September Video Game News Highlights
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Nechrol
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Disappointment reared its ugly head in October, the stench of shattered expectations hung in the air like the aftermath of viscous skunk death match in a hot and crowded portable toilet. Your mileage may vary on whether it reached such lofty aromatic heights but would have to concede that a stink was definitely kicked up.
Dead Island
Perhaps one of the most striking examples of division of opinion in some time, Dead Island was met with… mixed reviews to say the least. The main culprit was the teaser trailer that launched earlier this year and while not being a particular reinvention of the zombie survival game it at least promised an interesting twist on the old convention. The convention being tossing your child from several storeys in slow motion, something we can all connect with.
Tossing your child like a sack of market produce aside, the emotional, tissue grabbing angle they were going for was, somewhat ironically, cast away like your imaginary daughter and had their brains dashed like a can of cheap spaghetti on the sidewalk.
It wasn’t just the story elements that came under fire (something that was apparent as further trailers were released) but so did gameplay mechanics and nature of missions.
But this isn’t a review; it’s just an overview exposing how the initial hype of the game attached a metaphorical ‘winch’ to our collective expectations. As months went on and teasers continued our expectations rose further into the air. And expectations and reality are the introspective equivalent of the troll physics adage of a diamond car driving into a wall of diamond, one of them has to give.
In the end, you had the camp whose diamond Prius met with the mercy of the wall, shattering their expectations in the games harsh reality, while the others blasted through it cheering and whooping to fly off the cliff of happiness hidden behind the wall.
Gears of War 3 and Cliff’s hissy fit
Haters gonna hate, at least that was the mindset of Gears’ Cliff Blezinski after the reviews for the third instalment hit the internet. The game didn’t review badly to any degree, reaching universal acclaim on Metacritic which is nothing to turn ones nose up about.
I can see that if you look at a game like a child, or some kind of genetically engineered life-form that you’re continually pooling your resources and knowledge into you expect it to become better over time. After all, of the time spent tweaking the grey and brown pallets, chest-high walls and bulging neck muscles you naturally assume that a better product has been conceived. So you send your child into the world and expect it to trounce the ‘lesser’ models out there.
Things don’t always work out that way, and on paper the game may be better with various features improved but not everyone will see it that way. Critics have opinions, and though they stand on top of a soapbox with a megaphone it’s still their opinion, no one is tied to a chair a fed that review. And with a game in its third high successfully instalment, reviews have a lesser chance of impacting a buyers decision.
I think the main problem with the ‘outrage’ was that a higher review score was expected and they were in some way entitled to it, it wasn’t hoped for like with most publishers. Just look at long running franchises such as sporting games, their scores fluctuate more than other ones and previous games sometimes score higher, and sometimes they score lower. The developers don’t immediately think that there’s been a rip in the fabric of reality and rush outside to make sure the sky and ground haven’t swapped places.
And on a final note, just because you think one thing is “better”, it does not make it so. I think that a quality form of entertainment would be filming how long it takes an individual to bludgeon another with a plastic tray table at a fast-food outlet when they spend ages ordering their meal. Would it be better than Jersey Shore, perhaps?
Grown Man chokes a plebe
It was only a matter of time really, until the testosterone-fuelled romp of the COD series seeped through the HD monitor and into our lives, growing in gamers’ stomachs like some kind of ‘hate-stew’ until violent action is the only outlet.
For most of us, any form of completive gaming taps into a hemisphere of Neolithic anger. It transforms us from a civil gamer happily playing Farmville, to the simmering can of rage soup splashed in the face of an unruly waiter after we just were just shot by some camper.
Some of us will scream expletives into our headsets like a demented drill sergeant, others take a more physical approach, throwing a controller across the room, and some of us just take a time out.
For a man in England (somewhere in the north no doubt), he took the fourth option, personally laying the smack down on a child who constantly goaded him online.
There are a number of things disturbing about the story, and having knowledge of the Daily Mail and their penchant for massaging the truth to sell papers is one of the culprits. If they could, they would run a front-page image of a person with a flare shoved into a bodily orifice if they thought it would shift more units out of grim rubbernecking.
They claimed that the man in question ‘tracked’ and ‘hunted’ the kid down. It’s not like some rom-com where the guy only knows the girl’s net-handle and goes on a hilarious cross country adventure to find her. In reality, he knew the child and his parents; they lived next door to him, so within a matter of minutes his hands had a date with the child’s neck.
In addition, it was reported that the man had mental health issues, so probably should not have been playing a game where killing avatars and insurmountable rage go hand in hand. Not to mention the kid as well, who was 13 playing a certified 18+ game.
I believe in some strange and karmic way things worked out like an after-school special. The child learned that he probably should not run his mouth off in the event a possible psychopath might find out where he is and exact some righteous/disproportionate act of vengeance.
All joking aside, the only good thing to come of the altercation is that the man was able to unlock the secret “He who chokes first, laughs last” achievement, thus enabling him a perfect 100/100 gamerscore for Black Ops. I’ll go and crack open the bubbly.