No, really.
No, really.
No, really.
I’m not even joking here. This was a great year for video games --
like, the best year.
Now, look.
I know what you’re expecting here, because if you’ve been on this blog
long enough, then you know I’ve done the exact same thing before. You know that last time I wasn’t exactly in a
chipper mood. 2013 saw the release of some
really good games, but it also saw some truly awful titles (DmC is not what I’d call a good game --
and let’s just leave it at that). But in
the end, I was optimistic. I figured
that things would get better. I thought
we’d get better games on average, instead of as an exception to the norm.
As it turns out, I was half-right. The Wii U has given me one awesome game after
another, to the point where I genuinely can’t decide which one of its releases
is my personal Game of the Year. I’ve
dabbled with a couple of smaller games like Shovel
Knight, Fez, and Tokyo Jungle,
and walked away impressed; likewise, a slew of fighters have given me finger
muscles that would make Hulk Hogan in his entirety look feeble. And even though I’ve expressed my distaste
for “next-gen” games, I’ll gladly admit I can see the potential. P.T. showed
me that. As did Wolfenstein, of all things.
It’s about using your toolset effectively, not just having the best
tools.
On the other hand, there was some real garbage
this year.
For the life of me, I can’t tell if people like Titanfall or hate it -- or more
importantly, even care that it exists anymore.
It’s more than a little troubling to hear that a game hyped higher than
Olympus Mons could just drop out of the public consciousness so thoroughly, but
from what I can gather, the shooter primed to outdo Call of Duty (as made by some of the guys behind Call of Duty, while trying to do what Call of Duty already does…only with
parkour and robots) has been outdone by Call
of Duty. I can’t heap hate on a game
I haven’t played before, but methinks something has gone awry. We’ll see how it goes.
The same could be said for Destiny. I don’t think
highly of the game, and even if I spent more time writing a post on it than
actually playing it, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Again, from what I can gather I don’t see a
reason to; the game has its fans, sure, but be it from players or
reviewers/critics I’m seeing a lot of negativity. A lot of backlash. Disappointment, apathy, coldness, and even
outright anger. That’s not a good place
for any game to be in, let alone one with (possibly?) half a billion dollars
poured into it.
And then there’s Watch Dogs.
I don’t know what my Game of the Year is, but I
don’t need a second to name what’s at the bottom of my list. Watch
Dogs is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. At its best, it’s as bland as a pile of
month-old gruel. At its worst, it
manages to get wrong even the basics, be it gameplay-wise or story-wise. It’s not often that a game infuriates me to
such a level, to the point where it’s even surpassed DmC in terms of rage-inducing.
I don’t necessarily hate the people behind it with a passion, but I do
hate their product. I hate the misguided
-- if not short-sighted -- mindset that brought such a terrible, terrible game
into being.
Am I being melodramatic? Probably.
I’ll gladly recognize that there are worse games out there, even if I
haven’t played them. I still haven’t
forgotten how much anger Thief 4 drew
out of Zero Punctuation’s Yahtzee, to
the point where I expect him to name it as one of his bottom five games of
2014. Beyond that, Ubisoft -- not
content with just one failure a year -- put out the nigh-broken Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which could
probably work its way up to mediocre even if it didn’t have any bugs.
Reviewers across the board aren’t even trying to
mask their disdain for CoD anymore,
especially since this is its second entry
on eighth-gen consoles. Konami sold
gamers a forty-dollar demo with a straight face with Ground Zeroes. I don’t know
what the hell’s going on with The Master
Chief Collection, but it doesn’t sound good. You can’t look anywhere without someone,
somewhere, being unhappy with the latest games.
But that’s a good thing. Maybe even the best thing.
Take Watch
Dogs as an example. Apparently it’s
gone on to sell more than four million copies since its release -- probably
more by this point. That point alone is
enough to make my blood hotter than lava, but there’s an upside. If we pretend for a moment that those four
million sales directly equal four million players, then there’s a question that
remains: of those four million people, how many of them are satisfied
customers? How many of them are willing
to go “Yep! That was an amazing
experience. I would definitely play
more”? How many of them aren’t ready to sing praises? There’s probably a higher count of the former
than I care to acknowledge, but the same could be just as true for the other
camp.
Watch Dogs has
seen huge sales. So has Destiny, even if Activision refuses to
reveal the exact number (which probably doesn’t mean good things, but we’ll
just wait for now). So has Titanfall, since EA has apparently
greenlit a sequel. Plus, people will
probably still line up for the next CoD,
or the next AssCreed, or whatever --
if they haven’t already -- for the chance to play the latest and
“greatest”. But here’s the thing: more sales means more exposure -- of a
product, as well as its faults. The
number of people that know The Wonderful
101 is bad at explaining some of its mechanics is a smaller sample size
than the number of people that know you can fall through the ground in AC: Unity. And with the internet still alive and well,
that sample size -- and the negative press that follows -- travels pretty
freakin’ fast.
