#alder613

[blazehedgehog]

Any thoughts on the recently announced Mega Man: Dual Override?

It's funny, thinking about how sick I was of Mega Man games in the 90's. I hated seeing the announcement of yet another Mega Man game. There were years where Capcom would give us two, I think sometimes even three Mega Man games. And so many of them felt rushed and interchangeable to me.

Now I see Mega Man and it's like "Yay, Mega Man! I missed that guy!" Something something Brian Eno.

It's taken me a minute to warm up to the way Dual Override looks. It's not too different from Mega Man 11, but Dual Override changes Mega Man's proportions to look more in line with something like Mega Man 8.

Bigger arms, bigger boots, and a smaller head. Whereas I have quickly discovered I was one of the rare people who actually thought he looked good in Mega Man 11.

I like the bigger head, smaller boots look. I like that he has slightly more normal proportions. I feel sort of like how people joked that Sonic kept getting taller in every game, there was a time that Mega Man's boots and arms got bigger in every game.

But I'm getting over it. I'm interested in seeing more about Dual Override.

[thankskenpenders]

I'm sorry, but I despise what the Sonic the Hedgehog series has become. Nearly every game in the series since 2010 has been a nostalgic cashgrab, and SEGA seems to be more focused on live-action films and Netflix cartoons than the quality of the actual games themselves. I don't want to support this series anymore. I don't want to call myself a Sonic fan anymore.

this is not a confession booth

[blazehedgehog]

Am I wrong for not wanting to support third-party games on Nintendo Switch 2 because of Game-Key Cards?

Absolutely not! Lots of people seem to hate Game-Key Cards. It's the worst of all worlds; it's as bad as buying a download code in a game box combined with a waste of plastic.

Some devs have apparently been pushed away from considering Game-Key Cards because people hate them so much, and supposedly Nintendo was trying to reduce publishing costs so Game Key-Cards weren't so prevalent.

[blazehedgehog]

I cannot stop obsessing over how bad the Sonic series has gotten, but I cannot voice my opinions on the franchise because I know I'll get dogpiled for it. Why are Sonic fans so toxic? Why can't we all just get along without screaming at people for having an opinion?

I dunno. I keep saying it sounds like you need to find new groups to hang around in. I escaped all of the toxic Sonic spaces and I'm basically in smaller discords that aren't necessarily Sonic-focused but are full of 60-80% Sonic fans. They are normal and well adjusted and it's cozy. You are in control of who you hang out around.

[blazehedgehog]

...Do you think the lyrics in the opening theme for CrossWorlds were AI-generated? (I apologize if that wasn't grammatically correct.)

Things can be bad an not be AI generated. For example, Green Light Ride probably wasn't AI generated.

I don't even really think the lyrics are that bad, honestly. It's got the vibe of like... an anime that got converted into a b-tier Saturday Morning Cartoon, you know? Like a Nelvana dub, or Ocean Productions or something.

These are all in the same class of song to me. It's kind of nostalgic.

[blazehedgehog]

It's been all but confirmed that SEGA's upcoming reboots of Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi are going to be live service games with predatory monetization. Why would they do this? Why are live service games with predatory monetization still popular?

I mean this is the most naked example of capitalism.

Financially speaking, let's break down what a game means. If a company like Sega gets you to buy one game a year, that means you are giving them $50-$70 annually. If it's a game you really like, something that becomes your favorite game of all time, then it is the bar you compare all other games in the franchise to. Yakuza 5 is the best one? Well Yakuza 3, 4, 6, and 7 aren't as good as Yakuza 5, then. And maybe that means you eventually stop buying new Yakuza games, because you'd rather replay your favorite one.

In comes the live service game. You never buy it, it never ends. You can't say "Yakuza 5 was my favorite" because there is no Yakuza 5. There's just The Yakuza Game, and maybe season 5 was your favorite, but parts of season 5 are still in the game even though its season 28. Right? Season 5 never really goes away, not entirely.

An item in The Yakuza Game is $5. Maybe it's a shirt, maybe its shoes, whatever. And that's a lot cheaper than $60 for an entire game, right? So people are more willing to buy it. If you buy one $5 item a month, then Sega has made the same amount of money from you that they would have if you bought a full price game.

