Capcom Must Die

Yesterday I drew some Mega Man fan-art. I still love the character designs and the potential of their games, but Capcom as a company has mutated into something awful. And I've decided to stop giving them my business.

In fact, I'd suggest you stop giving them your business too. No, really. Stop giving Capcom money. Stop it. Don't buy that new Resident Evil, don't buy whatever stupid Street Fighter vs. Sesame Street crossover they're making. We have to stop rewarding these people. Money is the only language this company understands, because they sure as hell don't understand creativity or respect.

Capcom hates you. You do realize this, right? Capcom hates you as an individual. You are an ATM machine to these people. They hate you, and your family, and that thing you love. They hated Keiji Inafune, the man who made them wealthy. The man whose ingenuity and hard work provided them with franchises they are still taking advantage of. They hate the fact that you wanted Mega Man Legends 3 more than Street Fighter vs. Sex And The City. They hated the fact that you keep asking for a character from a franchise they openly despise to keep making fighting game appearances. They hate Capcom-Unity for giving people a peek at the game development process.

They look at the people who allow them to prosper as unwashed, unworthy masses. They feel entitled to their success. I say the time has long since passed for us to take that away. This is absolutely something we can do.

▼

80% Chance That Navi Was Better

To the people who swoon over Ben Croshaw like he's video games' Gene Siskel, here's a podcast about the Zelda series(Skyward Sword in particular), demonstrating how to properly criticize a game while being British. See, they put in the effort. They tried to like it. They acknowledged its few successes, but don't let it get away with being(what sounds like) a really annoying waste of time, AND for treating the player like a complete imbecile. It also features one of the guys from Extra Credits, so there's that too.

Yeah, it's schadenfreude. But if any series deserves to be taken down a peg, it's this one. We haven't had a decent Zelda game since Wind Waker, and even that had to throw in pointless padding scavenger hunts in the last act. Even with that fucking Ocean, at least it knew what it wanted to be and came close to hitting that target. It didn't suffer from an identity-crisis like Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword.

Maybe the reason people look back so fondly on WW is a simple one: It's the last Zelda game that doesn't have a sidekick in the dungeons. That's right, that's the last major title in the series that didn't assume you've suffered brain damage, or just paired you up with a useless bitch.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

WE NEED MOAR DRAGONS

I think my biggest problem looking at and hearing about Skyrim also applies to a lot of other games. Not the fact that I'm bored of glitchy, mile-wide, inch-deep sandbox games with no real end-goal, no interesting characters, and the same handful of enemies and environments. No.

It's the dragons.

Anyone hyping up their game(or movie, or book) with dragons is a developer that has no ideas. Dragons, as an obstacle in a fantasy game are what happen when you are bankrupt of imagination. Not even cool-looking robot-dragons or something, like the PSO series does now and then. Not even fat dragons or anything that plays on the old formula, but the same generic, black, thin, spiky, long-necked cliché we've been fighting since time immemorial.

Dragons aren't cool anymore.

▼

THQ

Not that we didn't already know a company that exclusively made shitty licensed games was run poorly, but here you go.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

"Halo: CEA": Review

by Alex Hill

2.5/5

Halo: Combat Evolved has not aged as well as I thought it would. Playing it again, it's clear to me that it was good for its time. It was the next stepping stone after the Goldeneyes and Perfect Dark of the N64 era... Wait, can games about shooting people in the face have their "Renaissance"? Halo said goodbye to all of that, and while the series focused on making the immediate "game-feel"(as Egoraptor once put it) more fine-tuned, it sacrificed just about everything else to get to where we are now:

A screeching, prepubescent cesspool, the graveyard of creativity in video games.

▼

Firefall

On the one hand, Red 5, the developer behind the upcoming MMO: "Firefall" have decided to pull out of the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo. This is out of protest over the SOPA/PIPA nonsense that threatens every facet of online media, including their game. Pretty ballsy move, and I commend them for that.

On the other hand, "Firefall" is being written by Orson Scott Card, a notorious homophobe who's known for financially supporting some anti-Gay movements/organizations. So it's kind of already on my personal blacklist. That's not really Mark Kern or Red 5's fault, but it is hard for me to respect anyone who's willing to associate with someone that bigoted. (See also: Koichi Sugiyama of the Dragon Quest series)

Although it's well within their rights, and I wouldn't want that taken away just to appease my interests. They're allowed to work with jackasses, and I'm allowed to not buy their product. So the question remains:


Do I support these guys, as thanks for standing up when other companies will be too terrified to lose the E3 publicity? Or do I keep boycotting their product for its association with an evil lunatic?

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Mapstalgia

"I played the hell out out this game in my youth. And now, every time that I’m stressed, I’ll play it. I find it to be very relaxing. I go through the motions of a game that I’m so familiar with. It helps me clear my head.
Honestly, I’ve probably beat this over a hundred times."

That came from a post on "Mapstalgia", a tumblr account where you submit drawings of old level maps from video games, BUT only from memory. No references.

And I think it does a great job at explaining why I play through old games I've conquered many times. Even though there's nothing new for me to see. And perhaps it explains why I was so miserable last year. I kind of stopped my yearly tradition of going through an old game I adore. Figured I'd be sick of it by now.

Well now, in addition to Kirby's Return to Dreamland, Pokemon Heart Gold, Halo: CEA and the Mega Man Zero Collection, I'm also chipping away at new playthroughs of Wind Waker and Kirby Super Star.

Courtesy of vgmuseum.com

Good times.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Favourite Things Of 2011

Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Nuclear Meltdowns. Mega Man Legends cancelled. Terrorist attacks in Norway. Deus Ex: Human Revolution. My cat died. Failed two personal projects. Lost all contact with friends. The Occupy Movement. A month-long medical emergency at the end. 2011 was one soul-crushing disaster after another.

WORST.


YEAR.


EVER.

Because it was a non-stop parade of horseshit flying in from every direction, I'm going to be a bit more lenient with my unwritten "rules" for eligibility. Namely, it doesn't have to be something that was completed in 2011 to qualify for this list. It just has to be something that provided some brief respite from the biggest piece-of-shit span of 12 months I can remember.

(Otherwise I wouldn't really have enough to fill out a Top 10 list).

And remember: This isn't a BEST OF list. These are my Favourites. Things that I know aren't the best in the history of whatever. But for whatever reason, they helped me survive another year. If it's not on this list, either I haven't played it yet (Arkham City, Minecraft), or it's overrated bullshit (Deus Ex, Bastion).

▼

Bastion

I could have sworn Minecraft was available for the Xbox 360. And yet when I had that new points card I bought precisely for that purchase, it wasn't available for download. None of game sites mentioned a delay. So I got Bastion instead, since everyone's yapping about that like it's Braid 2.

You know, every time I try to make a positive effort to make this blog less about only pessimistic, mean-spirited things to say about video games, something comes along and craps all over my parade.

In this case, I feel I would be remiss not to point out that "Bastion" kind of sucks.

▼

Ico: You're Digging Holes

Dan Quayle was attributed to having said: "[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system.". And that was the dumbest thing I'd ever read, until Polly said that "Ico" is a worse video game than "Duke Nukem Forever".


Seriously? Seriously?


One of those was a minimalist story of a boy and girl who don't speak the same language, but still try to communicate, co-operate and trust each other. The other is a game where a guy picks up a piece of shit and throws it. There is no set of circumstances where the latter makes for a better, smarter or more emotionally engaging series of events, and yet that is the statement you have made. I have heard more convincing arguments for child rape.

▼