The Wednesday letters page celebrates the Britishness of Thank Goodness You’re Here!, as one reader addresses the recent negativity over VR.
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Talent pool
I wondered why they hadn’t tried to remaster that Deadpool game from the Xbox 360, I didn’t realise that Activision didn’t have the licence anymore. Although I admit, I don’t really understand how those things work.
I’d say the game was okay. Or rather the game is pretty mediocre but the script is great and very funny and interesting. I think it was done by an actual comic book writer and it shows, but the developer also did well with the cut scenes and presentation. It was pretty similar to the movies, so in that sense well ahead of its time.
I’m sure plenty of different publishers are thinking that now would be the time for another one though, so I wonder if we’ll see it happen. I know there’s been no game that’s been part of the MCU so far, but I am a little surprised they haven’t used the multiverse as an excuse to do one, since it’d make continuity a lot easier.
But as far my dream team-up goes, I think Saints Row maker Volition would’ve been a good pick before they went under. There aren’t many developers known for their comedy but maybe Double Fine or Ubisoft San Francisco, who did South Park: The Fractured but Whole? But they’re owned by other companies.
I sure would like to see Deadpool and the X-Men back in video game action and I don’t really care who does it, as long as it’s good. I’m not holding my breath though.
Scooter
GC: Sony is believed to have the exclusive X-Men licence, but they’ve never said anything officially – we only know that because of the hacks from last year, which could be using outdated information.
Global cost
Just read your review of Thank Goodness You’re Here! and it’s been added to my Steam list.
When did the lack of sense of ‘place’ of the development of games kick in? When I think back to the 80s, when many games where being written by individuals, or at most a team of two or three, there were a good number of games that were obviously British being released here.
I still think fondly of Skool Daze, so obviously set in a British comprehensive school (and I always think a huge inspiration for Bully – which never felt quite right in its US private school setting).
Monty Mole, inspired by the miners’ strikes of the 80s was another one. Dizzy too feels like a definite British game, but I can’t really say why (other than Codies).
I guess it changed when teams got bigger and the cost of failure became too high.
Probably the most British feeling game of recent years was Untitled Goose Game and it’s Australian! I can’t think of any Australian feeling games though…
Enjoy your gaming Y’all!
The Dude Abides
GC: As you say, it’s the increasing cost of making games that’s made regional ones financially difficult. It’s why the Switch, and before it Nintendo’s handhelds, have so many Japanese-only games, since it’s comparatively cheaper to develop for.
Mascot battle
It’s upsetting to see the IOC be so stupid about who gets the Olympics video game licence, but let’s face it: the Mario & Sonic games weren’t very good. They weren’t embarrassing but you could tell Sega made them instead of Nintendo and frankly I’m surprised they let them go on for as long as they did.
It always seemed a waste of a Mario and Sonic team-up and now that it’s over I’m hoping that Nintendo and Sega will decide to do something more interesting. A platformer is the obvious choice but I’m not sure how that’d work given they’re both two very different mascots.
For me the Kingdom Hearts style idea, with the worlds of both characters combining, has always seemed the best idea but that’s a lot of work and I don’t know if Sega and Nintendo would agree to that much cooperation. We can only hope.
Onibee
Negative growth
RE: Ashton Marley. Your feature made a lot of sense in theory, but I really think you’re getting carried away by the wave of negativity in the industry right now and have settled for catastrophising. You are correct that Nintendo’s not-so-secret power is their games and by extension their reputation. So, they aren’t going to decide ‘Actually, now that we have a bit more power under the hood let’s just stop bothering about gameplay.
The next Zelda should look gorgeous and be 1/3 as fun as Tears Of The Kingdom’. Not gonna happen. They’re also building a massive new complex in Kyoto, which has already been expanded from the original plans. They are planning for the future and to improve efficiency in many areas. Lightning rarely strikes twice, so I’m not expecting the next console to be as big as Switch, but I’m still expecting a hit and some damn good games.
David M
GC: A ‘wave of negativity’ is not how we’d describe 20,000+ job losses.
Future heirloom
I think it’s pretty obvious that any console beyond the Xbox 360 era is just going to be brick in a decade or two. There’s no unpacking an Xbox Series X/S to show your grandchildren, it’ll just be an ugly black box that doesn’t do anything, because the servers were turned off decades ago.
I’m not even sure it’s anyone’s fault in particular, it’s not like Microsoft or Sony do this on purpose. But that’s the price of gaming being increasingly digital only. We want the convenience but it comes at a price.
Although the truth is they’d probably break down long before they got to that point anyway, given consoles are far more complex nowadays, than a NES or a SNES, and so far less resilient.
