Podcast #01 - General Questions 1

hello everyone welcome to the inaugural untitled Matty mitosis podcast which we're doing on a whim basically I don't do enough things just off the cuff and we're trying to rectify that so you can probably already tell the audio quality in this video is not very good I don't have my regular microphone I don't have my soundproofing blah blah blah I'm not gonna get into one of these big long-winded introductions for the podcast I just want to let you know what's happening here okay so I put out a call for questions on my ask fm page and I've got some good questions back and I'm gonna answer them so I want to answer the better questions here but if you haven't seen the ask fm you should check it out at the moment there is over 700 answers on there already so if you've ever wanted to read my thoughts on a whole bunch of things you can read them there and yeah I think that's enough I know I'm not gonna bother explaining any more right we're just gonna get into it so the format here is ask and answer so I'm gonna read out a question I'll put the question up on screen if you're looking at the screen you don't have to Oh cuz I'll read it out and then I'll give you my answer okay okay so the first question how oh yeah so I should say this is probably my favorite question which is why it's going first and I only got it today actually I think um but this is one of the better ones so we're gonna start off on a good one okay so the question how do you define depth whenever you say a game doesn't have depth it seems like because there isn't a lot the player can do unlike games like the wonderful 101 where the player can do tons of things isn't that Brett though their depth only comes through scoring system not risk/reward etc so this is a good question and one thing I do want to say before I forget actually is I don't agree with that last sentence I definitely don't agree with that but before I just in case I forget to address that before dawn thought I had to go back to the start there one thing I think I should really clarify first and let the part of this question I don't really like is the very start how do you define depth okay and this is a little reason why I picked this one first because I get a lot of questions like this okay I get you know how do you define this how do you define that you know trying to lay down rules basically and this is something you're probably gonna hear me come back to a lot today is that I'm not a big fan of that right and in particular the definition thing and if you want to talk to me about semantic arguments you know like does this word really mean this or blah blah blah I'm not interested definitions aren't my thing okay and there's a few reasons for that but I suppose the most important one really is that people seem to really wanted to do this right they want to define what the word depth means I can I can understand the impulse to want to go and do that and you know maybe it would be useful the problem is like that's I if I took the start of that question and I wrote like a I don't know 50 page thesis about what is depth right and defining depth and explaining once and for all what dead the words depth means when it comes to game design right even if I did that and I did a really good job of it to the point where you know some objective gods looking down on us takes a peek at my work and he says wow you know Matthew mitosis is really defined depth there well you know well done the problem is nobody will ever agree to it right there are at least not everybody will agree to it right even if you put forward the best argument not everybody will agree to what you know to your definition of the word depth and I can I can I'm fine with people not agreeing with my opinion on you know games like I put forth my saw on a game and people don't agree with it that's to be expected and I understand nobody is ever gonna agree you know my opinion on every single game that's fine the problem is the the reason you want to define depth I think anyway the reason people should want to define it is so that everybody can be on the same page right so that when you use the word depth at the value I would see in defining the word depth is so that you can cut out a whole load of from your videos or your your you know your blog posts or whatever where you have to actually explain to people what you mean by depth right that's what I would love about having the depth defined is just being able to use the word and have other people understand what it means but the problem is that will never happen so there's no there's not really any point in trying to I think and you know cuz even if you get it right at the end of the day somebody's gonna disagree and have a different idea of what depth is blah blah blah and so this is this is what you're gonna hear me say if you start asking me to define what things are you know now I think it's also important to remember that you know we use words to communicate a point and that and really the thing is as long as you understand the point that I'm making it doesn't you know you don't have to define the exact words you know it's more about the overall point that you're trying to make when you say something right and of course we could get into I mean this argument could go on forever like for example if we all agreed on what the definition of the you know depth is that's all well and good until you know you go and talk to a Japanese developer about it and he doesn't know what the word depth is because they have a different word for it and their word will have a different sort of nuance to it so now you have to define depth for every language on the planet right and we're really going down the rabbit hole here so I think it's about time I cut it off hopefully you can understand why that doesn't really interest me okay but you do raise a good point here after this so sorry if you feel you got picked on a little bit there it is a good question overall it's just this is something I get a lot so hopefully people will hear this and understand where I'm coming from right so you said whenever you say a game doesn't have depth it seems like because there isn't a lot the player can do okay now I know this question was submitted and not long after I answered another question on the ask page where in my answer I talked a little bit about how fury at the game I reviewed a while back probably about a year ago now that game doesn't have a lot of depth to it right and one of the ways I talked about that was because there's not a huge amount of stuff that you can do compared to the wonderful 101 where you can do loads of stuff right um so I think you raise a good point when you say that isn't breath okay I don't think it is but I will give you an example of where that would be true right so for example in breath of the wild kind of a confusing example because we're talking about breath of the wild and breath right but it's just the one that comes to mind strongly for me because I played it recently right in breath of the wild you can the the player can also perform lots of different actions possibly even more than the one for one when you really break it down right you can I mean you can climb a tree and pick an apple off it you can use sort of magic on water to turn it into ice you can shoot an arrow at an enemy or you can like take things in your hand and put them in a cooking pot and make food out of it and that's just that's just the tip of the iceberg really there's loads of other things you can do in that game and but that is breath the the reason that's breath for me is because those actions don't really relate to one another you know one of them is about synthesizing materials one of them is about puzzle solving one of them is about combat one of them is about you know just resource gathering and those things are quite separate from each other so that's why it would be breath in that case the reason I do think it's a it's a valid example that when I gave about fury and wonderful 101 though is because both of those games almost all the actions you do in the game relate to combat so that's why it's it's part of the depth of the game because they all relate to the same thing and it is the case where the more actions you can perform in combat the more it kind of starts to fold in on itself and really create depth like so for example I have a habit of talking until I run out of breath and then I have to take a big hoo like I really got to get out of that habit hopefully doing a podcast and get me over that anyway and yeah so doing as a plain breath are so playing the wonderful 101 you can you know launch an enemy into the air by using a lawn chair move right or you could throw a bomb at the enemy and freeze them in place right but what you could also do is you could launch the enemy into the air and then throw a bomb at them so that they're suspended in the air for a period of time so even though it's two actions it's it's now those two actions can be combined in a way that makes them better or different or whatever way you want to phrase it you know and and I think I think the other reason you probably asked this question was because of the lost soul arts of demon souls video that I did recently where I talked a bit about that as well and it's not just a case of actions that the player can perform so you're right like this this is the next point I want to make is it's not a case that that that defines depth it's just that that's kind of the easiest way to illustrate it if you know what I mean or it's like one of the first metrics I would go to right and but for example in the demon souls video I talked a little bit about how in the combat and the soul series you you hit something and you either inflict hits done or you don't and it is a bit of a simplification because there is a bit more that you can do like for example in I believe in Dark Souls 3 there are certain sword arts you can use that kind of launch the enemy a little bit if you're using an ultra great sword you can probably use attacks that slam the enemy into the ground you know depending on which enemy they are but the reason I didn't really talk about them is they're kind of these very specific things that aren't all that useful against a lot of enemies they don't really open up more options for you you know the main the main way that the game does that is more like you know you've still locked your opponent or you haven't you know where as a good counter example or an example of a game that does that expands a lot a lot more is godhand all right so basically the point I'm making is that depth is not only just the number of moves you can do here you're absolutely right about that but also how those moves interact with your opponent and and and and arguably that's that's more where depta lies right but I think the more moves you have the more likely it is that the game allows you to do all sorts of mad to your enemies so in godhand like for example you can do you know you hit an enemy he goes in to hit stone you hit an enemy while he's attacking you he goes in to counter hit stone which opens him up to a lot more stuff you can sweep an enemy you know after you after you dodge you have a built-in sweep attack just for sweeping enemies if you enough times you can put them into a dizzy state you know they can be launched into the air or they can be catapulted across the arena both of which are good like crowd control you know moves that help you control the crowd they can be grapples you know there's probably a bunch of other little things like that and I'm forgetting and even there's lots of nuanced things that don't really fit into those big criteria so for example there are certain moves that will put gene low to the ground right so that that dodges attacks that effectively dodges attacks that come from high and that to me is that as well because if you know an enemy is gonna hit you high you can hit him without having to dodge you can skip the dodge phase and go straightly into the attack phase I can't do that because I'm at the game you know but yeah yeah that's it and and I do think that's again like what I just said right there for example is risk reward so you said that's not risk reward that that would be a quintessential example of risk reward for me because and the safe thing to do would just be to dodge whereas that the other thing to do would be to do an attack and possibly get a hit on the enemy like even again using godhand as an example it has different types of dodging which have different levels of risk and rewards so there's effectively three different types of dodges you can do and you know each one is riskier but more rewarding or less risky and less rewarding so it the depth absolutely does come from risk and reward there and also I do think that scoring systems can add to the level of depth as well just to just to come back to your original point though another reason I would I would refuse to define depth is for example all the stuff I just talked about and all the stuff I just talked about only applies to action games right I mean maybe even a specific sub genre of action games you know like people fighting people sort of action games and I don't know what other action games there would be but anyway my point is like something like a twin stick shooter those kinds of things don't really apply because it's not the kind of thing where you're doing all these come like things to your opponent you're kind of shooting them and they die or they don't die and and the depth has to come from somewhere else you know so not only do you know I have to define depth and try to get everybody to agree to it you have to do it for every genre and every game that comes out you know so that's why I wouldn't do it but I think it was a good question and I hope I was able to illuminate my stance a little bit so what what I liked about your question just in case anybody is curious is am you you kind of didn't understand what I meant by depth but you made it clear why you didn't understand that and hopefully because you've done that I've been able to clarify for you so so thanks very much for that one I'm gonna move on to the next one it took 15 minutes hopefully the one I'll take this long Jesus okay here we go we see analysis of a game oh yeah I chose this one as kind of a follow on I mean it was a don't think it was the same person that asked for a yeah so next question we see analysis of the game in depth but will we ever see analysis of how a genre can improve example how to improve RPGs turn-based system / fight initiation okay this is especially prevalent in backtracking earthbound has a fix after gaining a certain level enemies insta die on ingratiating is that proper use of the word ingratiating if it is that's that's pretty cool I didn't I didn't know right so um yeah so this kind of follows on from what I was saying before and this is probably the next biggest thing that people