INTO THIS TUMBLR THIS IS PSYCHEDELIC EYEBALL

Beefcake lottery

[psychedeliceyeball]

Son of drawing request!

Hello everyone, I’m back with some more news and another music album that will see the light of day soonish. If you don’t want to read the story behind this release, skip to the headline section (WHAT DO I WANT FOR COVER ART?).

I posted about requests of cover art for albums that I did in the past, but now, we are dealing with a compilation album that is brand new, but comprised of songs made way back in the past. We’re talking 2000-2007 levels of past here.

Back in that era, I had no hardware or gear to make actual music. All I had was a copy of Cakewalk Home Studio that I found on some random computer. It ran on Windows 3.1 and was outdated as all humanely possible. This was the starting point for my musical expeditions, as I used that program to make MIDI files. You know, these files that send signals to your soundcard to play certain samples loaded up in there. They sound awful nowadays because no one cares about MIDI playback anymore for the casual market, but if you had the right soundcard, MIDIs could sound awesome.

Despite the limitations of the format, writing MIDI files was awesome. It felt like a triumph against extreme limitations, as you’d use very basic samples to try and achieve alright sounding compositions. I even got to learn a bit about music composition in the progress, which I knew nothing about when I started.

Against all odds, some of my musical compositions found their way onto other people’s harddrives. People from the Doom community even used my music onto their map creations, which while unexpected, was a pretty awesome turn of events. I spent a long time relistening to my old output and going “this was pretty dang good despite just being MIDI and being like 16″ and I thought that this material could find some new ears. But definitely not in the antiquated .MID format.

With that said, I didn’t want to fully rewrite this material because that would violate my intentions upon first creating these pieces of music. They had to remain simple. They needed to stay pure.

Best comprise was to find an awesome device to replay these MIDI files... so enter the Roland Sound Canvas. Despite its age, this piece of hardware/software was widely acclaimed and gave MIDI compositions the love they deserved.

Staying true to myself, very few rewrites have been done to the original material. Sometimes it was to accommodate the sounds of the SC-88, sometimes it was to give a song a proper end. But about all of these songs remain the way they were when I first made them.

WHAT DO I WANT FOR COVER ART?

The name of the album is “The Toybox”, reflecting on the very makeshift nature of the songs that comprise it.

As for the cover art itself, I wanted a depiction of either a music box or a toy piano, or any kind of childish-looking instrument (or instruments, if you wanna go for more than one). While the looks of the picture should implicate a certain quirkiness or whimsical factor, it should also look menacing or gloomy. This reflects again on the nature of the songs contained within, which constantly switches styles and cover a lot of ground, whether it’s ambient pop, synth metal, creepy orchestral music and the oddball happy sounding vibraphone-based ditties. 

If you have any artwork you wanna share, feel free to send me a message on Tumblr (or Twitter, or even Discord) for me to read and we’ll discuss the terms of use and how much money you want me to pay for it. If you don’t want money, I can also pay you in video games; just tell me that one game on Steam you want but didn’t feel like spending money on!

Thanks for reading!

Twitter: @PsychEyeball Discord: Psych#2684

[psychedeliceyeball]

Cover art for Winter Always Winter!

Just chiming in with news about the last article I posted and I proudly present to you the cover art for my first album WInter Always Winter!

Big props go to Swauger for his mad art skills. Make sure you check out his Tumblr account by clicking the link down below!

https://swauger.tumblr.com/

I’d like to thank everyone who’s also volunteered to create cover art for any of the albums. I am still looking for art for Aquastrophia and Infinity Decayed, so don’t hesitate to send me your doodles!

Anyway, time for me to go to work and create some extra content for the album’s rerelease. Stay tuned for more details!

[psychedeliceyeball]

I make music, but I sure can’t draw cover art for it. What about you?

