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A whole bunch of questions without answers regarding the identity of this sound and light show called Electronic Entertainment Expo.
In my childhood, as soon as Thanksgiving were over – and sometimes before it had even arrived – I would begin counting down the days until Christmas. I was unable to contain my excitement, each day at school feeling like slow torture as the seconds seemed to take minutes to tick away. I would frequently sneak into my parent’s bedroom, seeking out the poorly hidden shopping bags full of presents to catch a glimpse of what I might be receiving that year.
Such excitement and anticipation is increasingly rare in my adult life, save for one single, annual event: E3. If I’m lucky, the interactive electronics expo occurs in tandem with my birthday, allowing me to perceive the celebration of marketing and consumerism as a gift packaged especially for myself. More often than not, I care less for birthday cake, dinners, or presents as all of my eager attention is drawn towards the industry’s biggest event of the year.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was the biggest gaming event of the year. There’s a lot of pundits and Reddit regulars and social media commentators that are blaming the past two years of lackluster announcements on Covid, but I think there was a general sense of deterioration well before the pandemic. Speaking anecdotally, I recall taking a week off of work in 2017 to sit in front of my television uninterrupted, absorbing any and all gaming streams I could. It was that year that I noticed a pattern developing with each E3: I’d feel disappointed and let down until Nintendo took the figurative center stage, concluding the major press conferences with a Direct and three days of live gameplay demonstrations.
At first I attributed this disappointment in all other companies to be the result of exhaustion and disconnection from the AAA gaming machine. While I think there is a modicum of truth to this, I also believe I was unable to discern the growing transformation of E3. It was no longer the gaming event of the year; it was now the first of many. Publishers stopped revealing their hand on stage long ago, saving many of their cards for later events like Paris Games Week, SXSW (South by Southwest), San Diego Comic-Con, Gamescom, and Tokyo Games Show. A reveal trailer may be shown at E3, but the development studio and publisher would likely be drip feeding more information throughout select expositions as the summer progressed. A carefully managed and distributed hype supply.
If E3 is anything, I think it is a habit. A habit of what, however? For whom is it a habit? Of that I am not sure.
Chris and Steve discuss a whole assortment of indie games, as well as what impressed or intrigued at the Ubisoft, Microsoft, Square Enix, and Nintendo conferences.
Guess I'll just write a whole lot of words regarding three specific companies at E3 this year.
I wasn’t really planning to do any sort of write-up regarding the specific conferences themselves, instead saving those thoughts for the podcast or a surprise Twitch stream with Joey and Zack around 8pm ET on Monday, June 21st. I do have a general E3 essay incoming, but it’s more a series of questions and considerations regarding the exposition’s purpose and why it feels so underwhelming compared to years past. There are no real answers to be found, but it’s a thought exercise I yearned to spill out onto the world anyway.
This morning I discovered that Shamus has pointed people over this way for potential discussion on Capcom and Nintendo’s events, capturing me completely unaware. Grateful, though! It just wasn’t something I was planning on.
While it is likely too late to capitalize on the spotlight shown my way, I figured I might as well go ahead and provide what has been advertised. With my own little spin, of course. There’s plenty to discuss regarding Capcom and Square Enix’s reveals, and much speculation to be had regarding Nintendo. Forgive any typos, grammatical errors, strange phrases or weak wordings, as this will be a “one draft” item. I’ve not done one draft in a long time, but what can be done under such short notice?
That all said, let’s get to it.
Special guest Shamus Young joins Chris once again to talk Batman: Arkham City, Marvel's Spider-Man, and several other digressions.
It's not often I fall for a game as much as this one, but I have. It's not perfect, but it's a very special kind of great.
Resident Evil Village is a different kind of mostly great. That was the planned title for my essay right after I beat the game. Then I immediately jumped back in for another playthrough. Then a third. The only reason I haven’t dove in for a fourth playthrough is so I don’t burn myself out on the game. So while I originally planned to be “clever” and reference the title of my Resident Evil VII write-up, I’ve found that doing so would fail to illustrate just how much I’ve fallen in love with Village.
