I wish developers would let me use the D-Pad

Fuck you, Control Sticks

As I play more Borderlands 1, I’ve come to notice a few things.

1. It’s still a good ass game.
2. Playthrough 2 doesn’t have as many legendaries.
3. Sony makes worse controllers than Nintendo.

Emphasis on point 3. As I continue playing, I notice that both my control sticks seem to be shot. One, pressing up or down (moving back and forward) causes my camera to shift left or right. I don’t know why it’s doing this as I’ve been far more gentle with control sticks after going through 8 controllers for GCN. But here, they fuck up without warning! It might be just typical Sony “oh we won’t make durable products so you spend more money on new devices” bullshit, but it’s annoying and difficult to fucking AIM when you’re trying to move as the damn camera keeps moving on it’s own!

Looking at my controller layout (as BL1 is not very comfortable with allowing you to configure your controls as the second game is), both sticks are used because L3 allows me to run without using a secondary button, and R3 for melee attacks. Would be nice if it didn’t feel like I was destroying the controller in the process. It feels like I’m gonna break this damn thing everytime I play Borderlands, and it seems almost exclusively a problem with this title. ThoughI’ve noticed the same issues in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 as well as a few Ratchet games, it’s a hinderance in Borderlands.

I keep wondering why I couldn’t use the D-Pad for this game as the movement controls are “move forward, backward, sidestep left and right”. Rarely do I use diagonal movement and double taps to run feel more natural than pressing a stick into the controller. But alas, this seems to be a big problem with industry as a whole.

EVERY game for some reason needs to use control sticks. The Ratchet games used to let you use the Dpad for movement, but going into Tools of Destruction, you are limited to the Sticks as the Dpads are now used for “quick swapping” of weapons (because people are too lazy to open up a menu?). DWG3 had you using the stick even though the first game allowed you to use the damn Dpad. For Amma knows what reason, LittleBigPlanet, this being a 2 Dimensional game for Dehuti’s sake, only allows you to use the control stick. Why!? Because there’s a helmet in the game that you need to aim perfectly with in order to get a sense of how pretentious it is. The PSP? If you’re not playing any 2D game, you have to use that fucking little thumb tack! Do these people know how goddamned uncomfortable it is to play shit on this device!? Sonic Racing Transformed is such a restrictive game that you can’t even change acceleration and braking controls!

Instead of using the Dpad which is already in a comfortable spot (the DOMINANT thumb position), developers cling to that damned stick, as if to try and force this as some sort of standard for gaming even though it’s impractical for anything other than bloated PC Adventure games. That and they fuck up to easily. For some reason, Nintendo is hellbent on abolishing Dpads altogether (can’t use Dpad on Brawl unless you’re using shit ass wiimote, 3BS designed with Dpad in a horrible position, same with Pii U, everything that isn’t NSMB, Kirby, DKCR, or Sucker Paper Mario has to use the nun chuck) even though most of their games could benefit from using them (especially Smash Bros.)

This isn’t me advocating some sort of destruction over the usage of control sticks either, they have their functions, like I said for adventure games or stealth bullshit, they’re fine, but for general action games, racing games, FPS’s (movement wise) where momentum of movement is rarely considered, it’s a hassle. I was shocked that a stealth game (Sly Cooper) allowed the use of the Dpad (accompanied by a run button :P).

First and foremost, a game shouldn’t make it so you have to take your left thumb off your movement controls, so any developer who’s eaten enough asshole sandwiches to use the Dpad as “just some extra set of buttons for you to switch weapons or styles ala DMC4” has already failed. The Dpad shouldn’t be some secondary set of buttons for menu/inventory management. It should be the other option for movement. If Borderlands 1 allows me to switch weapons using an alternative method, I should be able to move with an alternative method as well. The Borderlands series has some of the most unintuitive controls I’ve ever seen for an FPS. Then again, this is ported from the PC which got shit configured all over the damn place, it seems.

You know how Devs should treat the Dpad? Same way Vanillaware does. I was checking out Dragon’s Crown, read the manual… and I almost had a fit when I saw “move with goddamned stick”. But in the menu, you can actually CHANGE that… to the Dpad. Which is SUITABLE for a beat em up in the same vain as Streets of Rage. Could you imagine having to use that stick to try and dash!? Anyone who’s played CVS2EO on GCN knows that pain all to well.

I couldn’t imagine playing half these fighting games on a control stick. Mega Man Network Transmission was almost frustrating, the little bastard wouldn’t slide sometimes.

Funny. Most games I could see working with Dpad are games that don’t require you to walk! And that’s a large majority of my game collections. And everything I own on PSP. Games that require you to walk are mostly centered on Stealth and Adventure games. Sometimes FPS’s that have stupid segments for no reason than to show off creativity. Or stupid shit like Mario walking not to wake up one enemy in the whole game (the plants)… and maybe some thin boardwalks if you’re a pussy. And many games with the sticks for exclusive movement have nothing configured to Dpads, making them neglected inputs.

I would hope this isn’t the industry trying to force some standard down our throats, but seeing as they almost got their way of killing off used games, I doubt nothing. Couldn’t be any happier to use Dpad for Sonic Generations.

Grilled Cows

You know, over time, when you get older you start to realize that most games you enjoyed in your youth aren’t all they’re really cracked up to be. Infact, you’d think you were brain dead retarded when you first loved them. I know the feeling from countless N64 games (Don’t know what I saw in Space Station Silicon Valley).

Often times, for the sake of being “brutally honest” (a euphemism for “controversy baiting”), several reviewers, bloggers, and even journalists will outright attack what is deemed a “sacred cow” in the hardcore world. Xplay went out on a limb and said FF7 sucked just to generate hate mail. Square tards used to be that easy to rile up back then. Unfortunately, you never see anyone rip any of these games to shreds. These are games that are damn near immune to criticism but could be some of the biggest pieces of shit to grace a gaming device.

Lets be frank here, I love Treasure Inc. They’ve made some of the best action games in the history of action gamedom, from Alien Soldier to Mischief Makers and even Sin and Punishment 2 on the Wii. Hell, even Bangai-O has it’s moments. But when it came to the GBA, their output equated to an inert brick. If you’re not a fan of slowdown, the GBA was not the portable to own, but those problems seemed quadrupled when Treasure is around. Or more specifically when they’re being jerked around by the assholes at SegaSammy. Here’s an idea folks, how about not making a game that looks too damn blurry to see!

I’ve hated games that scrolled the screen too fast for you to notice any nearby enemies and while GSH isn’t that bad about it, combined with muddy ass sprites and enemies that blend a little too well with the scenery (even without matching colors!) becomes a piece of fecal matter and a peanut. A pain in my ass. But lets not forget about the combat, the one element that was supposedly improved in this sequel where your character is given melee attacks that feel more tacked on than they feel practical. While you’re flying around the room showing off your wire fu, enemies are free to fire away with their guns and turrets knocking you on your chaps, crying for relief along the way.

But don’t worry. Combat is still relatively fun… when you’re actually in combat. The jackoffs at SegaSammy had a sip of Nintendo’s vanity juice and decided to cram in several of their unmemorable arcade games. After Burner only works when you’re able to move your game character, Sega! Not just rotating the screen to avoid 2-dimensional missiles that make depth perception impossible to discern. When you’re not doing that, you have little chickens to find in a disorientating forest that for some goddamn reason ROTATES when you move! Not only is this a fetch quest, it’s a spinning labyrinth that you get lost in even though it’s tiny! And how many people actually enjoyed Flicky!? It was a crappy arcade game that Sega seems to adore, they shoved it into so many unnecessary games like Sonic 3D Blast and Mega Collection. Here’s, it’s a much greater pain in the ass when you’ve got enemies who can knock your collection of future KFC prey back onto the map and then you’re back to finding them all over again. FUN RIGHT!? Ah, but then there’s a top down version of Sega’s “Thunder…. name I can’t remember”. Here, you’re in a chopper dealing with walls and tiny ass enemies and bullets you have no real means of avoiding. This segment is a glorified endurance test. It’s slow, it’s very tedious, and takes up more time than the whole level itself.

For a game that’s listed as a “run and gun” game, you spend more time NOT running and is instead chained to some arbitrary minigame shitfest like the board game that should never have returned from the original game! Here’s a nice concept, if you’re at the finish line and you roll a number bigger than the amount of spaces you need, you go to a garbage dump! What do you here? You play Mr. Driller with a Desert Eagle. You fail, you die and start over. You succeed? You… start the fuck over anyway. What a genius idea! Create a minigame based around CHANCE… and create a reward and punishment based on events that are completely out of control! Hey Capcom, tired of leaps forward in fun factor for Devil May Cry 4!? Well get ready to take a step back to the world of Gunstar for ideas in how to piss off your fans!

That’s all this game is. 30% run and gun, 70% w/e bullshit these bastards have in store for you! Good thing it’s short! Right? RIGHT!?

What a fucking pile! I’ve been a staunch detractor of the “puzzle platformer fetch quest” fad that successfully died around 2003, but for good reason, Banjo Kazooie sticks out like a sore thumb. Mainly because I got a video copy of this game’s trailer in the mail that spelled out all the nuances of this nonsense. Most shit stain platformers at least came with decent attacks that didn’t feel awkward in 3D. Even Mario Sunshine has better combat! You know how we evolve Mario 64’s combat system? How about we give these characters a shit load of moves that eat away at their supplies!? A platforming game with the micromanagement BS we’ve dealt with from games like Resident Evil and every RPG in existence! You need red feathers just to fly and do crazy shit, gold feathers to make you invincible, eggs just to use your one and only useful attack in the game, shooting and shitting at enemies!

