A demo for Dante’s Inferno was released on the Playstation Network about two weeks ago, with XBox 360 fans seeing the release this Friday. Like other people out there, I was pretty curious as to how the hell the first portion of the Divine Comedy was going to be adapted into a straight up video game. I mean, it doesn’t exactly lend itself for video game fodder. Then again, Electronic Arts isn’t producing a faithful adaptation of the game: it’s effectively a God of War ripoff: angry male faces off against a deity (Ares in God of War, Satan in Dante’s Inferno) to win back his love. Generic character has ridiculous weapon and magical abilities. Yeah, I mean, I’ve only read the Penguin Classics translated version of The Divine Comedy so there may be something lost in the translation, but I am pretty sure that Dante never wielded a gigantic feck-off scythe. I’m also pretty sure that Beatrice, the woman whom the real Dante Alighieri pined over, didn’t have the body of a stripper, complete with massive D cups.

That said, who cares if the video game companies take creative license with things? There’s money to be made and boobs to animate. We can’t let silly things like ‘respect for the classics’ get in the way of things! After all, Hollywood’s been doing it for years so why not the gaming industry?

Exactly. So, here are some potential candidates for the next Classic that could be remade into video games! To any of my former professors who may have accidentally stumbled across this: I am so very sorry.

I’ll be honest: newspapers aren’t really my main source of information, what with this newfangled ‘World Wide Web’ thing that more and more people are flocking to every day. That said, despite my best efforts, I can’t always be plugged in, so there will be times when picking up a newspaper will be the prudent thing to do. Occasionally, I’ll head over to a restaurant and flip through a paper while having a bite to eat. There’s a 24/7 diner just up the road from where I live. It totally has that retro 1950s vibe going on, which is cool.

Anyway, recently this week I’ve been on a bit of a breakfast kick. I’m in the process of moving so I don’t have much in the way of cookable food left at my current place, so I’ve had to venture outdoors to get my nosh. This previous week was E3, the gaming industry’s mega-conference where all sorts of new games and information is unveiled. I kept up to date regarding E3 through the Internet, meaning I wasn’t exactly turning to print media for my information, so I was a little surprised when I saw that the Toronto Star gave E3 the front page treatment in their Entertainment section. I thought, ‘oh, cool’, ferreted that information away and went on reading the paper.

Anyway, Sunday morning rolled around and I headed back to the diner for some breakfast, this time picking up a copy of the Saturday Sun to amuse myself with. Flipping through Peter Worthington’s deranged, thinly veiled racist diatribes, I came across this little gem in the Editorial section from columnist Lorrie Goldstein, essentially bemoaning the fact that the Ryerson Review of Journalism, a student run publication from journalism students at Ryerson University, ignored the Sun and columnist Steve Tilley when writing a feature on video games and their coverage in Canadian print media.

Goldstein goes on to talk about how Tilley does a Really Good feature once a week on video games that is featured as a supplement in the Sunday Sun. He mentions that Tilley has ‘has the biggest journalistic footprint of anyone covering the beat in this country’, a claim that is seemingly only supported by the fact that Sun Media is Canada’s largest newspaper chain. Unfortunately, distribution doesn’t necessarily equate to significance in my books. Prior to reading this editorial, I had literally zero idea who Steve Tilley is, and I consider myself to be a fairly ‘in the know’ gamer. I imagine that if I were to poll other gamers asking them who Steve Tilley is, I’d receive similar responses.

What I find problematic with this editorial, though, is that this was a thinly disguised attempt to bitch about Ryerson and their dismissive attitude towards Sun Media…an attitude which I can’t necessarily fault them for doing so, as the Sun ranks roughly right above the National Enquirer in terms of journalistic ‘quality.’ They’re a tabloid newspaper and employ sports writers such as Bruce Garrioch (whose credibility and knowledge covering the NHL beat rivals only the punchline known as Eklund as being one of the worst voices in sports), Steve Simmons (whatever happened to him, anyway, or Mats Sundin’s career ending hip injury?) and Eric Francis (the epitome of a fair-weather, know-nothing fan whose claim to fame comes from having a famous mommy who was able to pull some strings for him.) Honestly, a cursory look at the Load This games page that the Sun runs, as well as Tilley’s own articles, show him to be nothing more than a glorified reviewer and fluffer. Honestly, I don’t get what Goldstein’s complaints are, beyond the fact that the Sun doesn’t get much respect…

“This is typical of Ryerson’s journalism program — and I don’t blame the students, but the faculty — which has a long, culturally inbred history of repeatedly dismissing or slagging Sun Media, a foolish disservice to their students.”