(IF YOU WANNA SKIP TO THE IMPORTANT STUFF SKIP TO THE PART THAT SAYS “UNTIL NOW” IN BOLD)

For this writeup, we will backtrack all the way to 2010. Back in the early 2000s, I use to write a bunch of music in MIDI format. Yeah, the music that sounds really bad on every soundcard out there today and for which you’ll likely need pro audio equipment to play properly nowadays. I wrote music steadily from 200 to 2006, which is when I got bored and tired of the limitations of the MIDI format.

If you wanna listen to some of these, check out my old dead site from 2006: http://music.themaxproject.com/midis.php

Fast forward to 2010, where I kinda grew disinterested of music in general apart from making some songs here and here. I was transitioning to audio, but never quite managed to find my footing. I started buying some actual music gear but failed to use it in a proper way. Then, February rolls in and I get to heard about the RPM Challenge. “Record a full album of music all in February.” This was an insane idea, so I signed up.

And I did it! With about 36 hours to spare, I came up with my first complete collection of songs I’d call an album. It was a 10-track set of ambient, wintery songs that depicted the adventures of an unnamed person dealing with winter. It had some filler material due to the circumstances of the project, but it was my very first baby and I was proud of it. It was called “Winter Always Winter”

This process repeated during February 2011 and 2012, where I created two more albums under the same circumstances. 2011 saw the making of a watery-typed album which was more pop-oriented and less on the ambient side, 2012 was a progressive metal-influenced musical journey about the experience of death. You can listen to all of these albums here:

http://themaxproject.rpmchallenge.com/

I released these albums online, but they never ventured far past the website of RPM Challenge. Part of me was doubtful toward the music, the production which I didn’t like that much (especially the 2010 album) but in the end, I designed these albums to challenge myself and not really for the public to hear. As a result, the artwork for these albums was just pictures found on Google Images and slapped without any thought. These albums were not to be sold or shared, so who cares about the cover art? I had some encouraging words here and there, but I didn’t believe that I should share these songs openly.

Until now.

After giving it some thought, I do want this music to reach to a wider audience. I’ll put it for sale on Bandcamp for people who wanna buy it, but I’ll also put free to download versions as well. But in order to do so, I need them to have an actual face. You know, actual cover art and not something taken straight from Google Images.

Since I have no artistic talent (on the visual side at the very least), this is where you can come and help me. If you like drawing pictures or take photographs, you can help picture my music and make cover art for my albums. You can go listen to the music on this URL to know how the music sounds like.

http://themaxproject.rpmchallenge.com/

I'll talk about the albums a little bit more in depth in order to help inspire you in your endeavours and for you to know what kind of thing you'd be dealing with.

Winter Always Winter (2010) : A mostly ambient album with an occasional experimental pop feel. The mood carried through the music is very somber, cold and distant. It conveys the story of a person confronting winter. It starts in an hopeful matter, but they end up losing a friend who gets swallowed in a frozen lake. They lose all reason, running through the woods endlessly and feeling the trees are alive and can attack them at any given moment. All sense of time is lost and they end up lost in the frozen woods, losing the last of their strength as the sunshine finally comes. By then, it's already too late.

Aquastrophia (2011) : The name was supposed to be a mixture of the words "Aquatic Catastrophe" and water is the main theme of the album. In comparison, this is a warmer album which has a stronger pop feel to it. It introduces some electric guitar elements and the overall mood is kinder. In due time, the music gets more menacing as the events unravel. It involves the idea of a beautiful lake that attracts whoever sets eye on it. As time passes, people feel the need to dive in the lake and explore it. However, the lake powers are so strong it lures people in believing they don't need to ever surface. They drown and drift away into a hidden community consisting of sea creatures, where they get revived, but also transformed as one of them, making sure they'll never return to Earth to speak about what they've found, but also making it so that they have a new life in the undersea.

Infinity Decayed (2012) : The last album of the lot. Definitely the darkest album of the lot and also the heaviest. Most of the pop sensibilities from the previous albums are gone, replaced instead with monolithic metal with heavy progressive rock influences. Compositions are dense, bleak and oppressive. The theme of the album is death and its process. The songs convey the following stages of death: the refusal of dying and the fight until the bitter end, the last of your strength fading away as death claims you, the feeling of your soul drifting away in the afterlife, the arrival in Limbo, where a huge stretch of nothing appears before your eyes and where not a single soul is to be found, the refusal of your new eternal home in Limbo and finally, the resigned acceptance of your new fate.

