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* RANDY PITCHFORD COMPARED RISK OF RAIN 2’S SHITTY UPDATE TO THE BEATLES ‘25%
HIT RATE’ AND THAT’S EMBARRASSING BUT EVERYONE STILL NEEDS TO SHUT UP

September 5, 2024
Needlessly Thorough Observations of Video Game Coverage

> “I’m going to keep making stuff. I wish everything could be a hit, but that
> is not how it works. The greatest musical act of all time, The Beatles, had
> a 25% hit rate. I’m sure every song they recorded was done with love and
> commitment to the art and belief in the quality of their work. My favorite
> artists, performers, and entertainers have all made things I didn’t like so
> much. It’s cool. When artists have a miss, that’s when they need fans the
> most to root them on so they are motivated to keep creating. I don’t know
> if I will ever make anything again that you like, but wouldn’t it be better
> for you to have that chance to decide than for artists to never create
> again after a marketplace miss?” – Randy Pitchford on X

The Beatles’ worst songs aren’t even closed to as bad as Borderlands 3 was.
What’s worse is that Randy Pitchford genuinely sees Gearbox Software as on
the same level as The Beatles proving once again that he is delusional and
incapable of making accurate assessments about the quality of his games.

It’s also weird to say this in the face of the recent failures of both
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Concord. I doubt that he’s
offering them the same grace that he’s oddly offering himself.

On the flip side of everything I just said, people need to calm down. They
will fix the game. Developers get to make bad decisions and put stuff out
early and fail to meet deadlines. They are people at the end of the day and
video games seem to be the only type of media that is criticized for not
meeting expectations. They just recently acquired Risk of Rain 2 and as with
any acquisition and first-time content updates, there will be growing pains.

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* DON’T PRETEND YOU DON’T KNOW WHY CONCORD FAILED

September 5, 2024
Categories, Needlessly Thorough Observations of Video Game Coverage

On the day that Concord came out, Deadlock had an active player count of
64,054 players and that was before it was even announced formally.

Counter-Strike 2 had over 1 million.

Dota 2 had 653,000.

Concord didn’t stand a chance and the bad actors claiming that it’s because
of ‘woke’ nonsense are being delusional. Deadlock is staying above water
because Valve has prestige, but no hero shooter is going to break ground
unless it is significantly different than its predecessors, and on that note,
while Concord’s differences weren’t necessarily significant, they were there.

The time to kill was longer, the classes had interesting mechanics, the maps
were generally designed for a lot verticality, and the game was generally
well received if you exclude reviews that navel gazed about its characters
not being straight white men.

The fact is that I really don’t like parroting what other writers can explain
better than me so I’m just going to put the link to IGN’s well-written
article here and I would encourage you to read it if you want to understand
on a deeper level the likely reasons that Concord failed.

Oh yeah, and fuck Mark Kern.

Why Concord Failed

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* THE MOST POPULAR GAMES ON ITCH.IO TODAY

August 29, 2024
Little Indie Games

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Bad Parenting 1: Mr Red Face by 2OO2

I can’t prove it because this is my first time writing this particular
article, but it’s been holding its position for a few days now. I haven’t got
a chance to play it yet, but I’ve found that for the most part, if it holds a
position in the top four games for more than two days, it’s worth playing in
some sense. You can also get unlucky and end up playing something that is
“YouTube bait”; my term for a game that becomes popular mostly because it
contains jump scares or ARG elements that do really well with almost always
cringy YouTubers. But sometimes even the YouTube bait is good, a mixed bag
that I don’t mind dipping my hand into.

Mirror, Mirror by Dead Possum Games

The core conceit here seems to revolve around a mirror and I’m sure that’s
interesting in the usual way that games like this are interesting. That is
the spirit of itch to me; that the game itself might be uninteresting or
unpolished or what have you, but it asks a question and adds something to the
conversation of game design. While Balatro did not begin on itch, Vampire
Survivors did and that speaks to the level of innovation that I am talking
about.

GOLLY SODA POP by LiminalRoad

This looks more like a meme game than anything, but I still find it
interesting and will definitely take a look at it this week. The fuzzy VHS
effect seems really interesting, but I imagine this won’t hold its spot for
long as a meme game.

Kiosk by Vivi

This game is on Steam which in a sense speaks to its quality because many
itch developers don’t have the capability of getting a game on to Steam as it
requires significantly more steps (which I will detail in a later post)

Super Chillers: The Chat Room by Rose Arcana Games

This looks unique and I can’t speak to the place it will hold on the page,
but I really appreciate its unique sensibility and that it was likely more
considered than the other games.

