Breaking News: Angry People Online Angry At Other People! (NSFW)

People are angry.  And not just angry, violently angry.  I brought this up briefly at the beginning of the month regarding Konami's cancellation of Silent Hills and the outcry regarding the destruction and imminent failure of the studio due to disappointing their most fervent (violently aggressive) and devoted fans.  This morning, Bethesda Softworks tweeted/instagrammed/social media'd a 12 second teaser of a Revenant shooting/screaming at something it apparently is not rather fond of.  And let me tell you, the outpouring of support for a new game in this beloved franchise has been so incredibly heartfelt.

Just a warning, the rest of this article will contain language, both taken directly from the interwebs as well as general sentiment interpreted and reworked by me in order to make a point.  I feel odd to mention that I do not, in fact, agree with genocide of any magnitude upon anyone.

And it's not even that those who apparently only want to see Fallout 4 released by Bethesda to be announced/released at E3 this year as being the game, that for lack of a better and friendly term, unfriendly people here really want to see/hear about.  Even some of those in favor of the development by id Software and release by Bethesda Softworks of Doom by taking a defensive position are just as crass in their response to people complaining about no Fallout 4 announcement.

I can only imagine what Tumblr, Pintrest, 4chan, digg, fark, forbes and reddit all have to say about the people on the other side of their personal opinion.  And no, I am not going to be looking.  I can only take so much of people yelling at their screens about their displeasure expecting a sudden 180 in a company's decision.  Like someone at Bethesda and id will be scratching their heads in a years time wondering why no one said anything about their bad decision to develop and release an updated vision of a game that kickstarted the fps genre.  If only they had bothered to actually listen to what the rest of the world and not the people tasked with writing and designing their own product.

I genuinely wonder what occurred in these people's lives that have made them believe that demanding that what they want is what everyone else wants.  That by making demanding in a derogatory manner will give them what it is that they so desperately crave.  Has yelling "I want General Mills to release the Super Mario Bros. cereal again fucking-damnit!" ever worked out?  For anyone?  At the end of a relationship, do they yell "If you leave me I'm going to commit genocide on your mother fucking family!"  Has company ever been thankful for the "Hey, leave them alone for making a game you don't want to play you whining bitch faggots!" comments that are left in their defense?  When has ever threatening a company or complaining like someone whining while online ever given someone their way?

The comments that really get me are the ones that sound like "No one cares about Doom, everyone wants Fallout 4!  Why don't you listen to your fans!?"  Which are usually followed up by some conglomeration of "Shut the fuck up whining fallout fanboy piece of shit!  Doom is amazeballs!"  Meanwhile, Bethesda is over in the corner drinking themselves into an early grave wondering why they didn't listen to their real fans and publish a game that real gamers actually want to play and not this Doom shit.  Sarcasm.

I saw similar fallout (eh?) when The Chinese Room announced that their upcoming game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was announced as a Playstation 4 exclusive, which included infuriated statements.  I read statements wanting The Chinese Room to fail with their game resulting in the closing of the company and that people would cancel their pre-order of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs as a sign of protest against PS4 exclusivity.  As a fan of both Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, I was saddened to hear that EGttR was going to be an exclusive, but I wasn't up in arms wishing for the failure of the studio and death upon everyone associated with the company.  

Granted not everyone wanting Fallout 4 wants to bomb Bethesda back to the stone age until they create Fallout 4 (or Elder Scrolls VI: [Insert Name of Desired Geographical Tamriel Province that You Think Everyone Will Only Want to Play in and Everyone Can Suck a Bag of Dicks Because They're Wrong, Obviously]).  Some people just leave "Fallout 4" as a comment, and while it can be annoying to see a page full of a game's title on a teaser video for a different game, at least those people are not threatening to set a person's dog of fire (Bioware helpfully suggests not to pet them).

I'm just going to stop as I know that I could just go on and on (and on some more) often repeating myself and how I view the people who apparently feel that complaining in the above referenced (and shown) manner will get them what they want.  See, I was just about to do it again, but I stopped.  That's called self control.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

How Blind Can You Be, Don't You See?

Whatever Impressions: Fallout (PC)

I say "Whatever" not because this game came out 17 years ago or because its graphics are dated, but because I have started various characters in Fallout, the first being about four years ago after Vorlynx bought the game for me while we were browsing around Best Buy (I have since forgotten our reason for being in Best Buy in the fist place though).  