Oh. Well, I guess that sums it up. Unfortunately, Goldstein completely misses the point of the article he’s being critical of, even when he’s gone so far as to speak with Prof. Lynn Cunningham, the faculty advisor for the Review. She points out that “she would have mentioned Sun Media, but only briefly, since Tilley does game reviews, whereas the article was mainly about the media’s lack of social commentary on the industry — something akin to the film criticism of Pauline Kael, the late, legendary movie reviewer for The New Yorker magazine.”

Which is the point. It’s wonderful that Tilley is a part of the Sun Media empire and writes lots and lots of words for reviews of games, but that’s not what the Review was going for. Hell, Tilley’s own bio states that he ‘actually gets paid to play video games on cutting-edge HDTVs.’ So, yeah, I could see why there’d be little interest in someone who is trumpeted as being nothing more than a fucking reviewer.

Video games are becoming more and more mainstream and they are becoming more accepted in our society. Being able to have writers who are capable of providing valid, mature and well-reasoned criticism, debate and discussion of the industry as a whole is important and is something that could appeal to video gamers who, believe it or not, are not just 15 year old slackers. If books, television, movies, comic books (sorry, SEQUENTIAL ART) can be treated with seriousness and maturity, why then is it so hard to do with video games? Sorry, Goldstein, but Steve Tilley embodies what is wrong with video game journalism, not what is right and your editorial shows that mainstream journalism’s attitudes about gaming and gaming culture aren’t going to be changing anytime soon.

Moving away from hockey, I found some interesting news regarding a Chrono Trigger ROM hack that was providing a ’sequel’ of sorts to the classic SNES game. Predictably, Square-Enix issued forth a cease and desist on this group. The real kick in the nuts, though, comes from the fact that this group had about 98% completed this ROM hack before SE decided to descend upon them and give them hell.

A lot of folks are pissed off at SE for doing this, claiming it was a scummy move and so on and so forth. Well, yes, it is a bit of a scummy move, but it’s one of those things that needs to be done if Square wants to protect their intellectual property. Some people might scoff and go ‘Well, it’s just a fan made game, nobody’s getting hurt over it and blahblahblah.’ While that’s probably true, it does set an ugly precedent and it would make it harder if someone else came along and decided that there was profit to be made in meticulously remade fanfiction using existing ROM files. The whole 98% thing, to me, is getting thrown around way too much, as well, as it seems to be nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence than anything else.

Here are some unfortunate truths for people out there who are wanting to get their hate on for SE:

1, They have had a history of stopping fan projects before. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the aborted 3D remake of Chrono Trigger. Square jumped all over that quickly and nipped it in the bud. For the people who have been a part of the Crimson Echo project to openly advertise and promote their project before it was done, knowing that SE has stopped fan projects in the past is either naive or ignorant.

2, A sequel to Chrono Trigger hasn’t been made because the original creators aren’t all involved. Despite everyone screaming bloody murder at SE and going ‘OMG WHY WON’T U MAEK GAEM’ as a justification for a lack of a sequel, SE is instead showing consideration for their fans by NOT making a sequel to the game that doesn’t involve people who were originally affiliated with it. This is part of the reason why I find this whole thing to be hilarious: rabid fanboys think they know more/better than the original developers/designers of the games and are arrogant enough to go where the Big Bad Evil Company are loathe to. Yet people are angry at SE for being ‘money grubbing bastards.’ Oookay.

3, The ’shittiness’ of current SE games is YOUR fault. Yes, YOU. Okay, maybe not you specifically, but you catch my drift, yes? While there are tons of people out there who either love or hate Final Fantasy 7 and the subsequent trends that they created in JRPGs, often pointing to this guy:

As the source of Final Fantasy’s ills. For many fans, Sephiroth represented a lot of what went ‘wrong’ with the Final Fantasy series: vaguely effeminate, ‘badass’ character  with an absolutely mindboggling past that led to a plot that didn’t make a lot of sense. The black trenchcoat and katana also led to a more ‘contemporary’ look in character design and, blah, blah, blah. I’m not repeating anything that hasn’t been said before. While that’s all fine and good and nerds will either rage or love Sephiroth in entirely inappropriate and disturbing ways, I’d argue that Sephiroth wasn’t the root cause of all the bullshit that clogged up the pipes of the Final Fantasy series (and even I would argue that ‘blaming’ anyone or anything as a specific cause would be reaching…why I am writing this, then, I have no fucking clue.) No, the blame should land at the feet of THIS guy:

Big weapon, silly hair and the same sort of nonsensical backstory that you got with Sephiroth and whom also has a ridiculously huge cult following, just like Sephiroth. While there have been no cults forming in honor of Magus, there were a group of people who devoted five years of their life in making a game in which Magus plays a central part, if what I’ve viewed from the 15 or so videos already up on YouTube are anything to go by.