9 of the most uninspired worlds in the history of gaming. You get some random mountainside, a beach, a sewer, a swamp, a snow place, a desert, a haunted house, a ship harbor, and a forest that became the inspiration for Zelda Oracle of Seasons. At the same time, at least most other platformers had sensible explanations for how characters could travel to different worlds. Mario 64 had magical paintings, Vexx had portals, Jak and Daxter is really just one big open world island. Gruntilda’s mountain just has… caves and pipes. All of which you had to piece together several puzzle pieces just to fucking access! Great, so when I get said number of puzzle pieces, I now have access to the next world… no I don’t! Unfortunately, there’s this arbitrary door in my way that says I need a large ass number of music notes just to progress! Holy shit, 2 SEPARATE MACGUFFINS TO LOOK FOR! Double the fetch quest obviously means double the fun! What a bunch of dicks, you require 2 separate sets of items to progress through the game. Collecting puzzle pieces just wasn’t enough for these sadistic bastards, now I have another relic bundle to keep track of while I revisit the same locations over and over just to find shit.

And what is all of this for!? To save Banjo’s little sister? Why was she captured!? Because this wicked witch needs tootie’s beauty to not look ugly as hell. I’m sorry, this girl is like… 7 years old at best, w/e beauty she has, it hasn’t bloomed an inch. At least Crash Bandicoot’s sister had jail bait status. And even after you save the tramp after a torture test of a board game, the game still isn’t over. No! You have to find even more puzzle pieces just to fight the final boss herself in what can be explained as my entire reasoning behind why multi-part boss fights suck ass these days. There’s like 5 friggin parts to this whole fight!

Banjo Kazooie has always been undeserving of it’s praise and only seemed to gain it because  western 3D platformers were immensely popular for simply being in 3 fucking D! The late 90s was the industry glorifying western platformers as if to claim some sort of triumph in carving a niche of fans that stuck around in a much shorter time than Mega Man’s relevancy. There’s a reason why barely anyone recalls the late 90s 3D platformer saturation, and Banjo’s utter stupidity is proof fucking positive.

3D Platformers are nothing more than glorified Adventure games with an emphasis on exploration to find crap rather than actual challenge. Unfortunately, the western industry is so in love with the adventure genre, they renamed it “Triple A” just to hype that piece of shit genre up.

Of all the rage I spent pissing away on “Into the Nexus”, I’m actually quite glad that my first entries were a bad spinoff and Tools of Destruction. If I had played the first game… first, then I’d never come back to the series. If I played 2 afterward, I would treat Ratchet and Clank the same way I treat Jak and Daxter. Going Commando couldn’t possibly get away with “most tedious Ratchet game in existence” as All 4 One still exists, but going so far as to consider how massively underpowered you will feel through out the course of the game is a start. Damage scaling and ammo starvation create a sense of non-badassery as you find yourself NOT engaging against enemy hostiles and spending more time scavenging for supplies. No matter how many times I upgrade my weapons, they are still no match for the thugs4less enemies that seem more overpowered than the spiders in Devil May Cry.

Why did the first 2 Ratchet games make you afraid of engaging enemies? Especially since the sequel boasted about it’s improved combat system, we didn’t see any actual improvements until the best game in the series, Up Your Arsenal. What you get are weapons that feel like they can do something which seems to only piss off your enemies, and improved controls which is most appreciated (oy, did I just use the “A” word!?). When the game isn’t busy not being shit, it gives you enemies that will completely decimate you with reckless abandon. How fucked is your life when you’re staring down a bridge filled with nigh-impervious tanks? You have lots of ammo deposits emptied where by you have to buy more ammo later on because good luck finding that shit in the wild. Insomniac couldn’t seem to remove the bullet sponge effect as damage scaling in this game was unbalanced. When you have only 2 weapons that are truly useful for anything in the later half the game, you know it’s fucked. At least when the game allows you to use your weapons. There’s one boss fight in the city in which you have to run around and find turrets just to kill a giant robot boss whom you can only seem to tickle. This fight literally took me 20 minutes because I CAN’T UPGRADE RANDOM FUCKING TURRETS!

Ah, but there’s the plot. The first game was compelling enough to see Ratchet and Clank work out their differences to stop a corporate wanker who schemed to destroy the planets of POOR people in order to funnel more money into his bank account. How do you beat that? Why… by making smirf looking Venonats as the game’s new bunches of enemies! I’m wrapping my head around who in the green fuck thought this was a good plot! The only significant aspect of the game was Qwark’s asshattery, but beyond that, this was one game that everyone could skip. Play Up Your Arsenal after the first game, you would barely notice the details.

Say kids, you like execution complexity? Well get ready for a time when fighting game developers knew jack shit about accessibility like oh Idk CAPCOM, the same company that thought using 6 button inputs was a good idea. Of course, everyone would be able to get a handle on the control layout, but slap that shit into CPS2 and prepare for pain. Virtua Fighter players would blush at SFA3’s execution.

Why is it that more than half the roster of characters are practically unplayable? Could be because some of their worst moves are configured to 3 different button inputs? Shit like Guile’s somersault strike super is enough to make any grown man cry at his bleeding palms. What psychopath figured it was a good idea to configure a super motion to a charge DownBack motion, and then rapidly fire DownForward, DownBack, UpForward, Kick just to pull off a most unimpressive super attack that could’ve just been easily configured as a DownForward 2x motion? Apparently the crazy fucks at Capcom! These bastids have move executions that really aren’t befitting of the end result, and the charge times on some of these moves are often too long to be useful.

But that’s got nothing on the  gutted Alpha Counter system which is so utterly worthless, it’s not even considered a viable strategy. Along with SC5’s Gutted Impact system, Alpha Counters were unintuitive little shits and giggles where you use up meter just to counter what is essentially a move that would probably not be too dangerous. Reason it’s not recommened is because you fucking need your meter. Street Fighter turned into micromanagement fighter where keeping a watchful eye on your meter became more important than the actual fight, where players would fly around the room whiffing their attacks just to build up enough meter to use their AWESOME SUPER POWERS! That said, why waste Alpha Counters on moves when chip damage doesn’t have that much risk when meter building is just too important!? Not to mention the damage dealt is completely ass in comparison to Alpha 2. Or how about the beginning of the end for rewarding play with the introduction of guard crushes!? You know when fighting games actually required a little defensive tactics every now and then to ensure that you don’t die? Yeah, for some reason developers thought this was problematic and decided “lets change that shit up so there will be more offensive play in mind” which means jack shit for characters with charge motions

I have no clue why Capcom made so many alterations to Alpha 3, maybe they were trying to pound the idea into your head that this is a new game, and to get their point across, they’ve thrown out what works and made illogical changes out of spite. 2 buttons throws are ass, Guard Meter punishes defensive play

Even if you manage to learn any of the overtly inaccessible characters, all of your efforts will be meaningless in the face of Akuma, or more specifically V-ism Akuma. When he’s not busy being the wetdream of every loud mouth kid online in SF4. Akuma is such a one-dimensional character that I’m really not that shocked and angered by his repeat usage anymore, but back then, this bitch was merciless. For those that live in a cave, V-ism gives you custom combos or “gay ass after-images that hurt people”. Activating it means you will dominate almost 100% of the time. Why? Could be thanks to the immense juggling properties the Vism possesses, the Tekken retards would be calling for help. But in the hands of Akuma, you might as well forget the concept of winning. Akuma has always been an overpowered shit stain, but Vism takes his already high-damage and priority moves and amps them up to disproportionate levels. If it’s not VAkuma, it’s the retard FGC that would be in a hurry to find a youtube video of Vakuma losing to a low tier character just to show that Vakuma is somehow not overpowered.

And why wouldn’t you use Vakuma? The roster of characters (being nigh inaccessible) are just boring characters in general. You have characters from an old relic called Final Fight whom’s ass was thoroughly kicked by the supremacy of Streets of Rage. You get Guy and Cody, but then you get 2 total nobodies from the Mad Gear gang. Joy! The highlight of the Alpha series was drawing connections to an old beat em up for no reason other than to have them in the series. Then you get Rainbow Mika who was possibly only added to have a Zangeif with boobs and a stink face move. Other retarded character choices are Karin who is a rich girl and rival to Sakura. WOW! Foreshadowing the irrelevancy of Asuka and Lily in Tekken! Alpha 3 has the most boring and uninteresting roster of characters ever to grace any fighting game second only to Virtua Fighter. Not to mention it’s some prequel so obviously characters look younger in order to appease Japan’s obsession with youth.

Capcom has a nasty habit of creating fighting games with uninteresting characters with the exception of the Marvel vs Series where they practically had no choice but to use all the cool bits for the game. But SFA3 is crammed with no one you want to use. Unfortunately, this trend continued with SF3 and 4.

Speaking of that obsession with youth, here’s another damn prequel starring a high school student named Dante! At least… he looks like one.

Along with Capcom’s obsession with origin stories, this one covers the tale of how Vergil became a boss encounter in the first game, something we can’t help to give no fucks about. Which is ironic given that the only game in the series that has the best narrative unfortunately becomes the least enjoyable entry in the entire series.

Lets take a simplified control scheme from DMC2, a game that is a guilty pleasure of mine, and screw that up with some awkward “style” system which nerfs the dodge function by adding delay and long recovery times while limiting it to a style that gets no other perks like the other 3 styles, one built for sword combos, one built for special gun attacks I think, and another for counter attacks. You know what would be better? Having the ability to switch between all different functions on the fly! I can’t stand games where you’re limited to using certain functions until you’ve completed a level where the option to switch becomes available, or find little nodes in between levels to do so from there.