It certainly is a different kind of mostly great from its predecessor, and depending on your tastes it may even be worse. If Resident Evil VII was a course correction for the franchise, Resident Evil Village is a “regression”. It not only focuses far more on action-packed gameplay, but explodes into the excessive camp of prior games without the wonderful self-aware nature of Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil IV. Only the primary antagonist hams it up like the games of old, feeling oddly out of place with the otherwise straight-faced acting and delivery of the rest of the cast. Where the strength of Resident Evil VII was its focus on the small world of the Baker family, Resident Evil VIII sacrifices screen time belonging to its own bizarre family of freaks for the sake of a bombastic and epic conclusion with implications for a larger scale ninth entry in the franchise.
To summarize, Resident Evil Village betrays everything that made Resident Evil VII’s narrative work so well and made players care again.
As a modernized reinterpretation of Resident Evil IV, however, Village succeeds in much the same way as Resident Evil VII drew inspiration from and freshly envisioned the very first game. It’s so effective that I may actually like playing Village better than IV, even if I’m not sure it’s a better game.
I was surprised to find the Sonic the Hedgehog movie rather enjoyable, but is it really a Sonic movie at its heart?
I am not a Sonic the Hedgehog fan. That’s not a surprise when you consider my preferred childhood games were either story-focused Japanese role-playing games or side-scrolling action games that encouraged thorough exploration of the map. While the most obvious example of this preference is Super Metroid, a title such as Mega Man X would become my favorite entry in the Blue Bomber’s multi-generational saga due to its scattering of upgrades and power-ups across its levels. Super Mario World was littered with hidden secrets and additional exits to its stages, each one revealing alternate paths throughout the world map.
Sonic the Hedgehog did not reward exploration. It’s not that the game punished exploration, either. Sonic himself was just not built to thoroughly spelunk through his maps. Instead, it’s a try-try-again approach to progressing through each stage, maintaining that sense of flow in order to reach the end point. Mirror’s Edge is, in some ways, a spiritual successor to the more abstracted concept of platforming that Sonic the Hedgehog introduced.
Nonetheless, I was a child during the early days of the “console wars”, incited to anger by the SEGA marketing campaign that dared treat my beloved Super Nintendo as the “dweeby” console. My hatred of the smug smirk on the blue blur has not fully washed away, and has often felt justified as I’ve sat in the spectator’s seats of SEGA’s constant efforts to keep the character relevant through the shifting landscape of gaming. Perhaps most shocking is that, despite all of the “How do you do fellow kids?” the hedgehog has suffered and endured throughout the aughts, he has somehow managed to maintain a cross-generational fandom of near-religious – if not fully religious – devotion.
Oddly enough, it is this cross-generational fandom that makes last year’s Sonic the Hedgehog so widely accepted. It feels somewhat engineered to feed into the interests of nearly every target demographic within the anthropomorphic runner’s crowd of enthusiasts, but not in the same cynical fashion that you’d expect such a work to function. It doesn’t feel designed by committee, nor does it feel like a work shoved out onto the Internet by a mind that cannot comprehend humor, capable only of regurgitating that which is perceived as funny or amusing.
I think, most importantly, it recognizes that Sonic himself is not a character so much as an icon.
Chris is joined by co-streamers and friends Joey and Zack for a long and spoilerific conversation on Resident Evil Village. The first hour is spoiler-free.
So many of the characters in Arkham City seem to be motivated by their obsessions. All but the two that matter most.
In my previous essay on Arkham City, I noted how “distraction” was as much a theme of the gameplay as it seemed to be in the narrative. Batman’s attention seems to be pulled anywhere but the primary threat throughout the length of the game. Be it Catwoman strung up by Two-Face in the courthouse, Joker injecting his infected blood into Batman’s veins, Penguin imprisoning Mr. Freeze and torturing a group of previously undercover cops, or the various scattered diversions throughout the city, Batman just cannot seem to sit down and focus on the matter at hand.
I feel as if this is the result of two conflicting desires. The first is to tell yet another story centered on the Joker and his relationship to Batman. The second uses Hugo Strange to justify the existence of the rather implausible and titular Arkham City. While similar open-world superhero games like Marvel’s Spider-Man or the inFamous franchise are more than happy to include civilians in their city settings, Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Montreal seemed insistent on creating a game world where only thugs, criminals, and the occasional political prisoner exist. This is why future spin-off entry Arkham Origins takes place during a snowstorm where all the innocent, law-abiding citizens remain sheltered in their homes, or Arkham Knight’s Gotham takes place after the civilians have evacuated the city. It wouldn’t make sense to have civilians wandering the streets when so many armed criminals are on the loose. Why are so many armed criminals on the loose? For the sake of the gameplay desires and ambitions of the developers.
