Rantology: Having Fun

So the other day I caught myself turning on my XBox One for the first time since I had moved back in April, and while I admit it did take me a shameful amount of time to turn it back on and play it again, I don't regret me decision.  See, I've actually been keeping plenty busy on my other consoles lately, with Mario Kart 8 coming out on switch, Destiny starting their Age of Triumph celebrations (of which I still need to finish off my record book), and other assorted titles filling out the rest of my time with a sprinkling of WoW just to keep me in check.  Now, that's not to say that I regret my decision to have not turned on my console, but I feel I have neglected it for too long.  That being said I loaded up some Halo 5: Guardians, and just dived into my favorite new game mode Warzone Firefight.

Now Warzone Firefight launched sometime last summer, and while I was fully aware of its release, I was too busy playing other games at the time, I don't remember what games, but it was something I kinda wrote off as something I'd get to later, Well now that later has arrived and dear god I don't know what took me so long.  The game mode is absolutely brilliant in all the right ways, the usage of REQs, the team based goal oriented combat, in fact the only negative thing I can say about it is that respawn timers can get too long late in the game, but even that is offset by the weapons you've unlocked to that point.  However, as much fun as I was having I felt dirty for enjoying my time with the game.  I felt like I was somehow degrading myself for playing a game so many fans disliked, a game that was criticized for the removal of local coop so it could achieve a smooth 60 fps, and I will fully admit I was one of those dissenters at first, yet, as the Halo nutjob I am, went out and purchased Halo 5 at launch and at least gave it a shot, and while I like the direction the story went, despite some of its previous misgivings in Halo 4.  As dirty as I felt though, I just didn't care because at my core I was actually having fun.

See that's something that I feel like people have lost sight on in recent years, especially when it comes to gaming.  We all want this huge awesome new IP to launch with open world, and crafting, and all these other things to give us freedom in our worlds because a handful of games did it well and we're constantly under the illusion that that is where success lays, but I've come to disagree with that and instead I put forth a new idea: instead of chasing the heels of previous success, or criticizing something for every graphical misgiving, or a person for their taste, let's just all have fun.  It's really not that difficult of a concept to embrace, all you need to do is if you see someone enjoying something you don't, just ignore it, let it go.  Don't tell them you hate it, don't tell them why it's bad, don't criticize it for what it is or isn't, let them enjoy something.

Oddly enough this isn't the first time I've found myself in this situation either, with many releases over the last couple of years I've found myself either having to defend my interest in the game, justify why I would ever play such a thing, or I've just felt ashamed for playing something that I am genuinely having fun playing simply because the gaming community as a whole dislikes it for whatever reason.  A couple of very recent examples are Mass Effect Andromeda and Ghost Recon Wildlands.  It would be no small secret to the people who know me that I am a HUGE Mass Effect fan, I have art on my walls, clothing in my drawers, hell I even splurged on the $130 Pathfinder backpack, $100 DieCast Nomad ND1, and I'm currently in the middle of purchasing the FigPins.  Needless to say, I LOVE Mass Effect, it's wonderful and I practically disappeared when Andromeda came out this year, starting the game a mere week and a half before I moved, whilst packing mind you.  I loved the game, and had a ton of fun playing it, and while there were things I was looking forward to that weren't there, such as dynamic outposts, being able to land on dozens of worlds, and a larger selection of romantic options.  All those put aside I still enjoyed the game, and had hours of fun playing it despite having to defend my interest in the game due to its glitches and facial animations, both issues that in my playthrough were a maximum of  maybe 30 minutes in a 50 hour experience.

I felt assaulted and wronged because how dare I have fun when a few people put videos on YouTube for reddit and other meta sites to laugh at and criticize the game for it. How dare I enjoy something that let down their expectations, people who didn't play the game and had no interest in it in the first place.  How dare I have fun.  How dare I enjoy myself.  The same issue revolves around Ghost Recon Wildlands.  The reviews came out for it and were less than positive, the game was repetitive, the open world felt like it made the player travel vast amounts for no real reason, and the narrative is too shallow, but I found myself in the same place, having fun.  I've enjoyed my time with Ghost Recon, I love taking down bases, getting into firefights driving around Bolivia, flying up as high as I can and parachuting back down to Earth.  I'm loving every minute of it and I've actually been putting off completing it because I don't want it to be over.

