Today has been very long, but luckily a bit lighter on nonsense. I want to say up front that today is my last day on Twitter, where I’ve been doing all the live-tweet threads that make up the backbone of these posts. I will be transitioning the threads to my Fediverse instance, which you can follow here. If you’re not sure why I’m (finally) (for real) leaving Twitter, the short version is that recently Elon Musk has decided to make moves to remove important features like fully blocking users.
Being able to block – not just mute or unfollow – is vitally important not only for maintaining a safe network but also for maintaining the principle of freedom of association, something I believe in wholeheartedly. The fact that Musk allegedly veered in this direction at the behest of a sympathizer of the neo-nazi group Atomwaffen Division is both immediately alarming and ultimately in line with the hard-right direction Twitter has been going down since Musk bought the site last October. This is my last straw. Not even for a goof will I continue to sit on a site which is now making important design decisions at the behest of nazi sympathizers.
Anyway, I have put together a Linktree page that collects all the different social media sites I’m on (as well as contains a 30-day invite link to my Discord channel, which I will not be updating after the time runs out). You can find that here.
As far as the game showcases were concerned: today was better! All of the cringe was concentrated in the PC Gaming Show, which might have been the worst event I’ve seen all week (though like I said yesterday, I am simply not watching the OTK Games Expo). I thought the Xbox showcase was very good, reasonably full of some pretty interesting titles; I enjoyed laughing at Todd Howard attempting to make “NASA-punk” happen; presentation aside, I was excited for quite a few of the games in the PC Gaming Show; and I had a lot of fun watching the Final Fantasy XVI prerelease celebration.
The Xbox Showcase
The long-running meme by people intent on keeping the console wars going is that Xbox has no games, it’s a dying console, and nobody wants to play it. Frankly, it’s silly to even entertain. Remember: Sony and Microsoft are both terribly shitty corporations, and it doesn’t benefit anyone but their bottom line to pretend that one is “better” than the other.
To that end, the video games they showed at the Xbox Games Showcase were pretty neat. I would even go so far as to say I mostly enjoyed the trailers I saw. Considering this is Day Fucking Four of watching trailers, I think that’s high enough praise on its own.
The trailer for South of Midnight checked multiple boxes for me: stop-motion animation, bayou setting, big fucking crossroads devil playing the Delta blues. If even one of these elements ends up in the actual game, Compulsion Games will have grabbed itself a new fan. Hopefully though, this is indicative of the game’s actual art style and vibe. Definitely one to keep an eye on.
If the trailer for Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name got me excited for some good old fashioned Yakuza series brawling, the trailer for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth got me hyped up for the series’s goofy hijinks and gaffes. Ichiban Kasuga waking up on a Hawaiian beach stark naked is not a new gag, but it is extremely funny, and I already want to know more. Give me more, RGG!!
Still Wakes the Deep was the creepiest trailer I’ve seen all week. From The Chinese Room, it looks like a survival horror game set on an oil rig, one of those immediately recognizable yet highly underutilized pieces of industrial machinery. We’ve been to abandoned hospitals in games dozens, hundreds, thousands of times; but the abandoned oil rig is a lot more provocative to my mind. We’re nearly 15 years out from the BP oil spill disaster on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and this is the first game in my memory to actually play with such a cursed space. Maybe I’m making too much hay about this, but I’m actually excited for this game – a feeling I don’t typically get… at all for horror games. Let’s see what happens here.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is a game by the Persona 3 through 5 developers at Studio Zero/Atlus, and I want to see more of it. It looks stylish as all hell, with interesting menus and environments, and it feels as though it might be the first game in this vein to move away from the Shin Megami Tensei brand entirely into its own thing. Of course, that’s all subject to change as the game doesn’t come out for a hot minute. Still though, definitely looking forward to this.
Starfield Direct
Okay, look. Listen. I watched the whole Starfield Direct even though I wasn’t initially going to. I am markedly not interested in this game. But some kind of morbid curiosity gripped me, and so I stayed watching the thing to dunk on with some friends in a group chat. What I saw honestly kind of shocked me.
When it comes to Bethesda games, I expect there to be some overlap in design choices. Characters are going to interact in certain ways reminiscent of Fallout, your level progression is going to be handled in a specific fashion akin to Elder Scrolls, and so on. What I didn’t expect to see in this Direct was how similar Starfield is to games that have come before it.
I harped on this quite a bit on Twitter, but the game looks like it’s directly biting off of games like No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous in terms of its exploration and traversal design. Everything, from jumping between planets to scanning alien flora and fauna and even getting into space battles, had this distinct air of “you have absolutely seen this before.” To be clear, I am not accusing Bethesda of plagiarism here; I’m sure they came up with their own extremely roundabout and bespoke way of getting to the same point. But for a game that is apparently going to change the world in ways we’ve never seen before, it’s shockingly conservative in its design choices.
Going past those moments of clear “wait someone else has already done this!” I thought the brief description of the narrative stakes of the game left a lot to be desired. The factions and your relationship to them appear to be shaping up in ways that are similar to previous Bethesda titles, and the fact that – from what I gather – a lot of moment-to-moment interactions on different planets are simply going to be procedurally generated instead of placed there intentionally has me feeling kind of cold. I think maybe the silliest part of the whole ordeal was watching us go to Alpha Centauri to meet the extremely post-colonial British aristocrat-ass “Constellation” faction.
Are there interesting ideas in Starfield? Maybe. Maybe you get five, ten, fifteen hours in and a little spark of inspiration takes you. I imagine this is what kept people playing Skyrim and Fallout 4 all these years. But nothing I saw in the Direct lit that fire in me.
The PC Gaming Show
…was miserable. Fucking abysmal. The central gag at the core of the show – that host Day9 replaced cohost Frankie with an AI to make money – was fucking old and tired after about 15 minutes, and the show was meant to go on for over two hours. But even if the humor had remained strong, the showcase fucking highlighted a ChatGPT make-your-own-TTRPG abomination. I simply cannot fucking watch this event again.
Anyway, there were games. Here they are.
You already fucking know. You already FUCKING know. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. We are so fucking back!
Similar to the above, I am absolutely over the moon to see more about Nivalis. No word on a release date, but man, I can’t wait.
I didn’t much like Exo One, but this puts that game’s conceit into a much different context. I’m happy to drive a rover over some alien dunes, hell yeah.
There are a lot of beat-em-ups, boomer-shooters, etc. out there, and Mullet Madjack is one of them. I love this goofy bullshit.
Anyway the less said about the PC Gaming Show, the better. No thank you, not next year.
I also watched the Final Fantasy XVI celebration, but all that really did for me was confirm my thought that the game looks great and I can’t wait to play it next year when it comes out on PC.
One more fucking day of this, folks. Just the Ubisoft thing and the Capcom thing left. Hopefully they’re both short.