Hopefully that should cover most of it. If you have any artwork you wanna share, feel free to send me a message on Tumblr for me to read and we'll discuss the terms of use and how much money you want me to pay for it. If you don't want money, I can also pay you in video games; just tell me that one game on Steam you want but didn't feel like spending money on!

Thanks for reading!

[psychedeliceyeball]

So what’s new?

Congratulations! If you read the following, this means that I no longer post on Something Awful and all Let’s Play related news will go here on this blog from now on. If you follow me on Twitter, you probably already know what happened; if not, don’t worry about it. I’ve said my peace about it and I don’t think it’s worth talking about anymore.

Recently I’ve been settling into a cozy streaming schedule and I do streams on Twitch every Monday and Tuesday at 7 PM EST on https://www.twitch.tv/psychedelic_eyeball, but what about doing more Let’s Play videos?

I haven’t started a new Let’s Play for a while mainly because my life hasn’t been kind to me in the whole “time” department that you generally need to make these. I have recently graduated and am in the process of getting a new job and moving to a new town, which is always pretty nerve-wrecking. I’d generally spend more time internally freaking out over doing things that would be considered constructive whenever I’d have free time.

I might as well spend some time debating some differences between what I’d consider a traditional Let’s Play video and streams. Aren’t both the same anyway? Yes and no.

I’d consider a stream akin to what most Let’s Plays ended up being in 2007. They’re raw, unfiltered and generally tend to be a little more emotive. The big difference here is that streams will usually end up being dedicated to two different audiences: the people who watch it live and the others who will watch later, either on Youtube when it’ll be uploaded there or watching the VOD on whichever streaming site you use. The audience also has a certain power over the actual content being broadcasted: the ability to comment live on what the player is currently doing can always lead up to some unexpected reactions or interactions with the audience. Also, we get stream alerts which would sometimes be considered annoying (especially when used incorrectly), but in the end, allow you to further build links with your viewers. Especially if you’re like me and often mispronounce your followers’ names. In the end, they’re a very immediate form of Let’s Play.

Traditional Let’s Play videos nowadays either end up being very tightly edited, often end up being a collection of highlights from a gaming session or video game footage that has been carefully put together. Many of my older Let’s Plays (especially Prince of Persia 2) required tons of retakes/retries to get a proper video of a level that was worth posting. Nowadays, people still do that kind of thing in order to either show the game in its best or worst aspect; it all depends on what the game you’re playing is. Audience will be able to try and dictate how a Let’s Play would be, but such an answer will usually be delayed since it’s all footage and commentary you recorded away from your viewers, posting the full video only whenever it is done. Let’s Plays will usually tend to be more polished but will always be more disconnected from your audience.

I’m growing happier and happier with streaming because it’s brought me things that I never would have thought could be possible, things that I genuinely feel like I don’t deserve. But while I think streaming is getting in a position where it can replace Let’s Play videos altogether, I still have a soft spot for these. I always like putting together footage in the aim to try and make a more polished construct. Not that streams are all unpolished or anything; a bunch of streamers have amazing layouts and run their show like champs. But hey, doing a bunch of different stuff is always fun.

So what does all this come down to? I probably should tell some of my upcoming projects whenever I’ll finally muster the energy to do them. An immediate project is to give the Isaac Rebirth Let’s Play I attempted way back a proper farewell with one last video which will showcase and talk about an amazing fan mod, Antibirth, with more in-depth detail. I had plans for a Doom LP that I ended up canning because I didn’t feel like I had the time to do it (and I’m also lazy) which I’ll have to pick back up. And then there’s the plans for streams every Monday and Tuesday. Thankfully,  I don’t have trouble finding new things to do for these as I feel like I know what to do to torture or reward myself for the pleasure of whoever watching. If anything, these streams are giving me some ideas for games to do Let’s Plays about (Plans for the Doom LP came back to surface after beating The Plutonia Experiment) so I can’t say the streams are a bad idea or anything.

