Yahoo Game News...Just Stop It...Please!

Dear Yahoo,

Please stop trying to inform me on gaming news, you are terrible at it, you've always been terrible at it. I have used this blog on several occasions to point out how awful you are at delivering game news. You used to write your own articles with crappy sources, wrong information, and even worse opinions, but these days all you do is repost other gaming sites, or sites that have something to do with gaming. I actually applauded you when you stopped trying to write your own articles, you figured out that you didn't understand gaming in the slightest. You used to repost from decent sites like IGN and Gamespot. But lately....what happened? Did your repost robot break? It is reposting from sites like Vox and Gamefaqs!

It doesn't surprise me that you don't know Gamefaqs isn't a gaming news site, but what's worse is your robot is reposting message boards...yes that's right MESSAGE boards. The one you see above was written by some random nutter on the internet (much like myself) who declares his passionate hate for Indie games littering the PS4 store. It is an uninspired opinion at best, and at worst not entirely thought out either. It surely didn't deserve a front page on Yahoo's website. But if that's what Yahoo finds compelling for gaming news...far be it for me to judge.

And Vox? Really? You need to stop reposting Vox stuff. All Vox is that I've seen, is a website that absolutely hates white people and America, and anything capitalist or remotely right wing. I am about as liberal as you can get, but to these guys I probably sound like Rick Santorum. Still, they have absolutely ZERO insight into gaming culture or gaming news. They write click-bait articles designed to point out how atrociously "unprogressive" the gaming industry is by wagging their finger at random things in games, and getting offended by anything and everything they can attempt to spin to sound offended. I'm picturing a guy working for Vox who has the unfortunate task of writing this tripe googling video game images to learn about a game and then trying his damnedest to loop in a way to be offended to have an article in before lunch.

I think this is where you and I need to part ways Yahoo gaming. Before I used to be able to make fun of your articles, but...now you're just a robot reposting things. It's not funny anymore, it's like making fun of an answering machine.

*PS - Feel free to repost this Yahoo*

Assassin's Creed and Bandwagons

Make no mistake, I am a fan of the Assassin's Creed games. I think they are really fun and well crafted, and just damn pretty to look at.

With that out of the way, the new Ass Creed as I affectionately refer to them as, was announced yesterday...to a SLEW of hate from gamers on nearly every board I looked at. This new Ass Creed is getting Call of Duty levels of online hate (yet still bought by millions) and it's not exactly sudden. This has been brewing for some time with fans lamenting how "samey" the games feel and I can understand the sentiment. It's never been quite THIS overwhelming though, so what changed?

Unity happened.

Even die-hard fans of the series bought Unity and it was practically unplayable for about a month or so. This is about the worst thing you can do to a gamer. Blue balling them by delaying the game is one thing, but when you have the game all lubed up inserted into your system for easy penetration and you're still blue ballsed? That's a slap in the dick face.

So it's no wonder really why gamers are so outraged and skeptical over the newest entry, but, I feel as though they are far too harsh if not riding a bandwagon of hate. Looking over Ubisoft's gaming career, when has something like Unity ever really happened before? Something on that scale of unplayability? I can't name another time this happened from them. They didn't have some awful track record like EA with its long list of anti-consumer policies that drove gamers away by the truck load. This was ONE game, ONE instance, unless you were one of those gamers who felt lied to over Watchdogs marketing the game wrong, there hasn't been too many instances where Ubisoft has annoyed fans...except for Uplay also...ok...ok so there's a bit of a list here!

I am getting a sense of bandwagon hate here, it just seems too overwhelming in the comment sections. Sales of the series still being fairly high indicates to me that I'm not alone in liking them. Same goes with Call of Duty or Madden, people do like them, but you'd never know it if you only read comment sections. I almost wonder if the lack of positive comments is related to people being petrified of the recent waves of internet bullying from people with holier than thou opinions on literally every topic. I feel like this is where the internet has gone, and the "conversation" has become extinct. Everything has to be blue or red, right or wrong, Chinese or Finnish (I'm obligated to mention minorities in every post now...yeah I know right?....thanks Obama)

I guess where I'm at with it...is I just don't care. I love the series, I love the settings, I love the adventures, and the music, and at the end of the day Ubisoft is giving me what I want as a gamer and I just don't feel entitled enough to ask for "more" when I barely know what that would be. I actually asked angry fans what they wanted, and MOST of them said they didn't want a buggy game. Beyond that, they couldn't articulate how they wanted the series to change or evolve, instead they're just tired of it, which is something I understand, but it's not something that ever happens to me. If they made Mega Man 1 million I'd be the first in line to buy it. What? I love Mega Man dammit!

