The Malgorian Blog

So I started watching another of the CU Podcasts recently where Pat and Ian talk about the pricing of video games and whether games "Should cost 60 dollars or not". (For the record, a complete game hasn't been 60 dollars for years but they're just talking about the base game. ie: What -use- to be the complete game up until game publishers gained the ability to hack apart their game to sell piece-wise, rush before it's done to patch later, etc etc.)

I had to stop watching it as soon as I heard Pat mention "Oh but we never really talk about inflation".

In other words he jumped into that broken argument of "Oh 60 dollars from 20 years ago was a lot more than 60 dollars today!"

That may be technically true. But at the same time calculate what you were making as a salary back in those days and you'll realize that you were making a hell of a lot more money back then than you're making today, once you convert those old dollars into today's dollars.

And that's the part that everyone trying to use inflation to justify things being "cheaper" today get it wrong. They always leave that part out, giving an incorrect assessment of the issue.

Either way, no, I don't agree that inflation would justify DLC - assuming that's what Pat would have went on to say. Furthermore, saying that these triple A games have hollywood movie budgets also doesn't justify skyrocketing costs in the end product, or scummy tactics being attached to them in the way of season passes (the rest of the game), loot boxes (gambling machines), or straight up microtransactions (because why not sucker.)

Being a game company doesn't free you from the burden of trying to budget properly. Something they always fail to do - as shown by how they'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars just on marketing to brainwash people into buying a game that's now underfunded by a few hundred million dollars.

These companies have stockholders. Stockholders require the company to do better each year than the previous year. That's all that matters, and that's why all this shit happens. So the only ways to increase those profit margins each year fall into a few groups:

1. Make more games per year.
2. Get more players playing their games each year (And thus, in theory paying for them.)
3. Squeeze out every last penny out of a gamer on just a couple games.

Guess which of these 3 is the easiest, cost-efficient, way to boost profits.

#1 requires full development crews hired.
#2 requires either a lot more marketing, a lot more lobbying to make gaming attractive to the current non-gamers who are bred to see it as either evil or geeky, or egads lower the launch price of the game and hope you get a lot more people buying the game.

#3 Requires selling incomplete games before their complete, cutting out parts to use as pre-order bribes, cutting out more parts to sell as DLC either as itself or as part of an expensive "expansion pack", addition of consumable dlc that has to be bought repeatedly, and/or making the entire DLC purchases a case of random luck (purchased luck of course. ie: lootbox schemes)

We already know what path the industry chose.

So the guy who got someone killed by SWATTING them is facing jail time for involuntary manslaughter (if convicted). But he's already in jail awaiting the court hearing, with his bail set at half a million dollars. So yeah, he's in there til his day in court at the very least.

From his first interview from his jail cell he said "Of course, you know, I feel a little of remorse for what happened," he tells KWCH. "I never intended for anyone to get shot and killed. I don't think during any attempted swatting anyone's intentions are for someone to get shot and killed..."

Let me get out my violin.

First of all, I think the guy's lying through his teeth there. After doing this shit for how many years, and seeing others do it for how many years and seeing HOW MANY CLOSE CALLS we've had in the past, how the FUCK can you not think someone might actually get killed?

Second of all, this is probably the biggest part of the problem. The fuckers swatting someone AREN'T THINKING. And that rather makes them dangerous - enough so that I'm fine with them getting put away if they get caught. (And I don't particularly think someone needs to lose their life for that to happen.

So yeah, hopefully this guy does end up in prison. Perhaps it'll put a bit of a chill effect on the other punks out there that get their jollies off of doing this kind of crap.

It's amazing how fast this guy started saying how remorseful he is about what he did after he got caught. His first reactions after doing the SWAT was the standard gloating. Then when he realized someone got killed because of him, he immediately went into denial mode "I didn't kill anyone." followed almost immediately by trying to hide his tracks by renaming his account on twitter, etc. Sadly people had already gotten a good deal of his tweets and shit saved before he did that. It wasn't until he was caught that he stopped trying to deny it regardless of what he says.

Let's not forget his own epic tweet "if you can't pull off a swat without getting busted you're not a leet hacking God its that simple."

Haven't gotten into doing another Game Night since Utawarerumono, but I have been (re)playing through Blaster Master Zero. I'd play this in 30 minute spurts for the most part so can't really call it a Game Night.

Anyway I started replaying it when I realized there was more to the game after the bad ending I received. To get to that ending you had to collect all the powerups, weapons, and map pieces before defeating the mutant master at the end of area 8. That opens up the way to area 9.

