Gaming Journalists Make No Damn Sense

[Bedinsis]

My understanding is that comic sales in general is struggling. Particularly single magazines, people prefer to buy them in completed anthologies/albums. Which is not that surprising since newspapers in general are struggling.

And the comic industry is not struggling in just the US, I've heard similar things from both Sweden and Japan.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Do you have any evidence for that statement?
The last boss of Uncharted 3 and 4 are melee fights.
The last boss of Uncharted 1 is you running up, unarmed, to a guy with a gun and beating him unconscious in a QTE.

In every game there are trophies like "Kill 20 Enemies with Brutal Combo" and "Kill 10 Enemies in a Row with a Single Punch After Weakening Them with Gunfire"

You run out of ammo in Uncharted games, and melee is one of the ways you get more
It's a major part of the game. I'd even say that it's impossible to beat any of the games without any use of melee (some speed-run/challenge type has probably done it though)



Do you think Martial Arts 101 puts you at a level higher or a level lower than "a good bar-room brawler"?

Yes, I played the fucking games, melee is not a major part of any of the games. Boss battles are not a major part of the games either and Uncharted bosses suck. The only game you could even argue about melee is the 3rd game that went for an "Arkham" type melee system (the new hotness at the time) that failed horribly. Mirror's Edge has 2 melee trophies and also a disarm trophy, I guess melee is a major part of Mirror's Edge too!!!

Lower.

 

[Buyetyen]

i just feel like the article is only skimming the truth of the decline, and mostly just tries to misdirect blame.

Which is a laugh and a half because I thought it did a pretty good job examining the actual nuts and bolts business practices. And they focused on Marvel because Marvel has the biggest market share. And Marvel is the most common target for the sort of shallow criticism that boils down to, "Get girls out my comics! I was here first!"

When I was in college I had a whole gaggle of comic book friends who went to the shop every Wednesday to pick up the latest releases. Then their favorite characters started to die off and they didn't have any interest in a new universe or retelling of shit they already knew except with more cases of "being woman is hard".

The plural of anecdote is not data.

My understanding is that comic sales in general is struggling. Particularly single magazines, people prefer to buy them in completed anthologies/albums. Which is not that surprising since newspapers in general are struggling.

And the comic industry is not struggling in just the US, I've heard similar things from both Sweden and Japan.

This. The industry has become a victim of its own success. It happens. The question is whether or not these companies can turn things around in time.

 

[Houseman]

Mirror's Edge has 2 melee trophies and also a disarm trophy, I guess melee is a major part of Mirror's Edge too!!!

Yes, it is. When confronted with enemies you can do one of two things, run away or melee them. I'd consider that very major. I only played the demo of Mirror's Edge, but I remember it teaching me how to melee enemies.

How are you defining "major"? I'm defining it as "without this, the game would be fundamentally different". Can you go without it? If so, it's minor. If not, it's major.
Like, I can go through a whole CoD campaign without stabbing a single enemy unless it's a forced stealth section or something. I'd call melee a minor part of CoD.

Lower.

So it's not that Drake is good at fighting. Everyone he's ever fought has just absolutely sucked at fighting so that zero of them are better than "a good bar room brawler", despite being trained soldiers.

Nadine, a woman (entirely by coincidence), is the only person who ever graduated to Martial Arts 102. In fact, she's so skilled that she can take on two men, bigger than her, and not even get hit once. Because she's just that good and everyone else is just that bad.

This isn't contradictory, just very silly. So silly, you have to wonder whether or not Nadine was just feminist wish-fulfillment to push the idea that there are no meaningful differences between men and women.

 

[BrawlMan]

Hey mods, you can close this thread? It's gotten way off topic for the like past 15-20 pages. It's not even about the journalists now. Getting beyond pathetic and ridiculous.

 

[Houseman]

Hey mods, don't close this thread. I'm having fun. If someone wants to strictly adhere to the topic, then they should go to Current Events.

 

[Trunkage]

If it happens, it's not going to happen overnight, we can agree on that, right? It's going to be a gradual process of alienating more and more people and losing more and more money until someone decides to finally pull the plug.

