natellite

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Posts posted by natellite

  1. Posted

    Are you talking about ABZÛ? The game is looking pretty good, but it's not from thatgamecompany, it's made only by the art director of Journey, Matt Nava.

     

    Today they released a new vídeo with gameplay footage of it, it looks super good:

     

     

    Good catch! I was totally thinking that was from thatgamecompany. Now I'm glad I was wrong, because it means I get two games.

  2. Posted

    According to their website, "Since finishing Journey, the team has been hard at work to make an emotionally engaging experience centered around human connections for players of all ages and backgrounds."

     

    No idea what that means, but I'm excited for whatever they do. Also, they're contract with Sony is now up, so hopefully their next project sees wider release. That's one studio that I think creates really important stuff and I hate that it's on such a limited platform.

     

    It's that... ocean game. Underwater journey. There was a teaser at E3 last year.

  4. Posted

    <3

     

    Oh my, ethics!

     

    Usually I like to say that the fewer sites report from E3 the better, but a specific ban is obviously shit.

     

    Yeah, that's wild. Stuff like this always highlights the huge power imbalance between the press and the companies. I guess that's a problem in tech generally, too. I can't help but think that overcoming or subverting that is gonna be our Big Issue - or, you know, another Big Issue on the pile along with misogyny, harassment, and the general existence of games press as a branch of games marketing divisions.

  6. Posted

    I'm hearing you when you say that silence in the face of injustice is a bad policy. I think that's absolutely true.

     

    Most of the time.

     

    I apologize in advance if this feels like an attack. It isn't my intent. These are just my own opinions. 

     

    I feel there's a difference in Polygon calling out Penny Arcade, a media juggernaut and a major public face for gaming, and Polygon elevating Hatred out of the nothing it came from every couple of days to remind you how awful it is. As you say, Penny Arcade doesn't operate in a vacuum. They have roots in the industry and to the community as deep as any institution in videos games. Calling out their bad behaviour in the context of that influence and importance is necessary and just. And you are absolutely correct when you say that the games press has frequently dropped the ball when "nice people" do hurtful things, either because they don't understand the harm or because they're worried about burning bridges.

     

    Jerry, in that very post even, likes to act like PA is just a couple of jokers making .jpgs. It's a great way of deflecting criticism: "well gosh, why're you so worried about little ol' us". But, they (or, more accurately, Robert Khoo) have built a media empire that has to maintain a reputation to continue dealing with real companies in the real world. More importantly, they see themselves as a force for good, even if their behaviour is informed by shitty prejudices and biases they aren't aware of until they trod through them and smear shit all over the carpet. To be square with their own identity they need to reconcile that self image with the feedback they get. Maybe they would like to be left alone and be spared that painful process, but they have to make at least some effort to address these things. 

     

    Hatred and the devs who make it, however, have no relevance beyond the outrage they seek to generate in the games press. They have no reputation to be harmed. They can't commit career suicide as they have no ties to the greater games industry. Critically, they don't see themselves as anything other than edgy enfant terribles taking the skeleton warriors for a ride and making a buck while they're at it. It isn't like they haven't corrected their trajectory because they're not aware that what they're doing is hurtful and awful. On the contrary, every blog post, youtube video, tweet and tumblr decrying Hatred is, to them, a badge of honor. They're a cancer, but they are literally nothing without attention.

     

    You can't rehabilitate cancer, you can only cut it off. 

     

    Yeah, and through the course of this discussion I've realized that my problem isn't with the way that Holkins talks about Hatred per se (though I think his characterization of it as 'punk' is absurd) so much as his sneering about people who write about games, which isn't strictly relevant to the conversation about the game. So, like, a discussion for another time - or, indeed, no time at all, because the less time I spend thinking about Jerry Holkins, the better.

  8. Posted

    Haha I recently gave up coffee so I could save money (and be a little healthier, but mostly to save money, if I'm honest), so I'd rather not go back to Starbucks! D:

     

    Haha, I understand! Cinnamon chai tea is just herbs in a pouch, but if going back to starbucks is going to make you want to drink coffee, then probably best to just stay away. The only reason I recommend it at all is because I work there, and it's the only kind of herbal chai I have any firsthand experience with. There are likely dozens and dozens of other varieties.

  10. Posted

    So what happened is he used a piece of rhetoric about inside connections which also gets used by Gamergate, so you assumed he was a big old anti-feminist who wants people to praise the nazi game, despite none of that being present in the text? Is alleged games media collusion like the Hitler mustache, so tainted by association that one cannot use it for any purpose without looking bad?

     

    That's not a rhetorical question or an attempt to trap you in an argument, I'm really asking. It seems like it might be happening, and it's not necessarily an invalid premise.

     

    No, but Penny Arcade doesn't operate in a vacuum. That piece of rhetoric is combined in my view of their organization with their past defense of things like Dickwolves, as well as Krahulik's tendency to say dumb, incorrect and hurtful shit about trans people on twitter, just to name the two things I remember offhand. In aggregate, that leads me to believe that they view the games press - the same games press that jumps to call them out on their missteps - with disdain. And at that point, the things they have to say about the press start to sound very familiar. At the very least, it's enough to make me not want to extend either of them the benefit of the doubt. They wasted that capital with me years ago.

