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Call Me Crazy

As the title suggests, I feel like I might have been the guinea pig of some social experiment and they won. I failed and they got my money. Let me explain.

This starts off with no alarms or red flags but rather a bit of disappointment. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and if you have, Hi, welcome to the Overworld) Epic, the developer of the Unreal Engine has really been setting little brown bags on fire in front of us consumer’s door steps and kicking our sand castles over lately. Thanks to that phenomenon Fortnite they’ve made quite a few declensions that I’m not too big on. Among those the big one is making deals to publishers so that their games launch exclusively on the Epic Store. There was a whole fiasco with Metro Exodus and some other lesser known games that were originally going to Steam are now removed. Albeit some are time exclusives but that’s beside the point. If your curious, see these links for reference.

https://www.pcgamer.com/metro-exodus-epic-store-steam/

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-outer-worlds-and-control-will-launch-on-the-epic-store-not-steam/

https://www.pcgamer.com/detroit-become-human-beyond-two-souls-and-heavy-rain-are-coming-to-pc/

https://www.pcgamer.com/satisfactory-is-now-available-in-early-access/

Anyways, I tell you all of this because just today I noticed on Steam that Ubisoft is having a sale on Steam. That sounds good right? Well, yeah sales are always awesome but this seems different. When I read articles like the one below. I get nervous that Ubisoft is going to pull their games off of Steam in favor Epic Store. 

https://www.pcgamer.com/ubisoft-has-extended-its-partnership-with-the-epic-store/

To be fair I get the business aspect of a decision but that doesn’t change the fact that I am, as a consumer, invested quite heavily in Steam and it’s ecosystem and don’t want to fragment my library anymore than it already is. Steam is not perfect, not even close but it’s what I’ve called home for gaming since I signed up back in 2007. I like my friends, and forums, games (obviously) among many other features to remain in one ecosystem. To be clear, I don’t mind Epic wanting to put games on their Store. Putting it on the Epic store and making it cheaper there is fine by me as well (Steam does not allow that, mind you). What I don’t like is not having the choice to purchase my games where I want.

*Sigh*

So when I saw the sale and my brain said “Oh God, this is the going away party that Ubisoft is throwing on Steam”. I went into “Doomday/Tin-foil hat” mode and bought a bunch of Ubisoft games on Steam.

GG Ubisoft. Your 70% cut of my $103 I just spent through Steam might be the last time I buy a game from you. Please don’t move your games off of Steam. I really like your games.

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This is the direct embodiment of @therealjacksepticeye channel and message. Hooray for art and courage!

My very first fan art! I am no artist by any means, drawing is something I’ve always wanted to do but unfortunately I suck at it (unsteady hands never helped). So pretty much everything I’ve ever drawn has immediately wound up in the trash. But Sean and his Positive Mental Attitude campaign just had me say why the hell not. I am usually an incredibly silent person in the community. I’m very shy and anxious, and kinda self conscious about the fact that I am much older than most people in the fan base (32 on Tuesday). But everyone always seems so accepting and nice. The way Sean encourages the community to be better and do better, and they just run away with it, helps restore my faith in humanity little by little. Considering how much negativity there is in the world, it’s nice to have a small corner to just wash it away for a while. YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!

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Video games! What I Play Now vs Then. (a loot box response)

     I haven't done a legit blog in a while and have shamelessly been plugging my let's play videos on the site (check it out if you like it, why not subscribe and share your newfound let's player, hehe). Although that will continue I still like to blog occasionally. This time it's a little different. I'm going to reflect on how my gaming has evolved over the last 25 years touching on what I feel is important. To give you an answer as to why I'm blabbing about this, it's all in response to the latest craze publisher cooked up in the kitchen, loot boxes.

"The NES came with Mario and Duck hunt bundled in the same cartridge. We sunk hours into it that game."