The game's a lot like the original NES game in ways that count but it has changes made here and there. For instance:

1. The layout of the world and levels aren't 100% the same. To be expected, but there's certainly enough of the original here.

2. While all the original bosses are more or less here, they've got changes to them. Additionally there are "bosses" that are more accurately called monster lairs or attack rooms.

3. The amount of weapons you have available has been increased, with alterations made here and there. For instance while your max powered weapon is still the wave beam that cuts through everything, the weaker version of it has been changed into a flame thrower.

4. You don't have infinite grenades. On the plus side, grenades do more damage than they did in the original! Additionally there are placed mines, flash bombs, a gun turret, and a remote cannon strike. O.o That last one is basically you making the Sophia III attack the boss from god knows where! Only used it once.

5. For the vehicle/Sophia III's weapons and abilities, those are also increased. You no longer have to collect powerups to use, but instead they all use the hover bar. The hover bar also recharges slowly over time. In addition to the triple-missile, homing missile, and lighting subweapons (all of which you have to beat bosses to obtain) there's a laser cannon, max-beam cannon, massive explosive missile type attack, and an ultimate beam attack. Yeah, lots of ways to waste your hover power! If the hover function isn't that useful to you there's also an alternate hover function that acts as an air jump. A quick burst is sent out of the tires to toss you upwards. I'm still more partial to the hover's precision.

6. They added a sidekick, Eve, that you meet part way through the game. I guess they figured they couldn't add a lot of story with pure monologues the entire game. Not really sure how I felt about this, but it didn't distract from the game at any rate.

Ultimately, I had a blast. It was fun to play from start to finish with only a couple parts that left me thinking "wtf do I do now..." I guess the best advice for those instances would be "if you can't reach it from below, can you reach it from above?". Certainly several do-or-die obstacles where you have to jump around outside of Sophia III.

Getting the good ending unlocked two more modes. You could probably consider them "easy" and "hard".

In one you start off in the alternate vehicle you get in Area 9. (Sophia Zero) which is basically a powered up version of Sophia III. All the weapons are stronger/faster/etc. Also all weapons/powerups/etc are already unlocked. So it's just a matter of going to each of the area bosses and progressing through the story. They officially call it "Unlimited Mode".

In the other mode, "Destroyer Mode", there's a long list of differences including stronger enemies, all enemies/bosses being beatable by specific weapons, max-life ups don't work, etc etc. Definitely "Hard mode".

I don't feel like I was missing anything with the base game but I ended up buying one of the additional character DLCs anyway despite myself. Having to go through the game as Shantae felt necessary~

I only played the Shantae mode a little so far, but I'm going to try to go through it next. Her weapons are obviously different - based on her magic types, and she has a different colored Sophia. I dunno if she meets Eve or not since I didn't get to that point. Either way the game play overall was certainly different, at least when in the top-down areas.

Haven't dropped a vocaloid related video on here for a while (or ever, as far as dreamwidth is concerned!) so here's a video of one of AdyS's latest songs. It's one of those songs where he tries to use just about every vocaloid he has purchased and used thus far. The main highlight is for Alter/Ego NATA, which is a voice synth available on bandcamp. I've resisted trying to buy it thus far - mainly because I have little in the way of musical talent! - but we'll see if I end up buying it anyway after the holidays.

NATA's the first voice that starts singing in the video.

So yeah, looks like EA is going full throttle (ahaha) with Loot boxes in all their games going forward.

I'd be more angry if I ever had an impulse to buy an EA game, but that doesn't mean I'm not unaffected entirely. As predicted, microtransactions and loot boxes are polluting full price games now after they were such a hit with the free to play crowd.

This is why the free to play crowd (The gamers) really should have known better than to fork over shitloads of money playing those types of games.

About all I can say is how I feel I suppose. No matter how shitty, how expensive, or how lazy the game industry is currently - there is no ceiling (no bottom of the pit?) that we're standing at. If you encourage it by forking your money over, it's just empowering them to take that next step for the next half assed game they put out.

*update*

Another link I found, showing exactly how uninspired yet fitting my subject line is.

So, I guess this is what I get for letting NIS America off the boycott list lately.

I do still plan on picking up the recently released touhou game when I get paid but after that I think they're going back on the boycott list for a couple years.

My 100 dollars paid for -most- of a game that's apparently half-assed in localization. Since I bought the physical edition my disc will forever have that poor quality version unless I download (And redownload as needed) the god knows how large a patch which won't be available for another month.

