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All posts for the month April, 2012

I’ve Got 99 Problems…

Posted by MCM Zevin on April 29, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , . 3 comments

Listen guys, can we please stop cluttering up my Facebook feed with links to the fucking “Hot Problems” video?

Look, I get it, this song is awful and it’s pretty hilarious. But stop acting like this is the death of music. For as eager as we all are to throw around the word troll, I’m surprised I’ve not seen it used more in reference to this video, because I called troll less than 45 seconds into the video.

They see my blonde hair, blue eyes, and class, but what they don’t know, I‘ve got a really big heart.

This is the stuff of parody and to hear these girls, “Double Take” as their calling themselves, talk about writing this song in two hours, it’s hard for me to believe they did this with anything but hopes of provoking another Rebecca Black level pop culture shit storm. When you talk about this song and call it the worst thing ever the joke is almost certainly on you. Also, part of me can’t help but feel like I’d hear this on the radio about 18 times a day if it had spent a little more time in the oven and was performed by Ke$ha. Food for thought.

Don’t worry though, if you really are hard up for the most awfulest thing since Rebecca Black, “3 Second Rule” by Lisa Gail Alldred has you covered. This is most certainly the real deal, as Alldred had the original video pulled from YouTube after the negative reactions came in. Thankfully the Internet never forgets and will reupload any stupid bullshit they notice has gone missing. Now you too can learn the secret to keeping your man in line.

Truly this is some Alldred family secret passed down from one generation to the next, now being shared to a world of women who need this sage advice, lest their men fornicate with all the women.

Everything about this is bad. Everything. There is not a fucking second of this video that is not 100% awful. It really does speak for itself and nothing I can say does it justice, if you can’t see why this is bad you probably don’t possess the mental faculties to read anything I’ve written thus far, so I’m just going to stop.

Pop Goes the Bullshit

Posted by MCM Zevin on April 22, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , . 1 comment

So, last time I promised an article called “User Generated Content” which was intended to be a series of articles responding to stupid shit hate mail I received for running this site. I actually wrote about 700 words of that article before I realized that I couldn’t find a voice for it other than butt-hurt whining, so that article has been shelved indefinitely. So moving on, we’ll be looking at the Game Trailers series Pop Fiction.

Pop Fiction is the video game equivalent of Myth Busters, or something like that. The show is all about digging up old urban legends pertaining to video game content from various points in the medium’s history and determining if there is any truth to them.

See, there’s no denying that this stuff is fascinating to me, I was part of the Pokémon generation after all, where glitches and rumors were the bread and butter of playing the game. Remember the supposed Pikablu? The Pokemon Tree? That damn truck that still mystifies people to this day? All of those things made playing Pokémon a richer experience back when I was in fourth grade, so needless to say, a show like Pop Fiction appeals to me, at least in theory.

Going back to the Myth Busters comparison probably highlights the greatest shortcoming of Pop Ficiton. Part of why Mythbusters works as a television program is that the sort things they do are dangerous and require a controlled environment to test out. That’s just not the case here, sure it’s cool to have some guy tell me about the jumbled map areas in Metroid, but why not just load up a copy of the game and try it myself. If I’m enough of an Animal Crossing enthusiast to care about the unlockable NES titles hidden in the game, I’ve likely already bought an Action Replay and hacked them myself years ago. What I’m getting at is that so much of this just feels pointless.

In my opinion, Pop Fiction officially reached its nadir of insight and quality on Mar 26, 2012, with the release of “Episode 22: Cheetahmen II“.

The episode is different from past entries, this time guest starring James “The Angry Video Game Nerd” Rolfe in a parody of the Saw films, the joke being that because Cheetahmen II is such a rare game, that they had to kidnap Rolfe and use his copy to do the episode. The episode is dedicated to determining if it is possible to reach the final two levels of the game that are usually inaccessible due to shoddy coding.

This episode is bullshit for a number of reasons; most obviously it’s a blatant attempt to generate interest in the series by shoehorning in a shameless AVGN cameo and piggybacking off his considerable fandom. Rolfe presence in the video is purely superficial as he offers nothing of value. He could be anyone until you pull back and realize that he is only in there as an attention getter.

Second, there is no reason to do a video about Cheetahmen II. Most people do not give two shits about the game, much less own it. Past episodes of Pop Fiction focused on classic titles such as Super Smash Bros. Melee, Metroid, and Mario 64. Cheetahmen II is a title that never saw an official release. The only reason any copies exist in the wild is because they were found in a warehouse years after the game was cancelled and they demand an incredibly high price, if you’re lucky enough to even find one. Anything this episode has to tell me or practically anyone else about Cheetahman II is useless since barely any of us are ever going to play the game or even care about it.

Finally, this video is redundant. Rolfe himself proved the existence of these levels about two years ago in one of his own videos. Sure, he doesn’t explain why the game functions this way , but it’s not like the Pop Fiction episode was very good at explaining it either.

That’s all I really have to say about Pop Fiction. I’m sure some of you want me to write about James Rolfe at some point, and I promise that he’ll get a few articles in the future. At the moment I’m working on solutions so that I can have a faster turnaround for new articles, so just stick with me, I’m pretty new at maintaining a blog in the long term.

Occupy Video Games

Posted by MCM Zevin on April 3, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , . 1 comment

Tales of Graces f, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Mass Effect 3. These three games are the most important releases of 2012. This may seem like an odd statement, two of these titles are niche JRPGs, representatives of a now much derided genre here in the west, but together these three games represent a paradigm shift in the relationship between gamers and publishers/developers, one brought on by the increasing acceptance of social media as a part of our everyday lives.

