, because the developer I guess never played his game and didn't realize the lives/continues nonsense doesn't matter. You have to have that gun, or the game is just insanely hard. The hardest points, by the way, the become moments where other power ups appear on screen and you have to desperately dodge getting the inferior weapon. Does this sound like good game design in action?

There's not really much to say about Super Cyborg. It's a very short, pointlessly hard game I got half way through. Needing to constantly restart and redo sections to learn patterns just made me feel like I was studying for an algebra test. There is a lot that could be done to bring the genre forward and refine it, but this game does nothing new with the gameplay. The game looks cool, but it is ultimately just 80s tier design.

If you look at the screenshots and think that looks radical, and you're up for pattern memorization based trial and error gameplay, there you go! You're the tiny niche target audience! It's a well made game for what it is, but what it is, doesn't interest me in the least.

Woah Dave!

Woah Dave! is a single screen attempt at building what probably amounts to a retroclone from the arcade era. It feels very familiar, honestly blending elements from Mario Brothers the not super, arcade pixel art and Super Mario Brothers 2 (NES version) into one relatively cohesive game. If that sounds like I'm bashing it, well, it depends on how much design space you imagine there is within a single screen and how much polish you think the game should have.

Oh, and it sort of reminds me of Super Hang-On, although that's probably the sort of subjective memory absolutely no one will get.

At its core the game is extremely simple, but there is just a little more to it than you think there is. At first it just looks like you pick things (that eventually explode) up and throw them at things, which become more dangerous things if you don't handle them and while that is all there is to it, there is a weird sort of strategy to each of the levels that begins to become apparent, especially when things get out of hand. It simple, but I find it fun. It also sounds good, and the music is very catchy although there is really only one track or at least only one set of tracks that play as you get deeper into the level. They did not add additional tracks with the additional levels in the "deluxe" update, which is a little disappointing, primarily predicated on the fact the music is legitimately catchy.

There is a progression from the word go, with the lowest floor slowly being consumed with lava, and then various new enemies added once you've reached enough score, with some other modifications. It does give the game a sense of shifting change, but it's nothing major. Basically what you see is what you get. It plays smoothly and it plays pretty frantic, but that's about it.

The game is, as I said, simple ... But it in some ways even for the goal it sets out for itself are undermined by being a little too simple. As I said, one of the dangers is the things you pick up explode. The problem here kinda goes a little in a couple ways. For one, your character can leap out of the screen, which can muddle the things you're carrying or pick up things that haven't dropped on the screen yet. This is minor. Less so is how difficult it is to discern the remaining time of objects on the ground, especially if they stack up, which the game can happily do by itself. There's no real reason the game can't shade objects a little more, or shift their sizes a little to make them all not almost identical, and it can really add to the frustration for really no real design benefit.

The other thing about Woah Dave! is the game almost works against its best fun. Essentially speaking, you most enjoy it when you're scrambling around, struggling to try to keep up with the downward flow and ever upgrading aliens. The problem is that, due to the randomization of drops, you can never get behind - if you're ever behind, it is very likely the next drop you sorely need to catch up won't be the one you need or even worse drop onto something you need to deal with, preventing you from reacting. Once the screen becomes polluted with rapidly evolving foes, you're pretty much done. The best, frantic moments don't last long. It feels awesome to recover, but it is rare that manage to. On the other hand, drops are random, so sometimes they just fall in the same spot as the same item repeatedly and you get pretty bored.

Regardless, I played it for more than a few hours and quite enjoyed my time with it. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's good clean fun for a time, which is more than I can say for most retroclone stuff, you know?

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2014 in review

As with previous years, this review splits games into four categories. I'm going to proactively not read my earlier YiRs and just assume I remember roughly a year later the system I was using. Maybe I'm not. If I recall correctly, it works like this. This is an entirely subjective, made up of nonsense system, based completely on my experiences. I tend to dislike things that are overhyped because I'm trying to figure out what is so great about it, and like things where people tell me they're bad because I'm always awaiting the game to take a big dump on my face.

Category A: Games that I think everyone should pick up and try if they have any faint interest in them. Games I came out of feeling like I'd really enjoyed myself. Something to branch out and try, and definitely something to pick up if you like the genre they are included in.