They can give all the assurances they want but to me this smacks of "Get it out the door now so we can get paid faster. We'll fix it later."

This isn't the first time I've seen a bad translation by them - there have been rush jobs before that put a damper on enjoying the product offered. One example that springs to mind from the PS2 era is Ar Tonelico II. (Keep in mind that they were on the boycott list until only this year, and I put them on it back when the first Hyperdimension Neptunia game released, so finding examples of shoddy work is difficult in those years.)

I remember playing through ATII back in the day. (And in fact I have it in my lap right now as I type :p) It had at least 1 typo every 5 minutes of storyline. You want to know how you can tell it was a rush job? Every single grammatical error was something a spellchecker would fail to find. IE: Wrong version of a word (Too, To, Two), wrong tense of a word (had, has, etc) an extra word inserted for no reason at all (to to) or an outright missing word. I don't believe there were any actual incorrectly spelled words. Meaning nobody actually ran over the text of the game after the initial translation. They apparently ran it through a spellchecker and called it good.

The other thing was they introduced a game crashing bug to a particular boss. The crash didn't exist in the original version of the game. Essentially you fight that boss during the game a couple of times but the battle always ends before a particular boss attack is executed. (Thankfully.) After that, near the end of the game, that boss becomes an optional boss fight where each time you win the next fight becomes harder. If the boss gets to like round 3-4 then it does a special move - and the game freezes. If you can beat the boss in a couple rounds, no problem, but otherwise your shit out of luck.

Like I said a shoddy rush job. In one way it can be expected given the game was released in the winding down years of the PS2. Still if you don't want your rep tarnished don't fuck it up.

I loved ATII mind you but I would never give it a 10/10 ranking simply because of the poor localization attempt.

I haven't played Ys VIII yet - I'm still working on Mask of Truth after all. While they'll be "fixing" their shit job with a free download next month I'm tempted to start playing it asap just to see the level of crap first hand then I'll just restart the game after the patch is live and see if it's actually improved.

I will be extremely strict on the level of quality on the game after the patch is released however. They're already getting shit for a poor launch but I swear if I see anything screwed up after their second time I'll probably add an extra year of boycottedness to the couple they're getting from me as it is.

Yes. I know a game publisher won't give a fuck about some individual gamer boycotting their crap. They aren't going to miss the cash (Which probably shows why game publishers have such a horrible time budgeting their resources properly) but I'm certainly going to notice having the extra spending money for other things.

And that's the point.

I have apparently now spent about 26 hours on mask of deception according to the save game data. I don't appear to be wrong about how rare the battles are - in the Free Battle mode, there are only 11-12 battles I can replay to build up BP. That averages out to less than 1 battle per 2 hours of visual novel.

Mind you, I'm enjoying the visual novel for what it is. I don't particularly feel it's been a waste of cash to buy both this and Mask of Truth - but I have absolutely no interest in buying the DLC. (note: I haven't even looked at the DLC for Mask of Truth, so I reserve the right to change my stance on this. I highly doubt I will be changing said stance however.)

I've spent more time on free battle to build up the BP, although going through them have less use for actual leveling up. In story battles, everyone gets quite a bit of XP after completing the battle, enough to level up several times I find. In free battle, you only get XP for what you attack on the battlefield. So while you will get a level here and there, the main purpose of free battle is to build up the BP to slowly boost up the stats of your characters.

Not much else to report on this game I guess other than notes on the story itself, which I don't really feel like getting into. A part of me does hope that they release a ps4 version of the original Utawarerumono which comes before these two games. An all ages version obviously. ^_^;

Anyway Game Night will focus on other games going forward - I'll do a Game Night or two specific for Mask of Truth when I get to it, but otherwise just assume I'm playing Utawarerumono throughout the week, etc in addition to whatever is on the plate for Game Night. :)

Next Game Night will be probably be Blaster Master Zero on the Switch. I'm actually already playing it although in short bursts. So unless I complete it beforehand, it'll be the next game night. I'll post about it in detail regardless of what happens.

As shown in Angry Joe's vid below, Shadow of War is basically full-on the DLC Whore Train. Basically very similar in setup to how Street Fighter V does their excessive DLC.



Basically it's the whole Dual Money System again. You can buy "Gold" with real cash, or you can earn a different, likely much inferior, currency by GRINDING your LIFE away in the game itself. Come on, even if they're not telling us that you'll be grinding for hours to get even a portion of what you can get with the "Gold" currency, we all know the game will be balanced that way to make you want to say "Fuck it, where's my god damned wallet."