Room 202 by Max Horror

I’ve always find games about rooms interesting as other than games iterating
on Slenderman, they are probably the most common, but sometimes the most
interesting like No Snake Hotel.

遅れた宿題 Late Homework by sodaraptor

Late Homework is also in itch.io’s Featured Games list which doesn’t happen
very often as far as crossover for curated games on a list sorted by trending
popularity. This is the one I’m definitely the most excited to take a look
at.

"Voices Of The Void" Pre-Alpha by mrdrnose

This has cropped up on the Most Popular page for several months at least and
I should probably play it. It’s mostly just that the featured image isn’t
very interesting.

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* THE WEEK OF GAMESCOM 2024

August 26, 2024
Needlessly Thorough Observations of Video Game Coverage, Ranking The News

RANKING THE NEWS

12. RANDY PITCHFORD BEING CRINGE

Continuing to pretend that Borderlands villains are in any way supposed to be
taken seriously or “sinister”, Randy Pitchford suggests that the Borderlands
4 villain will be even “more dangerous”, which I guess means he will have
slightly more scars on his face.

Part of it for me is the way that CEOs of companies get so involved in
essentially promoting their game on social media and adding so much context
not included in any promotional media. It feels like it’s an acknowledgement
that the existing marketing for the game hasn’t done a great job of
representing what was intended by the person that heads the company.

Lastly, my problem with the last game wasn’t the villains. It was the
gameplay which notably isn’t addressed at all.

11. MINECRAFT IS COLLABORATING WITH SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS FOR NEW DLC

Kill me.

10. THE NEXT CIVILIZATION GAME’S NARRATOR IS GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE, WHICH IS
IMPORTANT FOR THE SEVEN PEOPLE WHO MIGHT KNOW WHO SHE IS

Multiple articles were written about this suggesting in some way that this
was a big deal or of note, but I don’t know who Gwendoline Christie is. She
seems nice and she has a gorgeous name. I always love a woman with two last
names, but when I think of what I enjoy about the Civilization series, it’s
not the narrator that comes to mind.

9. FINAL FANTASY XVI MAY BE ON PC AT SOME POINT

We are in an era where it feels like people are just so dead set on things
coming to PC that I think we should start forcing PC owners to buy one
console as a mandate. Console players have to deal with exclusivity all the
time and the idea that PC players are entitled to games that were advertised
as being explicitly for a specific console just shows their hand at the fact
that they do, in fact, think that they are the master race. The best part
about my computer is that I can play indie games on it, and not the Crypt of
the NecroDancer kind of indie games either, but the kind that you can only
get on the beautiful landfill that is itch.io. Where else could I be the
first player to get a chance to play Fortnite 2? I already played Final
Fantasy XVI on PS5 because I’m not cheap and enjoy playing games when they
come out, not to mention the brief yet worth mentioning joy of getting to
feel the DualSense controller at its best while playing Astro Bot: Rescue
Mission and then realizing that no PS5 game will utilize the majority of the
features displayed in what is essentially a tech demo.

8. SOME STUPID FUN FACTS ABOUT THE TOMB RAIDER SHOW COMING TO NETFLIX

I don’t actually know if the Tomb Raider show will be bad, but I can
confidently say that it will be bad — just like the Cuphead Show, Dota:
Dragon’s Blood, and Resident Evil. What more is there to even say about Lara
Croft anyway?

But I want it to be good. It will probably be bad, but I want it to be good.
Arcane was good. I hope that this show is actually is what’s being pitched
which is an interesting deep dive into a well-known video game character that
people have a lot of nostalgia for and somewhat of a relationship with. There
have been so many attempts to adapt video games to TV or film and I want it
to be more successful.

7. STARFIELD DLC, SHATTERED SPACE, WILL MAKE THE GAME A BIT MORE SPOOKY

lol

6. PEOPLE ARE ENJOYING WE HARVEST SHADOWS FOR SOME REASON

I played the We Harvest Shadows demo. There’s a portrait in your house on a
farm that changes over the course of your days and while the portrait did
change, I didn’t really have an urge to continue and I’ll be honest: horror
games scare the shit out of me. Even soft horror like SOMA, or Until Dawn
makes me shriek out loud (upsetting my partner and sometimes putting me at
risk of waking up my child). It’s one of those games where I can tell exactly
where it’s going and can estimate to a relatively finite degree the
experience I’m going to have and ultimately, it isn’t really something I want
to do. And I could be wrong, but I’m happy to be wrong on the probable chance
I’m right.