But the idea isn't just to make you spend $5 a month. Maybe you spend $10 some months. $15. Even $20. For $20, you get four virtual shirts, and that's cheaper than the price of one real-life shirt. Right? You feel like that has appropriate value.

But in Sega's eyes, all these small increments add up to you giving them more money over the long term. And on a game that lasts forever. $60-$240 a year, every year, in perpetuity.

They don't have to worry about a remaster in ten years, because if it catches on, then this forever-game will still be getting played in ten years. At worst, you can do what Fortnite, Overwatch and Apex Legends did, and have throwback seasons (and in those cases, you can charge people a second time for updated versions of items users might already have).

This is how Epic Games makes $20 billion a year. A live service game has the potential to vastly exceed the profits of a traditional one-and-done game by truly staggering degrees.

The catch being the same thing that happened in the mid 2000's. World of Warcraft exploded big time and everybody scrambled to make their own MMO to steal WoW's thunder. Turns out: people only have so much time in their day. Dozens of MMOs failed. Wild Star, Everquest Next, Tabula Rasa, Warhammer Online...

Remember when I said "Maybe Yakuza 5 is your favorite" and mentioned how many Yakuza games came both before and after it? Yeah. Now you aren't competing with other games in the series, you're competing with the pillars of the genre. For a live service game to succeed, you need to nail "the favorite" on your first shot. And there aren't very many games that do that, in any format.

And in a live service arena like this, where a lot of the profit is generated from entrenched, habitual spenders who burrow into one game and never leave? The odds of pulling them out of their comfort zone shrink, and shrink, and shrink. If you only play video games for an hour per day, why would you go somewhere new when all of your friends and items already exist in the current game?

But such is the siren call of profit. Why make $100 million on Jet Set Radio when it has the potential to be $1 billion, $5 billion, or even $10 billion? Even just a sprinkling of live service can sweeten long term earnings, after all. Users may not like it, but they'll tolerate being annoyed a little bit. And it's fine annoying them a little bit. And a little bit more. And a little bit more. And a little bit more.

Please, we only made $390 million on this game. We expected $1 billion. We can't make games that don't generate $1 billion in profit. $390 million is nothing. Nobody can do anything worthwhile with just $390 million. The investors are laughing at us. Throw yourself before the golden throne or you'll get the cattle prod again. Your favorite game franchises demand it.

[blazehedgehog]

Just thinking about Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds makes me mad, and it's mostly because of the inclusion of Sage on the base roster and the lack of ANY characters or tracks from other SEGA games. I wish I could stop thinking negative thoughts, but I just can't.

That's a little weird.

If it makes you feel any better, we've seen one Sega game track already:

In some of the footage this is called "Magma Planet" or "Lava Cave," but it's clearly a match for Planet Velteor from Galaxy Force II:

It's going to be kind of obnoxious if all the Sega references are things like this, where it's clearly a named thing from a game but they give the track a generic title like "Magma Planet" in order to mask the reference.

[blazehedgehog]

I know this is in relation to an older post of yours, but I need to get this off my chest...did people really hate the original Halo back when it first came out, or was it just the Penny Arcade guys that hated it?

There are definitely people who did not vibe with Halo back in the day. Most of them came from the PC space, I believe, where a game like Halo seemed a lot less special.

Because, like, Halo didn't invent big levels, or shooters with vehicles, or even dual stick analog aiming. You could, if you wanted, pick Halo apart really easily. It had a very long hype cycle, being announced three or four years before it came out, which back in 2001 was nothing short of an eternity.

Bungie made a lot of promises about what they wanted Halo to be, and then delivered on less than half of them once Microsoft came knocking. I believe it's been said they rebuilt most of the game from scratch in only a few months in order to launch with the Xbox. But I also believe they credit Microsoft with lighting a fire under them that helped Halo come out at all, otherwise it may have spent years more in development hell.

But make no mistake, Halo was a big deal. Huge. It may not have invented its ideas, but it used them to bring a type of game to a type of people that had never seen anything like that before. Halo did a lot of things right, even if later parts of the game feel held together by bits of duct tape and a photocopier.

The Penny-Arcade guys were just the biggest jerks about it.