#gottaspeedkeed

[blazehedgehog]

Man, 7th gen really was the worst when it came to how games looked and ran, wasn't it? Sub-60fps sometimes sub 30. Resolutions under 1080p or 720p and even the art direction was bad. Would you say that was the dark ages for gaming?

I mean, the PS1/Saturn/N64 era was often the time where games struggled to even hit 30fps. Ocarina of Time runs at, what, 24fps? It wasn't uncommon for some games to hit sub 20fps, or even single digits.

And that's for games that weren't even 640x480 yet.

[blazehedgehog]

Final Fantasy VI or Final Fantasy VII?

No contest. Final Fantasy VII.

I played through the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy VI a little over a year ago and did not connect with it at all. Some of that had to do with playing it on a portable, I think, where sometimes it would be days or even weeks between sessions. It took me something like 8 months to get through that game because I’d only play it in small, 10-20 minute chunks.

But the story also seemed both too simple and incredibly hard to follow. Characters would shift personalities rapidly (Celes in particular, who is supposed to be a fearsome general in the Empire but shows absolutely no sign of that once she joins your party). A lot of events just feel like they happen arbitrarily without any setup or justification (here’s the phantom train! wave goodbye to your loved ones we only learned about 20 minutes ago! what?), and the plot has a weird vibe like they’re trying to hurry you through a lot of stuff without dwelling on it for too long (I guess Terra wants to be a mom now?). I never really got a sense of where the story was going or what it was trying to say other than “Kefka bad, heroes good.”

It was the sort of thing where I guess I didn’t hate it, but I could not see what all the fuss was about. It really felt like the sort of thing where FF6 got elevated because even though Final Fantasy VII was “the big one”, FF6 was the game where the plugged-in kids got to say, “I played Final Fantasy before it was cool.”

I can see bits and pieces of a good story and a good game in FF6, but it’s very scattered otherwise. The end result is merely “okay.”

That being said, I don’t know if it’s necessarily fair that I pick FF7, given I haven’t played the original game since, like... well, when I made this video, that’s me actually playing the game on my real PS1, so technically I’ve played FF7 some time in the last 11 years. But I haven’t put serious, real “I’m gonna see the credits roll” time in to the game probably since 1998 or 1999.

So my memory of Final Fantasy VII is hazy and coated in a thick layer of nostalgia. But here’s what I do know for sure about FF7:

Some people have said FF7′s popularity can be attributed to it being “the first one people played,” but it was not my first JRPG. Earthbound was probably the first JRPG I ever truly finished. I had very likely played and finished Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG by the time FF7 was out, too, and I’d borrowed games like Breath of Fire 2 from friends. I’d wanted to borrow their copy of FF6, but they refused to part with it.  

Thinking there was no way I was going to be able to play FF7, I actually picked up a cheap copy of FF4 on the SNES in the months leading in to Christmas. I was surprised to find a PS1 and FF7 under the tree. For a time, I was actually juggling playing FF4 and FF7 at the same time. so it wasn’t even my first Final Fantasy.  

I played more FF7 than any other JRPG then or now. As I’ve said many times, I fully cleared that game over more than 100 hours of play time, and did a lot of it without using a guide. I immersed myself in that world in a way I rarely do with any game.

Ergo, it’s safe to say that I feel a much bigger connection to that game than I did when I played FF6 last year.

That being said, I’d be totally down for a Final Fantasy 6 Remake that properly retells that story so that everything is solidified better. I don’t even necessarily mean like they’re doing with FF7, they could do it in the style of the DS Final Fantasy 4 Remake and I’d be happy.

[blazehedgehog]

Thoughts on the Dragon Quest series?

I feel like I would really love Dragon Quest but I find it hard to get in to.

So it used to be that I hated grinding in RPGs. Any RPG that makes you grind is game design failure, I thought. It’s so boring! Who would ever want to do that?

I think I played Dragon Quest III for the GBC for about 30 minutes, and the quiz at the start sucked me in, but I think once I ran a few battles and saw how steep the starting difficultyl was, I ended up stopping.

