An Old Gamer take on E3, or Oh good it's the MS presentation, nap time!

Another E3 has come and gone, or is still going on, or something and you can probably guess my sentiment pretty quickly from how vague I sound.

Not pictured: Me napping

I read discussion of maybe half the Microsoft E3 "thing" which may or may not count as 'advertising' or 'razors marching up the street' depending on your personal perspective of game giants getting on stage and announcing some stuff that may or may happen in the upcoming whatever period of time. E3, like all gaming long con advertising - And that's all I'm going to call it, seriously - is mostly just announcements of vague promises and then some demos running on hardware that might not exist, or of builds that may never exist, or just other things.

care potato

None of this crap excites me and yes, I fully realize, can articulate in simplicity and totality: It literally and figuratively is Not For Me. But reading through people slamming Microsoft, the schizophrenic house divided org chart like trenches in WW1 company it is, two very real things did actually occur to me. Two actual "feels" in an otherwise long yawn at gamers desperately trying to earn cred with their peers by figuring how to best summarize the atrocious rape joke MS scripted into its, uh, Killer Instinct presentation? MS is boring, and people talking about it is boring, and yes I'm boring too. Also please never mind the bit where people got excited MS is running games on the Win7 kernel, or how companies that don't have production hardware don't demo it on prototype hardware, or all that other false excitement press where we monkey around about things that Can Not Ever Actually Matter.

The biggest thing I think about whenever I dip my toe into gaming media and mediums outside actually moving the bits and bytes in my personal computer is a friend of mine talking about Blizzard about for years back. Though the sentiment is nothing new and nothing exclusive to Blizzard by any stretch, it resonated with me. He essentially painted all Blizzard convention appearances as gleefully clapping your hands and cheering as various dudes got up on stage and then lied to you about ideas that they probably wouldn't be putting in a game you wouldn't playing any time soon, and if you were playing the game it probably wouldn't be patched in within the remaining time before the heat death of the universe. As such, it basically boils all E3 and media con convention advertising panel presentation stuff as a long

picture this

blog-post from a

teenage girl about what she'd like to do to [Popular pop star] assuming she got her hands on him. The tone is breathless and excited, with lots of gaps and pauses as description fails to really conceptualize anything that ever will happen.

And that's it. It's all dreamy and lovely, a perfect white wedding fantasy, but really it doesn't amount to much of anything. And I'm specifically using teenage girl because I want you to picture something willowy and sweet, not what teenage boys generally think of which is more what the general fanboy populace has going on in their heads. We'll talk about that now, and please forgive my usage of gender stereotypes - They're cultural, not biological, I'm not a hater.

Which segues into the next sentiment I get, something newer and more interesting to me. Gamers are slowly waking up to the fact that the industry isn't really doing them any favors, and you see little dribbles of this at the edges of certain topics. I don't necessarily want to present that as a vast unified paradigm shift, but rather a very individual yet group comprehension as gamers by themselves kinda (but never totally!) clue in. You're allowed to talk shit about EA, or Sonic games, or whine about always on DRM or certain other topics but on the most part we as gamers generally just keep our heads in the sand. And other parts of the metaphor are, in fact, up in the air...

We buy into something and then you see this weird bias crop up as teenage boys try to work through two emotions in parallel: The fact they love gaming and what they game on, then the sordid reality that gaming doesn't usually love us back. Not as much as we love it, anyway. A feedback loop of resentment burns a hole between the two topics and you're left with a bunch of negative energy you want to direct somewhere. And oh boy how they ever do so! Fanboyism has raged so hot since the time of nintedo vs sega and only gotten more absurd as the anon structure of the internet brings us new ways to take out our grievances on the world. Fanboy debates are essentially how I imagine the clown college debate team would look, all spilling out of tiny cars and honking at each other with nothing meaningful to say.

In turn, the gaming giants of the world have come to an inverted conclusion: All this whining doesn't amount to anything. All this hurly-burly yell at MS about imagined slights and real ones is little more than barely influential upon their bottom line. If the Xbone or WiiU fail, it'll come down to the relationship the manufacturers have with game development and not really how gamers feel about DRM or the kinect watching you watch porn. We are given negativity in spades and then allowed to fire hose it out at convenient meaningless points. Then, as studies have shown (or just the fact D3 kept selling while it's meta critic score was in the toilet and the servers didn't work) once we're spent we open our wallets to them anyway. Feel free to watch this, too, if you want http://www.slideshare.net/bcousins/paying-to-win

I just find it really boring. They advertise. We rage and/or geek out. Then we spend. The loop continues over and over. We might not give them our money, but it won't be because we were boycotting it, since if you're emotionally invested enough to be angry you probably want it. And then you probably buy it. You know why? Because Gaming is actually still pretty great and still amazingly cheap. It costs $12 to see Iron Man go being boring on the big screen, for $12 I've bought 3-10 games on average! That's like x100 the entertainment!

