TKO Creations

I never particularly wrote on this game because frankly, my opinions of the title amounted to “Trash Bin,” and that was after all the updates and patches the game got.

But then I stumbled upon this re-review from Luke Plunkett at Kotaku, and it inspired a couple thoughts.

1: In The Dark Knight, a theme that emerges, to the point that it is outright voiced on at least two occasions, is “You either die a hero, or live long enough to be a villain.” I’d like to offer a rewording, at least for the sake of game development.

“You either sell out a hero, or produce long enough for people to figure out who you really are.”

This sort of rushed launch and frantic patching to eventually produce a finished product was hardly new to Cyberpunk 2077. It may have been its most famous example, but you don’t have to dial the wayback machine too far to discover that The Witcher 3 was a nigh unplayable mess when it first launched. Or that The Witcher 2 didn’t exactly launch in what we would call a “finished state.” Or… The Witcher…

Hmm…

I actually struggled to think of any CDProjekt Red title that didn’t need significant patching to bring it to a playable state for a good many gamers. If your CDPR game played great right out of the box, you were in the minority. This sort of thing was not, and is not, new for this developer.

And it’s not like this phenomenon is unique to CDPR. For example, “Bioware Magic” was always fruitless management dithering followed by a frantic burnout stretch that destroyed employees to get their titles up to snuff before their publishers got too angry. EA’s production process was always about getting the most revenue for the least amount of effort possible. These companies didn’t really change their stripes in any meaningful way; the consumer base merely started to see them for who they had always been.

2: Another thing is that we really need development studios and publishers to understand is that games aren’t movies, nor should they try to be. Players really aren’t terribly keen on a four to five hour non-stop adrenaline rush when the controller is in their hands. They want to be able to take a breath, look around the world constructed around them, then dick off for three hours doing something completely irrelevant to the main plot if they so desire.

Any game that doesn’t understand that, and allow for the game to slow down, is probably not going to be received all that well. I suspect that’s a major part of the reason why I so loathed Final Fantasy XIII (a game which is getting renewed interest by a generation of gamers). I spent so much of that game rushing down hallways that it left me thinking, “If you guys wanted to make a movie, you should have just done that rather than give me a controller like anything I do here matters.”

Anyway, that’s my intermittent blather for the month. Have a good day.

Note: A more in-depth, spoiler-laden review will be forthcoming as I digest the details a little bit more.

So, after all the drama and spoilers and assorted nonsense, this (perhaps overly) anticipated game finally reached the mitts of the general public. It almost feels pointless to even have a spoiler-free review at all at this point, as quite a few things were already spoiled long before people outside of a handful of media outlets played it, but in this case, I think it might help to detach the story from the game for the time being.

Let’s be honest, if you were playing these games for the narrative… you were probably playing them for a different reason than Platinum Games and their head honcho made them.

Firstly (and let’s get this out of the way), it is not the same Bayonetta that you play in the first two games; thank you convenient narrative multiverse devices. In fact, the only character that is actually the same, as far as I understand, is Rodin. So, in that sense, a lot of things that might seem like ass-pulls at first glance in fact do have a story-based explanation. Not a particularly good one, but an in-game explanation nonetheless (we’ll get into more detail on that in the spoiler-ridden review, which might take me all month at the rate I compose blog posts).

Secondly (and let’s also get this out of the way), Hellena Taylor is a lying sack of human excrement who tried to manipulate what was, and is, a very real problem in the industry. It disgusts me how she will inevitably make it even harder for voice actors to get what they deserve in the future.

So, with that out of the way…

Mechanically, the game plays as well as it ever did. Combat is tight, yet fluid, and is probably the most gameplay-rewarding Bayonetta of the three. It feels really good to hit those combos just right, and the superficially similar foes (the homonculi and the angels really don’t play all that differently) still feel different and fresh; giving you benefit of a new experience that still rewards your muscle memory.

The more open world (because it is by no means open) is a nice touch to the linear experiences of prior games, and also serves to pad the length of a series that normally could be “full completed” in a handful of hours. As a result, the game doesn’t feel as fast-paced, which may be jarring for some but I found personally welcoming. Being able to backtrack (in a limited sense) was a welcome feature, especially to someone like me who hates just missing something a second before.

The new combat elements do take some getting used to. Directly controlling the demon beasts has a pretty rough learning curve, and the game doesn’t give you that much time to figure it out before making it really complicated. Someone not particularly used to managing two separate characters simultaneously will likely struggle.

The new character added to the game also takes some adjustment. Viola herself as a character isn’t the problem, and I don’t share the general sentiment of her being grating or unwelcome (I suspect that has a lot to do with her origins, which will be discussed in the spoiler-laden review). Mechanically, she is quite the deviation from the norm, and again, Platinum really doesn’t give you much time to get used to her idiosyncrasies before throwing you neck deep in some difficult fights.