kind of asked me about is about genres and about how genres you know how games in a certain genre stack up against each other and things like that um genres are again not a big thing I think I'm a big fan of because they are again a definition you'll never get people to agree to it and also it's kind of restrictive in the way that you think so I've said this before on the ask fm page I think you're better off letting go of a genre definitions and just trying to enjoy each game as it comes but anyway um that that's the reason why I don't talk about this is because genres are just too broad for me it's just too broad because even under a certain umbrella what works for one game doesn't necessarily work for another game so I'll give you an example okay so you mentioned RPGs and earthbound stuff had app so I have made it no secret that I love the Shin Megami Tensei games okay now one one reason that I really love them is because they have the daemon fusion system right where you fuse your demons and get new demons and you have to do that as the game goes on you have to the thing that I love most about the series really from a gameplay aspect is that idea that your party is always changing you are forced to constantly change and adapt your party to you know what's going on in the game and also just because they're becoming outdated right they don't gain exp at the same rate that you do they don't level up they will be left behind okay so you have to fuse them into new demons and it's just this really cool and it's kind of like you know like in in the Final Fantasy games where you've got materia or you've got the Sphere Grid or something like that it's a little bit like a different version of that where it's deciding how your party grows but the party member actually changes in the process but if you think about it just as a purely mechanical thing it is kind of like the Shin Megami Tensei series equivalent of materia or the Sphere Grid at a license credit or whatever Final Fantasy equivalent you want to think of because most people have played Final Fantasy right now junctioning or whatever I can't remember what the Final Fantasy 9 version was what was it they they learned skills they were very class based on that one anyway right so yes so I love that system okay I love it I think it's great I love it it's brilliant and but if we take another example Pokemon a game which is in a lot of ways very similar to Shin Megami Tensei you go and you recruit Pokemon for your team you know even though I love the Shin Megami Tensei way of doing it I don't think that Pokemon would improve if it had that system I think Pokemon would actually be a worse game if it had that system because now I'm not going to talk about the depth of Pokemon because I know that there's competitive people who really love the depth that it has at higher levels okay that's not what I'm talking about when I say this okay but getting from the start of the game to the end doing doing the story doing the you know starting off and completing all the gyms right I don't think that Pokemon has that same sort of depth that shin megami tensei has where you're forced to constantly change your your team like for example I played the Pokemon games when I was very young okay pokemon red okay I was I was quite young when I came out I was probably eight I want to say ma'am and I you know I've like eight-year-olds aren't very good at games right so when I got it I got Bulbasaur he turned into venusaur and I just swept everything in the game okay I went in and I killed everything even because I had leveled him up to the point where it didn't matter you know I was able to kill everything even if he was weak to it water types to just diet right because I was a kid and I didn't really you know I'm not I'm not saying I never used the weaknesses of course I did but both the storm was my starter he was the highest level one he was the one I went to and so that's how I played the game whereas in jimang I meet and say I can't do that you can't do it okay so so in that sense the Shin Megami Tensei one is better because it forces you to adapt but the appeal of Pokemon is totally different the appeal of Pokemon is that you raise and nurture this thing you know this this animal right and if you have to fuse your Pokemon and throw them into the fusion mixer and kill them to get new ones it would it wouldn't be as popular right because kids don't like killing off their their little baby animals all the time so that's why I don't think that system would work for Pokemon so you can see that even though those two games are in the same genre and they're actually very similar in a lot of ways and I think that the Shin Megami Tensei way of doing things is better I still don't think I would put that system in Pokemon because Pokemon the appeal is different you know so this is why I don't talk about your own ism why I really want to encourage people to to think about games individually okay I'm gonna go on a bit of a tangent here but um I gave another answer the other day somebody asked that how to enjoy Kamiya's games right and i said i talked a little bit about how Kamiya is the type of person who he wants you to discover the fun for yourself right he doesn't want to tell you everything he wants you to discover it okay um and it was only after I did that answer a few hours later it kind of occurred to me that I've been doing the same thing with the channel from from the word go I try not to lay these things out in such plain terms because I think if somebody like what I've just said to you about genres yeah I think it when somebody lays it out to you like that in such plain terms you kind of go yeah yeah yeah and if you don't agree you don't agree and it's not gonna change your mind you know but with the channel what I've done is I've tried to instill this idea that every game is different every game has different needs you know what works for one game you know what's bad in one game is good in another game right I strongly believe that can be true okay so you know when I see people say oh you know you like this in this game but you don't like the same thing in another game and that's a contradiction you know I think those those people are missing the point and that's a shame but I didn't want to come out and just say that because I don't think that that convinces people as well as trying to nudge you in the right direction you know so thinking back maybe it was kind of stupid of me to try and unlock that idea away and just kind of knowledge people I don't know but um yeah come out and said it now so there you go this is the way I think about and talk about games is that they're all different from one another so talking broadly about genres isn't very useful for me I don't think people should be thinking about games in that way um so yeah anything any tech slow down and catch my breath a bit right so sorry for that sniffling by the way I think I have hay fever hay fever tablet to try and stop it but um so where was I we were talking about RPGs and all that kind of stuff and yeah so I I absolutely agree with what you said about earthbound Aerith man do you gain once you're a certain level over the enemy you touch them on the field they just die because what's the point what's the point of fighting them again you know now I've played a fair share of JRPGs probably more than most people and and I but I only played earthbound recently right I don't think it has it ever even released in Europe I don't know but I never had the opportunity to play it and so I played it recently a year or two ago I want to say it was and yeah it blew my mind that here it is here is this system that I have seen in a couple of JRPGs I think I know it was in persona 5 you have to you have to do a certain social link to get it but in persona 5 they have that system as well where you can instantly kill enemies right but I played earthbound a year or two ago and III I was blown away that I'm like this is in earthbound why it wasn't this in every JRPG since then you know and I and and I think there was a couple more things like that and earthbound honestly it was a game that just seemed quite far ahead of its time you know when I played it I was just like why aren't JRPGs better oh yeah I'll give you another example one thing I loved about earthbound was that there is multiple battle themes right and from what I can remember of the Final Fantasy games they have one battle team for the whole game all the ones I've played I mean they have boss themes and mini boss themes but from what I remember there's one battle theme for the whole game and some and I think actually all most of the Shin Megami Tensei games I've played have that as well to have the earthbound thing where there's loads of different battle themes because why shouldn't there be you're spending so much time playing the game in battles that of course there should be more than one battle team you know it seems like this really obvious thing but for whatever reason nobody caught on or a lot of people didn't catch on and do that maybe it was just a budget thing I don't know so like there's aspects of Earthmen that I really liked and I thought every other JRPG should have them but at the same time I'm hesitant to say that that's always the right choice like for example enemies dying when they're too low a level for you okay and you look at that system and you think yes it saves time and brilliant actually some people complain about that in persona 5 because once you unlock that ability you can't turn it off and it robs you of the ability to go into weak fights and do certain things interact with those demons anymore unless you go and fight them head-on at which point you're at a disadvantage it's just kind of annoying you know it's an annoyance and now I I didn't mind it personally I didn't mind it but it's just an example of how things that we think are always the right thing to do can-can you know that they did they're necessarily always the best thing to do is what I'm saying and I'm not imaginative enough to imagine a game where I wouldn't want that to happen but I think it would be wrong with me to say that somebody else couldn't come up with a game where having that feature would be a bad thing I think that there could be a game released we're touching enemies when they die is a bad thing and some people would say that actually in persona 5 that is a bad thing so and this is why I don't talk in depth very much about genres I would prefer to talk about individual games so again one one more kind of follow-on question which I chose before we really move on to a different topic is a next question okay with the rise of souls like games like Lords of the Fallen let it die neo and recently the search hollow knight can be considered one thematically and aesthetically - do you think souls like will become a big thing in the future doesn't have any potential so I'm just gonna repeat what I said and I'm gonna say that labeling things like that just restricts the freedom that we have to think about them and for people to make them you know if somebody sets out to make a Souls like game they're probably gonna do something a bit different than if they just try to make a game and occasionally thought about the souls games as an inspiration generally I mean hopefully you do but for example you list neo there as an example okay I haven't played neo yet I've played the Alpha and the beta as well actually and so I've played the two online tests that they did and I can say just from what I played of it what I'm looking to get out of neo isn't the same thing I'm looking to get out of the souls games neo with its mission based structure and just the general vibe of the game like that the more overt story and stuff like that did the way they've set it up it just doesn't pull me in in the way the souls games do and I also think aesthetically it's not on the level of the souls games okay some people because I talked because I had that Demon Souls video lately people have been speculating about my thoughts on blood-borne and Dark Souls 3 and all but I'm not I did not mean and it's not in the video I'm not saying that those are irredeemably bad games or anything like some people jump to these incredible conclusions and one thing I would say about blood-borne is that it is incredible on an aesthetic level it is you know in terms of executing an art direction it is almost unparalleled in my eyes you know certain parts of that game are just absolutely beautiful to look at you know they have this from soft have always had this great way of setting up levels so that they just look good you know they do that really well and that hasn't changed okay and and neo didn't have that for me okay but neo has its own things you know like that the enemy's stamina system that you commute that you can abuse to break an enemy's guard that's really interesting to me I'm not a big fan of the whole stance thing I think it's a big clumsy maybe my opinion will change when I play the full game but that enemy's stamina thing is interesting to me and I think that in terms of pure combat it's possible that neo you know will scratch an itch that the solos games don't scratch for me you know so even though these this is an incredibly specific sub-genre Souls like you know people would say neo is a Souls like game even though it's this incredibly specific sub-genre I still think what I'm looking to get out of both of those games is different and that's good that's good that's a good thing to me so that's I think I've said enough about genres and stuff like that for now I've probably said too much so I'll move on do you think that people should consider commercial realities when playing games they couldn't have afforded this they only had so much time not all bugs can be fixed etc or is it fair for players to criticize games for things the developers had little control over this is if I could pick one thing that I really flip-flop on it when it comes to you know judging the quality of games this would probably be the one and sometimes I have a lot of sympathy for developers and sometimes not so much and I think I suppose if I have to decide what my criteria are for that it's more a case that as a game gets more ambitious or the budget gets bigger or you know the expectations are bigger I'm more willing to accept that certain commercial realities are inevitable you know and I take breath of the world as an example of again there's things in that game that I don't like so much that I feel are targeted you know or more about the the mainstream audience you know pulling in a mainstream audience but at the same time I have to recognize that a game of that size with that many people working on it is never gonna get made just for a niche audience it's never gonna be this 100% niche game that appeals to that specific thing only if it has to if it costs that much money they have to they have to rake in a certain