Videogames and Catharsis: The Benefits Of Being An Online Jerk

When "catharsis" was revealed to be topic of this particular edition of the Critical Distance Blogs of the Round Table I initially thought I would have to sit this round out or show myself up for the hack that I truly up. The last time I entered a blog into BoRT I annoyed Alan Williamson by implying the Sega Mega Drive controller was a bit rubbish, imagine how much I could screw up a topic that requires discussion of emotional release and problem solving. When I actually sat down and thought about it however, I realised how perfect of a topic this is for me. Videogames have been a source of catharsis for me my entire life, and ever since online gaming became a major thing they've probably become the main source.

In order to get you up to speed regarding myself ASAP here's a little nugget of information; I have Borderline Personality Disorder. Actually, "borderline" is considered to be a little bit of an old hat term these days, apparently the more modern term of choice is "Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder". CHRIST. As if the stigma regarding mental health issues wasn't bad enough! Even I want kind of wanted to lock myself up after hearing that for the first time. Anyway, before you call the cops on me here's a passage taken from the Wikipedia page on BPD just in case you don't know what it is:

"...symptoms usually include intense fears of abandonment and intense anger and irritability, the reason for which others have difficulty understanding. People with BPD often engage in idealization and devaluation of others, alternating between high positive regard and great disappointment."

The short version of that particular passage is "I don't deal with people well." As I've "matured" (if you can even call it that) I've found far more comfort in spending a lot of time by myself. That's not to say I don't care about people, in fact I would probably be a lot happier if I didn't, but I have to make sure I don't put myself in situations where I don't get overwhelmed by them. By far the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life was to move in with FIVE other people during my third year of university. Yes, I can't believe it either, FIVE of them. The truth is they were five decently well-mannered people, but to me it was like living inside a mosh pit for a year. I mean, what if I'm having a day were I'll just scream if I see a real human being and I need to go to the bathroom? I have to assess the situation so my morning schedule doesn't clash with FIVE other people, or do what I actually did which was to deliberately ruin my sleep patterns and be awake to go to the bathroom at 3/4 in the morning instead. This really didn't have anything to do with the particular people I was living with, it's just the fact that they were people. 

This is where online videogames come in; assuming that most people you're playing with aren't using microphones (and I've been predominately a PS3 player this generation, so they're relatively rare) most online games involve two or more people interacting with each other purely through an avatar. Granted, people still find ways to act like a dick through these limitations, whether it's rage-quitting, teabagging or sending over some hate mail, but the point is they are mostly stripped of their humanity within this environment. What I'm saying is, no matter how big of a jerk you are online, I'm far less likely to get stressed out by a Nathan Drake avatar thrusting at me than a real human being.

I find it helpful that there is always an opportunity for me to interact with other people without the need to engage with them intellectually or emotionally. I go through semi-regular periods of withdrawal, where it's just best for me to lock myself in a dark room and get on with whatever needs getting on with, but it's important to not completely detach yourself from the world. And hey, it's the topic of the roundtable and it's been tiptoed around so far so I'll just come out and say it; it's pretty cathartic to be able to shoot people in the face when you're having a bad day. 

It doesn't always work though; game choice is pretty important depending on what mood I'm in. For example, I'm pretty fond of The Last of Us' multiplayer, it definitely feels like a tacked on feature in a lot of ways but there genuinely are a lot of really neat ideas in it. The problem, or rather the complication for me, is that these neat ideas are mostly based around the idea of working together as a team, which involves trusting other people. There's a mode in it called "Interrogation", which is basically the game's equivalent of capture the bag. The premise is you wound members of the opposing team to "down" them, and then when a safe opportunity presents itself you mount them to interrogate them. If your team does this successfully five times you find the location of the opposing team's safe and first to unlock that wins the game. 