And then I played the demo for Dragon Quest VIII on PS2. And it’s hard to describe, but something about grinding in that game felt really good. It was relaxing. I wanted to grind. That had never happened before. The demo wasn’t super long, but I ended up playing it for something like three hours because I grinded out enough money to buy the best armor. And when it came time to face the boss at the end of the demo, I shredded them.

I wanted to play the full version, but never did.

Years later, I was between portable games, and I started Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen on my DS. We’re talking around 2009, 2010. I was lead to believe it was one of the best Dragon Quest games. After my experience with DQ8, I figured I was in for a good time. RPGs are also best on portables, because I tend to get distracted a lot when I play big, long games on my TV. It’s often way easier to play RPGs portably because breaking it in to bite-sized chunks during commutes, or lunch breaks, or bathroom visits works really well.

I played DQ4 for about an hour, got bored, quit and never looked back. Until DQ Builders on PS4, that was the last time I ever touched a Dragon Quest game.

I love Akira Toriyama’s art, I dig the classic JRPG settings, I like turn based battles, it’s everything I think I’d want, but… I dunno. Just never had that moment where one really hooks me like the DQ8 demo did, but I suppose I’d need to try more of them.

[blazehedgehog]

People, myself included, really want a Wonderful 101 port on Switch. But it got me thinking. How would it replicate the drawings you'd use on the Wii U gamepad? I remember that game used the gamepad a lot. It's a port that I'm wondering how the whole game would work.

Platinum teased a Wonderful 101 Switch port a year or two ago, and hinted that it’s something they’re still exploring. But perhaps the entire reason it hasn’t surfaced is because there’s no reliable way to translate something like that to an actual controller.

If we’re being honest, I haven’t played Wonderful 101 beyond briefly poking at the eshop demo back when I first got my Wii U in, gosh, what, 2013? I think you drew formations on the touch screen, right?

That could possibly be translated to right stick gestures, maybe. I don’t think you have a lot of control over the camera in that game, given most of it is seen from a top down perspective. But I guess I’m a little out of my depth, sorry.

[blazehedgehog]

Is Keiji Inafune a con man or do you think he was just bad at managing the Mighty No 9 project?

He is 100% not a con man. By Inafune’s own admission, he is not a game designer. Even his company’s name was “Comcept” – they were supposed to be an idea house that got others to make the games in question.

And the MN9 Kickstarter fell in to a lot of common traps that these other Kickstarters run in to as well, namely lowballing their estimated development costs (and making up stretch goals that only exacerbated this problem).

Tim Schafer talked about this with Broken Age. When he Kickstarted “The Double Fine Adventure” he figured they would make a tiny retro adventure game that was an hour long. And they’d do so almost out of charity; the money he was asking for wasn’t really going to cover the game, but it would be so short and simple that it wouldn’t matter.

When they ended up with multiple millions of dollars, they found themselves in this terrible place where there were now misplaced expectations set upon them that they would have trouble fulfilling. They had enough money to make a nice looking game, but not enough money to make the game people thought would be possible.

And multiple times since then, Tim has been very up front with how the money for Broken Age was spent. What the cost of living was for his team, the length of time required to make the game, how much it cost hiring their voice actors, testing and QA costs, certification, etc. etc. etc.

And then you have Skullgirls, headed by Mike Zaimont, who has also gone on these big rants about Kickstarters that fudge their goals and sort of spoil the pot for everyone else, because they’ll be like “Yeah, we’ll make Yooka-Laylee for $175,000!” When that’s not the whole story. They’re obviously getting funding from other sources, but they’re creating this view that these games aren’t expensive to make, when they definitely are.

The idea is that by crossing a threshold, you prove to investors that you’re worth investing in. The Shenmue 3 Kickstarter was actually somewhat upfront about that, actually. But it leads to another situation where a Kickstarter is basically a preorder that you make dangerously early in a game’s development cycle. But instead of promising overpriced plastic statues or a soundtrack CD with six songs on it, you’re promising impossible things like “For another $30,000, we’ll port it to the 3DS!”

How will they port it to the 3DS? They don’t know. They might not even have a 3DS development kit. But if you preorder pledge now, you’ll get the ball rolling enough that maybe everything will fall in to place.