As such, Hugo Strange is used to contextualize Arkham City. As outlandish and “comic book” as the concept is, it works for the sake of the gameplay. However, once the context of the setting has been addressed, the game developers seem to just shrug it off in pursuit of the Joker storyline. Or, perhaps, the story itself only exists in order to string together set pieces. Someone had a cool idea for a fight against Mr. Freeze, but there needs to be a reason for that fight to exist. Ah! How about Penguin’s has trapped Mr. Freeze in the Iceberg Lounge, and in order to fight Mr. Freeze you must first defeat the Penguin? Oh, and we can throw in that shark idea while we’re at it! Wait, why is Batman rescuing Mr. Freeze?
This seems like the simplest explanation for Arkham City’s scatter-brained story. A series of set-pieces created first, stitched together by a desperate attempt to contextualize the whole lot of nonsense during the late stages of development. Unfortunately, there’s a key moment towards the game’s end that leads me to believe the writers – which included Paul Dini, one of the lead writers of the 90’s era animated series – had something a little more substantial in mind.
Note that the rest of this post will be heavy on spoilers.
Fitting to the narrative, one of my issues with Batman: Arkham City is just how... distracting and unfocused its game world can be.
I recently decided to revisit Batman: Arkham City the other day, inspired by rereading many of Shamus Young’s excellent analyses and essays regarding the caped crusader’s most popular game franchise. That it would be one of Shamus’ favorite game series, one in which he devoted hours to mastering and perfecting its combat, has always fascinated me. Don’t ask me to explain why, as I don’t think I have a suitable explanation. It just doesn’t seem to be a “very Shamus-y” title, and yet it’s one in which he is frequently comparing other games.
I myself have played the original Arkham Asylum several times – including a recent trip back last year to help ease the pain of unemployment – but I’ve only taken maybe two trips around the generally favored Arkham City since its release. I’ve always favored the former due to a preference for the linear gameplay design, taking inspiration from personal favorites such as Metroid Prime or – intentionally or coincidentally – the original Resident Evil. Smaller worlds and environments that you explore more intimately are more my cup of tea than sprawling cities or open-worlds behaving as obstacle-courses.
It’s that very open-world design that I imagine made Arkham City a favorite among the fanbase, however. Having played through the game again, I feel even more confident in the assertion that the sprawling urban playpen is what curries such player favor and fervor. What I also came to realize, however, was the nature in which this expanded scope would impact not just my enjoyment of the game’s world, but also its narrative.
For the first time in a while, I'm actually excited to see what Microsoft brings to the table at this year's E3.
Despite having been removed from the constant snark of social media for some time now, I cannot help but feel cynical and sarcastic during most consumer-oriented gaming events. Be it the Video Game Awards or E3 press conferences of years past, I find my face buried in my hand during some overpriced performance engineered to desperately generate excitement in the crowd in the most embarrassing fashion possible. At best, half of the game announcements in any presentation put on by the likes of EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and Sony are not only of complete disinterest to me, but poking at my disdain for AAA gaming trends.
Yet I, like many other Millennials whose primary caretaker was the television and game consoles of their youth, have taken mass media consumption up as a hobby, decorated with pompous and pretentious over-thinking disguised as intellectual analysis and study. In a world where leisurely entertainment can be considered a hobby, the bread and circuses equivalency becomes not the media itself, but the announcement and promise of even more media in the future. Chasing the ever elusive feeling of happiness, it is a rapturous spell that events like E3 promise, allowing us to salivate over and dream of the games that are to come.
This year, I must confess to an additional interest: the potential future movements of Microsoft in the wake of Sony’s apparent shift in priorities. Though it is nowhere near as great as the hubris the company possessed when entering the seventh generation of consoles with the PlayStation 3, I feel Sony is sitting far too comfortably atop their current gaming throne. We don’t have concrete sales data to suggest either side is “winning”, and such sales data is unreliable as all corporations are running on limited supply due to Covid-related restrictions. All we know is that both systems regularly sell out swiftly any time they are back in stock. One could perceive, then, that now is the time for Microsoft to strike.
However, as many are already aware, Microsoft isn’t aiming to bring players to their next-gen consoles. Not exclusively, at least.