It's a great idea for a mode, and it can really spark up a "let's GET 'EM BOYS" sort of comradery with your teammates when it all gels together. But when it doesn't work, oh boy does it not work, when I shoot down a guy and some waste of flesh on my team deliberately caps him in the head to steal points for himself and screw the team over...let's just say this is part of the reason why two of my controllers don't really work properly any more. This is the general flaw of online multiplayer in general, and I don't think there's been a game that's overcome it entirely, no matter how tight and polished your mechanics are they can be DESTROYED by pure stupidity. If I'm in a bad mood and this happens this can be a mood killer for an entire evening, I mean I'm already playing this game in the first place to escape people and now they're infiltrating my online space to ruin even this for me. It doesn't help that getting killed in The Last Of Us involves the opposing player's avatar mounting you and viciously smashing your skull against the concrete as you particularly feel the shockwaves tingle up your arm, basically a perfect metaphor for how I'm feeling around that point. 

That's worse case scenario though, here's a much more optimistic example. I was messing around on Grand Theft Auto Online recently (messing around is pretty much all you can do on it due to barely functional matchmaking, but that's a different topic in itself) and there was a kid on microphone who couldn't have possibly been any older than 13. Some other (adult) guy was so offended by his Mickey Mouse voice and too clueless to figure out how to mute him that he just HAD to plug in his own microphone and verbally abuse this kid. Eventually it got to the point where he was threatening to stab the kid while asking him questions about where he lived, causing the kid to get audibly upset. I took it upon myself at this moment to ruin this guy's time as much as possible, messing with his objectives and running over him whenever I could get an easy shot in, which conveniently agitated him enough to forget about the kid.

Hey look at that! When it comes to GTA online I am literally a social justice warrior! Maybe that's a little much, probably more like a social justice troll, but justice is justice!

Here's the thing though, the fact that through the medium of videogames I was able to slightly ruin this one jerk's night probably momentarily deflated any stress or frustration I had been harbouring at that time, and personally I think that's a pretty healthy way of dealing with it!  Find online videogames that you personally enjoy, and when the jerks inevitably pop up out-jerk them in the funniest way possible. 

So that's my personal source of catharsis as far as videogames are concerned; using on-screen avatars to interact with people in a meaningless and harmless environment. Even with these limitations, the fact that most games have some kind of strategy or etiquette attached to them still gives the people you meet potential to either be really cool or really lame. This gives an outlet to feel some kind of comradery with the former, and appropriately screw with the latter. Both can be a source of releasing stress, and perhaps learning to hate people a little less. 

Even if you don't agree with this let's just end on this; all of this is DEFINITELY a better idea than going on Twitter.

A Review Of Every Game I Own!

A random picture of games that I don't own that has nothing to do with this post!

Well, because I haven't written anything in a while and I'm getting rusty, let's loosen those joints with:

A REVIEW OF EVERY GAME I OWN!***
*well from this generation anyway
**and pretty much just the PlayStation 3 ones
***I shouldn't have put 3 stars

Halfway through writing this very sentence I just remembered that I own an absurd amount of games digitally from the PlayStation Network so this is going to be a long one! LET'S NOT WASTE TIME.

Alice: Madness Returns - I wrote the title thinking this would come first forgetting that I traded it in and don't actually own it any more! Now it's stolen 15 hours of my life and ruined this article :(

Alone in the Dark: Inferno - For the 20 minutes I played of it I was constantly around other characters and everything was on fire, good thing they added the "inferno" part of the title to the PS3 version or someone could go to jail for this kind of thing.

Arcana Heart 3 - GUUURRRLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Assassin's Creed 2 - The horrifying warning of what will happen when GPS units become sentient and start ordering us to kill. Also happens to blow.

Batman: Arkham Asylum - Possibly the best interactive use of a licence ever, as a videogame it's kind of okay. The Scarecrow bits made me jump on two separate playthroughs so I guess it's a winner overall.

Batman: Arkham City - I think Xboxachievements.com made more money off this game than Rocksteady did.

Bayonetta - Hey! The combat is as awesome as *loading* ....woah wait what happened I lost my train of thought.

