If you’re one to go around video and computer games media, you’ve probably already a few things that are happening with digital media. First is that Sony’s announced that after the 31st of August, users will be unable to access Studio Canal properties in Germany and Austria, 314 and 137 titles respectively. Sony cites evolving license agreements as the reason, which means altogether nothing. It can mean Sony doesn’t want to pay for Studio Canal’s license fees, or that their license agreement just came to an end and nobody in Sony was eager to continue. Hard to say, but license issues are like this; the consumer will get shafted. According to Sony themselves, they’ll be removing these items from the user’s libraries. A Variety article points out that Sony was to allow access to these titles via on-demand, but the whole removing them from the libraries seems to be the overriding thing now. As for refunds or anything of that nature, of course, there won’t be any. As anti-consumer groups want to tote, you don’t buy to own when it comes to digital; you purchase a license to lease that item and the provider can take that license away from you any time for any reason they wish to.
The second thing is how Ubisoft managed to piss people off again by announcing Decommissioning of online services. This means killing off a number of titles’ online functionalities, ranging from patches, multiplayer, and DLC. This has happened before and will keep happening as long as the games-as-service model exists and functions are tied to being online. They also managed to stumble harshly with Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD on Steam, where they had the game -75% discount, and announced they’d be pulling it off after they made the sales. The language on the Steam store page makes it appear as if the game would be completely unavailable for the platform, but Ubisoft called their PR people to convince the people who had already “purchased” the game would still be able to access the title, but not its online components. The whole shebang comes from Ubisoft wanting to close down uPlay on certain platforms. It was a massive PR failure on Ubisoft’s part, but things were as expected.
The third bit is how last year’s news about Apple being sued for terminating his Apple ID has made some rounds as a result of the two previous bits. The plaintiff Matthew Price had spent almost 25k dollars on content attached to his Apple ID. Of course, when Apple closed his account, citing violations of terms and conditions, he lost access to all of it. Price says his account was terminated without notice, explanation, policy, or process, nor does the claim itself state what were the alleged violations. He wasn’t the only one who found themselves losing access to content he paid for. David Andino is the leading plaintiff in a class-action suit against Apple over the deceptive use of “rent” and “buy.” ArsTechnica had an article on it, and it covers all the basic bases just as well. Be it Valve, Sony, Apple or Netflix, they have the same unvoiced thing when you sign in and give them your money. The only difference here is that Apple voiced it as an argument in this case; “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely. US District Court Judge John Mendez rejected this, and Apple’s motion to dismiss the case. Amazon’s in the same pickle jar, having to defend themselves from consumers who have lost their digital libraries.
Back in 2019, the French court ruled that Valve should allow users to sell the goods they’ve bought on Steam. Valva argued that they were a subscription-based service, but the court disagreed, as the games were sold in perpetuity. This led Valve to change its terms and services as well as revise the language used across Steam. Steam still geoblocks titles and has differences in pricing, as well as preventing resales of games you’ve “bought.”
The whole issue stems from the languages these companies use. The terms buy and purchase give the idea of gaining ownership over an item. Digitally, ownership has been drastically eradicated from the equation. Without reading the Terms of Service, you wouldn’t probably know that you’re more or less buying a license for an item, which the corporation has any and all power over. If they wish to take away that license from you for any reason they wish to, they will. Physical media may be going the way of the dodo slowly (though it was first supposed to be dead in 2006, then 2012, then by 2020…), but ownership should not. Not only Valve’s practices with Steam have eradicated almost a generation’s worth of idea of what owning something and carrying the responsibility for it means, but we’re also taught that owning nothing means we’re going to be happier. Leasing and renting are being pushed as the future, yet that kind of future is looking grimmer and darker with every new iteration. Ownership means responsibility, which is being taken away from you, willing or not. If you carry no true responsibility for your actions and items you have, there is no reason to care or put effort. However, you’ll also be prevented from modifying, working, or doing anything to the same items, as they are not yours. It will lead your life being led into a box, where these companies are able to fully dictate how you act and what you consume. All because you’re dependent on their products, and even a small violation can lead to contract termination, effectively losing your way of living.
This may sound like a dystopia. Mostly because it’s all the little things that are piling on top of each other, but also because there are worldly political and economical factions that are gunning for it at your expense. Losing ownership is going backward in the overall progression of western civilization. One of the reasons companies like John Deere have had a hard time striking through the African heartland is that outside the major farmers, the land is owned by community leaders, not farmers themselves. At any moment, their land can be seized from them and given to anyone else. There is no incentive to put the effort into nurturing the farmland, which Africa has about nine of every ten farmable acres in the world, because the moment you make it work, it all can just vanish. All the modern and big equipment you might need to run a successful farm, alongside the workfoce, just isn’t worth investing in. Not to mention sabotaging these people putting the effort in isn’t uncommon, be it via damaging crops or just outright breaking the equipment. So, it becomes easier just to go with the minimum effort so you could keep the small bits that you don’t even own. This sort of lack of ownership isn’t uncommon in world history, and every time people get to own their land and their equipment, they start to care and put the effort into it. The exact same applies to the ownership of common good items and digital entertainment media. When the customer is given the responsibility of the product, be it what they produce or buy, there is care given. When it comes to working, things like giving the worker more responsibility and ways to properly do their work are highly important. For example, putting effort to develop new methods to make the work more effective and easier is rewarding in itself, and employers should take note of this. Sadly, the modern work environment is very stuck to certain ways and methods, and any sort of development that doesn’t come from the middle management tends to be shot down.
Funny that, ownership is very much individual freedom, something that you can express yourself through. That too is part of personal responsibility, something that is being slowly but surely eroded away from you.
So, the future of digital property will be the lack of it at this pace. You’ll put your money into subscription services and never consider it a loss, although, in the long run, you’re the losing party. All this can be changed if the customers will it. Everything runs on money, and you yourself know the best whether or not corporations and their products are worth it. When it comes to digital goods, be it on Steam or a sub to Netflix, take a few moments to consider whether it’s really worth it. You probably already have tons of games and movies around in one way or another. Don’t follow the new dangled shiny things in front of you, but put more time into the things you still have unfinished. It’s never going to go away; it’s digital after all. It’ll never truly vanish, not even when licensing agreements are to expire.
Unless it is a games-as-service model. Then you can just ignore it all and wish some hacker manages to make the online work via custom servers and hacks. Even better if you take up the mantle and become that hero yourself.
Devilotte with her underlings and you probably will never get to play as her in Capcom Fighting Collection
Capcom Fighting Collection is almost upon us, with the usual marketing heads and Internet influencers having early access codes to showcase and market the title for you. In effect, you’d get the same experience from watching captured footage from a CPS2 arcade board, or just random Fightcade streams. There’s no reason to assume the Collection won’t have equally as competent emulation as what you have access to now. This makes the Fighting Collection a nice collection for arcade purists for sure, and online for some of the games is nice, but the reality of competition is that you can already play all the games in this collection in the aforementioned Fightcade, or FC for short. Sure, it’s illegal to download ROM files and all that, but again, not many really give a damn. As these are direct ports of the arcade games, Capcom is fighting their own shadow here. Not all games have online in the Fighting Collection, something FC provides, and if they’re raw arcade ports, they lack options and additions some titles got with their home ports. For example, Cyberbots had three additional playable characters, Chiyomaru Kagura, Princess Devilotte de Deathsatan IX (a fan favourite), and SHADE, that weren’t accessible in the arcade original. They also added full-voiced dialogues to the game. If you’d be going with the Saturn port of the game, you’d get a nearly arcade-perfect port, something Capcom had a knack for doing for the Saturn. Few cut frames of animation here or there because the hardware is a fair trade in exchange for more content and voices. We may disagree on this, but seeing Capcom already has done all this work for the previous port, there should be no reason to have their subcontractor do any less than their best to match up against these older ports. Of course, arcade perfection will be used as an excuse and some will buy it. Capcom has already made their money on these arcade games though. CPS2 encryption wasn’t broken until the millennium had changed, and at that point, Capcom had moved on from the system and wasn’t making profits off of them.
Shuhei Matsumoto had an interview with John Carson of Gameinformer about Capcom Fighting Collection, which of course serves more as a PR fluff than anything else. Though not just for the customer, but also for the industry as well. While fans have seen this collection more as a Darkstalkers collection with some other games thrown in, the reality seems to be that KOBUTA and MUUMUU, long-time programmers at Capcom, finally wanted Warzard/Red Earth ported to home consoles. Matsumoto confirms that the versions will be arcade ports and specifies that they’ll be versions used in tournaments. While it is nice to see these titles preserved for modern consoles, the fact that emulation and gaming archiving scenes have already done that. All these versions, and many others of these titles, have already been preserved for future generations. It may be through emulation, that has been more of a necessity than anything else. Game companies themselves have been notoriously bad at archiving their own code and artwork, something that Sega is infamously bad at; they’ve lost all the masters and source codes for Saturn games. This is why all Saturn games’ ports, like Princess Crown on the PSP, are running through Saturn emulation. Emulation which isn’t exactly accurate still. Saturn’s architecture wasn’t exactly orthodox and is a challenge to tackle properly. While we can discuss whether or not emulation is a proper contender against an official product, the question of how these have been ported to modern systems does make it relevant. If these are running on an emulator, then the comparisons should be completely relevant. If they’re proper ports made to run on modern hardware, then we should give them all the support we want. I’m guessing all the games in Fighting Collection will run through emulation, so in practice, there shouldn’t be any difference in you choosing between Fighcade and Fighting Collection; you’re getting the same shit anyway, except FC can update its emulators for even more accurate results.
Matsumoto: I genuinely want these titles to be played once again on current gen consoles. I also want people who may have seen them but never had the chance to play them to get this opportunity. That said, we do not think that this will necessarily increase the possibility of these series being revived.