After an unplanned hiatus, Chris and Steve reunite to discuss console hardware, Monster Hunter, Destiny, and Outriders. Garnish with Immortals and Resident Evil to serve.
Are games better when they shove the experience grind onto optional quests? Or does it continue to be a tedious consumption of time?
Some years ago, back when I was still in my twenties, I had discovered all of my efforts to grind in EarthBound had been a waste of time. During my youth I thought the occasional level in which only one or two stats would see an insignificant boost was just poor luck. During my adulthood, however, I realized that any significant level gain typically coincided with a large jump in required experience points to reach the next level.
Rather than pace back and forth in specific dungeons and hazardous areas, coaxing foe after foe into a brawl so that I might slowly climb towards greater feats of strength, I decided to… just play the game. To progress linearly, tackling all foes that came my way and gritting my teeth in preparation of getting my flattened posterior handed back to me inside a Mach Pizza box. While my first assault on the arcade and climb up towards Giant’s Step – the first dungeons of the game – were a bit more troublesome than usual, EarthBound typically leveled me up to the strength necessary to take on each location’s challenges. The experience rewarded for defeating enemies was already calculated by the developers to match the amount required on an unknown “table” that defined the ideal level for each section of the game. While a player could certainly grind in a dungeon’s entrance for a few levels, they’d fail to gain many – or any – substantial new levels on their way towards the boss.
As I progressed towards the game’s end, I found my characters and their levels were approximately the same as I’d grind them to in prior playthroughs. I always found the game to be so challenging that you “needed to grind”, but the reality was that the game minimized the benefits of grinding in order to maintain a challenge. It would require an immense amount of patience – an amount I certainly did not possess as a child nor had the time for as an adult – to perceive any benefit.
It was this experience that encouraged me to approach all my prior childhood role-playing games without grinding. No more pacing back and forth in forests on the overworld map, sailing across the world to the perfect spot with the most rewarding foes to fight, or sticking to the ideal corner of a dungeon to get some farming in. The more of these games I play without grinding, the more I realize I never needed to do so. At best I’d simply be overpowered for one or two dungeons, gaining almost nothing until smacking right back to where I was supposed to be. Alternatively, avoiding the grind encouraged me to explore each game’s mechanics more deeply, developing a deeper appreciation for its design than I had before.
For this reason, I find The Witcher 3 and Xenoblade Chronicles’ “solution” for grinding interesting yet flawed, while having a begrudging appreciation for Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s inclusion of this trope in an arguably efficient manner.
Resident Evil VII makes a case for itself as the best entry in the entire franchise... save for one or two minor exceptions.
Destiny was my calming chaser to follow every nerve-wracking session of Alien: Isolation. I felt jittery down to my fingers and my toes, too alert and nervous to head to bed and get some sleep. I loved the game, but the first-person perspective would gradually become too much for me to bear. I never completed it. A couple years later, Capcom would release the Resident Evil VII: The Beginning Hour gameplay teaser. Despite there being no proper risk throughout the demo, I felt that same sense of frightened nervousness as I had playing Alien: Isolation.
As a result, Resident Evil VII: Biohazard was the first mainline entry in the franchise I had not purchased since discovering Resident Evil Remake on the GameCube. I had concluded that first-person horror and I just did not mix.
Yet I could not hold back my excitement when I saw the trailers for Resident Evil Village. Just as VII: Biohazard seemed to call back to that old mansion of the first game, Village seemed to be beckoning back to the rural European hamlets and castles of Resident Evil IV. There was no way I could avoid this one. However, I felt it necessary to go back and play through Resident Evil VII and familiarize myself with fresh-faced protagonist Ethan Winters.
I’m glad I did, and I’m just as glad to have done so on stream. The crowd of viewers peering over my metaphorical shoulder provided a calming effect to what would have been a dreadfully nerve-wracking sense of isolation. Though they often mocked my decisions or frightful yelps, it allowed me the courage to creep forward through the Baker household… even if it was on the easiest, most cowardly difficulty setting. Nonetheless, Resident Evil VII captured so much of what I loved about the earlier games in the franchise while carving new, gruesome and terrifying territory for the survival horror franchise.
...mostly.
Special guest Shamus Young joins Chris and Steve to discuss some of the tech behind game engines, as well as the legitimacy of The Meta as a game design concept.
Rather than suffer through a discussion on the META in games, Chris convinces Steve to instead discuss Outriders, The Messenger, and various other digressions.
