BadHat

This piece Patrick just linked to in the latest Worth Reading is absurdly relevant. Someone named Chris (not the same guy, sadly) berates a review of Beyond: Two Souls for not being objective enough. The reviewer responds by creating a satirical "objective" review in a similar style to objectivegamereviews. Chris complains that the reviewer is mocking people who want fact-based reviews rather than "opinion pieces." The reviewer challenges Chris to write his own review for B:TS. Chris complies. http://errornotfound.org/2014/01/24/objection-the-ballad-of-crimsonwing69/ I had to skip ahead at some point during the interview because he was getting far too long-winded, but it's a pretty fascinating read. Like other Chris, his version of objectivity consists mostly of going into far too much detail and citing as many examples as possible to back up his assessment of the game, then claiming that it's rooted in fact despite how evident his subjectivity is. He claims that reviewers should be bound by credibility according to their adherence to fact-based analysis, instead of trying to persuade people with opinions, which sullies the hard work developers put into their games by turning away potential customers. His solution to this is to claim that, for instance, Skyrim is a "true 10 out of 10 game" despite personally finding it boring. He literally could have read his own review, purchased the game based on the objective recommendation, and still not felt his purchase was worthwhile. This leaves me wondering - who the fuck are objective reviews even for? What are these people actually trying to accomplish, besides asserting their own value-based judgments as more in line with unbiased, untainted fact? The writer's mock review contains a really choice quote at the end which sums up pretty much everything I feel about the actual utility of "objective" reviews in far less words than I've already put in here:

put it in your mooooouuuuuppphhhhhhhhhh Edit: Weird, I actually entered this thread with the intention of posting this.

It's pretty much guaranteed at this point that anything game-related done by Blur Studio is going to be really pretty and really boring. They make the same stupid BADASS SUPER KUNG FU NINJA MAGIC FIGHT trailer for every fucking game they're contracted to.

This fucking guy. How dare he be younger than me.

You secured an air drop and had someone thank you for helping them? Sounds like got pretty fucking lucky with your server selection.

"If you want to continue making shitty satire intended to mock people who want better reviews then you can go fuck yourself." Better. Nuff said.

For reference, this is his idea of satire. http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/04/01/the-future-of-games-as-art/ Edit: The best part of his open letter is when he says "in the interest of time and space."

HMM. I was basing my assumption on some footage of what looked an awful lot like Ariamis non-painted with a bunch of dragons around. Seemed pretty past-y, but his version sounds plausible.

Weird, I thought I'd seen certain things that suggested DS2 might be taking place in the past. Then again, time has always been a bit fluid in Souls games.

I enjoyed this. https://twitter.com/Perfect_Beanis/statuses/427656493005950976

I feel like the looting in Last of Us was in this weird place between being thematically justified and kind of out of place at the same time. Scrounging for items makes sense in the context of the world that's established through the story, but it makes a bit less sense on a mechanical level. I think the disconnect comes from there being no time constraint on looting (like a couple people already pointed out, as compared to something like DayZ). The rest of the game does a pretty excellent job of establishing a sense of desperation and urgency, but you can be as leisurely as you like scouring (most) areas for loot once you've taken care of the baddies. Not only does it break up the pacing, it damages the sense of world by forcing you to map out the areas you're moving through by literally scouring every corner for loot prompts. It becomes more difficult to buy into a level as a believable chunk of world when you know its dimensions so exactly. Idunno, maybe that's just me. This is coming from the same guy who couldn't leave any given cave level in Diablo 2 until the automap was completely filled in. :v

I don't give two shits about this game but it is really unreasonably pretty.

Does saying "pause" have anything to do with the lyric in his song "we press play don't press pause." I only know this because my flatmate played this song about 50 times a day for the better part of a week so now I will never not know it.

I really liked the Raid but yeah that fight scene at the end went on for far too goddamn long. Funny to see that guy has a part in the sequel. Trailers look so good.

"Update: In a video message to fans, producer Ryozo Tsujimoto announced that Monster Hunter 4G will receive an early 2015 Western release called Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. Tsujimoto confirmed that 4 Ultimate will support online play in addition to local play." Thank christ they're not gutting the online. That wait is gonna be brutal, though.