This quote also damns the whole Capcom Test, an old thing they’ve done and which I discussed two posts ago. Matsumoto lays it down nice and flat, something that game companies don’t really like to do. Transparency is a positive thing and grows trust with the customer, but that also means competition sees what you’re doing. Take the quote as it is; game series will not see a revival from you buying Collections. This will, at best, see Capcom putting out more collections. A few years ago I went through Capcom’s Investors report, which mentioned the revival old of IPs. This is the route they’re going with it, packaging old ROMs with emulators. Things like Mega Man 11 and Street Fighter IV were only possible due to these games having an internal champion that took it upon themselves to see pitch the title and take all the heavy glory. These games may make or break them. The future of old Capcom IPs is a zombie state in collections of all sorts, repackaged lovingly with bare-bones ports with bells and whistles added to them via picture galleries (of artwork you can track down on the Internet in higher quality thanks to scanners [I doubt there’s going to be much new content in this regard]) and online play (which is already provided by emulators that are probably more accurate than what Capcom is packing in.)
Old fans and customers had hoped for new entries in long-sleeping IPs, but ‘lo, just pay for ROMs and emulators.
This isn’t bashing Capcom or telling you not to buy the collection. This is more about whether or not Capcom is giving you any better options than what is currently available for all, piracy or not. Capcom could take some actions if they wished to do so, but that might sour the relationship with the hardcore fighting game fanatics that play these games all day around. This barebones collection is for the people who want to play certain titles online in an official capacity, Capcom enthusiasts, and new fans who just can’t be arsed to track down the proper ROM file and an emulator. Capcom’s fighting an uphill battle against an enemy of their own making of sorts, and with the promise of this Collection not affecting any future game developments and being just the raw arcade ROMs with their usual unrealistically high expectations for sales numbers, all this is so goddamn awkward. The Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, while admirable in scope in most cases, suffered from games stuttering, game dropping inputs, input delays, bad online code, the game volume having issues, and stuff like that. There’s no promise of Capcom, or their subcontractor, making things any better, except for online play. That’s what the talking heads and PR always seem to go towards nowadays and how online play has to be 10/10. There’s never a moment given that the games themselves need to be more than what’s already out there, especially when you can go for a better online play for all these titles now with FC and other alternatives.
What is the supposed reason for this Collection to even be? Maybe people will buy it and play and for an hour or two, then move onwards to something else, because that’s how things just seem to work nowadays. Hardcore fighting game players probably will throw in the money and never even touch the game because Fighcade exists. I’ll probably buy it just to get a legitimate version of Red Earth to play at home. That’s as good a reason as any. Putting this kind of thing together probably is relatively cheap, and can give support for future Collections as well as bring in some cash into Capcom’s coffer. If this Collection’s core reason to exist is to celebrate Capcom’s fighting game history, it’s not doing so well. While I’d like to see Capcom doing collections of games that haven’t seen wider ports from the original arcade and one-console-ports, that might not be the most sensible in terms of marketing and sales. Bolting all these one-time titles with Darkstalkers is a good move, something they probably could replicate by using the clout Rival Schools has among Capcom fans and throwing in Star Gladiator games and Kikaioh to form a theoretical Capcom 3D Fighting Collection. Power Stone has its own collection on the PSP already, which honestly is superior to the original games in many ways. It having an anime and all other stuff might just make the Capcom executive veterans nostalgic enough to try to put it out as a digital-only upscale for Steam. I’m eager to see what’s it gonna be when the game launches tomorrow, and despite all the perceived negativity I have here, there’s always a slimmer of hope its (hopeful) success just might give Capcom some ideas to try out something else that isn’t Street Fighter when it comes to fighting games. That’s a one-in-a-million chance though, so don’t rely on it.
The Capcom Test is an old term dating back to the 1990s, though the practice probably dates well into the 1980s when Capcom was becoming an arcade powerhouse. Capcom used to rent yellow arcade boards to arcade operators for a time to test the game among consumers and to encourage the operator to make a full purchase of the arcade title. With consoles, this had to change, especially with the death of rental stores. Now the method is to put out a collection or a limited-budget production title, like the numerous Darkstalkers collections, to see if sales would be generated to ensure a new, higher-budget title. Often the sales number and the revenue these Test games have to make is unrealistically high, as Capcom moved towards a high budget, high-revenue model with their mainline games since the early 2000s. Personally, I would put the shift starting from the original Resident Evil to Devil May Cry 2. DMC2 was developed by an ex-arcade development team that was out of their depth in making a console game of this calibre. It is a lynchpin game, where Capcom would slowly, but surely, move their focus further on bigger-than-life titles with grandiose visuals. By all means, titles like Monster Hunter were part of this, as the franchise had grown bigger and bigger in terms of how grandiose it is despite the play part subdued. Hell, certain elements have been completely excised from Monster Hunter World. There has also been a further focus on the framing story sequences, which have slowed Capcom games down quite a lot. Mega Man is a good indicator of how Capcom sways. Aside from Mega Man 11, things have been very quiet, baiting with nostalgia via licensing.
The very recently announced Capcom Fighting Collection is, by all means, a Capcom Test. Social Media has people asking others to buy the game as it is seen as a Test for Darkstalkers series, a series that has already had more Tests than most other franchises. While yours truly is a fan of the series and would love to see a new entry, I also highly doubt this collection will yield any positive results for the fans. Capcom often has unreasonably high expectations of their titles, as any title is more or less expected to make Resident Evil or Monster Hunter tier revenue. That is not going to happen, as there is a finite amount of money the consumers can shell out and Capcom’s competition is harsh. Street Fighter 6, which got a teaser, too, did not exactly lit the audience. Simply displaying a fujoshi’s wet dream Ryu in RE Engine is not enough to make out what the game will be like. Sure, most people who have been in the arcades or given a glance at the fighting game scene know how a Street Fighter generally functions, but as usual, the core audience wants and needs to see and know more.
Would probably do good to showcase what’s been talked about
This Collection probably is not testing just Darkstalkers in a vacuum. While there is an obligatory Street Fighter II thrown in there, the rest of the titles are peculiar. Warzard/Red Earth is a CPS-3 system game that has not seen a homeport until now. Should’ve included all three Street Fighter III games while they were at it. Cyberbots is a cult game with little to no audience or live scene. Pocket Fighters is mostly a throwaway, it is not going to make any ends or means. What is peculiar about this collection is that it only has 2D fighting games. There is no Rival Schools, Star Gladiator, Power Stone or Tech Romancer. Not even a word is being whispered about Street Fighter EX titles in a collection, and I am sure Arika, as the developer of the games and owner of the series original originals, would be willing to cooperate. The reality probably is that this is a reasonable budget title for Capcom to test waters whether or not there is an audience for a new fighting game to go alongside Street Fighter but yet is distinctly different in visual and style. Darkstalkers still retains a very unique look, with the whole Western cartoon animation thing going on with its Universal Horror monster closet, while Cyberbots is strong mechanical mayhem to a tee. Red Earth is deeply rooted to its character growth system and will offer only a limited interest due to its low number of four playable characters. However, I believe this is the only way we would have ever got Red Earth ported; as a port of a collection.
Nevertheless, the styling is clear; a standard and safe Street Fighter II fair, a horror fighter, an SF mecha fighter, and a fantasy-themed fighter. All titles are going to use rollback netcode, so at least online play should be nice and nippy. If I were somebody at Capcom looking whether or not to greenlight a new project based on one of these games, I would have a line of code that would record how many hours each of the games are played to see what series, and what iteration in case of Darkstalkers, is the most popular and go with that. For better or worse, statistics still rule.
Maybe we’ll get at least a Capcom 3D Fighting Game Collection if this one sells reasonably to justify porting their 3D fighting games to modern platforms. I
The other side of the coin is that we are on Mega Man‘s 35th anniversary year as well. We have yet to see any kind of title being announced. Sure, it’s late February and there is a lot of year left, but there is not much Capcom can do in regards of collections. The latest Collections are not very old and are still in circulation, so putting out a new one wouldn’t be the best move to pull. Sure, something like Mega Man Legends collection would be nifty, but that’d also put the lens on the cancelled Mega Man Legends 3, and that’s something that probably salted the ground with Mega Man quite a lot. Mega Man is the other side of the coin due to how it depicts Capcom’s priorities. The best we can expect is a game during the Blue Bomber’s 40th anniversary. I honestly don’t expect a full-fledged Mega Man game on our shelves in the next five years.
There is no definitive way to say whether or not past Capcom Tests have been successful. When it comes to arcade games, we definitely can see how certain games floated to the top and became the cream of Capcom history. We can mostly point to Darkstalkers as a prime example of how the Capcom Test has flunked a series. I would say that the same can be appointed to the Mega Man series, which is now in the mobile game hell with Mega Man X DiVE. However, looking at a certain lack of titles that have come from Capcom’s collections as of late, chances are that even if the Fighting Game Collection sells, the hopes for new Darkstalkers should not be raised. Vote with your wallet and showcase the game, if you want to make your voice heard.
Though there’s always the question if modern Capcom can actually produce a new fighting game that isn’t a hyper-realistic million-dollar piece. All this sounds nice, but seeing how Capcom is doubling down on making the most Hollywood-like top-tier graphics experience with their RE Engine, the question that has to be asked is whether or not there is anyone who could head a cartoony horror fighter. Darkstalkers is very much a cartoony fighter with bright colours despite its motif. While Darkstalkers themselves are serious things. While the story hardly comes through the games themselves, their background is rich and gives all of the more than just that one shade of blood red. There’s whole mythology you can only see in sourcebooks. While the story and the result of these matches were equally as serious, the animations were always tightly knit to the Tom and Jerry kind of gag animation. You could cut your opponent open mid-fight, but he’d just flip back together and get up. It’s tons of fun, and in my older days, I’ve slowly come to appreciate the craftsmanship the series has in terms of animation over titles like Street Fighter III and King of Fighters XIII. If Capcom would be making a new entry, I hope it’ll be colourful fun, filled with cartoony gore. I hope my fears are crushed and Capcom can actually rip themselves off from sticking to either anime or hyper-realism.