I haven’t seen where people were so fed up with the difficult aside from 2 boss battles. Agni & Rudra, and motherfucking Vergil. Ok Fine, Vergil’s the main antagonist. He’s supposed to do all the asskicking, but if you needed proof that 3D and action games don’t mix, then look no further than DMC3’s camera and the need to fight 2 bosses at once! And not just any pair of bosses, you’re fighting kung fu legends. 2 big ass statues that took some classes from Hwang from Soul Calibur who decided to use DMC3’s shit camera to their advantage all the while having superior blocking, dodging, and counter attack measures all the while sporting super moves like fiery tornadoes. Wish I could do all that at once, but I don’t have a node on hand, and because you assholes are so cheap, I couldn’t bare facing you 2 without my nerfed evasive maneuver from a previous title! Who the hell thought this was a great idea? DMC is already a difficult enough series, but putting in 2 bosses in a microscopic room with enough clutter to throw you off isn’t my idea of fun.

Infact, the whole game isn’t even fun. Combat becomes a boring chore by the time all the enthusiasm you had for making “sweet looking combos” goes the way of  vapor, and the game goes into that “Adventure” bullshit in which you have so much backtracking on hand. You could easily get lost in this game thanks to every area being copy/pasted horse piss as well as having the most unintuitive map and saving system ever. A game where you can easily get lost and not have a viable save function is a double negative, having boss battles that take longer than 10 minutes is a triple negative. The fact that this tween Dante appears in MVC3 over the superior DMC2 awesomeness Dante is a quadruple negative! It’s not compelling, it cannot engage you, it’s combat is even more dull than DMC2’s spammy pistol-whippin fest, it has no convenient game flow, and is a much worse DMC4 gameplay wise.

Trying to go back to playing Metroid 3 is an exercise in boredom. The only thing this game has is atmosphere, although with the existence of REmake on the gamecube, Revelations on 3DS and HD, and even Metroid Prime 1 & 2, Metroid 3 has aged about as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gut.

The first 2 games in the series promoted exploration through choice rather than requirement in which the games possessed items that weren’t mandatory to your progress through the game. Imagine not needing to have the long beam or the screw attack in order to progress, you didn’t have a bazillion fucking obstacles in your way basically shoving into your face that you need X item to progress beyond this point! People have suggested that Aonuma Zelda was guilty of having mechanical overworlds that advertised mandatory items to progress, but all that bullshit started with this game. How many green and yellow doors do I have to pass up before I can find the only blue/red door in the whole corridor? Oh, you wanna bomb this wall to discover a secret passage? Well fuck you loser, you need FLASH boots for this bitch!

You weren’t arbitrarily locked out of an area until you found the appropriate item in the original Metroid (all you needed were missiles for red doors), but for some reason Nintendo seems to think spinning your wheels is an acceptable form of entertainment, which would explain how enabled Aonuma seems to be with all the shitty elements contained in recent Zelda games. How lazy is the “item renting” feature in that shit?

How incredibly obnoxious of the Space Pirates to point out their own little security flaws in order to delay their inevitable destruction? And I mean that literally, this game is piss easy. If not for having stiffer controls than a Classicvania game, you would be able to nuke the entire cartridge in less than an hour. Then again, there’s Phantoon. Fuck Phantoon. That is all.

And for a game that could’ve been described as Survival Horror, it’s not at all scary! It’s got the eerie music and dangerous caverns, but for what it’s worth, it could’ve been a simple remake of the original. Monsters aren’t at all terrifying beyond how tedious they are to deal with. As long as you have enough missiles and super missiles on hand, there is nothing that can stand in your way. There is very little challenge in this game beyond getting lost and a couple handful of boss battles that a lot of times you won’t expect.

If I had to describe my experience with Xenoblade chronicles, I would say I was deluded in a vain attempt to wash out the bad taste Skyward Sword left in my mouth. This game might as well cost 20 bucks.

As a game where you walk around big ass worlds, it rocks as people love to travel. As a game for fun, though, it has virtually no lasting appeal. All of this due to the game’s combat system which is virtually on autopilot for the entirety of the game. If you loved FF7’s RTB system for w/e pantshitting reason, you will fall in love with this game. Don’t expect combat to feel like anything more than a chore as you could pretty WATCH how the game plays out as the characters can fight for themselves. Oh you can use certain skills to increase your chances of winning, but does that really help? Of course not. The most you can do to not die is position yourself where the enemies can’t hurt you, and this is difficult to figure out as specific enemies might have certain effects that you’ll never really know until it’s too late and your teammates start falling one by one.

This would prompt you to use strategy. What kind? Why you keep the fuck away from enemies and do a plethora of shopping lists for lazy NPC’s. And believe me, this is what the majority of your time will be spent doing in Xenoblade Chronicles. Completing the game’s wretched amount of quests simply to gain money and experience points, essentially being a power-leveling fest where you don’t even have to worry about a little thing called “strategy”. But that’s cool, I guess. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to grind by playing these boring ass battle sequences over and over again simply by walking up to enemies and watching my characters hit them.

The story, which lets be real is the only reason people bother playing RPGs in the first place, is actually quite a thrilling revenge story where the main character’s assbitch gets murdered by giant robots… only to come back as a robot herself. Then the story starts going into random mythology nonsense about “Telethia” and some shit called “Zanza”, it gets to the point that the game starts focusing on psychic pokemon that wishes to eat the human race. The story plunges head long into animuville and becomes far too unrealistic for anyone’s taste. It’s got this huge prologue about 2 giant statues fighting each other, then dying where their bodies start sprouting life where 2 different races exist, then it dumps that shit for a race of people with wings on their heads who completely take over the story! I don’t care about these wing cap mother fuckers turning into Green Dialga’s!

Out of all the Rainfall games, Xenoblade is considered a must have, but honestly speaking, The Last Story deserves more attention than it got. It has a REAL combat system, FAR more interesting characters and content, and a much cooler villain who isn’t some nerdy scientist that inexplicably became god for no reason.

Dishonorable mentions go to:

Super Paper Mario
Injustice
Metroid Prime 3
The Medal of Honor series
The Sims
Dig Dug
NBA Hangtime
Gex: Enter the Gecko
GoldenEye 64
Castlevania Symphony of the Night

Iwata on “Quality of life”

Mmmhmm.

“Surely, a lot of people around the world must think ‘Nintendo is a company that is just for video games,’ about us, and I believe that there are more and more of our own employees who’ve begun to think like that,”

Why WOULDN’T they think like that in the first place? Is Nintendo not known for making kick ass games in the past? Mario isn’t some character people like for GP.

“Some employees that are in charge of making things, are often kept in positions where they have to think of how they can make the game in front of them more fun, so I don’t think it can be helped if others outside of our company think like that.”

Yadda yadda bababooie.

“So, even if the fact that our focus is videogames won’t be changing, I felt the need to take this occasion to say ‘Nintendo is a company that can do whatever they want’.”

This explains their output in recent years.

“This subject came to light when Yamauchi passed away, but I felt ‘our surroundings are greatly changing. We need to redefine what Nintendo must do, from this point on.’ However, I felt that saying ‘Nintendo will do anything,’ was also the wrong idea for the company.”

The right idea would be “Nintendo will do anything to make consumers happy”. Right? RIGHT?

“Yamauchi was one to always say ‘Nintendo is a company for entertainment, and it shouldn’t be for anything else,’ and he didn’t necessarily think that ‘entertainment = video games’. I’ve been wondering how to express Yamauchi’s feelings, and I’ve been thinking about it non-stop, even during the New Year’s holiday break.”

I seriously hope Iwata isn’t starting to think that Nintendo has to move away from video games just to fulfill the quota of “entertainment”. This is what I’m getting from this statement. Nintendo must expand into other entertainment sectors such as TV and mobile phone devices in order to truly be considered an “entertainment company”.

Is this somehow tied to how badly the Pii U is doing? Is it causing him to think that Pii U’s blunder means “no one wants video games anymore?” Eh, maybe I’m thinking too much.

“Lately, the words ‘QOL’ (quality of life) have come up,” says Iwata. “Entertainment is there to improve people’s quality of life. After your basic needs, there’s entertainment. However, when it comes to ‘improving people’s quality of life,’ I didn’t know the difference between us and household appliance makers.”

The difference is one is for work and the other is for play. The only similarity is that they both provide BENEFITS to consumers. How they benefit people is different. One benefit is to improve productivity in household choirs, and the other is mostly a stress reliever where people have fun.

Nintendo being a game company already has the role of providing entertainment/fun. The only thing you need to worry about is quality of your entertainment.

“At the start of this year, I finally figured that ‘improving people’s quality of life with fun,’ with emphasis to the ‘fun’ would be perfect for Nintendo. And that’s when I decided to use this as a focus during the financial results meeting in January and wrote the manuscript for the presentation.”

That’s a good thought process, but it’s not enough. You need to understand what is actually fun to people before jumping into anything. The Wii was a fun device, but your in-house devs killed it. Them having too much power is the root of Nintendo’s current problems. They don’t give a damn about fun, and once you get to a certain age, changing a decaying mind is a waste of time. They’ve got to go first for progress.

Everyone continues to say “Iwata has to go”, but it’s really the developers. Of course, the first rule of leadership “Everything is your fault”. Iwata needs bawls to set his people straight.

Finally, Sega learns that Turn-based RPGs suck.

Fighting game based on Shining Force.

Great, so now we have the 2D variant of Dead or Alive games.

I’m not sure about Sega’s talent in making fighters. Virtua Fighter is barely interesting as it is, and I don’t know about Chaos Code. Then again, this isn’t coming stateside for anyone to care. After the Shining Force controversy over at youtube, I wouldn’t doubt if people were still bitter about getting their accounts banned over a complete misunderstanding.

W/e the case, it looks ok for what it is, but I wouldn’t hold any breath for a western release… ever. A stupid title as well. “Blade Arcus from Shining”? Who the hell came up with that name?