5. BLACK MYTH: WUKONG HAS A HARD BOSS AT THE BEGINNING

I want video game coverage to succeed, I do. I am currently attempting to try
and build a website primarily built around writing that focuses on this exact
concept, the hope that there can be good writing about video games, but so
many articles from every prominent video game website are just informing the
reader about something happening somewhere else online. Maybe it’s a tweet,
or an Instagram post, or a TikTok, or a livestream, but in the ether is a
shared challenge in a specific spot in the game that reflects part of what’s
so great about video games: a unique moment experienced by millions across
the globe. When it’s written about as news, even in the form of a guide, it
feels rote, unspecific, and mechanical. It doesn’t feel like building
community. It feels like commodifying an otherwise wholesome experience. This
isn’t a friend sharing a secret bomb location. This is a teacher showing how
to beat Ganon on a whiteboard.

4. SPLITGATE 2 SEEMS FINE

I liked the first Splitgate okay, but ultimately the mechanics were too
complicated to be enjoyable and it seems like the same complaint is being
made about its sequel. It’s a game that’s so ambitious in its mechanics, that
its ability to understand how they work is lost on the player. This is the
same sentiment expressed in Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s review and I was pleased
to see that someone else had come to the same conclusion. Splitgate reminds
me of Lemnis Gate where the potential is there, but it takes thorough mental
labor to grasp the mechanics.

These are the kind of games I want to succeed because I want all games to
succeed. I hope it grows a dedicated player base that fully engages with all
its intricacies and some small part of me wishes that I could be a part of
that player base, but I won’t be there. I will be here cheering it on,
celebrating the unique design it brings to the table.

3. KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE 2 WILL PROBABLY BE BETTER THAN THE FIRST ONE

The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance is one of those games that is somewhere
in the middle of my backlog and while it is technically possible I will play
it someday, I respect it from a distance.

Full disclosure: I did load it up once for about twenty minutes and found it
too difficult to continue. It still sits in my mind as something I would love
to play, but difficult games are games I play rarely because I work and I
have a life and sometimes lack even the confidence or appropriate level of
mental health to engage with something that beats you down. And I know that’s
the point. I’ve played many games that do this. I’ve beaten Elden Ring after
thousands of deaths, but while it is fun, it is also taxing. I respect what
Kingdom Come: Deliverance and the studio, in general, is doing, but if it is
too taxing for me to ever really try it remains to be seen. In the meantime,
I wish it the best.

2. THE NEW MONSTER HUNTER IS ANOTHER MONSTER HUNTER

This isn’t intended to be as disparaging as it sounds although I see the
irony. It’s just a game in a series that is good and it will be good and
people will think it’s good and critics will think it’s good and I will also
think it’s good. I just don’t think I will play it.

1. WE’RE COLLECTIVELY HOPING THAT STAR WARS: OUTLAWS MIGHT BE GOOD

Star Wars: Outlaws might not be good, but I think I want it to be. Cynically,
I can see that the entire conceit of the game is Uncharted as Ubisoft would
make it plus space lasers. You will jump and you will shoot, but most
importantly, you will fucking climb.

* You will climb vertically on the metal frames of abandoned ships.
* You will climb down the shaft of a ship that is in the middle of going
down while being shot at.
* You will climb cliffs at the top of which are two guards standing next to
each other and one of them is designated to be stealthily killed in a
tutorial section where an NPC ally assassinates the other serving as a
mini-tutorial for the stealth mechanic that you won’t use because it takes
twice as long and killing enemies is more time efficient.
* You will climb up a wall into a vent and drop into a room either behind a
guard, or an empty room that will lead to a hallway with a guard.
* You will climb towers to unlock more areas of the map because it is a
Ubisoft game.

And that’s okay. Climbing, shooting, jumping, and talking to NPCs is
absolutely okay. I am going to play it — and I will probably like it. I
expect that it will be fairly unmemorable in it’s Ubisoftness, but it will be
fun enough to pass the time, make fun of on the internet, and still be a part
of the conversation: an aspect of video games that is very important to me.

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* 414 GAMES RELEASED ON ITCH.IO TODAY

August 24, 2024
Digging Deep, Scratching The Itch

THE GOOD

PENLOPY_WEAVER

PILVI_FAWN

Penlopy a weaver girl in a small town can you help her find all the yarn to
finish her project ?