The second bit is that Darkstalkers is known to be a hard as hell game to get into. While the first and the second game are relatively easy and simple, that’s only by comparison to modern mechanics in fighting games. Then you have Darkstalkers 3, or Vampire Saviour, a game that has people who want to get into it, and people who have played it for good two decades or so. There’s very little middle-ground when it comes to skill ceilings. The game’s speed is still unmatched, and the mostly polished mechanics make a game that’s very hard to get into. Sure, there are a few bullshit regulations and rules on how some of the mechanics work and Dark Force is utterly useless with some characters, but those mostly add to the meta-skills the player has to learn. It’s easy to say that Guilty Gear is a poster boy for having a gimmick with each character, but Darkstalkers did that first by having the first character to airdash. One character in the original game’s cast could airdash as we think it nowadays, the others couldn’t. Sure, Morrigan’s forward dash would actually lift her off from the ground, but that’s not the same in function. Other characters have long hops that force them into an aerial state. All this is to say that while the very core basic walking might’ve been shared with all characters, characters would also have different ways to do more advanced movements, like dashing forwards or hopping or just disappearing for a moment while sliding forwards. I take that back, actually. Guilty Gear is still the poster boy for gimmick characters, Darkstalkers has characters that are built around certain unique options only accessible to a single or limited number of characters.
In the modern environment, where eSports is a thing and has to drive sales, I can’t see Capcom putting an effort into making a game that has a high learning curve which is also further affected by each character in a heavier manner than in Street Fighter or King of Fighters. Guilty Gear mostly has bullshit single-character mechanics that might as well be a whole different genre. I can still hear Jack-O playing tower defense in my head. Heavily in-depth and complex fighting games don’t seem to make good sales or nice eSports titles, especially if the game’s emphasis is blitz-speed with no pause of any sort for Super Moves. The cartoony animation has to carry that wow factor. Perhaps it’d be better if Capcom would make a new Cyberbots instead. Their realistic approach could work very well for that game, and there has been a serious lack of quality robot fighting games as of late. Alternatively, a new Red Earth title could emphasize player-build characters through an easy interface with expanded RPG-like growth mechanics and elements thrown in, but that’d be effectively Soul Calibur.
I’ll most likely be picking up this collection on launch day just to be able to play a legitimate copy of Red Earth without resorting to emulation. That’s a sticking point with some, seeing this collection moot because all the titles innit can be played through Fightcade. While an option, emulation doesn’t really showcase Capcom what the customers would like to have as it doesn’t show up in their revenue tape. In a sorted twisted sense, it can also show that people are completely fine playing the old games over and over again. All Capcom needs to do is to release a new collection every decade or so to test the waters. We’ve been through this a few times already. That’s kinda sad innit. Here we are, getting a collection of games we’ve played tons already throughout the years, just to test waters with if Capcom might want to make more money in making a new entry.
Capcom fans are weird beings. On one hand, the fans want new entries for their old games. On another, there’s always a want for something new. It’s just Capcom wants to test first if there are enough existing fans to justify making a new entry. God only knows how the hell Capcom ever manages to produce new IPs, but they really need to get on that boat too in the near future.
That’s an answer I’ve given few times when people have asked me about the whole shebang about MS buying Activision Blizzard. Sure, they gained applauded and popular IPs with and now can become the ultimate Western military shooting console with Bethesda’s RPGs and whatnot giving a countering balance. On the surface, it looks good for the Xbox in the future and most likely it’ll be a better platform for numerous games over both of Sony’s PlayStations in this regard. The Switch and whatever Nintendo’s cooking up next will be in its own ballpark again.
However, The Windows Company doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to company acquisitions. On the contrary, much like EA, Microsoft has more or less run their companies to the ground in one way or another. Rare is a perfect example. Banjo Nuts and Bolts is a mess and whatever the company did before is mostly remembered as a game Rare made rather than for their own merits. Battletoads looked exemplary in Killer Instinct and they allowed that modern, franchise-undermining soft-reboot to happen. Lionhead Studios had a strong start with Black and White and Fable, but thanks to The Movies failing Microsoft nabbed ‘em up just to produce more Fable with falling quality. We can discuss the merits FASA Studio had with their MechWarrior games, but MS ultimately decided to kill off the studio and license the studio’s games back to one of its original founders. Mojang is just a Minecraft studio, but the franchise’s growth has stalled significantly.
Bungie and Halo was a godsend gift to Microsoft and Xbox and is the sole reason why Microsoft is still kicking the brand around. However, Halo and perhaps a few other titles, everything Microsoft has done is just copying and following trends. Microsoft has not one creative decision under its belt that could be described as original. Nintendo at least has always been a follower as much as they have been a trendsetter. Sony is sort of falling between following and setting trends, but the trends they set have been more on accident rather than intentional. It’s more that Sony has tried to repeat business and technological successes rather gaming innovations. PlayStation 3 tried to create a new marketplace in a flash, similarly, how PlayStation 2 accidentally created a marketplace for DVDs in Japan the night it was released on. Both Microsoft and Sony catered their consoles as the media centers of your living room. In reality, they both kind suck at it.
If I have criticized that Sony lacks their own strong IPs that they could run with pride and prestige, Microsoft is, in all honesty, best known for Flight Simulator and Halo, and even here Bungie had been developing their game for a long time. Microsoft might have a want, or more likely a pressing need, to have their own IPs to contest Sony and Nintendo, but they have effectively failed in this core process. This shows a major weakness in Microsoft’s gaming business model and the lack of understanding of markets outside the US. It is out of weakness Microsoft has purchased Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, and we have yet to see anything solid from the Bethesda deal.
Gaming has not changed, though that is what numerous talking heads have voiced. This is normal business. Microsoft has obtained companies for their IPs so that their platforms would have a competitive edge against their two main rivals. All these IPs will most likely be fed to Microsoft’s game streaming service, of which I have yet to hear or read one positive thing about. I do not think a gaming streaming service will ever become truly mainstream unless games become shorter and more to the point. People do not have enough time to slog through tens or hundreds of hours of games. It works for music and movies just fine; they are something you do not actively engage in. Playing a game requires time and effort with concentration. Perhaps that is why game journalists are trying to push for the Skip-Game button. It is not that they could not learn the game well enough to beat, but they just do not have the time for them. People should not expect gaming to deliver similar passive media experiments. That would be just silly.
Still, Microsoft is intending to make their Cloud services to be worthwhile, and it is highly possible that they intend to include numerous Activision Blizzard titles into their services. As much as Google was touted to become the Netflix of gaming, chances are that Microsoft is aiming for that role. Even then, people really would like to have community ran servers, as it seems most of Microsoft’s online games still suffer from servers being down and preventing online multiplayer. I really wish companies would include local multiplayer functions more these days.
Microsoft’s GamePass will, of course, be the main thing to benefit in terms of IPs, but on a grander scale, this is Microsoft wanting to include more content in their whole digital ecosystem. Honestly, MS picking up Activision Blizzard seems to be a pre-emptying move to keep some other tech giant, be it Amazon or Meta, from acquiring them first and including these IPs in their particular ecosystems. If Microsoft had their own strong IPs to back to, they never would have found the need to make this purchase. The whole metaverse can be ignored, for now, it has no real relevancy outside being the moment’s hot discussion topic.
Of course, the question of whether or not these IPs were worth it. Blizzard has managed to effectively screw up their ‘craft games and their remasters to the point of fans taking things into their own hands. Word of Warcraft is losing people to that latest Final Fantasy MMORPG. Diablo III is still a disappointment. The whole company and every aspect of their IPs have been falling in the eyes of the consumer for the potshots they have taken at ‘em too. Blizzcon fiascos, capitulating to the Chinese Communist Party by banning players voicing for independent Hong Kong outside their games all the while displaying an innocent plastic face while having harassment issues at their company. Looking at all the big hitters there, Blizzard has mismanaged all of them to the point of stopping at a wall.
As for Activision, they never really had a good reputation. They’ve effectively been a smaller EA in that they buy smaller studios and effectively fuck them over. Raven Software developed some great games by using Id’s engines, some better than Id’s own games. Neversoft will always be connected to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Spider-Man alongside Treyarch. Infinity Ward birthed the Call of Duty franchise, which Activision has been riding on ever since their acquisition while cutting down companies like Raven Software from their high position and relegated them as nothing more than CoD support team. Gray matter Interactive developed one of the best sequels in Return to Castle Wolfenstein but got thrown into Treyarch to work in the CoD support teams. RedOctane did Guitar Hero and Activision effectively killed the franchise.
Activision has a lot of good studios under them, but nobody really likes what Activision has done with them. There are so many former studios that it isn’t even funny. So many unused IPs that are completely dead in the water. Even CoD, while printing money, is far less popular now than it used to be. Much like so many of these IPs, it’s run to the ground. As a whole Activision Blizzard has made some seriously stupid and regressive decisions and has backpedaled many opportunities to push their IPs forward. Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon revivals were well received and sold well, all things considered. Despite this, the dev teams were thrown back to the Call of Duty mines to work in a supporting developer role.
Funny that Microsoft now owns numerous family-friendly franchises that originated from Nintendo and Sony platforms.
Now, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer, the big dick running the Xbox brand, has stated that reviving old franchises, like Hexen and Guitar Hero, is on the table. While the consumers might see this as a great thing, a return to (their personal) glory days of gaming, stockholders don’t see it that way. These old IPs don’t really make the same amount of money. Thus, it could be possible that Microsoft might want to franchise or lease these newly gained IPs for other developers or whatnot to make a good buck on the side.
Another reason why Microsoft would have wanted Blizzard is to have a foothold in the Asian market. Xbox is still the rag dog that gets kicked around in the Orient, but with Blizzard, the Chinese market opens up that much more, especially with all the mobile phone games the Chinese and Koreans consume. The Japanese on the other hand most likely will still stay as an unsalvageable mess, unless Spencer really wants to change their methods. Spencer should follow what the Japanese have been doing but in reverse. Effectively, copy what Sucker Punch did with Ghost of Tsushima; take something Japanese, and make a somewhat Westernizer version of it to sell to the Japanese. The Japanese have been doing this as their main method of exportation, from cars to video games. Ghost of Tsushima showed that it works the other way too, as the Japanese audience loves the game. Credit where credit is due, Sony publishing the game was a good stroke and netted them some seriously needed credit amidst all the issues with their internal censorship that extends to the developers’ as well.