Literally can't see the problem. That's a feature, not a bug

 

[Trunkage]

It would kill itself economically, which is a concern of mine because some of these things are stuff I already like. I don't like how they de-aged Constantine, and made him into a demigod. I don't like how they rebooted Charlie's Angels. I think it's a pretty natural response. They take stuff that can work and be enjoyable but turn it into a Trojan horse! It's all so tiresome

I'm assuming your talking about comics, I don't have much to do with Constantine

Yeah, I'm starting to think you dont read much comics if you think they haven't been pulling this 'woke' stuff for decades. Half the characters loved today we made for woke reasons. Sure, be angry about if you want. Similar people in the 70s said the same thing. They've been woke the whole time and they didn't listen

 

[Houseman]

Literally can't see the problem. That's a feature, not a bug

Series dying by mistakenly appealing to a demographic that doesn't exist in large enough numbers to support them is a good thing?

 

[Trunkage]

Series dying by mistakenly appealing to a demographic that doesn't exist in large enough numbers to support them is a good thing?

Time for the inevitable reboot. Classic Coke

I've been around comics enough to know that unless you have a name like Batman, you will eventually wither and get rebooted. It's the natural cycle of comics.

Even with Batman, he got soft reboots like turning away from his homosexuality in the 60s

 

[Mister Mumbler]

I'm just gonna leave this here:

 

[BrawlMan]

Which means you know you got nothing to stand on otherwise. Mods, feel free to close it or move it to current events. I prefer the first option, because otherwise the same dumb shit is gonna happen and get closed anyway.

 

[Houseman]

Time for the inevitable reboot. Classic Coke

I've been around comics enough to know that unless you have a name like Batman, you will eventually wither and get rebooted. It's the natural cycle of comics.

Even with Batman, he got soft reboots like turning away from his homosexuality in the 60s

That would require publishers and execs to know WHY they need a reboot and what they need to "turn away" from.
I don't trust them to be competent enough to figure that out.

 

[Gergar12]

Most game "journalist" like most "journalist" wants to access, access to games, hardware, in this case, or people.

Whether it's the bootlickers at IGN, or anywhere else to a lesser extent.

I use a mix of user-reviews, and Metacritic aggregation scores.

Games journalists if you can call them that are the farthest people way from consumer rights.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Unless you're arguing that Nadine beating both Drake and Sam (which by the way she doesn't) is utterly impossible, I don't get why you're questioning the plausibilty of this fight as opposed to... pretty much everything else that happens in Uncharted. Most of the characters are able to climb shit like it's nothing, including a nearly 70-year old Sully. People are able to punch others in the face frequently without sustaining any injury to their hands. People can just walk away from explosions by dusting themselves off. Get dragged behind trucks, get into car crashes, jump off cliffs. But this buff chick, her beating the crap out of two middle-aged treasure hunters... nah, that's just implausible. This nearly 50-year old dude gets completely run through by a steel bar and not only survives, but makes a full recovery thanks to a 14-year old kid who isn't Doogie Howser nursing him back to health. This girl with muscles though, thats just totally unbelievable in the apocalypse.

If Sam hadn't grabbed the Gun she would have won as such.

I'm not saying it's impossible but the ease with which she's doing it is the issue. If you watch the stairwell fight in Atomic Blonde you get to see a highly trained agend vs basically two low ranking Russian agents and you see the difference because she wins but it's not shown as an easy fight in that film.

Exactly, it's not like other creators haven't had fetishes slip into their work. Hence why people need to make such a big fucking deal about Nadine and Abby, right?

Because they stick out more and are more core parts of the plot rather than Tarantino having his actresses show their bare feet in 1-2 shots in his films.

Dude, it's Star Wars. There has never been sword fighting technique in Star Wars.

except I did show Luke was trained

Yeah, because Finn's a stormtrooper. You know, the grunts that get mowed down like they're nothing.

Doesn't mean he couldn't have been trained one way or another.

And you claimed Rey was stronger than them, which is BS.

Because she has far less trouble fighting Kylo than Finn did.

