Chef033
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The Thing
2002
The idea of a Thing game is odd first and foremost, so I thought this would be a quirky game with some ideas even if it was a crash and burn.
It is even worse than that, a tasteless 3rd person shooting gallery with ZERO horror or atmosphere.
Story is so irrelevant here, because nothing can carry that cold carcass gameplay. Floaty movements with like 4 enemy types in total, and the whole squad trust mechanism is of absolutely no effect on gameplay. Never had a member distrust me and if they shift into monsters I just mow them down and move on without a single care that my mate was a thing.
I thought this would be a mediocre licensed game, it is even worse and there's no reason to revisit it. It's not a half decent game and it takes zero hints from the movie.
It is even worse than that, a tasteless 3rd person shooting gallery with ZERO horror or atmosphere.
Story is so irrelevant here, because nothing can carry that cold carcass gameplay. Floaty movements with like 4 enemy types in total, and the whole squad trust mechanism is of absolutely no effect on gameplay. Never had a member distrust me and if they shift into monsters I just mow them down and move on without a single care that my mate was a thing.
I thought this would be a mediocre licensed game, it is even worse and there's no reason to revisit it. It's not a half decent game and it takes zero hints from the movie.
Buddy Simulator 1984
2021
Tortura em forma de jogo. Aguentei o adventure de texto, aguentei o joguinho 2D de exploração com diálogos chatos, mas o jogo ainda consegue piorar e se tornar no RPG com o pior sistema de batalha de turnos que já vi, tudo isso somado a uma trilha intankavelmente chata, diálogos insuportáveis e uma exploração cansada. Tudo pela promessa de que algo vai acontecer e me surpreender há algum momento.
Tortura é uma palavra muito adequada, é um eterno lenga-lenga de um "terror" que ameaça a todo momento que vai te dar medo e nunca chega lá.
A ideia é legal, mas aqui não passa de uma ideia pretenciosa e mal aproveitada.
Tortura é uma palavra muito adequada, é um eterno lenga-lenga de um "terror" que ameaça a todo momento que vai te dar medo e nunca chega lá.
A ideia é legal, mas aqui não passa de uma ideia pretenciosa e mal aproveitada.
Buddy Simulator 1984
2021
Deeply embarrassing.
Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.
Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.
This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.
The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.
The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.
Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.
Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.
What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.
If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.
Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.
Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.
This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.
The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.
The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.
Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.
Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.
What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.
If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.
Atlantis no Nazo
1986
This is the second Famicom game I've played named "Mystery of Blank" that really wanted video games to die in 1986.
The jumping in this game is the most homophobic shit I've experienced since Ice Climber, when I first pressed the jump button and flew myself directly into falling bat shit I could only sit there in amazement as I cursed to myself. When you jump the game demands you go in a wide floaty arc, every time. Air control barely exists, if you decide to long jump you can only hope to god that nothing flies into your way, otherwise that's a lost life. Even when trying to drop from a ledge? Tiny arc that makes it a nail-biter every time you come centimeters close to a pit, you seriously need to give the slightest tap to the d-pad to not accidentally plunge to your death. Seven lives feels generous, but it really isn't. The entire thing feels like a shitpost from people who say every NES game is unplayable garbage. It's abominable.
Combat is a joke, your weapon is basically similar to the torch from Ghosts n' Goblins except somehow more useless in practice. You use explosives which take a few seconds to go off, you can only have one on screen at a time, and when the game already didn't feel spiteful enough they can also kill you by accident. These explosives also uncover hidden doors in certain areas of the stages, and that's probably when it dawns on you that in addition to being a sadistic action-platformer, this thing is also a galaxy-brain demanding mystery akin to Milon's Secret Castle. So-called "solutions" to these "puzzles" include falling down a random pit that looks like every other pit that would normally kill you. It's stupefying, I really do wish people who decry Simon's Quest would try something like this without a guide.
The worst and most punishing thing in the game is a door that leads you to a "black hole" room where you constantly fall to your death until you game over. Kaizo Mario invisible blocks have got nothin' on that shit. The only thing worse that I can think of is the "ha ha" room in Dirty Harry that just traps you until you reset.
Comedy gold for everyone from the boys at Sunsoft, shame it wasn't brought over here as "Super Pitfall II" as originally intended, would've doubled the length of the AVGN's episode on the first game.
The jumping in this game is the most homophobic shit I've experienced since Ice Climber, when I first pressed the jump button and flew myself directly into falling bat shit I could only sit there in amazement as I cursed to myself. When you jump the game demands you go in a wide floaty arc, every time. Air control barely exists, if you decide to long jump you can only hope to god that nothing flies into your way, otherwise that's a lost life. Even when trying to drop from a ledge? Tiny arc that makes it a nail-biter every time you come centimeters close to a pit, you seriously need to give the slightest tap to the d-pad to not accidentally plunge to your death. Seven lives feels generous, but it really isn't. The entire thing feels like a shitpost from people who say every NES game is unplayable garbage. It's abominable.
Combat is a joke, your weapon is basically similar to the torch from Ghosts n' Goblins except somehow more useless in practice. You use explosives which take a few seconds to go off, you can only have one on screen at a time, and when the game already didn't feel spiteful enough they can also kill you by accident. These explosives also uncover hidden doors in certain areas of the stages, and that's probably when it dawns on you that in addition to being a sadistic action-platformer, this thing is also a galaxy-brain demanding mystery akin to Milon's Secret Castle. So-called "solutions" to these "puzzles" include falling down a random pit that looks like every other pit that would normally kill you. It's stupefying, I really do wish people who decry Simon's Quest would try something like this without a guide.
