Dare to be stupid

We all love dumb, cheesy media. Everyone, at one point or another craves a piece art that lets us turn our brains off, laugh at some dumb jokes ,get lost in some corny romance, or get high on the adrenaline fueled primal cravings for action. Some media is subtle and thought provoking, some media straddles the line between intelligent and cheesy, and some go all out, take no prisoners and indulge fully in their own campy-ness. Every level of cheese in a movie or book has it’s audience, even genuinely bad movies can amass a following on their lack of quality alone, but don’t think that campy media doesn’t have merit as art, or that it can’t be valued simultaneously for the things it does intelligently and the things it does stupid.

Game Feel and the Gun play “Dragon”

In regards to video games, the concept of  “game feel” is an ever illusive and nebulous concept that is pivotal to the perception of a game. Game feel is an all encompassing phrase used to describe how a game . . . well feels to play, and it can make even the most well designed games not fun to play. The controls, the look of the enemies, the jump sound, the shoot sound, the sound of coins being picked up, all of these things can add an extra layer of satisfaction to a game if done well.

Steam Green mile: The end of Valve’s community driven game voting system

The time has finally come. Like a killer on death row, Steam Greenlight slowly makes its somber march toward execution, atonement for it’s crimes! But is Greenlight truly to blame? Is such an execution justified?

Steam Greenlight had a lot of good ideas behind it. It was a user driven service that allowed budding developers to submit their games onto Steam for little money, and allowed Steam users vote for games that they would have loved to play, which has led to many great games being given a home on Steam’s marketplace through Greenlight curation.

Call of Duty Zombies: To infinity and below the bar

With November seeing the less than enthusiastically received release of Call of Duty : Infinite Warfare, and the subsequent release of the Zombies in Spaceland game-mode/map, I hearken back to my experience with the zombies game-modes of Black Ops 1 and World At War. I reminisce to the adrenaline fueled half-marathon, half-massacres that raged through the decrepit halls of Nazi strongholds, echoing with the frantic rhythm of heavy metal. The over the top guns, the over the top violence, the churlish and brash banter between the characters, and the utterly absurd story-line made for an indulgent, engaging experience that greatly contrasted with the dire, and drab personality that the Call of Duty campaigns always provided.

Heroes of Overwatch Part 1: Every man Hero

First off: Overwatch is a great game, and from a purely gameplay perspective Overwatch is utterly superb. For each character in the game the movements are fluid, the weapons feel deadly, and the possibility space presented in the game makes every match an entirely unique experience. I like Overwatch’s mechanics allot, but I have always felt something was wrong with the game aesthetically.

Although I concede that my initial doubts of Blizzard not being able to keep the characters balanced, and the gameplay fresh have been, more or less dashed, I still harbor some levels of uncomfort with the characters of Overwatch. After playing the game for as long it’s been out, I think can articulate exactly why I, (and perhaps others) feel this unease. And ,although I have stated that Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch are fundamentally different, I will be comparing the lore and character traits of Overwatch’s heroes with Team Fortress’ mercenaries, as well as traditional comic book heroes in order to better explain my opinion.

Standing by the stranding

I love Hideo Kojima, I really do. His work on the Metal Gear series is astounding and he has proven himself to be quite the creative mind. With his newest project, Death Stranding fans of Hideo and his work are anxious to see what he can do when unrestricted by the shackles of his previous employer… Konami ,yuck!

Death Stranding, it seems, is yet another example of a well know creative mind breaking their chains and really sticking it to there previous employers, who just didn’t care about the needs of fans, by making a game themselves. What’s the other example you ask? Mighty Number 9, the game that got delayed three times, launched buggy on all systems, had uninspired, un-creative, characters, levels, bosses, story, music, dialog, and gameplay, and just looked bad, not awful, but bad.

Mighty Number 9, just like Death Stranding had a well known, well respected creative head, who worked on a very popular game series, break free from the restrictions placed by the company they worked for in order to create “the game that fans wanted”.