Does that mean Inafune was a con man? No, I’m sure every penny from the Kickstarter was faithfully spent developing Mighty No. 9. But it wasn’t enough. Not everything fell in to place. I’ve heard some speculate that what really killed Mighty No. 9 was being shackled to the Wii U and the 3DS, because it meant having to spread development resources too thin to support such a wide range of hardware and it ate up a lot of the finances in the process.

Inafune probably didn’t lie, he was just very optimistic and more than a little naive. But the road to hell is paved with the best intentions.

[blazehedgehog]

How do you feel about GTAV almost 6 years later? Does it hold up or do you see flaws you didn't when you first played? Also, how do you feel about Rockstar being scummy with the casino they introduced in GTA Online?

I’d been sitting, waiting for GTAV on PC to get cheap enough where I wouldn’t feel guilty for double dipping after owning it on 360. That actually happened in June-ish, and I started replaying it, albiet very slowly.

It holds up a lot better than GTAIV does, I’ll tell you that.

What strikes me is just how much money Rockstar spent on that game, clearly in excess. The game is absolutely stuffed to the brim with tiny, one-off details that nobody would ever see. Some of it was undoubtedly added for the PC/Xbox One/PS4 ports that increased the overall detail, but still.

On one hand, it makes Los Santos feel like a living, breathing space. Every road, every sidewalk, every corner store feels important. At the same time, though, it is at the heart of a crossroads between whether or not any of this makes the game more fun to play.

It’s tremendous just getting out of your car and exploring the streets of GTAV in first person. There’s nothing like it. But when you get bored of doing that, what’s left?

There’s no changing the fact that there are places on the map that, at least in single player, are totally empty. They serve no purpose. There’s stadiums, horse racing tracks, and yes, that casino. Obviously these are spaces that now sometimes have functions in GTA Online, but six years ago they didn’t, and it’s possible they were never meant to. You can’t tell me that six years ago Rockstar was honestly planning on opening the casino in GTA Online now.

Which is the number one problem I’ve always had with this game, and it was technically a problem I had with GTA4, too: they’re smaller games. There’s less to do in them. Some of that makes sense, given the increase in development costs. All games have technically shrunk in scope (hello, Skyrim).

But Rockstar went out of their way to spend money on frivolous things. And, obviously, they’d already built a lot of these locations. If you happen to go to the dog track in the original Xbox 360 version, it’s got a really eerie feeling to it. All of the ambient sounds disappear, no pedestrians spawn anywhere inside of it, it feels kind of unfinished. Obviously if it’s there, it was probably for something, but they didn’t have the resources to make it work.

But they had enough time and money to produce something like an hour’s worth of fake TV shows and fake movies for the player to watch. They created entire named NPCs that aren’t involved in missions, but have unique designs, unique animations, and sometimes minutes worth of dialog you may never hear.

Again, these are all really cool details! But you also have to stop and think about priorities. If cutting down on these unique one-off details gave me more missions, more actual gameplay, I might take it. Because once you hear the sidewalk preacher give his sermon once, you don’t need to hear it again, and it doesn’t really provide a whole lot of additional fun, either.

Because that’s the long and short of it, really: there just doesn’t feel like there’s enough game in GTAV. It’s a big game, there’s tons of atmosphere, but you run out of things to do pretty quickly (especially for Franklin). The ending doesn’t even feel like an ending, it just kind of trails off in to a wet fart. The story has nothing to say and our characters don’t learn anything or meaningfully grow as people. There needed to be more side activities, there needed to be more heists (which were planned), there needed to be real single player DLC (which was teased)!

Instead, Rockstar poured everything they had in to GTA Online, something that is apparently an insane nightmare to actually try playing, especially on PC where hacking is easy, rampant, and usually unpunished.

And even though I think there’s a lot about GTAV that’s still pretty fun, it’s difficult NOT to be incredibly bitter about the whole game.