Anyway, my first run through, I thought I had beaten the game when I acquired the computer chip required to fix the water filtration system and brought it back to Vault 13 before the 150 day time limit expired.  People who have played before know that this is not the way to win the game.  I then did something very stupid.  I found a gun that I did not really care for, only later realizing that said gun happened to be one of the rarest guns in the game and can only be found by a random encounter with an alien saucer.  That gun, I sold for a paltry sum, so I created a new character, intent on finding that gun again.

That was when I found out that the gun could only be found by random chance and was not a static item in the world.  Needless to say I became a bit discouraged having scrapped my first character and now finding out that the super awesomely powerful alien gun was simply random.  So I continued playing until I reached an underground military-type facility full of things that wanted to kill me that I could not escape.  I think it had to do with the Brotherhood of Steel.  So I had to start over.

My third character, I did a lot of similar actions and stories that I did with my first two characters, but this time I found a dog as a companion that fought along side me.  I went on a mission to oust a bandit that was raiding in the nearby area.  At some point during the umteenth time I tried taking out all the bandits, the dog was killed.  I of course did not realize this until after I had been successful in taking out all of the bandits.  I was seriously at a crossroads as to whether or not I should restart for the sake of my digital dog.  After some time to grieve, I decided that the death of the dog was a character building moment and went on with my life.  The last I saw of this character, I was in town that had some kind of rad-creature infestation in a warehouse area that I was trying to clear out so that I could potentially have better gear/weapons/money.

Then Conklederp and I moved up to Portland and I rediscovered Diablo II.  A few months later I poured a pint of Guinness on my computer.  I have not played or attempted to play Fallout since that dark time.  Until today (today being October 23rd as opposed to the 27th).

What I have noticed so far, and it is something that is leftover from the previous times I have played, is that I am constantly afraid that I am going to do something that will fuck up the story.  I am not referring to the 150 days I have to fix the water filter in the vault or the extension you can buy from the water supplier, although those deadlines do not help.  I am referring to the many stories and side quests that exist within this game.  I want to be successful.  I want to save the people in Vault 13.  I want to not have my dog (wherever it may be) die.  I want to explore the world and I want to build the best character I can without the help of a "Build the Best Fallout Character to Have the Most Fun or You Suck at Gaming" guide.  

Wasting time in Junktown, or finding a way to save the people back in Vault 13?

I just feel that I am doomed from the outset.  It probably has a lot to do with the time limit established at the beginning of the game, and even knowing that I can extend that time limit by an extra 100 days.  I honestly do not know what happens when Vault 13 runs out of water.  Does the game end the same way as if you were killed?  Do you just go on exploring the world knowing that everyone you grew up with has died from dehydration?  But I love this world.  I want to know what happens to the people in Vault 13 and all the other Vaults that I have yet to come across.  However, there is this constant nagging feeling that I am wasting time and that I have not done something correctly.  That is probably not the best feeling to have going into a game for the fourth time.

Yet on I play.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Like Pawns On A Distant Shore

Kinda like Rogue-like. Like.

The rogue-like genre is one I first heard of maybe last year or so.  The name comes from an old PC or Arcade game called Rogue.   The Genre is marked by a couple features:  One is procedurally generated dungeons, which means that the dungeons are invented by an algorythm, not created by designers piece by piece.  So the levels are different every time you play.  The other thing is permadeath.  When you die, you die.  No continues. Tough shit. 

That second feature is not so popular.  In fact, for example, probably one of the most famous Rogue-like-likes from our time is Diablo.  But there wasn't permadeath until Diablo II, which was dubbed 'hardcore.'  I think Blizzard realized that they could sell more copies of the game if it wasn't quite so punishing. 

If you have any interest at all in the genre, I highly recommend checking out the IndieStatik Roguelike-primer by Dominic Tarason.  It's an article that breaks down the best games in the genre into entry level, intermediate and expert.  And then there's a final bit for genre bending games like FTL.  

From the list in the above article, the games that stand out for me are: Dwarf Fortress, Unreal World RPG and Roguelike Doom (the id software classic reimagined as a roguelike).  

A quote from the blurb on Dwarf Fortress:

"I can’t think of many other games where you can deliberately twist an embedded blade to cause pain, hoping to drive your foe into unconsciousness."

I just really like that quote.  Moving on.