Yet it was in a PSN group chat that I realized I shouldn't feel bad for enjoying something, if its fun then why should I care what people say about it? Lately we've all been obsessing over review scores and graphical improvement, and making sure that everything is tippy toppy to the point that anything but the very best isn't good enough.  People complained about Arkham Knight's graphical and game play issues, but I still had fun, I may have been frustrated at points, but I enjoyed the ride through the game.  People complained about Destiny and it's lack of story content and it's MMO-esque approach to gameplay, yet here we are almost 3 years later with the sequel getting ready to release and new players are joining every day, something must be keeping those players coming back. Another much criticized game over its lifetime is World of Warcraft, being one of the largest games of all time leading up to the 2010 release of Cataclysm that rebuilt the world from the ground up and saw many players straight up leave the game after being so invested for so long, other games stepped in place to acquire some of it's player base like Rift, SWtOR, Guild Wars 2, and more recently Final Fantasy XIV.  Yet many remained loyal to the game for a myriad of reasons, even throughout the Warlords of Draenor expansion, which some refer to as "The Dark Days of WoW".  Yet still, the rush of getting new equipment, enjoyment of friends, and conquering bosses still remained fun to players to world over, these players didn't leave because they were still enjoying themselves in one way or another.

Now none of this is to say we should be happy and content with whatever the industry hands us and just "be grateful we're getting games", but we certainly shouldn't talk down on someone who enjoys something.  As a long time fan of the Koei's Warrior franchise I know very well what a double sided dose of criticism looks like.  It takes a certain sense of mindless grinding to get any sort of real enjoyment out of those games, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, in fact sometimes a mindless grind is exactly what I need to destress after a long day, I find it relaxing and fun, so what.  We all got into this insane hobby around the central idea that games and gaming is fun.  No one started off day one out of the gate as being the best and min maxing every character to be the mathematical best at whatever, we all have our own unique playstyles, and our own unique approaches to everything, so why should our enjoyment be any different. Gaming takes all types, some like graphics, some like stories, some like mechanics, some like to min max and feel powerful, some are just tournament players who dedicate everything they have to being the best at their game, and that's all okay.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that we need to stop getting into petty arguments and judging each other.  We need to sit down and just appreciate gaming a bit more, appreciate gaming for what it is, something we have fun with.  Not everything needs to be an artistic masterpiece, not everything needs to appeal to everything, glitches happen, and someone is going to disagree with you about Ubisofts Spiderman game on PS4, but who cares.  What really matters is that you're having fun, and if you see someone enjoying something you don't like here's a little piece of advice: don't attack them for it (unless of course that thing is discriminatory in any way that is), they're people like you. Let people have fun.

Rantology: That Kotaku GameStop Article

Okay. sooooooo yea, journalism, not just mainstream but games as well, has a really nasty habit of not doing their research and sensationalizing things.  Specifically I'm talking about a recently published article on Kotaku about GameStop's Circle of Life.  What I want to do here is discuss a few critical things in this article, and bring to light a few facts that were conveniently left out, or not communicated.  First though, I make transparency in what I do a point of personal pride, so with that in mind I'm going to be transparent, and as I've stated before, I am employed by GameStop on a part time basis.  I'm not a manger, I'm not in charge of a store, or a district, simply a Game Adviser.  Now along with that, there is a document I signed called the "Social Media Posting Guidelines" that more or less state that I cannot post about upcoming promotions, company "secrets", inventory, and other things of that ilk.  I'm probably going to be going against that, but the truth is way more important in this issue than that piece of shit corporate sellout document in this case.

Okay, I'm going to leave images out of this as much as I can, since this is kind of a brass tax issue.  I'm also going to quote the Kotaku article directly and offer my insights and personal experience about this.  So if this isn't that funny, I apologize, but I feel this is one of the few times I need to be somewhat serious and address an issue head on.

The article starts off like this: "They may simply be lying to you, fueled by a new program that discourages GameStop salespeople from selling unopened copies of video games.

The program, called “Circle of Life,” gives each GameStop store different percentage quotas for 1) pre-orders; 2) reward card subscriptions; 3) used game sales; and 4) game trade-ins."  The fact is that is simply not true.  Circle of Life is a sales technique that has been used by GameStop for years.  The idea is that the PRO card is the center of it all and drives everything else, it further goes on to say when you buy a new game you want to pre-order it to make sure you have a guaranteed copy you can get when it releases, then when your done playing that game you are welcome to trade it back to us and apply the money you get towards another game, if it's preowned all the better for us, and we encourage you to keep pre-ordering games to keep you coming back.  More or less trades drive value, which drives sales.  It's not a new sales program, and neither are the metrics behind it.  They're just now what we're focusing our numbers on.