That’s not even touching on, like, the trend since GTAIV of telling serious crime dramas in a world still obsessed with teenager toilet humor. GTAV in particular feels like, because the game has so much detail, that bar of quality for jokes was astoundingly low. There are so many places to put jokes now that they couldn’t just hire one person to make up funny things for all of them, so it feels like whatever the person assigned to that section could come up with, they used. It leads to a lot of stuff that is tragically unfunny or just plain stupid because a dozen people who have never written a joke in their lives are painting these textures. And its everywhere! On everything!

Meanwhile the actual storywriters of GTA sit, noses firmly in the air, sipping expensive brandy and smoking cigars, pretending they’re writing Goodfellas or something, while they have fake airliners named after farts, fake internet services named after piss, and fake electronics companies named after boners.

At this point the casino in GTA Online doesn’t even surprise me. Spend real money on fake money to buy fake casino tokens to gamble. Just the worst. GTA Online made this one of the most profitable games of all time and apparently it wasn’t enough money for them.

It’s gonna take a lot more than just an outrageous development budget for me to care about GTA6.

[blazehedgehog]

I asked you about your favorite Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 campaigns a while ago. But I was wondering if you could rank those two game's campaigns from best to worst?

I’ll lump them all in to one big list, but I’ll start at the worst because, uh, that’s how I ended up writing them out in this text file.

Cold Stream This was the one and only fan-made campaign Valve added to Left 4 Dead 2 and I’m still not sure why. Adding fan-made campaigns to Left 4 Dead was a great idea, and there’s a lot of very creative ideas Valve could have officiated – One 4 Nine, Questionable Ethics, Yama, I Hate Mountains, Drop Dead Gorges, Suicide Blitz – but instead they picked this turd. They polished it the best they could, but it’s still very poorly paced. The places you go and the routes you take to get there are super arbitrary, and the random, instant-kill traps are frustrating. I feel like the only reason this campaign got officially added to Left 4 Dead 2 is because somebody lost a bet or was paying back a favor.

Crash Course In general I don’t like the DLC campaigns. I don’t like how they have really long middle chapters, and all of them lack their own identity. Especially Crash Course, which is just a less cool version of the same city we saw in the lead up to No Mercy, culminating in a dopey Dawn of the Dead reference. It’s not so much terrible, just very bland.

The Passing Same deal as Crash Course. I know the longer middle chapters were to help shorten up Versus games, but it makes these feel really weird. The idea of the two survivor teams interacting is interesting, but in practice it’s more of a letdown, and it kind of messes with the lore of Left 4 Dead 1 taking place in Philadelphia and Left 4 Dead 2 taking place in Georgia. I know they kind of address it with the train and the comic, but it still feels like a stretch.

The Sacrifice The best of the DLC campaigns, it has the strongest identity out of all of them. You kind of get the feeling of The Parish, but not quite so southern just yet, so it’s got more of an industrial, middle-america marina feel. I am also endlessly fascinated with the Tank encounter here, given he’s a special unique model with a military tattoo. Things like that make me really upset that these games are never designed to give definitive endings. Valve almost seems afraid to give their games endings.

Death Toll Death Toll is one of those campaigns I struggle to remember, but all you have to say is “church” and immediately I know exactly what we’re dealing with, because that’s the focal point of this entire campaign. Probably kind of an underappreciated campaign, but a lot of it does feel kind of samey and doesn’t stand out super well.

Dead Center Zombies and malls are a good combination but I feel like Dead Center gets off easy by making their mall dark, empty, and thoroughly lifeless. I mean, I guess it’s sort of realistic, but an infested mall should be a lot more fun than this is. Needs more funny store names, you should be able to enter more of them, etc. There’s unrealized potential here. Also, this map buries Rochelle’s strongest character moment – when she enters the gun store before you get to the mall proper, she’s supposed to have an epiphany where she comes out as a closet gun nut. For whatever reason, Valve cut this, but all the voice clips are still in the game of her going wild in the gun store.

Blood Harvest I love the outdoorsy feel of this campaign, but for being called “Blood Harvest” there could’ve been more farm land. The cornfield we get here is actually kind of tame, but I appreciate the effort, and the actual farmhouse itself is impeccably built. I would live in this map. Minus the zombies, obviously.