Microsoft has to respect existing contracts between Activision Blizzard and Sony. There will not be much exclusivity to be seen in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, I do wish Microsoft would simply cease putting any of their owned IPs on Sony’s consoles whenever they can just so Sony would be forced to think about their revenue streams first and foremost. However, Microsoft has to think through their growth and revenues now too, and expanding to Sony’s platform and making money on a PlayStation is win in their books. In the short term, we will not be seeing any sort of massive shift in gaming or change in content. If anything, it will take at least a few years until we see anything definitive coming from this deal, and even then, it might be extremely clashing due to the currently incompatible corporate structures and cultures between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. Sorting that shit, and the whole lawsuit Activision Blizzard has to deal with, takes time.
Sony might be seen as Microsoft’s main rival (Microsoft has really just followed Sony’s path of grabbing up studios and probably will be making extensive limited-time exclusives in the future) but really, we could also see this as a move to counter how much power Tencent has. Tencent has its fingers in so many Western and Asian studios that it is not funny, and most likely few of your games carry their name somewhere on the label too. Honor of Kings or Arena of Valor as known under its international title is the most profitable electronic game in history. It alone has contributed over 13 billion dollars to Tencent’s revenues since 2015 and continues to contribute with its 80 million daily active users. With Activision Blizzard under their belt and the revenue stream possibilities they now have open, Microsoft is in a much better place to contest with Tencent. On the side, all the money Tencent is making is also money the Chinese government is making.
Gaming hasn’t changed suddenly with this purchase nor has Microsoft gained a monopoly. Like most things, the game market is constantly moving and shifting. Making sense out of it is just as hard as any business is. Consolidation of developers under a bigger banner has been happening constantly, but that doesn’t exclude people from putting up their own development studios and publishers. Even if Microsoft and Sony would prevent developers from having games on their platforms, there are tons of alternatives, including Nintendo’s. It might not have the exact same popularity or consumer base, but you have to start from somewhere. The best first step in becoming popular and mainstream is to first become a cult classic. Not every game can be Super Mario Bros. or Street Fighter II.
The whole issue on the mainstream Internet media is far too US-centric. The IPs that are cited are most popular in the US, while European and Asian markets fluctuate how popular Microsoft’s games can be. Xbox itself may be more popular in the US, but it still has to fight tooth and nail in the European markets. We’ve covered Asian markets, so there’s that too. Looking at the global situation, this purchase seems to only benefit in the American and select European markets, with only droplets of Asian markets making a dent. Though even then I remember the news about Blizzard making quite the revenues in Asian mobile phone game markets, so that’s a bonus. There are no other home game console companies in the US, and the market is global. It’s not about an issue of Microsoft hogging all these companies and IPs to themselves when it comes to competition. The issue is what the competition is going to do in order to present their device as the superior option. The answer is as it has always been; have content that is able to compete with the opposition.
Personal opinion? I don’t really care for any of the IPs Microsoft acquired, but I do hope the purchase will go through fully and Microsoft will begin to consolidate all the IPs solely into their ecosystem to the point that its competitors have to find their own titles to counter. I wish to see the day when console libraries are vastly different and would be truly unique.
The usual rules apply; the game must have been on a physical media to count (unless there’s significant merit for it), 2021 must have been the year I’ve first time have had a copy of the said game, and the year of production doesn’t matter. As usual, these are not in any sorted order; the first listed game doesn’t mean it is better than the four after it. With all that laid out, I’ve noticed that I haven’t really played many new games this year, and have concentrated on older titles instead. theHunter: Call of the Wild ends up being my to-go stress reliever still from the last year, while certain other titles serve other roles on the side.
I admit that once again, I’ve found my resources being invested in other matters. A new home has taken a significant toll on me in many ways as has human relations. A broken PC Engine has limited my choice of games for it quite a lot. I’ve also found a certain lack of time to play games due to work and other necessities. It’s less than I’ve suddenly had more responsibilities and more that I’ve decided to not fuck around with things that will have longer-lasting consequences. Adversely, this has also affected my want to write more, but have lacked time for it. Ah well, there’s always the next year. Unto the list of games;
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together2011, PlayStation Portable
There’s not much to be said about Tactics Ogre or Ogre Battle that hasn’t been said already. It’s one of the best tactical role-playing game series that has been produced to date, which also spun off the best Final Fantasy title to date in Tactics. I decided to jump into the series this year after wanting to play something tactical and enjoyable for some time, and the Ogre series turned out to be a pretty good target. Now collecting those games into my shelf is another thing, so starting where the bar was lowest with the PSP remake of Let Us Cling Together was an easy choice. While a lot can be and has been said about the game’s historical inspiration in its narrative, with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the end of enforced peace between Croatians, Bosnians and Serbians, the play really is its driving force in the end.
Building your own team and fine-tuning the synergy between your units and their skills is extremely enjoyable, albeit also very time-consuming. This is due to the need to grind as usual, but the end result often gives a strong, well-balanced team. Sure, the game can be somewhat easily broken even without the use World Tarot system, after which the Japanese subtitle Wheel of Destiny was given. In this, after beating the game you are able to skip back to story points in the game with your current units and make different path decisions.
Additional tweaks make the PSP remake somewhat easier game than the Super NES original, like being able to rewind back to max 50-turns, class rebalances that make their end-forms more breaking while being more crippled at the start, experience points are given as classes rather than individually, permanent death on the field has a 3-turn count with 3-lives backup and such. However, players can choose to handicap themselves and ignore most of the tweaks from the original if they so choose to. One of the best additions to the game is an overhead map, which hardcore fans like to equate to chess. Sadly, all this reminds us that the game got tweaked quite a lot, but visually it’s still the same title. Higher-resolution character artwork looks nice, but some sprite assets don’t really look all that good in comparison to the new higher resolutions portraits and even text boxes. It creates a mish-mashed look. Remaking the game from the grounds up with modern low-polygonal 3D assets for the playfields and perhaps even replacing the character sprites with proper 3D models would’ve made things less jarring. The overhead map becomes essential, as with the current sprite maps, you can’t rotate them, something that would’ve made the game that much more.
Nevertheless, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together is a damn fine game independent of whatever version you are playing it in. The PSP version is still rather easy to find and not terribly expensive, while the English PlayStation version can break a wallet. Of course, Japanese versions are readily more available, but you’ll be faced with a language barrier.
Last Gladiators 1995,Sega Saturn
I can’t say no to a video pinball title when I see one. If we’re honest, making a good video pinball title is hard, and you’ve essentially got two choices to go with; either make it a simulation or embrace the video game format and go nuts what it could be. While the NAXAT Crush series of pinball games are more of the nature of video games, Last Gladiators embrace the simulation aspect. Surprisingly, where video pinball will always lack in terms of kinetic controls and that simple feel of real buttons on the sides of the pinball cabinet, the atmosphere and design have been nailed like no other.
Just by looking at the game’s footage, you can tell a few things it got so damn right. The field design is limited to one screen, but everything has been laid out as if it was a real table. No scrolling back and forth, no gimmicks that wouldn’t be possible on a real table, text and colours are appropriate for an actual table’s screen. The sound is spot on, with one of the best rock soundtracks from the era and the constant barrage of pinball sounds you can expect. Even when text is flashing on the screen above the playfield, it is short enough not to mess with your concentration. Different guides are positioned to the sides with arrows in a manner that’s not to obscure the field itself.
The game offers four fields, all of which have their own theming and concentrated gimmick. This might make an individual table somewhat short in gimmicks, but they’re rather concentrating on doing those few things right. Some modern pinball games like to throw tons of different kinds of gimmicks on one table without much balance, so going back to something that offers multiple tables with their own strong designs with less content per table is a nice breeze of fresh air. Designing a pinball table is stupidly hard and becomes geometrically harder with each introduced goal and gimmick. However, there is a slight over-reliance on ramps, so on a longer session that might become a dulling effect when jumping between the tables.
The most important bit in any video pinball game is in ball physics, and much like how I’ve sung NAXAT Crush series praises, Last Gladiator nails it. The visuals add an impressive heft to the ball, the sounds add to it even more and controlling the ball feels heavy and accurate. All this of course adds to the need for instant action and reaction, something that modern flat-screen televisions and screens still have an issue with. Playing with a good ol’ CRT is your best option, with a nice surround system to go with. Trying to run the game on an emulator didn’t really help. The latency of modern hardware just didn’t cut it.
The game is nothing short of a burst of pure energy. The way it is distilled fun and game in a package that we don’t get nowadays all that much throws it at the top of my list. I wish we had real pinball tables still around here.
Cotton Reboot 2021, Steam, Switch, PlayStation 4
The Cotton series of games is again one of those 1990’s Japanese exclusives that saw very little attention in the West. Mind you, even in Japan the series was more a cult classic than anything else after its arcade-original game. Yet it was kept afloat by fans and people who remember all these old games, and just like we’ve seen resurgence with Umihara Kawase (for the better or worse) Cotton and her lust for candy has graced us with one of the better remakes in some time. It’s one of the best kinds of remakes, don’t do too much for it, make it more what it already was, and give it a banging soundtrack. Cotton Reboot has without a doubt a year-defining soundtrack, with the first stage’s theme ringing in my head from time to time spontaneously.
Cotton Reboot is a rather standard horizontal shooting game, though its stage designs and Bomb mechanics are rather unique. Some stage layouts take advantage of Cotton’s magical broom having an afterburner-like flame and able to damage enemies right behind her all the while having loads of verticality. While the first stage is a sort of forward-push kind of deal, the rest of the stages mix and match the scrolling direction. Enemy patterns across the board shine, with some clever use of ground-only mooks with chasing Deaths. You get stronger and stronger Bombs, or rather Magical Spells as you level them up with experience points. An initial Fire Dragon may be anaemic, but level it up for multiple Fire Dragons or one massive, screen-filling monstrosity. Alternatively, just drop tons of rocks across the whole screen.
There’s so much you can say about a remake that nails the original’s tone and style, something that can turn people off. The game has that 1990s Japanese whack-humour, similar to Slayers or Battle Mania at their zaniest. Visually, the designs, shading and everything that’s presented to you is top-notch in production quality. The usage of modern tools to reproduce older styles has come a long way in the last decade or so and all of it looks glorious.