Whenever I’ll start a new Let’s Play, I’ll post about it here on Tumblr to give it some sort of introduction, the same way people usually do it on Something Awful. The only difference is that people won’t have to pay 10 bucks to read it now.

See you whenever I’ll write something else.

[psychedeliceyeball]

Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ Review - About as fun as eating two placentas

When Afterbirth came out, some fans of Binding of Isaac felt that many of the new changes ended up damaging the game more than helping it. For all the cool things it did (Tech X, Restock, Item Reroll Machines, new item synergies, making the Lost playable, among others), it also did some very nasty things. You had harmful treasure rooms, boss rush rooms with less items or spikes in front of items, bosses with scaling health like Hush and Ultra Greed, annoying challenges which rewarded you with useless pill effects (like Relax, ???, Addicted and Percs), the awful Keeper character and the list goes on. Afterbirth+ had a lot of challenges to overcome; could it solve the issues that cropped up with Afterbirth and dragged down the core gameplay? Would the addition of mod tools also help people overcome design issues that people had with the game?

The answer is no.

Afterbirth+ is like putting up a new coat of paint over the previous one, only though you ran out of paint before you even started the job. Not only all of the faulty designs of Afterbirth are still present and unchanged, but AB+ adds so little that you’ll often have a hard time believing you’re playing a different game. And whenever something new finally appears, you’ll just sigh at how dumb or pointless the addition is. There’s only 6 new enemies to the game, most of which are recolors and reskins of existing enemies. Except for two: out of place looking mushrooms that sometimes replace the Hosts and... the enemy spawning portal. Appearing as early as Floor 1, these will make your life a living hell by flooding the rooms with new enemies to fight all the time, and sometimes even bosses. There’s also only 4 new bosses; three of them are reskins of existing bosses in the game with a new name and with way too much health considering their point of appearance in the game. The last is the new final boss of the game, Delirium, which is a glorified boss rush with scaling health that will destroy you by teleporting on you all the time. Apparently the designers liked this fight so much that the Chaos Card can’t be used against it for an easy victory. You gotta play all the way.

In Afterbirth, we had a bunch of new floors that were yet another alternate floor you could have upon entering the level: Burning Basement, Flooded Caves and <adjective> Depths and Womb, which was lazy but added some variety nonetheless. In Afterbirth+ you get... nothing. Instead, we have a new final floor, the Void, which consist of all possible floors in the game and reminds me of the Final Fantasy 5 Void, only less interesting because the rooms add nothing new. The concept could have been neat; it symbolises that Isaac is going crazy in his final moments and his whole journey becomes a blur where everything merges together, but it's executed poorly and it just comes across as a low-effort way to introduce a new floor while doing as less work as possible. If the Void had some personality and way to set itself apart from every other floor, it could have been good. Alas.

The main draw of the game would be the new items, right? Unfortunately, not even this part is interesting. Either the items are just more of the same we've seen ever since the beginning, or you get items like the Clicker which feel more harmful than useful to you. Why would you turn into an other random character and risk losing an item in the process, multiple times during a run? What if you turn into The Lost? There's also the Shard of Glass, which is just like the item Anemic, only it has a chance to not trigger upon contact! How fun! The only interesting items would be the Void and Smelter, which allows you to respectively consume pedestal items and trinkets to gain their effects or stat bonuses. Even then, the item pool is so bloated at this point that you'll rarely get to see the new items anyway. Plus you'll have to unlock them. At least the new character Apollyon starts with the Void and is available from the getgo. That's about the only interesting thing with this character, because he has no other particularities.