Category B: Games that I think, if you're interested in the genre, are definite good times. Not necessarily something to pick up if you're not into it, though, but maybe if you like the look. A bit riskier as propositions go. Most games I finish fall into this category.

Category C: Games that are decent enough if you like this or that sort of game, but not really the sort of game you should go out of you way to try. Games I quit near the end or games I was reluctant to finish tend to fall in here.

Category D: Games I regret play, regret buying or regret existing. I would advise against picking up category D games unless you find your tastes run in stark opposition to my own, which is mind you entirely possible.

To switch it up this here, I'm going to start with the games I don't recommend, and then move up the games I really liked. Whoa. Daring.

Long Card Road Home: Saturday Morning RPG

Nostalgia. Nostalgia never changes.

It's Steam sale time and me here at this blog is am playing many games to try to churn out the last few cards to sell during the sale. And by play, I mean idling games like this one and this one that I got from bundles. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just not man enough to review visual novels.

Or play visual novels. I'm sorry. I'm just not strong enough. Not strong enough for this at all.

(I am totes buying that when it isn't that many cents. It just makes no sense to buy it now though.)

Anyway so unrelated to that I gave Saturday Morning RPG a try. The basic premise is its a "saturday morning cartoon" inspired RPG with a ton of QTEs in the combat system. I'm not sure if they still even show saturday morning cartoons, having not owned a TV or really watched much in the way of cartoons they'd show on saturday mornings (I really hope they don't show Rick and Morty to children, pls), but if they don't there was a point in time many whatever generation I am remember fondly when they would get a big box of disgusting carb laden cereal and then in a blissful sugar high watch advertising.

I mean saturday morning cartoons. Which were probably the first and purest convergence of media and product placement in history. I mean we all love Optimus Prime, but the dude was basically showing up to give us all 21 minutes of 'buy me! buy my friends! buy my enemies so you can hit them with my friends!' and having nostalgia for that is like looking back lustfully upon your real estate agent. But we can and we do, so here we are, with a RPG entirely centered around referencing that stuff.

a pun, I think

I don't think this game has even a hint of irony as Blood Dragon did, either. There is nothing all that meta, as best I can tell, about SM:RPG. It is really just supposed to be: here are references, do they amuse you? And it isn't especially aggressive or excited about them.

Well, I guess joining GIJOE, who are referred to as Private Johnson in game isn't exactly played straight.

ah hue hue hue hue heh

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

Play relevant month: Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon

There's not many games or releases or concepts I get hyped for. We live in something of a two pronged gamer assault world now - God, what does that sentence even mean - somewhere between the shitpipe that is early access and the other, shittier pipe that is triple A hype machines. We are constantly being blasted on the two sides of our faces. Yet games are largely all about the same level of quality, with a few stand out gems, but most are "fine" or even "fun but flawed". Yeah there's a couple really obvious stinkers, but usually if you don't like a game in this day and age it has more to do with genre and intent. So why get excited? There's going to be 2-3 more entries in that genre, that very year, in case you don't like a given individual game.

But Blood Dragon ... Well, for one, I had zero excitement for Far Cry 3 itself. The only excitement I get from Far Cry games is when I forget they're not Crysis sequels or whatever, but then, I wouldn't even get that now that Crysis 3 was the joke it was. However you take a brand new engine like Far Cry 3 and you commit to giving a DLC pack with some far out 80s action, I'm going to take notice. That first trailer really sells the idea. Then you announce it's going to be a cheap standalone attempt at a more experimental style of game? I won't lie, my ears perked up. Admittedly, the experimental side of Blood Dragon lies in the less than mainstream or at least less than modern mainstream because that really is quite the hammy 80s production. Or a 2013 production through the eyes of being an 80s production? Layers and layers of obscured tropes here son. It's cyber-boots on a human skull all the way down to the turtles here.