Bionic Commando - With another year in development to figure out its ideas and get some polish this could have been the kind of game that people would have pretended to have liked at the time 10 years from now. As is it just kind of sucks.

BLAZBLUE: Continuum Shift - People are still arguing whether it's pronounced "Blaze-blue" or "Blaz-blue". Apparently the Z is supposed to be silent, and if that's true then that's the dumbest thing ever ERO STARS

Catherine - Whenever I play this it's ALWAYS time to be dead. A genuinely interesting little game though, worth a runthrough if you can tolerate anime.

The Club - My brother gave me this to show off that he didn't forget my birthday, if I had actually played it and not liked it I could put "AND I WISH HE HAD" as a punchline, but I haven't, so I can't, so this sort of has to awkwardly fade out...

Dark Void - See Bionic Commando.

Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut - Has just enough fantastic ideas to make up for the complete mess it is (for me anyway), this game is on my list to write a way too long thing about one of these days.

Dead Rising 2: Off The Record - GUESS WHAT JERKS, you got your precious sandbox mode and it blew chunks. Maybe try and figure out why you like a game in the first place before demanding design-breaking changes you chodes. Dead Rising 2 is still radical though.

Devil May Cry 4 - A game that takes bizarre pleasure in just how much it consistently sucks with borderline sociopathic level design. It's like a collection of all the worst parts of other Capcom games with some pretty decent combat flopping around in the middle of it.

Dragon's Crown - BOOOBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Enslaved: Odyssey To The West - All I know about this game is that James Bralant really likes it. If you don't know who that is...just...ugh...you don't wanna know.

God of War III - If you haven't played this game, watch the Homer themed episode of DuckTales while spinning on a desk chair furiously masturbating and you're pretty much up to speed with the experience.

Grand Theft Auto IV - If being called up by your fat cousin to go bowling genuinely ruined this game for you then YOU'RE probably someone's fat cousin. OWNED

Grand Theft Auto V - The only thing in videogames that hates women more than Ubisoft's character animators.

Heavy Rain - A true art game, but only if you find something artistic in how it somehow makes child murder funny.

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus HD Collection - These are NOT two of the best games ever made, they are however both unique enough and important to videogame development that they deserve your time.

Katamari Forever - To be honest, you only really need to play one Katamari game in your life, so you may as well go for the one with the best music...which isn't this one.

Killzone 2 - Almost hilarious in how uninteresting it is. Got a lot of graphics though.

King of Fighters XIII - Not for beginners! I don't care how many tutorials or guides you put into the game my fingers are more likely to learn this entire game's soundtrack on keyboard before they pull off half the casts basic combos. Looks great though!

L.A. Noire - Rockstar were really onto something fantastic here, however they made the uncharacteristically careless mistake of forgetting to include a videogame.

LittleBigPlanet (2) - Should have been my favourite game of the generation, I love everything about it apart from the platforming. Unfortunately, the fact that the platforming sucks is kind of a big deal. Sorry guys, but when Mario Maker comes out on Wii U I'll probably never play these games again =/

Lollipop Chainsaw - One of those games that people pretended to like when it came out because the aesthetic made you want to like it. Unfortunately when that initial bubble popped everyone realised it's not fun at all and forgot about it.

Metal Gear Solid 4 - I don't know what's worse, the sheer length and idiocy of the cutscenes, or the fact that people actively try to defend them. Kojima tried to murder his own series by tying up every potential plot thread possible so maybe he could move onto something else in his life, but instead Metal Gear lives on and this just feels like a hate crime against videogames in general. This is meant both as a compliment and as smack-talk; no-one will ever make a videogame like this again.

Metal Gear Rising - The combat isn't as good as Bayonetta or God Hand, also has some pretty flabby design for such a short game. I guess it's still cool but I don't love it.

MotorStorm - People seem to have largely forgotten about this series now, which is kind of a shame because this game is alright!