The biggest problem of the game is that in its ensemble, the game feels incredibly spiteful to the player, and thus more than ever. It takes so many steps into antagonizing the player and not making them feel welcome at all. Afterbirth already had a few measures like this as forementionned in the review, like Krampus suddenly deciding that his brimstone lasers rotate, without any additionnal warning. In Afterbirth+, instead of always shooting his lasers in all cardinal directions, he can now shoot them diagonally instead. Without any new animation or anything. It also adds mimic chests, which are impossible to tell apart as such until you're so close to it that you probably touched the chest anyway and took damage. Treasure rooms can have no item in them whatsoever (or sometimes two of them, but the odds of it happening are so low). Most new bosses have way too much health and have attacks that are almost impossible to dodge (the Vis Sisters being the worst offenders in that regard, with their wiggling giant brimstone laser that covers close to the entire room). The Delirium fight is awfully mean as said above. You even have a trinket that will make you drop all your items on the floor when you get hit because.

All of this pales in contrast of Greediest Mode, AKA the worst addition in the whole game. It allows the spawning of Champion monsters and bosses, involves more waves per floor, gives you less time in overall to clear them and gives you way less coins. Even clearing the early floors with these odds against you is a feat. But the mode caps off in a hilarious middle finger way by giving Ultra Greed a second phase. You know, that boss fight which already took you over 3 minutes to beat. Have yet another 3 minute long murder fest in which even the overpowered character will perish. Because it's only fun if you lose. And it's not as if it's especially rewarding. The whole room will all be covered in gold but what's the point if you can't pick it up? Also, you'll have to beat this with all your characters because there are unlocks hidden within it.

Afterbirth already was a punch in the face to some Isaac fans when it came out, especially when compared to Wrath of the Lamb for the original Binding of Isaac which was made in Flash and Binding of Isaac Rebirth, which finally gave the game a worthy engine and added even more goodies to a game that already had plenty of it. These two releases changed the way everyone looked at Binding of Isaac. So did Afterbirth and Afterbirth+, but unfortunately not in a good way. Afterbirth mainly added a bunch of useless bloat to the game, and so did Afterbirth+ if you squinted hard enough to see what was actually new there. Out of curiousness, I played the game 3 more times while I was writing this review and none of the new items even cropped up once; I only saw one of the new bosses and a few of the very few enemies it adds. Even if this expansion was free (which it should have been, considering you need to also own Afterbirth to play this!), it would have come across as a huge disappointment. But the fact that it costs $6.69 feels extra insulting. We can only hope that the added mod support, which is pretty barebones and not even properly documented at the time, will give some added value to the game. But why would you pay for the money AND then do work in order to fix the fuckups that the designers did? If you want more Isaac, you should give the fan project The Binding of Isaac: Antibirth a try, which is free, doesn't require Afterbirth and which feels more like an actual expansion that Afterbirth+ ever did. Afterbirths aren't pleasant and I'm sure having more of them is not gonna go well with you.

[lemmingsdiary]

Tame level 17 - Honey, I Saved The Lemmings

Two.

Keep reading

[psychedeliceyeball]

You could also have clicked only once by digging besides the staircase at the bottom.

Aren’t Tame levels fun?!? (no they’re not)

[psychedeliceyeball]

Super high school game journalist reviews Mass Effect

by Molis Yonipapapopoulos or whatever

There are many horrible things that came out through our fascinating course through humanity's anals. Things like women's suffrage, lesbianism, gamers and Canada remind us every day there are multiple obstacles for us to become a civilized society. But many years ago, the unthinkable happened: something even more worse has happened which makes me reconsider my faith against humanity; this thing called a game studio which is Bioware. Filled to the brim with multiple SJWs that do things like pleading for world equality, political correctness and even grooming little puppies, these offensive felons also develop games in their spare time and dare release them to the world, trying to brainwash the masses with an outspoken political agenda and massive lies that are ignored while we decide instead to campaign against neutral games like Manhunt and Hatred, which are nothing but art displays.