An exciting new entry into the Rogue-like genre is a game called Rogue Legacy.  Rogue Legacy was featured in Extra Credits - 'games you may not have tried 6'.  And the guys over at the Experience Points podcast listed it as a game of the year in 2013. Frankly, it sounds like a great game.  I love the generational aspect; it's a cool idea  that when you die, the next playable character is from the next generation of your family, and inherits all the money you earned in your last play.  This is doubly cool, because it is a side scrolling, castle-dungeon game, with a basic story that your family has tried through the generations to invade this particular castle and destroy the evil within.  

Well, holy shit.  This is basically the entire Castlevania series boiled down into one game.  It seems to me that Konami only has one available choice:  Rip this idea off completely, and create a Castlevania Rogue Legacy-like in which generations of Belmonts try to bust through the castle to kill Dracula.  Probably they should use a procedurally generated castle to keep the game fresh when starting different legacies.  Also, Alucard should be a hidden character somehow.  Yes.  Do this. NOW.

-D


P.S. uh oh! looks like someone already beat you to it, Konami!  But come on, it's not too late to show them how it's really done!

FPS: First Person Sickness

The content of the following post may change the way that some people see me.  Some people might feel that what I'm about to reveal/confess will not only make me less of a person, but less of a "gamer" as well.  To that, I rebuttal with: "Piss off."  Just do a Google search and you'll come back with over 100,000 results for motion sickness and video games.  It's not an isolated thing.  It's pretty common.  And that's what I'm here today to talk to y'all about.  Yes, I just typed "y'all."

But first off, I wanted to mention that I used to get car/motion sickness a bit growing up.  Up until sometime in Jr. high or late elementary I would have to either be sleeping or watching out one of the windows so as to not feel ill on car trips.  So, the happenings of motion sickness aren't entirely foreign to me.

So I just finished playing about an hour worth of Legendary (as of the writing of this, which I did a couple of days ago) and I had to stop as I started feeling the onset of motion sickness.  This is not the first time this has happened.  The very first time I felt motion sickness from playing a video game was back in 2006 when I was playing Time Splitters: Future Perfect.  When it happened, I recognized the feeling but at first couldn't figure out why it was happening.  I'd played other FPS' before (Goldeneye 007, Time Splitters 2, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter) and had never felt sick before, so I just chalked it up to just feeling sick for no good reason.  After the second time it happened, probably the following day, I realized that it was due to motion sickness caused by the game.  Did that stop me?  Uh-hell no!  I played a bit until I felt the first tinges of sickness, then stopped for a while, eventually going back to the game sometime after I felt significantly better.  Eventually the feelings of being sick stopped entirely and I was able to play all night/day/night/sleep/day etc.

I guess I felt that I had since become immune to FPS induced motion sickness as I hadn't thought about it again until earlier this year when the feelings of being ill came back.  Later in 2006, I purchased Time Splitters for the PS2 and was perfectly fine with that game.  When I played Doom 3 in 2010 in a darkened room with headphones, I felt perfectly fine; although maybe that had something to do with some sensory deprivation, or I'm just making shit up.  Then late last year/early this year when I started playing a lot of PC FPS' (Portal, Portal 2, Bioshock, Doom, Dear Esther), I felt perfectly fine.  

Then, a month or two ago, I started feeling ill after maybe 30 minutes of game playing.  This wasn't from some current AAA title either.  This was from Doom II: Hell on Earth.  By the end of the first level, I was starting to feel like I was going to be ill.  I've played Doom II now for only 58 minutes because I was feel like crap every time I play it.  I felt a little bit ill after playing Team Fortress 2, so I don't know what that's about.  maybe it's my eyes being too used to moving around and I'm just sitting still.  I've also played Slender for about half-an-hour and felt fine afterwards.  A little jittery about what was in any shadows, but physically alright.  And now, motion sickness again from Legendary.

A lot of the posts I've read about how to curb/cure this is to play often to adjust your eyes/brain to what's going on and that it's normal.  Another one is to move farther back from the screen, which I don't think is my problem as I currently have my laptop connected to our TV, which is about seven feet away from me.  I personally think that I might be able to lessen the effects by just playing an FPS frequently enough, but if it doesn't seem to stop, then I may just have to stop playing that particular game.

My name is Jack, and I sometimes get motion sickness from first person shooters.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Now That That's Over, Time For French Fries!


Update: It is two hours after completing this post and I feel fine now, with no sign of nausea.  All I did was eat some baked french fries, drank a bottle of Ninkasi Total Domination IPA and finished watching Wrath of the Titans.  It wasn't a very good movie, although I liked Toby Kebbell (the guy who played Posiden's son).  I'd totally watch The Adventures of Agenor.  Let's get on that Warner Bros.