Like you said "in some cases", not all, not even most. Most people that played LiS actually liked it. And Undertale features a genderless protagonist and has gay characters galore, so how is that not progressive or "woke"? And if progressivism is really such a turn-off the Game Grumps name wouldn't have mattered.

Undertale has had it's creator basically say they don't want it used for either side and don't consider it a work aimed at either side with political talk banned on the Undertale subreddit.

Also for all those who liked LIS it didn't translated into sale of LIS 2 apparently.

 

[Trunkage]

That would require publishers and execs to know WHY they need a reboot and what they need to "turn away" from.
I don't trust them to be competent enough to figure that out.

Every comic has been rebooted. Every hero has been replaced. Most of them have died at least once. Everyone has gone 'woke' over the years and then back to conservativism. Remember Maude Wonder Woman? Hopefully not, because that was awful.

As a person interested in comics, you just gotta get used to shift and changes. Don't buy the ones your not keen on. Just because you dont like them, doesnt mean someone else doesnt. I've found that out with female Ghostbusters. There are a lot of fans of that movie

It was quite clear that the 'old style' of comics didnt sell. That's why they're trying this way out. It might not work but what is certain is that the 'old guard' is just to insignificant to justify making comics. It's just not big enough of an audience. You'd have to downsize everything to make it economically viable. Quite possibly, to live off the 'old guard', the best approach is just abandoning many comics. Either way, comics are never going to be the same

 

[Trunkage]

Most game "journalist" like most "journalist" wants to access, access to games, hardware, in this case, or people.

Whether it's the bootlickers at IGN, or anywhere else to a lesser extent.

I use a mix of user-reviews, and Metacritic aggregation scores.

Games journalists if you can call them that are the farthest people way from consumer rights.

I don't think user score are great either unless you are aware of the latest SJW/Anti-SJW drama. And bots. The scores aren't true at all

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Let Tony Stark refute you on why that doesn't work. Think of Pillinger as the esteemed indie devs who make these thought provoking progressive titles like Gone Home and Sunset, actual Sunlight and other indie game and Tony Stark being EA and the Big Six

View attachment 1484

Indie games don't make as much an impact as a dudebro shooter devs thinking the old boys club of manly testosterone muscle men killing one another should allow for female soldiers to participate in the setting. Or having gay and nonbinary characters proper into the series like Gibraltar and Bloodhound from Apex Legends, devs could have sat contently and ignore the shrill complaints of people like CasualShinji, Avnger and Gethsemane,.

But they chose to listen and do the best a big company can and is constantly trying to improve in spite of complaints from Chuds like you and iron.

Minecraft is the best selling game of all time. It began as an indie game.

Battle Royale games kind of started thanks to Minecraft mods and the ideas being put into other lesser known titles which created a new genre.

If this audience chomping at the bit for certain content existed, really existed and really cared, they'd find the games with said content fairly easily.

I mean people who love grand strategy games don't struggle to find their games at all but they're often very niche.

COD's more futuristic games have had female soldiers for a while with no real issue.

That's pretty clearly not what he said.

But hey, if we're going to talk about audience size, Monster Prom had a successful Kickstarter and the sequel did even better. It's a parody of dating sims and visual novels and it's selling to people who want one of those. It's also woke AF. Everyone is bi, you can make the player characters trans or enby if you want to, one of the romance options is pretty obviously trans-coded, there's a secret character who's ace and aro, and the pitch black humor never delves into actual bigotry or meanness to write a punchline.

Is this game going to sell like Call of Duty? No. Is it because of all the woke elements? No, it's because dating sims and visual novels don't sell in the same volume as established AAA franchises with ungodly marketing budgets. But Beautiful Glitch made a game for the audience they wanted and were very successful at it. Enough so that they got to make a sequel, which is also doing well among the target audience.

"Get woke, go broke," is nothing more than gatekeeping from people who can't accept culture is moving on without them.

Monster Prom has Jesse Cox involved and a number of other youtubers who helped voice stuff and or promote it so there's a bit of a reason to it selling so well. Also you can literally play Monster prom how you wish basically because all the characters you can date are basically Bi which actually has been objected to in other games because it's removing said characters specific orientation or something like that was the claim.