Gamers have tried to sway corporate decision making in the past, perhaps most notably in 2006/2007 with Starmen.net’s efforts to influence Nintendo in the decision to localize of Mother 3 (skip ahead a little in that video, as it documents the entire series, not just Mother 3), a failure which to this day remains a sore spot for many gamers. After this, most gamers seemed to give up on the idea of online movements to influence gaming’s corporate fat cats, we just became complacent, bitching about our distaste on GameFAQs ; the rule of thumb became that online movements never work, gaming or otherwise.

But in the last year or so this has steadily changed. Internet organized protest movements just seemed to start packing more of a punch and when it comes to gaming it all really seems to starts in February of 2011 with the localization announcement of Namco-Bandai’s Tales of Graces f, a title that would have never seen a U.S. release had it not been for the unorganized collective bitching of some 50,000 fans of the franchise across the Internet over the course of 2010.

Later, in June of 2011, the gaming community saw the emergence of Operation Rainfall. Op Rainfall was/is concerned with the U.S. localization of three Japanese RPGs for the Nintendo Wii; Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, and Pandora’s Tower, all of which had received or were announced to receive an English localization in PAL territories at the time the movement began.

Op Rainfall has distinguished itself by being one of the best organized and level headed fan movements to ever grace the Internet, if the Tales fandom had got what they wanted by spewing (justifiably) hateful vitriol across numerous social media websites and gaming journalism outlets, Op Rainfall was going to do this with a bit more class and tact, choosing to spread the word about the three titles to the uninformed as opposed insular bickering amongst already existing fans, again, using Facebook and Twitter to spread the word and gain attention.  This approach ultimately paid off, with Op Rainfall having gained attention and support from multiple gaming news outlets during its time in operation. The end result is that publishers have heard Operation Rainfall; as of writing this the North American release of Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story have both been confirmed. Operation Rainfall has shown just how far gamers can get when it comes to influencing publishers without having to throw inflammatory accusations about trolling or not being loved.

Now, with the release of Mass Effect 3, we’ve seen this all come full circle into something awful, stupid, and entitled. With the Tales fandom and Operation Rainfall, we saw fans of these titles rallying to get the games released in the US so we could, you know, actually play them. I supported these movements because they built up the medium and supported publishers and developers in making admittedly risky publishing decision. But here, that’s not the case, “Retake Mass Effect”, as it’s being called, has gotten it in their heads that they deserve a better ending to Mass Effect 3, as their official facebook page states;

“Bioware is a business if we can make them understand that by using the current endings they alienate (no pun) their customers, and destroy the replay ability of the trilogy they are hurting their profits we CAN bring about a change for the better.”

So they were unhappy with the ending, and judging by the 59,000+ likes the page has gotten, a lot of people shared these feelings. That’s fine, really, it is, you can feel however you want about it, but demanding a new ending is dog shit. Great games, movies, books, and TV Shows have had bad endings all the time and we’ve always just sort of bucked up and learned from it, it’s not that important, no matter how much Mass Effect means to you. This is all very stupid on this principle alone, but it really gets dumber when you go a little deeper.

I’m going to assume most of you guys on firmly opposed to Roger Ebert on the subject of videogames as art here, just based on the fanaticism of how you’re acting about this and my talks with a few dozen Retake Mass Effecters, so please, for a moment, tell me why you feel you have agency over the artistic vision that Bioware’s team has for their work? How would this be any different than George Lucas’ endless reediting of the Star Wars films that he didn’t direct? We give Lucas shit for reediting those all the time, but Mass Effect fans are chomping at the bits to force Bioware to do essentially the same thing.

If you were unsatisfied with the ending of Mass Effect, the responsible reactions would be to either 1.) openly criticize Bioware for producing an unsatisfactory product and hope they do better on the next game or 2.) create your own work of fiction (be it a game or otherwise) and not make the same mistakes you feel Bioware made with Mass Effect. The responsible action is not try to exercise creative agency over someone else’s work. Of course those would involve doing a little more leg work than simply spewing filth and bile about this crap on the Internet like a bunch of petulant children and would actually require you to have the mental facilities to create something as opposed to simply consume it.

Since I started writing this, Bioware co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka has come forward and said that the team is considering making changes to the ending. You people disgust me. I sure hope the new ending to Mass Effect is worth it, because you may have very well destroyed every shred of creative dignity the medium ever had to get it. It can no longer be about the expression of the design team, it’s all what the loudest, dumbest, most bored people on Facebook want from here on out. You haven’t “retaken” Mass Effect, it was never yours to take back, you’ve taken it away from its creators and possibly ran roughshod over the medium in the process. You think the ending sucked? Is this the first bad ending you’ve ever encountered or just the first time I’ve had the misfortune of hearing your incessant bitching about this crap. Get a helmet kids.

Now I will say this before I close, there is this theory floating around called “Indoctrination Theory” I won’t go into it here, just follow the link and the 20+ minute video will explain, but if the theory is true, and it very well could be seeing as how it uses established precedents from the whole franchise at face value, there is a good chance that the ending we got is a fake out, and that future DLC will continue where the game left off, in which case any “changes” made to the current ending could have very well been in the cards from the get go, which means all my bitching about running rough-shod over the creative integrity of the series is moot and we’ve all been played for fools, but you’re still all idiots.

Next up, a very special Man-Child Messiah: User Generated Content.