The worst and most punishing thing in the game is a door that leads you to a "black hole" room where you constantly fall to your death until you game over. Kaizo Mario invisible blocks have got nothin' on that shit. The only thing worse that I can think of is the "ha ha" room in Dirty Harry that just traps you until you reset.
Comedy gold for everyone from the boys at Sunsoft, shame it wasn't brought over here as "Super Pitfall II" as originally intended, would've doubled the length of the AVGN's episode on the first game.
This review contains spoilers
Eu juro por Deus que não consigo entender como as pessoas gostam da história desse jogo. Eu diria que é uma ofensa a qualquer ser pensante que presta atenção na tela e tenta se imergir em uma narrativa séria, mas é um consenso tão absurdo entre todo mundo que eu devo ter entendido alguma coisa errada em algum momento.
Nós começamos o jogo depois de um assalto aleatório ter dado errado, matado uma galera da gangue, congelar todas as economias em um ponto inacessível e forçar todo mundo a se esconder nas montanhas passando fome e frio. Esse capítulo é muito importante pra definir duas coisas que acontecem o jogo todo:
1: Os personagens não são pessoas comuns em uma situação difícil, eles são heróis lendários mitológicos indestrutíveis que atacam um acampamento de pelo menos 100 pessoas sem nenhuma estratégia fora se jogar no meio do tiroteio e de alguma forma sair ileso.
2: Os personagens são pessoas horríveis completamente irredimíveis que sequestram um jovem azarado e submetem ele a dias de tortura em um tom de descontração e diversão, removendo qualquer empatia que você poderia ter por eles. (O que se confirma quando eles assaltam um trem, matam todos os seguranças sem esbanjar emoção e o Dutch deixa bem claro pro Arthur que tá tudo bem se ele matar todos os civis inocentes que estavam a bordo com ninguém da gangue achando errado.) A forma completamente natural que isso é demonstrado torna evidente que torturar pessoas e matar inocentes é algo recorrente a todo mundo envolvido na gangue.
A partir dessas regras o jogo segue pelos primeiros 4 capítulos, onde os personagens casualmente se envolvem nos maiores tiroteios já vistos em toda a história do velho oeste sem nunca elaborar qualquer plano ou medir as consequências morais do que estão fazendo. O jogo finge que tá avançando a narrativa trazendo personagens e áreas novas, mas na prática você tá só andando em círculos, indo de uma galeria de tiros pra outra mudando levemente o contexto.
Eu falava a um tempo atrás que esse é provavelmente o pior jogo que eu já joguei, não no sentido de ser o mais desprezível mas no sentido de ser o que pior usa a mídia pra transmitir qualquer emoção. Repensando nisso recentemente porque mesmo as piores e mais ofensivas partes de red dead ainda são totalmente dependentes da mídia dele. Se isso não fosse um jogo, as pessoas começariam a estranhar os personagens irem assaltar um banco sem nenhum plano em mente, ou matar metade dos guardas de uma família rica e depois ir trabalhar pra ela achando que não vai dar em nada, ou toda e qualquer ação que eles tenham em qualquer ponto da história acabar em 10 minutos de tiroteio frenético onde 60 inimigos morrem mas todo protagonista sai ileso. Sendo um jogo though, isso é só parte da ludonarrativa que a gente ignora pra ver o resto da história, e o jogo aproveita isso ao máximo pra se recusar a oferecer qualquer trabalho textual interessante e só estimular seu cérebro com umas explosões no lugar de um plano.
Durante essas missões filler que não progridem a narrativa, não oferecem um plano interessante de acompanhar ou desenvolvem qualquer personagem, alguns membros da gangue vão morrendo. Apesar do jogo tratar eles como deuses imortais que matam 150 pessoas por dia, a morte deles é sempre anti climática e humanizada, como se fosse por um erro bobo. É nesses momentos que eu digo que esse jogo é uma ofensa a inteligência de qualquer pessoa, você acabou de ver esses personagens matando um exército de policiais sem esboçar reação, esses personagens se mergulhando nesse tipo de tiroteio como plano principal ao invés de secundário. Matar eles dessa forma é uma tentativa tão artificial e ridícula de humanizar eles e criar tensão que fica risório. Sean morre em uma emboscada que realisticamente teria matado todo mundo envolvido, Lenny morre em um confronto que você canonicamente poderia evitar com suas habilidades se o jogo não bloqueasse.
É também bem difícil simpatizar com qualquer um desses personagens. Um elogio que eu ouço com frequência de todo mundo é em como os personagens parecem humanos de verdade e o quanto você se importa com eles durante o jogo, e eu do fundo do meu coração não consigo entender como. Fora o fato da maioria deles serem psicopatas cometendo crimes brutais de forma casual (e os que não estão diretamente envolvidos nisso são cúmplices de bom grado), todos são o ápice da imbecilidade. Dutch, do começo ao fim do jogo, fode todas as pessoas presentes naquele grupo um por um. Não tem nenhum plano dele com lógica, nenhum plano dele que dá certo e nenhum capítulo em que ele não coloca todo mundo em risco por bobeira, mas eles continuam fielmente seguindo ele mesmo assim. "lealdade" precisa vir de algum lugar, se o Dutch conseguiu lealdade o bastante pra não ser questionado nesse nível de circunstâncias, é obrigação do enredo mostrar pelo menos um traço admirável dele pra ser compreensível alguma lealdade ter surgido. Não mostrar esse traço nunca e forçar na garganta do jogador uma lealdade desumana mesmo assim é outro insulto. Seguir personagens que são tão psicopatas quanto imbecis cria camadas de separação dramáticas impenetráveis que em retrospectiva só me faz ficar feliz que a maioria morreu. O melhor argumento possível pra defender essa caracterização é considerar as histórias que eles contam na fogueira as vezes. São legais e divertidas, mas se isso é realmente tudo que as pessoas exigem de uma obra pra considerar os personagens incríveis, o padrão de qualidade tá realmente muito baixo.
