Gaming Under The Influence

Lies of P is the first true equal of Fromsoft's own games, capturing the themes and mechanical complexities that make Miyazaki's work special. Further, it is the hardest soulslike ever made, particularly for parry design, boss patterns and the commitment required to best even mid-game bosses.

Phil Spencer’s ambition to acquire Nintendo for Xbox has been the talk of the town this week. Join Alex & Mike for a discussion of why such an acquisition would lead to the production of sub par games. When creatives lack control of their own financial interests, they inevitably become the instrument of another party’s financial ambitions.

Outsiders view the soulslike genre as impenetrable, and for good reason. Steep learning curves, absent tutorials, abstract themes and storytelling all make it difficult for newcomers to begin playing games in the genre. Join Alex and Mike for an introduction to soulslike games via five of the most accessible titles. Only “pure soulslike” games (with no easy mode) are included.

Expectations were high for these long-awaited releases from Bethesda and Fromsoft. Both are clear successes. Join Mike and Alex for a discussion of worldbuilding, story and gameplay in Armored Core 6 and Starfield. Gaming Under the Influence @ Green Dragon CVR with Mike + Alex; SUPPORT GreenDragonCVR https://greendragoncvr.com/store/support-green-dragon-cvr

Join Alex & Mike for a review of 2023's Remnant II, a soulslike with procedural level generation and third-person shooting from Gunfire Games.

Alex and Mike return to the lore of Final Fantasy XVI. After some initial disappointment with the worldbuilding, the boys have come to appreciate the broader strokes of the story and world, despite some lingering distaste for bearer-related plot beats.

Valheim recently received its biggest update since launch, containing the titular Mistlands biome long-time players have waited many months to explore. The new zone is weird & awe-inspiring, with rocky peaks jutting into a purple sky from an ocean of impenetrable mist, where man-sized insects war with the dverger (a dwarf-like race of initially-friendly npcs) amidst the skeletons of giants. The content also brought challenges; the difficulty spike from the plains was more severe than between previous biomes, while the new Seeker raids destroyed the most well-fortified bases in short order. The fear of death was palpable throughout our time in the Mistlands; we were forced to utilize every mechanic possible to ensure our survival. Learning enemy patterns & navigating carefully through the mist was necessary. But people have been complaining about just this same content. After much complaining, a patch has been announced, which will nerf enemy aggression in the Mistlands & Seeker raids in particular. Join Mike & Alex for a discussion of why these changes amount to disappointing pandering to gaming’s lowest common denominator (people for whom self-gratification is the only measure of quality, even at detriment to the game).

The Game Awards 2022 were the best iteration of the show yet. Activistic filler content was minimal, awards were well-distributed and the industry's greatest developers presented their current projects. We were left with many reasons to be excited about the future of video games. Join Mike & Alex for a recap of the most interesting announcements from the Game Awards 2022.

Evil West is a refreshing game to play in 2022. While, as its marketing has noted, it lacks secondary monetization features of any kind, it also recalls games developed in the PS2 era, before the advent of contemporary information technology: when developers lacked the ability to monitor community opinion or concurrent steam players and instead had no choice but to focus on the integrity and self-contained merits of their games.

At the AAA scale, both Kojima & Miyazaki have attained an unusual degree of financial & creative freedom over the games they make.: Miyazaki is president of FromSoft, while Kojima owns his own studio. Join Mike & Alex for an optimistic treatment of the future this makes possible.

Alex & Mike at GreenDragonCVR present a list of the absolute best games yet to launch in 2022. From JRPGs to farming sims, from Pokemon to survival horror, some of the most important games of the year will be released in November & December. Are you ready? Harvestella [Developed by Square Enix, Live Wire] The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me [Supermassive Games] Pokemon: Scarlet & Violet [GameFreak] Evil West [Flying Wild Hog] The Callisto Protocol [Striking Distance] Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Remake [Square Enix]

Join Mike & Alex for a discussion of the top 10 games of 2022 so far. From soulslike to survival to pokemon to FPS, this year has been packed with outstanding games we could not be happier to share our thoughts on. Tune in next week for a list of the most exciting games left to release this year.