     Let's start with in the beginning… no not that far back, let's say 1991. Me and brother got the NES for Christmas. Oh the freakishly high pitched vocals our little voice boxes shrilled, when we thrashed the wrapping paper off of the box like the Doom Guy does to the flesh demons with a chainsaw, was magical and probably headache inducing to the rest of my family. The NES came with Mario and Duck hunt bundled in the same cartridge. We sunk hours into it that game. We didn't know about any of the secrets or hidden world warps or even the negative world (which technically is a bug but meh, whatever). So much fun, I tell you. Back then company's obviously were very different when it came to video game development. Sure they wanted to make a profit but they knew that was far fetched with a relatively new industry that was beginning to hit its first stride after the infamous video game industry crash. Innovation was at the heart. If you had an idea and a dream to do something in the industry there was a pretty good chance that with a little luck and know how you could make whatever the heck you wanted and boy did it show. I won't lie, looking back, there were a metric-ton of shovelware and forgettable titles but in that same moment, when those floodgates opened there were a lot of good games that floated to the top. Everything from the first Final Fantasy to Excite bike, Paperboy and obscurities like Nightshade were all fantastic games that ALL played very differently from one another. They're what paved the way to literally everything we have today.

“It has always been about the money."

    True enough those were simpler times. The industry started evolving. Hardware first followed by innovation with said new hardware. 16 colors to 256 colors, sprites to pixels to polygons. Anti-Aliasing, Bump-mapping, Tessellation, I could go on. One innovation after another but at some point it started to change. When was that? When did it go from “making a game because it's fun or because you want to tell a story with this new median.” to “make a game so our investors are happy with the return they were promised on that last investors call.”? Well the answer is both simple and straightforward. It has always been about the money. That's right, you heard me. The bottom line is that company's exist to make money. Shocker I know but it's the truth. If Nintendo, a 200 year old company, knew that they would never make a dollar on the gaming industry as a whole, I guarantee you they would've never made the console. The difference that we see today is now creative development of a game doesn't always match up with the budgets and funds provided. So they have to scrap that “new dynamic weather system” or bleeding edge “water and fire” engine as it'll cost 900k and 6 months of development time.

“It's very common place for these development teams, along with publishers, to require millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of years to make a single game.”

    So, let's fast forward to today. Why do we have games that you pay $60 for and then pay additionally for loot boxes/DLC/season pass/collector's editions for all the big titles? That boils down to cost. Whether we like it or not games, AAA titles specifically, have gotten stupid expensive. It's very common place for these development teams, along with publishers, to require millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of years to make a single game. If you take an average annual salary of a entry level programmer at  $60,000/yr for 3 years, that's $180,000 for that one person on that game. It would take 3000 purchases to cover that one person's wages for that one game. That's not including marketing, which would basically double that number or any retail store markups or digital stores taking their own cut nor is that including whatever investors agreed upon for their ROI (Return on Investment). If you have a hundred man team it adds ups quick. Of course I'm pulling the wage out of thin air so you can give or take 15-20k. Regardless it's still expensive.

“Let me be clear, I do not condone loot boxes as a means of game/character progression...”  

     Now that I have that out of the way. Where do I sit in all this? Single player? Multiplayer? Casual? Competitive? E-Sports? Let me be clear, I do not condone loot boxes as a means of game/character progression, having said that, for me I've learned as I get older that the fast-paced, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants multiplayer games are typically not my style. I find them shallow in the long run and view them in the same light as casual phone games that you spend a few minutes on every so often. That's not to say the game play is that of the casual nature but in most circumstances I'm not going to get the same enjoyment on a multiplayer game (driven by loot boxes that you have to purchase in order to keep up with everyone) as I will a single player story driven RPG. To put some examples out there, I don't mind playing games like The Forest or ARK Survival Evolved or even 7 Days to Die so long as I'm playing on a private server with my close friends. I won't play those games on a public server nor do I care anymore to play the Call of Dutys or Battlefields or Overwatch or League of Legends or DOTA2. They're just not fun, to me. The game communities are too toxic for my taste. Now I find myself playing games that were independently developed (indie) or are small passionate teams with publishers that give more freedom to the dev teams. They make a simple concept game that can be quite deep in its gameplay and in most cases turn a profit for both themselves and their publisher (if they have one). An example would be Factorio. Anyone that knows this game knows it's concept simple but gameplay depth is deeper than the Marianas Trench. Others like Cryptark, Rimworld, Diluvion, Cortex Command are all good examples, for me at least, of games done right. To me, these games represent what I enjoyed about videogames, they're not as mainstream or developed with huge budgets, comparatively speaking. They have quirks and weirdness and do things that triple-A titles would rip their hair out over. They make their games and patch them afterwards and their done. If the game was popular enough and had a story that could be expanded upon or if there was more mechanics that they wanted to try out that they couldn't do with the last game then I can see a sequel being produced but their production costs are never ridiculous.