MotorStorm: Pacific Rift - For whatever reason I've never felt inclined to play more than 10 minutes of it. Maybe this is why everyone forgot about the series.

Ratchet and Clank: A Crack In Time - Accidentally contains some fantastic stuff, otherwise it's pretty much a glossy PS2 platformer...not that there's anything wrong with that!

Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction - Pretty much a crappy PS2 platformer, and there's a lot wrong with that!

Rayman Origins - Better than New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and a lot of other things really. More AAA companies should try making games like this.

Red Dead Redemption - Almost inarguably one of the best games of this generation, even though it contains a whole lot of pointless garbage I don't like. Stuff like this is why I write douchey blogs about how Rockstar will someday make the best thing ever.

Saint's Row The Third - More fun than GTA...but only for a couple of hours. I'm glad it exists as an alternative for the more Dew-drinking ADD crowd but these games just never hold my attention.

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection HD - Fun fact: I've played Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on this collection far more than anything else on it, if I had an OKCupid profile this is probably what I would put on it.

Silent Hill Downpour - Unlike Heavy Rain it doesn't make child murder funny, just kind of boring and confusing. Had good ideas but dropped the ball on all of them, also is nearly unplayable on PS3 due to framerate issues.

Silent Hill Homecoming - Just genuinely completely awful. I would say it's like the official tie-in game to the Silent Hill movie, but it's more like the tie-in videogame to the colouring book of the movie.

The Simpsons - Should have been awful, is actually okay! It's not good or anything but there's some genuinely decent level design in it and better jokes than the show in the last 10 years. Worth it for Simpsons fans and no-one else.

Siren: Blood Curse - I haven't played it! My copy has no instruction manual!

Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 - Almost interestingly bad enough to actually play to the end, then you start to realise that it's just unfinished. The fact Sega thought this could reboot the franchise is even funnier than the game.

Sonic Generations - *deep breath* Okay people, I'm sorry, but it's time we all admit this. This game sucks too, it's just not as bad as other recent Sonic's, and we were willing to go along with it for nostalgia's sake. This game did however prove that Sonic Team also don't know how to make good 2D Sonics any more either, so we can stop demanding that too.

Soul Calibur IV - Some people say they got the Star Wars characters in it to make a cheap buck, I think they just got them in there to try and convince people it's not porn.

Spec Ops: The Line - Kind of a sucky game in all honesty, but it does some really nice narrative things, like the writers read a book or something! Worth playing through, but put it on easy first.

The Darkness - Actually makes child murder meaningful!

The Darkness II - See Siren: Blood Curse.

The Last Of Us - The game that almost puts videogames on the same level as TV shows in the most generic genre possible! Sounds like a diss but the sad part is that it's really really not.

uDraw Studio - Wait, what?

Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 - The most ingeniously stupid game ever made.Screw Vergil.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune - Shave and a haircut! Bodycount: 1250

Uncharted 2: Amoung Thieves - How many men have you murdered just today Drake? I dunno, probably about 6,000 at this point.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception - Not as good as the first two! Contains some really lazy, almost NES-like enemy placement and is kind of retread of the last game, the set pieces are still pretty hot though. Bodycount: 19200

Vanquish - It's Fist of the North Star does the Cold War in space! Sliding around and shooting dudes is cool, not quite the God Hand of third-person shooters but it's the closest thing we have to it.

WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2010 - You think after doing 2010 of these games they'd make a good one by now.

WWE 12 - A videogame so stupid it puts a guy born in Dublin in a stable called "The United Kingdom", possibly one of the worst games ever made.

WWE 2K14 - Probably the real reason CM Punk left.

WWE All Stars - A nice little game! Blows its wad pretty early though and doesn't really hold attention, you can probably get a copy for the change stuck down the back of your sofa right now so it's a worth a couple of rounds with friends.

Now we're getting into digital games, which my PlayStation 3 won't let me order alphabetically! So things are going to get messy:

Yu-Gi-Oh! Millenium Duels - Probably like the seventh best way of playing Yu-Gi-Oh! without having to actually talk to someone.

