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Sony announced the sequel to samurai open-world game Ghost of Tsushima, Ghost of Yotei. Its main feature seems to be that you get to play as an ugly woman. This is precisely what the market has been waiting for:
Made for the modern audience (going to sell horribly)
Look at the voice actor lol: https://www.reddit.com/r/pacificDrive/comments/1fqs6v3/erika_ishii_voice_actor_in_the_upcoming_ghost_of/?rdt=58304
Horizon: Zero Dawn is also getting a remastered version. This is hardly what people were asking for, but Sony keeps doubling down on their ugly female main protagonists:
Awesome! Playing Ghost of Tsushima as a badass samurai ninja warrior was so boring. The whole time I was thinking “Man, I wish I could play as a woman!”
…
On a more positive note, Team Ninja is working on a new waifu simulator, Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation Prism:
Might be a good time to get into the series.
The developers for MGSD:SE recently fixed some of their character designs for the better: https://youtu.be/0rYYq7kN8pc
Konami likes money too much to ignore displeased fans. However, I find the character design of “The Boss” from the PS2 version visually more striking than the updated version in the remake. There is also the problem of suspending disbelief because it is easier to accept a woman physically dominating a much stronger man if the graphics are not overly realistic.
Well, there’s hardly anything realistic about what goes on in this game haha. It has some whacky boss encounters.
The slut simulator Stellar Blade recently got a patch that enables the interaction between wind and clothing physics. Thus, the gameplay gets immensely enriched by the valuable feature of winds blowing up skirts, thus exposing grade-A buttocks. Perhaps this was done in preparation for the upcoming 2B skin:
https://x.com/wapdahca/status/1839390131998077289
Sweet Baby Inc. finally admits that their goal is to “burn the games industry to the ground”:
https://archive.ph/hfitA
Ew, that fucking thing in the picture looks gross.
Autism at its finest: close to 20 years after its release, Gran Turismo 4 gets a patch that overhauls the original game. Among others, you get “enhanced engine sounds for 400+ cars with 130+ new recordings”. I find this most impressive. This is the level of dedication/autism that all the top game studios used to exhibit in the past whereas nowadays they focus a lot more on putting out yet another heap of slop for the masses.
https://www.theadmiester.co.uk/specii/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NYHWty265Y
I really should play Fallout New Vegas again sometime. This game probably has one of the best modding communities which gives the game such massive replay value.
I wonder if Fallout 3 enjoys a similar benefit in mods. I never quite enjoyed it as much as New Vegas, but I’ll put looking into it somewhere down on my to-do list I suppose.
I recently came across the documentary 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience (2012). It is perhaps a bit shallow but it provides a good introduction to the Japanese arcade scene, covering the various phases it went through (inception, shooting games, fighting game boom, music games, dedicated cabinets). The focus is heavily on the customer experience. Instead of a few of these interviews, it would perhaps have been better to briefly cover the impact of changes in Japanese laws on arcades, e.g. games became shorter as arcades could no longer be operated 24/7, which fundamentally changed game design principles as it was no longer economical to have games that people could play for hours like Dig Dug, Pacman or Donkey Kong. Another important aspect missing is the enormous evolutionary pressure on arcade games, which led to a proliferation of genres and fine-tuning of mechanics within a very short amount of time. Nonetheless, it is a pretty good documentary and worth watching if you want to learn more about he Japanese arcade scene.
Nice, going on my list. Did you ever get a chance to check out that “my house” Doom mod video? Wow. What an insane mod.
I watched part of it. The longevity of Doom via mods is quite astounding. The only other game I can think of that had a somewhat comparable impact and longevity is Super Mario World, which has had countless hacks, and some of these seem to have heavily influenced the “masocore” style of platforming, for instance Super Meat Boy. In particular, I am thinking of the hack Kaizo Mario World.