While the game is easier than its original versions and offers infinite continues, it does come with its X68000 version with no bells or whistles added. While not necessary, these sorts of things always add something special to the mix and preserve old games for new generations. Too bad we can’t reproduce the dancing keyboard the X68k version had. While some bad blood was born between BEEP and importers when they removed English support after Western localisation was confirmed, the game stands out as damn fine and worth the purchase.
Mega Man: The Wily Wars1994, 2021, Sega Mega Drive
Retro-Bit re-published the somewhat rare compilation game Mega Man: The Wily Wars this year. After sitting down with it and mulling over whether or not it gets a spot here, or with the close-call-five, it gets a top-five spot just barely. The game was at one point much maligned as inferior to the NES original games (the first three Mega Man titles) but this has seemingly been due to most people playing the PAL ROM file, which runs at 50Hz. This does make the game run significantly slower and the music becomes droning. These aren’t really issues in themselves, but rather than the issues with development are visible across the board. Some of the sprites, while upgrades from the 8-bit originals, are of weird design at places. Proto Man’s sprite wasn’t redrawn either in Mega Man 3, which just looks weird with him being smaller and all. Numerous small sound effects are missing, but at places this is a blessing, as the first Mega Man has tons of ear-ripping sounds. Some mechanics are slightly different, like how there’s a slight delay in movement, Mega Man’s centre gravity centre is smaller than NES counterpart’s and glitches have been fixed. No more Player-2 pad debug features for Mega Man 3.
The game has some glitches due to the difficult nature of development that never got ironed out. These include the ability to re-spawn the final boss of Mega Man 3 by walking out of the room, which causes the ending to screw up too, using Ice Slasher in the first Mega Man to prevent spawning of certain flying enemies, DokuRobot’s Atomic Fire doing no damage under certain situations and stuff like that. However, outside very few glitches, a player most likely won’t be faced with these under normal playthrough. Speedrunners have used these for some benefit.
Nevertheless, this is your familiar Mega Man, Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3. While I’ll still argue how MM1 is a rather bad game, the whole package really is still a great way to play these games. There’s a fair bit of challenge, as the games use a Save system over Passwords, and if you’re intending to get to the whole-new Wily Tower segments, beating the three games first isn’t the fastest thing in the world. Mega Man 2 is still a series-making game and once you get used to slightly different controls, 2 and 3 become somewhat a breeze for experienced players. Wily Tower might be the only new content, but it’s a nice challenge overall for series veterans, and something to look for during your first playthrough.
Even when contrasted against other games we’ve seen this year, The Wily Wars stacks well against them. While it is an unrefined gem, an uncut diamond of sorts, it still pulled me back to the early days of Mega Man when we didn’t have tons upon tons of cutscenes messing with the play and slew of bolted-on gimmicks that didn’t do the series service. Do note that the game was also included in the Mega Drive mini, and that’s the thing I would recommend you to pick up if you have interest to play this outside your usual emulation needs.
Undercover Cops1995, 2021, Super Nintendo
While old arcade-to-console ports always lack something, they often retain that certain charm and pull that the arcade original had. Mind you, there are plenty of examples of failed home ports, but Undercover Cops isn’t one despite the lack of two-player mode. Sure, the home port doesn’t match the arcade original in sound or graphical fidelity, it sure as hell retains the charm and fun play. While it is your run-of-the-mill beat-em-up on the surface, the addition of hidden special moves alongside your usual desperation attack, clever use of the environment here and there (e.g. you can beat the first stage’s boss quickly by using a giant press rather than just beat it up) and superb controls make this a gem. I just wish they had managed to squeeze that two-player mode in.
Honestly, that’s all I should need to say, but the charm is strong with this one. Despite being one of the less colourful games out there, with loads of greys and browns with subdued colours in everything else, the character designs, animations and how they feel and act is just so damn nice. Backgrounds also pop-up like no other, but what would you expect from the same people that were in charge of Metal Slug? The converted spritework is superb and the large sprites sell themselves just fine. The designs are very much core 1990s, but in a manner that makes them nearly ageless; there are tons of cues taken from the sixties onwards in a blend that makes it hard to pinpoint any given era for the game’s world. The game does tumble with this by stating the year is 2043, which will sadly not look as rad as this. It was great to have the re-released, as the American localisation never happened despite advertisement being pushed out. Retro-Bit made sure there were both US and PAL compatible releases to boot.
It’s short, sweet and fun to come back from time to time, but perhaps not up there with the absolute best in the genre. At a time, it was an underrated title, but with the Internet making everything available for everyone, even somewhat obscure games gain a strong following. Personally, I’d probably pop this in over Final Fight or Streets of Rage 4 any day, but then again, I do love swinging a concrete pylon every other Sunday.
Do note that I would still recommend gunning for the arcade version, but not the World version mind you. Go for the Japanese or Alpha Renewal version, as they retain all the background details and moves. We really need something like an Irem Arcade Collection one of these days, which would collect as much of their original titles into one package as possible.
Honourable Mentions for those who didn’t make the cut
R-Type Final 22021, Switch, Steam, PlaySation 4 , Xbox One
It’s an unfinished product, by all means. R-Type Final on the PS2 was the last curtain call for the series as a shooting staple. Final 2 was supposed to be a glorious return, but instead, it is more retreading the same waters. It was delivered in a lacking stage, with only a third of those 101 ships found in Final. Extra Stages ended up being purchasable DLC rather than on-disc, which more or less means the game isn’t the advertised ultimate shooting game experience, but again ends up being a DLC hell cashing-in for nostalgia.
There’s very little that adds to the experience since R-Type Delta, and in the end the game feels a letdown in every respect. The new stages for the game don’t provide as much a challenge as previous games, no interesting mechanics have been introduced to make the game stand out in the marketplace and even the music has no real pull. The series stagnated right after Delta, and nothing has really managed to pull the series out from the rut. The Tactics games were interesting, but the overt masturbation on how difficult they supposedly are and how much a slow slog both titles ended up being, it would’ve been better to forget the series and forge for something new.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 2020, Steam, PlayStation 4. Xbox One, 2021, PlayStation 5, Switch
If you haven’t played the original games, or don’t have access to them any longer, do yourself a favour and pick this collection up. 1+2 updates both titles to the series’ latest mechanics and standards, and that’s also the fault here. The stages and challenges weren’t exactly designed to work under post-THPS3 mechanics and you notice that rather quick. However, you can rever the controls back to their original settings, and that’s who you should play the game; no reverts, spine transfers or wall plants. Nevertheless, it’s a faithful recreation of those two games, with some very minor changes to physics and mechanics. Most people won’t notice how it feels slightly different from the originals, but just like the Crash remakes from earlier, seasoned veterans will notice and will have to take some time to adjust themselves.
However, that’s all there is. It doesn’t exactly expand anything further, but it doesn’t really need to. It plays in the same ballpark as the 2001’s THPS2x, which was an enhanced re-released of the same games for the Xbox. It’s more of the same, but not really adding anything to the mix. It’s a damn good title nevertheless that I’d recommend, but not a Top 5 candidate.
Super Robot Wars 302021 Steam, PlayStation 4, Switch
The first mainline Super Robot Wars to be released in the Western frontiers, and plays like a sequel to a game we never got. DLC characters have nothing to do with the main game and are there to take up space in a game with plenty of units to choose from already. Because the game introduced a non-linear progression system inspired by the Compact series scenario system, which was also seen in Impact, stages have less a flowing feel and more something you’d play episodically. Honestly, the game wastes the Ultraman debut in SRW as DLC-only and based on the Netflix CGI show, and that rubs the wrong way. Loads of the sprites have a plastic sheen to them, which makes them more at home on your mobile phone than on a console or PC. Ever since SRW games have been getting closer to getting rid of the Super-Deformed designs, the further away we’ve been getting from well-animated sprites. SRW Alpha 3 has tons of SD sprites that have terrific animations, exaggerated and full of life, and in contrast, we’ve been getting animations that are stiffer by the year with more reliance on cut-ins. At this point, SRW might as well abandon scaled SD sprites altogether and present everything in so-called 1:1 design and have people wondering why the hell is Mazinger Z so big compared to a battleship. The series is going in the wrong direction.
Cotton Guardian Force Saturn Tribute 2021, Switch, PlayStation 4
This could’ve been a good collection, but after Cotton Reboot, this is just a lacklustre attempt to cash in. While the best way to get your hands on Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang and Guardian Force, it falls in the same category as many other collections that they do nothing else or special with them. In addition, the initial version of the game has notable input lag, which has been rectified to some degree via patch, but really, Beep’s just riding on Cotton Reboot‘s success with this.
Blaster Master Zero2017, Nintendo 3DS, Switch, 2019 Steam, 2020, PlayStation 4, 2021, Xbox One
I don’t know who wanted or asked for this game. Take a popular NES game, don’t give a modern face-lift but instead remake the game in overly used retro-sprites style and try to incorporate tons of story elements. Sadly, the graphics aren’t all that special and have issues with collision detection at places and plot’s forced down your throat while being poorly written. Serving both as a remake and a reboot of the original Blaster Master, you probably would end up having a better time with the original NES game due to how much the game holds your hand and halts the game with plot sequences. You’d think nailing a NES game revival’s controls would be easy, but yet they made them lacking. The revised designs are also pretty terrible, playing the most tired anime-esque tropes you can find out there. It’s IntiCreates went overboard where they could to compensate for the otherwise lacking design and detail in the game. In the end, the game ends up being a chore to play, but I admit, it at least is colourful.
Whatever your opinion or view on the Rittenhouse trial, it’s been a doozy to follow on the side. While this blog doesn’t really care about it, as it has no real relevance here, one point the prosecution raised does raise eyebrows. Naturally, that point is when the prosecution asked whether or not the Rittenhouse plays Call of Duty with his friends. The prosecution then continued to ask if the aim of the game was, to quote Isn’t the one thing people do in these video games, [is] trying to kill everyone else with your guns? Rittenhouse’s respond to this inquiry was lacking, but that’s probably the point. Prosecution wants to sell the debunked idea of violent video games having relation to violent acts. Rittenhouse, however, did make a point how a video game and reality are separate, thus the prosecution’s point is invalid. Only people who cannot differentiate between reality and fantasy act in reality as if they were in fantasy. I guess I’m beating a dead horse with this post, but this issue has been raised once again on the media, and I can’t help myself.