As you said Monster Prom is selling well enough. But I wouldn't claim it's leading culture anywhere or moving it really. It's doing what people said making a game for the audience size it has pretty much. There's room in gaming for plenty of different audiences but the issues is as it always will be to an extent the push to try and make one product for everyone. When you do that at best you get flavourless gruel which everyone can eat but no-one really likes or will alienate people.

Get Woke Go Broke seems to be an issue because of how things have been getting written because actually organic diversity doesn't get people caring.
Atomic Blonde features a female secret Agent whose either Bi or more likely a Lesbian. Yet the "Woke" crowd mostly ignored the film instead calling for a woman James Bond.

Doctor Who has had strong female characters for years, I mean from Leela the highly lethal evolved human cave woman to Ace the shcoolgirl who beat up a Dalek with a specially enhanced baseball bat and mixes her own custom explosives. However when they made The Doctor a woman all the "Woke" crowd were going "At last Doctor Who has a strong female character" because it seems like they barely know about the show in reality and all that mattered was making The Doctor a woman and all the other characters don't matter and never have. Oh and since we got a female Doctor the series has gone to crap with moments of lecturing and just poor plot. The series also has managed to somehow give us some of the weakest female characters since the reboot. The Doctor is not that competent as a character anymore even often having her allies being the ones to come up with the plans to save them and the other female character Yaz whose a female police officer has been resigned to mostly a background character who doesn't get that much to do and rarely gets any heroic moments, compare that to Rose Tyler who in the very first episode of Doctor who is swinging on ropes and helping save the Doctor.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Uncharted is a shooter, it's not DMC.

No, it's just using basic action movie logic that like every action movie has had since forever; standard goons are standard goons. Nadine is probably the only expert in close quarters combat that Drake has faced in the series.

I don't even know what you're requirements for these games are since what you call stuff radical that nobody else calls radical. But Uncharted 4 and ME3. Dwarvenhobble had a whole list and going by what they put down; Life is Strange (since the sequel was mentioned), Overwatch (as Battleborn and Lawbreakers were mentioned). I recall some bitching at Horizon Zero Dawn. TLOU2 is the 3rd best selling game in PlayStation history apparently.

Yes I'll mention here that we've just seen in this tread that Houseman played Life is Strange differently and took different options to others and didn't see the first one as woke.

You know what happens in LIS 2?

At one point you get given a choice to steal supplies from a store or not.
No matter if you steal or don't the old guy who runs the store ends up grabbing you and later he says something about "Thieving Mexicans, that's why we need to build that wall". You have 0 way of not seeing that scene because apparently the creators wanted to take shots at [current year] politics and make the store owner into a Strawman for them. If you stole then he's literally right you were stealing anyway. If you didn't then he's wrong but either way he's portrayed as the villain. That's not getting into the sex scenes later on where the romance options are a guy who a half shaved head punk / redneck girl. Also the fact you know the characters are meant to be underage but apparently those scenes were fine but anime games on Sony systems can't show too much skin for some reason.

I already mentioned these women players already have the systems needed to play said games.

Yes and most of the ones who do who are into shooters will already be playing shooters anyway. So the appeal to try and pull people in isn't working there is it?

The appeal is meant to be to some supposed new audience chomping at the bit but it's not being shown to exist. The women into shooters, especially Spunk Gargle Wee Wee shooters are already playing them

Some of the games I haven't heard of at all yet they were heavily pushed? I'm someone whose currently most anticipated game is Gamedec so I don't just pay attention to major releases.

There's quite a few things Overwatch had over Battleborn. Overwatch was the next big thing from Blizzard, it had the better presentation/graphics, it had the more pick and play nature to its matches as Battleborn was a MOBA.