"Each of these quotas is based on the store’s total transactions. Pre-orders and reward cards subscriptions are based on the number of transactions, while used game sales and trade-ins are based on the total dollar value of transactions. If a store’s quota for used game sales is 30%, and the store sells $1,000 worth of merchandise, GameStop expects at least $300 of that merchandise to be pre-owned."  Wrong.  This isn't true at all either.  In fact it's so untrue it could be called an Alternative Fact.  These numbers are derived from qualifying sales.  If an item CAN be sold as preowned, then it will ping the numbers, but if its a t-shirt, yea that's not happening.  Same with the PRO card.  If you have a PRO card attached to an order already it wont hurt your PRO numbers, same if the card would offer no value to the transaction.  I've done the numbers, looked at the statistics, and personally performed the experiments on all of this.

"In other words, according to salespeople speaking to Kotaku and elsewhere on the internet, GameStop is incentivizing employees to stop people from buying new games and hardware. " Again, this is simply not true, we're not incentivized to do shit.  We don't see extra money, we don't see less.  Yea, they'd like for us to hit these goals, and it makes us look A LOT better if we do, but as far as I've been made aware there has been absolutely no communication from leadership saying we need to stop selling new product.  What this is, however, is a case of shitty employees and managers seeing this, trying to get their numbers up, and telling people this.  If you trust your local store then continue to go there and utilize them as a resource, but I can assure you, the "official policy" isn't to lie to customers.

"“We are telling people we don’t have new systems in stock so we won’t take a $300 or $400 dollar hit on our pre-owned numbers,” one GameStop employee told me in an e-mail, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to press. “This is company wide and in discussions with my peers it is a common practice. We also tell customers we don’t have copies of new games in stock when they are on sale—for example, Watch Dogs 2 is currently $29.99 new and $54.99 pre-owned. We just tell them we don’t have the new one in stock and shuffle them out the door.”"  Again, see above.  This is an example of one shitty person in the GameStop hierarchy making it shitty for everyone else, not the company as a whole.

"GameStop staff have told me that corporate managers are monitoring both stores and individual employees, asking everyone to get a COL score of at least 75% by hitting at least three of their four quotas. If a store is hitting their COL targets but one salesperson is not, that salesperson may face punishment or even lose their job, according to company employees." While some of this is true, the fact remains that its not in the official policy that we can be fired over this.  If it was, we would have signed a form to acknowledge the policy changes as is federally mandated by US law.

Really the take away here is that the people who were talking to Kotaku either made a lot of this up, are really shitty people, or have really shitty people directly above them.  Yes the CoL is a thing, no it doesn't mean we're out to get you.  Yes PRO and preowned make up a HUGE portion of our profits, no that doesn't mean everyone is going to try and push you on all of it and make you do the 20 questions dance.  Yes its important for us to hit our goals, but its no more important than you and your job, and even if we do face punishment up to including termination we still have a right to fight back and ask why.  This is all just another one of those desperate stupid post holiday policy changes every store does to make its final quarter look a little better than it actually is and end on a high note.  Why is it so aggressive then?  Well 2016 sucked, and surprisingly enough it sucked for games too.  not much major came out and even the yearly heavy hitters didn't do well, but 2017 is looking to change that.

I could go into this more and talk about how we used to push the warranties and season passes super hard and were judged off them as well, but I'm not, I've said my piece.  I hope you found this insightful and somewhat useful in trying to get a better grasp of this situation.

Danganronpa 1 and 2 Review

So I've been lazy, and not just normal lazy, I'm talking full on fuck lazy.  Full on not doing shit when I'm at home besides playing with my animals and sitting my butt in front of the TV trying to recover from the holiday season. But I didn't do it all for naught, you see while I was lazy I was also looking up and doing some research to find out what all is coming out in the next few months, and well it would appear that one of my favorite game series on the Vita is finally getting a PS4 port.  That series being Danganronpa of course.  "But its an old series, why are you reviewing it?"  Well for starters, fuck you, we covered that in the original post, I'll review whatever the hell I feel like, and second the port comes out this month  oops, spoke too soon there, it turns out it actually comes out in March of this year, and I know a lot of people who got PS4s recently and they might be enticed to play it.

Seeing as this is a visual novel I'm not going to be posting any major spoilers, and the majority of the story components in this review happen in the first 30 minutes of the game and can be obviously gathered from both the box art and the paragraph about the game in the Playstation store so I'm not going to use my standard spoiler warning tags, BUT, if you want to go into this game 100% blind and not even knowing the basic premise of the game stop reading here with this brief "review": it's good  It's fucking good.  It's like having sex with an angel and a demon at the same time good.  Seriously this game will make you love, laugh, and cry.  Seriously if you like visual novels or good mysteries take some time and play this game, it's only going to be $40 for 2 games so its SUPER worth it.

Now that that's over with, on with the review!!

