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Showing posts from May, 2017

(Blog) why Walking Simulators do not work and need to die

In this era of gaming, there's been a surplus of one particular genre that's been on the rise since TheChineseRoom's Dear Esther. A narrative driven game that focuses heavily on said narrative... and absolutely nothing else. And many other games that came out have been trying to work exactly as Dear Esther has. And each time, each game provides simplistic 1-4 hours of minuscule game time with pricing way above the necessary limits. 20 dollars, 30 dollars even. Time and energy has been wasted making a game that shouldn't be called as such. And its an insult to both the gaming community and the medium itself to call these genres as such. Now I don't want to hear all this crap about 'its poetic' or 'its art' and 'its different' because these are not good excuses. They are never good excuses. And I honestly am ashamed to call myself a writer in a time where people look upon some of these as narrative 'masterpieces' befitting of literary

Prey: From a creative piece to a boring replica

Its hard for me to appreciate Arkane Studio and Bethesda/Zenimax's reboot of a highly underappreciated video game. Coupled with the potential sequel the original had before it was canned in favor of said reboot, it left a bad impression when I saw the initial trailer for it. And many of the underlying problems stems from a very severe case of unoriginality and uncreativity the game had. Sure the game mechanics were beautifully sound and the level designs were pretty decent, but said levels all looked exactly the same and there was hardly any substance to the style. Let alone the story itself is ill-motivating and very bland and ill-paced. From a decent genre of first person shooting sci-fi adventure/horror that was Prey, where the lines of supernatural elements and science fiction blends beautifully within a living starship, is brought down to a very ill-contrived reboot where familiarity and generalization takes the good out of everything that was to enjoy.  Arkane basical