And this is what I find the most insane of all of this: you have a group of people who have an obvious passion for something and, more importantly, the ability and desire to create something. Why didn’t they make their own game instead of penning what basically equates to a bunch of electronic fanfiction? And why did it have to be a game where the company in question has a known history for striking down such work?

I have little sympathy for these guys, as they were obviously begging for SE to come and take them down a notch or two.

Recap: So, this is going to be a relatively small update. I didn’t want my first post to be incredibly long, so I had to split up Curtis’ exploration of the town into 2 pieces. There’s not much going on at the moment, as everything mostly consists of just talking to people. Curtis has already explored half the town and is going to check out the rest of Spielburg. Will the rest of the town’s inhabitants be as elderly, rude or unhygenic as the ones Curtis has already encountered? Let’s find out!

Part 1: Introduction, Back To The Front, You Will Do What I Say, When I Say

Okay, call me a purist. Or a dork, I don’t really care which epithet you wish to throw my way. I refuse to acknowledge the Sierra Hero’s Quest games by their ‘Quest for Glory’ moniker simply because, hey, I grew up playing Hero’s Quest, dammit, not Quest for Glory.

Welcome to the first instalment of the LP for arguably the best Sierra adventure game produced: Hero’s Quest 1: So You Want To Be A Hero? I know that there are several LPs already done of the Quest for Glory series, so this isn’t necessarily being done to shed a ton of light onto a game that folks don’t know a whole lot about. HQ1 is a game that I’m really comfortable with, having played it to death growing up, so I think it’d be a good game to pop my LP cherry on, and it will allow me to spend time trying to make this LP entertaining, rather than going over everything in the game in detail.

So, I made mention I was going to talk about some books, and I thought that with my last post, talking about how video games have been changing over the years, I’d go with an author who just recently jumped back into my mind.

I caught an appearance from Steven Johnson on The Colbert Report about 2 years ago when he was plugging his book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, a short, interesting piece talking about how new media, particularly television and video games, has been evolving since their inception. It’s wonderfully written and has what I find to be some solid reasoning and analysis to support his claims, although it is a little short on actual hard data, a lack of which is disappointing, as it would have made his arguments far more compelling. As it is, the book is more theory than actual hard data, sort of like a Malcolm Gladwell book without the use of studies done by psychologists, doctors, etc. I particularly liked the comparisons he did with shows from the 70s and the Sopranos, as well as his analysis of the early Zelda games with more recent one, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Johnson’s case is pretty much that the stuff that teachers, politicians and parents are worrying about ‘rotting’ the minds of the youth of today are actually doing the exact opposite, as television and video games are creating a kind of thinker that is different from ones that had existed before and is developing different thinking and learning skills. To go back to the Sopranos example, Johnson illustrates how abstract and sophisticated modern television has become, using the various plotlines, larger casts and (occasionally) abstract ideas and symbolism that is used when compared to the fairly linear television that existed in the 70s. From there, he goes on to show how modern media results in users who have to track numerous points of data and, essentially, multitask. What some people may qualify as ADD could in fact simply be an intensive form of time micro-management.

Johnson does the same thing with video games, talking about how games have become more and more multi-faceted since the early days of Pong. This is one of the reasons why I’m not convinced that games are becoming more and more ‘dumbed down’ as time goes on, as they are becoming far more intellectually intensive for folks, as there are far more things to track and take care of. I’m not going to resummarize all of his arguments, but his hypothetical argument that reverses the roles of books and video games was pretty funny, if not more than a little hyperbolic.

I should also point out that while Johnson provides examples of how things have changed, he is not trying to make blanket statements about pop culture and that folks are not instantly becoming smarter just because they watch The Apprentice over Wheel of Fortune, or that you are going to go from being a C+ student to an A student if you play a few more hours of World of Warcraft every week. Although Johnson doesn’t go into this, I’d like to think that people are like raw resources, and media and our interactions with said media, are a sort of refining of those raw resources. The issue is where those resources are used. To use a brain as oil analogy, imagine if your brain does the equivalent of a rocket ship going to colonize Mars, which is infinitely more valuable than, say, using the same resources to do doughnuts in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

I know I sound like one of those web 2.0 dipshits, a wide eyed snake oil optimist going on and on about how the sky is the limit with the World Wide Web, lawl, but I really do think that video games, television and other kinds of media are great at developing well rounded thinkers, it is simply up to educators and parents to tap into and utilize those thinking skills, along with the ones that are traditionally cultivated and developed, to ensure that students are realizing their full potential.