number of people to pull that money back in you know so if it takes a couple of little things that I don't like for that to happen I'm absolutely fine with it I'm fine with it because if I if I got a version of breath in the wild exactly the way I wanted it to be they'd never make another one because it wouldn't sell enough or people wouldn't like it enough you know them the mainstream audience wouldn't like it enough so I think to an extent it's almost like there has to be a few things like that in there you know um and that's the world we live in I do think in an ideal world you know it wouldn't work that way but that's that is the world that we live in but if a game is really small and simple and you know easy to make then I think that you know those those commercial realities are they're not so good an excuse anymore you know so it's it's again something you just have to take into consideration with the game and I would say well what I don't like to see is when people start suggesting things that are completely infeasible for the developers to add you know when you get to the point where you're saying oh if only they had completely changed this massive element of the game the game would be better it's like that was never gonna happen you know this is something I really try to to adhere to in my videos as when I suggest things and I think to my credit if I'm gonna credit myself here I'm gonna jerk myself off a little bit I think I'm good at this if I suggest something I tend to suggest things that are pretty reasonable for the developers to do and I think you know if developers get something out of my video it's it's that that kind of stuff it's the kind of we actually really could have done this if we just worked on it a little bit more like for example yeah I think that's because I have a good idea of how games are made you know like for example I complained a little bit about and control options in the Zelda series you know um and one reason I know I said that should be a simple fix now I did oversimplify that if I was to go back I would probably clarify a little bit more and I think I think I was I actually missed the menu for this anyway so I could have been completely wrong but my point is and the this I know how a game works behind the scenes right and in a game what should happen is you don't just take a button input and put it directly into your game code you have abstract it out so you you talk to the hardware and you say okay the X button and you you abstract that out into like action button you know and then action button does all the stuff in the code right and then so if you've done that which pretty much every game should be doing this I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't want to code a game this way if you've done that then it's a case of just allowing people to change like what the action button is defined as is the action button circle or is it X you know like we've got a lot of games get changed when they come over and when they get localized because in Japan circle is seen as confirmation whereas here the exponent is you know I think I understand both sides of that argument you know circle does seem more like a positive thing than an X but also the exponent is kind of more comfortable to press anyway and yeah so the you know the reason they can do that is because they've abstracted it out it's not every single instance in the code is circle button it's you know confirmation button and there's a difference there is a difference between those two things because if you need to change circle button you need to do a big control H search and replace every instance of circle button and when you do that you're gonna create bugs cuz you're gonna mess something up somewhere whereas if you if you abstract all that out to one line of code where it just says circle button is action button then you only need to change that one line of code to change what the action button is so when I say that you know adding in these control options should be a pretty simple fix I have a good idea that that is the case you know but maybe sometimes I'm wrong about that but I think um that I've got a pretty good grip on that and so that's something I would like to see people keep in mind more is how a game is actually structured and that the way it's made you know when you get to a certain point some things just can't be changed you know it's these things have to be locked down a lot sooner than I think people realize you know and like a game is in you know it's got loads of content in it you know well before it's actually finished a lot of this stuff has to get done early on and then you know the final phases of the game are just ironing I so um yeah so I think that's something it's it's kind of the the more extreme version of your question which is you know it's it's less of a commercial reality and more of just a development we have to you know but yeah I hope events with your question there I think I went on a bit of a rant on that one boy that do you feel there is any oh yeah next question I should pretty do this but next question so you know I'm reading a question do you feel there's any merit to a game with static cutscenes with zero interactivity versus a cutscene with cue slash button prompts or those quote-unquote cutscenes where your character is forced to walk and have their buttons locked as they watch events unfold and I think I'll need to rephrase this because it's a little messy so you're you're basically asking about three different types of cutscenes cutscenes that just play and you can skip them cutscenes with a button prompt where you have to you know a QuickTime event or those quote-unquote cutscenes where we probably think of the last of us as the quintessential example of that where you walk along and the characters talk to each other while you have to just kind of walk mm or maybe even Red Dead Redemption you kind of do the same thing on a horse there I'm it was loads of games where you do that and so I would say that I don't see a big problem with actual cutscenes anymore I mean I think there was a time where I was a bit more idealistic about this around the time that I played eco which is God probably I don't know a decade more than a decade ago now and but there was a time when I played that game where I just thought you know why can't more games excise the cutscenes and just give me the actual game but over time I've realized you know you've cut things like eco and journey which are really all about that minimalism but they still have cutscenes it's not so easy to just get rid of them you know I think a lot of developers would like to get rid of them but it's not so easy to get rid of them but I do you think you know there's a lot of cutscenes that I would cut in games that I've played and like a lot of things I thought I talked before about how in my dark souls come to area talked about how the reveal of Anor Londo would be better if you just took an elevator up to it and I still strongly feel that way I think it's shoving it in my face and the cutscene didn't do anything for me if it just had an elevator ride up and then you saw anor londo yourself it would be better I suppose that's a minor spoiler for Dark Souls but whatever and yeah so you know cutscenes can negatively impact things but maybe there's a good reason why they have to use a cutscene for that you know maybe I don't know it seems feasible to me because I mean you stick they stick you in an elevator obviously that's time for them to do the fetching on on the next area because you're just in this elevator so they could have just made the other right long enough that you you know they could load an island off by the time you got to the top it seems totally feasible to me but maybe there's a good reason why they didn't do it and maybe there's a good reason why they did the cutscene instead again it's actually quite in line with the last question so there you go there I'm using the me scroll back up what was it a commercial reality again I'm kind of justifying it with the commercial reality you know but it's hard for me to say I I do think that it's it you know it seemed it makes sense to me that they could use an elevator because they use elevators and all other sorts of points in the game for the same thing but may you know maybe there's some reason for it maybe games are just so insanely complicated that it's really hard to say anything for sure about these these kinds of problems but anyway unless you're actually on the development team anyway and so yeah I was talking about cutscenes and and you know journey it tells most of its game without cutscenes but it still has cutscenes it still has them Iko still has them loads of games still have cutscenes and so they're not so easy to ditch I think people also on the sidelines we want to go oh yeah why don't you just get rid of all the cook scene it's I just don't think it's that easy I think if it was that easy more developers would be doing it that's that's the my stance on it anyway and then we come to the QuickTime event once and again QuickTime events are a good example of how it's not always bad people people say QuickTime events suck and you know we're gonna you know they're they're ruining games blah blah blah and I sympathize with that complaint a lot of the time but I'm gonna come back to one of my favorite something gonna say without a certain QuickTime event the wonderful 101 would be a worse game and it has it has the best QuickTime event ever if you don't know what I'm talking about don't spoil this for yourself don't um but those of you who know what I'm talking about know what I'm talking about and would probably agree with me that the wonderful 101 has the best QuickTime event ever and if you took that out of the game it wouldn't be as good and actually I think if it was the only QuickTime event in the game it also wouldn't be as good it's because the game has QuickTime events before that moment you get used to them and then it uses a QuickTime event to do something really fun and it's it doesn't feel forced then you know whereas if it had been the only QuickTime event in the whole game I think it would have been you would have been like what oh I have to do this now whereas you've gotten used to them you know so I think that I I'm like don't get me wrong I would love for there to be an option in the wonderful 101 that I could press this is something if like if I could suggest one thing to platinum it would be this okay I want an option in the menu where I can go in take a box when I finish the game take a box that says skip all cutscenes and QuickTime events I would love that because I do that in Bayonetta you know I skip every cutscene now it's not that I dislike the cutscenes some of them are quite good it's just they don't offer me the replay value that the game does the game has this insanely high replay value and the cutscenes don't have tab level of replay value so of course they're gonna get skipped right I think maybe the reason they don't do that is it's a little bit disrespectful to the people who work on the cutscenes they might feel that and I can understand that you know you work with these people all the time and you think do you really want to be the guy who puts the button in that lets you skip the cutscenes you know it's kind of it's almost disrespectful to those people in a way you know but they should do it they should absolutely do it just put it in and let me skip all that stuff and so I you know I want to skip it I'm telling you I want to skip it but I'm also saying I I wouldn't want anybody to have robbed me of that experience so even though I can agree that most of the time QuickTime events are bad sometimes they're okay sometimes are fine and so you know if you gave me the choice of just watching a cutscene or watching a cutscene with a QuickTime event that gets me a little bit more involved sometimes the QuickTime event is the better thing I'll give you like a wonderful 101 spoiler there's a bit it's it's only a very minor thing there's like a bit where you have to use drill to go through an enemy right to go through their sword and if it happened in the cutscene it would be cool but it's because the two of them clash and then you have to hammer you know it says I think it the QuickTime prom says breakthrough you know and it says breakthrough when you go yes I'm gonna break through and then you hammer that button you're more involved I don't care what anybody says you are more involved in that cutscene because of that I think my main problem with QuickTime events is that teachers they can't be skipped like cutscenes can you know so if you could skip them I'd be totally on board I would be I'd be totally on board if you know when you skip the cutscene and the wonderful one I won it also skipped the QuickTime events for that fine maybe maybe you could only do it on subsequent fighters you know but I'd be fine with that I'd be absolutely fine with it and yeah so I think sometimes I you know if I was gonna do a casual run-through of the game I would probably turn the option back on because I'd want to watch the cutscenes and do two QuickTime events again you know and so then the last example you gave where cutscenes where your character is forced to walk this is probably the worst one of the three and and again I gotta wonder if maybe developers can start putting an option in here to skip them I think yeah Bayonetta 2 has a few moments like that and you actually can skip them and you can press a certain button combination and it skips all the dialogue in that moment and you just get control back and it goes on at least if I'm remembering it right anyway so that that's an example of doing it well I think and yeah I I know exactly why people hate those moments but again I think if you if you play something like The Last of Us you have to know what you're getting into right you got to know you can watch a short video online and know that it's going to have moments like that in it so if you know the game is gonna be filled with this stuff yeah this stuff and you play it and then you complain about it anyway you kind of I don't know it's a it's a little bit like right I get the complaint well it's a little bit like I'm sure you've all seen that picture of you know the person on the the comic of the person on the bike and they're cycling along and they put the stick through the wheels the spokes on their bike and they fall onto the ground right it's it's a bit like that you shouldn't know what you're getting into you have a right to complain about it if you want to say I don't like the direction Naughty Dog has gone I am I'm there with you I'm waiting I think that for me personally I enjoy the crash bandicoot and the jak and Daxter series more than uncharted by a country mile country mile like just it's because it's just it's one of those games we control everything it's not one of those games where you you know you