Weekend Confirmed 108 - Resident Evil 6, Lost Planet 3, Fez, Super T.I.M.E. Force

A bow seems ridiculous in a first person shooter.


I know it was only a lighthearted thread in the podcast but I wanted to just think about that for a second. I don't think a bow is out of place in Gears of War, considering the main gun has a combustion powered chainsaw attached to it. Gears has always had a fairly zany weapons set, there's cleavers, flails, the digger that launches a suicide-bomber-creature that digs under cover. Other shooters have energy shields but Gears has actual shields that you can pick up and block bullets with. A bow is a pretty ridiculous weapon to have in a FPS but it feels appropriate, thematically, in the Gears universe.

When you think about it, the Locust have always had really less advanced weapons, they seem to just use what the humans threw away. The Hammerburst is made from discarded human weapons, the Boomshot looks like it's cobbled together from junk, the Boltok looks like a vintage pistol from western movies. Humans use satellite strikes but the Locust use hand operated mortars, humans travel in vehicles but Locust still ride animals. The Locust are just primitive scavengers.

2 absolutely insane moments in the show Garnett you are completely WACKO. Yes you were arguing for namco to put less effort into a game. The audience that would be ok with subtitles is very, very niche. Studio Ghibli is a well enough known brand that they cross many boundaries.

Second Andrea you bring it on yourself sometimes:) really saying lost planet looks more interesting than RE6. Zombies or snow, one of the most revered IP's in gaming or just another can't make it big game. Which looks more appealing? There are such things as stupid questions, they are sometimes followed by stupid answers;)

RE: Halo 4

There have indeed been a lot of interesting reveals regarding Halo 4's multiplayer this week. Anyone who spends 10 minutes in the Halo Waypoint forums will see what a massive shit-storm these announcements have caused, with Halo fans jumping to all sorts of wild conclusions.

I think the problem is not the details we've been given, but the lack of context around those details. We hear "customizable loadouts", and of course the fans freak out over the supposed similarity to Call of Duty. But then we have Franky come out and say "No, we're not doing anything like Call of Duty". Ok, fine..... then what are you doing? We hear that players will be able to upgrade their armor, which leads to concerns that balance will get disrupted (again, a la COD). But then Franky comes out and says "don't worry, it won't harm balance". Ok, cool...... but how?

We're being given just enough info to jump to conclusions, but not enough info to actually formulate an understanding of how the game is going to play.

Personally, I have complete faith in 343. They are a studio full of Halo fans, and they understand what makes Halo fun. I trust that they wouldn't make any changes that harm what makes Halo special. BUT I think they need to stop giving us these little sprinkles of vague info. I feel like they would be better off picking one or two features and really telling us EVERYTHING about them.

I'm gonna be completely honest, I have absolutely no idea what all the fuss is over FEZ.

Not saying it's bad. Hell, I haven't even really started playing it, but why the press lost their shit over this game for years on end is beyond me.

This might be another reason it's taking a long time for Ni No Kuni

http://www.siliconera.com/2012/04/17/ni-no-kuni-wrath-of-the-white-witch-will-have-more-content-for-the-west/

Ni No Kuni - missing the obvious

the big deal w/ localizing and providing English voice over is that this game has to be marketable for children. from what i understand the game is very easy. yes, many adults are excited to play this because we love Ghibli, but Ni No Kuni is primarily a game aimed at a younger audience.

parents won't buy this game if their 10 year old kid has to read the subtitles. leaving out English voices would be a big bullet in the foot.

Please have Andrea on every show, love her. And in her defense, a cross bow is much more bad ass and technical than a regular bow.

Okay people are getting very worried about the PC version of Dark Souls. From what Jeff said and some interviews with the direction, it's starting to look like the PC version will be locked to 30fps and 720p, which for most PC gamers is absolutely unacceptable. Care to clarify in the next episode if you can?

Honestly, I never expected anything beyond the basic graphics options you have in the PC version of Mass Effect: resolution, vsync, etc. The reason people choose to get these console ports on PC is so they can play them at higher resolutions and framerates. People were gonna double dip on the game because of this. A framerate cap and a resolution cap (which I've never even heard of for a 3D game) seems like Namco and From going out of their way to limit the port.