This shit nugget is called Mass Effect. First of all, let's analyse the title. Mass means something that applies to everything. Effect means a change to the industry. Why change the winning recipe of video games, which was paved by classics like Custer's Revenge and E.T.? Millions of these games were manufactured and were put in stores and all of these would have been a frank success if it wasn't for Anita Sarkeesian, who publicly called out both of these games in her videogame series Tropes vs. Women, which is under scrutiny for being an Indiegogo scam. Custer's Revenge was an historical gem highlighting how procreation took place in the early 17th century in America. Why deny history because of a few randos that thought the game content was pornographic and insensitive? Next, we'll have games involving the World War II concentration camps (not that they ever existed) and they'll also be pulled because of whiny kek babies. Lulz.

E.T. was another game explaining the difficulty of an alien to survive on planet Earth. He was constantly hounded by the FBI, SJW scientists that just wanted to build a cage and shove him inside because they reject all concept of diversity. Why did people didn't buy this game? Because they get nothing. If you're one of those who owned a NES and never played this game on it, you are against cultural diversity and I'll shove you into a pit where you can find telephone parts. Racist shitbag.

So what does all of this have to do with Mass Effect? EVERYTHING. 

Why oh why oh why do gamers love this game? Did it come with a free $100 dollar bill with every purchase? The story of this game involve some astronauts that try to protect peace from mean aliens. And that's as far as it gets. The game's story is so generic you can choose which character you play as. You can either be some male that starts out as a pansy but can be leveled into a love machine if you choose the right dialogue options. Additionally, you can be a female.

This is where the game falls apart. As a female Shepard (and who ever heard of those? You don't let a lady take care of sheep, she'll just play with them and they'll let them die while talking on the phone), your options are limited to simply showing your tits and get all of the best weapons of the game immediately. This is why you don't hear of women game designers folks; they're everywhere but they have no merit in their success because they sleep their way to the top. Without clothes and sometimes without underwear neither. This is not a game that encourages equality; it's very biased in how the game gives away it's rewards. You either get shit or the pot.

Looking at the reviews, it's very clear that Gawker and Vox Media had a great deal of collusion into saying how the game should be received. According to Metacritic, it's got a rating of 91, which means universal acclaim. Yet, I am calling out this turd right now. You can be sure my review will not pop up on their radar because these people refuse to listen to the truth. They'll make damn sure that no negative opinion is heard. Just in case you are doubting my facts, here's a flowchart that will explain everything.

 I rest my case.

As for the game itself, it's a third-person shooter where you use weapons to kill enemies. I couldn't exactly tell how the action went because I didn't receive my Xbox 360 yet. Also, while I was working on my review, my cat somehow turned off my router so I couldn't get any info about how the game goes and what not on the Internet. I had to ask my neighbor about what Mass Effect is and I can assure you he's a reliable source. Here's a photo I took of him to show you.

He's a prime cut gamer you can trust and love, even though he smells really bad.

That's my case about Mass Effect. A game so bad that the developers had to rewrite the ending every time because the proud gaming scene I represent hated them so much. Social justice is a dead thing and it's about time people saw that. Make sure you make the point across to these whiny assholes by complaining about every single game they like and love. Remember that these people want to destroy you and your video games. They may seem kind and caring, but they'll ruin everything you love and care for. That is the Mass Effect we must all be aware of.

FINAL SCORE: 7.5/10

GRAPHICS: 2 chihuahuas and a half out of 10 MUSIC: 3 Metallicas out of 20 GAMEPLAY: hahaha who the fuck cares

[psychedeliceyeball]

I'm bored so here, have my ramblings about games journalism.

It's Halloween evening, I have nothing better than keeping an eye out on masked people that may come in the convenience store, knife in hand, to get the content of my cash register, so might as well have a palette cleanser and just ramble about games journalism.

Okay. It's not really better but I swear it's an improvement.

Games journalism have become a really big subject lately, even if in the end, I'm not sure that people will say this is even what's being debated anymore. But many review sites, most especially Polygon, have been getting a lot of flak for various things which may or may be not related to ethics. We're talking about reviewers getting free copies of games, someone on staff having an acquaintance at the game studio... all sorts of little details that may change a review's score favorably or unfavorably.

