State of Development

Are We There Yet?

Around ten years ago a Youtuber by the name of Kurt J. Mac began a walk-a-thon for charity.  What made this particular fundraising drive unique was having it take place in Minecraft.  The goal was (and still is) to reach the "Farlands", a strange place that only appears in older beta versions of Minecraft when over 12 million blocks from the initial spawn point.  The terrain there takes on some very strange shapes due to floating point precision errors (caused by mathematical rounding) that result in blocks not aligning the way they normally should.  Of course, nobody has ever been to the Farlands without using hacks/mods because of their extreme distance from where the game begins.  Kurt is the first to make the journey within the limitations set by the game.  

The version of Minecraft Kurt plays is the last beta version of the game to feature the Farlands before they were patched out.  He never plays off-camera so his entire trek has been documented via VODs uploaded to Youtube or (more recently) streamed on Twitch.  Needless to say, it has been quite the trip.  In real life, during the last decade Kurt has moved out-of-state twice and grown an impressive beard.  In-game, he picked up a traveling companion in the form of a domesticated wolf named "Wolfie" and erected a number of monuments to mark his progress.  He has never died, but at one point was knocked down to a half-of-a-heart of health.  Recently, the charity aspect of the journey has been put on pause although it managed to raise over half-a-million USD for children's hospitals and animal shelters.  So why bringing all this up now?

The pace of Kurt's advance has always been best described as "slow, but steady."  However, starting in April 2023 he made a revision to his methods.  In particular, he decided to introduce an initiative in which he would walk 3 minutes for every Twitch subscription (with donations and gifts working similarly).  The result has been a rather explosive boost in forward movement.  It's possible Kurt was hard-up for cash.  He has never been an especially popular online personality.  Nonetheless, he has an annual tradition called "FLoB-a-thon" at the end of which he pushes the "F3" button on his keyboard.  Doing this in Minecraft brings up a debug overlay which shows (among other things) the location of the player's character in terms of XYZ coordinates.  As of May 16th, 2023, he has gone well beyond the halfway mark at just under 7.4 million blocks from spawn.  Even though he has a considerable distance to go, there's a noticeable jitter as a result of the ever-increasing errors that cause the creation of the Farlands.  This block offset grows more extreme at certain intervals, the next of which is at the 8 million mark.  Strange and disorienting as it is to stare at in-game, I highly doubt it will discourage him...after all the name of the series is "Farlands or Bust!"

Endpoint

Well...it looks like Waypoint is soon to be no more, and while I can't say I'm especially upset by the demise of that website, I'm not exactly happy about it either.  For me, Waypoint was very hit or miss.  If they talked about films, books, or games it was enjoyable.  If they talked about pretty much anything else it wasn't.  Even so, I was fond of the crew - Rob, Ren, Cado and Patrick.  They had good chemistry.  It's weirdly paradoxical that as the industry grows, employing people to cover it becomes less and less viable.  Certainly, corporations have shown that they lack flexibility and even the biggest such as IGN have to let most titles slip past.  In turn, this means niche streamers and Youtube channels are the only places that pay all but the biggest games any heed.  

There's an old song that goes "Video killed the radio star."  Maybe there needs to be a new song that goes "Internet killed the journalist."  I'm not sure games journalism ever really existed.  There's an argument to made that it was always just a mix of amatures and enthusiast press.  If there ever was a game journalist it would have to be Jason Schreier.  Incidentally, if ever there was a games newscaster it would have to be Yong Yea.  Regardless of all that, there's an unfortunate trend in the industry to favor the cult-of-personality approach.  More specifically, people who are often sustained by Patreon and labeled with nauseating terms like "influencer" or "content creator".  That's not to imply these people are universally bad, it's just there's a sever lack of quality control going on.  Trying to filter through all the low-effort garbage in order to find something worth while is a tedious process to put it lightly.  Case-in-point, I've been browsing various gaming podcasts for interesting topics or themes.  So far all of the ones I've bothered listening to though have suffered from abysmal audio for one or more of the people speaking.  I guess if all you need is something to throw on in the background while you do other stuff it's fine, but aside from a handful of underrated Youtube channels I'm subscribed to (that produce a slow drip-feed of quality content) it feels like there's a whole lot of wasted bandwidth out there - doubly so when everyone is uploading their playthrough of whatever the hot new release of the month is.  At least guys like CJUGames and Splattercat dedicate their time to giving indie titles a moment in the spotlight.  As for Waypoint...I hope the crew find new opportunities worthy of their talents.  Beyond that, I don't have a whole lot else to say about them.

2 Compared to 4

Out of curiosity, I went back and replayed the remake of Resident Evil 2 (first and second run, starting with Leon and ending with Claire).  Keep in mind this was only a few days after I finished three complete playthroughs of the Resident Evil 4 remake. So, there are some thoughts and comparisons I'd like to make while both games are fresh in my mind.

Right off the bat, the zombies in RE2 remake are kind of startling and hilarious at the same time.  They tend to pretend to be dead only to spring to life with a loud shriek or angry groan when the player draws close.  This sometimes leads to situations that can be summarized as follows:

Uhhhhh...

Blam! Blam! Blam!

Urrrrr...THUD!

Got'em

Gruuuuh...

Nope.  He's up again.

Blam! Blam! 

Gahhhh...THUMP!

OK, now it's safe to -

Raaaah...!

What the hell?!?

