Opinion
14 CommentsResident Evil 7 is making people sick, even without VR
Resident Evil 7 biohazard is one of the year’s first must-play games. The problem is that the first chapter left me in a sweaty, queasy state of panic.
The reason for that wasn’t Resident Evil 7’s copious scares, blood and gore. I’m no chicken; I can handle myself with a horror game just fine. Resident Evil 7 made me feel physically ill due to a strong case of motion sickness.
This wasn’t the PlayStation VR version, either, which is known to be more than a bit nauseating. This was the standard Resident Evil 7, played on a screen. The game’s constant camera movement and tiny field of view gave me an unbearable case of the shakes.
I’ve rarely experienced such a palpably uncomfortable sensation while gaming, but the few occasions that I have been overcome with seasickness were caused by...
Opinion
14 CommentsThe EarlyNinja Kickstarter is a big collection of bad ideas
The EarlyNinja pitch sounds simple: If developers sign up to sell their early access games through EarlyNinja, the company gets to control the revenue of those developers, and cut it off if milestones aren’t reached, while keeping 15 percent of the game’s sales. Players who purchase games through EarlyNinja can get a refund if the game isn’t finished or if content comes late.
There are some ... interesting ideas here, but that pitch is bad news for both players and developers. Here’s why.
Why is this a big deal?
It’s really not. EarlyNinja is only a threat to developers if a developer were to sign with EarlyNinja, and there’s not a lot of evidence that anyone is going to be willing to do that.
The Kickstarter for EarlyNinja — because of course a service for early access games has a...
Movies
20 CommentsOscar nominees are the most diverse field ever, but it’s not a trend yet
The nominees for the 89th Academy Awards may comprise a more diverse set of actors and filmmakers than ever before. But let’s not pretend that one good year for diversity means that “#OscarsSoWhite is a thing of the past,” as The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg declared.
As former President Barack Obama explained whenever he discussed race relations in America, it’s possible to recognize the progress we’ve made over the years while acknowledging that the work is never finished.
Perhaps the most striking and commendable element of the diversity in this year’s Oscar nominees is how widespread it is. Among the 20 nominations for acting, six went to black actors — a record for the Oscars, and a welcome development after two consecutive years of #OscarsSoWhite.
People of color also made...
Opinion
22 CommentsLadykiller in a Bind shows that we’re not ready to handle messy queer stories
Indie game developer Christine Love has rewritten a scene from her latest game, Ladykiller in a Bind, after backlash from players. In her patch notes, Love reports that “the bulk of the scene has been completely rewritten,” and now contains no sexual content.
While we completely support Love’s decision to edit the scene, the conversation around its existence has been disheartening. Ladykiller in a Bind is a game about queer women, by a queer woman. It is the perfect vehicle for queer women to explore fantasies — even fantasies that may seem unsavory. It’s valuable that these stories are told from a queer woman’s perspective.
Before we continue, be aware that this story includes frank depictions of sex and dubious consent. There won’t be any sexual images that would get you in trouble at...
Opinion
14 CommentsThis is what The Flash team needs to do to fix the show
Welcome to January, otherwise known as no man's land for entertainment.
Hollywood's “Dump Month” floods the cinemas with uninteresting properties, and all the best TV shows are taking time to regroup and refocus the back half of their big yearly arcs from secret writer war rooms.
Over at CW's “Legion of Doom Content” headquarters, the Arrowverse (The Flash, Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow) teams must be working overtime. To say these last few months were an uneven outing would be an understatement. There were a lot of pitfalls to avoid across too many writers rooms. Especially when they've just learned that gigantic four-show crossover stories can let CW print their own ... money? Ratings? They do quite well, is what I’m trying to get across.
But I'm focused solely on the myriad of problems...