grapple on to the grapple points and you know the platforming kind of does itself so I prefer those games but also you have to know what you're getting into you know I think it's fine to say I wish Naughty Dog would go back to that older style but I and I also think in Hawaii even play the game in the first place if that's what you're gonna complain about you know so yeah I think it's one of those things where I'm you should be aware of what you're doing as a consumer and it's one of those things again maybe I'm naive for saying this but you can vote with your wallet on this stuff you know if you don't like the Last of Us don't play it don't buy it and then complain about it just don't buy it in the first place you know what you're getting into don't pretend you don't know what you're getting into when you do that you know and for me I have a broad appreciation of games so I'm I I'm okay with it from time to time like I've made no secret of my love of the wonderful 101 or whatever but sometimes I don't really want to play a challenging game sometimes I want to have a story fed to me a bit more easily I want to go through things and just kind of experience it and I'm never gonna be the biggest fan of those walking sections but also sometimes I don't want to be doing all the crazy all the time I just want to chill out like watching a film you know it's playing something like the Last of Us is a more passive experience than playing something like jak and daxter or a crash bandicoot at least during those walking segments it absolutely is you know and but it's not necessarily a bad thing I don't know I I don't think it is I think is if you like that stuff it's perfectly valid but I I sympathize with people who think that you know this is the direction games are going and we're only gonna get that stuff from now on I don't want that I absolutely don't want that but I also think you gotta use your head a little bit and know what you're getting into you know so I would like to see less of those walkie talkie bits but at the same time you know having them in some games is fine so again going back to my point earlier which is probably gonna be the main takeaway from this episode of the podcast is that like assuming there's ever gonna be another episode of the podcast but it's that you know games are different and I don't want every game to do the same thing okay oh oh man how many questions when you're going through about five questions great you still got more to go but I think the I've kind of ordered them so that the answers are gonna get short or as I go I think anyway I put some of the more interesting ones at the front so we're gonna get a little bit more casual as we go go through it so this was an interesting one this is a very interesting one do you think do you think games can be better critiqued in the form of games like it is in the case of films with film reviews do you think there is dimension dimension missing from a critique that's in the form of just the video to fully understand the point I'm not sure if I read that right I kind of spaced out there but and yeah so the point you're making then is that you know films are reviewed by your list was that your movie sucks and red letter media right so they review films and they do it through the medium of film which is interesting and and perhaps that is the best way to review films I think you could be right about that what I would say the first thing I would say about that though is that the videos they make or the videos I make or anybody you know making these types of videos the videos that they make aren't the same thing as an actual film you know I mean it's it's the same medium but it's not really the same thing so in that sense I don't think it's one of those things that your question kind of makes it makes sense on the surface level but when I think about it underneath that I'm not sure it does make sense anymore you know I mean um yeah I I do see where you're coming from though they get reviewed a true film and and it is a great way to do it like it's why I do videos instead of doing blogs is because I can present things to you in video format and kind of use that to illustrate my points and I'm sure those other youtubers and stuff are doing the same thing they're they're using the medium to explain certain things um so it's interesting and I think one reason that it's okay do you think there's a dimension missing from a critique that's in the form of just the video to fully understand the point for games right so yeah possibly yeah my answer is yeah possibly I think maybe in an ideal world it is the way games critique would happen is that people would make their own little games to do it possibly yeah it is absolutely one thing I would imagine something that springs to mind for me for example is I I sorry what is it I want to say here I when I was doing my Mario series I said that Super Mario Sunshine had my favorite movement of all the Mario games right it still does it's it's the moment where Mario feels the most fluid and interesting to me he has the most options he's got nice momentum to him he's got lots of different things he can do it's cool um and Super Mario 3d World was a little bit stiff in that regard and there wasn't as much you could do and so at the end of my series on that I basically said you know I'd love to see something a bit more with the movement more like sunshine and then I added of course the caveat that I didn't like Sunshine's level design quite as much you know so it's or if there's pros and cons to both of those games right I'm just for anybody who hasn't seen the series I'm not saying that sunshine is the best or the worst just that they have different pros and cons okay it's a multi-faceted issue believe it or not anyway um so I suppose what I could do to illustrate that point if I had a lot of time or if time wasn't a factor right I could go out and I could you know I'm rusty on the old programming and I would have to learn I'll have a lot of to do this and I would have to do a lot of research right but theoretically if I had a lot of time I could go out and I could make a little demo for you like a toy box kind of like what ukulele did right just like a little void with some blocks and and then I could give you a button that swaps between the movement mechanics of Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario 3d World and maybe I could say to you try playing this level with both types of movement and see which one you prefer because now what we're doing is we're judging we're kind of its kind of like a control we're kind of removing the other factors right because we're playing in the same level now so the exact same level and we're saying which one is better which one do you think is better and maybe you can play and determine that for yourself and I think if I had done something if I was capable of doing something like that I think maybe that point would come through better I think maybe people who disagree would play it and realize oh actually sunshine does feel better I mean there's more stuff I can do here you know I have more ability to kind of make my own fun and stuff like that with sunshine than I do with the 3d world stuff and so I do think that that could be a point I'm not sure if anybody has ever actually done anything like that or ever will though because the effort it takes to do it isn't really worth it I mean if you're gonna if I was gonna go to the effort of making a game with you know it's got like the movement mechanics of Super Mario Sunshine and it's got a level that you can play around with why wouldn't I just at that point I'm a lot of the way towards just making my own 3d platformer you know so if I was to go and do that I would probably just drop the videos all together and just say hey I'm doing it I'm making a 3d blob because that's something I actually genuinely want to do personally so yeah why wouldn't I just carry on and make an actual game at that point you know it takes so much effort to get there that I might as well just continue you know so I think that's the reason why you probably won't see that but it's a it's an interesting thought experiment alright here's another kind of interesting one don't know what I'm gonna say about this but how big of an impact do you think the 2008 financial crisis had on games seems like big companies were terrified of any sort of risk creativity at that point and it's taken till now for them to recover my the main point I want to raise here is that it's hard to tell at all what kind of impact the financial crisis had on games because especially because there was a new generation just two years before that and of course Sony made the brilliant decision to go with the cel processor which you know it makes some sense in a way where you know they they wanted people to gradually get more out of the hardware so that it didn't become outdated quite as quickly I think that was the logic behind the ps3 the problem though is I know Mark mark Cerny gave a talk where he talked about the time to triangle right so the first thing you do if you're trying to build an engine or whatever is you trade the first thing you do is you just tried to get a triangle on the screen okay and he said that handing them like handing somebody a ps1 dev kit and all the information about it it takes a month to do that right from scratch I don't know how true this is okay because I've done like stuff like this before and it doesn't take a month to learn it but maybe there's something about console development that I don't know because I know it's proprietary and they could have it's I mean like with the ps1 they wouldn't have been using like DirectX or anything like that so they have to they have to have their own system for this stuff and it's hard to do somebody's gotta learn and sit down and read the material and and then go for it you know and then it takes time so I I would believe him anyway obviously he has a lot more expertise on this right than I do so he said with the ps1 it took one to two months to do to get a train hahaha upon the screen okay now with the ps3 I think I'm remembering this right it took six to twelve months six to twelve months because the hardware was so weird it took six to twelve months to do the same job and that was their goal with the ps4 was to that get it back down to one or two months like it cannot stay at this anymore and so that's that's where the presentation that's the presentation he was talking about you can look it up time time to triangle mark Cerny will probably give you the result but anyway um I think you know that's one reason why creativity sort of took a bit of a nosedive because it's just it's become harder and harder to actually make a triple-a game and it costs more and more money and you know it's an a it's a it's a I was gonna say age-old it's not an age-old point but it's an old point now at this point they cost money and the more money is involved the less creativity there's gonna be you know as a general rule and because people just don't want to bed at all on some weird idea and which you know kind of makes sense you know and one one more optimistic way to look at it is that those less creative games by publisher allow publishers to take risks on more creative games in the hope that the kree new creative game will be a massive hit you know so those those less creative games can have helped to fund other games by selling really well that's that's an optimistic way of thinking about it it's not really the way I think about okay um yeah I think I'm losing my voice a little bit and so the problem then is you know how much of that can be attributed to the financial crisis I really don't know and I don't think anyone will ever be able to isolate how much of it was the financial crisis and how much of it is the fact that it's just it's become harder and harder to make games and more and more expensive and I think that uh you know you say it's taken till now for them to recover have they really recover it cuz I don't think so personally I don't think so there's um an image that gets circulated a lot with the the back of the eye I love this right it's the back of the ps2 bar or maybe the front of the I don't know it's the back of the ps2 box right and it says coming this year you know for the ps2 right and all these games came out within about a year of each other right and they're all listed on the box and when you actually see that picture it just crystallizes in your mind how we're not really at that point anymore even today and I will say 2017 has been probably my favorite year for games in a decade right I think I'm willing to make that statement I maybe even longer I don't know I and they I suppose I'm basing that a little bit on some games that haven't come out yet you know but it's been a great year I think it's been a really great year but if you look at this image right it's got Devil May Cry ok revolutionize the action genre Metal Gear Solid 2 was like be just the the sheer technology in the game you know it was like a mind-blowing you know she's it's hard to describe this to people you know it's the fact that you shoot a fire extinguisher and it highlights the beams of a big bomb thing and all those little kojima touches incredible you know incredible and Silent Hill to still commonly referred to as one of the greatest horror games of all time Eko you know massive inspiration hugely inspirational to so many people in in the games industry some of the biggest games today the directors of them like Neil druckmann who directed the Last of Us or hit attacking me as a keen it directed the souls games they will list eco as you know this is the game this is the one you need to play because of kind of what I said earlier that minimalism the way it cut out a bunch of and it's just kind of focused on this thing this emotional sort of resonance that games hadn't really focused on up to that point and and I know there's more I'm forgetting I think maybe Jack and Maxtor was on the list as well which if I'm not mistaken is in the whether they actually got this right or not I don't know but it's in the Guinness Book of Records as like the first seamless world in a game because it has no load times whatsoever once you turn it on um and I think there's at least one more game on that list that is just really good and I I know Ace Combat is one of them not a big I haven't played them myself but like just it's incredible it's incredible to think that all those games came out within a year of each other and I I think you could be right that we're actually getting back to that point but I'm not willing to say that just yet I'm really not willing to say that just yet um but it's it's an interesting question I don't have the answer I'm not big on financial markets or anything of that but I did at least want to raise this because I think it's a cool question I'm not the right guy to answer it but uh hopefully I'll give you