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GALACTIC LOOPHOLE

PONDERSLIME

Space station gone wrong

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THE FUN

KRÓNEON

JAVIER GARCÍA

Collect memories, save loved ones, and discover yourself in the world of the
time travel adventure of Króneon.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TAX CORP

TMILLER209

Making Ruining Lives Fun!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE INTERESTING

FLAPPY WHALE

REZOVIAN

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FORTNITE 2

NICO7LO

Join the first game to surpass Fortnite in sales, popularity, and content!!

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* I MISS THE SCHOOL LIBRARY

August 21, 2024
Confessions of a Former Bedwetter, Feelings from the 360 Era

In seventh grade, my friends and I would all congregate around one or two
computers in the school library and fawn over whatever games were coming out
next. This could have been GameSpot, GameTrailers, or another website I don’t
remember, but they served a really important purpose: a social gathering
place for like-minded people to enthuse about video games.

Trailers don’t need to be written about. They’re on YouTube, X, Facebook,
Instagram and those are the appropriate places for trailers to be shared and
seen, but now we are inundated on things that we can already find on our own.

I don’t think there is a central location to find video game trailers anymore
and gaming news sucks now. It’s either a guide, a trailer, a quote from a
developer, or a fun fact about a game.

Tomorrow some guy is going to beat Elden Ring with a recorder that he made
out of a piece of celery and nearly every outlet is going to write about it
except for PCGamesN because PCGamesN sucks.

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* THE WEEK BEFORE GAMESCOM 2024

August 21, 2024
Needlessly Thorough Observations of Video Game Coverage, Ranking The News

RANKING THE NEWS

A BUNCH OF GAMES ARE COMING OUT

Black Myth: Wukong is out
* 18 articles
* 7 about its record high player numbers
* 5 guides
* 3 about its DEI controversy
* 2 about hardware issues on PC
* 1 straight up advertisement published as an article on PC Gamer
(extremely weird)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming
* 15 articles
* trailer looks fine

Civilization 7 is coming

Borderlands 4 is coming
* 9 articles
* will be bad

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NEW CONSOLES ARE PROBABLY COMING

Switch 2 probably

THINGS THAT ONLY HAD ONE ARTICLE WRITTEN ABOUT THEM

the japanese voice editor for Bayonetta died

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* SILKSONG ZEALOTS ARE AT IT AGAIN

August 20, 2024
Gamers Are Mad Again, Toxic Hype

Every year and sometimes for multiple years, “gamers” decide to rally around
the unannounced release of something that’s either made by developers with
prestige or the follow-up to an equally prestigious indie game. For the most
part these people are annoying and inevitably making the lives of developers
worse. I can’t really tell if this is thousands of people or tens of
thousands of people, but either way my heart goes out to Team Cherry for the
rabid obsession with when their next game is coming out.

While I can’t prove why these people are the way they are (though I do have
theories), I think it’s fair to say that they probably bring up Silksong in
regular conversations with their coworkers; the types of conversations where
their coworker nods along, saying “uh-huh” while assembling a McChicken.

There’s no way that Silksong is even going to be as great as fans are
assuming it’s going to be, which has nothing to do with Team Cherry, but is
just a matter of fact based on fans’ absurd anticipation of it. I suppose if
someone had cancer and knew they were going to die and were looking forward
to Silksong, then they could be legitimately disappointed, but seeing as that
isn’t most people, then maybe these people should enjoy their lives and just
wait for anything to come out about Silksong.

It seems like every time a new gaming event comes around, there are fans
anticipating potential information about it and at this point, I feel like
Team Cherry should just hide it somewhere within another game like Frog
Fractions 2. Maybe Hollow Knight: Silksong has been out this whole time
hidden within some mediocre Steam game.

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Dear whoever you are,

Isn’t there enough metroidvanias at this point

You’ll start with nothing, run around aimlessly, stumble upon some movement
abilities, find a boss, die to it a lot, think you finished the game, find
yourself at 92% and then take it upon yourself to 100% the game even though
you’ve already beaten the final boss and won’t be able to do anything with
the last few things you get anyway. But then there’s the achievements you
could earn allowing you not to boast about it online because most people
don’t care, but one day you’ll stumble upon a Reddit thread in which someone
mentions the game and their lack of completion of it, and you will comment
talking about how you did it and it’s not that hard, basking in your one
shining moment of glory where you get to feel better than someone else for a
brief moment before you’re interrupted by the woman in the drive-thru asking
for a diet Baja Blast.