Revisiting Sonic and the Black Knight… again

Well, I finally beat this game after several months of dissinterest. Ironically, that was the easiest final bosses in Sonic since Metal Overlord. I’m starting to hate this game all over again.

Afterward, I attempted to do some missions since developers expect you to pretend it’s actual replay value, plus I was trying to find out how to make all characters playable in each level. Like…. give towns folk 20 rings. How hard could that be? I love feasting on my words.

This is one of those “2.5D” sections that damn near everyone is sick of. And believe me when I say it is unplayable. Since the game has no option of allowing you to turn around, Sonic just stumbles about trying to walk back and forth across a giant caravan…. catapult… something. It’s mostly in 2D but feels less smooth than Unleashed Wii. So when I get to a section where you have these blue wind gusts (basically speeders) that shoot you onto a wall, you climb it (damn I hate this climbing shit, you can’t even jump off the walls, I swear) you get to the top and give the first person about 20 rings. But… the mission’s not over, so I continue onward to come to a gap, there’s a platform on the other side with some rings on it. That’s where the problems start. See, for some reason, Sonic cannot accelerate in 2D. He just walks with no alternative. So… we got a big ass gap to cross, how am I gonna gain any momentum to get over there? I figured since normally jumping would give me some acceleration (main game running usually… I think), I’d have a chance. NO! In mid air, he slows down even further and practically comes to a halt. So I do what any normal person would and do the homing attack. Now, I’m barely near the damn platform, like midway across the gap… but Sonic arcs over the damn platform and falls into another pit.

So… the homing attack like.. it has a slanted arc but it just sends me FLYING over the platform. I think nothing of it, so I try it again… missed… try it again, missed it again, after a while I said hell with this mission.

How about that? A game with… bad control design, programming flaws…. and now bad physics! Sonic cannot accelerate (or just fucking run) in 2D view for some reason, can’t  jump across a gap that isn’t even 3 inches long, and can’t slow down after doing the homing attack. And this is all in one mission.

So, I tried to ignore that and went on to a mission I could do with Knuckles “Rampage, kill 12 enemies”. I figured they probably had some tricky shit in store, and low and behold, I was right. Instead of using normal attacks, instead you have to use your meteor attacks or something. There’s this long corridor with a bottomless pit with red fairies in the mix, and that’s basically a prompt to say “WILD METEOR!” like some egyptian god card or w/e. So… playing as Knux, I notice I can’t even target the friggin enemies hovering over the pit. Idk if it’s this Knuckles is just programmed to… not work on this mission, but he has this long range attack where he flings his axes at enemies. The length between me and the enemies were non-existent so there shouldn’t have been a reason I could not target them. Oh, I can target the little electric balls next to me, but not the flying enemies over a gap. And I couldn’t try any jump attacks because Knux goes retard and does this slow dive downward, which would kill me in the pit. So I had virtually no means of completing the mission with my character.

It was Mega Man X6 all over again where the devs didn’t bother to test every level out so that certain characters wouldn’t be incapable of completing them. With that, I said hell with it and moved on.

I wanted to use the characters in all levels, but I didn’t know if that was possible so I tried completed another mission (Rematch with Shadow Lance or w/e) and this guy raped me to crumbs. It wasn’t because he was any harder, it’s this one part where I always get into a sword lock where you get a prompt to wiggle the wiimote to break the lock or something. Now, when it prompts me, I shake it, but I ALWAYS take fucking damage! Idk if there’s more to the prompt that I should be paying attention to but goddammit if it’s not annoying as hell knowing jumping attacks don’t work nearly as well as before because he has his patented Chaos Fart from Shth which knocks you on your ass  while airborne. I tried this piece like 6 times before my arm caved in, turned it off, popped the bitch out and had to restrain myself from snapping the game into 2 pieces.

I was wrong. This game isn’t fun at all. It’s literally an exercise in torture. There is no reason or excuse for this game to be so poorly designed to ever grace the market. Can’t even take the bullshit of being a “rushed” game into account. I’m still trippin that people keep bringing up Sonic 06. The entirety of Black Knight is nigh unplayable. You have to wonder what kind of deranged fuck would release a game like this, oh right. SegaSammy! It’s becoming much clearer as to why Sonic Colors got all this unwarranted praise. At least Colors is playable and doesn’t hurt your arms.

06-09 was truly the dark ages of Sonic games. After Naka left, there was just an endless stream of complete and utter shit being shoved out the door. If it wasn’t story book games, it was Sonic Rivals. It’s one thing to saturate the market with Sonic titles on a yearly basis, but shit!? You could smell that aeons into the future. Sammy was about to restart the crash with so many of their games de-listed.

Looking back at Secret Rings, it’s easy to see why people didn’t mind it as much. Gamers tend to let games slide if they aren’t as bad as a previous entry in the series (Read: GTA5). Beyond that, all developers had the excuse of “motion controls too hard”, I suppose. But now? This title is beyond fucked up. The only thing this game has going for it is a decent soundtrack… which is probably the last game in this whole series to have one at all. But outside of that is a game that is for all intents and purposes designed like ass all around. Secret Rings made sense for all the stuff it did…. well… except the sections where you’re stuck and have to walk around and solve puzzles or w/e (Freeing Sinbad), but otherwise it was an on-rails Arcade-like Sonic game, bogged down with petty RPG features mind you. Black Knight is just a mess. It doesn’t know what it wants to be and slaps in mindless and no-vision mission objectives without any real playtesting to see if it was actually doable! Who the hell is gonna have patience for a game like this? Praise Amma the Wii isn’t retarded with it’s save files (often).

 

Revisiting Sonic and the Black Knight

That Story book mess at the right side compels me to run away!

Jokes aside, I’ve been playing more and more BK in some idiotic attempt to preserve w/e coolness Knuckles had left and seer it into my mind permanently.

Initially, I didn’t like the game in the same way I didn’t like 06 as the whole package just felt unplayable. After a couple of weeks away from the Piss Station, I’d have to change my mind. The game isn’t half bad. I mean… it is, but what can you do?

Now, this is a Sonic game that you can tell was just slapped together real quickly or some change and failed to get even get one shread of cheese, one, they didn’t even bother to program the sword swings to… however you swing the damn wiimote. At the same time, they spared lots of expenses on the worlds.

Wow… now THAT’S what I call “brown.”

Well, there’s a reason Sonic Colors was given that particular name, all of the Wii Sonic titles prior looked drab as all hell. Goddamn, the Piss Station is turning me into a graphics whore. Or maybe it’s confirming that third parties cared about their Wii games about as much as Metacritic cared about it’s credibility. What is that shit, every level is one fucking shade of color, with only a few areas painted differently! Idk what’s lazier, this or lost mind. Sonic games, even with Unleashed, were never this bland looking, and for a series that… used to have vibrant looking environments about 80-90% of the time, this… is bullshit. Even Sonic R looks better than this game.

With… a few exceptions.

Course, that’s probably due to the fact that the game takes place in a medieval setting, and since everyone rips off LOTR for medieval settings, they all tend to look like crap (unless you play some of those fruity ass Zelda games), but does that really excuse all this? Granted as you see above, there are a few decent looking spots in the game, but overall, green, brown, and grey is the most color you’ll get in this game.

You could see something like this from a post 2004 PC game, it looks that basic.

Eh, at least it has more color than The Last Story.

Getting away from my growing dark side, there are a few things I’ve started to notice when playing this game extensively (though I barely touched Blaze because fuck her, that’s why).

Bitch looks like she came out of Bomberman 64. 😛

 

The level of… fluidity in controls is actually character dependent. And I’m only talking character attacks as that is where the majority of complaints are focused.

When it comes to attacking with Sonic, there’s been many complaints about a delay in controls from the amount of time you swing the wiimote and Sonic actually attacking. However, you’re never gonna know how much time because Sonic has a tendency to switch his animations randomly for different attacks. It doesn’t even matter how you swing the Wiimote, Sonic will attack in his own way. He’s got about 3 attack motions standing still and one of them has this giant… fucking delay in the attack where Sonic kinda has to twist his right hand back before taking a giant swing to the left. Amma I hate that animation! The fastest thing alive can even swing a sword quick enough to matter.

Should not take longer than 2 seconds to dispatch a couple of spiders.

 

Not that it would as many of your attacks will come from when he’s got some momentum or when you’re airborne. This is where Sonic Unleashed Wii would’ve helped if you dared to use those horrid homing attacks on Nunchuck. Sonic’s spin slash will rape everything to crumbs without a doubt. Not that one should have to do so, it brings to question why Sega chose to put these long ass delays into the attacks. What’s even more daunting is how Sonic shows that he has the homing attack… but it only makes Sonic touch the enemy so he can slash his sword at close range (Why gimmicks are bad for Sonic).

Hate these parts.

Even more frustrating is the combat sections. You could be running, minding your own damn business then you just “bump” into some asshole who pops right up your face and what happens is Sonic is stunned and can’t attack momentarily which means… yes, you WILL get knocked out. This is easily the most infuriating aspect of the game, that single bump in which couldn’t possibly anticipate to happen unless you’re an alien or Japanese. Because when you’re stunned, you can’t attack and blocking seems to be disabled momentarily as well. Take the worst aspect of DOA and put no method of defending yourself if you get stunned. When you consider how difficult depth perception is in 3D combined with the camera being so far up Sonic’s asshole, it makes for a game that is more tedious than it needed to be.

HAHAHAHA! YOUR SLOW ASS SWINGS ARE NO MATCH FOR THE GUARDIAN ANGEL!!!