something give gave you something to think about there anyway and I really hope that games do continue if they are recovering which they might be you you've raised a good point there I really hope that continues because sorry because I that is something I really miss about the the ps2 sort of era or even earlier than that is there was more room for those sort of people call them Double A games you know like games that didn't have this massive budget they did take some risks and they were a little bit weird you know like on my channel cooler world you know it's not a game you think of when you think of this great game to me that is a great game it is just this genuinely great game nobody can convince me otherwise you know and it's not something that would be made today with this big you know the indie it would be an indie game today I suppose but you know when I think of Double A and what that might mean today I'm kind of thinking of something like Nier automata where I don't think it had a very big budget but it does have very experienced developers behind it and you know I hope that's paid off for Square Enix and because a lot of people have enjoyed it and hopefully we are getting some of that creativity back I think you could be right about that and just I just don't know how to answer your question that's all but good good question how often sorry next question how often do you think games suffer from designed by committee if so do you have any advice to work against this is it even possible for a video game to come to life through artistic vision I know this is three questions apologies I'm just amped you're doing a podcast so I kind of I let you get in with this one because you're you're amped and you you threw that in there it was nice um no this is interesting and I raised the point recently with the whole Demon Souls thing you know that I I don't like games that are designed by committee you know they try to appeal to everybody and that means for someone like me who appreciates lots of different games and I would hope that I'm helping to engender that mentality in you as well that you should appreciate lots of different games for somebody who appreciates lots of different games one of the most boring things you can do is try to be lots of different things all at once you know and kind of it's almost like I'm contradicting myself there because what I said in the demon sales video was that it was because it spread out and managed do lots of different things that it was good but I think it's the exception rather than the rule in that regard I think that a lot of the best games are the best games as I see them anyway are games that kind of skew in one direction you know like like you know I mentioned godhand earlier skews heavily in one direction right it's all about the combat right it's got a funny story in there and it's got a great soundtrack as well but the reason when you pick up God on to play you play it to beat the out of dudes right that's and women as well to be inclusive right you you you beat the out of people in God hand right so God hand that's why you play it that's why you play God and whereas I also mentioned Eko earlier you don't you don't play Eko to beat the out of people you play Eko to go on this like little emotional roller coaster you know this quiet little thing that pulls you in and it does something completely different you know it's a little harder to describe what that game does but it's on the it's totally opposite and it's skews in a different way and that the combat isn't good it's not even really meant to be good it's just kind of meant to be there to pull you more in on the emotional level you know and so it's bad combat or like just barely possible combat if that but really nice emotional resonance and beautiful aesthetics and things like that God hand looks insane you know it's it's crazy it's fun it's it's got this you know punched the out of everything mentality and you are the God hand that's that's the way that game skews and I think mmm I kind of I have another question along this line which I'll get back to you later maybe it's best for me to read that one now I think it is I was gonna save this one for the end but I'm gonna read it now okay so mmm here we go I was saving this one for the end but I'll do the next one because I think this point I'm getting into really relates here okay this might be a generalization but why do you think that Japanese game franchises have been so influential in videogame culture and critique while Western games have fallen out of favor with enthusiasts it seems like there's a divide of sorts and this year alone has been evident of that I'm not really sure what you're referring to at the end but um that's just because I'm kind of out of the loop on what everybody else is saying but anyway um I think this is this is the Japanese mentality and I think it's something it's it's probably the most controversial thing I'm gonna say in this thing or probably have said for a while but the reason I think Japanese game franchises are influential for me and pull me in is just because I've played a lot of games and I'm not interested I would love to know this is if you're gonna talk at all about anything this podcast I would love to know if you're somebody who's played a shitload of games what do you think of the whole Japanese Western versus Western thing right because for me the Western the reason the Western ones don't influence don't don't pull me in quite as much and there are exceptions I will there's absolutely exceptions to this okay I don't want to tear everything with the same brush and I think that's something you risk doing but it would be naive to say that there is no difference between Japanese and Western games there clearly is some kind of difference right they have a strong directorial influence is what I said the other day Japanese games but I think the reason for me that I don't get pulled in by Western games is because I've played a lot of stuff and those games try to have a broad appeal they try generally again I'm generalizing here but they try to do a bunch of different things kind of well whereas Japanese games and again generalizing here completely at least the ones I play when it comes to Japanese am Heston right I can't believe I have to qualify this so much you yeah yeah you kind of have to treat people like babies sometimes I think you put anyway there maybe that's the worst thing I'm gonna say in this in this podcast but anyway Japanese games you know they skew heavily like both of those ones I listed God Han Nico they're both Japanese and they skew heavily in one direction right and again it's almost like I'm contradicting myself here because what I praised about Demon Souls was that it didn't do that but I think an I think it's one of those few games that actually managed to do a lot of things really well and and was greater than the sum of its parts because of it right but generally what I'm looking for in a game is that it does something and it does it really well you know if you look at and a lot of the favorite games on my channel right like let's think about all the games that I did as my recommendation series okay so you've got ghost Rick ghost rick has an incredible story with lots of twists and turns and stuff like that that's what is about it's about the story and the characters and the way it does that is phenomenal okay and pretty much everybody you finish this ghost Rick feels the same way and to me it doesn't matter that it doesn't have these incredible in depth gameplay techniques because I can just go playing at a game for that that's no problem I can go play something else you know I'm happy to go play something else and again dustforce you know just forest doesn't have a story okay it has a theme it has a theme where janitors need to clean things but it has no story whatsoever whatsoever and again I don't care because if I want story I can come and play ghost trick I can go and play Phoenix right or whatever you know if I want the story I go elsewhere if I want really really good platforming I go to dust force and dust force is a Western game so there you go there's one of the exceptions to the rule and again litter I'm gonna list another in western game and this is I think here you what you're seeing now is the divide between indie and triple-a right because the next game I'm gonna list is Space Camp okay Space Camp absolutely brilliant puzzle design brilliant brilliant puzzle design again the story is there I I barely read it to be honest with you I barely paid attention to it and but that's not why I play it I don't play it for that I play it because it's got really good puzzles and if I don't want really good puzzles I play something else and this this seems like kind of an alien concept to some people and it's it's sad to me actually I'm laughing but it's sad to me and because I really wish that people would just appreciate all these different games and I think that's why Japanese games appeal to me more by and large because I think that those those Japanese games do or at least you know when it comes to the the big names versus the big Western ones they do skew more in a certain direction and they provide you something deeply that another game can't you know and that that's the value of it to me is it gives me something new something or something on a level that I haven't seen before you know whereas Western games by and large especially the Triple A ones they sort of are spread out you know when I think of Western game I think of The Witcher or Grand Theft Auto or assassin's creed or Mass Effect or whatever to me anyway all those games are spread out there kind of doing have several different things and it's not really you know and again I've barely played them so I hate to comment on this so much you know but that's that's the difference for me anyway is that it feels more spread out it's like it's an it's trying to appeal to a lot of people to me that if you enjoy something like The Witcher our Grand Theft Auto it's because it gives you a lot of things so like maybe you're the kind of person and again I'm probably gonna get loads of for this okay but I'm just genuinely curious I would genuinely like to know whether or not I'm right about this or not so I am speculating here okay so give me some slack right but I think the kind of people who enjoy The Witcher or Grand Theft Auto or whatever are the kind of people who don't play a lot of different games they want to come home they want to put something on that provides them with like a safe sort of consistent thing and it gives them a couple of little things in there like you know in The Witcher you've got your RPG elements and you've got your combat and you've got a little bit of this a little bit of that you know you've got I think you can do races and stuff like horse races you know and you've got all these bits and pieces so you're still getting that variety you know where as I get my variety from playing a bunch of other games and that's that's the difference to me so I don't even know how I got onto this but I think what I what I would like to do is I would like to get people to just play more games and and I think the more games that you play the more you start to appreciate those games that really do skew in one direction they the way I think about it is kind of like em you know those kind of hexagons or Pentagon's they have where they've got like a character's power level in it you know like he's good he's got good speed or he's got good power over the Japanese ones they've got you know they've obviously still got a little bit of everything you know they've got music and they've got you know good art or whatever but they skew this way or that way you know where is that the Western ones spread out their stats a bit more and to me that's just not as valuable because when I play a Western game like that that's the problem okay I think I'm hitting on the problem now when I if I was to play I haven't played The Witcher okay but I've seen a good bit of The Witcher 3 my My partner missed mitosis whatever you want to call her we don't have a good name for she she has played a good chunk of it right and the TV is right next to me and I've seen a good bit of it right so I know that you can do races and stuff like that and and combat and all that so if I was to play The Witcher mostly what I'd be thinking when I was doing the combat I'd be thinking you know why am I not playing a combat game like godhand you know and then if I was doing the racing I'd be thinking why am I not playing a racing game it's because it would be better it would be better at this would be better at that would be better at this be better at that whereas like I like certain action games more than godhand right but when it comes to just that feeling of beating the out of people no game does it better there's just no game does it better like I can't pick I can't think of a better game to do that and that's why it's valuable to me and that's that's the way I approach these kinds of things you know and so I does I'd be interested to see what other people have to say about it if you were gonna leave a comment on the video or anything like that that would be the thing I would like you to talk about I don't know how many people are actually gonna listen to an hour of it and take my advice on that bottom yeah I'm interested to see what people have to say on that one yeah sorry I'm just scrolling back up through the questions right what are your thoughts on linked-in sorry read that again what are your thoughts on length in games most people hated the order for being too short but a lot of gamers also praised portal 1 and 2 again I want to point out portal is a good example of a game that does skew heavily in one direction so again I'm not making it just a Western versus Japanese thing portal is a great example of a game that skews and provides you with something that you don't get elsewhere but anyway well I'll start again what are your thoughts on LinkedIn games most people hated the order for being too short but a lot of gamers also praised portal 1 & 2 and both are very short and don't offer a lot of replay value The Witcher 3 was praised for its content but alien isolation was criticized for being long and if you're interested in my thoughts on this I talked quite a bit a bit about it anyway in my Devil May Cry commentary which if you're only ever gonna watch one of my videos it should be that one don't let the link to put you off or anything I think some people still think that it's just kind of gonna be all this because it's so long but it is the most tightly written thing I've ever done I put the most effort into okay so watch it am in The Devil May Cry a video I think it's what would it be be mission 21 if you want to find the timestamp for that I believe around mission 21 I talked about this and I think length is basically irrelevant to me it's more about it's