Depois de se repetir 150 vezes o jogo resolve que quer avançar a narrativa de verdade e te manda pra Guarma em uma guerra aleatória. A maioria das pessoas acha esse capítulo o pior e embora seja horrível mesmo eu acho ele um pouco melhor que os outros, pelo menos a ação exagerada faz sentido e a narrativa progride em quase toda missão.
Capítulo 6 é quando finalmente alguns personagens começam a ser trabalhados, Arthur sofre de tuberculose e começa a questionar as decisões do Dutch, e o Dutch fica dolorosamente estúpido. A idéia do personagem é ele ficar instável, inconfiável, impulsivo e ter a moralidade denegrida, mas na prática mesmo ele só começa a ficar muito burro. Os planos dele que antes já não passavam de se meter em tiroteio rezando pra tudo dar certo agora não eram mais nada além de chamar atenção da polícia. Você literalmente, pelas palavras do próprio personagem, começa a fazer ataques terroristas aleatórios pelo mapa pra chamar a atenção do estado e passivamente aceita depois de se questionar um pouco se é ou não uma boa ideia (personagens humanos k). Um dos momentos feitos pra questionar a confiança nele é quando ele se recusa a salvar o John da prisão, o que é de muito longe a decisão mais inteligente e louvável que ele faz o jogo todo (visto que é fisicamente impossível salvar o John da prisão), mas é reprimida pela maioria do acampamento.
Sadie e Arthur vão salvar ele mesmo assim. Todas as missões do jogo são um lixo mas eu quero enfatizar essa:
Você rema em um barco até uma prisão de segurança máxima onde não tem nenhuma parede ou guarda vigiando a costa pra caso alguém tente invadir a barco. Mata dois guardas com um rifle atraindo atenção de todo mundo da prisão imediatamente ao invés de ir no stealth, usa um único soldado de refém contra um forte armado de mais de mil guardas pra conseguir um homem absurdamente procurado por todo o estado, imediatamente se livra do refém e começa a meter bala em todo mundo sem nenhum motivo, volta pro barco e rema de volta rezando pra ninguém atirar nele enquanto isso (e por intervenção divina não atiram)
O jogo começa a vender que as coisas estão cada vez piores pra gangue, mesmo que na prática esteja exatamente a mesma coisa de sempre, só com os personagens ficando bravos uns com os outros. O que acontece de forma bem estúpida inclusive, do nada pessoas aleatórias começam a se odiar por suspeitarem de um traidor (mesmo ele tendo acabado de se confessar e ter levado um tiro) e o Dutch começa a confiar fielmente no Micah sem nenhum motivo que o Arthur é problemático, mesmo ele sendo a fonte de 98% da renda de todo o acampamento.
Eventualmente você descobre que realmente tinha um segundo traidor e era o Micah, removendo qualquer peso do personagem dele (que já era pouco) e só transformando em um hate dump genérico. No caminho pra falar isso pra gangue o jogo começa o final catártico onde do nada vem um bando de policiais(?), a gangue se desfaz inteira, o seu cavalo morre em uma cutscene que o jogo trata como dramática (eu ri de tão artificial) e o Arthur se "sacrifica" pelo John (mata alguns policiais aleatórios que o John canonicamente poderia fazer sozinho se você escolhesse ir atrás do dinheiro)
Arthur morre espancado, se você terminou com honra positiva ele morre feliz assistindo o por do sol enquanto uma música heroica e trágica toca de fundo. O arco do Arthur é que depois de contrair tuberculose ele percebe que é uma pessoa ruim e tenta buscar redenção pelos seus pecados, e o que esse final implica é que no melhor dos casos ele conseguiu uma redenção completa por tudo que fez e no pior dos casos ele morreu tentando de forma honrada e respeitável. O meu problema com esse arco é que ele não existe. Literalmente, não tem nada que solidifique esse arco até o final do jogo. Arthur expulsa o Strauss, o que é o mínimo do mínimo pra não ser a pior pessoa que existe, e até a última missão do jogo ele continua matando policiais sem questionar. A atitude que o jogo trata como o ápice do personagem dele é ajudar o John, o que não é relevante pra história (John poderia fazer sozinho) nem um sinal de mudança (é algo que o Arthur faria da mesma forma no começo do jogo). Não existe arco de verdade pro Arthur, só a ideia de um que nunca é elaborado.
Epílogo é um pouco melhor que o resto mas é um lixo também, Dutch ter continuado a seguir o Micah esse tempo todo mas mudar de ideia do nada no confronto final é hilário. A gameplay é uma mistura de seguir a linha amarela/vermelha do mapa com o cavalo e um minigame de space invaders pra concluir as missões. Os gráficos são bonitos.