An old post of mine how there is no evidence for the Gaming Disorder still persists as true, including that electronic games have no negative impact on the player’s psyche. Something already has to be there. In Rittenhouse’s case, there was no case made for such a thing. Yet the old perception that violent video games lead into bad behaviour sticks to the cultural perception, and while it seemed that electronic games as a whole were getting rid of that stigma, cases like this show that people are willingly intending to mislead that a form of media, once again, would explain something about a person other than what their tastes are. Raising Call of Duty as a point of any kind was a weak attempt at illustrating a point and using video games as some sort tell-tale sign.
Media is less influential than we give it credit for. If we allow media to influence us in a stereotypic ways, e.g. not questioning its content or message and taking it as valid truth, of course that’s going to influence our behaviour and thinking patterns. That goes for everything else as well. However, with fiction we are aware of its status as make-belief fantasy, we don’t tend to allow be influenced by it. Only works like documentaries and such which people can and often take as word of authority on a given subject, we are influenced to some extent. However, no documentarist would like to be accused of enticing people to commit violent acts. Of course, you have peer-pressure from social media, which might make you want to act in a way or another, or changes your perception because you want to belong to the inside circle of things, but that’s a different form of media influence.
We all have consumed violent media in a form or other. Horror films with visceral gore was, and perhaps still is, accused of corrupting the youth and yet we don’t see news of horror movie buffs going about killing people in gruesome manners. Such things are often done by people with serious mental issues. Pretty much every form of media and genre has been accused for corrupting people in a way or another. The history of electronic gaming just happens to be very much tied to the old pinball and arcade parlors even before the previous century. It’s understandable that something which has been deemed as immoral and corrupting since almost their inception hasn’t got rid of their infamy. It’s just that the form of games has changed from kinetoscopes to mechanical pinballs to arcade games, and lastly to home electronic games. Even if the place where games are being played has become our homes, the content of these games is still being contested. Children are no longer in dark pinball parlors among the seedier members of the society finding alcohol, sex, drugs and criminal activity; now they’re finding such things in the comfort of their homes.
Joking aside, one of the more pressing issues with modern electronic gaming is the other people. Parents who do not follow what their children are playing or with who they are discussing things are letting things slide too easily. One of the more pressing issues parents have with online multiplayer games is how their child might be talking to a child predator. Violent content is always another, though the question why children have access to all this content without adult supervision is rarely the issue. Funnily enough, the twelve years old kid who plays Grand Theft Auto probably got the game as a present from his mom.
Normal people don’t go out and chop people with sword or riddle pedestrians with bullets because of video games. A video game might be an outlet, where a person might be letting out some steam and live out a fantasy, but the game is a third party tool; it’s not the instigator of such action. Neither are movies of books, which may contain glorified violence for the sake of storytelling effects. You don’t learn how to shoot a gun within a video game. You might learn how to operate one, if the game is accurately simulating the functions of a real firearm. Yet, the first time you shoot a gun, you will not hit your target dead-on. You won’t be ready for that kickback or the loudness of the gun. Then again, you can learn all the necessary things of weapon operation from manuals and some such.
Games also don’t teach kids to act like they are in the military, as very few game even attempts to portray a realistic situation or methods of training. For example, any military wants soldiers that are professionals who are able to think and solve problems rationally, not vigilantes. At best, video games like Call of Duty teaches moment-to-moment reaction with your eye-hand coordination. The framing of a video game is far too narrow to allow realistic decisions and reactions to take place. The adaptability of a soldier cannot be found within the restrictive frames of a video game. While militaries across the world have begun to use virtual learning tools, which can utilize video games as their core, they do not teach violence or desensitize to it. These tools are teach decision making when the shit hits the fan and working with your team.
What influences people more are real factors. Family violence, depression, alcoholic family members, peer influence, mental disorders, bad parenting and such. None of these issues are easily solved, and at worst, may be things we can never truly remove as factors. Rather than work on these difficult issues, scapegoats like the media gets propped up. If you want to prevent violent behaviour in children, it has to start with the parents and the family surrounding. If there are mental issues, they must be met with proper care.
What does cause people to have violent behviour, be it through words or whatnot, is more often than not the competitive nature of a game and frustrations that come with it. If we were to ban violent games because losing may rile people up, we really might as well take a hard look at sports as well, where people riot when their football team loses and other similar cases. Clearly, the game and its competitive nature must be equally at fault for peoples’ reactions rather than the people themselves.
To round back to Rittenhouse’s case, all the above play a role in the prosecution bringing Call of Duty to the table. The prosecution wants the jury to make their own mental connections with the negative effects of video games and Rittenhouse, as it is easy and cheap. While many think its ineffective method, sadly the news media is still full of parents who blame their kids’ misbehaviour on games. Then you have Jack Thompson and his ilk, who championed on the total ban of violent video games while citing misinformation out of belief.
I highly doubt electronic games, or overall media for the matter, will ever get rid of the argument that media makes us act in some way. Bad behaviour has always been associated with media, though it changes with time and culture. Someone, somewhere, will find use of blaming the media for a tragedy or negative actions in order to further their own agenda. Let not a good crisis go to waste.
This post is to archive scans for Vic Tokai’s 1993 Sega Mega Drive game Battle Mania Daiginjou‘s cover and manual. These scans are presented in 600dpi.
I’m blaming television and monitor marketers for the current obsession for screen sharpness. Partial blame goes for people marketing every-advancing home video media formats. Sharper image! Better colour! Higher resolution! HDMI connectivity! It’s understandable that consumers would end up wanting the best picture and sound from their home media, be it whatever. This makes sense in regards to film and music, as the original recordings usually were in a better format than what you could have at home. 35mm film is, by any measure, superior to VHS or DVD, and if we’re completely honest, any digital format we currently have. We can’t really apply the digital age measurements to what is an analogue format, much like how we really can’t apply digital screens’ resolution to CRT screens. The technology and measuring system are not compatible with each other.
In which we end up with the current era of digital technology, and how easily we disregard the technological divide. The way we see old media nowadays is probably completely wrong. The strife for ever-better visual and sound has effectively beaten down the intended method of seeing something over what has been possible, and in many ways, this has been a marketing slogan at times.
Star Wars was, much like most other movies, was intended to be seen on the big screen. If you haven’t seen the movie in a theatre, “you haven’t seen it all”. Then, the inverse should be true as well. If something was meant to be seen on the small screen, in our case a 4:3 television screen, then we really haven’t truly seen it as intended. For example, nowadays we enjoy Star Trek at least on what we could call DVD-quality, and that probably is not the way it was ever intended to be viewed, digitally remastered or not. The show may have been recorded on film, everything from set designs to costumes, and their colours, was designed and made to be shown on 1960s television. Most often the television set was black and white with the picture quality probably being deteriorated due to the received signal. The farther away you were from the city, the worse the signal would get. If you had a rotator antenna, you had the best quality. Interface from planes and trucks would be a factor. The screen quality would vary widely depending on what sort of TV set people had, and also how well people fine-tuned the channel. That’s how Star Trek was expected to be seen, and that’s how people watched it.
With the advancing technology, we would end up seeing more of what was on the film, which in many places lead to an unintended result of seeing the (literal) seams of the sets and costumes. It becomes easier to ridicule these as cheap sets and costumes, but in cases of shows like Star Trek, that’s part of the low-budget television. With home releases on VHS, Laserdisc and later on digital media, we saw the show in resolution and manner like never before. What used to be hidden technology decades older was now in plain sight, and people would laugh at it. However, put the same media in its proper timeframe and technology, and things look a whole lot different.
An issue that has to be taken with the DVDs and digital remasters is that they still showcase the “original” in much higher fidelity than originally aired
We should not forget the change in culture as well. Television was new at the time, and image quality didn’t mean nearly as much as it does now. There was no prior generation of people who had grown with worse picture quality or the like. When television was new, the picture didn’t really matter. It was what it was and you worked with it. What mattered was the content and the novelty of it. Shows like Star Trek was something new and exciting, and seeing this more cerebral television show about humanity in the stars in a hopeful manner captivated people in the long run. Nowadays, with the proliferation of science fiction shows and dozens upon dozens of derivates, it’s very easy to put the original series down both in terms of its content and delivery.
Television has the benefit of having a pure analogue format in film. The images and sounds are recorded on pieces of film and tape; they are not set in stone and are relatively easily remastered according to modern digital standards. It’s work-intensive for sure, and probably requires tons of extra work if you wish to clean every single thing, but it can be done. Sometimes you have to use multiple different sections of film from different prints of the same movie to achieve this, but it can be done.
I recommend watching, or listening, to the whole three hours video. It covers pretty much everything this particular fan’s own restoration. It covers pretty much everything from how certain elements were layered in the original movie to how he uses multiple sources to restore parts of a individual frame to gain the best possible version of a shot
This is not possible for video games or any other purely digital media format. The moment a game developer, or any other creator of digital content, defines the way their work is seen or heard, it will be stuck to that moment. While they can future-proof their work and save everything in much higher fidelity than it would be currently possible to output, e.g. a digital movie was recorded in 4k in an era where 1080p was the standard, at some point the technology will catch up to them. 35mm film movies are being progressively ruined by noise removal algorithms and smoothening nowadays, in a manner, the same has been done to video games. The difference is, video games and their consumers have a completely different paradigm that, in effect, has skewed the idea of how raster graphics should be seen.
Composite – RGB – Emulator screenshot The emulator screencap has also cut away the overscan area, which would not be seen in a real CRT screen, but would be visible on a flatscreen. See more in this video, where the two first were nabbed from.
The above three screenshots, while usable when comparing different signal qualities coming from the machine itself and how things look in emulation, isn’t how Sonic the Hedgehog was intended to look. As we are now, sitting in front of our computers or using some palm device to read and see these shots, we are not seeing the sort of middle-hand output. The end result of a console, or any other device for the matter that was using a CRT screen, is lost to us. The image we get from emulators, digital re-releases of games and whatnot to our modern screens is inaccurate how the game was developed and meant to be seen.