more about whether a game capitalizes on everything that it has before the time runs out and conversely if the time if the timer goes on too long and the game isn't really capitalizing on its strengths anymore you know or it feels like it's getting repetitive then it's too long you know and so a short game is fine by me I list the journey journey earlier journey is fine by me it takes about two hours to finish it but like if it was longer I think I would like it less actually and it's because it's short that it's it gets in it hits it's emotional beats and it gets out before you get sick of it that's it and it it's good that it does that because it's not it's simplistic gameplay wise it doesn't have much going on in terms of gameplay you know and it's kind of like that almost like the difference between a film and a television show you know like a film it gets in it presents an idea it messes around with it a little bit then it gets out before you're sick of it whereas some TV shows go on way way too long you know some TV shows I like more than films anyway um yeah so in case you can't tell already by the channel and all that I'm very much a quality over quantity guy to a fault I possibly you know um yeah quality is just so much more important to me than quantity and I think getting hung up on quantity is one of those things that I'm I I worry about when I see people talk about it you know this is this is an old mentality but it still persists today where people sort of take the length of a game and divide it by the dollar cost or whatever and they say oh it's it's you know provided me with this much value because blah blah blah and that's just not the way I see it you know journey for the two hours it's it's pretty expensive it's something like fifteen dollars or something no yeah I'll talk about that again in a second but it's something like fifteen dollars but it was worth its weight in gold to me because of the what it presented to me you know that I would happily hand that money over again no problem if you if you said take it back do you want to buy a journey again I would say yes here I have it back like cuz it the money the experience it provided me was well worth the money it doesn't matter how long it took to get there that really shouldn't matter um but I do think there are some extreme examples where it can matter like I've played Stephen sausage roll and I would not have bought that game at full price it's it's very pricey for what is essentially a twist on soul Caban and I mean it's good I'm not gonna say it's not good it actually is good I was I was very skeptical going into it it is a good game I I can say that I really enjoyed my time with it of the Sokoban style games I played it's the best one but the price on it is pretty insane so you know I suppose even I have my limits but I think as an and you know from an analytical viewpoint it shouldn't matter which is basically what I've said in the DMC video and I personally I got Stephen sausage roll I think I bought it as part of a humble bundle or something like that so I paid very little for it compared to its normal price you know and so again that's another reason why it's irrelevant again it's another point raised in the Devil May Cry commentary so basically what I'm saying is watch the devil may cry commentary please watch it because it's the best video I've done and you should watch it okay so anyway um yeah I don't get behind this whole notion that games should be judged by that you know and I worry about it affecting the developers mentality as well one game where I worried that that might have been the case I'm hesitant to criticize this game because everybody loves that has been talking about it lately but um I'll go ahead and do it anyway hollow night okay I played hollow night for twenty five hours and I've got 90 percent completion and I don't know if I'll go back and do any more um I kind of feel like I've seen everything there is to see now but anyway I got 90 percent completion in 25 hours okay and to me it did not feel like there was 25 hours of content in there it just didn't and I'll give you a great counter example of a game that I I think you should play which is called environmental station alpha which is another Metroid style game and it's actually quite similar to holo night in in a bunch of ways I think um and I came I played that about a year ago about a year ago right um and when I finished hollow Knight I thought to myself you know like the the backtracking in it just took so long and I don't think that it really had enough going on in terms of its movement mechanics and stuff like that to justify making me walk around so much so when I finished it I was like man you know I feel like your environmental station alpha had just as much stuff in it and I wonder how long that took me to finish by comparison because I was curious right so I tried to guess in my head well environmental station uh it felt like it had about as much going on you know maybe even more so that game probably took me around 25 hours as well because I do think I got lost a bit you know I spent some time wandering around doing and not making progress for a while and it's definitely one of those games that will will let you run into a brick wall for a while before you can progress you know so I thought to myself probably around 25 hours so I looked after I guessed I looked and it was 16 hours so in those 16 hours environmental station I had done just as much or more than I think hollow knight did and to me that is far more valuable because you're literally saving time out of my life like you only spend so much time being alive everybody understands that right you're you are gonna be dead at some point in the not-too-distant future sooner than you think okay and if a game is stretched out then that is essentially getting closer to your own demise without experiencing as much cool right so I really value that conciseness you know conciseness of the conciseness of environment the station alpha was really good for me I think that it was good and the times when it wasn't concise it was mostly because I was wandering around and kind of my own fault for not knowing where to go you know and so yeah it's I don't think it should affect how you feel about a game and what I worry about when I see people say something like that oh it was great value blah blah blah is I worried that developers are going to stretch their games out to fit that you know and I'm not saying that happened with holo night I I'm not saying that at all just that it was an example that I played recently that kind of stuck out to me where it could have been shorter and I would have been happier if it was shorter and I could say the same about some games you knows some games I'm happy they go on for as long as they do and some games could be shorter I can knock the kind of guy to lay down rules and I don't think it's something that I would judge that it's not something I'm not gonna judge a game because it lasts X amount of hours it's more how much does it pack into those X amount of hours you know it wasn't worth those X amount of hours you know yeah I think actually I want to come back to that point again I think that's another thing that it's easier to see when you're really into games right and especially for me now and as I'm a reviewer and I mean I already felt this way but I only feel more strongly this way an editor a reviewer because for me it's very easy to justify buying a game right I mean it's already pretty much all I spent my money on I spend money on being alive and buying game right but now I got money on patreon and it's like well what am I going to spend that money on games right that's what people give me the money so I can do games so I spend it goes on games if you ever wonder where your money goes it goes on keeping me alive and playing games so it's even easier for me now to remove that money part from the equation because I really it's my job it's what I do you know people give me money and if I imagine the people who donate you know if they could pick one of the things they would want the money to go on it would be a game right they don't want me to go out and buy something really frivolous with it that has nothing to do with my role as Matthew mitosis they would say you know oh I hope he gets a good game out of it right it was very easy for me it's easier forever easier than ever for me to spend that money on games and so that that has removed it even further from the equation for me I really don't care about that and I think that's what people are talking about when they're talking about lengths and games they're really obsessed about how much value they're getting out of it you know whereas I I think you should value your life more I mean obviously there's a conversion rate on life to money you know but am I you really should value your time more I think which is why I kind of almost skew the opposite direction I suppose ultimately I more kind of won a game to do its thing and move on you know or or do its thing and be over and let me replay it if I really want to rather than stretch it out that I would rather again be too short than too long I suppose is what I'm saying yeah so hopefully that that answers you another one where I'm gonna have to recommend a video to you so don't don't be asking me questions that I've already answered guys you have to go watch the entire channel first not money invested actually I wouldn't want you to watch this video if you haven't played journey so anyway I should ask the question first right do you think it's important for a video game to be fun or do you think a game can work towards inspiring other emotions like fear and still be successful for example many people cite the tank of old horror games as bad but I would argue they served at Dave's vision thoughts on this um so go and watch this video if you have finished journey or if you really don't think you'll ever care about your any I would rather you just give it a go then try and write it off but anyway yeah if you've watched if you've played your any watch this video the journey and dear Esther comparison this topic comes up and and I'll just say exactly what I said then or paraphrase it which is I don't think a game needs to be fun for it to work and I think that fear is the easiest example it's the example I went to in in my in in that video I explained you know if a horror game if you're if you feel fun while you're playing a horror game it's probably not a great horror game right because you play a horror game to be afraid and that's and you know some people I think someone has said this to me in the past and you know some people would say that feeling fear is fun because it's what you go into the game for but I think you're really moving the goal posts on that one you know obviously after the fact you can think oh that game was fun because it made me myself but it's not that's not what the game was doing at that time it was trying to make you afraid you know and that's not the same as fun at least if the game is doing it right I don't think that's the same thing as fun exactly anyway and if it is then the same applies to everything the same applies to everything like like I talked about journey journey is fun then like the emotional parts of journey are fun because they're what I went into the game for so if you're gonna try and use that to justify fear being this little exception to the rule that doesn't fly with me I think everything falls under that umbrella if it's what you go into the game for and you think oh I went into this game to be afraid so therefore it's fun well I went into you know journey to see what the hell it was all about I had fun okay if that's your definition of it um and you know actually parts of journey are for and fun and they are supposed to be fun I think but anyway yeah so it's it's it's something I don't think games have to be or should have to be to be enjoy I think there's a broad spectrum of things and again it's like kind of like what I was saying earlier where I skewed towards games you know there's some games that I find that I'm incredibly fond you know but sometimes I want to play something that invokes something else it's like when you're listening to music you don't always want to listen to depressing stuff you don't always want to listen to pop music you want to listen to one or the other kind of depending on your mood or depending on what you're thinking about or whatever and I think the same is true for games and I hope people start thinking that way about games you know so we're getting to the part with short or enters and answers now I think as I kind of picked this to finish it out so next question what do you think of the recent trend of always online multiplayer focused service games being the main focus from Western triple-a companies personally I can't see people talking about games like the division or destiny in 20 years time because if they're always online games as a service focused nature while games like breath of the wild and persona 5 it's a bit of a run-on sentence ok I've written worse though well games like breath of the wild and persona 5 are going to age considerably better and likely be heralded as classics ok yeah I picked this question mostly just because I kind of agree with what you're saying I don't really have anything else to add and but one point I would add though is that um ok so basically the point of driving eyes in 20 years time nobody will even be able to play destiny which i think is probably true unless they unless destiny is still a thing in 20 years time was still going nobody's ever gonna be playing and there's already a whole shitload of online games that have been taken offline and nobody can play them anymore just because there's no servers for them and there's no way to get people going and so yes I I think that just for that fact alone single-player games like you mentioned breath of the wild and persona 5 it's not so much that they're gonna age considerably better exactly it's more that they're just gonna be playable people can play them people will be able to play them I presume anyway I mean I can't them I cannot imagine a scenario where 20 years time I can't play right of the wild for all I know my switch and mic we'll probably still work in 20 years time and so it doesn't matter you know if nobody if literally nobody else on the planet cares about breath in the wild in 20 years time anymore I can still play it and I can still enjoy it so just for that reason alone I think that you know what you're saying is correct what I would say though is that even though they're not really my kind of thing the division and destiny because I think those games as the service things kind of add in a whole bunch of RPGs and microtransaction and all that and I'm not really interested in and I you know I'm just kind of making a broad statement there I haven't even played either of