Watch Dogs (feat. Kamen Rider W)

Let me say this to start: this post is, at a bare minimum, eight months old.

Like, I’d written pretty much everything a while back.  But for one reason or another, other posts took priority.  I’d blame a single game for it, but I think for now I’ll just take the high ground and point fingers at the better part of reality itself.  So at some point I just decided to have it go up on a certain date.

“Hey, you know what?” I asked myself.  “You’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of your very first post on Watch Dogs, AKA the game you consider the worst western-developed game you’ve ever played.  Why not celebrate sheer mediocrity and unacceptably-poor design by offsetting it with your not-at-all-secret Kamen Rider propagandist agenda?”

So here we are.  And here we shall be, until the world knows just how miserable of a game Watch Dogs is -- and that we must never forget what Ubisoft hath wrought.  But on the plus side?  Guys in big dumb monster suits.  And armored suits.  Just suits all over the damn place.

Beyond: Two Souls (feat. Kamen Rider Fourze)

So.  Not too long ago, the Two Best Friends -- or technically the Super Best Friends, since Matt and Pat brought Woolie along for the "Sadness" -- finished their LP of Beyond: Two Souls.  I’m on record of saying that I would sacrifice a goat for the gang to play the game from start to finish, and my prayers were indeed answered.  It certainly saved me the trouble of playing the game beyond the demo.  And as it turns out, the Best Friends did me (and our species) a greater service than they could have ever imagined.

Yikesy mikesy.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if I had played Two Souls for myself, from start to finish, it would easily be the WORST game I’ve played all year.

It’s like a thirty-car pileup on top of a train wreck on top of an oil spill on top of a forest fire, with a ruined birthday party thrown in for good measure.  This game -- and I can’t even use the word “game” properly -- gets so much wrong it’s almost fascinatingly terrible.  Almost.  I’m pretty sure I never bore David Cage and his crew at Quantic Dream any ill will before; that’s true even now, but after seeing them at their “best” I can’t say I have even an eighth of the good will I had beforehand.  Whatever they’re cooking up next, if it’s anything like Two Souls they need to start over. 

A part of me was willing to start this post by asking “Has David Cage ever played a video game?”  It was going to segue into how you could use the medium to tell or enhance a story, given that his game has been done, and done better.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t the right question to ask.  There isn’t even a question I need to ask.  Why?  Because I have a theory.

David Cage doesn’t need to play more video games.  He needs to watch something dumb.

WARNING: Spoilers for Beyond: Two Souls AND Kamen Rider Fourze coming your way.  One of those is worth caring about.  The other isn’t.  Guess which one.