Nós começamos o jogo depois de um assalto aleatório ter dado errado, matado uma galera da gangue, congelar todas as economias em um ponto inacessível e forçar todo mundo a se esconder nas montanhas passando fome e frio. Esse capítulo é muito importante pra definir duas coisas que acontecem o jogo todo:
1: Os personagens não são pessoas comuns em uma situação difícil, eles são heróis lendários mitológicos indestrutíveis que atacam um acampamento de pelo menos 100 pessoas sem nenhuma estratégia fora se jogar no meio do tiroteio e de alguma forma sair ileso.
2: Os personagens são pessoas horríveis completamente irredimíveis que sequestram um jovem azarado e submetem ele a dias de tortura em um tom de descontração e diversão, removendo qualquer empatia que você poderia ter por eles. (O que se confirma quando eles assaltam um trem, matam todos os seguranças sem esbanjar emoção e o Dutch deixa bem claro pro Arthur que tá tudo bem se ele matar todos os civis inocentes que estavam a bordo com ninguém da gangue achando errado.) A forma completamente natural que isso é demonstrado torna evidente que torturar pessoas e matar inocentes é algo recorrente a todo mundo envolvido na gangue.
A partir dessas regras o jogo segue pelos primeiros 4 capítulos, onde os personagens casualmente se envolvem nos maiores tiroteios já vistos em toda a história do velho oeste sem nunca elaborar qualquer plano ou medir as consequências morais do que estão fazendo. O jogo finge que tá avançando a narrativa trazendo personagens e áreas novas, mas na prática você tá só andando em círculos, indo de uma galeria de tiros pra outra mudando levemente o contexto.
Eu falava a um tempo atrás que esse é provavelmente o pior jogo que eu já joguei, não no sentido de ser o mais desprezível mas no sentido de ser o que pior usa a mídia pra transmitir qualquer emoção. Repensando nisso recentemente porque mesmo as piores e mais ofensivas partes de red dead ainda são totalmente dependentes da mídia dele. Se isso não fosse um jogo, as pessoas começariam a estranhar os personagens irem assaltar um banco sem nenhum plano em mente, ou matar metade dos guardas de uma família rica e depois ir trabalhar pra ela achando que não vai dar em nada, ou toda e qualquer ação que eles tenham em qualquer ponto da história acabar em 10 minutos de tiroteio frenético onde 60 inimigos morrem mas todo protagonista sai ileso. Sendo um jogo though, isso é só parte da ludonarrativa que a gente ignora pra ver o resto da história, e o jogo aproveita isso ao máximo pra se recusar a oferecer qualquer trabalho textual interessante e só estimular seu cérebro com umas explosões no lugar de um plano.
Durante essas missões filler que não progridem a narrativa, não oferecem um plano interessante de acompanhar ou desenvolvem qualquer personagem, alguns membros da gangue vão morrendo. Apesar do jogo tratar eles como deuses imortais que matam 150 pessoas por dia, a morte deles é sempre anti climática e humanizada, como se fosse por um erro bobo. É nesses momentos que eu digo que esse jogo é uma ofensa a inteligência de qualquer pessoa, você acabou de ver esses personagens matando um exército de policiais sem esboçar reação, esses personagens se mergulhando nesse tipo de tiroteio como plano principal ao invés de secundário. Matar eles dessa forma é uma tentativa tão artificial e ridícula de humanizar eles e criar tensão que fica risório. Sean morre em uma emboscada que realisticamente teria matado todo mundo envolvido, Lenny morre em um confronto que você canonicamente poderia evitar com suas habilidades se o jogo não bloqueasse.
É também bem difícil simpatizar com qualquer um desses personagens. Um elogio que eu ouço com frequência de todo mundo é em como os personagens parecem humanos de verdade e o quanto você se importa com eles durante o jogo, e eu do fundo do meu coração não consigo entender como. Fora o fato da maioria deles serem psicopatas cometendo crimes brutais de forma casual (e os que não estão diretamente envolvidos nisso são cúmplices de bom grado), todos são o ápice da imbecilidade. Dutch, do começo ao fim do jogo, fode todas as pessoas presentes naquele grupo um por um. Não tem nenhum plano dele com lógica, nenhum plano dele que dá certo e nenhum capítulo em que ele não coloca todo mundo em risco por bobeira, mas eles continuam fielmente seguindo ele mesmo assim. "lealdade" precisa vir de algum lugar, se o Dutch conseguiu lealdade o bastante pra não ser questionado nesse nível de circunstâncias, é obrigação do enredo mostrar pelo menos um traço admirável dele pra ser compreensível alguma lealdade ter surgido. Não mostrar esse traço nunca e forçar na garganta do jogador uma lealdade desumana mesmo assim é outro insulto. Seguir personagens que são tão psicopatas quanto imbecis cria camadas de separação dramáticas impenetráveis que em retrospectiva só me faz ficar feliz que a maioria morreu. O melhor argumento possível pra defender essa caracterização é considerar as histórias que eles contam na fogueira as vezes. São legais e divertidas, mas se isso é realmente tudo que as pessoas exigem de uma obra pra considerar os personagens incríveis, o padrão de qualidade tá realmente muito baixo.
Depois de se repetir 150 vezes o jogo resolve que quer avançar a narrativa de verdade e te manda pra Guarma em uma guerra aleatória. A maioria das pessoas acha esse capítulo o pior e embora seja horrível mesmo eu acho ele um pouco melhor que os outros, pelo menos a ação exagerada faz sentido e a narrativa progride em quase toda missão.