If anyone wants to talk about the future of EA's shooters, and AAA shooters in general, I think it's kind of interesting speculating just what EA is going to do.

On the show they say that Crysis 3 might be saturating things a bit, but remember that EA doesn't actually own Crysis. It's still totally under CryTek's control through EA Parnters. In way it doesn't REALLY factor into shooter plan.

As for Battlefield, I don' think we're gonna have a Battlefield 4 this gen. I still feel like it's mainly a PC franchise that operates under the rules of the longer tail that PC games usually follow. There was a five-year gap between BF2 and BF3, and people still play BF2. Maybe we might see another spinoff game or something, like BF1944, 2143 (which apparently a lot of people are asking for), or Bad Company 3, but new main BF games seem to be treated like a once-in-a-generation event.

...and we still don't know what Respawn is doing.

Garnett in not alone his ethusiasm for the storyline in Resident Evil 6. Never before have so many classic characters appeared in a single Resident Evil game. This is "The Avengers" of Resident Evil!

Not excited? That's cool but don't be a hypocrite. We all have our favorite franchises. For example, I've never played Mass Effect yet I don't mind all the gushing about details that make no sense to me. Also, I think that those unfamiliar with the Resident Evil backstory will still have fun experiencing the characters and concepts in 6.

i fucking love me some andrea renee

Personally, I think that Crysis is the most interesting FPS franchise in EA's arsenal, because it represents a wonderful balance of the scripted action 'roller-coaster' of a COD title, with the dynamic sandbox of a Halo.

The suit powers really do help set Crysis apart from other shooters, and combined with the unleashed enemy AI (glitchy as it could sometimes be in Crysis 2) and the relatively open 'combat bubbles', the powers give players a great tool-set with which to approach different scenarios.

I'm really looking forward to Crysis 3.

Is it just me, or does the name Ni No Kuni make it sound like a game about a girl named Ni that has no vagina?



Bazinga! ;)

On DmC-

I truly hope that all of the querulous talk I hear about this game has no bearing on how it sells once released. Many online commenters claim to be skeptical of the upcoming title, but to me it just seems like people feel spurned by Capcom permitting the updated character design and the new development team. Heavenly Sword and Enslaved are two of my favorite games, and I own all of the older Devil May Cry titles (they’re ok-I was more of an Onimusha fan) so DmC will be a day one purchase for me.

It really gets under my skin to hear things like

‘…the latest explanation as to why they’ve screwed up Devil May Cry.’

Or, let’s label the game ‘Devil Makes Me Cry’

Can we please hold off on repudiating the game until we have some substantial portion of product to review? Also, do we really have to laugh, or mockingly point out the silliness of the latest trailer? Why is it ok to be excited about Lost Planet 3, but not DmC?

And can we also stop griping about how Dante looks? The CW? Really? Personally I think Dante has the lankness of a scarecrow, but he’s robed like a vagrant (which, in my opinion, is awesome). I don’t watch the CW, but I usually catch images of well-to-do, pretty teens on that channel, not smoking hobos.

Please let it ride.

By the way, Heavenly Sword was awesome.

Wow, I am completely at odds with Cannata's taste in shooters...

Bulletstorm... the trick mechanics got old fast and the narrative was not motivating at all. I had to force myself to finish it and I was glad when it was over so I didn't have to play more of it.

Crysis 2 ... extremely bland scenario. What was awesome about anything you see in this game, Jeff? It's a boring conrete jungle from start to finish. I gave up about 2/3rds in because I couldn't stand the same boring combat combat scenario anymore..

And Far Cry 2 ... man, that game was just a stinker. Good first impressions but becomes the most boring copy-and-paste sandbox I ever saw. What was directed about that game? Sometimes I wonder if Canatta played more than 10 minutes of the games he's talking about. "Two much of the same thing too often" applies to this game, not to Far Cry 1 (that game had different weaknesses; the mutant parts, for example).

Crysis 1 beats all these games easily.

