Atomic Heart Hype

 

This is going to be a pretty short post but it's pretty rare for me to get hyped by an upcoming game so when I do I feel like I have to mention it.

Actually if I'm honest, Atomic Heart is a game I saw a couple of years ago via a trailer on YouTube and then forgot about.  Someone in my stream mentioned it and I just had to go and seek it out again.

 Game play wise it looks like pretty standard stuff, a Bioshock or Fallout type affair and since I really enjoy the first Bioshock, taking that game and giving it a Russian twist is more than welcome.  But what really got me interested was the striking visual style.  The overall setting looks like standard post-apocalypse but the things that inhabit the landscape and the indoor environments in that trailer look like some kind of abstract painting come to life.  Even if the game releases and ends up being bland open world bullshit, I'll probably enjoy exploring the world at the very least.

It reminds me of when I was younger and the I saw that Bioshock trailer for the first time

I suppose it's pretty clear that the developers of Atomic Heart are trying to imitate these old trailers with theirs and that's a good thing.  Hopefully their game will be just as interested as the first Bioshock was

Unfortunately though, there is no release date for Atomic Heart as far as I know.  It has a steam page with a big TBA on it but I'm OK with this.  I'd rather it take a long time and be a good game rather than have them rush it out and have another buggy mess on my hands.  I will be watching very carefully

Sonic the Hedgehog Trailer

So the trailer for the new Sonic movie dropped and OH BOY what an experience that was to watch for the first time.

So I think everyone in existence who saw the design of Sonic for this movie recoiled at just how awful he looks in this film.  He just looks....weird.  I think what they were trying to do was to make him look "realistic" but now we have this..thing..that makes just a little bit of sick come up in the back of your throat every time you see him.  For me personally it's the teeth, whenever he opens his mouth and I can see his teeth it just weirds me out for some reason.  Whoever designed that and whoever OK'd that design really needs a slap upside the head.

But that aside, the trailer actually sort of impressed me.  It's not going to win any awards but if you go in expecting a dumb bit of fan wank based loosely on some video game source material this looks like a good bet to me.  Jim Carrey as Eggman/Robotnik really made that trailer for me, from those small clips I already really enjoy the performance he's giving out with it.  I mean, for a Sonic movie to be "true" to its source material all it really needs is Sonic, Eggman, robots and sonic destroying those robots.  In the trailer it shows Eggman chasing Sonic and some dude in a car where Sonic then gets out of the car and spindashes Eggmans vehicle causing it to fly off the road.  Sonic quips at him and then Eggman sicks some robots on him.  Can't get much more Sonic than that without making the movie just a 90 minute lets play of the first game.

For anyone who looked at that trailer and threw their hands up angrily like "oh my god what the fuck is wrong with these people?!" my reply to you is "what the fuck is wrong with YOU!?".  Video game movies have been shit since the dawn of video game movies.  Just because you ironically like the original Mario Brothers movie doesn't change the fact that it's a steaming pile of shit that has nothing to do with Mario.  I can hear people screaming at me now like "But Silent Hill is a good video game movie", which it's not.  Even the Mario Bros movie didn't misunderstand the source material quite as hard as that movie did, Silent Hill isn't just hot garbage but it's offensive hot garbage.  On top of that, don't forget the piles of boring, forgettable, shit video game movies like fucking Hitman and Warcraft that have come out over the years.

This will either be a good bit of stupid fun and be remembered for being so bad it's good OR it'll be a boring pile of nothing that everyone will forget about in 6 months after it's release.  I for one, can't wait to see it, I'll be in that line for the theatre DAY. ONE.

Streets of Rage 4

Well it's been more than 20 years since we last had a Streets of Rage game and since then the side scrolling beat em' up has been very much a niche genre since those days but that didn't stop this trailer from sweeping in and making every old school gamer squeal like a school girl.

At time of writing there isn't much information on it.  Hell, we don't even know what platforms it's going to be on yet.  It's like this video came out to tell us nothing other than it exists but to be honest that's more than enough for me.

I do have one little problem with it which is the art style and it's not that it's bad I'm just not really digging it.  But me slightly disliking the art style of the trailer and the game isn't enough to turn me off, it still looks like not only an honest to goodness old school side scrolling beat-em-up but also a really good sequel to a classic series.

As of right now it looks like a lot of love is going into this project and let's hope that further developments will keep it that way.

FMV Trailers Are Bullshit

I don't watch a lot of trailers anymore.  I can't think of a game with the exception of Persona 5 that I bothered to check out any of the pre release material for.  Even a game that I was excited for as Nier Automata I didn't bother to look at trailers for.