The lowdown of all this is simple. It doesn't matter one bit.

When was the last time that you got excited over a video game because you went "Oh my god, that one guy at Gamespot gave that game a 9 out of 10?!? I have to check out that game now!"? The answer is that it never happened. Instead, a lot of people will read a review not in order to learn about the game, but in order to see the reviewer say and write everything that they wanted to see. Based on what? Based on all of the videos and any other PR that the publisher of the game have let out.

I'm surprised that no one even talks about the publishers in this story. Is it because if we start questioning their methods, they will outright stop making video games? Is them delivering the product to the consumer what makes them so sacred? It's okay. Developers are regular people too, who have families, friends and whatever you want. Just like reviewers and just like you, the consumer. The developers' job is to make a product, under certain constraints, that the public want to buy. They also have to give their potential customer base reasons to buy their products. That's why there are previews, trailers, teasers and whatever other word ends with -er. With this info, they can turn their potential customers into a frenzy and they'll buy the game no matter what happens.

So what does the reviewer do in all of this? I see the reviewer as a middleman that is here in order to try to either temperate or escalate all the hype that the game has got. He has the harsh job or trying to say to people "now look, this game is not as good as you may have thought, but it's still pretty good". And other times, the reviewer is just as ecstatic as everyone else is. But in the end, he's not the factor that will make a game sell more or less copies. If anything, negative reviews got me to buy more games than positive reviews ever did. But it's mainly all about the impressions that the developer has cast to its audience.

As an example to this, I bring forth a grand classic in video game reviews: Jeff Gerstmann's review of Twilight Princess. The 8.8 score. Just google it, it won't take you long to see all the death threats he got because of that. Now, in the grand scheme of things, 8.8/10 is pretty damn good. Also, as an added bonus, the review was well written and showcased what he liked and didn't liked. However, because the customers expected nothing but perfection, that review was perceived as a slap in the face. Because one person in the world thought the game was just "pretty damn good", the world of a few dozen people stopped dead in its tracks.

How could he do this to Nintendo? We refuse to stand for it, this game will be amazing! Man, you can tell this fat asshole wants the Wii to die. Don't worry guys, I will assassinate him.

And so on and on. I'll spare you the other replies.

So what was the point of even reading the review if you knew right off the bat you'd disagree with it? What's with people simply saying "fuck this reviewer for giving the game a 8" even though the article itself was close to nothing but praise? Is there anyone who even reads reviews anymore? Hell, are professional reviewers even still necessary in this day and age when it's so easy for everyone else to be a reviewer? Nowadays, you get review sections on almost every platform and site out here. Every game on Steam will have user reviews. Metacritic has user reviews. Gamefaqs. People will even go and do Youtube videos to review games. The list goes on. You want reviews, they're everywhere.

Additionally, one must not forget, a review isn't a de facto statement that everyone must abide by. It's an opinion. We all have those. Some are all right, some don't really make you care, some will make people think you're a weirdo. It's up to the reader to use his/her intelligence to sort out what the reviewer says and make up their own mind about the end product.

Paying reviewers to get a good score is deplorable, but why would the journalist be the only person to get the blame? Once again, do anyone even remember the Kane & Lynch scandal? Jeff Gerstmann gives game that is being heavily advertised on Gamespot a review lambasting the game for being mediocre. A few hours later, Eidos gets him fired from Gamespot. You think the reviewer here has any saying on how game reception should go? If anything, they're the first ones to get shit from everyone. Publishers want their heads if they give a bad review. Gamers will say their review was shit because it gave 8/10. No one's happy with them. I kinda feel sorry for them because they're doing one of the most ungrateful jobs of the gaming industry. I'd rather be filling coke machines for a game developer than write reviews for a professional web site.

