Welcome to the YouTube Round-Up, where contributors and editors of NFOpocalypse share their gaming videos and favorites. Have a suggestion for a video that should be featured here? Leave a comment!
Once upon a time, games journalism was all fact.
Well, actually, there’s no way games journalism could ever be all fact. In the same way that movie reviews are never “all fact”, game reviews, previews, and other such articles have been subject to a journalistic bias since the dawn of of the medium. It’s just a fact of life that when somebody looks at something, they perceive something different from the person next to them. What is an amazing experience to one is a catastrophe of creativity to the other.
Don’t you just love that nice alliteration? But the crassness and vulgarity of this article’s title captures the essence of it perfectly. Sometimes when a series moves forward, the hardcore fans bitch and moan because the game isn’t exactly like it was before. Fuck Fallout fans. Fuck them so hard.
Another Atlus game in the Shin Megami Tensei series (and spinoffs), Digital Devil Saga is bizarre. I don’t mean the regular kind of bizarre, which is what Persona 3 or Final Fantasy X might fall under. Digital Devil Saga is downright creepy in its employment of the surreal, creepy, and extraordinary elements of its plot. Perhaps the biggest element of this insane aesthetic is in the fact that you consume your defeated enemies. Not only that, but the enemies you defeat used to be human. So, in essence, Digital Devil Saga is about cannibalism.
Just some indie news, since I happen to be a HUGE independent game junkie. James Silva (who did Survival Crisis Z, which I happen to like so much) is gradually getting closer to the completion of his next project, an XNA game called The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. He’s posted a status update on his developer blog, and it has some interesting things on it. For example, there will be a ranked story mode that is about equal to the hardest difficulty. There’s also going to be 3-play co-op in unranked story mode. Sweet. Check his post for his complete status update. I’m no uncouth enough to post the whole thing verbatim!
To put this into context, I tend to go through phases when playing videogames. It normally goes along the lines of first-person shooter, American RPG, Japanese RPG, Strategy RPG, Turn-based Strategy, Real-time strategy, and then repeat at FPS. This is just how I function as a gamer. There’s individual games within those genres that I always play, and there’s some genres that are always good to play at any time. For example, I always play shoot-’em-ups. I always play Team Fortress 2. And when it comes to Japanese RPGs, I always play Persona 3.
There’s just something that draws me in about Survival Crisis Z. I can’t quite place what it is, because there’s so many amazing aspects behind the game. I guess the biggest thing that compels me to play it would have to be the persistence of my character’s progress, even if the random generation removes the emotional attachment I have to the characters and the persistence isn’t really true persistence. The only person I really care for is myself, since eventually my party comes back and just leaving and reentering buildings respawns the characters. It’s a sort of let down, but I can understand why.
A demonstration video I made yesterday using the magic of debugging. Shows Hibachi’s bullet patterns. All I have to say about it is holy shit.
Divided into two parts because YouTube sucks and has a 10 minute limit. More of the same. This time I make it to the level 3 boss!
The second in my series of Let’s Play! Donpachi. I get a little farther, but still no luck. This is going to be a very long road. Video after the break.