Playing a game involves two things: gameplay on the one hand and, on the other, the world, story & meaning which gameplay conveys. Gameplay, like the words in a book or paint on a canvas, is the medium the game-maker uses to communicate his concept. Even where gameplay mechanics are similar, as between entries in the same genre, each game is distinct at least to the extent that its mechanics are used to communicate an original world, a novel story & meaning. Sometimes gameplay impedes player enjoyment of the world & story; tedious, repetitive mechanics, reused assets or even scenarios implemented to pad out the game can make it impossible for the qualities of the game-maker’s ideas to shine through. We call this ‘gameplay bloat’. Other times, the concept a developer has tried to communicate is itself impoverished: tedious & reused, passed between hands & kept alive for profit alone. This is ‘franchise funk’: no mechanics of any quality can save a game from a poor, zombified & unappealing concept.

What does the failure that is Stadia have in common with the firing of Kurvitz, Hindpere & Rostov from ZU/AM? They both result from an industry fixation on market-immanent metrics of a product’s ‘success’ at the expense of the integrity of the work. Join Alex & Mike for a discussion of streaming services & sh*t-canned creators, both of which manifest a profoundly sick & degenerate video game development culture.

Alex & Mike discuss bloat in contemporary open world games & the tension they often exhibit between narrative & systems. While survival games & soulslikes convey the intelligible content of the world & plot via the player’s tactile engagement with a virtual space, western open world games with heavy narrative focus put forth an unhappy and contradictory marriage of needlessly dense systems and cinematic storytelling. Also a brief discussion of why Cyberpunk 2077 should have been a walking simulator.

Gaming Under the Influence @ Green Dragon CVR with Mike + Alex; Developers out of 343 Industries have recently offered insight into why they believe “games are harder to make these days”[i]. Amongst the items on their list of reasons are enhanced technical expectations and the intricacies of running, updating or maintaining online games. Not one of these things is integral to a good game; this serves as a list of features proper to many games precisely as bad.

Alex & Mike revisit the status of games as art. Recent conversations on the subject have evoked Ebert, who answered in the negative, citing a lack of worthwhile subject matter comparable to great works of other mediums & of authorial control resulting from player freedom. Meanwhile others have said video games are a “synthesis” of all the fine arts, as though a methodology, skillset or choice of expressive matter settled the question. We opine both are wrong & for the same reason: each describes only [a facet of] the matter of potential video game art and of art generally, failing to specify its essence formal element. Listen (or read on) for i) an explanation of art according to Maritain's Art & Scholasticism [in the tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas & the Thomists]; ii) to learn why, according to this definition, video games are the most advanced phase of artistic representation.

Join Alex & Mike at GreenDragonCVR for a casual discussion of Live A Live, The Ascent & Observer: System Redux. Touching on the history of Live Alive before its publication in the West circa 2022; the excellent cyberpunk worldbuilding of Neon Giant’s The Ascent; the cyberpunk pessimism of Bloober Team’s Observer: System Redux. Including a definition of cyberpunk fiction’s essential concern.

Join Alex & Mike at GreenDragonCVR to discuss the point of completing video games. Is the point of a game to see the end of its narrative? Is finishing a game necessary to “understanding” or appreciating it? We argue that, since we engage with the sensible & narrative aspects of the work to penetrate its “creative concept”, these aspects are instruments to an end. If the concept has been comprehended (or worse, found wanting) further pursuit of the instruments of its expression is for no purpose relevant to artistic contemplation.

Join Alex & Mike at GreenDragonCVR for a discussion of the ‘political’ nature of video games. Must games exhibit political content? Is there such a thing as neutrality? Is it really about ‘politics’ or a deeper view held by the artist concerning reality & human nature (which politics derives from)? We propose that all art, since conceived from a human vantage, will necessarily convey the artist’s view of human nature & reality (& resultantly, politics); this not as a pamphlet containing a list of statements, but as a particular instantiating a universal.