Anyway, enough rambling on about this particular book. I highly recommend picking it up and seeing what Johnson has to say. However, if reading about television or video games sounds like a dreary task for you, there are other works by Johnson that are equally interesting, one of which I’ve read.

The Ghost Map is an historical recount of the cholera epidemic that hit London in the mid 1800s and is a wonderfully researched affair. Johnson delves deep into the cause of the cholera epidemic, examining faulty infrastructure, popular opinion and environmental factors that led to a ‘perfect storm’ for cholera to thrive. He also looks into how medical minds of the time were able to figure out where the outbreak originated from and move away from the ‘miasma’ theory of disease, a revolutionary concept that helped to further our medical knowledge. Great stuff.

His most recent book, The Invention of Air, came out at the tail end of last year, and is another historical read, looking at Joseph Priestly, an exiled English scientist who fled to America, and the role he played in influencing the founding fathers. This is the book of his I have not yet read, but am quite keen on checking out. Based on his prior works, I should have nothing to worry about!

—

Unrelated, but a funny sidenote: My first rant about Dumb Decision Designs was centered around the silliness of fighting games forcing characters to unlock half the roster before they get all the characters. While my post was centered around Street Fighter IV, there are other games out there that were worse offenders, such as Marvel vs. Capcom 2, a game which has a total roster of 56 characters, but (I could be wrong here, my memory sucks) only had about half that available, forcing you to unlock new characters.

Well, Capcom announced on Monday that there’s going to be a port of MvC2 onto the PS3 and 360, but with the entire roster already unlocked. Woo hoo! See? Not all gaming companies hate you!

Part 2. Time to rant about people ranting about video games. Woop woop. There’s a TL;DR at the bottom, by the way.

So, this:

Has been pissing off quite a few people as of late, for a variety of reasons, the least of which is, arguably, that it’s a horrible fucking show, at least in execution. In concept? Maybe not so much. I don’t know. At the very least, people seem to forget that there are people out there who will watch gamers. Particularly over in Korea and with Starcraft.

Anyway, this wonderful show has been leading to a ton of people to stand up on their soapboxes and loudly bitch about how ‘The Man’ is exploiting gamer culture. Case in point. To which I have to say…what?

Okay, so it is fashionable to be a ‘gamer’ now, apparently. Video games are ‘cool’ and you’re no longer shunned for liking them. Err, well, yeah. That’s been the case for pretty much the entire time I have been ALIVE. Oh, but we’re talking about HARDCORE gamers, the ones who eat, sleep, breathe video games. The ones who will PLAY ALL NIGHT. Right, I don’t for the life of me understand why this sort of behavior would be looked down upon.

Look, I’m not mocking someone for having their own hobbies or interests…you could bring up crazy ass sports fans who wear thongs in -30 weather, slathered in body paint. Or music fans who follow artists around while they tour. I knew a girl who used to do that with a couple of bands. There’s nothing wrong with going to extremes, like camping out or whatever. People should be allowed to enjoy whatever the hell it is they enjoy (within reason.) But to get hyper defensive because other people are encroaching on your turf?

Seriously? Who the fuck cares. The crazy ass football fan isn’t going to get mad because other people like the Minnesota Vikings. I cannot think of a person alive who would not be THRILLED at getting someone else into a band that they adore. So why the problem with games? People act like this is the first time that “TEH MAN” has tried to encroach on their electronic fiefdom. Well, not exactly. You could point to Fred Savage’s lovely cinematic masterpiece The Wizard for proof of their attempts at trying to make gaming go ‘mainstream.’

Note to Ramsoomair: games have always been marketable and, more often than not, they’ve generally sucked when attempts are made at trying to appeal to the mainstream. As much as you may want games to serve as your own personal pleasure dome, they’re interested in making money.

Which goes to the second point most folks go on about when they talk about television shows like The Ultimate Gamer, and that’s how it is clearly pandering to the ‘casual gamer’ demographic. You know the type, ‘idiots’ who like World of Warcraft, the Wii or, gasp, play Bejeweled. These people are clearly ruining games, because games nowadays are complete and utter shit, right?

Well, no.