So while I was browsing Facebook a trailer for an upcoming game called Extinction appeared on my feed.  It was a FMV trailer of a man with a strange choice of wardrobe parkouring through a city killing monsters in a rather bloody and ruthless fashion.  Think God of War meets Prince of Persia but the main character looks like Connor McGreggor watched a few too many fantasy movies.  What really wound me up that the post and the comments were like "OH MY GOD THIS GAME LOOKS SO COOL!" 

It's fine to get excited, it was pretty bombastic but what people seem to forget about watching trailers like this is that they don't actually tell you anything about the game.  The trailer looks cool but information about the game is minimal.  Nothing about the game play, the most important part of any video GAME, is present.  Just a little bit of story and a cool action sequence with a big ogre thing being chopped into little bits.

If you took the time to go and look further into it you'd find that there is in fact some game play footage.  Now I'll give you that it's pre alpha so the developers have a lot of time to make it not awful but right now the game looks fucking awful.  The kind of thing you'd expect to find at the bottom of a cardboard barrel in a place like CEX along side stuff like Bullet Witch and Asura's Wrath.  To me the game play trailer looked a bit like that Attack on Titan game on PS4 just a lot less interesting and combat that's trying really hard to be intricate but really isn't.

I'm not gonna say the game is going to be shit or that trailers aren't worth watching.  Just keep in mind that when you do find a trailer and it's entirely an FMV with no information on the actual game, maybe you should take a minute to think about what you just watched before getting all excited.  Get excited for the game, not a glorified cutscene.

Losing Hope for Final Fantasy 7 Remake

I was going to make this little rant post the day that the trailer hit but I'm glad I held off because the bullshit got worse in the small span of time I waited in order to write this post.  Before I go on I just want to clarify that I desperately want this game to not suck, I want it to be good but all the evidence that is being given to me right now is pointing to this remake being full of shit and betrayal.

So first let me post the trailer so you can watch it if you haven't seen it already

Looks pretty exciting right?  I mean the good thing is that the visuals are awesome and it's kind of nice too see all the old Duplo charactes from the PS1 game finally being brought to live with a more realistic look.  I only really have one complaint about the  game visually and that's the choice that they made for Barret.  At what point in time between them finishing the adventure on PS1 and restarting it on PS4 did he decide to become a hard core Wesley Snipes impersonator?   While it's kind of dumb looking like Wesley Snipes isn't exactly a bad thing so that's nothing more than a minor nitpick.

But there are 2 big things in this trailer that throw up red lights.

The first one is the combat that is shown.  No longer do we have the ATB fights from the original and instead we are given this weird Kingdom Hearts-esque combat that's entirely in real time.  Now I'm not some kind of prick who thinks that there's something inherently wrong with real time battles but in FF7 I can see the new combat system making a lot of fights piss easy.  No longer will you have to carefully manage materia, equipment and limit gauges in order to overcome your foes.  No, you'll just be able to fucking dodge everything in real time (I bet there will be some kind of rolling feature) and all the enemies will have either stupid telegraphs that make it easy to predict whats coming or undodgeable screen filling bullshit.  I'm sure they'll change the combat to make the already existing fights more challenging but generally speaking action RPGs are piss easy and I'm sure there are plenty of fans that are sad that the old ATB system that they knew and loved has now gone.

The other part of the trailer that set my alarm bells off is right before they start showcasing the combat.  Cloud is surrounded by a bunch of guards on a road above some train tracks in the middle of Midgar.  Now, if you'll recall back to the original game you can choose to either fight them or run away and after 3 fights or so cloud hears a train horn and makes his escape by jumping on the top of the train.  

Now, in the trailer for the remake something weird happens.  Cloud winces and the screen gets covered in some light static and he starts to run for the train tracks.  I KNOW this isn't the way the game transitions into combat because the first fight they show is from a completely unrelated bit of Midgar and it does eventually cut to the part on the bridge, also the combat in this section is already done with when cloud makes his escape.  So what's the big fuckin' deal?  Well this small detail points to one possibility and that's that they are changing the story which to me would be unforgivable.  I don't mind them making small dialogue changes here and there but the overall plot has to stay the same otherwise this remake is going to become a giant piece of betrayal.  FF7s plot may be a little bit silly and nonsensical in some places but that's what makes it FF7 you can't just go changing it now after all these years all willy nilly without upsetting a lot of people.