Granted, like I said, it's all not for me. I don't buy new games, and no it's not because I'm some elitist snob who doesn't blah blah NEW GAMES ARE UNCREATIVE or whatever nonsense. I buy games off Steam and honestly? I'm just so far behind on my backlog I can't assemble the enthusiasm to buy anything new. You can easily see how many games I've finished this year and I've bought double the number more in that same time-frame. I have a problem. And no, several of them are excellent titles I'm eager to get to - Spec Ops the Line, The Last Remnant, Gianna Sisters: Twisted Dreams, Kingdoms of Amalur and my friend bought me Dark Souls which good lord I really should be playing. It's a damn flood of interesting gaming! I'm drowning!

The funniest thing for me though was watching this guy over here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzerU6PVTV8 which is a video from March. The funniest thing about this -  It's a long complicated diatribe with a lovely voiced dude probably about my own age, and then there's 13 year old kids screaming at him for wanting loving from the xbone or that he 'should have waited for E3'. The video from March. Should have waited for E3. As if it diluted the message any.  It just made me laugh and laugh. The fanboys will get mad at you for saying consoles in general aren't that exciting. The resentment, even if taught by their peers to boys not angry about anything, is running through their blood. Why get mad? Why not just say, fuck you buddy, I'm going to game and I'm going to like it. Oh, that's right, because...

I'm not saying I agree with the bunnyhop show guy's point, just that I enjoyed the video and even more enjoyed reading the comments month later where people flung spittle in his direction. Although the PC gaming master race stuff, oy~

How do people seriously use the term from this ancient video and actually not realize "PC gaming master race" is a sarcastic term describing an unnecessary schism between two dopey groups of gamers? And what is that guy even saying? Amazing sports car? Have you ever been outside? Hello did you know Yahtzee was trolling? This is like when people use that damn slow clap gif, isn't it? Why are we so proud of being consumer whores?

Anyway, if you enjoyed E3 and there's hot new shit coming up, please don't tell me because oh god I need to idle for cards now too? Steam is actually giving me money for owning games to spend on other games? And the steam sale is in less than a month?

I will never be free. (and it's great, praise be the holy gabens)

Still RPG month: Risen

One of the ever increasing joys of the new age of computing is getting games from somewhere other than Japan. I'm not complaining about glorious Nippon, which has given so much, but it's nice to get another culture. I'm from Canada, so for me American games are pretty base, but Europe man, Europe is a bold new world.

The first moment where I really realized I was playing a European game was playing through King's Bounty: The Legend, a game I played through more than a couple times, where the main character married a 'Frog Princess' and she talked about having tadpoles. Whoa! Europe! What's going on? The Witcher is pretty weird like that too, Dwarves making jokes about tying Carrots to their dicks. You don't do that over here, all games are glum excursions through ultra violence. American games is brown town splattered with blood. You are only allowed to make jokes at the specific joking moment.

I picked up Risen entirely because of Risen 2, that being, Risen 2 sounded sweet. Pirate RPG! Well damn son, I like pirates. Let's try the previous game, made in 2009 (which isn't too far back!) to see how it is while we wait for the second game to go on sale. This is an excellent plan, one that can't possibly fail. Besides I paid $5 for it, which is the 3rd best class of price.

First class is the EA Origins coupon error, which allows you to buy any games under $20 for free. So Dragon Age: Whatever and Shank 2 were free. (Actually I guess Dragon Age wasn't quite free, since it's 21 gb, so there's an opportunity cost to getting that one installed) 2nd best is the Witcher price of 2.50, which is less than the price of just about anything worth buying. I'm digressing rather than talking about Risen. Risen isn't bad, but it's kinda hard to talk about.

Risen feels a ton like the opening of the first Witcher game, though much less in terms of both grounding you into the game mechanics and flavor. On the other hand, while it looks similar, it looks a fair bit better. The engine itself isn't that impressive, but it has some nice touches like dust motes, pollen and waves crashing that pleases the mind. The UI on the other hand is downright primitive, rustic like you'd playing a SNES game that somehow got ported to 3d. I'm not kidding here, it looks like Magic Sword or something.

But I mean, SNES games are sweet, right...

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!