Speaking of “masocore”, every now and then I’ll see a short of some guy running a near impossible level build in Mario Maker. It really something how the fundamentals of Super Mario World have bred such fierce levels of platforming.
Nintendo suing Palworld seems a bit overboard to me. That’s almost like Ubisoft suing Nintendo for using the “snychonization” feature atop the towers in BotW to uncover parts of the map. Or like Fromsoft suing because Link uses a sneak attack mechanic similar to Dark Souls. Maybe there’s more to this that I’m not realizing, but I’m not a fan of the move. I don’t even care about Palworld.
PS4 emulation is developing quite well, at least when it comes to one of the handful of exclusives worth playing. Bloodborne is looking pretty good already and can even be played through already, assuming you have a beefy PC. There are still random crashes, though.
Two of the most high-profile figures in Japanese manga and video games, Kazuhiko Torishima and Yuji Horii , talk candidly about their views of US meddling with their products. The former refers to the US as a “ridiculous country”:
https://streamable.com/fn1spb
“Which way western man?” for computer games:
https://x.com/EndymionYT/status/1837620805418864774
Decent SH2R trailer: https://youtu.be/0JHD_vb4jxE
This game will certainly be polarizing. At some point around a month or two ago, it became fashionable suddenly to praise Bloober after two years of constant hate.
This could have ended up looking a lot worse, but the character models are in dire need of a remake, no pun intended. The female characters look horrible, though. Modders may not be able to fix it, but if they replace the ugly women with Ada Wong and 2B we would be a lot better off already, despite the loss of suspense of disbelief.
Early access of SH2 on Steam is receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews. We’ll see how that holds up in the coming days, because it’s possible that people spending $80 on a game are feeling a false sense of “non-buyer’s remorse”.
I am really curious about the reception of Silent Hill 2 of the general buying audience. The characters models are so ugly that you need to inhale a lot of copium. I am not rooting for this game to fail, though. At the very least, there were no reports of pozz being injected into SH2. The best-case scenario is that the remake is competent, and the character models will be fixed by modders.
I think James looks fine, and Eddy is appropriately disgusting because in the original his character arch was basically him embracing ultra violence as a way to cope with having been bullied for being a fat loser. However, they seem to have missed the mark with his voice acting (and several others) more than anything. Like, when Eddy doesn’t snap back to being scared and remorseful for what he has done, and instead leans more into being a machiavellian type of personality.
As far as the three adult female characters go (Mary, Maria, and Angela), I’m split. This is partly because they never had great appeal, especially when comparing FMVs of Silent Hill characters to those of FFVIII characters (on the PS1!). I think Mary looks appropriate, as she was sick and dying, and homely in the original. Yet, Maria is supposed to be the ideal sexualized embodiment of Mary, and kind of looks like a chick in her 30s that smokes too much in the remake. Angela, however, just looked like a crack head in the original and way older-looking than a 19 year old should.
I think the biggest miss on this game is more to do with it sanitizing themes of sexual repression, rape, incest, suicide and murder. This game was never meant to be beautiful, but actually very ugly. There’s a scene in the original where Pyramid Head is molesting a 4-legged mannequin monster that gets completing censored in the remake. The overall tone of the remake is too melodramatic also.
We get a big upgrade in graphics, explore-ability of the beloved town of Silent Hill, and some modernized combat mechanics. I think if you strip away the narrative of the original game, which was heavily inspired by the likes of Jacob’s Ladder and Crime and Punishment, you’re left with a pretty shitty horror game anyways.
This is probably the biggest miss of the remake: https://youtu.be/BGA9zHVD-OI
Notice how in the original comparison Maria is warm and almost playful, then switches into something sinister, like the town of Silent Hill is toying with James. In the remake the delivery is just flat and unconvincing. There’s just not the same unsettling effect. It’s like they didn’t understand the subject matter and it’s not even that hard to grasp.
The scenes from the remake are really poorly made. I have never played Silent Hill but if I was a fan, I am not sure I would be able to pretend that this is not a downgrade.