those games but it's just not the kind of thing I want to play but even though I would say that even though they're not my kind of thing I don't think that makes them inherently worse than breath of the wild and persona 5 and in fact in terms of in fact in terms of impact or you know the amount of enjoyment people get out of those games it's totally possible that you know more hours of enjoyment and overall you know net happiness has been generated by destiny than ever will be by breath the wilder persona 5 just because so many people are playing them and so many people are playing them constantly you know Destiny's been out for years people have been playing it for years and maybe those people my suspicion is that many of those people are just kind of compulsively playing it to hang out with their friends that would be my speculation but maybe there's a lot of them that just really really enjoy the game and really enjoy all the time they spend in it and you know most people don't play for someone five again immediately after completing it some people do hats off to you I I wouldn't do it and you know I'm not saying I'm never gonna play it again I probably am but you know in terms of just sheer manage yeah if we were to try and come up with some objective standard destiny would probably win in that regard you know so I'm not gonna say that it's inherently worse by any means or anything like that but um I do think it's something that is a bit of a shame like I always want people to be able to go back and play games again this comes up in the Devil May Cry commentary you know and and like for me it would be a tragedy if somebody if we got to a point that and nobody could play Devil May Cry and you know and because it's such an influential and an interesting game to play and to think about and to talk about that that would be bad you know that and it's part of gaming history and there are lots of games that I like that you know minecraft and one I'm not big into but you know minecraft needs to be preserved and actually I'm getting into a different question that was asked later so what I'll do is let's skip to that one I did it at that yeah he actually had two questions along similar lines I'm gonna read two more questions now do you think there will be a time in the future where fans of older games will never get to play them again or new audiences will never be able to try them out themselves and somebody else asked what do you think about game preservation what is the future of current and last gen consoles when the servers go down and what effects will it have on the future of the retro market slash community when you want to play Assassin's Creed unity for your collection in 20 years and it is a broken piece of crap and so they're they're kind of similar to the question raised a minute ago and the point being that you know you Assassin's Creed unity I believe what you're getting out there is it was patched after release so without that patch it's gonna be it's it's not gonna be playable even if you have the discs you know and that's why I don't like day1 patches that's why I've always been against them I've not against them exactly I mean if a game is gonna release broken I would rather there be a day one patch you know but that's why I've always wanted games to come out as complete as they can be because it is a big problem for preservation you know and so yeah it's something that's on my mind again it comes up in the Devil May Cry commentary I believe it comes up during one of the nightmare fights if I had to guess I would say mission 19 so there you go and but basically my point is is essentially what I'm saying now is that presentation or preservation is important you know it's it's something I think is important and I think people should be more considerate of and I think that the modern practices of you know all this DLC and all the day one patches and all that and online-only and all that is is really getting in the way of preservation and it Mike back to be a big problem because people in the future just won't be able to play those formative games you know like what I think about and again I'm winning whose Devil May Cry as an example just because it's where I talked about it what I think about is like all these action games that have come out since Devil May Cry and they've built on it in certain ways okay and what would be interesting to me is if you know 20 30 40 50 years from now some kid who's really some nerd who's really into games like me he comes along and he's like oh man you know I love games and I want to learn more about them you know I've done this I've gone on I've played games that were before my time hopefully you have as well if you haven't played pac-man you should play pac-man it's a really good game okay it's just genuinely a really good game and it's before my time it's probably before at a time of most of you if it's not before your time hello I didn't realize I had people of your age no no that was such a stupid thing to say but anyway um yeah so it's it was before my time but I went I played and I've played a bunch of old arcade games as well because I want to know more about the history of games so what would be interesting to me for example would be you've got all these presumably people will still be making action games 50 years from now right and they'll be building on the action games that came in the last 50 years but what would be really interesting to me would be to see somebody who has you know at that point in time somebody who doesn't really play action games but they go out of their way to explore retro games and then this far-flung future Devil May Cry is a retro game it's not a retro game yet okay I hope it's not anyway um and they go back and they play that and maybe because it's at like this early branching point maybe because it's so simplistic compared to some of the later games maybe that has a different effect on them you know maybe maybe he thinks about it differently or maybe he rediscovers something about the action genre that was kind of lost along the way you know and that's that's why preservation is important to me because it allows people to go back and see these things you know yeah I know like for example playing pac-man is like pac-man is something that comes into my mind you know I didn't do that pac-man and scoring video for no reason it's because of the game I think about quite a lot and just because of its simplicity and because I love the way it's I believe it's 100% deterministic in nature you know that's what I love that I love the fact that it's got this complicated setup with the ghosts but the ghost behavior is deterministic and you don't you actually don't really see like that anymore you know and you know possibly some of the AI in games that we see today is completely deterministic buts really hard to tell and more likely it's got like these random randomization factors especially because you've got different difficulty levels and stuff you know so to me the idea of a game with these ghosts which are completely deterministic is something that's kind of been lost along the way and that's kind of what what I'm getting at and why I feel preservation is really valuable because it allows people like me or people like that guy 50 years in the future to go back and look at things and see what might have been lost or what we might do differently what other paths because we have taken you know if he plays the original Devil May Cry without having played any of the newer action games he could have completely different idea about what an action game should be you know and that's a good thing because it leads to more games and people can build on them more and so on and so on you know and so I think if you make a multiplayer only game you really you really screw yourself over there because people aren't going to be playing it in 50 years time whereas if you make a single-player game yeah people could be playing that no problem even if it's a game people don't really care about that all that much you know how many people actually really genuinely loved cool overhauled back when it was released I'm not sure I mean I never really heard anybody talking about it but now you've got somebody like me with a big audience and what you know I I talked about cold world and maybe now a bunch of people have played it maybe somebody who played it really loved it you know I got quite I got a comment recently from people saying that they love driven you know and just that's great because I'm not gonna say that Riven is completely overlooked but you know if it hadn't be for me going back and playing that I and talking about it then maybe those people would never have played it and that that's that's a bad thing in my eyes you know so that's that's why I that's one aspect that I prefer about single-player games the idea that people can still play it in far into the future I think that's that's cool oh my God my trove is killing me okay loaded question I believe momentum is one of the most if not the most important aspects to any action slash platformer games mechanics do you agree it's my it's pleasure is innate and hard to spot but it's felt constantly and can severely dampen an experience if not on right okay I think you are right to a large degree again this is one I chose because I mostly agree with it and again part of what I prefer about Super Mario Sunshine movement is not just studies got more moves than he has in 3d world but also that he does have a bit of momentum to him that he doesn't have in 3d world at least I didn't I didn't feel it the same way in 3d world as I did in a sunshine you know I've talked about how dust force is one of my favorite platformers and dust force is very momentum based the idea I mean if you really want to get a good score and dust force basically what you have to do is hit a ramp get momentum and keep that momentum for as long as possible you know or even build on it even more and it's you know almost a little bit like sonic in a way which is a weird comparison but anyway um yeah so yeah I do think momentum is a big thing and another reason I wanted to bring this up is because based on what little footage I've seen I haven't seen much of it but based on what little footage I've seen I want to raise this as my main concern about Mario Odyssey I think I mean they've obviously gone to some lengths to make sure that mario has a bunch of different moves he can do to kind of bring it back to that super mario 64 level and of movement but it still feels a little stiff like what I'm doing what's kind of code that sunshine is what I did two seconds ago can affect how I'm doing what I didn't press that really badly and what I did two seconds ago like diving forward and building a bit momentum can affect what I'm about to do now so like if you spray some water dive on it build momentum go down a ramp and then do a triple jump you'll go a lot further than if you just did a triple jump at the end of the ramp just by standing there and that's really cool that's cool I think gives people a lot of cool things that they can do depending on the level and stuff like that you know and I worry that that's not something that will apply to mario odyssey but of course i have to hold out and see but i just wanted to raise that as my main concern about it you know i also i did talk a little bit about this in the mario galaxy one video where i talked about one of my biggest problems with that game is the way the spin move kills your momentum completely and i think it would have been a much better game if that didn't happen so yeah momentum is definitely important to me when it comes to platformers anyway okay gaming as an art form is still seen as immature with a lot of catching up to do do games lack maturity from a storytelling perspective should they even be trying to mature in a way that emulates other mediums are there taboo subjects games aren't tackling where does this reputation come from and I talked a little bit about this in one of my asked answers before what I said well I'll summarize what I said there I forget the question exactly but somebody asked me if somebody asked me about games that present negative emotions right or something along those lines and I said that possibly one reason that games don't do that is because they take so much work the idea of spending so much of your life trying to make a game that just makes the player feel like afterwards isn't really all that appealing for a lot of people you know if you want to make a game you kind of want to put if you're gonna spend that long on something you kind of want to put something positive into the world you know or at least if you're gonna do negative you kind of want to do something really cool and interesting with it you know and so I think that's one reason why we see less of the sort of taboo subjects that you're talking about there is because games it's partially fear I think because they a lot of people don't want to bring that down on their heads it's also more just that they don't want to skew negative I think I'm using the word skew a lot they don't they don't want to present negative things all the time and do you think that games I have a lot of catching are so sorry catching up to do and did I lack maturity from a storytelling perspective I think that's probably true to some degree yeah I think that's the kind of thing that will just come in time it's not something I really worry about and I think that for a lot of games the story that they have suits them you know even if it's not all that brilliant like you know if the story suits the tone of the game it's it's fine by me you know and are there taboo subjects oh yeah sorry to go back to the lack of maturity and storytelling perspective and obviously I would like the storytelling in games to be a better on games especially again it's the main takeaway the theme of this podcast is all about talking about you know games individually right so if you want maturity from a storytelling perspective I want that from certain games and not from others you know or I want certain games to focus on that more than others and and I suppose we you know we you know something like The Last of Us gets a lot of praise for its maturity and I do think the way it's presented is really good the way it's presented is really good but in terms of what actually happens in the story it's not not amazing you know I like the ending the very last scene I think is a good example of how of a game ending on a note that you normally wouldn't think a game would end on and I don't want to ruin it for people you know because it was one of my favorite aspects of the game was that it just it did have this I hesitate to use the word mature but it's the one popping and Dad because I'm in my head because I'm looking at the question but that is kind of what I would think of when I think of a mature ending is it's like it's not this big blow up sort