However, we can surmise some things from the above three screenshots. For example, Sonic is much bluer in the composite shot, with shading and the greens melding into each other in a natural manner. The further we go to the right, the sharper the image gets, but at the same time, we lose smooth surfaces and these melding of colours. We can also see a slight shift in the aspect ratio. It wasn’t uncommon for games to have oval circles that got stretched into proper circles due to how the console was outputting the signal or how a monitor might naturally stretch it, but props for the emulator shot for correcting the aspect ratio.
Dithering is often discussed topic when it comes to the Mega Drive visuals, as many Mega Drive games use dithering to smooth out colours. You would use two colours in dithering, which would meld together on a CRT and produce a third colour, melding them all in a nice gradient. However, this isn’t apparent in higher-end cables, which would show the dithering in a much distinct and crisp way, destroying the carefully laid graphics. Retro-Sanctuary has a short write-up on dithering I would warmly recommend giving a look.
Yuji Naka uploaded a short clip from 1990 showcasing the room where games were being developed, where we see a young Naka working on Sonic the Hedgehog‘s collision. You also get a shot at Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker being developed, particularly Michael’s walking cycle. These games were developed on and for CRT screens. It wasn’t until the seventh generation of consoles when games began to be fully developed for digital screens. Most, if not all sixth-generation games that used sprite graphics, were developed with CRT monitors and non-digital cables in mind. Now, what if we took a photo of that same Sonic title screen on an actual high-end CRT monitor and compared it to an emulated screen?
Sonic the Hedgehog (1991, Sega) – Genesis
Sharp Pixels vs. Genesis Composite via Sony PVM-20L2MD
I can’t believe I forgot my man’s 30th birthday! I’ve even had this post ready for months! Here’s to 30 more years! pic.twitter.com/lH8HVwOU72
CRT Pixels is an account that posts these comparison shots between emulators and CRT screens. There are tons of images comparisons that showcase how dot graphics, sprites or pixel graphics, whatever you want to call them, were designed and drawn with CRT monitors in mind. When an already existing artwork has been digitised, the person in charge of digitization had to take into account how the image would be represented on screen. It could never have been a 1:1 transfer of data from a painting to pixels due to the sheer nature of the technology of the era. Considering how a machine could output an image that was intended to be stretched naturally on a CRT, sometimes the graphics had to be squished in a direction so that it’d look proper when outputted. This happens a lot with Super Nintendo games, which had led to some heated discussions about whether or not its games have to be stretched to a proper aspect ratio, or whether or not the console’s internal aspect ratio and resolution is the real one. The real answer, however, is that it varies game by game, as some titles relied on SNES’ internal resolution while other developers created their graphics the output devices in mind.
Of course, arcade game developers and manufacturers had the freedom to decide on these things on their own. Capcom’s CP System uses 4:3 aspect ratio across the board, but you probably see loads of emulator screenshots in 12:7 aspect ratio. This is because, before digital screens, we had non-square pixels. This is also is one of the reasons why we can’t apply modern screen resolution standards, which counts pixels per heigh and width, when we had no pixels per see, and even then they were non-square. Displaced Gamer has a good video on the topic in a much better package than what I could do. Though I might add that it didn’t help that we had some widescreen format CRTs as well, and people always wanting to fill the screens never helped in the matter. Something that persists to this day, as so many emulation enthusiasts force their old games’ ROMs into the widescreen format.
We are fast losing the way games, and many other forms of media were intended to be consumed. Emulation and game preservation has made immense strides in preserving video and computer games’ data, and have begun to replicate consoles’ and computers’ internal workings in 1:1 emulation manners, something that probably will be impossible to fully emulate with the PlayStation 2, this scene has largely ignored the intended way these games were meant to be seen. No, that’s not exactly correct. For years we’ve got dozens of different ways to mess with emulators’ output. We’ve had tons of different filters that add fake scanlines or smooth the emulated pixels for an effect, often trying to mimic how a game would’ve looked like on a CRT screen. Different renderers are trying to replicate the originally intended form, some a better effect, some mangling them to a horrible degree. However, consoles like the Game Boy Advance, don’t really need these sort of post-processing effects, when the display itself already had square pixels. Hell, sometimes watching sharp pixels can mangle a sprite to the point of you not knowing what the hell you’re supposed to see there, but with that softer quality via post-processor filters or proper CRT screen, the sprite’s shapes and colours make a whole new shape and shades you can’t see otherwise.
A paper describing a method to depixilize pixel art is probably slightly off the intended path. This post-processing method doesn’t take into notion how the graphics were meant to be seen, but rather it ends up re-creating an interpretation of pixel graphics in a smoother form. The end result is less than desirable, but in a manner could also consider this kind of approach to aim to recreate the original underlying artwork that was then used to make the sprites. This is not, however, how the games’ graphics were meant to be seen.
Post-processing probably will end up being a way to solve the issue of how old games are being represented in the future. Perhaps we simply need high resolution enough screens to properly portray non-square pixels and colours a CRT can shows. In essence, rather than emulating just the hardware, emulators would have to take into account the cable quality and how CRTs output the picture. Granted, tons of emulators already do this, but not as default. Most often you still get a modern interpretation of square pixel, internal resolutions when you open an emulator, necessitating individuals to go into the settings menu. Menu, where they have tons of options they might not know what to do with. While we are getting copy systems that emulate hardware to a tee, they are also machines that are made to have HDMI output only. Clone consoles like RetroN and all the Analogue consoles, like the NT Mini, only output in modern HD via HDMI. Sure, you have in-system post-processing to make the games look like they’re played on a CRT. That’s the breaking part really.
A Hi-DEF NES kit modification kit
Console modifications have been around since consoles have been a thing, with RGB output and mods to circumvent region-locking have been the most popular things. Nowadays, we have these custom made boards that you solder to your older console and have it output via HDMI cable. They’re often directly connected to the CPU and video unit, so it interprets whatever the console wants output and tweaks it so the image is compatible with modern screens. Much like their copy-console brethren, they have built-on filters. Nevertheless, both of them utterly destroy the intended manner of how to view games on these older systems. They might be crisper, sharper, have the perfect colour from the palette. That may be preferable to some people, and certainly makes these old consoles compatible with modern screens, but they nevertheless destroy the intended way these games were meant to be seen.
The issue may end up being about authenticity. Modders and certain parts of the electronics consumers don’t really want to let go of these old machines and will do everything to update them for modern standards. That is a losing battle in many ways, and perhaps the approach is wrong too. While we can change some of the inner components, like the leaking caps and that, we can’t really restore old technology per se. Perhaps rather than trying to find a way to emulate the CRT screen, we should find a way how to replicate that particular screen technology. However, considering how dead CRT technology is, I doubt anyone will go their way out and try to find a way to revive it. I’m sure if CRT tech would’ve kept advancing, the shape and weight would’ve dropped, but the flatscreen tech we have now is in most aspects superior. It may still be struggling with replicating the same range of colours and true blacks as even cheap CRT could do, but their utility really beats CRTs in every other aspect.
I guess we can’t return to the intended way games were assumed to be played and seen. Much like how we didn’t have any other options to play the games “back in the day,” the same kind of applies to what we have now. The difference is, from all the options we have nowadays, from line doublers, upscalers and such, that crude reality is your older consoles were not meant to be played on modern monitors let alone be emulated in a crisp, in-hardware pixel-perfect output. These older games were played on a piece of shit telly, and that’s how they were build to be.
Of course, some Australian cunts probably would tell you there’s only one way to properly play the game, e.g. using SNES’ internal resolution and not give one flying fuck about intentions. Consumers have created options for themselves, and only relatively recently game companies have awoken to what emulator filters have been doing for a longer time. Filters themselves need to be completely re-evaluated, as there used to be rather heated discussions between people who wanted those raw pixels and the people who used all sorts of filters. Of course, neither party were absolutely correct, though if you managed to attach your PC to a CRT screen via S-Video cable or something, then there was no need to use filters.
In the future, we will lose the intended method of viewing games, and the rest of the media, which were created in analogue means as intended as the world proceeds with digitalization. With time, we’ll either lose them altogether to time, or most probably, they will be replaced with the closest possible approximation. No amount of remaking, remastering or modding can save old media. All we can really do is preserve and repair them in order to keep things in their original form as much as possible. At least in gaming, emulation will always be the second-best option to the original thing, and to some, emulation is already superior to the original hardware. That of course is not playing or seeing games as intended, but that has not been a factor to many at any point. What matters to many is the sharper image with higher resolution, even if that would effectively destroy the carefully balanced image the developers put all their effort in creating.
Parts of the Internet loves Metroid, but to an ill degree. Outside a few hot takes about sidescrolling games shouldn’t cost as much as games with three dimensions of movement, Metroid Dread has seemingly gained quite the amount of positive attention. Not that I’m here to piss into your cereal, but the developers of Dread have misunderstood Metroid to a degree. At its core, Metroid has been about powering up as you adventure through the game world in a balanced manner. There are obstacles that are required to beat, though not necessarily only in one manner. At its core, Metroid games are sidescrolling open-world games, or as we used to call them, adventure games. What does this have to do with Dread, and by that extension, that Metroid 2 remake on the 3DS? That modern Metroid is broken, and it was Fusion that shattered it.
For better or worse, Metroid missed the cereal train back in the day. Super Mario Bros. and Zelda were always the bigger franchises anyway
If you play any Metroid game prior to the modern era, there are few things you should notice. One of them is that Samus is strong by default. She may not have a long-range shot, but she has great mobility nevertheless and her rate of fire is not diminished like it is in Samus Returns remake and Dread. All the areas in the Classic era are filled with all sorts of little crawly animals you’re supposed to take down, which require Samus to be strong. It makes it much easier to kill enemies that fly in front of you as you power up, yet not all that necessary if you don’t want to item hunt. While Fusion manages to replicate this to a point, Samus Returns is a hollow game with large areas of one or two crawlies around, and this design change was made to compensate for the new melee and aiming mechanics. Much like how Other M had awkward as hell controls between third and first-person modes, Samus Returns suffers from awkward shooting and melee mechanics that necessitated changing the core play, and through that, how Metroid plays out. Perhaps you can argue that it offers a more relaxed pace for the game and the player is now required to time his actions better. However, the player already could dictate the pace they wanted, and weapons always took a degree of skill.