Now on the other hand, as I’ve stated before, Knuckles is the best character to use. Why? NO… FUCKING… DELAYED ATTACK ANIMATIONS! Knuckles really only has one or two at best. Infact, swinging the wiimote furiously producing something akin to E.Honda’s uh… fist of ten thousand hells? Cervantes’s Fluttery… Sword of ass cutting? W/e, he kills enemies faster on the ground than Sonic ever could. While airbourne, that downward… bomber shit doesn’t work nearly as well as Sonic’s Windmill. But w/e the case, there’s a much better experience to be had playing Knuckles than anyone else. Shadow is about the same as Sonic with those delayed attacks and meteor moves. In short, the problems people have in delayed attacks come from Sonic exclusively as he plays like shit. The other characters feel more natural for this game

Speaking of which, you’re gonna forget you have those meteor moves as they’re not essential for anything other than taking down king Arthur.

How ironic that these guys never hit me when everything else does.

It’s already apparent that the game is running on Secret Rings’s engine, right down to the inability to turn yo ass around. This isn’t on-rails anymore, Sonic doesn’t just run automatically, you can walk around in your own pace, so why in the natural fuck can’t you turn around or even fiddle with the camera!? This is the primary issue with this game. For some reason, it still thinks it’s Sonic and the Secret, not even taking note of the fact that Sonic doesn’t run without your consent anymore. Not only that, but for some reason, even though Sonic has full 8way mobile direction, Sega couldn’t be arsed to program the fucking thing to let you walk straight if you wanted to. I noticed this when I was doing one of these missions where you couldn’t touch any towns folk in a cave where if I tried to walk straight, Sonic would move diagonally toward the damn townsfolk. Sega might be fans of philosophy professors because this game was designed to fail you at a moments notice. How do you not even bother to spend time programing the blue dork to walk in a straight line!? Goddamn Sega.

So you’ve already got design flaws, and then you have programming flaws. A deadly combination. I’m surprised blocking actually works in this mess. Now, while combat is definitely it’s weakest element as the attack delays severely hamper anything you do, the parts where you’re simply running around avoiding obstacles and shit… are ironically the best parts of the game. The characters move pretty fuckin fast. Aside from bumping into random enemies where Sonic has no breaks to speak of, it’s pretty fun rushing through large plains, volcanoes, and interior mountain ranges. The rate at which enemies spawn is ridiculous, however, so most of your time is spent in the crappy ass combat portions of the game. Idk what it is, but anytime a Sonic game seems to focus on combat more often, the games are less fun as a result, or BK’s combat just doesn’t fucking work well. Especially when concerning boss fights where these sadistic bastids decided to include QUICK TIME EVENTS! Great, lets assume every motion is just another button press yet again, Sega! Afterall, third parties couldn’t seem to get out of this mindset of configuring motion controls as if they were regular fucking button controls!

I shouldn’t even like this game as lazy as it is. Shit, they even reskinned Sonic’s pose on the back of SR’s box… for BK’s back of the box as well! Even the content is dry from the very title it was given. “Sonic and the Black Knight”? Honestly, anyone with a brain could tell you “Sonic Blade” sounds way cooler, or even “Sonic Slice”, fuck it. My question is where did the team get the idea to create a bunch of “story book” games for Sonic? If anything could be any lamer than a sub-series of Sonic games being more castrated versions of pre-existing reading material that dates back to Amma knows how long, it’s also a series that seemed intent on shouting overly-simplified morals as well. “What’s the point of a world that goes on forever?”, well Idk, maybe it wouldn’t create the “diasporic” mess that everyone seems to be in or claim to be in. With so many people trying to erase history from more than just pages, I’d say there’s a pretty big point as to prolonging the health of future generations, even to ensure that there IS infact a future generation aw fuck I’m rambling about shit no one cares about. Anywho, I can’t really find any dirt on why they decided to take this turn with Sonic games aside from one interview that pisses me off to even bother quoting. All it says is “we want to do fellatio with little children” which is enough to send facebook foaming at the mouth. Though I do like this one bit.

I think that the users are always right. They’re the ones paying the money and playing the games. If they don’t enjoy it, they’re not going to buy it.

…….Why does everyone diss him again?

For the improvements, I can’t think of anything right now off the top of my head. If I think of any ideas then Sonic Unleashed 2 will be the time for that, so I don’t really have an answer for that. But you will see the Werehog again.

Oh…. yeeeeeeeeah.

Even more revealing.

I confess that I’ve always wanted to see Sonic holding a sword.

Perhaps most challenging was to make Sonic have a sword. I had to hold on to the Sonicness. If he loses that as a result of having sword, then it would be preposterous.

Ok, so that was really just his own desire that put Sonic into lame content. Still doesn’t explain where the idea of a “Storybook series” came from. This name only came up with BK announced.

I mean… these games had good soundtracks, but the rest of the game just didn’t… fit in. Like it was struggling to prove it’s own masculinity or something. Eitherway, exclusively playing as Knuckles seems to be the only reason to play this game. At least he can fly over enemies and not have to deal with them either way.

This would make a nice Sonic game

Something called “Hover” for 8th gen consoles. Looked neat.

The Japanese and their obsession with “uniqueness” in fighting games

 

I’ve decided to revisit Soul Calibur 5 in order to wrap my head around just why this game is such a fragile lobotomy that gave cancer to every well known Soul Calibur fan that entered the series at #2. Of course, learning that there’s an anti-AI exploit made unlocking custom parts for character creation didn’t hurt either, this seems to be the only reason to own this massive turd of a fighting game. Having calmed down from my rage, I’ve come to find that yeah, it does play a hint better than 3 and 4 outside of the atrociously retarded Just Defend and Critical Edge systems, names that people will immediately become intimidated by as having Just Frame systems in any fighting game not named “Garou Mark of the Wolves” should be abolished for all eternity. But no, the game plays very smoothly if not a tad slower than SC4 which is already slower than SC2. And even worse is when it comes time to find a main character, you’ll find the game’s current cast to be incredibly lacking.

How lacking? Try “Mitsurugi feels naked without Relic Stance” lacking, this coming from a guy who abhors the concept of stances in fighting games. I can’t imagine how the Ivy fans felt considering that everything that was completely broken about her was removed to the point that she might as well have gotten her goddamn tubes tight. Nerfed fails to even begin to describe just what happened to the returning characters Namco had the decency to keep in this game, none of which are named Talim and Zasalemal unfortunately, but they found some eager means to keep Maxi even though nobody likes him. I guess being a Japanese character gives you a free ticket to be in every game even though he goes mostly unused. Unless you’re a ninja in a leotard with bigger tits than Mai Shiranui, but not being anywhere near as slutty as Mai Shiranui so you have to be replaced by what is easily the most FUCKED UP character choice you could possibly conceive.

From the bottom of my dick, Namco, you guys have to be bigger assholes than Capcom. Least they managed to compensate for cutting some fan favorites like oh idk VENOM with other nice substitutes like Doctor strange, you mother fuckers couldn’t even be arsed to put in any character with even a fraction of Taki’s (sex) appeal. And not only that, the character’s personality couldn’t be any worse. Do you like American Valley girls that talk go around spittin about how “boring” everything is as if the Japanese’s definition of what’s “cool” is to make their characters a bunch douch bags and bitches that… oh…. damn I’m off topic.

I’ve come to find that all the characters and fighting styles that DID infact come back have been nerfed in some way, shape or form (with the exception of all the JAPANESE CHARACTERS and Goddamn Nightmare) in favor of, are you ready for this, Competitive balance. Easily one of the most unbalanced fighting games in the world over and after 5 games, they start to care about the retarded tournament crowd who have done their part in damage controlling this game to this very day. Are you upset that Soul Calibur 5 removed it’s various single player modes, something that Soul Calibur has had since the very fucking day it was conceived making it something of a series staple? Well go play a ONE PLAYER game bitches because the concept of “necessity” has reared it’s ugly head in flamewars across the board! Nevermind that even boasting about it’s “Online is the only goddamn thing that matters” mantra into your earlobes means jackshit when the game’s netcode is absolutely trash.

But it’s not even the tourney shit this game desperately wants a pie of. See, the game decides to neuter every returning character in favor of something that I consider to be a recent disease fad. Character uniqueness. What is character uniqueness, you might ask? Well, take several characters in the game and design them with such severe limitations that they absolutely cannot be viable in any way imaginable without playing them a specific way, which might go so far as to be considered a gimmicky character. Case in point…

VIOLA! Figuratively and literally speaking, this is the most unique Soul Calibur character in the series. Instead of having close range weapons designed around the concept of “getting” close to your opponets just to deal damage, we just give this bitch a pair of claws and a ball that she can magically warp around the arena to disorientate her opponents. Some might call this a character who specializes in “Space control“, a concept that only Dhalsim players in Street Fighter could hope to understand. IE using the ball to your advantage to keep the distance between you and your opponent since Viola is shit up close. This is considered a character that’s hard to use but might be rewarding if you master her balls. Unfortunately, characters like Astaroth, Nightmare, Mitsurugi and even that bastard Xiba aren’t designed around controlling space and yet they do so in much better ways. How much better? Try “not having complicated commands for controlling the ball” better? Viola is such a piece of shit character, it makes Xianghua look playable. Unfortunately, SC5’s roster is comprised of characters that are literally handicapped in order to emphasize specific play styles. Viola and ZWEI with that wolf… thing is designed around space control, Hilde is about buffering moves (basically, a charge character where you hold certain buttons then release in order to pull off special moves IE not fun at all to play) Xiba, Maxi, and Nightmare are button mashing, Ivy is about stances… wait, sorry, that’s Voldo… I think, you get the idea.

This creates a big problem though. If all the characters are designed to be played a certain way, it removes their appeal tenfold, why? Because it removes them of any viability whatsoever. Having a character designed with severe limitations that the player cannot do anything outside of their intended gameplay style is harmful to the practicality of that character. Take Blazblue for example. This game epitomizes this concept. Every character is designed with a unique playstyle in mind.