Capítulo 6 é quando finalmente alguns personagens começam a ser trabalhados, Arthur sofre de tuberculose e começa a questionar as decisões do Dutch, e o Dutch fica dolorosamente estúpido. A idéia do personagem é ele ficar instável, inconfiável, impulsivo e ter a moralidade denegrida, mas na prática mesmo ele só começa a ficar muito burro. Os planos dele que antes já não passavam de se meter em tiroteio rezando pra tudo dar certo agora não eram mais nada além de chamar atenção da polícia. Você literalmente, pelas palavras do próprio personagem, começa a fazer ataques terroristas aleatórios pelo mapa pra chamar a atenção do estado e passivamente aceita depois de se questionar um pouco se é ou não uma boa ideia (personagens humanos k). Um dos momentos feitos pra questionar a confiança nele é quando ele se recusa a salvar o John da prisão, o que é de muito longe a decisão mais inteligente e louvável que ele faz o jogo todo (visto que é fisicamente impossível salvar o John da prisão), mas é reprimida pela maioria do acampamento.
Sadie e Arthur vão salvar ele mesmo assim. Todas as missões do jogo são um lixo mas eu quero enfatizar essa:
Você rema em um barco até uma prisão de segurança máxima onde não tem nenhuma parede ou guarda vigiando a costa pra caso alguém tente invadir a barco. Mata dois guardas com um rifle atraindo atenção de todo mundo da prisão imediatamente ao invés de ir no stealth, usa um único soldado de refém contra um forte armado de mais de mil guardas pra conseguir um homem absurdamente procurado por todo o estado, imediatamente se livra do refém e começa a meter bala em todo mundo sem nenhum motivo, volta pro barco e rema de volta rezando pra ninguém atirar nele enquanto isso (e por intervenção divina não atiram)
O jogo começa a vender que as coisas estão cada vez piores pra gangue, mesmo que na prática esteja exatamente a mesma coisa de sempre, só com os personagens ficando bravos uns com os outros. O que acontece de forma bem estúpida inclusive, do nada pessoas aleatórias começam a se odiar por suspeitarem de um traidor (mesmo ele tendo acabado de se confessar e ter levado um tiro) e o Dutch começa a confiar fielmente no Micah sem nenhum motivo que o Arthur é problemático, mesmo ele sendo a fonte de 98% da renda de todo o acampamento.
Eventualmente você descobre que realmente tinha um segundo traidor e era o Micah, removendo qualquer peso do personagem dele (que já era pouco) e só transformando em um hate dump genérico. No caminho pra falar isso pra gangue o jogo começa o final catártico onde do nada vem um bando de policiais(?), a gangue se desfaz inteira, o seu cavalo morre em uma cutscene que o jogo trata como dramática (eu ri de tão artificial) e o Arthur se "sacrifica" pelo John (mata alguns policiais aleatórios que o John canonicamente poderia fazer sozinho se você escolhesse ir atrás do dinheiro)
Arthur morre espancado, se você terminou com honra positiva ele morre feliz assistindo o por do sol enquanto uma música heroica e trágica toca de fundo. O arco do Arthur é que depois de contrair tuberculose ele percebe que é uma pessoa ruim e tenta buscar redenção pelos seus pecados, e o que esse final implica é que no melhor dos casos ele conseguiu uma redenção completa por tudo que fez e no pior dos casos ele morreu tentando de forma honrada e respeitável. O meu problema com esse arco é que ele não existe. Literalmente, não tem nada que solidifique esse arco até o final do jogo. Arthur expulsa o Strauss, o que é o mínimo do mínimo pra não ser a pior pessoa que existe, e até a última missão do jogo ele continua matando policiais sem questionar. A atitude que o jogo trata como o ápice do personagem dele é ajudar o John, o que não é relevante pra história (John poderia fazer sozinho) nem um sinal de mudança (é algo que o Arthur faria da mesma forma no começo do jogo). Não existe arco de verdade pro Arthur, só a ideia de um que nunca é elaborado.
Epílogo é um pouco melhor que o resto mas é um lixo também, Dutch ter continuado a seguir o Micah esse tempo todo mas mudar de ideia do nada no confronto final é hilário. A gameplay é uma mistura de seguir a linha amarela/vermelha do mapa com o cavalo e um minigame de space invaders pra concluir as missões. Os gráficos são bonitos.
Haze
2008
Fumbled.
We are gathered here today not to mourn the passing of Free Radical, but to celebrate the fact that Free Radical once lived. We are, however, here to mourn Haze, which is a middling-at-best shooter whose story carries it until it crashes and burns just in time for the game to end. There is a wonderful, biting, powerful game tucked away inside of Haze's DNA, but it ultimately isn't the version of Haze that we got.
Haze is not an especially good game, which is okay, because Haze is a remarkably interesting game. I have no idea where Free Radical were getting off putting something this explicitly anti-American-invasion in a 2008 Playstation shooter, because the people who would have bought this game at launch would have been the exact kind of people too stupid to understand the sentiment. Six Days in Fallujah got announced the year after this came out. The War on Terror was cool, provided that you were from a certain subset of people who benefitted directly from the War on Terror. That person was the target demographic for Haze, and they weren't ready for it.