Opinion
12 CommentsHow to fix the problems with championship Pokémon
Pokémon is one of the most successful video game franchises in the world, with 280 million copies of the various games sold worldwide as of last May. It handily beats franchises such as Call of Duty (~250 million), Counter-Strike (~50 million), Super Smash Bros. (~39 million) and StarCraft (~19 million).
So why has the official, competitive double-battle-format struggled to find the same success as other esports? The Video Game Championship (VGC) series has gameplay that’s easy to pick up but takes years to fully master. There are exciting moments where everything comes down to a single decision or prediction. There’s a shifting, nuanced metagame that evolves just like the Pokémon that populate it.
Most importantly, there are wonderful players with interesting stories. Watching them...
Good Game
24 CommentsVideo games owe a lot to President Obama's administration
Former President Barack Obama was the most video game-friendly president in U.S. history, a title that he may retain for awhile.
It was under Obama’s administration that the Supreme Court of the United States declared video games free and protected speech, afforded the same rights as a Mark Twain short story and a Jackson Pollock painting. It was during Obama’s administration that the federal government was given the opportunity to investigate any real link between violence and video games, but declined to. And it was under Obama’s White House roof that game developers gathered for the first ever White House game jam and an online stream of a video game competition.
One could argue that the times, not the president, were what made this last administration so accepting of video games....
Opinion
67 CommentsStop using Kanye West's ‘Power’ in trailers
On May 28, 2010, Kanye West released “Power,” a single from his fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Just a few months later, Sony Pictures Entertainment featured the song in one of its TV spots for David Fincher’s The Social Network.
Since then, “Power” has made an appearance in countless trailers for movies, TV shows and games, but it may be time to retire it.
West’s “Power” has a bit of a history, and it wasn’t long after it debuted that it became the center of a new meme. In 2011, the use of “Power” in trailers was appropriately referred to as “No One Trailer Should Have All This Power.” It started as a result of two games, Saints Row: The Third and Forza Motorsport 4, using the song in their trailers during E3 2011. Giant Bomb writer Jeff Gerstmann tweeted out...
Opinion
3 CommentsSkyrim helped me fix my relationship with food
Roast chickens, venison stew, apple dumplings, cabbages … these are the items that fill my Skyrim character’s bloated pouches. Though certainly not the most efficient way to play, I’ve always opted out of purchasing potions to restore health — although I’d certainly use them if I had them — and instead turned toward the stuff that’s lying around everywhere: food. Found scraps of food in Skyrim are a cheap way to keep health up, although you’re going to need lots of it to heal completely.
And I had loads of it. Food is power in Skyrim, whether it’s boar meat stripped right from the bone or a pile of cheese wheels stolen from the vendor next door.
This didn’t extend to my own reality. My body was shriveled, and my bones were as brittle as ice at the dawn of spring. Anorexia plagued me...
Opinion
21 CommentsWe need a good Wolverine movie
Hugh Jackman has played Wolverine nine times, if you include Logan. The most passable films have included the X-Men, with each stand-alone film being uniquely disappointing for different reasons.
This is Hugh Jackman’s last chance with the character, and if it doesn’t work out the actor will have spent a significant portion of his career on a series of films that can, at best, be considered OK. The stakes are as high for him as they are for us. Everyone involved, including the audience, deserves a good Wolverine film before Jackman bows out of the franchise.
They weren’t all bad, right?
The first X-Men film came out in 2000, which makes it 16 years old. If it were a person, it would be driving.
This was before the era of mainstream superhero films and cinematic universes, which...
Opinion
63 CommentsThe Nintendo Switch won’t kill the 3DS
When Nintendo first revealed its new handheld-home console hybrid system, the Switch, I was convinced that it was more than a replacement for the Wii U: It would take the place of Nintendo 3DS, too.
After going hands-on with the Switch last week, however, I’m not so sure that’s the case. Despite its stature and portable-friendly features, the Switch doesn’t read quite like Nintendo’s next move in the handheld space. Instead, the tiny console feels more like ... well, a tiny console.
