So many games to complain about, so little time.

For some reason I had convinced myself that I was making these entries at least once a year but looking at it that has either not been the case or I posted them elsewhere and forgot. Whatever the case is it is time for me to look back at another year.

I don't want to talk about current events because this is still a gaming space not a political one but the current pandemic has meant travel restrictions and that has been very difficult on me personally. I am sure it has been for many others too and I appreciate that even being able to afford to travel is a luxury in itself but being separated from loved ones is a real downer to put it mildly and not even having the option to attend a funeral has also been painful. Infact continuing on from 2020 it seems, 2021 was best described as painful.

Many game studios were caught abusing employees and releases jpegs saying how sorry they were while doing nothing going forward to protect against future abuse. EA staff were allegedly stealing breast milk from new mothers, which sounds like a joke until you remember this is the same company that pressured women to join an in-house tracking program to inform the company of when they were due to deliver a baby and gamers as a whole flexed their gaming muscles to prove that Gamergate had been about ethics in gaming and gaming journalism by doing absolutely nothing about these very real, very harmful things from large gaming companies and simply going back to buying products because a game being good justifies inflicting human misery apparently.
So forget the big gaming companies, my last post talked about the mobile gaming platform and how has that been going? Its uptake on Steam was slower than expected as many mobile game companies refuse to release PC versions of their titles and they are not without their own controversies either.

Just like I haven't listed every crime the major PC studios made, I just literally don't have the time to talk about its little brother, the mobile market as despite the state of triple A gaming, the mobile space is like a dumpster fire raging inside of a train wreck! Runa Narumi is a name that probably doesn't mean anything to you but she was a voice acting talent who decided to cheat on her boyfriend with her former lover, a man who was also sleeping with anything with a pulse it seems and upon discovering this, she decided to threaten his other mistresses because only she was allowed to have unprotected intercourse with him. Why do I bring this up? Well this is the abridged version of events and of course I don't condone her actions but she also represents a trend in Mobile gaming which is if a person says or does something bad, nt only are they scrubbed from the work they previously did, that work gets a new VA cast and we just pretend that former person never existed. Chances are if you google her name beyond 2023 you will find a small wikipedia article and little more.
People make mistakes, do bad things or general defecate the bed but I remember a time when we rediculed dictatorships for trying to erase people out of photographs and pretend they simply never existed yet with the passage of time it seems to have become acceptable behaviour? A worrying trend from capitalist Japan, despite what she did and the degrees she went to for a man of questionable behaviour himself, she is not the first VA to just be scrubbed from mobile gaming history.

Ubisoft, EA and Activision Blizzard may have protected some real creeps doing awful things but so far they haven't...Oh McCree's name was changed from Overwatch because it was based on a former employee?
Yeah it has been awhile since my last post and its not because my passion for gaming died, it is because it was murdered.
That isn't a hyperbolic joke either, another name most of you don't know I assume is Shawn Spaulding. A creative man who created Gamemaker Studio and its sequels and spinoffs.
He sold the rights to the property in 2021 and I am happy for his success however the rope was becoming undone even before he sold it and I feel like he handed over a turkey the day before Thanksgiving knowing it wasn't going to survive the night anyway.

I don't know whom reads these entries but years ago I reviewed a game called Banzai Pecan and the developer/creator got in touch with me after the fact. We talked for a while and they are still on my friends list but one question they asked me was "why don't I make a game?", at the time I sheepishly talked about my lack of dexterity in my hands (which is true) and other such excuses but in reality I didn't want to tell them or anyone that I actually was working on a game, 3 in fact. To be clear none of them were supposed to be massive 40hr time sinks but instead they were laid out to be a way to increase my programming skills and knowledge, starting with an extremely simple Pong time fighting game, yes really, but its still pong mind you don't get excited and ending with my most ambitious project at the time based on what I felt I could do. That last idea already was made eventually and it was "Your Friend Pedro" which was better made and executed than I ever could have managed as they used jumping and slowdown AKA "bullet time" to solve some of the design flaws I was running into.

To be clear I am not saying they stole my idea or anything self serving like that, many of us have ideas for things but execution is where it matters and since I ended up making zero games at all and we are 6 years after the fact? Maybe longer? What happened? Did I just give up? Well not exactly but eventually I did. Originally as is the case in life, you think you have time but then life says you don't and I became depressed. Opening up my projects and losing half a day stuck on a simple problem and getting nothing done really burns out the enthusiasm. Game Maker itself was also outdated, Game Maker 2 was the future! and all the tutorials for 1 were outdated with no way for you to know until it was too late, for example, Pong is a really simple idea and when creating it one thing that you need to do is have the ball rebound off the paddle and in coding that will be something saying "ball hits paddle then it flies off at a certain angle, maybe 45 degrees" and this worked fine in Game Maker, but only on one side of the screen! If you tried this on the other side of the screen Game Maker would crash and because of the advent of Game Maker 2, support for one was over.

No problem, move onto 2 right? Well 2 was going through some... Cashflow problems, first you bought it and owned it, then that became a subscription model, then it became a new product as Game Maker 2 was actually called Game Maker Studio and we got a Game Maker 2, it was a mess and when you are a hobbyist like I am, you don't need the latest because you are just looking to learn. New versions also bring compatibility issues as well so in the end I gave up altogether and was very miserable. Firstly as someone who critiques others work I am very sensitive to the very valid opinion that is "if you can do better, show us". It is very easy to complain about what someone else has done but they have done all the hard work, gone through difficulties and set backs and juggled life throughout it all, As a reviewer I don't care about any of that, I just look at what is before me and judge it. I feel that is how it should be because ultimately I come from an engineering background so in a cold, detached way, I judge games like I would a screwdriver, I need a competent tool that is fit for purpose, I don't really care what colour the handle is but I do care if it can't do what I need it too.

Making games however is like making art, sometimes literally, a piece of yourself goes into it. When you can't even finish your own creation, it is extremely disheartening. I would also like to mention that I tried moving to unity as well and if you try unity too, create a new e-mail address. They e-mail you about once a day for the first 3 months. I wasn't aware of this and ended up setting it to spam because most the e-mails were useless. "How to use shaders", How to market your game", how about having info like that on your website so when I am ready for advanced tips like those I can find them where I need them? Who in their first 3 days is using shaders and ready to ship?!

While I am complaining, here is an odd one. Good games. I have found some more games I really enjoyed and want to recommend, the problem however is that they are so good, I can't quite accentuate into words how much I enjoyed them, I have never had that problem before so I guess urm, play Monster Sanctuary? I really want to spend a lot of time writing good reviews about good games as I believe they deserve the respect but it is genuinely hard to say why something is good without resorting to just saying "its good". Even popular youtube game reviewers fall into that trap and I never noticed how much of a problem it is until I tried not to do it myself. For all the variations we have on defecation, we have surprisingly few when it comes to giving praise. Make of that what you will but it is also a testament that either the quality of games has improved or I am becoming more forgiving of games, I'm not sure which it is yet but given I haven't written a review since 2021 and that was 2hrs ago, maybe I'm just not as young and on my feet as I used to be.

Oh right, bot reviews, well I think I am done here, bot reviews are for now just a mobile problem but I am seeing them spring up on Reddit too. It is only a matter of time before they land on Steam if they haven't already but for all my complaining, PC gamers are a resilient bunch and I am sure the anti-bot movement will pick up if it ever becomes too much of a problem, it worked for TF2...Sorta.