Also Overwatch had sexy butts. Around launch believe it or not Overwatch was kind of hated by the Woke crowd. A crowd that still gets mad at the game quite often:
Police outfits for charactrs
School girl D.Va
Lack of Strong Black woman stereotype character (and they ignore Paladins which has a Strong Black Woman character)
Torb being straight
Zarya not being the one revealed as a Lesbian but Tracer who was "Conventionally attractive"
The fact there's an implied romance with Mercy and Genji and Mercy and Pharah aren't in a Lesbian relationship

As far as Dishonored 2's DLC, DLC or standalone DLC doesn't sell as well as the game it's DLC of. The Lost Legacy didn't sell as well as Uncharted 4 when it's a far far better Uncharted game than Uncharted 4.

It's an effect that can be seen though that if an entry put people off they won't buy the next one. Lost Legacy might have suffered because of Uncharted 4's decisions.

Why did gamers let health regen become genre convention when it makes games worse and also isn't accurate/realistic? Gamers make dumb decisions as a group constantly like how the people that play "hardcore" modes think the game is more realistic when it actually plays less realistic than normal mode and also unbalances all the guns. I know the reload times in real life are much longer.

Idiot team mates in team based games.
Having to wait for an idiot medic to heal you when the person picked Medic just for the heavy machine gun is a pain. That's even if you get a medic on your side not 15 Snipers.

Listed games that done well with diversity in response to Houseman.

Diversity and Wokeness are different things as I've said before.

E.G.
Stargirl is diverse as a show.
Batwoman is woke.

The difference?
No-one mentions that "yeh at last I'm a woman in this role" in Stargirl they just are. It's seen as nothing. Hell in Stargirl the villains are as diverse a cast as the heroes.

You're criticizing technique in a pulpy action game? Nadine's technique/animations are noticeably different and communicate to the audience that she's skilled. I'm sure there's plenty of moves in action movies that you can find the same issues with.

I'm criticising technique because as some-one who did Judo for a little while and BTW was only ever an absolute novice I can look at her technique and point out it's wrong, that's how bad it is a guy whose barely done 6 months of Judo can look at it and point out it's bad technique. If you want to portray her as skilled that's an amateur mistake to make and makes her look less skilled than the argument of "Oh she's just so skilled" really would need to work.

I'm not a fan of Neil Druckmann because I don't think he's a good director, it has nothing to do with whatever progressiveness he's pushing or not pushing. I knew TLOU2 was in bad shape from this interview. Guess what that interview has literally nothing to do with? It's not like Abby beats up/kills Joel because she's better or stronger than him, it's cuz her group outnumbers Joel and his brother. Someone wanting revenge on Joel is rather expected, he is a bastard to a lot of people. I already went over this with Houseman, the reason Joel gets killed is so the game can continue with its stealth action gameplay loop. The game was FUBAR from the second it was decided it needed the same gameplay loop as TLOU1.

And there are so many other ways Joel could have been killed that would have worked better.
Also Abby is actually a bit of a problem due to believe it or not unrealistic body image standards of all things in that her look is unrealistic / unmaintainable. Like acual women doing that in the real world have highly specialised diet regimes etc and can only normally get that look for competitions and hold if for about 2 weeks in every 6 or so.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I believe that you believe every word you're saying. I just don't see the existential crisis that you do. Indeed, I do not see evidence that being progressive is a kiss of death for media considering how much of it succeeds with its intended audience. And most of the so-called failures are dramatically over-stated.

So yeah, I believe that you're sincere in your grievances. I just don't agree.

The issue is intended audience vs other audience.

Some are getting mad that the largest media isn't catering to them. Problem is they apparently don't care to support the media that is unless it's already a big established thing that is suddenly now changing.

Doctor Who being the big example.

Lots of strong women in that shows history. Didn't matter apparently because only one The Doctor became female were the woke crowd paying any attention. The numbers have been dropping for Doctor Who because mostly the audience isn't there for the new version which initially I argued wasn't woke or trying to appeal just to the woke audience. What happens? It has to prove me wrong with the most recent series where the biggest divide can be seen in 1 single episode. Praxeus. Worst episode of the series because of contradictions in it and one hell of a mixed up plot, loved by the woke crowd because it has a gay Astronaut in it and they were on about "Woo first gay kiss in Doctor Who cannon" Except Jack Harkness was in Doctor who Spin off Torchwood and Jack is very much gay and kissed people in that show but nope didn't count for some reason.