Swamp Fever I like Swamp Fever, but I’ll admit, it never saw as much play in our rotation. Not because it’s a bad campaign, but probably because it’s SO wide open. Valve does their best to give Special Infected places of cover, they force survivors in to interiors, and trudging through the deeper waters are perilous, but something just doesn’t click super well. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten this campaign even existed until I was about to hit submit and had to go back and find a place to stick it.

The Parish Left4Dead 2′s showcase campaign. And it’s pretty good! But because it’s the showcase campaign, there’s definitely a feeling that it’s not very unique. Which is crazy, because you have, like, the Mardi Gras floats, all the restaurants, the graveyard, and the big sprint to the end across the bridge. It’s a heck of a campaign!

No Mercy Alternatively, here’s L4D1′s showcase campaign. Again, kind of generic feeling, but still super good. The exploding gas station, running around in the abandoned subway, and oh, gosh, the hospital. The hospital is immaculate! You can keep your malls, the best place to set a level for a zombie outbreak is a hospital, hands down. I love how much I hate it.

Dark Carnival And on the topic of great places to set the zombie apocalypse, an amusement park is also just a total chef’s kiss. And, thankfully, Valve doesn’t cheap out on it, either. Other campaigns save the best stuff for last, but you spend over half the campaign in the amusement park here, running across rollercoaster tracks, doing shooting galleries, and going down the tunnel of love. I remember when friends told me of the concert finale, it sounded too ridiculous to believe. “ELLIS SANG AT A ROCK CONCERT AND KILLED ZOMBIES WITH THE POWER OF HEAVY METAL AND THEY CELEBRATED IT WITH FIREWORKS” But that happens!!

Dead Air Speaking of campaigns that commit to a gimmick, gosh, I love Dead Air. Yeah, it’s another city campaign, but the airport theme is wonderful, and sort of like the hospital, it makes a lot of sense that there’d be an outbreak at the airport. Also, entering the finale map and seeing that plane crash was, and still kind of is, one of the most impressive things I think I’ve ever seen in a video game. I could watch it over, and over, and over.

Hard Rain And finally, the uber-campaign. Hard Rain delivers on so much. The premise sounds kind of lame – you go somewhere, and then retrace your steps back the way you came. But the storm changes so, so, so much. It also takes field of crops from Blood Harvest and actually does them properly, where it’s nearly impossible to see more than a few feet because the plants are so tall and so thick. And that’s not even touching on this being a focal point for encountering the witches! And all the great traps Special Infected can lay in the sugar mill! Oh man! HARD RAIN IS SO GOOD

[blazehedgehog]

What are some of the best worst lines in Sonic games?

The line that drives me the most crazy is “Long time no see.”

Because Sonic characters are largely trapped in sort of the state that all cartoon characters are, where they don’t really visibly age. The implication is that Classic Sonic is Sonic when he was younger, yes, but even Sonic Forces kind of tried to twist that as Classic Sonic being from another dimension.

My point is, Sonic characters are like how Bart Simpson has been in the 4th grade for 30 years. Even if you assume every episode of The Simpsons equals one day, there are well more than 365 episodes. Ash Ketchum from Pokemon is the same way; that dude’s caught dozens of Pokemon, earned tons of badges, saved the world multiple times and throughout it all he’s always been 10 years old.

Sonic celebrates a birthday in Sonic Generations, but which birthday? They don’t say.

“Long time no see” compounds that, because Tails is still a little kid, Cream the Rabbit is still a little kid, etc., but obviously they are acknowledging that weeks, months, or even years have passed since these characters have met. And yet, nothing has changed.

I’m not asking for them to age up Tails, or Cream. I’m asking for them to stop drawing attention to it. As an iconic line, it’s nothing so special as to be worth holding on to.

The best? Gosh, I dunno. The first thing that jumped to mind is right before you fight Shadow for the last time in Sonic Adventure 2, where he kind of shrugs at Shadow and is like “What you see is what you get, I’m just a guy who loves adventure.”

After all of their other meetings being so intense, the fact that they’re being casual to each other in that moment is actually kind of a fun change of pace.