Andrea made a comment this week that got me thinking.... There are a lot of franchises or genres that I turn a complete blind eye towards. I would assume that most gamers have a similar sort of list.... games, franchises, or developers that fail to achieve even the slightest level of interest for them.

Later on in the show, I again thought of this issue while Garnett and Jeff were having their "localization" debate. I very much agreed with Garnett's side of the argument, but I was thrown a little bit when Jeff started asking "Why do you assume this game will only have a niche audience". This got me thinking....

Jeff C, Jeff M, and Garnett had nothing but great things to say about the game in question. And yet I have absolutely no interest in playing it. The moment I hear "JRPG" I just assume I will hate it. (This isn't a completely blind assumption. I've tried to play several beloved JRPGs over the years and hated every moment).

Now I think most people have this reaction to something. There are people who hate shooters, or puzzle games, or sports games, etc. But I feel like JRPG's fall into a special category. Maybe I'm just imagining it, but I feel like there is a greater gap between people who like JRPGs and those who don't, compared to most other genres.

I don't as a rule like fighting games, but I'll still pick one up every few years and have some fun with it. I don't as a rule like racing games, but I've purchased Forza 3 and 4 and loved them both. Over the course of my life, I've become friends with many gamers, all of who have a similar tendancy to occasionally dabble into genres that they don't usually preffer..... except for JRPGs. On the flip side, I know people who LOVE JRPG's, and they are often reluctant to try ANYTHING else.

I wonder: Have JRPGs become their own little island in the world of videogames?

In regards to Dubbing and Reading Disabilities

First I acknowledged Garnett’s argument about the extra effort to dub being a cause to not publish a sequel to a game later on. That’s NOT what I’m going to argue with.

When I hear someone shoot down dubbing I get frustrated. It doesn’t matter if it is a valid argument about the economic that would better sustain a series or a hard core fan who is bitching that anyone would plays a Japanese game in anything but its original Japanese. None of those augments takes into account that dubbing is also an aid for those with reading disabilities.

I am a dyslexic adult and I can certainly read but not as quickly as many subtitle movies require. If the pace of a subtitled movie becomes at all fast I get lost trying to keep up with the dialog and miss out on what is visually happing. It is just not fun. Historically this hasn’t been an issue with video games that told most of the story in text that I could read at my own pace and hit “x” to continue. Now with the beautiful cut scenes we have today its just as frustrating as watching a subtitle movie.

Thoughts?

So I'm just going to throw it out there that one of the main reasons I started taking video games seriously, and really enjoying them were the stories in the original Resident Evil games. And as such I'm going to break down Jeff's statements in this episode.

So when Jeff says:
"I can't name a Capcom property that isn't like that. ... This is a company that grew out of the arcades. And a lot of these properties are vestigial remains of the arcades. And that's not bad either. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm attached to their narrative."

So, aside from the inherent absurdity of calling Resident Evil inspired by arcade games, lets just start with the basic premise of the RE franchise. What was it that made those games so distinctive and exciting back in the 90s? Uhh.. well that they were FILMIC. The whole thing that Resident Evil 1 pioneered was that video games could be truly scary, because it used cinematic camera angles, music, and effective "boo" moments.

Beyond that most apparent aspect of presentation though---the games make constant allusions to various horror films: obviously zombies, but also a haunted house, booby traps, mutated giant snakes, sharks, alligators, and spiders, Frankenstein esque tyrants. So much of the original conception of Resident Evil was *homage to horror film.*

So these are two major points that immediately fly in the face of the notion that Resident Evil was built on the "vestiges of the arcade scene" and that one would have no attachment to the narrative.

But lets look a little deeper, at the content of the games, and how the homage translates into something we might actually feel attached to. Garnet mentioned Sheri of Resident Evil 2, lets consider what she is for a second:

An innocent young blonde girl, scampering around in the shadows of a police station, who is adopted by a tom boyish woman (Claire Redfield), and is chased relentlessly by a monster that wants to implant her with an embryo---that will gestate in her chest and eventually explode from her body.