The point at which I start actively hating a company is when they actively stop making video games I find fun, or selling me a broken game that they refuse to fix, and so far Ubisoft has yet to do that.

*Is it...is it in yet?*

Holy DLC Batman!

Something weird happened in gaming news this past week that has me completely befuddled, flabbergasted even. A bunch of gaming news outlets like IGN, Gamespot, Yahoo (if they count) commenting on the press release they got from Warner Brothers about the newest Batman game having a $40 season pass. So, immediately my first reaction to this news is, ok yep nothing new here...mooooove along. But then...something happened. The titles of these articles were of outrage! $40 Batman DLC! Nonsense! Blasphemy! Outrageous! MUUURRRDDERRR!!

Ok, I went a little overboard there on the last reaction. But the message was clear from gaming news sites. They weren't going to stand for $40 Batman DLC! Solidarity with gamers! I guess...? Wait...I thought we all liked DLC...Didn't we? I wrote a very unpopular blog years ago that was rebutting a post made by the head guy at CTRL ALT DEL who was defending DLC and how great it is for gaming etc. And his opinion was reflecting the voice of gamers at the time, most agreed with him that DLC was fantastic. Getting more content out of a game you love? Great! Pay for it.

That's not the aspect of the argument I disagreed with however. What I hated was the practice I was seeing where developers were clearly done with certain things they were charging separately for like maps in CoD (especially "retro" maps that they've already done for previous games), or characters in fighting games that were already ON THE  DISC WHEN WE BOUGHT THE GAME (Capcom SFxT). I went through a diatribe about the shoddy practices of DLC, and lamented at days of yore when a game was sold to me for $50 that it was done and that the full experience was thus rendered to me as intended. Instead the full experience is now segmented behind pay walls that were otherwise unknown to me upon purchase. Now, it's just expected to see something like a Season Pass like what we see here with Batman.

Except, though, now suddenly gaming news sites are angry. Why? We've dealt with the $50 CoD Season Map pass for well over 6 or 7 years now, Borderlands had its $50 season passes all over the place. Bethesda would split its DLC into $10 or $20 increments with the expected Game of the Year edition to be released less than a year later for $60...which is what normal gamers paid for the game without that extra content initially....So it comes as a complete shock to me, utterly surprising that suddenly my complaints about DLC are being reverberated by gaming news sites. But why now? It's awkward timing isn't it? The whole gamergate thing has finally died down, many sites changed their policies as a result, lots of people were fired, the backlash was felt, and made waves.

Are these sites suddenly being more receptive to their audience now being against these anti-consumer practices like this DLC crap? That's my only guess why they're doing this, because otherwise it's entirely hypocritical to have never brought it up before this. This has been going on for years after all with plenty of other developers doing it openly and freely and the only real backlash I ever saw to it was against Capcom for Street Fighter X Tekken when we found their DLC on the disc we already bought. Somehow Bungie got away with it when people found their DLC on the disc of Destiny and posted videos of it though. No one complained about that.

The inconsistency of all of this is what pisses me off though. So far they've been fine with Activision, and EA shoving $50 map packs at them, but SUDDENLY Warner Brothers has the gall to charge $40 for a season pass and everyone flips their shit. I don't get it, I can only speculate, and that's essentially the point of this rant. I'm just looking for some consistency here, that's all. Will this be a trend though? We'll see...a new Call of Duty comes out in November after all. Then there's god knows what DLC going to be attached to the new Star Wars Battlefront.

Will they complain about it, or will it get a pass like usual? Who knows. They're probably getting paid off by them and Warner Brothers forgot to cut the checks for this one most likely. 

*Gamers keep whining and I keep whining about them whining*