Relius and Carl Clover both have control over Stands… I mean “Puppets” which happen to be their wife and sister respectively. As fucked up as it is to fight with a character who uses his own blow up doll as a weapon is sickening in itself, and so is this. These puppets are the true strength of these characters. You can’t do shit of worth without your puppets. But there’s a problem. These things run on batteries, so you have a little gay ass meter above your super meter. And you have to keep an eye on that bitch and make sure you’re not abusing your special moves too often or else you’ll be defenseless for a moment or 2. So you have fighting game characters… where you literally have to stop fighting to conserve energy! Holy nutballs, it’s Skyward Sword’s stamina system! Now granted, Relius has a few moves he can use that doesn’t require any puppet action, but they’re so awful and slow, you might as well not bother.

On the other hand, you have this thing.

Unfortunately, there’s no stink face moves. Mu-12’s entire gameplay style revolves around setting up a bunch of reflector… turret… mirror things and spam lasers through them. While the monkeys who made this game had the decency to give her decent melee attacks, they’ve also had the audacity to make them harder to pull off than setting up mirror turrets. Meaning this is a character that’s built around disorientating your opponent, but is otherwise screwed if the opponent gets to close. So Amma help you if you’re fighting against Taokaka… you know, the cat bitch that’s obsessed with bewbs?

The Guilty Gear series managed to avoid this pitfall by being a ripoff of MVC, only better. Unfortunately, this idea seems to be spreading in Guilty Gear Xrd. Pulling a Namco, these guys decided to cut the roster down to only the characters that have a unique playstyle. Oh sure, they’ve kept the 3 rush down characters (Sol, Ky, Millia thankfully) and maybe Chipp counts too, but everyone else is on that uniqueness crap. Venom with his pull ball traps, Slayer with his high priority interception punches or… something, Potemkin the slow ass charge character, Axl the resident keep away space control guy, Faust with his… weirdness, May with her charge moves and dolphins, etc. The other characters in the series were more or less rushdown combo frenzy characters (my precious… precious Jam) which were all removed in favor of a mild reboot of the series (or because 3D models take longer than 2D sprites… or w/e excuse the FGC uses these days).

I won’t mention Brawl as i’ve bitched about that game enough as it is, but this idea of making characters have unique playstyles is more damaging than it is beneficial. Many people who play fighting games have no patience to learn the nuances of specific characters. IE everyone who plays Street Fighter rushes to that fucking Ken Masters. Why, because his lack of uniqueness is actually a benefit. If you wanted a Ryu that was better up close, there’s Ken or even Akuma.

Here’s an idea, Japan, if you want to make a fighting game with unique playstyles, look at what Capcom does. They IGNORE the concept of uniqueness (and unfortunately saves that bullshit for universal fighting systems or Street Fighter 3) and simply makes characters with unique playstyles WITHOUT handicapping anything else about them. We all know Zangief is shit from far away, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a means of getting around those bastard fire balls from shotonewbs.

Or a better example…

There’s no uniqueness beyond the rad concepts of the characters. Majority of them all can teleport or have some fireball, but they all have different properties. Noob Saibot, that cheap son of a bitch has a teleport that automatically grabs you. Kung Lao has a teleport, but it just gives him the option of 4 different attacks.  Sektor’s teleport is an uppercut while Raiden’s teleport is blazingly fast. You see what I’m saying? The characters may share moves and not be unique, but they have their own definitions. I hope that makes sense. And amazingly enough, even though the characters are all samey in some way…. the game fucking rules! It’s such an odd concept in Japan these days, not trying to be “creative” with characters actually has a positive effect on the games we play and enjoy.

This is also why I recommended Persona 4 Arena in the greatest form of irony. The characters all play the same but they have their own definitions. I don’t think I can explain this any better than going back to Street Fighter 2. See, before everyone discovered special moves, everyone just had 3 punches and 3 kicks. This is how everyone started off playing SF2. In this process, it was known that each character had different definitions for these punches and kicks. Ryu had normal kicks, Chun Li had twenty kicks, Vega could slide kick, that kinda shit. It was very basic in nature and everyone had fun with the game. It wasn’t until characters started to be defined by their special moves that fighting games (at least 2D fighters), started becoming unfun to play with their bullshit command complexity, and 3D games which were glorified SF2’s started to flourish. But that’s aside the point.

She’s so damn country!

At least 2D fighters started getting better after SF4 released, but companies like Namco, Nintendo, and Aksys especially are falling into this trap of thinking unique character playstyles are somehow a good thing for fighting games when all they really do is limit your choices to the most fun and practical characters to use.

Recommendations for Piss Station 3, and ones I wouldn’t recommend even though they’re still butt kickin.

Since I’ve practically run out of topics to talk about until that damn E3, I might as well give some insight on games that people should be playing on these HD consoles. Keep in mind, these are the only games you should ever give a damn about…. EVER.

And later on, games I thought were good, but I know you’ll hate anyway. And yes,  I tried to sound like “Honest Trailers”.

Hey kids! Tired of those action games that treat themselves like hardcore nut rides with stories that pretend to be the deepest piles of mess while still trotting out big tits in the form of serious, cocky or emotionally fragile women? Are you fed up with lists of crappy combos that you’re more or less required to learn to defeat only a fraction of the enemies in the game? do you tire of action games that remove any semblance of player choice in favor of living out the wild visions of their creators while still having some thought-provoking (read: pretentious) narratives!? WELL, KONAMI HAS THE GAME FOR YOU!

Imagine a game that allows you to make your own combos and attacks that are effective against enemies regardless of how you approach them… unless they’re boss fights. A game where stealth sections can be completely ignored because you’re too goddamn awesome for that pussy footing shit that Solid Snake and Sam Fischer have to go through because they aren’t bad ass cybrid ninjas! A game where you can awesome across streams of missiles, run down the side of a building, across a burning bridge, fly through collapsing sky scrapers, and mess someone’s suit up after midnight, and then… walk like you’re on crack because your character realized he’s just so goddamn awesome anyway! Metal Gear Rising is the game for you! If you want to truly feel bad ass with out the need of arbitrary and complex lists of useless combos, you won’t need to worry. This game is the REAL 3D version of Ninja Gaiden without the stupid mechanics of number 3…. and unfortunately without the motion controlled bewbs of the 2nd and 3rd game that totally made you feel all tingly down unda!

Meet Raiden, the guy everyone hated in MGS2 for trolling fans who wanted to play Solid Snake, and instead played a character that was meant to make teenage girls wetter than Robert Pattinson! Now he’s back in a last ditch attempt at making Raiden an appealing character! By making him ugly and “dark and mysterious“. Now he trades in his aaaaabs for cybernetic body parts and cybernetic high heels! Sound gay? Totally, but don’t worry, those are just for gripping his sword…. with his fucking feet! Homophobia has never felt so beast!

Feel like the world’s greatest bad ass until the game removes that option and makes you get beaten up by a Mexican. Jetstream Sam who is totally everyone’s favorite character. Journey across Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and America in order to uncover a government conspiracy that everyone is completely aware of. Wars are being started to restart the American Economy… or to bankrupt the American Economy… and burn it down? Who cares how stupid the plan is or why they’re kidnapping children from across the world to use them as future cybernetic warriors in a subplot that is completely ditched by the last half of the game, but gets more relevance than the “Deleter” sub plot from Metroid Other M! And if you’ve never liked Colossus from the X-Men, then it’s your lucky day as he’s the final boss, combined with a random bag of fire powers and fights like a Dragon Ball Z character! Holy nut balls this game is awesome!

METAL GEAR RISING: MADE UP WORD!

You have no idea how ironic it is that I’m listing this game. Having dissed it in the past, I am looking for the nearest shoe to eat it.

Get ready for a fighting game that has no learning curve whatsoever, but takes a little more effort than Tatsunoko vs Capcom, especially if you’re a fan of Zero (you little bitch)! Persona Arena is the game for you!

Created by the masters of Guilty Gear and… the retards of Blazblue, comes a fighting game with a little mix of both! Get ready for a move list so accessible, you won’t believe you’re playing a fighting game! Every special move is activated by Quarter Circles or just randomly mashing buttons! It’s the 2D Bloody Roar you… or at least I’ve always wanted! Based on the really shitty RPG series comes a game where the creators finally learned that RPGs suck, and fighting games are completely superior! If you’re a fan of Jojo’s Bizarre on the CPS3 emulator, then here’s a skimmed down version of it! A game with only 2 attack buttons and 2 Stand attacks, where every character has only one special move! Just kidding, but it will seem that way if you played Yu Naka… something!

Get ready for a fighting game that doesn’t take itself seriously and gives every character a nickname! Sister Complex King Pin of Carnage! The Protein Junky! The Snow Black!And The Beast in Heat! And I totally didn’t make that last one up! Prepare yourself for a soundtrack reminiscent of Capcom vs SNK 1 and 2, but only mass destruction stands out!

A fighting game that’s just as fast as Guilty Gear, with enough nuances to make a superior Blazblue game, and an inviting control scheme without the stupid shit developers do to “balance out” the easy to do special attacks. And a TEDDY BEAR as a fighting game character…. that totally sucks ass! And you should feel bad for playing him. Finally, a real Aksys game to tie you over until Xrd comes out for the West!

PERSONA 4 ARENA! Man, who knew an animu fighter could actually be fun for a change? And no real DLC schemes like characters on the disc? Who’da thunk it? Who would pay for sunglasses on their characters though?

Prepare for more irony! From the company that ruined gaming forever comes the game that surprisingly didn’t ruin the Marvel vs Capcom franchise!