Hmmm what. does. that. sound. like. what science fiction horror classic..... orphaned girl... embryo.... heroic woman... Oh gosh! That's right! It was Pac Man! Or no, I mean Ms. Pac Man!

So what we see here is RE2 transposing a really effective story element from one of the greatest horror films of all time into a zombie context. The way in which RE expands that plot idea though for its own purposes is that the mutant is actually Sheri's father, and you the player he is your greatest obstacle in the game.

Now think for a minute about all the creepy intense parables that evokes. William Birkin wants to track down and impregnate his daughter basically. In his first major form he has a tattered white shirt and wields some kind of pipe. He is this patriarchal figure that a young female outsider has to stop.

Ok so that's an argument for the content and meaning of the RE plot line. But lets make some empirical observations about the sheer significance of Resident Evil's narrative.

I would argue that RE2 is the first video game to ever use the concept of narrative continuity. It is resolutely an expansion and continuation of the first. It takes place in the same world as the first one, but not in the same setting. It uses characters who are different, but with relationships to the original cast. And it takes place in a part of a linear timeline established by the first game.

These are things that are incredibly rare for video games even today, at least in a credible way, and are not something to be scoffed at. Even Metal Gear Solid, perhaps the series most known for story, continually reinvents itself using meta devices like clones, virtual reality training, the idea that you are constantly a soldier being treated as a pawn.

RE2 is perhaps the first video game in history that was not by designed as a product of planned obsolescence---for the purpose of increasing the technical "fun" of the product, but in fact designed using planned canonical expansion.

But beyond even that there is the evidence in RE being one of the first original game properties with a novelized book series that ran for like 9 installments. And books that didn't just expand the universe, but would literally retrace the events of the games in prose narrative form.

As a fan I have loved the original fictional world of Resident Evil for an intriguing combination of the X-files and Dawn of the Dead. Its a great gore laced mystery surrounding a corrupt pharmaceutical corporation. Now everything Capcom has done over the years does kind of obfuscate that idea. But lets not just sit back and rewrite history.

I think Garnett made a lot of excellent points about Ni No Kuni's localisation.

Couple of things though.

I think, unfortunately, Jeff Mattas is right that there is a segment of the population that will turn their noses up at subtitles, no matter whether it's anime, games or foreign films. Level 5 wants to reach the widest audience possible and that's probably why they're localising it.

Atlus have done quite a few localisations, particularly with the Megaten games (Shin Megami Tensei, Digital Devil Saga, Persona) and all of them have had excellent localisations. They're probably the best in the business for it.

Garnett is 100% right about Yakuza. Those games don't need English voice acting at all.

As someone who is a serious fan of JRPGs, I can say with genuine conviction:

Legend of Dragoon is shit.

Don't waste your time with it.

Wow! When Garnett said 'ice pirates' I immediately thought of my Ice Pirates VHS and the first memory it invoked was the Space Herpy. I was laughing hard when the WC followed the exact same thought progression.

Gonna have to pull that old thing out and watch it. I'd encourage anyone who hasn't seen the movie to do the same.

Garnett I wonder, you say it's pointless for Namco to translate Ni No Kuni I say it's pointless for Capcom to use anything more than motion comics in their resident evil Cut-Scenes, think of all the money that could go to a longer, varied, and amazing looking game.

Also I remember waiting a year for Fire Emblem on Wii to be translated that game has approximately 20 minutes of voiced dialogue and all text. Good translations take time even without voicework

As precious as Garnett's enthusiasm for the RE6 trailer was, can we PLEASE stop getting excited over cinematic trailers? It was sad when people got hyped up by the Dead Island trailer and this is a little sad too. It's like when people were all amazed by commercials showing FMV during the Sega CD/Playstation era and I felt like I was in the minority being more excited by ads that seemed to show actual games. I know not everybody understood the wool was being pulled over their eyes, but these days we should know better. I love Resident Evil (ever since 4) and I'm sure 6 will deliver the gameplay but this trailer was worthless fluff. I'm glad everyone else on the podcast seems to agree.

The obvious solution for Bulletstorm 2 is a dickstarter.