Scarpo
Ultimate Immersion
I think PS’s letter is missing the point about at least some of the negativity around VR. I did pick up the first PlayStation VR in a Black Friday deal in 2018, because the enthusiasm was too hard to ignore, but after nearly six years I’ve managed barely three hours on the thing. And that’s nothing to do with a lot of the assumed factors, like getting my VR legs, nausea, value for money, or any specific issues with the hardware.
It’s just increasingly clear VR, in anything like its current form, isn’t going to align at all with how gaming fits into my life. So, you can imagine what many of those who aren’t even willing to try it think, which is also likely to be less about the quality of the experience.
It seems to be at the polar opposite end of the spectrum from the likes of the Switch or the Steam Deck, in that it requires us to double down on that man cave mentality of chasing the ultimate form of immersion by regularly closing ourselves off from the rest of the world.
I get why there are similarly lots of people who can’t understand why you’d want portability for high-end games, and so constantly question the value of those devices I mentioned, but it’s pretty obvious that ultimate Immersion isn’t always the primary driver for people playing games.
The market seems to support that at any rate, with the recent the popularity of (and love for) the PlayStation Portal further demonstrating it isn’t about how we fit our lives into gaming but the other way around.
To be honest, I think this has been the elephant in the VR room since at least the days of the Oculus Rift. If Meta expensively flexing its influence isn’t going to prompt some sort of techno-social revolution, where we’re all putting helmets on to attend meetings and have coffee, I can’t see how VR can be the future of gaming until it somehow becomes the future of absolutely everything.
Panda
Switch blades
I completely agree with McConnell. The Xbox 360 blades user interface is the best console dashboard ever, which they only used for three years (2005 to 2008). It was colourful, efficient and even satisfying to flip between the blades, thanks to the ‘swoosh’ sound effects.
Inexplicably, some smartass at Microsoft devised the NXE dashboard that was far worse during that generation. A lot of fans (including myself) were furious about the change. Microsoft have this nasty habit of stealing defeat from the jaws of victory.
Si
The worst generation
I’ve been surprised the love the old Xbox 360 (in particular) and PlayStation 3 era has been getting recently in the Inbox, because it being a golden age of gaming isn’t how I remember it at all. I agree with the idea that it was the time when the resource costs of producing games hadn’t yet gotten out of hand, allowing for some experimentation in triple-A game design without ruining developers. However, that generation had a boat load of problems people seem to be overlooking.
From a technical level, game performance was shoddy thanks to the move to widescreen HD. Frame rates on consoles were awful, rarely hitting 30fps and far worse than what we have today on average. Sony’s baffling PlayStation 3 architecture (that still struggles to be emulated today) meant the range and variety of the PlayStation 2 wasn’t possible and they conceded ground to the American focused Xbox and Microsoft, meaning there were far too many mediocre brown and grey ‘shooterbox’ titles inspired by Gears Of War.
There was a weird obsession with ultra violence in an effort to seem grown up at that time generally, which I’d imagine stopped the console market expanding and made the industry feel quite laddish. Remember Army Of Two or Kane & Lynch? By the end of that generation it seemed like traditional home consoles were in terminal decline, leading to Microsoft’s disastrous Xbox One entertainment hub with Kinect reveal.
Also, Japanese developers flailed around, unable to adapt to the new HD technologies, and this pivot to American tastes, leaving prestige older franchises like Pro Evolution Soccer, Tekken, and Final Fantasy pretty much obsolete (though thankfully there has been a comeback and some are back on top).
Then thanks to the Wii, Nintendo were pretty much MIA in gaming culture, with titles like Super Mario Galaxy not having much impact on wider development, in the way it’s great games of old had driven the uptake of new gameplay ideas.
Anyway, for me the preceding Xbox/GameCube/PlayStation 2, and following PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Switch, generations were far superior.
Marc
Inbox also-rans
Enjoyed your Thank Goodness You’re Here! review GC, but I have one question: is Matt Berry in it a lot and who does he play?
Matt Berry
GC: We’d love to know the answer to that ourselves; we couldn’t work out which one was him.
One of the presenters on TalkSport radio just mentioned that his mate who lives in Canada is working on the new official FIFA game. Not an exclusive but I guess it confirms that there is a new FIFA game being made, and it’s (likely) by a Canadian developer. No other details, but just thought I’d share…
Stephen
GC: There have been plenty of rumours about FIFA and/or 2K making a game, so it could be true. But EA Sports FC is also made in Canada, so the presenter may just have been confused over the name.
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The small print
New Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content.
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