Since this is technically 2 games in one, and they both play very similarly with minor differences I'll cover the first, then the changes in the second one as far as game play, music, extras, and anything else that comes into mind.  I'll also go over their settings in a one-then-the-other fashion so as not to confuse people...too much.  Now, with that said, on with the show.

Danganronpa starts off with a description of the setting of the game: Hope's Peak Academy, a premier school where the best of the best are educated and groomed to lead Japan into the future.  These students are the very best at what they do, so much to the point of being called Ultimates.  You play as Makoto Naegi, the Ultimate Lucky Student, who won a national raffle of all high school students in Japan to be lucky enough to enroll in Hope's Peak Academy.  However, after arriving at your new school you black out to awaken alone in a classroom, but soon head to the entrance to discover the other students you are in school with (I'm not going to go through all of their names because that's just a lot of unnecessary typing on my part, but if you want to know I'd refer you to go here but be warned it does contain spoilers).  Upon meeting your fellow students you discover you are trapped in the school and summoned to the Gymnasium where you meet the nefarious Monokuma who reveals that the only way out is to murder one of your fellow students and get away with it.  But that's just the start of the fun as you unravel the events and reasons you and your fellow students are trapped in the school, and to what end this horrific"Killing School Life" serves.

Danganronpa 2 starts off very similarly to Danganronpa, but this time you play as Hajime Hinata, the Ultimate ????.  Instead of being trapped in a school though, you and your classmates are on a majestic island resort called Jaberwock Island for a field trip supervised by the kind hearted Usami.  You and your classmates must gather the hope fragments, which you obtain by discovering the personalities and pasts for your fellow students, to bring them into a bright and wonderful future together, that is until Monokuma comes to spoil all the fun!  Monokuma reveals that he has taken control of Jaberwock Island and set his Monobeasts (colossal robotic monstrosities) to  guard parts of the island he doesn't want you to go to, and forces Usami, now known as Monomi, to obey his bidding by breaking her magic stick that gave her control of the islands faculties.  During the course of this "Killing Island Life" you'll discover what happened to the island, why your there in the first place, and why Monokuma is interfering all over again.

One of the things that really stands out about these games for me is the music, and how well done and polished it is.  Not only are the sound tracks fun, but they are perfect at setting the right tone in the right places, like when you make a big discovery about the setting, or you find a body, or are in the middle of a class trial.  The music is absolutely amazing.  The other noticeable thing with the music is that between the first and second game the music is almost the same, however they "remix" it to fit the tropical theme of the game, and they also tell you what song is currently playing.

Something else that sets this series apart is the gameplay, while traditional VN's just have you interact via dialogue and choices therein, Danganronpa actually has you explore your environment to interact with characters and discover clues and items hidden throughout the world.  Then once a murder happens you are given time to investigate, you initiate a more traditional VN style of gameplay in the form of a class trial, or when you try to discover who the killer was.  There are minigames and times when you will need to use your gathered clues to break counter arguments, present information, or find key words that help with making a solid case.  Overall its a very unique experience that makes the game feel more alive because of it.  Other great things are the the exploration is done in first person, and while traveling around Jaberwock Island in the second game you see your character in 3rd person, and while a fast travel option is available, I often found myself walking anyways because of much I enjoyed it.

The character design and art style is a bit different at first, but it will quickly grow on you throughout the series and the sprite for the characters can be quite funny as well.  I personally found them at first to be off putting, but quickly fell in love with all the little details placed in them to further enhance their characters.  Also every character has a full body concept that shows them with items that relate to their Ultimate ability in some fashion.

There is a lot of other parts of this series too, which while they're not necessary, they do help to flesh out and explore the universe a lot more.  The first game has been redone in both manga and anime form, and while this misses a lot of subplot and character development, they do serve as a decent means to enjoy the series without committing to a 30 hour gameplay, even though I highly encourage it.  Additionally a 3rd game, Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls,  does exist to help explain events that are occurring outside of the school as well (saying more would lead to pretty big spoilers, but trust me, it's interesting).  Then as recently as last summer two concurrent animations, Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School Future Arc  and Despair Arc, aired to explain the events that happen after the second game and before the first game respectively, though both of these contain MAJOR spoilers so I would avoid both of them till you have finished both games.  And finally this year saw the release of the 3rd entry in the main series, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony.  Overall if you find the first two games enjoyable please by all means check out the rest of the series as it does tie together everything nicely.

As I stated earlier I love these games, they're amazing and really set you in a mood of wanting more and coming back to enjoy another play through.  Are they perfect? No, but they're about as damn close as you can get, and it is for this reason I give Danganronpa 1 and 2 Reload 9.5 giggling bears, out of 10.