There is a concept of adding unnecessary mechanics for the sake of differentiating from the flock. Samus Returns reeks of this with everything it changed during the remake period to accommodate the melee mechanic. As weird it is to say aloud, Metroid is a shooting game much like Mega Man or Contra. Leave the melee for the Belmonts. Some fighting games, like Guilty Gear Accent Core, are faulty of this same thing, where there are additions of new mechanics for the sake of new mechanics that do not add any real value. In Metroid‘s case, this has caused a core change in how the game now must be played and approached while still being represented as being the same game. Metroid has become its own imitator. The surefire way to make a better Metroid title than Metroid 2 or Super Metroid (do you remember when people were arguing which one is better? I sure do) is to take the core element and expand upon them and see how far you can take them. The only reason people seem to prefer the melee mechanic is that Samus’ firepower was otherwise gimped and kicked down. If Samus Returns would have kept her firepower the same, there would be no reason for melee counters.
I don’t mind Samus’ new look though. It’s fine, but they should’ve stayed away from using white in the standard armour
An element that Dread is lifting from Fusion is the unkillable enemy chasing you. While SA-X is often cited as one of the more memorable things from the game, in Dread this seems to be a game-wide threat. This is turning Metroid into a stealth game, as now there seems to be a mechanic where you can turn Samus into a statue so one of these coloured robots (which look like iPhone store guards) can’t scan her. I’m sure we’re going to get story reasons why they can’t be destroyed and the game’s story will allow them to be destroyed by the end. That’s so goddamn tiresome. Metroid being an adventure game, an open-world title, fights this kind of written-in-stone story-driven progression fights against its nature. The same criticism was laid down on Fusion as well, though there it even broke the game’s core mechanic of non-linearity as you could only get items in a certain order as programmed into the game’s code. There was no sequence-breaking or creative choices done from the player’s part. Just like Samus Returns and Dread have minimised the player’s part in the exact same manner.
The thing is, Castlevania can do close-combat in non-linear games with some projectiles is because the overall design lends to it. It feels and looks like Castlevania, and more importantly, plays like Castlevania. It has balanced the game systems with the AI and game world to a fine point. Neither of these modern 2D Metroid Nintendo is making, and yes I am putting this on Nintendo as Sakamoto is still spearheading this franchise to hell, play like Metroid should. We have tons and tons of Metroid clones on the market with superior design in every aspect, and yet whatever the hell Samus Returns tried to be is shoddy lower-midtier garbage. Metroid doesn’t need to have melee attacks or counters. All of the play mechanics got gimped because of the want of this one extra mechanic that the game’s design can’t handle without breaking down. You can shave Samus Returns play to counter everything. All other mechanics are secondary and borderline useless. Unlike Castlevania, Samus Returns and Dread have screwed up whatever design the best of Metroid had to offer. Samus isn’t a goddamn ninja; she’s a fucking space Terminator. She’s not supposed to be a bac knock-off copy of her Smash Bros. version in her own games.
I won’t find any spot to talk about this otherwise, but holy shit doesn’t Samus Return have a terrible soundtrack. Most of the time you’re listening to this trash ambient soundtrack, and only in areas where you’re supposed to have a nostalgic rush you hear what is essentially re-used tracks from Prime. If you back and listen to Classic Metroid game soundtracks, the scary ambient things were saved for very specific areas and moments, but otherwise, you always had a rocking tune in the main areas. Maybe that’s for the better. Every time modern Metroid tries to do something new it flounders and fails like a fish on the Sun’s surface.
Speaking of white, these iPod dogs look less threatening and more… boring. Why would Samus shoot its face though? It looks like its most armored spot, while its lanky joints look like they would snap off from the ball sockets
Metroid is never going to escape Other M and Sakamoto. Hell, you might as well drop all hopes for Metroid Prime 4 at this point, as Metroid has long gone to be a story-driven adventure rather than the player’s adventure. Metroid was about the player facing a world and the sort of adventure that would be. Now, unlike its current contemporaries, it is about the player having to play out the outlined story. Best examples of this in the series? Metroid Fusion as a whole, and gimped world and adventuring in Metroid‘s GBA remake. Metroid has become about Samus despite Samus herself was never important. How the player had his adventure was, and we’ve lost it.
We can pinpoint the day when Metroid was lost. It’s the day when Gunpei Yokoi was killed in that car crash. I’m sure some people remember that there was an era where Yokoi’s name was attached to Metroid like Sakamoto’s is nowadays. I don’t like blaming one person for a failure of the whole team, but when you have a person who is put into a leadership position and publically proclaims his role in making and spearheading Samus’s story and knows her secrets, we can put his head unto the guillotine bed just fine. Just like with Link and other silent player characters, they’re supposed to be there for the player to play as. Take that away, and you’re forced to create a proper characterisation and framing for them, and seeing how video game writing is dumpster fire tier, and people like Sakamoto have zero talent or experience with actual story writing, you’re going to get stuff like repeating THE BABY the nth time.
Metroid Dread looks, sounds and probably will play cheap. This is sock-filling, a stopgap game. I’m sure it has a competent budget and all that, yet its lacklustre nature compared to independently made adventure games are laughing it out from the park despite their shoestring budget. Hell, just ignore what Nintendo is making and go play AM2R again.
Few days ago, news about the PlayStation 4 being a gimped console broke through. No, not in the fashion of it having ballgag. Down the pipe, when Sony decides to kill off their online services for the PS4, your console will end up as a brick. Lance McD explained further that the Trophies require the internal clock to be correct, and seeing people can’t change their internal clocks, when the servers and battery die out, so does your ability to play games. Your only way to sync the PS4’s internal clock is through connecting to PSN.
This is stupidly lousy engineering on Sony’s department, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m not putting blame on Trophies as well. Gaming consoles have become smarter and smarter without any true benefits to the customer. All they need to do is to play the game. Trophies, movie playback, sharing to Social Media and all that is gibble. It’s the same ol’ thing again; consoles are just dumbed down PCs. This one of the many negative results of it. PC like machine brings PC like problems. Concentrating on essential necessities for playing a game and excising the excess should be an industry standard. We don’t need access to Twitter or the like via linked accounts. A generic browser should be all you need for that, but everything needs to be its own program nowadays.
PS4 clock battery problem is for the long-term. At this moment in time, you are able to drop in a new battery and reconnect with the servers. In the future, this won’t be applicable. Gee, who the hell would be playing PS4 games ten years from now? Dunno, who the hell would be playing SNES games twenty five years after the console?
This’ll pose some interesting challenges down the line when it comes to archiving and keeping records on PS4’s games. Future historians that want to see the games running on their native hardware will have to find a way to get around the limitations Sony put on the system clock. Oh but of course, the Trophies must be protected that people don’t have bragging rights. What a shit decision to put any protection on the whole thing.
The most permanent solution will end up being modding the console to access all levels of functions. This game reading error will not be a major issue for Sony, and it getting fixed will be a very low priority. Especially now that the Japanese aren’t running the show. Few individual commentators have mentioned how this will ultimately be a positive thing, as this’ll force people to move to new machines and recycle their old games and consoles, or how this is beneficial for the competition between players, or how this somehow is a great anti-piracy measure if people can’t play games on a timed-out system. Fellating corporations always goes against the needs of the consumer. None of the points have any legs to stand on; the longer a machine functions and is playable is most economic and green option; Trophies amount to jack shit in eSports or other forms of digital competition outside dick measuring contests; this will have the opposite effect.
PS5 and X… I don’t even have a real shorthand for Xbox Series S and X. I’ll have to go with XboXSX just for the gringe factor. Anyway, both PS5 and XboXSX were launched at a terrible time. We’re going into an economic slump. We’re already short of chips and whatnot to build these machines. Both of these consoles were designed for a much better economic time they ultimately ended up in, much like how X360 and PS3 were. Part of the Wii’s success was in how concentrated it was in its function; it plays games. It doesn’t need to do anything else. By cutting away all the excess fat from the system Nintendo managed to find a low price point people could justify during an economic slump. After that, we experienced a nice rise in economics. We wouldn’t have seen the rise of Kickstarter and similar services in the same manner. People could pledge hundreds of dollars for people through Patreon and such. There was money to go around. That’s not going to be as the economy keeps balling down the road. Sure, big companies will make a big buck. It’s the smaller and local businesses that’ll go under. No better time to put more control on the media and devices you should have ownership over.
Sure, nobody in the Big Three saw the slump coming, though even without the Shangai Shivers some economists had been foretelling we’d go to an economic downward slope around 2019 or so. Having a to-the-core machine, and just one version of it, would’ve served the customer better. I agree that it’s nice to have all these bells and whistles most people barely use, some none at all, yet this whole PS4 battery bullshit is a symptom of putting the emphasize in the wrong court.
No, the battery isn’t the thing people should get concerned over, or the engineering, but the priorities that go into deciding to even put these things into the console; it’s all needless extra. A console’s basic core function is to play games. Everything else should be cut off from that. If all else fails in a console, be it network connection, internal battery, user account or whatever, the user should be able to put the game in and have it played, physical or not. Reality isn’t all that nice or consumer friendly, sadly. Just imagine; Turn the console on, see boot screen, put game in, and you’re playing. Nothing else going in the background or connecting to anywhere else. Just you, the game and the ability to play without seeing a dashboard, needing to connect to the servers, seeing news or being asked to install new updates that take half an hour.
If you’re reading that as me advocating of removal of capabilities modern consoles have when it comes to services and such, you’d be correct. All a console truly needs in addition of playing games is to be able to connect to the Internet for patches and multi-player. Everything else can be trashed. All the other resources can be put on making the controller better, or perhaps not used at all, minimizing the limit when a console goes to black. That’s not going to happen with Sony as long as they want to pretend still to be a prestige brand with the best home media center to offer. Sony’s quality assurance hasn’t been up to that level for good thirty years now, and things like this PS4 internal battery situation is one of those signs.
The best fix would be Sony to remove this whole shebang and let consumers to set the clock by themselves without a need to connect to the servers at any point. Fat chance, but I can always dream of having more freedom.
Aaltomies 