That’s a whole different thing
There are plenty of obvious reasons for this. The Switch’s battery life is notably lackluster; games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the system’s most exciting launch title by far, will only last for three hours on a Switch that’s not plugged in.
The Joy-Con...
Opinion
72 CommentsNintendo Switch's touchscreen looks toward the past, not the future
The Nintendo Switch will include a touchscreen, one that sounds like an upgrade from that of the Wii U or Nintendo 3DS. As Nintendo revealed during last week’s Switch press conference, the hybrid console’s screen will have multi-capacitive touch, allowing for numerous points of interaction at once.
That’s an exciting upgrade for fans of touch-based gaming. Yet on the floor at Nintendo’s New York City hands-on event for media last Friday, it was easy to forget that the Switch had a touchscreen at all. Not a single Nintendo game included touch-based controls whatsoever; only one of the games we sampled even allowed players to take their hands off the Joy-Con controllers and start tapping the tablet’s screen instead.
Skylanders Imaginators, a launch title from Activision that’s already...
Opinion
18 CommentsWhen violent games want you to play nice
So much of video game narrative consists of finding justifications for mass murder. The enemies are baddies/zombies/demons/splicers! Killing everyone is the least bad of two bad outcomes! You get the point.
There needs to be a good reason for people to die so you can kill them without feeling bad about it.
The Dishonored series offers no pretense. Act like a mass murderer and the game will rightfully call you a tyrant; the populace will fear you because you’re a serial killer. Dishonored 2 is not afraid to call it like it is and, by the same token, envision the world as it could be.
Dishonored 2 believes in and cares about its own world, and goes to great lengths to get you to care as well.
When killing makes a difference
Since most violent games don’t think that all killing is OK,...
Opinion
20 CommentsBlack-ish is the first, perfect example of how TV should handle Trump’s election
It didn’t take long after Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States for television to address the orange elephant in the room.
The producers behind series like Designated Survivor, The Good Fight, Quantico, and Mr. Robot all publicly announced their shows would tackle the divisive election in some capacity. One of the most outspoken creators, however, was Kenya Barris, who reiterated that Black-ish, a family sitcom on ABC that follows a wealthy black family in Los Angeles trying to retain their cultural heritage in an overwhelmingly white landscape, has always been a series about addressing complex issues.
“We need to be examining each other as a country and as a society," Barris told Complex in November. "It’s not about money or having success, it’s about...
Opinion
45 CommentsHow Twitch is turning ‘always be streaming’ into a career with zero balance
There are 168 hours in each week. As a full-time Twitch streamer, I’m expected to be live for as many of them as possible.
The only reprieve granted by the general populous of Twitch viewers is the understanding that all broadcasters are human and will eventually break without things like food and sleep. Twitch has just introduced a new directory that might take away that option for many up-and-coming broadcasters.
What changed
Twitch has introduced the “IRL” directory, a new place where broadcasters can share anything from their life, creating the potential to erode the ever-delicate balance of separating life and streaming that many broadcasters find so difficult already.
IRL broadcasts require interacting with your chat instead of just streaming whatever you want, with no...
Opinion
21 CommentsHyper Light Drifter taught me that it was OK to ask for help
Hyper Light Drifter is my game of the year. The look, the feel, the sound, the story ... everything about it appealed to me. It’s the game I didn’t know I wanted until I played it, and then it felt like something that was made specifically for me.
It’s hard not to be consumed by an ongoing sense of dread when playing through Hyper Light Drifter. The immaculate pixel art, the hair-raising tones and the apocalyptic landscapes continually reinforce a message of decay.
This morose tone is punctuated by moments of relief: you can feel it in the pause after a battle, the beautiful vistas wrapped in pleasing synths or a peaceful town of refugees who’ve escaped from their ruined homelands. The tension is highlighted by the time you’re freed from it.
But that wasn’t why I picked it. I choose...