Silent Hill 2 is a critical success, however, it looks as though to be a commercial failure. Peak player counts upon official release were right under 24k. It probably won’t do much better than that. Arguably, the game may have faired much better on PS5, but Konami was marketing the game pretty aggressively about a month out from release. I read somewhere that to recoup total costs and break even that they’d need to sell around 3.5 million copies. Assuming Konami doesn’t pull the plug on Silent Hill f and the other however many spin off titles in development, this may be the beginning of the end of the franchise.
Isn’t this the norm nowadays? Basically every game the danger-haired journo class likes players stay away from. The root cause of Silent Hill 2 is different, though. While the amount of wokeness seems quite moderate gaming has fundamentally changed in the two decades since its release and the IP itself is not particularly strong either.
I have spent a few hours recently to look into the history of Konami and concluded that they are extremely business-savvy. Sure, players often complain about not getting a new Contra or Castlevania game worthy of its name. However, these games were never big sellers. I could not find official sales figures for Contra III, the most acclaimed entry of this series, and Super Castlevania IV only sold 800k copies. Symphony of the Night sold 1.5m, which was probably why they greenlit so many sequels for the GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS but none of them was particularly successful. Still, those were low-budget projects so they surely paid off.
Konami pulled out of producing 2D action games in the mid-1990s, doubled down on Metal Gear Solid, but otherwise was very careful about spending money on developing unproven games. On the other hand, they invested heavily into markets that were profitable, such as music games. After the breakout success of Beatmania, they focused on that, almost to the exclusion of anything else. In addition, they seem to have done quite well with some horse racing arcade games. They still put out plenty of games over the years but with modest budgets instead of the Western betting-the-farm approach. With Silent Hill 2, they also proceeded in a smart way, i.e. they went for the most acclaimed game in this series and put a decent amount of money into a remake, but not so much that it would bankrupt them, all in order to understand if the market really wants more Silent Hill games. Surely, for them it was not even clear if the franchise is still relevant.
Capcom has a similar approach but they seem to play this game even better, i.e. they invest less money to gauge the market, but if they have a success title in their hands, they double and triple down. However, they also ditch a franchise if it starts to decline instead of crashing and burning, unlike many other game studios. They milked Street Fighter like crazy but backed off after SF III failed commercially. The 3D spinoff Street Fighter EX they even outsourced. Yet, they explored SF IV after the rerelease of SF II: Hyper Fighting on the Xbox360/PS3 did far better than expected. This seems to be why SF IV plays more similarly to SF II than SF III or SF Alpha. On the other hand, they got plenty of fan request for a new Darkstalkers game so, listening to their fans, they put out a compilation rerelease and shelved plans for a new game in this franchise after it sold poorly.
“Isn’t this the norm nowadays? Basically every game the danger-haired journo class likes players stay away from.”
I’m going by the Steam reviews. They’re more favorable than the meta critic.
I think Konami also misjudged how popular the original title is. It originally sold around 1 million copies. There’s also a very vocal minority that shills for this game and the franchise in general.
“The root cause of Silent Hill 2 is different, though.”
Agreed. I don’t think being woke and having ugly chicks is the problem here. Just look at Baldur’s Gate 3, which was mega woke in comparison. If SH2 goes on sale for like $20 at some point I’ll check it out.
“Capcom has a similar approach but they seem to play this game even better, i.e. they invest less money to gauge the market, but if they have a success title in their hands, they double and triple down.”
At least there are more RE games to look forward to. Hopefully the female management doesn’t mess them up.
“With Silent Hill 2, they also proceeded in a smart way, i.e. they went for the most acclaimed game in this series and put a decent amount of money into a remake, but not so much that it would bankrupt them, all in order to understand if the market really wants more Silent Hill games.”
However, alongside SH2, Konami invested into like 5 or so different SH games, 3/5 having already come out have all failed. And then there is a movie in the works. I’d say they really went all in on Silent Hill without first testing the waters.