The actual resultant game almost has a sense of meta awareness to it, a box inside a box feeling of both playing and the game itself. It's petulant and juvenile on both levels, with weird quirkness that extends beyond the Play button on Steam. There is also this odd rub of being almost a truly indie production, with odd little problems and screw ups in design that surprise you given the pedigree of both the studio and the core title this one is based off. I mean I've read Far Cry 3 has terrible, terrible writing but I never heard anything about it being a bad game from a design stand point.

It's also sort of weird in that Blood Dragon almost feels intentionally mediocre at the start, luring you in with a rather bleh starting point then - When you stop expecting anything awesome to come out of the lumpy beginning and the oddities of uplay - actually gets really, really good. At everything. All of the things. And the voice actor is a wizard.

Of bad ass.

Shootember: Fall of Cuberbots

I don't usually like to play sequels shortly after finishing a previous chapter in a series. It towards doing two main things: Graphics are always better, gameplay is always worse. Gameplay might not actually truly be worse, but it feels worse as you struggle to nail down changes in motion and control scheme.

just walk right into the gun

First impressions out of the gate: The game is definitely prettier, in fact, it might be one of the best looking games I've ever seen. WFC was attractive and polished, but Fall of Cyberton is actually legitimately gorgeous even beyond the environments which were already stellar. Gameplay is a bit weaker, but even more varied. I feel like it has encroached a bit too close to 'modern shooter' for my tastes, although it still doesn't have a full cover button scuttling walls "thing" that I've seen in some other games. Compared to the first it feels a bit sluggish and transforming comes off as slower. There's less a feeling of agility in much of the game.

literal of tower of power

The game's plot picks up what I imagine is some additional amount of time after the first one, though it's hard to pin down how much. As far as I can tell they have stopped talking about DARK ENERGON which is a massive, unreal huge improvement. I have no idea who settled on that plot device for the first game but I hope he sobered up and is living a healthy life now. It's hard to think he was in a good place when he imagined up that particular macguffin. There are more characters and more variety in enemies, though enemies still suffer from difficulty in being differentiated at a glance. It's a bit saddening since this is an issue in just about all FPSes, but in this game you can design totally different bodies for them! This is jarring when you run into "name" characters, who all look extremely different from the mainstay buffoons. Except the Combaticon fivesome, who look quite similar to the primary decepticon models. I found that interesting to see in action, as though the art team changed gears near the end of develop to put them into the game using other models as the basis. They look great, so it's not a complaint, but it's odd how Megatron or Starscream look so different from all of their soldiers.

haven't seen any others of those, huh

The plot remains, on the most part, pretty weak. Most characters and most dialogue is good; Megatron remains an awful eyesore with horrible dialogue and just ridiculous nonsense spewing from his mouth at all times. It's very strange how in the moment the game feels good, but you stop to consider what is going on and it is just silly. I have no idea what Megatron's overarching goal was supposed to be, other than just being angry about ... Something? I don't want to sperg out about the plot, but even more than the first game it really feels like Megatron just yells reality into warping itself to his desires. Stuff around him just doesn't make sense.

While character driven dialogue - the exchange between guys, the plans, the cut scenes and various speeches - are all really good, one thing that really stood out about the game is the very weird taunts the enemy units I think are directing at you. It's very strange because the audio direction is set up in such a way that I wasn't sure for most of the game who they were at all talking to. Were they talking to each other? The wall? It wasn't really clear.

Transitions through chapters and the general pacing of the game is much better than the first one, with lots of variety in those chapters as well. Transforming is unfortunately somewhat marginalized here, with enemies basically never transforming in a meaningful way and much of the vehicle stuff basically forced into the moment. When you do need to transform though, the vehicle sections are much better. The game is surprisingly when you consider just how poorly most vehicle sections are in most games. I mean the tank part of Crysis was so terrible - out of nowhere - that I actually cheated past it. I guess that's more of a FPS thing, maybe, thinking back on the vehicle sections in Just Cause 2 which were good. My favorite vehicle stuff involved the mid-game helicopter level with Vortex, who felt like you were rewarded for using each of his weapons and both of his forms. Also watching the thruster animation as the helicopter started jetting around never ceased to amuse.