Hell, some other times, the reviewer will heavily praise a game and it'll still go unnoticed. Back in 1999, Looking Glass published System Shock 2, a revolutionary first-person shooter with RPG elements that was innovative and very atmospheric. Game got multiple 9s, 10s, Game of the Year awards and so on. And you know what? The game still was for the most part a commercial flop, the studio soon disbanded and the game faded into obscurity in legal limbo for many long years until Night Dive Studios managed to bring the game back to a customer base.

There's always a few interrogation marks as far as reviews go and one of those would be the Gone Home reviews, where people could argue that giving the game a perfect score may be questionable. I have a few reasons for thinking so myself. For instance, does a game like this have any replayability? It might offer a good story, but replaying it would be like the equivalent of reading a book or replaying an interactive novel like Phoenix Wright. It offers only one truly meaningful playthrough. It's a great experience but you can never come back to it or enjoy it the same way. Some will argue that it's unfair of me to say a game like this have no lasting value whereas I've read the same book many, many times. And you know what, it's just my opinion! I prefer playing games for the gameplay they offer, the story comes very, very far after. I'm used to video games being a poor storytelling medium for the most part so I don't really care. I'd rather read a book again over playing a video game which is nothing but a story.

Therefore, many reviewers just state with their review that they enjoyed their experience with the game due to it being different. I don't agree with 10s because truth be told, I don't believe in perfection at all since it's impossible for any form of media to find universal acceptance. We all have different tastes and values so we can't possibly enjoy every genre of games, movies, music and whatever else you like. Don't think that because a game like Gone Home got glowing reviews, the Call of Duty crowd will all buy this game and suddenly become bookworms and such. Despite the media attention it has received, it remains a niche game and I doubt that it will be a game genre that'd be easy to imitate. It would be incredibly easy to fuck up and would probably sound hollow and fake. On the flip side, you can badly copy a successful shooter and there probably will still be enjoyment to be had with it.

That brings me to the whole GamerGate part of the story, where people are campaigning using the boogyman of corrupt journalism to lynch whoever stands in their way. They've used reviewers in order to highlight their points (which would soon disappear as they now mostly attack random women in the industry because) but as I've already showcased, reviewers are mainly a non issue. They don't really have any power, who gets the last word in the end is the publisher and customer. The publisher makes the game and the promotion material, the customer shows with his/her wallet that's what people want. All the reviewer does is say "okay it's good but" and gets told to shut up.

You think giving game reviewers a copy of the game is corruption? Then a lot of critics would be professional frauds because this is how every industry works. How else do you want people to give free publicity for your event or media? If you just want them to buy it themselves, chances are they won't bother. Sure, you'd have perfect integrity, but at what cost? Chances are if you worked that way, you'll retire when you'll be about 80 years old or so. When you have to play every game that comes out, watch every movie or listen to every album ever made, it digs a huge hole in one's wallet. No one would be doing this job because they still wouldn't have any respect in their living and they'd also be starving. That's a lose-lose situation we have here.

Remember that back in the 80s and early 90s, game reviews weren't a thing. Or in the least, they were found in magazines that you had to buy. You had Nintendo Power, but it put more emphasis on being a mini strategy guide for games than being a review source. But for the most part, people only had access to hearsay to tell if a game was good or not. You were buying/renting a game without any knowledge on whether it'd be good or not. Was that really much better than what's going on right now? You'd think that with the readiness of information we have thanks to the Internet, people would use this knowledge to further make more reflected decisions. Instead, we get people attacking others, digging up their personal information and call them on their phones to tell them to get raped. Cute.

So that's all it is. To GamerGate, reviewers are just one of the many scapegoats they have in order to deflect their criticisms of them not being good or smart customers. It's always easier to blame others around you for your failings instead of yourself. In the meantime, we'll probably have more AAA buying off journalists with money, laptops, phones and other goodies, but remember, it's always the journalist's fault for accepting those gifts. The publisher has no part of blame in this.

The video game reviewer is dead, long live the video game reviewer.

[psychedeliceyeball]

How to draw a mouse in three steps.

One, don't have a clue about how to do it and make it pink.

Two, give it cancer.

Three, make it fart fire.