Seriously? I didn't even get as far as the combat until I noticed the animation similarities. His walk cycle even looks identical.

Abandoned my SL1 game (for now) and did something I've been meaning to do forever - started a guy who exclusively uses big beefy two handers (no sissy shields). Started using the Zweihander as soon as I had the strength to wield it, even though my endurance was only good for two regular swings. It's fun being able to mince through larger enemies, except smaller and quicker ones have become even more tricky. My first goal is going to be to find some decent armor with poise on it.

I will eat your fucking families, Capcom.

But WHEN WAS PHONE??

Hah, finding someone sleeping in Rad Town is pretty amazing luck. Usually they're very much awake and armed to the teeth and not eager to share. Same story here, people convinced me to pick it up (sort of). The footage I'd seen didn't look terribly inspiring but I quite like the combination of survivaling and base building, I guess that much is sort of unique at the moment. We still haven't managed to get to the point of being stable and getting decent gear without being raided eventually, so the plan is to build a secondary cache somewhere discreet and just store enough stuff to make a fresh start relatively quickly. It's also difficult to find a server where a) everyone isn't a big jerk b) everyone isn't a big hacking jerk or c) the admins are actually responsive to a and b. Seems like it's a pretty easy game to speed/dupe hack at the moment, which can be annoying.

That was my reaction, regardless of how I feel about LOTR (liked the movies, but not overly attached) the tone is just... tired. Also I know it's Monolith but do they have to use so very fucking much slow mo. There's a thought though: a LOTR game after the heart of Brothers, where you're not a sword-slinging magic-wielding badass but a milder character of more humble origins surrounded by impossibly awe-inspiring and frightening things. If only there were some character in the lore to whom this description were apt.

God this trailer really brought out my inner gaming cynic. The game looks like a perfectly competent Assassin's Creed ripoff*, but they have to pile on so much box-ticking, pointless feature-touting, "player experience"-aggrandizing garbage just to make themselves stand out that it's kind of exhausting. There is utterly no way the systems presented are going to be as meaningful or tailored as they're making out when the orcs have pre-recorded dialog for "you burned my face" and "you left my master to burn." How many players do you suspect this particular version of events happened to? I'm going to go out on a limb and say 100%. Maybe the next guy's burnt face orc will have a different barely indistinguishable orc name. Whoa. Sorry for the unwarranted vitriol, I just hoped we were maybe past the point of selling games based on lofty but ultimately kind of meaningless features (haha). If this looked at all like it were going to be a more strategic game with more consequence-laden combat, that whole string of events might have seemed a bit more relevant. Instead, he possesses people with magic ghost powers, does big dumb slo-mo leaping attacks from 30-foot balconies into crowds of enemies, and quick time events his way out of compromising positions. Why, in light of all this, should I give a shit that I manipulated someone into reducing the boss's health a bit? Alright, cynicism over. * http://www.gamespot.com/articles/former-ubisoft-developer-accuses-shadow-of-mordor-of-using-code-from-assassin-s-creed/1100-6417307/

Incidentally, this is the same reasoning I have behind thinking the Matrix should have ended at the first movie (besides the second two just being incoherent garbage). Neo becomes the chosen one at the end of the first movie, and the rest is just implied as this is a logical end point for the story: nothing interesting can happen beyond this point because Neo is fucking god now. So it is that the second two movies become "oh no, everyone else is useless, I hope Neo gets here soon!" in the same way that every DBZ encounter starts with 10 episodes of "oh no, Krillin/Tien/Yamcha are useless, I hope Goku gets here soon!" Except the Matrix isn't even consistent with this stuff and just artificially strengthens/weakens people to fit the circumstances of whatever situation they're in to create the longest/most badass action scene possible. "Neo can bend the Matrix to his will now and literally jump inside people and explode them, what's a good match for that?" "Idunno, what about like a million Agent Smiths?" "Cool."

Whoa, I forgot those guys existed. Brad was the undisputed master of the whole getting-really-freaked-out-by-horror-games thing. Forget the pretenders, watching him yell at the screen in the dark playing Fatal Frame provided many quality hours of entertainment.

Why did the little girl fall off the swing?