The game is especially interesting for its capacity to actually continually improve over the course of the chapters, as many action games tend to get worse after blowing the opening set pieces. I wasn't at all impressed with the Metroplex stuff, but the middle levels are just a rush of really interesting set pieces as characters react to the climax of Metroplex's ascension and defense of Iacon. Then the plot falls back away as it attempts to slide back to the starting, as the entire game is a flashback. It kinda sticks gears with Megatorn returning to give boring speeches about how he's so angry about something. Given his giant phallic gun and his transformation into a huge dong, maybe it's pent up ... robo ... Something? Still, the levels continually improve other than his first couple scenes, which sucked. The last level reaches a fever pitch that actually got pretty exciting. As climaxes go, other game companies could learn from their lessons here - It briefly uses many of the assets introduced in the game

In the final conclusion I think the game is, in many ways, a slightly worse game and definitely a worse shooter than the first one. Many of the elements, especially the lack of transforming enemies and somewhat reduced variety of basic encounters, really takes away from the pound the ground combat the first game excelled at. On the other hand, the graphics engine has been pushed so far its glorious to just watch in motion, and the various chapters all have a ton of variety. This is a game where you spend some time as a hover jeep, a helicopter, a phallic tank, an eight foot tall titan, an angry brain addled robot who transforms into a dinosaur and even fits in a sweet little stealth action level. That's a ton of variety and presented in such a way where you legitimately wish the game was just longer! The ending alone has four completely different styles of play, with a gladiatorial battle, a dave and goliath fight and so on.

gimme five

That's pretty swell and I give them high praises for putting out so an interesting set of experiences. I wish I was better at multiplayer, but I'm so atrocious I'm not even going to bother. I'm a terrible shot, sigh. And yet I still quite enjoy shooters, and odd paradox.

Shootember: War for Cuber DARK ENERGON

no timer on nonsteam games

I avoided this game for a long time because I'm a Transformers "fan" of varying amounts on any given day and I assumed it was a boilerplate shooter that other Transformers fans were telling me was amazing because having Soundwave talk with a little synth action is enough to make their pants thunder as bits within break the sound barrier. I'm not kidding, it really doesn't take much to get them popping their cogs.

oh fuck it was dead space all along

So I finally fired it up and I was actually pretty floored with it. The thing that struck and strikes very quickly is how beautifully detailed the environments are, and not just the skyboxes!. The character models and animations are really slick too, with the whole Transforming element a joy to watch, but the levels are just lavished with detail. This is pretty weird, see, since shooters have a bad habit of being a bunch of boxes with other boxes in a skybox. War for Cybertron I was almost certain would be the boxiest robot box in the history of crates but somehow it isn't. It isn't better looking than Crysis 2 but it is really lovingly crafted.

The game is ostensibly a shooter but at times I'm not entirely certain it truly wants to be that. Characters can transform into a variety of vehicles, so there's drivingish bits and flyingesque bits that feel sort of like the shooter parts are still clinging pretty hard. There's also some jumping puzzles and some vague other sort of puzzles. It feels like they took a couple game ideas then hosed them down with shooter elements before dropping them into the prettiest damn boxes.

If that sounds sort of negative, maybe it is, but the game is a pretty decent shooter in terms of just gunning down dudes. Has a real blood pumping bam bam feel to it that puts a grin on your face. The other elements keep the action broken up, which I like, and some of the vehicles are nice to drive. I do find some of the jumping puzzles with their instant death time to reload dorkiness a bit annoying, but the game's check point system is better than some - not flawless, but fine. Also the game is not afraid to throw huge boss fights at you, or tease you with massive destruction being thrown around. Admittedly, if you're one like me who played too many mmorpgs and is long since sick of staged fights, you may find a little nausea in this game.

