Cblogs of 02/21/13 + Shadeisms (+ PS4-stravaganza)

Well well well, I guess I don’t have to tell you what the hot topic was today, do I now? What’s that Strider, you think you got a lot of PS4 blogs? Oh you ignorant fool, feast your eyes on these caps! In fact, because of the amount (and ratio, for that matter) of PS4-related blogs today, I have a little surprise for all of you! Yeppers. It’s in the Recap section, check it out!



So how about that PlayStation 4 you guys? How’s it looking? If I’m going to be honest, I didn’t see a whole lot to impress me yesterday. I don’t own a PS3 myself, and the thing is that I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Every once in a while a cool-looking exclusive comes around that I really wish I would be able to play, but other than that the console’s value is lost on me. Port Shadow of the Colossus, Ni No Kuni and Journey over to another console, and I don’t need a PS3 ever again. I literally just went through the Wikipedia list of PS3 exclusives, and those are all I could come up with, give or take Ratchet & Clank, and I even had to add Ni No Kuni myself because it technically isn’t exclusive.

But then, today is not a day of threes, today is for four! Like I said, however, I remain largely unimpressed. There is some cool stuff, but nothing cool enough that I would pay big bucks for it. The controller could be interesting since it’s got Move built into it, but to me it still sounds too much like the old PS3 controller which also tried to incorporate motion control, but felt flat. Case in point, Lair. The cross-play functionality with the Vita also has potential, but no more so than the WiiU already has built in. I just don’t see why people would be excited about this function despite the fact that it’s going to be expensive as fuck, whereas the WiiU just sort of has it already. As a self-proclaimed Nintendo fanboy, this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine; it seems that some people like to harp on everything Nintendo does until either Sony or Microsoft does the exact same thing; then it’s awesome. We saw the same with Move and Kinect (until especially the latter fell flat on its face) and I’ve seen some of that now too. Fortunately I haven’t seen much of that on Destructoid yet, so you guys still rule. Let’s see, what else is there to talk about? There’s cloud gaming, I guess, but I have yet to really see the added value of that; and then there’s the social aspect, which is also mostly lost on me. Not that it isn’t a nice feature, mind you, just that I personally wouldn’t benefit from it very much.


Now if only I had friends who cared

What else? Oh, wait! I forgot to mention the graphics, didn’t I?! They’re…good, I guess? I don’t really know to be honest. I didn’t even plan on discussing it after all that other stuff, I legitimately forgot about that up until now. It just goes to show that graphics don’t do anything for me. Hire a good art director, and all of your pretty polygons have become meaningless. See Mario Galaxy, Okami, Metroid Prime, Skyward Sword, Muramasa and many more. Actually, many of you may not recall this, but my very first blog on the ‘toid was about this very topic! Yep, true facts! Maybe I should revisit it sometime, because there’s probably much more to say about this than I did in that particular blog. It’s a good thing that I don’t keep a list of Cblog topics which is already up to six or seven by now, and don’t have to write a good three papers at the same time for my studies. No sirree, none of that here. All the time in the world to revisit old blogs!

Anyhow, it should be clear by now that I’m not a person who is easily impressed with graphical power, so Sony does not have to count on my money for just that.
….And then came David Cage.
For David Cage to basically claim that emotion in video games can be measured in polygons hurts me to my very core. Cage once again seems to completely misunderstand the industry he works in. I guess he never played To The Moon, or Don’t Look Back, or suteF, or LIMBO, or Final Fantasy VI, or Tower of Heaven, or Digital: A Love Story, or 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, or The Walking Dead, or Journey, or The Void, or Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery, or….Oh, I’m sorry, do I need to go on? Using pure graphical power to evoke an emotion from the player is the lazy man’s way of storytelling, and then for someone to claim it’s actually the only way is just awful. Cage makes the comparison with movies, saying that they too have only been able to truly convey emotions after the tech improved. His argument falls apart, however, in that he compares old silent movies to the movies we see today, a 70-year gap at least, whereas we’re now facing the transition from PS3 to PS4. Hardly the same scope if you ask me. But more so than that, Cage forgets that visuals and high definition don’t make a movie. I’ll show you what I mean. My all-time favorite movie moment is from the end of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King: “My friends. You bow to no one.” Gets me every single time. Here it is:



The thing is, though, this scene doesn’t work because it’s in HD or whatever. It doesn’t work because of Aragorn’s expression (although that does help), and certainly not from being able to tell exactly how many hairs are in his beard. This scene works because after all is said and done, the newly crowned king of mankind, his Elven wife who just so happens to be the granddaughter of the Elven Queen, representatives from all the major races on Middle-Earth and an entire plaza full of people, all bow to four little guys with hairy feet. The very idea of this scene is what makes it so powerful, and it did not require anything beyond movement (and a boatload of actors).