Games have always been shite. There has always been a healthy dose of crap out there. For every classic like Mega Man or Super Mario Bros. 3, there are horrible, horrible games like Bart vs. The Space Mutants. Or you get absurdist consoles like the headache inducing piece of crap known as the Virtua Boy. The oversaturation of video games was one of the main reasons the entire market crashed back in the 80s: the number of shit games vastly outnumbered the ‘good’ ones.

Yet people want to act as though there were never any horrible games released ‘back then’ and everyone got to enjoy some sort of magical gaming wonderland. I use the term back then in quotation marks because, really, the goalposts get moved to a certain period depending on who you talk to, which is what makes this all the more hilarious to me.

Take one of the sacred cows for gamers, Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64. That, along with Starfox and Mario Kart 64, constituted a good chunk of my time spent on the 64 back in the day. It was fun as hell to play, especially with friends.

Fast forward a few years and you have Halo, a game that gets a lot of hate from gamers because it apparently appeals to the date-rape frat boy crowd and I honestly can’t sort out how Goldeneye is superior to Halo, once you move past from the personal attachment folks have, which is really all this is boiling down to: Scott R becoming the old man, yelling at the kids to get the hell off of his lawn. Why, back in my day…

You’d think folks would be happy that gaming is becoming more and more popular. To go back to my music analogy, I don’t know why people are getting mad over the fact that video games are more mainstream than ever before. It’s common ground you can share with other people, isn’t that a good thing? Who cares if someone got their start through Peggle or the Wii or whatever, you get to play gatekeeper and open other people’s eyes to the truly great games. Why bitch about something like that?

TL;DR: There has always been a glut of shit games out there, with the few rare good ones buried deep. Gaming companies have always tried to ‘cash in’ and market games to the ‘mainstream.’ The Ultimate Gamer is a stupid show because it is crap television, not because gamers are being romanticized. Scott R not only made a poor webcomic that screwed up Colbert’s The Word segment, but he, and people like him, are getting bent out of shape over something that should be seen as a good thing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go watch old Video Power episodes on YouTube:

Okay, welcome to my second iteration of Dumb Video Game Design Decisions. I gotta give thanks to my little brother, Mikey. He caught my post where I was talking about having the PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics and he helped a brother out, hooking me up with a PSP. So…thanks!

That said, I have had some time to sit down and play around with Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, a game that was ported over from the Playstation and onto the PSP. For those who aren’t familiar with FFT, it fits into the FF family on the same branch as Chocobo Racing and Dirge of Cerebeus: games that deviate quite strongly from the JRPG formula that the Final Fantasy Series is known for. Tactics, as the name suggests, is a tactical RPG. You build a small army, using the FF job system to give them new abilities and access to different kinds of equipment. It’s very similar to Tactics Ogre, another tactical RPG, which isn’t a coincidence, given that both games had the same development team.

Like most remakes these days, War of the Lions has a bunch of new features and I have to say that unlike other remakes, WotL actually does have a bunch of new features thrown in, moreso than some other remakes, such as Chrono Trigger for the DS, or the Gameboy Advance remakes of Final Fantasy IV and VI, which basically had bonus dungeons thrown in at the end, like some sort of weird afterthought. There’s some nice stuff thrown in: fully animated cutscenes done in the game’s original art style, several new characters and 2 new job classes. There’s also some additional quests you can go through in the game, as well as some new battles involving Delita (who didn’t have as much of a role in the original game, despite him being one of the major players.) Although there were some minor complaints, such as the lag with some abilities, it’s not huge enough that it dampers my spirits.

For the most part, it’s a good game and it was a fun distraction going through and playing through Ivalice again. I know, big surprise that a self-professed FF geek is going to like an FF game. However, there is one pretty significant beef I have with the game and the decisions Square-Enix decided to make with War of the Lions. Specifically, the multiplayer features. There are two types of multiplayer available in War of the Lions: Melee, which is a sort of PvP option, where you can fight your party against other player’s parties, and the Rendezvous mode, which is basically a Co-Op mode that has all sorts of weird and wonderful battles. Oh, also, there’s tons of new gear, some of which is incredibly useful for the 2 new Job Classes that are available that can only be obtained in these 2 multiplayer modes.

See, this is a trend that is becoming ridiculously annoying with games nowadays: a focus on multiplayer functions, even if it’s not needed or necessary. More than that, though, is the insistance of tossing multiplayer features into games in a completely slipshod and random fashion. I don’t get it. More to the point, I do not understand why Square decided to shoehorn a multiplayer feature into a game that is a SINGLE PLAYER GAME. It’s like fireproofing the hull of a submarine: sure, it is a beneficial feature, but the practicality of said feature is questionable at the very best.