We’re in the eighth generation of video games
now. What worked in the past isn’t
enough anymore -- or at the very least, it won’t be soon. Likewise, at this stage we expect more from
our games. Even the stuff released in
the last few years -- Skyrim, for
example -- has shown us what games can be, so the expectation is that the new
stuff can reach that level fairly easily.
Barring all that, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a game to at
least be competent, especially if it’s from a company with enough money to buy New
Hampshire. But we haven’t gotten that
recently. We’ve had to talk about how The Evil Within isn’t scary, or Far Cry 4 is just Far Cry 3 with a worse story, or how DriveClub doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. We can’t talk about the good stuff in games,
because we have to talk about the bad stuff.
Constantly.
But when you think about it, that’s got to be the
best possible situation for us. Well,
granted the truly best possible
situation would be one in which all games on all consoles immediately came out
as TENOUTTATEN-worthy, but the point still stands. Maybe you can’t say as much for everyone, but
you can say it for enough people: there’s some real dissatisfaction among gamers.
They’re voicing their opinions. They’re articulating the problems. They’re not as eager to blindly accept
whatever gets thrown their way…even though they have to buy what gets thrown their way to judge for themselves, but you get
the idea. People across the board are
becoming more critical of the games they play.
And when that happens on a big enough scale -- when we have droves of
gamers demanding more from the men and women behind those walls of code -- then
we stand a chance of setting something in motion.
How can we get better games if we don’t ask of
them from our providers? The answer is
-- unless we start making games ourselves -- we can’t. And the point has long since passed for us to
start demanding higher standards of others.
Good thing we’re taking a giant step forward, yes?
Well, relatively speaking.
There’s still a lot of work to be done, of course
(given how AC: Victory was apparently
being worked on instead of making sure AC:
Unity wasn’t terrible). Setting
aside what’s going on in the game industry, there’s still the matter of sorting
out what’s going on with gamers. All of
the recent controversies -- and I don’t
think I don’t need to say which ones -- have opened up a lot of eyes to the
issues woven into and around games, and the people that play them. There’s no quick fix for that. There just isn’t. Frankly, there might not even be a fix at
all. But I want to believe that there is
-- for gamers, for games, and for everything in between. I’d think, or maybe hope, that it’s all about
changing the mindset.
And I want to be a part of that change.
I’m not even going to try and pretend like what I
write here and elsewhere have some far-reaching impact on the world. It’d be cool if it did, but I haven’t reached
that stage yet. I want it to, but that’s
a ways away. So for now? I’m more than willing to make my presence a
bit more widespread, but until then? I
just have to keep doing what I can.
Sometimes it’s not always about having the biggest audience; even if
there’s just one person enjoying what you make, you should make things for that
one person. That’s where it all starts.
I can’t begin to explain how much writing blog
stuff like this has helped me. It’s made
me into a better writer, both in terms of these posts and in the storytelling
craft. And likewise, you don’t know how
much I appreciate comments and opinions, whether they agree with me or
not. I want to be able to facilitate
that, and maybe even do that on a wider scale someday. But until that day comes? Right now, I’ll say thank you. And I’ll keep pushing forward for as long as
I can.
So, what does that mean for Cross-Up? Well, the holidays are right around the
corner, so -- despite my above claim -- I think it’d be best if I put the blog
on another soft hiatus. Things will get
back in full swing sometime in January (ideally), because even now I can think
of a few topics I’d like to talk about.
But I’ll save that for later. I
can tell you right now that I’m not planning on doing another visual overhaul;
that was a pain in the ass last time, and I can’t think of anything I desperately
need to change right now. At most, I’ll
just be going in and making sure that everything works as intended.
Beyond that, though? I don’t know when it’ll happen exactly, but I
absolutely want to get back to
working on I Hraet You -- up to and including
the implementation of some much-needed edits.
I’ve been thinking about it consistently for weeks now, and it’s only
served to remind me how much I want to get back to Lloyd’s adventures in
Porbeagle. This is a pretty hard swerve
against my earlier plans to do a crossover with Dead on Prime (which I’m guessing some of you don’t even know
exists…in a sense), but yeah. IHY takes priority now. The crossover comes later. So expect new chapters of the former
someday. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Until then, though? Don’t worry; you won’t be starved for
content.
I’ve talked about Kamen Rider off and on (and on, and on, and on) in my posts, but I
haven’t done anything direct on it since last fall. It’s time I fixed that. So, my plan is to have one post per week on a
series that’s taken up space in my mind for ages: the fifteenth Heisei-era installment,
Kamen Rider Gaim. What does it do right? What does it do wrong? How much can I nerd out? You’ll just have to wait and see for
Micchy, Kaito, and to an exponential degree. In that order.
So that’s about all I’ve got for now. Thanks for reading, both this post and the
posts before it. Hope to see you guys
soon. Until next time, then.
Happy holidays.
…All right, once more for the road.
#GoodGuyNintendo
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