Now, Mighty No. 9 came into being under circumstances vastly different than Death Stranding , (at least in the realms of financing and… *sigh* marketing). Death Stranding wasn’t Kickstarted, and currently has the support of Sony, a highly professional company, behind it. I’m not saying Death Stranding is going to end up like the bombshell that was MN9, but I do want to call attention to the similarities to Death Stranding’s and Mighty Number 9’s upbringing.

I have faith in Hideo Kojima

I want to believe that he’s going to write/ direct/ create something that’ll knock our socks into orbit. I believe that Hideo Kojima will give more love and care to Death stranding than Keiji Inafune, (the hack that led the development of Mighty Number 9) ever would have given to his project. I love Kojima’s work, his vision, but there’s still that part of me that is skeptical, cynical, rather about this whole situation. Maybe Kojima will blow it, and reveal himself to be a hack just like Inefune. Maybe the all writers, directors, and designers we praise as creative geniuses are just as un-creative, cold ,and greedy as the corporations they break away from.

Only time will tell whether or not Hideo’s future work will be as ground breaking as his previous, but either way I’ll keep an eye on it. I’ll keep coming.

Romance of War

There once was a time when war was something alluring, awe inspiring, enticing. It brought pleasure to gods, it brought glory to nations, and made boys into men. War was, to mankind, something beautiful, poetic, and powerful, but the idea of glorious combat started to die off in time.

War turned into horror in the 19th-20th century. Conflicts became global endeavors, and troops were sent further and further away from home to fight in alien dwellings. With more sophisticated capabilities, mankind created new weapons: tanks, machine guns, ,mustard gas, fighter planes, battleships, attack choppers, missiles, napalm, atomic bombs.

War stopped being a matter warriors clashing blades to defend dominions and became a world wide, expensive, excruciatingly efficient, killing contraption that is far too much of a worry than it’s worth.

Augment your President

The United States elections are almost identical to video game pre-order campaigns. A whole lot of time and money is used to fuel a hype train that shows a product/individual in the best light possible, in hopes of being funded/voted for before anyone has any real idea if they’ll actually be satisfied with the product/individual.

In the games industry, the popularity of pre-orders has gradually declined as consumers, video game consumers are wising up to both the great detriment pre-orders bring to games in the industry, and what little they get back from pre-ordering. If pre-ordering keeps loosing steam, eventually games publishers will be forced to make a return on investment via the quality of a game’s gameplay, rather than a games marketing campaign.

But let’s imagine a games industry were pre-ordering is the only means to get a game, and that you can’t play any new game unless you purchased it before release. You’d be investing in a game based entirely on its marketing. You are buying a game based on all of its supposed good aspects, and you will have no idea about that games problems, big or small until it releases.

The Future of Gaming Culture, and Culture Culture

Have you ever, really considered how much games have changed in the past, what? 60+ years of existence? Have you taken the time to think about how much games have changed in just the past twenty, ten, or even 5 years?

From rudimentary simulations of tennis on a super computer, to full scale, photo realistic warfare on a home computer, the landscape of games, their graphics their hardware, and their gameplay has evolved drastically.

But you know that already, right? You know that pong came before Pacman, which came before Call of Duty. Everyone knows how technology, in general has improved since the advent of the telegraph, it’s simple, but have you considered how that tech, gaming tech in particular has shaped and, will shape our culture?

Valve to achieve world domination?

So ,Valve is now making a game console. It’s not unexpected, Valve essentially owns PC gaming so naturally they’ll, like any successful empire, sail out to expand their domain.

With Valve being the number one distributor of PC games and setting out to conquer the console market, one wonders how big Valve can get, and more importantly, what they could do with that power. Valve is a very well respected company for both it’s development and distribution of games, but would this respect be important to Valve once it essentially becomes the one corporation to rule them all?