I'm paraphrasing a bit, but you get the idea.  It's all very unlike the people infected with "Las Plagas," who are always active and will only occasionally make an abrupt recovery from what seemed like a deathblow.  Zombies in RE2 remake are trying to fake out the player left and right.  Other than zombies trying to pull a fast one on the player, there are the "Lickers".  They occupy a role similar to "Hunters" in the first and third games, as well as "Garradors" in the fourth.  Supposedly, Lickers are what zombies become if they eat a whole lot, but if you ask me they're really just xenomorphs without skin or a tail.  Did you notice their ability to walk on walls and the celling (as well as their ability to perform a deadly tongue attack)?  Did I mention they hiss like aliens?  As loath as I am to admit it, it took me a really long time to figure out that you can bypass some fights with these guys just by carefully walking around them.  The lack of eyes means only the sounds of running or gunshots are enough to get their attention.  

While we're on the topic of similarities to the film Aliens, there are chest-bursting embryos and a Ripley/Newt relationship reflected in the interactions between Claire and Sherry.  Incidentally, the Ada and Sherry interludes in the RE2 remake are not very good.  They're short, thankfully, but require a far too stringent set of actions on the player's part to clear successfully.  In the original, not to mention RE4, the player has a bit more flexibility in terms of how they can overcome the obstacles that they are presented with.

I've heard people claim that the boss battles in Resident Evil games aren't very good.  I don't think they are especially great either, but they do serve as a chance to cathartically open up with all that weaponry and ammo that the player has (hopefully) been painstakingly hording up to that point (see the encounters with mutated versions of William Birkin for numerous examples).  For some reason the battle with him that happens right after obtaining a G-virus sample/cure always cracks me up because at the start of the fight he does this flexing gesture that seems to say "check out these big new claws I got!"  For better or worse, RE4 remake doesn't have anything as showy for its bosses.  In fact, the performances for the cast of characters (across the board) is more subdued too.  Actually, I take that back.  "Subdued" isn't the right word..."subtle" is how I think it is best described.  It's not a bad thing, but defiantly a direction the series has drifted in over time.

Anyway, those are just some random Resident Evil thoughts I wanted to share.  Until the next one.

Tokyo Sandbox 2023

Sorry to be a bit late on this, but back in April (the 15th of that month to be exact) I had a chance to stop by the Tokyo Sandbox event in Akihabara.  It wasn't a major gathering when compared to the likes of GDC or PAX.  Nonetheless, there were a lot of interesting indie games being showcased.  I was also impressed with the variety of people in attendance.  There were of course a few "otaku", but also several women game developers (one of which was a mother), a couple of fine folks from the U.K. and even one from Germany.  Obviously, it was a bilingual smorgasbord of English and Japanese.  Anyway...about the games themselves.

Rat Cage is a 3D platformer wherein you play as (you guessed it) a rat.  Not an anthropomorphic rat, just a plain old rat.  As far as I could tell, the goal was to escape from a laboratory.  Sadly,  some major screen tearing issues kept in from being fully playable, but I suspect it's a problem that the developer will remedy in due time.  Someone mention this to Grim Beard of Youtube fame.  I'm sure he'll like it for the premise if nothing else.

For fans of J-horror, there's Crimson Moon by Spear Soft.  It's set to release this autumn and appears to be about the classic premise of two students (a boy and girl) trapped in a haunted school.  The game seems very story-driven, but also has some RPG mechanics baked in.  Additionally, one of the developers is a tall pale Japanese woman who (at the time) was wearing a long black and red dress.  Maybe she's a vampire?...I kid, I kid.

Two games, I want to mention solely because of their art style are Thunder of the Demon King by teamHOLIDAY and LO-FI ROOM by Bearmask.  I didn't have much time to look at them in detail, but the former had a really good choice of contrasting colors while the latter featured a lot of painstakingly hand-drawn original art that only after the fact had been scanned into a digital environment.  

On a funny note, there was Scared Little Ghost - a game in which the player takes the role of a ghost that must avoid being photographed by a bunch of smartphone wielding poltergeist hunters.  The twist here being, the ghost is, contrary to expectations, afraid of the dark.  It's a stealth game first and foremost, but based on the gameplay I saw the player-controlled ghost eventually unlocks the ability to sneak up on and scare away its harassers...so, your not completely defenseless.

As an avid player of strategy games, I was excited to see Athena Crisis.  It's a bit like Advanced Wars or Hybrid Front, but with a few interesting innovations.  One thing in particular that stood out to me is the lack of cutscene transitions whenever two units engage each other in combat.  Instead, the game handles the battle with animations happening on the strategic map.  That might not sound especially noteworthy, but it does a lot to improve pacing while retaining enough visual flare to avoid turning the game into a spreadsheet simulator.

The last game, I want to highlight is I am Yours.  It's a very simple game that harkens back to the days of point-and-click adventure games like the Déjà Vu duology or Scratches.  It's also a very personal story about an old man who has to move to a new home and, in the process, decide what to take with him and what to leave behind.  You aren't going to save the kingdom or conquer the world in this one, but it might give you a new perspective on life and the things you've acquired over the course of it thus far.

There are many more games I could mention, but these are the ones that stood out to me most.  Thankfully, you don't have to be restricted by my personal tastes because all the games that were there have trailers and (in some cases their own) websites the links to which can be found by scrolling down toward the bottom of the page found here.  As for me, I'll be revisiting a few of these titles when they get closer to completion.