Unlike in Street Fighter V, the extra couple bounces down the shitty slope of DLC are shown by having all this DLC being expendable. (So it's not DLC per say, but full on Micro Transaction. (You know, the bullshit you get in freemium games. Only this game you're paying full AAA title price tag for first - just like with SFV.) Essentially the orcs and stuff you can buy with these microtransactions can be -permanently- -killed- in the multiplayer base defense mode thing Joe references in the video. (Which he compares to the multiplayer action in Metal Gear Solid 5. Which apparently sucks ass.) So spend your cash, get your toys taken away, go spend more cash, repeat.

The only thing I'd smack Joe up-side the head for in this video though is that he seems surprised that this is infecting Single Player games as if it's new. Granted, it's new to HIM since he doesn't play JRPGs and the like. (Persona 5 was new territory for him he said). The only reason he's foaming at the mouth right now is because it's finally infecting single player games he cares about. (We really needed him foaming at the mouth about this probably 7-8 years ago - now it's definitely too late to stop it.)

Yeah, JRPGs have been doing DLC like this for close to a decade now - almost as soon as it became physically possible for them to do so. It's why I skipped probably 80% of the JRPGs in the PS3 era, and haven't been eager to buy much at all in the PS4 era. (Got two Sword Art Online jrpgs at flash sale prices)

Titles as early as Disgaea 3 pretty much made it the standard mode of operation where a JRPG will launch with a full AAA price tag - regardless of if it was worth being AAA - then saddled with an extra 50 to 200 dollars of DLC. All things that use to be hidden perks of JRPGs that you can no longer unlock - must buy instead, OR they're things that simply put on display for EVERYONE to see exactly how little play testing was done for the game (stat, gold, equipment boosts) or things that just outright show that the game was balanced to make those consumable microtransactions desirable.

There's at least one game that basically passively lock the New Game+ mode out with DLC - in the form of level locks. That is, the new game plus mode is available but the monsters and bosses continue to get more and more powerful as you progress through it each time. And then you hit your maximum level 99! While the enemies continue to become stronger. No problem though, there are a FEW DLCs you can buy that add 300 levels to your CAP. (You'll have to earn the actual levels yourself though.)

So. Picked up the Switch yesterday on the way to work. Not sure if I'll get around to playing it much this weekend but the plan will be to at least get it set up properly. I heard you can use ethernet cords to wire up the Switch in docked mode, so if that works I might browse through their eshop. I was considering getting Blaster Master Zero or whatever it's called as well as potentially one or two other games.

I don't plan on being too generous on the switch digitally, but I figger I'll at least get a handful of games.

Right now the physically unlicked cartridges I have for it include Breath of the Wild, Cave Story+, and Puyo Puyo Tetris.

While I don't have them yet, I also plan on getting Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2, and Arms. I'll probably get those one per paycheck or something in the future.

As for other games on the system, I'm not sure yet. There are some I'm kinda interested in, but then there are others that I'd normally get but I suspect they're loaded down with DLC whoring options. (Since they're on other systems already and that's what they're like on those systems!)

Either way, it looks like the next game night will end up being Breath of the Wild. I have 2 of the 4 amiibos that were released for that game. Zelda and Archer Link. Looks like I was wise to buy the Zelda amiibo when I did since that was the first of the lot to dry up quick.

Still haven't had another game night yet. Some random gaming, sure, but no concentrated effort on a particular game. While goldpseudo was in town on his trip across Canada, we swapped some games/dvds/etc - mostly dups we had. On my side of the deal I got a few NES and SNES games.

Of those I'm stuck between deciding if I want to focus a game night on either Final Fantasy (NES) or Super Metroid (SNES). I was about to start Super Metroid last night but it seems the hookups for the SNES aren't with the SNES... As such tonight I'll probably just hook the NES up and start in on Final Fantasy. I'll do a little digging for the SNES hookups before then but I honestly don't even know where to start looking for them.

With regards to the 7800Basic tinkering I managed to adjust the game play as indicated in the last post. I also added a master clock in the background that keeps track of the total time the current game has been running - it'll display itself on the game over screen.

Not a lot of progress, I agree, but at this point the code is all over the place. I spent more time last night removing old player 2 variables both in the variable lists and in the code itself than with the actual gameplay changes! The next thing I want to add to the game is a bit more creative effects when you lose a life or hit a game over. (little explosion effects for instance instead of simply disappearing) However... that didn't go well! I think I'm going to have to spend time during this next week just looking at reorganizing the code.