What I’m specifically talking about with WotL is the local multiplayer option that is available. Actually, I shouldn’t say option, as it is the ONLY way you can use the multiplayer mode in this game. There’s no official way to play this game say, online. I say official, as there are ways out there to jury rig your PSP to play with other people online, but this requires more work and you having to then find people who own a copy of the game and have gone through the same efforts as you have, which is a frustrating endeavor for the sake of simply enjoying the new content that comes with the game, a fact made all the more frustrating as the other new fights and battles that are in the Story version of the game aren’t anything particularly special. The Delita battles I mentioned earlier? Delita is specially equipped to pwn the characters you face, meaning they end inside of a minute of starting. That said, the lion’s share of the new fights are in the multiplayer mode…and they’re also the most challenging and interesting content thrown into the game.

As a sidenote, I’d like to also issue a hearty fuck you to the spectacular bastard who thought it’d be a great idea require you to finish the game in order to fully unlock all the missions available in multiplayer. For the unitiated, the final portion of the game is a sequence of battles at Orbonne Monastery that prompts you to save before continuing onwards. The game prompts you to save right before you go into these series of battles and most experienced players will NOT save the game before going on to finish the game, as there is no way to get out of these fights once you’re locked in. Basically, if you save at that point, that’s all you’re going to be able to do with your savefile.

However, the multiplayer works on a tiered system: as you progress through the game and plod through the storyline more multiplayer missions will become unlocked for you. In order to unlock the last set of missions in the game, you have to finish the game, creating a ‘Clear Game Save’ on your save file. However, to continue with the mindfuckery, you have to have not saved your game once you’ve started these battles. If you have, you’re screwed, as the game doesn’t bump you back to the world map once you’ve cleared the game, unlike virtually every other game I’ve played that unlocks new content once you’ve finished the game. It’s like Square is actively TRYING to keep you from experiencing this new content by trying to construct as many hurdles as possible.

So, again, in order to play the full multiplayer features in this game you have to:

• Own a copy of the game (DUH)
• Know someone else who owns a copy of the game who lives close enough to you so that you can set up a LAN game
• Not save your game before fighting the final boss

Why would you lock out this content for what is admittedly a rather niche game? Why would you not provide an easier method of allowing users to use the multiplayer feature you provided? I honestly don’t get it.

And okay, maybe this is something that is huge over in Japan, and there are hordes of Final Fantasy Tactics fans that congregate at Final Fantasy Tactics Meetings and have tournaments and so on and so forth. Maybe I, the ungrateful gaijin, should just shut his cracker mouth and be satisfied that Square was able to port over a non-FF7 related game without laming it up too much. To that, I have to say fuck off. Final Fantasy Tactics was a cult hit on both sides of the pond and it wouldn’t have been impossible to have made the Rendezvous crap available in single player mode. I mean, fuck, they provided VOICE ACTING for the North American localization, something which didn’t happen for the Japanese version. Clearly, Square was willing to spend money on this game, so why not spend a few more dollars and make the game playable online (making it easier for people who live in Podunk, Alabama, say) or simply make the multiplayer features accessible to single players as well?

Long story short? Don’t fucking try to cram multiplayer features (or other, similarly needless features) into games that REALLY don’t need them. And if you must insist on such a course of action, make them as accessible as possible. From a marketing perspective, I can see why it’s supercoolawesome to have a laundry list of ‘features’ for the game to slap onto the back of the box, but at least make them features that people are going to be genuinely interested in.

Okay, so this will hopefully be the last post talking about GU Comics for a while now. To recap, I gave a bit of a history lesson regarding GU and some of the problems plaguing the comic that, in my eyes, make it look unprofessional, lame and unfunny for someone whose primary job is to be working on the comic. I talked about how artwork has been recycled repeatedly, the reliance on guest strips in lieu of his own content and lazy-ass comics that feature literally no artwork or show that the cartoonist is too damned lazy to actually do his job. There’s more to it, though, that rankles me with regards to GU and its owner, so, let’s get into it, shall we?

To add to the problems with the comic itself, there’s Woody’s Garfield-esque tendency to overuse jokes in lieu of providing actual content. To use video game parlance, it’s the equivalent of a palette swap. That example? Not the only time it has happened, as it should be painfully obvious that he loves going to the well again and again. The sad thing is that I haven’t even touched on one of Woody’s favorite old standbys: the game zapper. A quick search shows that he’s made over 50 comics referencing “TEH ZAPPER”, with a good chunk of them being in the last couple of years. Another quick look shows that, over the course of 2008, guest strips, ‘poopy’ strips and zapper comics made up 12% of the GU’s content. That’s not including comics that were ‘written’ by someone else, strips that used recycled gags or artwork or were just speech bubbles with zero artwork.