Are you ready for a game that easily compensates for the cutting of awesome characters like Venom, Cyclops, and Gambit… with Dante, Docter Strange, and mother….fucking….Ghost Rider!? Then prepare for a fighting game that didn’t have the decency to keep Captain Commando and still not be disappointing! A game that is surprisingly just as fast as Marvel vs Capcom 2 while still making unnecessary changes like Spiderman’s Web Swing into a Dragon Punch motion! Get ready for a Deadpool so obnoxiously unfunny, it borders on destroying the character worse than Fox or Highnoon studious could hope to accomplish!

Get ready for Vergil, the villain that made you rage in Devil May Cry 3, to once again rage at how cheap he is… unless you main Felicia from Darkstalkers where you can troll everyone with her rising…. flying kick… move? The only real bad news is that Gay ass Zero returns from Tatsunoko vs Capcom to make your life a living hell once more! And Thor has a special move where all he does is talk shit as long as you hold down the button! A game that has half the cast from the Avengers, and X-23 for no reason except to have another Wolverine with bewbs!

So strap in to get over the confusing control scheme and get ready for more striker spamming action than ever before! With a Wolverine who’s dialog is awesome enough to contain “Swiss Cheese!”, and a Spiderman who sounds lamer than Toby McGuire! A fighting system so accessible, button mashing newbs can actually kick your ass worse than they would in Soul Calibur 5! And the game is still surprisingly fun as long as you stay offline… forever! Resist the annoying prompts and forever go local!

ULTIMATE MARVEL VS CAPCOM 3! Seriously, the on-disc DLC isn’t even available anymore to purchase? Way to go game industry. Now I have no way to access the content on my disc… period!

Pssh… I wish I would recommend this mug…

Are you ready to punch foes into Red Mist!? Then get ready to NOT Joy puke your face off with that tedious ass sequel!

A first Person Shooter so by the numbers, it actually plays well, and the loot is actually good for once!

Meet Roland, the character that apparently got a stick up his ass in the sequel and became less funny. With a scorpio turret so broken, it literally destroys enemies faster than Mordecai’s stupid bird! With a dick so big, it attracts every white woman in the sequel, including his bottom bitch Lilith, a character with the creepiest face design ever, and devilish looking yellow eyes that stare into your very soul, and none of the male players would mind, the perverts.

Then, get ready to snipe with Mordecai, the arrogant expert who becomes a drunken retard in the sequel. And Brick, the berserker with a mouth who remained awesome in the sequel.

A game so forgiving, even dying is actually funny! Get ready for deserts, junkywards, factories, caves, more junkyards, more…. deserts, snowy mountain ranges with the most annoying aliens you’ll ever face off against. If you hated Claptrap, then prepare to love him and his entire entourage of lovable robots who cry in pain for your help, giving you nostalgia of Wall-E’s cute ass! DAAAAAAAWWWWWWWW…. isn’t enough to describe these woobee mother fuckers! Experience Scooter before the stroke happened, and marvel at how much better he sounded! Witness the awesome power of the Atlas Corporation that is in many ways inferior and superior to Hyperion like… having better human troops… and worse robot troops. General Knoxx, a character who could totally kick Wilheim’s ass, is the most hilarious Borderland’s character of all time!

Are you ready for a story that is non-existent or even intrusional? Then prepare yourself for more milder humor that doesn’t try to force memes onto the internet. Get ready for corrosive weapons that are so overpowered, you’ll wonder what Gearbox was thinking for nerfing the shit out of them for the sequel! You won’t believe your eyes when you can open up a locker and find legendary weapons that aren’t simply there for show! No! They… actually… KILL ENEMIES!

So strap in for zombies, way too difficult underground arenas, and the opportunity to kill Claptraps, you sadistic bastard!

BORDERLANDS. Better get the GOTY edition at a gamestop near you. Hehe, idiots.

Honorable Mention: MORTAL KOMBAT 9. If you don’t have this game, then in the words of Reggie Fils Amie “What’s wrong with you!?”. Unless you have kids. Sucker.

…But in all seriousness, these are, in my perception at least, the best games to get on this system. As far as genres go, you can’t go wrong with half the fighting games on the system, but MGR is a definite buy. Probably the only REAL action game that feels like a 3D NES Ninja Gaiden by far. Just without the annoying ass birds that knock you into cliffs. Or the cool fire powers. 😦

Now for the games that… I figured were good games, but have some nasty issues that keep me from recommending them on the basis that they are major flaws that should never exist considering what year we’re in.

Actually……there’s really nothing wrong with this game. Ok so there’s those marble puzzles, but this is probably the most flawless title on this system. The problem is… the game advertises a Crack in Time… and that’s the real problem.

Crack in Time isn’t a bad game in itself, but it is such a downgrade from Tools of Destruction, right down to it’s game engine. It doesn’t even feel like the same game, many of the weapons of previous titles have been removed in favor of “innovative” features like upgrades that no one cares about as these weapons will be useless later on in the game. Not to mention the puzzles in this game are 12 times WORSE than anything they had in previous titles. Praise Amma Insomniac allowed you skip them. I would have second guessed that White Jesus was a benevolent creature with this move.

Not to mention this was where the narrative for the series started going downhill. They had this interesting story of time travel stations and what not… but there’s a glaring flaw. Multiple times, the main characters travel through time rifts to solve problems in the present time, right? If Ratchet and Clank had the ability to go back in time on multiple occasions…. why didn’t they let Azerath or Azrael or w/e his name is… know that they could do this? It would’ve saved them the trouble of trying to stop him from destroying the very fabric of time itself simply because Azrael wanted to see his comrades… and even Ratchet was desperate to know what happened to his kind.

So…. WHY DIDN’T THEY TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THEIR OWN PERSONAL TIME TRAVELING ABILITIES!? Yeah, the game isn’t bad, but it’s a tad more frustrating in the logic department.

Now, considering this is my first actual entry into the series, I’m a tad biased. I’m a coop junkie at heart, so it’s hard for me to recommend against this title. But I absolutely have to. If you want to know why I am not digging Sonic Boom for any reason, this game would be it. Forced Coop Actions?! This game defined them. Imagine a game where 90% of everything you do is tied to your partner’s presence? Getting across long ledges with a “tether” gimmick, using a vacuum to shoots your allies across larger gaps, shooting your allies to switches (some being in limited time frames), having to shoot enemies in unison just to damage them at all, or even having to carry around a giant light bulb in a forest while another has to inevitably escort YOU through while you shine the light for them to see.

This is not true coop. Putting both players where they must work together makes the game feel mechanical and not at all organic. It makes both players feel like hamsters going through routine processes is not fun. The only element of the game in which this isn’t the case is in combat, but Insomniac managed to fuck that up too. You’d think you were playing Borderlands 2 with the amount of punishment these enemies can take. What this means is you wasting lots of ammo on bullet sponges, combined with ammo starvation all across the board = GHETTO RAGE! If you want to do anything more than tickle enemies, you pretty much have to use “coop bursts” where you shoot one enemy in unison with your partner, creating an effect where you both fire faster at the same rate, and then the enemy explodes doing MASSIVE DAMAGE… that isn’t worth shit. The other option is to buy the Critter Strike and upgrade that bitch to max levels so you can plow through enemies by turning them into pigs. This was the only way to easily progress through the game! So even player choice in weapon experimentation (an element that I damn well ADORED in this series) is revoked!

Still, it’s not an entirely bad game, just a very poorly designed one with neutered humor. No really, the game isn’t anywhere near as funny as the previous titles, and even feels like a neutered kid’s show on 4kids TV.

This is the main reason I bought the PS3. No bullshit. I mean… fucking Momiji man.

Ironically, because she isn’t good, I find myself using Zack and Hitomi more often while finding any means to make Lisa as nude as possible. She sho is built in this game. 😀

Still, I’ve never quite been a fan of DOA’s fighting system. Or rather it’s emphasis on the now-disorientating counter system. I hate situational moves and systems in any fighting game, so having one game where the entire point of the game is situational moves and counter systems is rage-inducing. Especially when almost every move characters have can put you in a stun state where you’re stumbling about like an asshole and being completely defenseless with the only actions available to you… is the goddamn counter system, or even mashing buttons to get out of your stun state (something you shouldn’t have to do). What this means is that this game really has no margin for error.

3D fighter devs have a nasty habit of overusing stuns in their games, and DOA takes the cake. Not only do you need to counter properly, if you do the wrong counter, you risk taking more damage than usual. And that’s the biggest issue of 3D fighters not named Bloody Roar. There is more risk than reward. DOA5 epitomizes the very worst of 3D fighting game systems to date, second only to Soul Calibur 5. The only redeeming really IS the tits this time! I’ve played earlier installments to the series and I don’t recall the fighting to be anywhere near this fucked.

It’s fun as a more laid fighter where you really just wing it, but trying to play “FoRealz” is not even an option.

Quite frankly, Brawl is not a terrible fighting game in itself. It’s a terrible Smash Bros. Like most Japanese developers (read AKSYS) who start believing that making “unique characters” creates a better fighting game experience, Sakurai jumped headlong into the innovation deadpool in some asinine logic where all the best characters are nerfed in order to showcase the craptastic innovations of Pikman, Pokemon Trainer (Squirtle is still awesome) and the retardation of Zero Suit Samus who’s access to this transformation is locked to items or a cheat code. Fuck Brawl.

Piss Station All-Stars tries to mitigate that. It… failed for the most part, but manages to be it’s own game in the process. For one, all of the goddamn characters are viable as long as you’re not a Starhawk or Jak and Daxter fan (sowwy Heat). Shit, even the burlap sack from the pretentious LBP series can kick your ass sideways.

This game would be fine if not for the fact that it literally advertises it’s on-disc DLC by making you fight the locked characters in arcade mode, as well as locked costumes to be shown off. How obnoxious can you get Sony? It’s like taking someone’s lunch money and then running down the hallway screaming about how you robbed someone of a cheap lunch. People are fed the fuck up with on-disc DLC and they go right the fuck ahead and openly admit they are ripping you off. Well that’s service after the sell, tell me straight up that you want more money and no complaints.