There are other things to nitpick at too such as the fucking TERRIBLE English voice work.  I've not looked to see if there's a version of this trailer with Japanese voices but the English voice actors really sound like they are phoning it in.  Also the exploration game play that they show is a little uncomfortably close to Final Fantasy 13 but I  think that's just the nature of the area rather than being an indication of the game as a whole.

But here's the reason I'm glad I waited a day before writing

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/12/07/psx-2015-final-fantasy-7-remake-will-be-a-multi-part-series

What the actual fuck, go and fuck yourself Square-Enix.  Multi-part games are bullshit on their own but there is NO FUCKING WAY this should be in multiple entries.  I don't give a flying fuck what the reason is, just release it as a whole, complete game.  When I buy an RPG, especially one that's a remake of a PS1 game from 199 fucking 7 I don't expect to have to wait months between key moments in the story.  The original was technically speaking in "parts", as in there were 3 discs and those disc changes came at key moments in the story but at least all 3 discs were packed in the fucking box upon purchasing the game.

This is just a cheap, shitty way to milk the fan base for as much money as humanly possible.  Of COURSE the hardcore fans are going to buy every single fucking part because it's a PS4 remake of their favourite PS1 game, it's guaranteed profit from people who have been waiting for this shit since that really old PS3 tech demo where they showed the opening in "next gen" graphics.

This would be like someone selling me the PS1 version for like £20 but only giving me the first disc and then making me wait a few months and charge me ANOTHER £20 for the next disc.  This isn't going to be some budget game with parts that cost £10 or less, I can almost guarantee that each part is going to be full game price and if it doesn't turn out that way I'll gladly let someone punch me in the face for falsely accusing Square Enix of being money grubbing little cunts.

Well whatever, I have no doubt in my mind that at the very least the Final Fantasy 7 remake will be a good game.  The only problem is that it will be so drastically different from the game we played back in the day that I'll be left unimpressed and pissed off.  I don't want to play Final Fantasy 7: Kingdom Hearts Combat Edition, I want to play fucking Final Fantasy 7 with fancy new graphics.  If you're going to go to all this length to make what is essentially a new fucking game, then just make a new fucking game.

Let's just give it some time and maybe things will get better but OH BOY I FUCKING DOUBT IT

Horror Game Advertising Sucks

If there's one thing that's pissed me off for quite a while now it's the way horror games are advertised to the public.  They have zero subtlety and everything is made far too obvious from the trailers. 

Let's take a look at an old piece of promotional material for the original Silent Hill

and let's compare this to

See the difference?  Silent Hill has a pretty decent trailer with it posing a question and then showing you a few scenes from the game to give you an idea of it's cast an atmosphere.  The majority of the games content is left a mystery and the little bits of horror that they do show you.

Silent Hills on the other hand has a pretty bad trailer that's all about the special effects and wowing you with next gen graphics rather than making anything remotely scary.  Apart from the fact that it's all pre-rendered, which pisses me off on it's own, the whole thing is more like carnival horror house rather than cutting edge psychological horror game.  No real build up or any mystery, just a big twitchy spazbeast chasing the character down and then some weird shit with a door and a dark stairway.  Don't even bother mentioning the man throwing up centipedes or whatever because that shit was laughably dumb.

Going from that trailer into Silent Hill is like going on a horror adventure filled with mystery while the Hills trailer is like a big advert for Kojima's Spook House.  However, a bad pre-rendered trailer, while annoying isn't the end of the world and it won't sour my opinion of a game before I even get a chance to play it.  It's those stupid fucking reaction videos that do that for me.

This kind of promo material is the fucking worst.  It's like someone saying "HEY GUYS! HERE'S HOW YOUR SUPPOSED TO FEEL WHILE PLAYING OUR SUPER SCARY GAME!".  These kinds of videos falsely put forward the idea of a game being scary, so that when other people play it they already have that idea in their heads.  The game isn't scary, they've been fooled into thinking it's scary beforehand by idiots screaming in front of a camera.  Outlast is actually a really good example because it's one of the least frightening "horror" games I've ever played yet there are people who think it is scary because they've had that idea forced into their head by stupid bits of promotional material like this.

Horror games are supposed to be about mystery and atmosphere and I think whoever the people are in charge of making trailers and promo material for horror games really need to get a clue and learn how to make a good trailer again.

Silent Hills Anti Hype

I'm not going to lie, after Book of Memories I was kind of hoping we'd never see another Silent Hill game and the series wouldn't have to be ruined by any more brutally bad games.  Alas, that is not the case as Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro have stepped up to the plate to bring us yet another game but guess what.....it looks fucking awful.