But for the overwhelming majority of a playthrough, the interweaving of narrative and gameplay in Haze leaves something like Spec Ops: The Line face-down dead in a ditch. Rather than the systems of play and story being at war with one another as they are in Spec Ops, Haze wants you to find the act of killing fun. Pressing L2 gives you a boost of Nectar, which makes you run faster, makes enemies glow, gives you a little rumble on your controller whenever you get a kill, and gives you an extra little dose every time you gun an enemy down. This encourages fast, aggressive play, always making sure you stay hopped up on Nectar; Nectar makes you better at killing, and killing gives you more Nectar. The actual gunplay is a little lacking, and you've got a remarkably limited selection of weapons, but the ones that feel good to use feel really good to use. Starting you off with a magnum with a report like thunder that practically blows the rebels in half when you shoot them is an inspired choice.
Your squadmates are similarly drugged out of their minds on Nectar, their bloodstreams flooded with enough stimulants to make E3-era Adam Sessler blush. I have to give praise to the writing for making me hate US troops even more than I already did. I imagined what it would be like to be an Afghani or Iraqi soldier, holding a rifle and tucked behind a blown-out brick wall, knowing that my country is being occupied by the stupidest fucking military the world has ever known. A battalion of jackboot dipshits, each of them spouting memes and quoting movies while they unload a hundred million dollars worth of munitions into an empty field. Tens of thousands of morons who never learned that they can breathe through their noses rather than their mouths, all getting into headbutt fights and giggling as they mow down civilians. It's not enough that they're evil, but they're also embarrassing, which might be the worse of the two. Getting killed by them isn't even dignified. It's like losing a footrace to a dog that someone bolted rocket thrusters to. If you also had the rocket thrusters, you'd win every single time, because you're a smart human. But you've got the misfortune of not being owned by a very rich and very committed master.
I'm getting off track. The point is that the narrative is sound, and the gameplay, while stunted, is still operating in harmony with the story. It works even better when you can't kill anything for a little bit, and the Nectar fades, and it becomes very suddenly clear how shit this all is. Not the game, neccessarily, but the act of gunning people down. The music stops playing. The rebels start screaming. You can see their corpses splayed out on the ground after you kill them. You have to commit to hiding and cowering when the bullets start flying, rather than sprinting out into the gunfire with bazookas under each arm and the hardest dick anyone has ever had. It's excellent. It's such a flawless integration of story into gameplay, but it ultimately can't keep it going for the entire runtime.
Free Radical were lined up for an Aaron Gordon backboard-shatterer, but they finished like 2005 Slam Dunk Contest Chris Andersen. The narrative was good for a while, if a little obvious — it was 2008 and you needed to be very obvious to hammer into the heads of Americans that war was bad — but it manages to trip over its own shoelaces by Bioshock Infinite-ing this shit and saying that the rebels are just as bad as the imperial pharmaceutical company invading their country for drug money. To Haze's (very) slim credit, it ends literally the moment before you find out if the entire rebel army is bad, or if it's just their leader. But it leaves a remarkably sour taste in the mouth that Free Radical felt the need not only to pull a punch, but to outright swing in all directions. It leaves you feeling not like this was a pointed takedown of capitalistic expansion and propaganda, but rather that it was Bart Simpson windmilling his arms and declaring that it's every side's own fault if they get hit.
When the narrative falls to pieces, it gets harder to justify excusing the way in which you interact with this world, because it's now clunky gameplay in service of a stupid story. The control mapping is completely unhinged. Losing access to Nectar is fine, but the feign death mechanic that replaces it literally requires you to lay on your back doing nothing for about fifteen seconds before you can get back up and rejoin the fight. Sit there and count fifteen seconds to yourself before you read any further. It's that long. You will be doing this multiple times per shootout. Black ops soldiers who are immune to Nectar frenzies get introduced, meaning that the only way to deal with them is to abandon your fun weapons and settle for whatever bullet hose gets the most rounds downrange the fastest.
At some point while playing a game and getting frustrated with some design decisions, you start wondering what the developers were thinking. This is a dangerous line of thought, because it's one bred from anger; the answer is almost always that an "obvious flaw" was something they were either compelled to include or forbidden from removing, often leaving the blame on the shoulders of the publisher. But no, Free Radical seemed genuinely pleased with every aspect of the game they released. They made their own graphics engine and proudly declared that the game was locked at 30 FPS because first-person shooters don't need to run at 60. It looks like shit, too, so it's not like this was a compromise being made for visual fidelity. Truly and honestly, what the fuck were they thinking?
Here's the Psychbomb cut of Haze. For one, we cut out the stupid subplot about the rebel leader secretly being a bad guy. Yes, there's historical precedent for opportunists rising up against tyranny during times of crisis and themselves becoming tyrannical, but that's not the character that we've been dealing with for 95% of the runtime. Get rid of the evil all along twist and keep him otherwise as is. Focus a bit more on the individual rebels, too; just as you had a squad of Mountain Dew-chugging bros in the first act, give us a squad of principled guerillas in the next.
Secondly, Nectar remains a factor for the whole game. We drop the whole "feign death" mechanic. Carpenter stays hopped up on Nectar and remains clad in his glowing armor and turns it back against Mantel. We recontextualize this in the second act not as a cool power-up, but as a twisted, tragic bit of neccessity. We make a shift over to guerilla tactics, focusing on traps and sabotage and making Mantel soldiers overdose on Nectar so that they kill each other, and we bust out our own Nectar boost in times of great crisis when there are no other options. We do an Edgerunners thing, basically; Carpenter is addicted to the Nectar, he knows it's going to kill him, but he can't stop taking it because it's his nuclear option that he needs to bust out against Mantel when shit really hits the fan. Mantel soldiers hopped up on Nectar should be borderline-unkillable juggernauts that need to be outwitted and not outgunned as they are in the current game.