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* WILL VIDEO GAMES THAT ACHIEVE ‘AMAZING’ GRAPHICS ESCAPE BEING “STUNNING”?

August 19, 2024
Needlessly Thorough Observations of Video Game Coverage, Semantics, But
Still…

WHEN DID IT START?

I first noticed it when I saw a story about how the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake
looked stunning. A cursory search led me to 64 articles that used the word
‘stunning’ in the last year alone. I didn’t even begin with the premise, but
rather, I just noticed the word coming up a lot.

> This isn’t a semantic distinction (maybe technically) because I care less
> about the word and more about how it diminishes the value of the games they
> are calling “stunning”.

That’s actually not true. It might be a semantic distinction, but it doesn’t
feel like it is and frankly that’s all that matters at the moment. I really
just hate the overuse of the word stunning and I guess I’ll try to figure out
what I hate about as I write this.

WHAT DOES ‘STUNNING’ MEAN? DOES IT MEAN ANYTHING?

What’s funny though is that the dictionary part of this doesn’t really
matter. The more ubiquity there is among headlines, the less likely we are to
recognize them or care that they are there. Everything is stunning. Every
game, every trailer, every screenshot, every teaser, and even every Steam
page.

In the next example, “a stunning view of the lake” is implying a feeling of
awe at seeing the lake, soaking it in, and failing to come up with a more
interesting adjective to describe it (which is fine because it is generally
an appropriate word), but applying it to games which are manmade,
thoughtfully designed, constructions of what starts in a brain, ‘stunning’ is
woefully insufficient.

The “extremely attractive-” part of this definition is the most telling as in
all three examples, it’s describing something with other elements to its
beauty that would contribute to the use of ‘stunning’ like in “You look
absolutely stunning!” where said statement would be between two people and
the word in that case can be related to the person themselves outside of how
they look.

EVERYTHING IS STUNNING, I GUESS

Who would’ve thought that a visually accurate $383.99 statue that looks like
the same iteration of Banjo-Kazooie in the most recent Super Smash Bros.
would be stunning? Is it stunning because it’s life-like, or is it stunning
because looks like it should? What is stunning about? Even if I was
unoriginal enough to use a word like stunning, I don’t actually see anything
stunning about it.

Sometimes stunning doesn’t even emphasize visual elements, like PC Gamer’s
recent article about a 240Hz 32-inch 4K OLED monitor, which again is
‘stunning. Is it the absurd number of acronyms and consumer terms needed to
describe it that is stunning because in that case, I would agree.

IT MAKES EVERYTHING WORSE

Stunning is a buzzword. We know this, but part of what makes reading video
game news, especially via an RSS feed so miserable is that everything
eventually blends together and becomes everything else. By the time you make
it through the multiple instances of stunning, and PC Gamer’s Wordle answer
of the Day (which just, like, do the Wordle), even when you do stumble upon
an article worth reading, it’s too late.

After guides about Minecraft and the stunning new trailer for a pixel art
Metroidvania, it becomes industry layoffs that are actually pertinent to
video game development and video games themselves. But again, it’s too late.
As far as I can tell, everything appears stunning to someone, even games that
have an anime style that looks like every other thing that also has an anime
style, which I get it, because it’s easy, but why is it stunning? There’s a
new Destiny 2 mission that takes 19 hours to complete and even that’s
stunning.

To be fair, it’s not as annoying as “hidden gem”, “soulslike”, “charming”,
“cute”, “fun”, or “wholesome”, but it’s not an excuse.

PLEASE STOP BUYING VIDEO GAME PERIPHERALS PRODUCTS PARAPHERNALIA

If I wrote an article about a nearly $400 Banjo-Kazooie statue, I might say
it captures the era of the mascot with its beady lifeless eyes and represents
the soulless consumerism of ‘gamers’ attempting to cash in on not on anything
substantial or of merit, but simply their own nostalgia for something that
they so clearly haven’t played in a long time because as someone who has
recently played it can firmly say that it does not hold up at all, and though
I have nostalgia for it, it has to simply be the idea of its existence and
the opening of the door for me to better games because it is, for the most
part, a miserable slog. This statement would not fit in a headline but it is
something more substantial than stunning.

FOR $400, YOU CAN BUY THIS BANJO-KAZOOIE STATUE THAT ON PURCHASE WILL PROVE
YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED IT IN A WHILE

That’s the headline.

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