I can understand why people WOULD be hyped for this game because on paper the idea sounds awesome.  One of the best game developers in the industry teaming up with a highly talented movie director to bring us a new horror game for the next generation; sounds awesome right?

Well no, first of all there's the problem of the trailer.

Nothing happens in this fucking trailer.  A man who looks like Murphy Pendleton's fucking brother walks down the street, spots a speck of blood and a flickering street lamp and then it's a bunch of fucking logos about the Fox engine and all that stuff.

Now there is another video that I can't be arsed to find but if you type "Silent Hills Playable Teaser" it will come up.  In those videos it shows people walking around a house in first person before being jumped by a dirty woman and the demo ending.

It's like they took the first person apartment sections from Silent Hill 4, which everybody fucking hated and used THAT to showcase their big, scary horror game.  The other problem is that the demo ends with a fucking jump scare which is never what Silent Hill was ever about and to top it all off you get jumped by a fucking person.  People aren't fucking scary because you know what they are.  Sure, a person with a chainsaw or something is threatening but it's not scary.  You can shoot a person in the face and unless it's a zombie (and please god don't bring zombies into Silent Hill) they should fall to the ground.

Look at all the enemies in Silent Hill 2 or 3.  Just these vague shapes that kind of twitch around and they are scary because you know they are going to fuck you up but you aren't quite sure how.  They are scary because they are intimidating and vague but a woman jumping out of a closet and killing you with her bad breath is NOT fucking scary.

Also why the fuck is it called "Silent Hills".  Anyone who has played the games once or twice can tell you that the whole multiple dimension thing is wrong or is it just a case of Kojima being addicted to pluralizing everything like with "Ground Zeroes"

The point is though, we didn't NEED another fucking Silent Hill.  Team Silent said way back after Silent Hill 4 that the series was done, just let it fucking die already.  It's already a steaming pile of shit and betrayal so even if Kojima did produce something decent at the end of the day all he's doing is coating a turd in gold. 


EDIT: It came to my attention via Facebook that some of my information given in this post was wrong and I'm sad to admit that it was.  The playable teaser does not end with a jump scare, oh no, it's just EVEN MORE BULLSHIT THAN I FIRST IMAGINED.

So here's what happens; you walk around a creepy house, see some creepy shit and get jumped by a dirty woman along with some other things.  Then in the ending there's a phone call with some guy on the other side talking about how he's "back with his new toys" or some shit and then it leads into the footage from the initial trailer.

Guess what....BULLSHIT!  I have one HUGE glaring problem with the content in this trailer.  Silent Hill is an ABANDONED TOWN.  It was abandoned because of the influence the of the cult and their drug running and all sorts of other shit you can read in the FUCKING FIRST GAME IT'S NOT HARD.  So from that we can safely assume that the house featured in the trailer is NOT located in Silent Hill.

You could argue that the character has been brought here by someone judging from how it started but who and why would anyone do that?  Also the demo talks about a father gunning down his family  with a shotgun and the foreshadowing is about as subtle as a steel pipe to the head so now I'm assuming it's going to be about a "man battling his demons" which means THE GAME IS BULLSHIT.

Anyway, the reason I make a big deal about the location of the house is because SILENT HILL CAN'T/DOESN'T AT ANY POINT EVER TELEPORT PEOPLE PEOPLE.  So if the house isn't in Silent Hill and he walks through his front door into Silent Hill that means he was teleported there so COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT.

May I suggest to anyone looking to comment via blogger or Facebook to PLAY THE FUCKING GAMES.  The P.T is bullshit and so is anyone defending this nonsense.  Silent Hill Downpour had a similar initial promotional video and look how THAT game turned out

I rest my damned case.

The Phantom Pain

The Phantom Pain is the name of a game that was announced at VGA and has a very cool trailer.  If you wanna watch the trailer, here it is!

When I first watched it I though it looked like a really cool horror game or something, but I noticed something that made me feel like I'd seen the character in the trailer before.  That hair, that eye injury...Big Boss?!  That's right folks, this cool lookin' thing may or may not be a new Metal Gear game!  It doesn't really matter if it is or it isn't though, just from watching that trailer I'm interested (it probably is)

Give it a google search if you want a big list of the evidence that points to this being a Metal Gear but if it is a new one, I'm curious as to why it's not being shown as such.  This whole subtle clue thing is really cool and all but there must be a reason for it.

So watch that space, if you're a fan of Metal Gear you probably have a reason to by hyped, and if you're not, it's still a damn cool trailer