Even after getting over the paywall nonsense, you have an online community that is easily one of the most vile hives of scum you’ll ever meet. They make Sonic Stadium look dignified. Here’s a bit of advice, don’t play this game online unless you are Japanese because if you do not demonstrate perfection in combos and mind games or what not, you will be completely ostracized by it’s deluded community. There’s nothing worse than a nerd… than a nerd with high expectations of other people to be good at a video game. I wish I could say “I’m not playing this game to live up to your ridiculous standards of how good I should be especially since most of you cocksuckers can’t deal with my spammy ass Ratchet” but will that solve anything? Hell no. Online gaming has never felt anymore alienating than in this game, and even the asshole community can’t compare to what is easily the worst thing about this game.

Fuck Cole. Easily the most overpowered son of a bitch in this entire game, this guy redefined the term “White Devil”. Infinite stun lock exploit!? Easiest character to build meter with!? And they nerfed Jak!? Sony been sippin on Yak! I’ve never met a character that felt so impossible to defeat since Zeus on Piss Station All-Stars! This guy can suck 20 asses through coffee straws.

Being the resident “Classicfag”, a title I wear proudly, I can safely say that after many complaints that have arisen from Sega’s inability to “get it”, this is quite frankly the first time they’ve ever “gotten it” in years. Sonic 4 Episode 2 easily rectifies many of the previous game’s complaints such as poor level design, bad physics and enemy placement, as well as gimmicky levels like LIGHTING FUCKING TORCHES, and creates a game that is much closer to the Genesis games than anything that has come out prior. We can all say that Sega has finally listened to their fans for once… only to shortly cancel the fucking S4 series in favor of appeasing Nintendo. Is listening to the fans is such a bad thing for this company that they have to immediately shift gears away from gaining consumer trust for corporate trust!?

Whose side are you on, Sega!? Afterall,the reason you canceled the Wii version of Episode 2 was because of memory restrictions, and I come to find this game is really no bigger than Episode 1. There’s still only 4 goddamn levels and one crappy DLC where you play as Metal Sonic…. THROUGH EPISODE 1! WHAT HORSE SHIT! People hated Episode 1, why in hory fuck would you make DLC based on Episode 1!? Infact, why not just combined both games into one so we can get a complete game to sell on a retail disc!? Who the fuck wants Episodic games?

The biggest problem with Episode 2 is it’s length. Nobody likes short games anymore, or at least games that have no replay afterward. Making traditional Sonic with only 4 zones is an insult. And the music is still ass. Yes, this game is the only real time that Sega actually gets what their fans have been bitching about, and it’s also the only real time we get a true glimpse at how little they cared either way. And it’s still a better game than Sonic Advance 3.

…………………….It’s Dynasty Warriors, you do the math.

K. Done.

Are Sonic fans truly unpleasible as a whole?

Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of confusion and disorientation regarding Sonic Boom……but rather the supposed “gimmicks” the games have had since Adventure. Everyone has come to a general consensus that because each and every “faction” of the fandom has demands that would otherwise…. piss off every other faction (detailed story, Sonic Only, even the fucking Chao Garden), this gives credence to the “fact” that you cannot please everyone.

Permit me to make a controversial statement, but this fact supposedly only applies to Sonic fans… and Pokemon fans. They’re both like cross breed high strung folks that go batshit crazy over every piece of news that comes out.

Maybe I’ve become disillusioned with this fandom and Sonic games in general, but at this point I am just sick and fucking tired of everyone being so diametrically opposed to allowing anyone else to have any kind of happiness in regards to this one video game franchise. You will never find another fanbase that is this dis-unified. Unless you wanna point to Twlight bitches. “JACOB! EDWARD” all dat nonsense…

The biggest issue is that… everyone’s demands have been worked on in some way. And due to Sega never learning to stop being shit, all of everyone’s demands were never met. So people are coming to the conclusion that w/e ideas that were tried before have been proven flawed and must not be attempted ever again lest you desire failure above all else. Execution of any idea is never criticized. The idea alone is a failure because the game itself was a failure.

This train of thought shows that Sonic fans on a whole don’t really pay attention to the gaming environment to see exactly what is wrong with the franchise, why it’s not selling, and why it probably will never recover given these conditions, but damn if they lettin something like “story or 2D gameplay” get in the way of dictating what is and isn’t going to save the franchise.

At this point, we’ve covered several problems going on with Sonic.

1. It has become an irrelevant franchise as of 2008.
2. Obvious racism (Sega despises westerners which makes up Sonic’s majority audience)
3. Incompetent game designers.
4. Massive waves of lies about promises.
5. Pachinko companies ruin everything.
6. Needlemouse is not a favorite of Japan
7. No Yuji Naka = No chance of series having any respect
8. Italian sausage in exchange for advertising fucking Yoshi.
9. The wrong western devs.

W/E the case is, as long as Sonic remains in the hands of SegaSammy, there is absolutely nothing that will save the franchise. Despite all the analysis and internal searching for answers, we still have a majority group of people believing that scaling back on certain aspects will save the series. Sonic fans are simply not paying attention.

Course, it’s foolish of me to expect them to. No matter how many people scream in their face about what’s wrong with the series, everyone has their beliefs and will choose to fight if only to be proven right.

So lets say Sonic was given to a really competent company that was passionate about benefitting fans (and I can’t name anyone anymore seeing as BRB up and proved me wrong). This “miracle” worker was given the opportunity to save this franchise from Sammy’s cock. What would they have to do in order to salvage this thing?

An idea I had was have a game that did infact feature different kinds of gameplay modes, but instead, it would have this “revolutionary idea” of “player choice” in that you get to choose what game mode you play each stage in. Like say you wanted to play Zone 1: Act 1 with the Boost shit from Generations (and I suppose without the 2.5D crap), but the very next level, you’d have the option of playing Act 2 as a “Classic” level in 2D with all the newaunces of the Genesis/Advance/DS/PSN games. Act 3 could then be played of your choosing an “explore mode” where you basically have a kinda blending of Classic and Boosts modes, but you’re mostly looking around a 3D space trying…. to solve puzzles or w/e stupid shit the hardcore likes to do. And this would be of your own choosing. You could play the whole damn game in Classic form if you wanted to. Each mode would have their own perks for incentive to play them anyway, you could choose w/e character you damn well please, and that’s the fucking end of it. Everyone… would be happy.

Son… of… a… BITCH! I can’t get this damn song out of my head! If I catch that son of a bitch who played this at work…

I think… that alone would shut the whole damn fandom up…. for a few years. But that’s only the game flow being mitigated. Content, general gameplay, etc. I’d leave to someone else because everyone has their wild ass ideas about what Sonic should be. And ofcourse, you’ll get those asshole “realists” who’d go on about “Oh that’ll take up too many resources and Sega’s broke” cause I really give a damn about Sega’s bank account when they haven’t given me a damn good reason to care after the BS they’ve pulled with PSO2. And they shreddin cheese off that bitch too…

But then you have people who feel that ANY of the above could or should not be in a Sonic game ever again. Either 3D is evil because 3D Sonic has had flaws or 2D Sonic is evil because it’s 2014, so even trying to please everyone would be….. pissing people off anyway. You followin me?

I don’t even want to touch the “Light and Dark” stuff anymore. At this point, I’m like…. as long as I enjoy it somewhat, I could care less. I just don’t want no childish bullshit like in the last 3 games (but we still gettin it).

But that’s aside the point. We’re dealing with a people that are high strung about saving the franchise, and not really concerned about their own tastes. So the mindset isn’t even on about “what they want”, it’s about “getting everything right”. When you’ve got a majority shooting down every idea in the book, it’s mostly a fear reaction as they believe the ideas would make the series worse (it’s already in worst phase). Meeting fan demand is not in their prerogative as Sonic fans have hoodwinked themselves that fan demand killed the franchise (again, Shadow the Hedgehog). It’s ironic in a sense as the fanbase is thinking in terms of audience expansion. Trying to find some way to make the series relevant again, revitalizing interest in it. I don’t think any other fandom even considers the relevancy of their favorite franchises. I’m certain Mega Man fans aren’t even aware of it.

On the other side, no one can come to a consensus on what should actually go into to making a good Sonic game because every idea has been tried so to speak, but since they don’t think about execution (or what actually appeals to people), there’s just rampant  in-fighting.

It’s not so much everyone is unappeasable, it’s simply that everyone is on edge and in the mindset that something has to change or else the series might be indefinitely killed off.

The ones that have stopped caring are probably the sane ones as trying to decipher what’s right or wrong for Sonic just causes a battle of egos where everyone butts heads anyway. The non-caring folks are all like “I’ll find w/e I can enjoy out of all this mediocrity”. Deep down, to me, we shouldn’t even be “trying” to have fun with these games, but more power to em. I’ve already stopped caring, and for some reason Black Knight is growing on me.

When people are in a state of “preservation”, there’s no such thing as meeting demands. One half would have demands, another would be having plans to salvage the franchise. The latter would unfortunately be the majority speaking, and that in itself is an issue. How far Sega has fucked up the series is unquestionable and undeniably simple to decipher.

Course, that said, the only thing Sega needs to do to please everyone in the fandom is to make a good game. I’ve played their shit aside from Sonic the hedgehog, I know damn well they are capable. The question is are they “willing“? Seeing as they’re letting someone else do all the work and repeating all the same problems of other developers, it’s easy to see they have no desire to work on Sonic.

So… Yes and No. Sonic fans are pleasible in that a good game would shut us all up, and no because Sega is not willing to make a good game. They just want to shut us up.

And now fur tits.

Because I could