I was not aware that Konami had tried to resuscitate this corpse of a franchise so many times. Instead, I was under the impression that Silent Hill: Downpour, which was released over a decade ago, was the last released game in this series. You are right, there were indeed other failed projects, which makes me wonder what is going on over there. Perhaps they have too much money on their hands. Konami as a whole is doing quite well.
Assuming Silent Hill f doesn’t get cancelled I think it has potential to be pretty interesting (Taiwanese developer). Apparently they have a renowned writer on board for the story. I think Konami has the overall best approach for MGS3. Not only is it a 1:1 remake, but reusing lots of assets is probably a pretty conservative use of development costs. Likewise, Kojima diehards should really have little to bitch about it here assuming the character models are decent. I feel like the prevailing piece of criticism will be that they played it too safe. Anyways, should MGSD:SE pan out then they could potentially green light other projects without getting in too deep.
After Konami fired Kojima, it seemed plausible that this would be the end of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. It would be rather shocking, to the wider gaming audience, if Konami was able to produce a well-received and commercially successful MGS VI, and if the remake of MGS 3 does well this is probably not completely unrealistic. On a related note, Konami fired Kojima because he was blowing too much money on MGS V and at some point they just had enough of him.
Through the context that Mark_MSX is essentially throwing his hands up and surrendering to the trajectory of the current gaming market and “remake culture” at large, he is actually not super critical of Silent Hill 2: https://youtu.be/UxVg8Uj__QA
At a couple of points he even goes on to remark the game is a “breath of fresh air” in regards to being more to the point in its play style than other modern horror games. Ultimately, he prefers and recommends the original, and couldn’t get through a second play through of the game. This is strictly a gameplay review only, though he casually notes how the rape scenes were (either heavily censored or) omitted.
Mark_MSX recently gave up his day job in order to become a fulltime YouTuber. We will have to see how this is going to affect the quality of his videos. In the past, he focused on various niche genres and provided in-depth discussions. Yet, now that he need clicks to make money, he is suddenly into survival horror, it seems. I have watched quite a bit of his videos in the past and even listened to a few of his podcasts but I do not recall him ever mentioning Silent Hill.
Good point. In fact, I distinctly remember him disregarding REmake 1 as essentially not worthy of his time when discussing RE4. Now he suddenly prefers fixed camera angles even though those were obviously implemented due to technological restraints. I believe Shinji Mikami even commented at one point that he disliked fixed cameras (paraphrasing here). Also, Idk why Last of Us gets credit for the over the shoulder free camera system. Dead Space figured it out 5 years earlier!
I was just think how on the flip side of Mark_MSX going mainstream essentially, we can get a guy from the inside covering new releases, so to speak. However, I think what this will amount to is having another contrarian commentator. There are already in fact plenty of those. Under the Mayo comes to mind (I honestly think he’s too pessimistic), and Synthetic Man just seems to focus on outrage content anymore. When relying on youtube for money it is almost guaranteed that the creator will end up producing subpar material in some form or another or just pandering to their niche fanbase. Also, Mark’s channel has been around for quite a while and yet it doesn’t seem to be taking off. I’ve seen channels that focus on shorts only, like cooking, for example, that garner 10x the amount of subs in 6 months. Idk how viable this career path is, he seems to be getting less than $1500 on Patreon, but then there is youtube (whatever that equates to, no idea) and occasional merchandise drives. I suppose he is streaming these days, and if he is then there is hopefully a steady stream of dudes tipping him regularly.
I think his channel cannot grow much larger by catering exclusively to a hardcore audience as there are not enough people around. Even worse, when he started his channel, there were plenty of people in the shmup community who openly attacked him for bringing visibility to that genre. It was beyond ridiculous. These niche genres are normally quite elitist, so this is perhaps not too surprising.