     

    I'll be the first to admit there are significant issues with games journalism, but to my mind, a lot of those issues stem from the fact that people who write about games extend too little criticism about their subjects, not too much.

  11. Posted

    The overall tone of this thread seems to be that you're supposed to talk about Hatred, supposed to write a bunch of news articles about how it's a terrible evil game made by terrible evil people (which is true). But why? If you want Hatred to go away, do badly, or otherwise not exist, the only course of action seems to be what Jerry's proposing: give it no publicity. I haven't seen anyone disagree with his premise that media controversy boosted the game's sales substantially. What exactly is the point of the anti-Hatred article then?

     

    For what it's worth, I don't know what to do with a game like Hatred. I'm of two minds: As a game, it's thoroughly mediocre, but the way that they've positioned it as a product is clearly designed to bait people into talking about it. It's a time-honored tradition, and it works. So obviously, you don't want to give them the column space. But from my perspective, that's how I engage with things like this - I play the game, and then I talk about it or write about it. Saying "just ignore them" doesn't actually work.

     

    I think Hatred is going to be thoroughly forgotten in a month or two, and hopefully the people who made it will go back to drawing pentagrams in the margins of their notebooks or whatever. But I fundamentally disagree with the notion that the best way to deal with something I find offensive is not to engage with it at all. 

  12. Posted

    Yeah, and not to turn this into Dota Thread 2: Electric Boogaloo but I have that problem even with games that don't monetize hero selection. Gyrocopter is one of my compendium challenge heroes and I've been on a crazy losing streak trying to get that guy to work for me, but Xboct can jump in and farm 6 slots by minute 40? How is that fair? Valve, please fix.

  13. Posted

    I fail to see how that leads in any way to your earlier response.

     
     

     

    What does anything he said have to do with feminists or his perception of them as spooky? He called the game bad multiple times, how much further can he get from demanding people praise it?

     

    My point is that Jerry takes a break from calling a bad game bad to slydog the games press by saying "heh, if Hatred wanted some good reviews, they should have said it was a deconstruction," like we're too dumb to know the difference between Hatred and a game like Hotline Miami - and by the way, when people did talk about the hyperviolence in the latter game, they were decried for "missing the point". It just sounds like Gamergate-lite (which, I suppose, coming from the writer of Penny Arcade, is unsurprising).

  14. Posted

    I've spent a ton of money on Dota 2, yeah. More than I'm comfortable admitting! But none of it (barring the weird PA arcana mini-game thing, of which I was at once both a fan and a hater) actually affected gameplay in a match proper.

     

    I was under the impression the expansions actually cost real money in Hearthstone, but I've only heard from other people. Everyone seems to buy it outright. Which is fine, I will never berate someone for spending money on something if they want to spend that money. I will, however, berate the developer for all time. That said, if you can grind for it, that makes it a whole lot more tolerable for me, as a concept, although I've played League of Legends, and grinding new champs in that game takes so fucking long as to be utterly worthless. Especially when you buy a champ you think you might like from a few games in the free rotation and then a few games later you wish you'd bought someone else with your magic grindy points. And now you have to wait another few weeks before you've earned enough.

     

    Riot has long suffered accusations that they balance for maximum cash rather than actual game balance - new, more expensive heroes are more powerful and then once the fervor wears off they get nerfed back down. I don't know if it's true, I've never played League. It makes me thankful I play Dota, though.

  15. Posted

    Who cares if it's $1000? Nobody is punished for choosing not to buy it.

    I don't get the anger at Blizz selling a useless status symbol.

     

    "You can always not buy it" isn't a good excuse for a bad pricing model! And it isn't anger so much as, like, as someone who has put single-digit hours into Hearthstone, I don't understand how anyone could think that this is worth that kind of money.

     

    ...on the other hand, that Shadow Fiend arcana was, like, 20 dollars, so it's not really without precedent, I guess.

  16. Posted

    What? What quote did you read? Because I read one where he called Hatred a bad game, and the only thing he said about the media was that their attention made this bad game sell better than it should have.

     

    Actually what he said was the difference between hatred and hotline miami is that the spunky indie devs over at Devolver ingratiated themselves to the games press with concepts like "irony" and "inside connections."

     

    edit: It's not even actually about Hatred. Let me clarify (emphasis mine):

     

    A big part of the problem on the developer side is that they didn’t flatter games media.  What a developer is supposed to do is to give their violence ironic cover, or agree to pretend that it’s a deconstruction of violence, or make the player wear a surreal animal mask, anything to “elevate” the piece so that the press can rub their faces on it like a cat.  Barring these, you’d better fucking know one of them.

     

    The implication here is that people who write about games are either 1. desperately looking for an excuse for making hyperviolence socially acceptable or 2. too stupid to know the difference. With all due respect to Jerry: fuck off with that.

  21. Posted

    Yeah, I fed 10 bucks into the dota maw and got a few cool sets for some heroes I play pretty often, so I'm happy! That Dragon Knight set is neat-o.