Can I repeat that one more time? For a full calendar year of updates, GU Comics consisted of, at most, 88% original content. Again, not factoring in comics with recycled artwork or recycled gags. I’d imagine if one were to go through and catalogue all of that, that number could be brought down to roughly 75%, if not more so. I don’t have the time to pour through a year’s worth of comics, though, so bugger that.

And this is someone’s full time JOB? Amazing.

Yes, out come the knives. Speaking of original content, why is it that Woody loves drawing characters as though they are fans of the Rock? This is a silly criticism, perhaps, but it again indicates just how lazy Woody is when it comes to his artwork. Much like how Buckley’s artwork over at CAD consists of a vacant stare with a half opened mouth, Woody’s default facial expression for characters consists of pursed lips and a raised eyebrow. Once you see it, it is everywhere. What was that I saw in the last 3 strips? Gee, it looks like more recycled artwork.

Let’s stay focused on those last three strips for a second. Woody has come across as a prude more often than not, not wanting to use foul language and keep a ‘PG-13′ rating for his strip. He’s also highly sensitive about stereotypes, at least, when it concerns him. Yet it doesn’t stop him from making a cocked eyebrow strip using foul language or using prostitution as punchlines to his jokes. Look, I have no problem with wanting to have a ‘PG-13′ strip if that is what you want to be doing, but if you’re going to bitch about how ‘rednecks’ are portrayed or get on your moral high horse and look down upon people who are media pirates, you shouldn’t be using demeaning, dehumanizing treatment of women as a source of humour in your comic strip.

That’s not the least of the depths of Woody’s hypocrisy, though. While he himself hates being characterized as a redneck, because he grew up in the south, it doesn’t stop him from taking potshots at people who really don’t deserve it. Nice incredibly thinly veiled ‘censoring’ there, too. How risque! Let’s take a crack at someone who took the time to speak about a project they are working on and bash him because, I don’t know, Uwe Boll is a horrible director or something. Wonderful. But let’s also talk about how ‘great’ the film about Watchmen is while admitting you haven’t seen the original source material.

Does anyone else see the complete hypocrisy going on here?

It gets better, though. Woody HATES being criticized. The post I just linked is attached to the comic that I posted up above. The comic would have been funny enough and shown that Woody doesn’t let what anonymous people on the Internet have to say about his comic get to him. The subsequent rant where he runs down Wikipedia saying he doesn’t ‘like’ it (why, because they didn’t ‘check their sources’ like he whined about in his post?) and then runs down the vandal who made the original changes just screams insecurity and bitterness. Especially since this isn’t the only instance where this has happened. The rant that’s attached to that comic in particular (scroll down) starts off with praise, trying to show that, yeah, Woody’s not bothered by the comic, before going into a totally unfunny passive-aggressive rant against Yahtzee.

I guess Woody didn’t get the memo that Yahztee had his own webcomic, thus making his self-cognizant, self-depreciating stabs in his original rant all the more barbed? Okay, okay, enough mocking Woody’s own passive aggressive responses to criticism.

And all this from someone who makes a living from criticizing and making fun of developers, gamers and pop culture in general.

It gets worse, though. Make any sort of comment that gaming could have a negative connotation to some people and Woody’ll be there, histrionics at the ready. Don’t believe me? Here’s another cocked eyebrow strip with Woody working himself into a frothing rage over someone daring to insinuate that World of Warcraft has addictive qualities, a rage that’ll occur anytime someone speaks ill of gaming in general. If one were to speculate, I’d daresay that he’s taking such comments about gaming personally, which either speaks of a guilty conscience or…insecurities of some kind or another! It would help to explain why he decided to make fun of Yahtzee when his comic was blatantly targeting CAD in particular and not webcomics in general. You know, outside of trying to hitch his wagon to people who are actually funny.

Here’s another example of ANOTHER popular (and funny) gaming critic saying nothing about Woody or GU Comics, yet Woody still somehow takes it personally. Again, he goes on to say that ‘oh, no, I know he’s not talking about ME’ but then goes on to personalize it at the very end ‘we’re not all bad.’ Make up your fucking mind, alright?

Of note is the line “I don’t use a lot of symbolism or visual metaphors but I use my comics to poke at the very industry that supports me.” Yeah, continually using a bug zapper or representing gaming companies as pieces of paper aren’t modes of symbolism or kinds of visual metaphors. Suuuuuure.