“Basically vote with your wallet.“

    Okay, okay, okay, I've word vomited this whole time. In the end I can't say that I will never play a game that has loot boxes. I think that's a dumb thing to say. I like to keep my options open for whatever reason. Middle-earth: Shadows of War looks quite fun as I played the first game quite a bit. What I can say is that it's extremely unlikely that I will buy loot boxes for a game to make it less grindy and would rather use that money to buy a indie game that will give me the same amount of hours of entertainment. Basically vote with your wallet. I like Shadows of War, I'll buy it, I don't like loot boxes, I won't buy loot boxes. Eventually this controversy will stop. People won't complain about the loot boxes and they will be a way of life. All this will be irrelevant to me though because I'm focused on preventing my prisoners from escaping in Prison Architect or hijacking a glitch ship in Heat Signature because I bought those games instead of incremental improvements via a loot box.

    What do you guys think? So I make some valid points? Do my opinions align with yours, let me know! Thank you for reading

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Remember how I said we would later start dying in due to asphyxiation well yeah... Let’s just say I wouldn’t hold your breath on us not doing that. I know, I’ll see myself out the door now thank you.

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This was a fun little jaunt into multiplayer jump scares. Ramathon and I were fumbling around trying to figure the game out. I had some extra fumbling as my mouse was not locked to my primary monitor and instead kept clicking off the game.Was frustratingly fun.

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I don’t do well with horror games. Which is why I don’t play a lot them on my channel (which is why I probably should play more of them). Creeping around my starting house with “fear” as my only weapon in the game didn’t give me much incentive to leave the house. That said, being inside the house didn’t do much for me either...

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It’s titled the most boring episode but I wager some people like that kind of stuff. Kind of like how Dragon Ball Z can have a muli-part episode that has nothing but charging up for a fight... Yeah like that only with more of.. uh not the charging up part. Yeah I nailed that.

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SPPPAAAAACCCCCCEEEEEEE!!!! Me and Heather are at it again, trying to not die from asphyxiation. Spoiler, it catches up to us in later videos...

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Derelict mining would be such a cool job to have for at least 3 and a half minutes, you know that's the expected life span of one of these guys. Amazing anger managment therapy and death sentence to anyone not good at their job.

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Finally, mission running for a house. Was fun and productive. Did you know you can have a base too? News to me!

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Dress for the occasion, in this case that would be something more than tufts of grass for shoes in sub-freezing temperatures. I’m glad they haven’t implemented frostbite.

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Guys these highlight videos are way too fun. I want to do more of these. Please someone send halp!

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I’ll be adding a few videos today since I forgot to add them in the past. So if you only follow me on Tumblr and not Youtube this will be new content lol

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This is my first highlight video! Well technically its not but its the first one that I put more than just an hour into. This is from a live stream that I did on Twitch and wanted grab the funny stuff (I think is funny). Enjoy!

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Survival of the ill! Who’s more sick? Not sure. From the smell of everyone due to a lack of hygiene to sounds our stomachs keep making I can’t tell half the time who’s a zombie and who’s a friend.

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Queue Tuesday’s late tumblr post, you know how I roll. Nothing like what takes place in this episode. I die, a few times actually.

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Fire hurts, especially if you stand in it...