The spy missions featuring Jeanne are a nice attempt to give her something unique to do within the story other than be a palette swap for Bayonetta, and while I appreciate the attempt, I think it’s a case of trying a little too hard to make her impact on the story and the game play different. Giving her some missions in the same way they handled Viola’s I think would have been fine.

The one part that is going to be rather wholly negative, and this really isn’t Platinum’s fault, is that we are definitely hitting the absolute limits of what the Switch’s hardware is capable of. Platinum does their best with what they have, but the graphics and frame rate do take some pretty heavy hits at times where there is a lot going on. Perhaps oddly, I think the game is more stable and pretty in handheld mode.

At the end of the day, if you’re not particularly playing this for the story, you’re probably going to enjoy the experience immensely. In terms of its play, it really is kinda like a Bayonetta+; it doesn’t sacrifice terribly much to give you more of what you already liked over two games, either by adding wrinkles to old systems or expanding the world to give you more to explore.

But if you were invested in the story and/or the characters… we’ll discuss that at a later time.

Hello.

If you’re reading this, it’s possible you have followed a link from my Twitter or Facebook profiles after one of my online offerings “blew up,” as the saying goes. You might be wondering why I put together a blog post rather than some link to my works to piggyback off my “blowing up,” so let me tell you.

I hail from the era of Usenet and the early pre-AOL days. The sentiment of that proto-social media community was pretty unanimously “the Internet (yeah, we’re talking about the era where proper English dictated that the word was always capitalized) isn’t real.” It’s a social programming that I haven’t amended… and don’t particularly feel compelled to either.

Social media exists in my sphere of consciousness to peddle my wares and occasionally shitpost. It’s why I have more than one real life acquaintance and/or friend that has me blocked on various social media platforms (this is perfectly okay, for the record). Any nuggets of wisdom you find from me on Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat or wherever is going to be few and far between, and you’ll only disappoint yourself looking for them.

I prefer to leave my serious observations of insight to this blog… that rarely updates, which should tell you how often I have wisdom or insights to share. I’m just a dude, trying to create my own problems to resolve… then sell them to you!

I’m told I also intentionally construct things to make them look far more absurd then they really are. But that’s just silliness, I tell you.

Anyway, have a good day, afternoon, evening, or night. Feel free to explore this blog if you wish. Maybe buy something as long as you’re here.

Or don’t. It is a silly place, after all.

I will readily acknowledge that I did not follow the entire Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation case outside of summaries, so it is entirely possible that one side made nuanced arguments that I never heard.

Secondly, I am also going to acknowledge a potential bias before we begin; that I come from an abusive relationship with both parents, who were abusive in different ways, but abusive nonetheless, and a lot of the summarized arugments that went back and forth struck very familiar chords during their divorce case.

So, with that said, here we go.

In hindsight, I find little to celebrate or bemoan when you have two shitty people behaving like shitty people in something that didn’t deserve coverage outside of tabloids. I am distressed that this case became a lightning rod for MeToo and domestic violence because of it will inevitably be used to muddy waters and discourage people who were abused from coming forward.

If it had been my decision, I would have flipped the judgment; both absolutely defamed each other, but Heard’s career and life were far more heavily affected. But at the end of day, I am not going to shed any tears for either of them, because neither of them deserve my sympathy or my sorrow.

One aspect of this trial that really grated on me was how much the argument seemed to be centered on who started the abuse. “He/She started it!” wasn’t a valid argument when I was six years old; it’s not a valid argument now either. Who started the cycle of abuse in this case matters far less than who participated in it.

For example, when you have an abusive father, do we dismiss the man’s actions because that’s how his father raised him? Of course we don’t, nor should we, because we as a society accept that agency still exists. As some point, you make a willful decision to step up to the level of those that abused you, a point where you adopt their patterns of behavior, and once you do that, you are no longer a victim of abuse; you are an abuser yourself.

So, no, I really don’t care who started it; because my answer would be the same. Either Johnny Depp or Amber Heard decided it was okay to jump to the same weight class as the other, and they have thus lost my sympathy now that it’s all come to a head in front of a society eagerly devouring the drama as children are getting shot up in schools.

But that’s another rant for another time I guess. In summary, all I can say is good riddance, and may both of those clowns get out of the big top.

So, social media is on a bit of a boil over two separate but kinda similar-ish sorta events.

1. A school board in Tennessee removed the work Maus from their library, and banned it from being taught in their school. (Link)
2. A school board in Washington state removed the novel To Kill a Mockingbird from their curriculum’s required reading list. (Link)

Now, you may assume that being a writer, I’d be vehemently against the idea of “banning” books (in the sense of academic use). You’d be wrong. As far as it pertains to teaching purposes, I’m generally not bothered by what books are and aren’t specifically used. There are many books in this world, and any of them can be used by teachers to convey the messages and writing techniques that they wish to convey to students.