Lastly, rather than the rebel leader accidentally firing a rocket at the carrier while you're still on it and then coming in with a helicopter to extract you, Carpenter volunteers to sacrifice himself. The Nectar is going to kill him within days at best no matter what he does, and he opts to do something truly good in his final moments. He busts out every dose of Nectar he has, rampages through the carrier in a horrifying whirlwind, slugs it out with his former squad leader just as he does in the current game, and makes sure that the carrier blows up with him and every other Mantel soldier in it. The Promise Hand clean up the rest of Mantel, successfully defend their homeland, and then burn down the Nectar fields so that nobody can ever use them again.
Sure, this one ends a little white savior-y rather than both sides-y, but there's no reason we can't just make it so Carpenter's ethnic background is from the same country he's invading. He's a fucking nothing character in the current game, so why not? It'd introduce some cognitive dissonance where he has to square what he believes or knows about his ancestral country with what he's being told about it. That's solid motivation for him to be hesitant and kick off his squad's doubts about his commitment to Mantel. It might not be a perfect idea, but I'm confident that it's better than the narrative we have here, brought to you from the same mind who gave us the stories of The Division and Rambo: The Video Game.
But now I'm writing fix fics for Haze, which should be the ultimate sign that I'm too far gone.
This might be the most well-known pieces of box art for a game that nobody played.
We are gathered here today not to mourn the passing of Free Radical, but to celebrate the fact that Free Radical once lived. We are, however, here to mourn Haze, which is a middling-at-best shooter whose story carries it until it crashes and burns just in time for the game to end. There is a wonderful, biting, powerful game tucked away inside of Haze's DNA, but it ultimately isn't the version of Haze that we got.
Haze is not an especially good game, which is okay, because Haze is a remarkably interesting game. I have no idea where Free Radical were getting off putting something this explicitly anti-American-invasion in a 2008 Playstation shooter, because the people who would have bought this game at launch would have been the exact kind of people too stupid to understand the sentiment. Six Days in Fallujah got announced the year after this came out. The War on Terror was cool, provided that you were from a certain subset of people who benefitted directly from the War on Terror. That person was the target demographic for Haze, and they weren't ready for it.
But for the overwhelming majority of a playthrough, the interweaving of narrative and gameplay in Haze leaves something like Spec Ops: The Line face-down dead in a ditch. Rather than the systems of play and story being at war with one another as they are in Spec Ops, Haze wants you to find the act of killing fun. Pressing L2 gives you a boost of Nectar, which makes you run faster, makes enemies glow, gives you a little rumble on your controller whenever you get a kill, and gives you an extra little dose every time you gun an enemy down. This encourages fast, aggressive play, always making sure you stay hopped up on Nectar; Nectar makes you better at killing, and killing gives you more Nectar. The actual gunplay is a little lacking, and you've got a remarkably limited selection of weapons, but the ones that feel good to use feel really good to use. Starting you off with a magnum with a report like thunder that practically blows the rebels in half when you shoot them is an inspired choice.
Your squadmates are similarly drugged out of their minds on Nectar, their bloodstreams flooded with enough stimulants to make E3-era Adam Sessler blush. I have to give praise to the writing for making me hate US troops even more than I already did. I imagined what it would be like to be an Afghani or Iraqi soldier, holding a rifle and tucked behind a blown-out brick wall, knowing that my country is being occupied by the stupidest fucking military the world has ever known. A battalion of jackboot dipshits, each of them spouting memes and quoting movies while they unload a hundred million dollars worth of munitions into an empty field. Tens of thousands of morons who never learned that they can breathe through their noses rather than their mouths, all getting into headbutt fights and giggling as they mow down civilians. It's not enough that they're evil, but they're also embarrassing, which might be the worse of the two. Getting killed by them isn't even dignified. It's like losing a footrace to a dog that someone bolted rocket thrusters to. If you also had the rocket thrusters, you'd win every single time, because you're a smart human. But you've got the misfortune of not being owned by a very rich and very committed master.
I'm getting off track. The point is that the narrative is sound, and the gameplay, while stunted, is still operating in harmony with the story. It works even better when you can't kill anything for a little bit, and the Nectar fades, and it becomes very suddenly clear how shit this all is. Not the game, neccessarily, but the act of gunning people down. The music stops playing. The rebels start screaming. You can see their corpses splayed out on the ground after you kill them. You have to commit to hiding and cowering when the bullets start flying, rather than sprinting out into the gunfire with bazookas under each arm and the hardest dick anyone has ever had. It's excellent. It's such a flawless integration of story into gameplay, but it ultimately can't keep it going for the entire runtime.
Free Radical were lined up for an Aaron Gordon backboard-shatterer, but they finished like 2005 Slam Dunk Contest Chris Andersen. The narrative was good for a while, if a little obvious — it was 2008 and you needed to be very obvious to hammer into the heads of Americans that war was bad — but it manages to trip over its own shoelaces by Bioshock Infinite-ing this shit and saying that the rebels are just as bad as the imperial pharmaceutical company invading their country for drug money. To Haze's (very) slim credit, it ends literally the moment before you find out if the entire rebel army is bad, or if it's just their leader. But it leaves a remarkably sour taste in the mouth that Free Radical felt the need not only to pull a punch, but to outright swing in all directions. It leaves you feeling not like this was a pointed takedown of capitalistic expansion and propaganda, but rather that it was Bart Simpson windmilling his arms and declaring that it's every side's own fault if they get hit.