I think that he lives in a low-cost area, was it rural Idaho? I recall him referring to himself as a “hick from Idaho” but it was not clear to me if this was meant to be taken literally. Maybe this was just a humorous way of saying that he does not live in the poxx-coast parts of the US. Probably he can get by quite easily on $2k/month. I recall him mentioning that some indie developers have reached out to him for advice, so perhaps this amounts to the occasional $5k windfall for him. In any case, I think it is plausible that he will be able to get by quite comfortably for years, and he may even able to branch out into the industry, albeit this might be a bit of a stretch. Several YouTubers in the fighting game community, for instance, were able to land gigs at developers, publishers, or e-sport companies.
In the back of my mind I’m sure I was factoring in his wife and children. It’s possible that he is way more well off than I realize, and that he is able to just coast off of his creator content and, like you say, indie game development consulting. Perhaps opting for this lifestyle and “following his passion”, as they say. I’ve heard him mention Idaho also. Tbh, I don’t have the faintest what’s there besides potatoes.
Also, wasn’t he supposed to develop a video game? That has supposedly been in the works for years, yet he never mentions it anymore. I recall seeing some gameplay footage of it and it kind of look ridiculous (in a bad way). It was a shmup with premise that there was zero downtime. Not trying to knock the guy’s knowledge of the genre at all, just that whatever it was wasn’t going to be the next Zero Ranger or Blue Revolver.
I recall him talking about that once or twice. Zero downtime is a bad idea, which is why there is an ebb and flow in good shmups where there are less demanding parts after you have survived a brutal onslaught. If you leave that out, games become tiring to play. The first two Tetris The Grand Master ease up briefly before ramping up the difficulty. TGM 3 does not do that, which is one of the reasons why this game feels so exhausting to play.
I just got a 1CC in the original Street Fighter II (SNES) with Ryu on default settings, with some perfect rounds. I only lost one round in the entire playthrough as the Dictator (Vega (JP)/ M. Bison (US)) used an attack pattern I cannot handle yet. Apart from that it was a run I am pretty happy with.
Hey, congrats on your progress with SFII. You seem to have really become invested in this timeless classic. It’s great to be able to really appreciate a single game and dig in deep. Is there a competition scene around these days by chance?
There is a competitive scene on Fightcade, but it centers around the various arcade releases. The last time I checked, there were a few hundred people online to play the various SFII variants, the most popular being SFII: Champion Edition.
“Is there a competition scene around these days by chance?”
I’ve been to a Fighting Game Discord before for Melty Blood. They did run special competition events if I remember right. They might even have had prizes for winners but I’m not too sure as I never participated in those. I just decided to play a casual match with one of the regulars, and I got my ass kicked real quick. I was good enough to consistently handle Melty Blood Actress Again’s hardest CPU settings (but not to the extent of handicapping myself like Aaron is doing here) and I thought that should have decently prepared me for the scene, but boy was I in for a surprise.
I could probably get into the scene and get decently good with practice, but wasn’t willing to dedicate that kind of time to this.
Street Fighter is much more popular and bigger scene than Melty Blood. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have a competition scene. You’ll probably have to go on discord though to check.
The monetization director of Ubisoft is begging people to not be critical of his company and rooting for its demise, after spitting in the face of the main audience for years:
https://archive.ph/8N9nK
Of course, I am staunch supporter of Ubisoft and I hope to see them double-down on the path they have chosen for themselves, which is why I have recently replaced the banner of this blog with a screenshot showing the black samurai Yasuke, the main protagonist of the upcoming Ubisoft game Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.
Ubisoft has stretched themselves way too thin for too long. It’s also funny that the Japanese have romanticized and portrayed the West quite graciously with many of their games, yet they’re not afforded the same.
Black Myth: Wukong had a budget of $43m. Recently, there was a press release that this game has sold over 20 million copies. Thus, this is easily one of the most profitable AAA games in years.
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/black-myth-wukong-budget-was-43m.1676029/