I do have a bit of a problem when they are used to score political points, which to different degrees both of these incidents are. A big clue is that neither school board has shown any indication what they intend to replace those books with in their curriculum… or even if they have any plans to do so. These were decisions to demonstrate to the parents just what these school boards believe in.

Sure, both school boards will give their reasons. To Kill a Mockingbird has problematic “white savior” narratives that run through it, or Maus contains “graphic imagery” that is disturbing to young students, for example. Many of the criticisms will be legitimate on its face. But at the end of the day, it’s hard to see how they aren’t a fairly clear political message.

(On an aside, to Mike Cochran of the McMinn County School Board: I had many emotions running through my mind as I read Maus. “Enjoyment” was certainly not one of them. While I am willing to accept that you poorly chose your words in an off-the-cuff quote, there is a significant number of the world’s population that would genuinely “enjoy” the imagery of that graphic novel, and those are not good people. Anyone who said they “enjoyed” Maus would be asked to provide a pretty damn good explanation for their choice of words lest they quickly find themselves no longer talking to me, and probably for good.)

That said, these two stories are, in fact, not the same, and our fourth pillar would be served to not treat them as if they are. Much like nearly everything else in our political discourse, one side is significantly more guilty and with significantly greater severity than the other. The conservatives and reactionaries among us are a far greater threat to our political discourse and sustainability of our society at this moment, and these two stories reflect that.

Maus was outright banned. Teachers are no longer permitted to discuss it. The school library is not allowed to have it on their shelves, or even in their stacks. For students whose only exposure to books is their school library (which is no doubt a non-zero number), Maus no longer exists in their world.

Meanwhile, To Kill a Mockingbird is simply no longer required reading for students in the Mukilteo school district. Teachers are still allowed to present it to students as supplementary text (and I’m sure many will). Students can still be recommended it and it can still be found in their school libraries. Depending on what book is chosen, there is not necessarily any meaningful loss in the education of these children. Presuming, of course, that a replacement actually is chosen or at the very least some rationalization that other books already in the required reading list can fill that niche.

Which it may not be, because again… it’s hard to see how at its core, this move isn’t political posturing of its own. But at the same time, it is long past due to stop approaching such decisions as binary actions of equal severity.

Welcome back to another (extremely intermittent) commentary on people and the things they do to be noticed and stay noticed.

In today’s episode, we meet Tectone.

Tectone is a content creator, most notably for the game Genshin Impact, but not exclusively. Now, Tectone’s typical creative process runs something like this:

1. Make a juvenile but otherwise largely innocuous bawdy tweet about something, like “waifus” or the size of a game character’s chest or ass.
2. Soak in the angry replies from the professionally outraged on Twitter who seem to make a living out of overreacting to anything that happens to come into their vicinity.
3. Make a Youtube video complaining about how he’s being attacked on Twitter.
4. Repeat.

Now, let’s get some things out of the way.

Firstly, this process is entirely intentional. Tectone knows exactly what he’s doing.

Secondly, there’s absolutely nothing new about this. If anything, Tectone has merely refined the process of instigating a fight, then crying foul when he gets exactly what he was looking for, that has existed on social media pretty much since it’s inception.

Thirdly, Twitter is certainly filled to the brim with people who haven’t matured emotionally since fifteen and giggle delightfully when someone makes a tweet about “[insert character name here]’s massive mommy milkers,” and a legion of people who are too chickenshit to fight in real life, so they trawl the internet for hours every day looking for an opportunity to throw metaphorical hands.

Of course, none of this should happen this way. Is Tectone playing down to the juvenile? Yeah, he is. But there is absolutely nothing the dude says that should warrant anything more than an eyeroll. The proper response to his games is to mute the conversation, then go on with your day. Let him have fun with the forever teenagers. It simply isn’t worth ruining your day over. They aren’t an army of dangerous incels. They’re a bunch of just out of college aged kids that still laugh at fart jokes.

On the flip side, you kinda start losing sympathy for a person that keeps sticking his hands in a cage filled with angry dogs and inevitably gets bit. Should there be a pack of angry dogs in that cage? Probably not. But they are, and at some point, you lose the right to whine when the dogs in that cage attack you after you’ve stuck your grubby mitts in their face one too many times. I mean… what do you think is going to happen?

At the end of the day, social media has gone all in with the old journalistic maxim of, “All press is good press.” It doesn’t matter what you say, as long as a million people react to it.

And it’s just as tiring to witness now as it was twenty years ago.