A Letter From The Publisher

"Dear Mr. Tim Schaefer,

We regret to inform you that we will not publish your game. We do not feel confident at this time that anyone would be willing to pay for it. People only want brown and grey first-person shooters with chest-high walls and Madden. Nobody wants fun or creativity. Consumers would much rather have shitty sequels, movie tie-ins and intrusive DRM.

While it is true that you have maintained a level of trust with your audience, a transparent relationship of trust between a developer and the consumer has never equated to profitable business.


...Except for the 17,000 people who completely paid off your kickstarter project within 9 HOURS, with over a month still left to donate. This in turn raising over $800,000.

But other than THAT, clearly there is no demand for your work in this economic environment, Mr. Schaefer.


~Sincerely,

The Morons In Charge Of AAA Game Studios, DNR."

Firebird

So it looks like I'm going to have a new webcomic soon. Sooner than I was hoping for, actually.

See, it's going to be told through Halo 3 screenshots. The character-customization and level-builder is robust enough to make little stupid fan-fiction story things out of this way. I can save up to 30 screenshots at a time, the most recent of which go online at Bungie's main website for me to download. Which I do, and then I put word balloons over them and fill those balloons with crap and nonsense.

Except... see, the screenshots were hosted on Bungie.net, a company not affiliated with the series anymore. They're passing the torch to 343 Industries and thus halo.xbox.com. While the most recent game in the series "Reach" will still be supported this way, Halo 3(the game I'm working with here), will NOT. Effective April 1st, I won't be able to take any more screenshots.

So that gives me about 40 days to get enough screengrabs to fill out 7 more "issues" of comic material. There's about 2-4 screenshots per page, usually. And while the first couple of issues are around 30 pages each, that number is going to grow.


So that's what I'm going to be busy with this month. I guess this is just the kick in the pants I need to get it done. I never did find a reliable webhost, so it's going to be on this blog. It's a pretty clunky setup I've got, but I don't have another 2 years to learn the php, html, java or whatever the fuck it is you need to make a website. So this will have to do for now.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

"Kirby's Return To Dreamland" Review

by Alex Hill

3.5/5

What can I say? I just like Kirby games. I just like Kirby. I like how they're mostly simplistic and fuzzy-wuzzy, and then in the last act there's some unsettlingly morbid final boss that cries blood or something. I like any platformer that has the guts to include a side-scrolling shooter section in the 3rd-act, for no other reason than because the developer likes those and wanted to include one. It's like the opposite of those cursed vehicle segments in First Person Shooters.

And honestly, I like any game that has the guts to be cute. Could any other video game series get away with having a pink main character on the box?

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Impulse

So a whole bunch of Valve games are coming to Gamestop's "Impulse" online service. But here's what it says at the bottom of the page announcing this:

"All Valve titles require the Steam Client to install and play."

...What?

"Steam" is the online service thingy that Valve uses. There is no point in buying this on Impulse and giving Gamestop money if I have to open up Steam to use these games anyway. I can just buy those things on Steam.

Are ALL decisions in video games made today by a man freebasing moon dust and slamming his dick against a Speak-And-Spell, and then obeying whatever monotone commands it issues?

END OF LINE

~A.H.

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.

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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.

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