I really dig the animations on the characters themselves - It sinks in more and more as you play different bots that they all have beautifully detailed idle cycle, transformations, so forth. Although if looked at too long it becomes evident they are blocks that don't really "work" in terms of having joints or functional range of motion, they are still a delight to watch in action. They also sound really good on the most part - I find Cullen's Optimus a little out of place sometimes, but worse voice actors producing better lines feels about the same. Megatron's voice actor is not quite what I'd hope for, he's more of a Turmoil sounding character, which is a reference no one will ever get.

of course it rains in prison

Megatron's character and the overarching plot of the game beyond individual scenes of robotic mayhem, which the game does extremely well and with impressive grasp of scale, is pretty much repulsively awful. Megatron has no real character, he is as one dimensional as they come and his plot device which he screams repeatedly is unexplained goofy nonsense. I don't know if I want to say Dark Energon is children's cartoon level, since honestly it basically get hamfisted into everything and feels like something even little kids would start rolling their eyes at. It does everything! It defeats bosses for you, empowers his armies, is part of bombs and opens doors. You know you're really reaching with your plot device when in addition to everything else it is a skeleton key.

The story is on the most part simply awful. The characters are good, the dialogue is good, but the person who wrote the story should simply feel bad about what he's doing with his life. I mean really, really should think about how he's writing at a grade school level. When almost all of your plot centers on a blow by blow level on "plot device!" you're doing something wrong. It's honestly worse than watching an 80s cartoon. It's sort of a pity watching good voice actors perform good dialogue that, when you stop and parse, is absolutely dreadful in scope. Also the story does little to articulate why anyone is fighting this war at all. They hate each other and ... And yeah, that's all of it.

And don't give me the "There's a story???" tripe. If you don't want to pay attention to a story, that's totally fine. But you could have taken the same scenes with much the same dialogue and laid out something at least run of the mill instead of outright insulting.

Other things that aren't fun, and never were fun, and never will be fun. Waiting during a fight for some "instant death" attack to finish. The game gets worse and worse in this regard, with some of the last few battles having extremely long sessions of "drive around waiting for missile barrage to finish". This is MMORPG level design and it's beyond irritating to see it migrate into other games. I get that you want to make people dodge or avoid attacks, that's fine, but making me drive from something I can not see for more than even two seconds is boring and hovers right above being a chore. Past that and you're into tedious monotony.

really

It's not binary, of course, but a spectrum of tense moments that rapidly dissolve away. Tension turns into stress, and stress is the biggest enemy of fun. I think people have a ton of difficulty discerning or articulating the difference, which can make game design slippery. You desperately seek tension, but you utterly do not want stress. Worse, while I really like the NPCs that make up your squad, the fact you can run into them while you're trying to avoid something is atrocious.

Still - regardless of the bad story and a couple snafus in fight design - the game overall is a polished, surprisingly deep shooter with a great variety of play. As I said the game feels less like a shooter, more like a shooter operating through multiple minigames. Transforming can be pretty tertiary, or really important, depending on what stage of the game you're in. Also the game is surprising in terms of environmental variety; Cybertron really does feel like a "different world" and not just a metal Earth.

what a fucking Shock

Video game branding and in fact the fundamentals of branding have shifted further away from the ideals of my childhood, or at least the claimed but truly not attended to ideals of my childhood.

I want to say that marketing people were more creative in those by gone lost halcyon days but a deeper resentful thought occurs to me that whenever people refer to eras we can barely recall they are entirely full of shit. One I'm fond of is "Gamers these days are dumber" and "has to be dumbed down for the console crowd!"

I'm old as gamers go but I really don't think there was an era where game and intelligence were some sort of ubiquitous marriage. People like to say this but in which era exactly? The mainstream when I was very young was ... Mario. I didn't really enjoy Mario so much as a kid, preferring Sonic through into my teens (and then getting out of console gaming when Sonic should have too) but either or you really can't make an argument for Mario being an especially harder to play game than say, Call of Duty. Have you ever played a fucking FPS on a console? It's quite a bit more difficult than Mario's beep boop run jump gameplay, at least from a mechanical perspective. You could sort of argue that RTS games require 'more' out of the player than either, but RTS games never "Dumbed down" or "dumbed up" anyone. They're just there and they're pretty much the same. There is perhaps some progression of titles that "would have been" for the PC slipping onto the Xbox or what have you, but I'm A) not entirely sure those titles would have existed at all without consoles B) actually any stupider. More RPGs which aren't dumbed down are actually just really irritating and filled with tedium, which in case you haven't solved all the fucking mysteries sherlock, are not actually on any level an interaction with your potential or lack thereof intellect.