In closing, I want to say that I used to read GU quite frequently, but started to cut down on how often I’d visit the site until I was no longer reading the thing at all. Someone linked one of Woody’s cartoons on another website, which made me think about why. So, these 2 blog posts are basically examining why I don’t find GU Comics to be all that particularly interesting or funny anymore. Woody is a talented artist, but his laziness, both with his work ethic and his creativity has led me to tuning out GU Comics. There’s no grudge, no blood feud, nothing like that, really. His comics are unfunny to me and these are in large the reasons why.

Sorry about that, folks. Life sometimes gets in the way of things and causes all sorts of HILARITY.

So, I think before I get right back into the swing of things, I’d like to take a minute and talk about web comics. Specifically, video game web comics.

No, I’m not going to go after the easy target that is CAD. That’s already been done to death by people much funnier than myself. Rather, I’m going to look at the tragic headcase that is GU Comics’ Woody Hearn and his rather horrid comic…which will hopefully segue into a larger indictment of creative types in general.

For those who aren’t aware, /gu (as it is ‘properly’ called) is a comic that initially started off as a comic strictly about the dinosaur of MMORPGs, Everquest. It was a one panel strip that dealt strictly with the game’s ‘in-jokes.’ I’ll admit, even as someone who didn’t really play EQ all that much (I dabbled in it before going ‘fuck this shit’ due to the inane time constraints the game had and the fact that, well, I wasn’t exactly on the most stable of internet connections ‘back in the day.’) some of the jokes were funny. It didn’t hurt that it was one of the few well drawn webcomics out there, and one of the few webcomics about video games that didn’t consist entirely of recycled Megaman sprites or were drawn by people who were suspected pedophiles (hi2u CAD)

This strict devotion to Everquest, and ONLY Everquest, was a huge deal. However, there are only so many times you can make jokes about how women in fantasy games wear skimpy clothing, lol, before it got old. So, when Woody decided to switch over to do comics about non-EQ stuff, it was ’serious business.’

Over the years, GU has seen a number of scheduling changes and has devolved to provide some of the stupider cliches that permeate gaming comics. Namely, the man-child character who, were anyone sane actually living with said individual, who have killed him or had him committed to an asylum. Yes, I’m talking about Ted the hee-lar-ious ‘wacky’ character who does all sorts of zany things while Woody’s Mary Sue plays the straight man to him. Ho-fucking-hum, ain’t this a tune we haven’t heard a million times before. Other transgressions include multiple caricaturizations of Jack Thompson, something, which, again, every single gaming webcomic out there has done, making ‘Ted’ an employee of a gaming store (I think, I’m not what you’d call an ardent follower of GU…) and so on and so forth. Enough with the history lesson.

The problems with GU, though, are many and varied. The first is the art style, where Woody seems content on recycling artwork over and over and over. The particular example I provided, of the orc, whose only real differences consist of the odd change in facial expressions, can be found in other examples. It’s not necessarily a problem, per se, other cartoonists have have their characters in a default ‘costume’ (eg, Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade, Charlie Brown’s iconic shirt) but when you’re relaying the exact same drawing over and over? That reeks of laziness.

Especially when you look at the number of guest comics that he uses in lieu of his own content, or his own self-professed throwaway comics. Or artistic gems such as this one. There’s also his use on the Stickman ‘Poopy’ comics, which are essentially Woody’s way of going ’sorry, no comic today!’ To me, it screams of someone doing the bare minimum to scrape by, which is funny, given that he has taken other game companies to task for being lazy, either in releasing a title, or for releasing crap games. Unfortunately, this sort of behaviour can be seen as a sort of an epidemic amongst web-cartoonists. ‘Guest’ comics, to me, are ones that are done by another, well known artist (or writer, in some cases) and are not done by rabid fans. Somewhere along the line, though, accepting the offerings from your fanbase has become an accepted practice and is one that is done by other webcomics as well. The worst example of this, off the top of my head, would be VG Cats, which has a horrid release schedule and has been using ‘guest comics’ as a way to staunch the bleeding. The difference, though, is that VG Cats, which is run by Scott Ramooholycraphisnameisworsethanminetospellar, is a side thing and Scott isn’t doing this as a full time gig. Woody, on the other hand, has GU as his main job and when you write comics that are of a stickman going ‘Sorry, too busy playing [Game X] to make a comic, piss off.’ Well…I’d like to know what employer would tolerate that sort of behaviour if given a similar response when asked why they weren’t doing any work. Have a little bit of professional pride, for pete’s sake.

Okay, this is getting sort of long, so I’m going to do some more ranting about GU Comics in a later post. I’ve got other things I want to talk about.