of thing it kind of is but it's it's got the epilogue is really what I'm referring to you know the last bit it's it's a bittersweet I suppose and I said that I wanted to see more stories and on that bittersweet note and I think that that would be good but I think you know people are quick to jump to games and say oh they're very mature and blah blah you know all the praise BioShock Infinite got its release or even something like the Last of Us the majority of Last of Us is not all that interesting or deep or mature or whatever word you want to use it's a zombie story it's a well executed zombie story um it's good but it hits the usual sort of things that zombies stories hid you know by and large and it just happens to present that in a good way and I think again so sorry to pick on Naughty Dog here but back when Uncharted was new people praised that all the time for its mature storytelling and all that and I like Amy Hennig as a writer but I've always felt that you know jumping to saying when charted is great for that kind of stuff is a bit of a leap you know it's like it was made to be sort of game version of Indiana Jones and Indiana Jones doesn't get praised there's some sort of massively deep mature story which isn't decided it's bad you know but it's just it's not it's not that mature sort of storytelling that you're alluding to I think and and Arthur taboo subjects games aren't tackling yes yes daran dare I say it yeah they're dare I say did the n-word again you know yeah I mean like Bioshock pussied out on using the word okay and it did that because it was afraid of offending people and the reason I think that was dumb and the reason I just said the word is because words only have meaning in a certain context like I didn't use the word there to call anybody that I didn't say that to anybody I said it because I was saying the word you know and I at the very least I would have understood that if BioShock Infinite had done that it's like it's not the developers are going out it's you know they're not actually trying to lynch people in real life you know they're they're they're just presenting a theme in a game and people should be more open to that even if it's the kind of thing that Oh on a surface level oh this offends me whatever like it's it's just it's just trying to be true to life I think you know like Huckleberry Finn don't they yeah that's they use the word all the time in that right and is that a bad novel because it's offensive in that regard I don't think so and that's you know when did that book come out over a hundred years ago maybe I'm not sure I'm really bad with dates but you know that's why I think people still think games have the kid gloves on because they're not willing to do that somebody's got to step up and start presenting themes and treating people like adults you know because because films can do that all the time films if it's appropriate they can use that n-word all the time and games can't do that you know they because they're just silly little games you know somebody's got to step up and take the hit and I think if you were really gonna go all in on that racism thing like the way BioShock Infinite did then they really should have taken that step but obviously they didn't want to and and so I think that's an example of a game avoiding you know avoiding a subject you know being being too afraid of a taboo you know but also I will say in defense of games that this kind of happens anytime a new kind of medium is introduced it's a it's not it's not a new phenomenon you know even when books were first made people thought that books we're gonna poison the minds of the populace and and ruin them and now books are seeing is this hoity-toity if you're not reading books you're not an intelligentsia sort of thing you know so that the thing is completely flipped on books you know and it's possible I don't know how it'll happen but it's possible that someday the same thing will happen with games so I think it's kind of thing it's not kind of thing I worry about and I will say as well in defense of BioShock Infinite nobody really wants to step up and be the one to do that taboo cuz you're just calling a rain of down on yourself you know so in a way I almost don't blame them but as a critic I had to I had to call that out you know I have to UM but I will say you know for me it's easy for me to say that it would be harder for me to make it game and do that do the same thing and but that's that's my role as a critic right now you know and I don't really blame anybody for not wanting to make games like that though yeah yeah again I just want to reiterate I think it's something that will happen in time video games seem to be less original as time goes on only trying to appeal to the mass market when you look back at the NES era there was no preconceived idea of what a VG video game sorry should be so developers took more chances and were more creative do you think creativity will continue to die as time goes on um well I sometimes I my opinion on this matter depends on how long it's been since I played a game that really wowed me in in a sense you know sometimes I feel very doom and gloom about this sometimes I agree with you that games aren't being as creative as they were but then occasionally I play something like Ghost Trick or space scam or the wonderful 101 and I go you know oh there's still there's still a lot of room for imagination here there's still a lot to be done you know and so I think that those games and those games and games like those are a great reminder and there's something that really keeps me truckin when it comes to not getting too down about the future of games so if you're worried about it I think you should try to branch out more and try to explore and find more things that interests you because there's a good chance there is something out there that you would love that you haven't discovered yet you know and I tried to surface those things to people but I'm only one person there's only so much I can do um but a great example for me would be something like down well okay no I don't think down well is quite as imaginative or crazy as something like space cam or even Ghost Trick really but when I played down well I was very much struck with the sense like how has this not been done before that that was my first reaction to it and to its credit you know it's like I mean maybe there's just some games I haven't played that I haven't done it you know but I think even if there was a game that kind of went in a similar trajectory going downwards it wouldn't have quite the same focus as down well I don't think that has been done and really what it is is it's taking a platformer and just flipping it vertically you know it's kind of like reverse ice climbers ice climbers was going up but down well goes down I think we had those games that went up and we had the games that went sideways but I don't know how many games we had that just went straight down forever and really encouraged to you I had to think about that and play with that concept and I knew when you play it you go what the how did nobody come up with this you know how did this game not exist until now was it something like thirty years after Super Mario Bros down well comes out and to me that's that's a great example of how they're still creativity you know I might be over selling it a bit I don't I don't want to go too hard on it because I know some smart ass in the comments is gonna come out and say actually there's this game that's quite a lot like damn well that came out five years beforehand and okay yeah okay there probably is a game like that you know I've try try to play as many games as I can there probably is still game like that that I've overlooked but my point still stands I think where I play it and I go you know if there was another game five or even 10 years ago that's still 20 years since Super Mario Bros you know and I just I wonder to myself how many other things there are that are like that and where when I play it I'll go why didn't we have this sooner you know how could no but he had done this yet and that's that's exciting to me when I play something that's like that so I still think there's a you know there's a lot of imaginative people out there who will come up with something like that and come up with things that surprised us like that you know I think if pac-man didn't exist if pac-man hadn't been made I think um I'm not sure we would have a pacman today if you know what I mean I'm kind of reversing my premise here saying like if arcade games had continued on and you had space invaders and Galaga and all that if if pac-man hadn't been made would we actually have any games where you go through a little maze and collect dots and you work on this sort of digital up-down left-right and you get chased would there be anything like that I don't think so I really don't think so um or if if it had happened it might just be happening now like we're down well you know and so yeah I again somebody might point out that there was a maze game before pac-man maybe there was and thought yeah I think it's really interesting to think about and I know where you're coming from and if another few years elapses without me finding a game like that I probably will start to feel very pessimistic but right now I don't feel pessimistic about it because I do think that there's been enough I mean maybe it slowed down I think you could definitely say it slowed down is another reason why I want to encourage people not to think in genres because I think we might be getting more that kind of stuff if we didn't think in John Roos you know but like if you think of a platformer as a genre the bottom of the screen is the part that kills you you know whereas in down well the bottom of the screen is the part where you want to go and if anything the top of the screen is what kills you and so yeah yeah that's another reason why I don't want people to think in genres so much sorry I'm I think I should wrap this up soon because I'm starting to to phase out I actually only have one question left okay alright last question do you have any strong opinions on photo modes that were a brief trend in triple A's a year or two ago on one hand as a screenshot junkie I loved being able to strip out the hood and stuff but on the other it always felt like I was marketing the game for them especially when you can slap a logo onto it um well first thing I would say is if you like a game and you want to post a screenshot of it on Twitter and the game gives you the ability to do that yeah it's marketing I suppose and the marketers and the ones that are gonna be happy to have that feature in the game cuz it means it sells more copies and they get a bigger bonus but you know if you genuinely like the game I don't think that something is you feel ashamed of or weird about or anything like that and I say go for it no problem so yeah it's it's definitely put into the game as part of the marketing idea but you know don't don't worry too much about that um I have no problem with the photo modes and I think it's kind of interesting in that it may be stuff that was already in a lot of games it's just actually being surfaced to the user you know because they needed a way to take screenshots for games anyway and they I mean there's debug menus and games that do all sorts of things like especially with the camera and stuff like that you know so it could be a case that they they had a bunch of those options maybe not all of them but it could be a case that a lot of the options you see on that list there's stuff that was already there and all they had to do was make a menu for it and do some testing to make sure that it doesn't break anything and then they can just put it in as far as a final product so I think um it's not something I use it's not something I would get a lot of use out of but for the amount of effort that it takes or the amount of effort I think that it takes it's probably well worth it I you know like again from a marketing perspective it makes sense it probably will get a few extra copies for your game even if your game is kind of obscure just seeing even one screen getting one more screenshot of it out there I could make a difference you know and that's not really what I think about when I think about games though I don't really care about the marketing or trying to sell it to more people but I do think there's people that enjoy it like I said you're a screenshot junkie and there's a lot of people like you so giving you the ability to go in and tweak your screenshots and make cool wallpapers or whatever that's a that's cool so I've got no problem with it and I think even though I don't enjoy it the amount of time it subtracts from development probably isn't big enough that I would be annoyed about having it in a game that I like or anything I'm not gonna look at the photo mode and go oh only they hadn't done the photo mode they would have been able to do something else you know that's probably not the case it's I would guess that they're mostly just taking those things and making them available to you as their end user and okay so I think that about covers it hopefully this came out ok I think I might be a bit low there's nothing on the mix I can do nothing about that I'm also very close to the mic so I'm sorry if there was a lot of breathing and shitty noises and stuff like that it's because I've had this mic for years and I had to kind of shout into it to make it register me at a decent volume but I'm not going to shout into it for two hours so apologies for that if I do carry on with this thing I'll try to improve the quality it's just that I actually record my videos elsewhere where I have soundproofing and it's not noisy it's only quiet here now because it's for I am I live on a busy road and the cars go by constantly so it's really bad and but that's your insight into my life for now yeah I'm not really sure how to end it so I'll just end it here if you have any feedback or anything you want to say let me know hopefully there's been something in here that's been illuminating for you and if not then at least maybe you got some nice background material for a couple of hours yeah I'll sign off for now if I do another episode of this I'll try to take different questions about about a different sort of topic so I get a lot of questions about I wanted to talk about actual games you know and and game design decisions and stuff like that but I gotta I also get a lot of questions obviously about the channel itself or about just my opinion on various games like what do you think of this game is it good is it bad tell me so I might get around to those at a different point um but for now that's it um yeah so I'll see you next time hopefully

Channel: Matthewmatosis Extra

Views: 70,068

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Id: 2V6jjLdN5iA

Length: 118min 26sec (7106 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2017