So I think that's a load of shit and I think waxing nostalgia about a past era were marketing departments didn't fuck rape the sequel engine is probably intellectually dishonest as well. Still it's hard to really look at Bioshock Infinite and not seriously wonder at least a little bit about the stillborn progression as it goes. I was re-watching some Yahtzee videos (Zero Punctuation) to see how he felt about stuff I'd recently played and watched Bioshock 2's review. I agreed pretty much totally in regards to this one, the game largely did not need to exist and wasn't very good. It was good enough to finish, but not really better than say reinstalling the first game and just replaying it again.

This is a snapshot of Bioshock Infinite's wikipedia page at the time of this review, whenever the fuck that is. The problem here, if one is not certain, is that the game isn't on speaking terms with actually being FUCKING OUT, OR PLAYABLE. There is more detail here than most games I've played or will ever play, in spite of the fact none of these people have to my knowledge played it. Maybe they have, at which point ... Should wikipedia seriously be hosting what is essentially an internally review product shot? (Maybe there's something here to be discussed regarding the natural progression of media outlets arriving and eroding until they become 'mainstream journalism' but cyclical shit is JUST THAT)

But still I digress - the part of this game that I truly well and hate is that it's named "Bioshock" in the first place. Bioshock itself is billed as the spiritual sequel to "System shock" a series I've never played but have been told I'm a bad person for not playing. Tough but fair. The name Bioshock comes from the impact of genetic engineering techniques either on your person, or on a society, at least on a general level. The SHOCK of BIOtechnology. Har, dee har, har... har... I mean maybe it's actually named for two programmers eating too much Domino's pizza and brewing up some truly shocking biology. Maybe. The SHOCK of colon BIOlogy?

What exactly is Bioshock about this one? It appears to grope the same "We're nouveau artists of the sublime video realms" tree as Bioshock -or at least the same low hanging branches- in that this giant paragraph here seems to talk about nazism, but beyond that I'm at a loss. Does it have the same characters? No. Same mechanics? Other than guns in general it sounds like no. Some connection to the story? Coy answers from the marketing department who haven't determined the first fucking thing about their game. Fire all marketing departments.

So they could have called it "something"Shock and most likely it would have fit fine. I would say 'Skyshock' is the easiest from what the game seems to be about, which sounds like Bioshock and I think 99% of the population would get it. I'm not really suggesting that name, since that name is sort of mopey.

But they literally think we're so unbelievably stupid we can't assemble the publisher, the developer, the lead programmer, the genre, the word shock and successfully deduce that this is the successor to Bioshock. It's a real fucking mystery is what it is, and there just can't ever be enough clues! Just never enough FUCKING CLUES! Need INFINITE CLUES! So instead they re-use the same name and then tack on Infinite, as if to reinforce we're infinitely stupid and can't solve the mystery of the missing Bio.

Infinite fuck yous, Bioshock. Not buying you til you're $5 anyway cuz I still haven't beaten ALL THESE GAMES.

Oh and on a side note if you're one of those arrogant and self-congratulating plebs who like to talk about how 'people these days are so gosh darn stupid look at blah blah' you should really ground yourself in a deeper understanding of the material at least insofar as human history. Not only do basic statistics technically argue otherwise, but the most basic points just don't make any sense.

I mean the most ironically parroted one is the bit about how only idiots breed with idiots nowadays, which sounds like good logic if you're a nazi and you think eugenics is proven to work but ... It just doesn't add up. Have you looked at your ancestors? I mean really looked at our pool of ancestors? There's several generations who engaged in gun warfare where they lined up shoulder to shoulder and shot at each other. Before that they were peasants in the dark ages, or busy fucking goats in rome. It's a wonder we don't have goat genome in our blood stream somehow. Or thought the sky was made of Magic. When were our ancestors brighter? Maybe there's a couple glorious civilizations, like say ancient China, but those people turned around and starved to death because they decided to just stop farming.

And sure, you can point to popular culture. Go for it. Thirty years ago was the eighties mother fuckers. Reality TV ain't got shit on this! Bright neon rollerblades and rapping Turtles!