When the narrative falls to pieces, it gets harder to justify excusing the way in which you interact with this world, because it's now clunky gameplay in service of a stupid story. The control mapping is completely unhinged. Losing access to Nectar is fine, but the feign death mechanic that replaces it literally requires you to lay on your back doing nothing for about fifteen seconds before you can get back up and rejoin the fight. Sit there and count fifteen seconds to yourself before you read any further. It's that long. You will be doing this multiple times per shootout. Black ops soldiers who are immune to Nectar frenzies get introduced, meaning that the only way to deal with them is to abandon your fun weapons and settle for whatever bullet hose gets the most rounds downrange the fastest.
At some point while playing a game and getting frustrated with some design decisions, you start wondering what the developers were thinking. This is a dangerous line of thought, because it's one bred from anger; the answer is almost always that an "obvious flaw" was something they were either compelled to include or forbidden from removing, often leaving the blame on the shoulders of the publisher. But no, Free Radical seemed genuinely pleased with every aspect of the game they released. They made their own graphics engine and proudly declared that the game was locked at 30 FPS because first-person shooters don't need to run at 60. It looks like shit, too, so it's not like this was a compromise being made for visual fidelity. Truly and honestly, what the fuck were they thinking?
Here's the Psychbomb cut of Haze. For one, we cut out the stupid subplot about the rebel leader secretly being a bad guy. Yes, there's historical precedent for opportunists rising up against tyranny during times of crisis and themselves becoming tyrannical, but that's not the character that we've been dealing with for 95% of the runtime. Get rid of the evil all along twist and keep him otherwise as is. Focus a bit more on the individual rebels, too; just as you had a squad of Mountain Dew-chugging bros in the first act, give us a squad of principled guerillas in the next.
Secondly, Nectar remains a factor for the whole game. We drop the whole "feign death" mechanic. Carpenter stays hopped up on Nectar and remains clad in his glowing armor and turns it back against Mantel. We recontextualize this in the second act not as a cool power-up, but as a twisted, tragic bit of neccessity. We make a shift over to guerilla tactics, focusing on traps and sabotage and making Mantel soldiers overdose on Nectar so that they kill each other, and we bust out our own Nectar boost in times of great crisis when there are no other options. We do an Edgerunners thing, basically; Carpenter is addicted to the Nectar, he knows it's going to kill him, but he can't stop taking it because it's his nuclear option that he needs to bust out against Mantel when shit really hits the fan. Mantel soldiers hopped up on Nectar should be borderline-unkillable juggernauts that need to be outwitted and not outgunned as they are in the current game.
Lastly, rather than the rebel leader accidentally firing a rocket at the carrier while you're still on it and then coming in with a helicopter to extract you, Carpenter volunteers to sacrifice himself. The Nectar is going to kill him within days at best no matter what he does, and he opts to do something truly good in his final moments. He busts out every dose of Nectar he has, rampages through the carrier in a horrifying whirlwind, slugs it out with his former squad leader just as he does in the current game, and makes sure that the carrier blows up with him and every other Mantel soldier in it. The Promise Hand clean up the rest of Mantel, successfully defend their homeland, and then burn down the Nectar fields so that nobody can ever use them again.
Sure, this one ends a little white savior-y rather than both sides-y, but there's no reason we can't just make it so Carpenter's ethnic background is from the same country he's invading. He's a fucking nothing character in the current game, so why not? It'd introduce some cognitive dissonance where he has to square what he believes or knows about his ancestral country with what he's being told about it. That's solid motivation for him to be hesitant and kick off his squad's doubts about his commitment to Mantel. It might not be a perfect idea, but I'm confident that it's better than the narrative we have here, brought to you from the same mind who gave us the stories of The Division and Rambo: The Video Game.
But now I'm writing fix fics for Haze, which should be the ultimate sign that I'm too far gone.
This might be the most well-known pieces of box art for a game that nobody played.
Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.
Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.
Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.
Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...
Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.
Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.
Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...
I think the reason I keep coming back to TOEE more happily than other similar titles is to gaze at its massive testicles at display. If computer turn based rpg's equated to dungeon masters, Divinity: Original Sin would be a massive dudebro stoner; ask him if you can try doing X thing and he'll answer with "nahhh idk bro the boss is immune to that shit" after which he'll go back to lighting blunts and introducing random innocent dogs in the encounter to totally hilariously die in the crossfire. TOEE, on the other hand, is a more chill dude, sticking to the classics but understanding the importance of FUN; ask if you can charm the boss so that they in turn would aoe slaughter their allies he'll answer with a simple "sure". It's a higher roll but a cracked mage should be doing powerful things, no? Glitterdust completely KO-ing giants out of fights? Yeah knock yourself out. Temple is archaic in ways and sticks to rimming the PnP experience far too much, but still soars freer than the pretenders.
Neo Turf Masters
1996
La puntuación de este juego es directamente proporcional a si he ganado o perdido mi última partida
Dumped a bunch of API files and the Rockstar launcher into the root of my games folder, which then revoked write privileges on every file in every subfolder, presumably as some sort of anti-cheat. It then proceeded to break several programs in the games folder because they couldn't actually write any data without being run as admin. I spent a few days wondering why so many of my programs were suddenly breaking, and thought I was staring down the barrel of a hard drive failure. No, it was just Rockstar Social Club and the accumulated ~150mb of files that didn't get deleted after I uninstalled. Had to manually clean everything up and reset permissions myself.
Would still be fucking boring even if it wasn't malware.
Would still be fucking boring even if it wasn't malware.