This shot is what makes it. This shot and nothing else.

Now to be fair, while David Cage has really missed the point about storytelling in video games, Old Man Demo is not half as appalling as Kara was; all that was, while dressed up nicely as a story about androids and stuff, was David Cage showing us a video of a woman begging someone not to kill her and going “You see? Emotions!”. The sad thing is that Kara used a setting that is so ingrained into our very beings that it would almost be impossible not to feel emotion, no matter what medium it would’ve been on. You could have made Kara using 8-bit sprites and it would’ve worked. Hell, you could have cut the visuals entirely and just present the audio, and it would’ve worked. I’m serious, try it! Hell, at one point she screams the line “But I’ve only just been born, you can’t kill me yet!” Yeah. For all of Cage’s talk about subtlety, there was none to be had in Kara. Using graphics to evoke emotion my ass. Luckily, Old Man Demo didn’t have any of that, and his expressions were indeed pretty good, but if the philosophy is really that better graphics make better games, then I’m out.

Goddamn, I guess there’s a blog topic in here as well, isn’t there? That’s going to have to be added to the entirely non-existent list.

But I was talking about the PS4. For all my harping on the thing, there were still some cool announcements. The Oddworld developers creating a new game was nice, Knack looked interesting, there seem to be a boatload of third party developers making something for the new console, and above all the option for indies to self-publish was a good move on Sony’s part. Despite this, unfortunately for Sony, in the end yesterday gave me only one announcement that I got truly excited over, only one thing that made me go “Wow, that’s awesome!”: Watch_Dogs coming to WiiU. That has me more excited than anything I’ve seen about the PS4, and on Sony’s day, that’s a little sad.




* - This man has penguins in his username, and is therefore awesome. Although I refuse to believe that penguins could ever be manufactured in a factory. Either way, he has good things to say about the PS4 and the new approach that Sony has taken with it.


Sexy, ain't it?

A - Pedrovay and I seem to be on the same page regarding the PS4. What's that they say about great minds?

A - There's a new trend in video game land, and it is revealing consoles without, you know, actually revealing them.

A - This one focuses on a different aspect of the PS4 reveal: Do us gamers really have to hate everything?

A - You'd be surprised how much thought goes into designing a video game controller. So here's a question: concave or convex?

A - Sir Davies wonders how Sony will deal with some important privacy issues on its new console. Will the PS4 come to know too much about us?

A - Have the big three dropped the ball when it comes to competing with the up-and-coming Mobile market?

A - As with any console launch, is it really smart to send out games both for the new console and the old one?

A - Apparently Kotaku looked at the PS4 conference and thought to itself "You know what? There aren't actually any women up on stage, this smells of an article!" Fortunately, Trioptical asks the relevant questions.

A - Okay, I apologize for that Kotaku crack, because mochipixels also notes the lack of women during the PS4 reveal. I know I'm a guy and don't understand these things, but was this really an issue? Elsa?


A - You had to look carefully today, but there were in fact some non-PS4 Cblogs to be found. This is one of them, listing a couple of game that could've tried harder to win you over in their first couple of hours.




That sounds dirty, I like it.

S - It hasn't been a good week for Pixie. A friend was being an idiot, and Sony had little to say about the Vita.

F - More Super Sentai Friday Night Fightin'.

D - Indie Game Story, or as I'm going to be calling it from now on "Indie Game: The Movie: The Game", is currently in development, and the devs are looking for our support!

V - Be honest: How many of you only know B-17 Bomber because of the Angry Video Game Nerd?




Dude, don't look now, but I think God is trying to tell you something.


C - If you're snowed in anyway, might as well hold a Zelda marathon. Just pray that you won't get a power outage...

C - And this is a liveblog on said marathon....including a power outage.

C - Could Bioshock Infinite get delayed to put it on the new consoles? I would say "no chance", but then I think of Rayman and am sad. :(

S - We already knew this, but Plants vs. Zombies is free on iOS for the rest of the month.



- ShadeOfLight
May you always find water and shade


FPotD