DuckTales Remastered - I am amazed by WayForward's ability to take decent games from 25 years ago and somehow make them worse in every possible way. Everyone involved in this should never work on a videogame ever again.

Skullgirls - Probably a decent game but I just don't like it! It seems to want to be beginner friendly but the choice to make it a six button fighter makes it feel more like a Marvel Vs Capcom 2 fan game.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition - Possibly the best example of pixel art ever, I suck at the game though so that's about as far as I can appreciate it.

Mega Man 10 - Has a really interesting atmospheric soundtrack! Other than that, it's even more Mega Man, which is cool I guess.

Castle Crashers - Probably the best example of a modern update of an outdated and kind of crappy genre of this generation, and considering how much terrible retro stuff there's been lately it has my respect for that.

Tetris - Why did I buy this?

The Walking Dead - Better than The Last Of Us.

Scott Pilgrim Vs The World: The Game - A prime example of fantastic audiovisual design saving a not that great game, too charming to hate.

Sonic 4 Episode 1&2 - Both games blow, but at least Episode 1 felt like it was trying, Episode 2 feels like it was designed during multiple trips to the dentist's office.

Spelunker HD - I HATE this game, but I've still wasted hours of my life trying to beat it. It's a personal issue.

Blue Toad Murder Files - Professor Layton for people who want to judge their friends for sucking at puzzles.

Earthworm Jim HD - Earthworm Jim isn't a very good game! Toning down the difficulty helped a lot though!

Double Dragon Neon - Somehow even worse than DuckTales! I would say that thing again about everyone who worked on this should stop making games, but one of those guys went on to make Shovel Knight, so maybe there's hope for the rest of WayForward.

Worms 2: Armageddon - Why do I own Worms on a console!?

LocoRoco: Cocoreccho - If it was made law that this had to be everyone's screensaver at work the world would be a different and far more wonderful place.

Mega Man 9 - Came out before Mega Man 10 so you can't say "even more Mega Man", but you can say "more Mega Man"!

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure HD - Not as good as a lot of other Capcom fighters, but a LOT better than Namco's recent JoJo fighter.

WipeOut HD - I got this game for free when the PSN broke, a constant reminder of Sony's failures.

ARKEDO SERIES - 1 Jump! - Needs more jump.

Limbo - The most overrated game of the generation! It's not a good platformer, not a good story, the atmosphere of the first hour disappears soon after, the puzzles aren't interesting, the world doesn't feel interactive and the game just sort of...stops. Should have been half the price and a third of the length.

Hamilton's Great Adventure - I don't remember what this is!

Solder-X 2: Final Prototype - Less impossible and betterer than the first one.

Burn Zombie Burn - A cute little twin stick shooter thing, would probably be more at home on an iPad or a Vita.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed - Actually a better game than the NES Bionic Commando, you'd think that would be standard for these things but nope.

Braid - A far superior game to Limbo!

Hmm, well that's all I have to say about that. I was thinking of going on to go through my Wii games then I realised I haven't played most of them for more than 10 minutes so oh well!

You're free to interpretate this little exercise as evidence for videogames this generation kind of sucking, me having highly bad taste and poor consumer decisions, or that I'm just kind of jerk. My vote's for all three!

Rockstar: Creators of the Best Videogame Ever (Just Not Yet)

Ever since I watched Charlie Brooker's Channel 4 documentary How Videogames Changed The World I've had one line stuck in my head. As part of the show Brooker described pick no. 24 of the list (No. 25 being Twitter, which was a fantastic choice by the way) The Last of Us as "an HBO boxset in videogame form". I actually kind of like that description, it sounds more specific and less generic than declaring something "the Citizen Kane of videogames" as bad journalists continue to do whenever a mainstream title pretends to have a story. We should probably update it a little more though; let's say The Last of Us is the "HBO Amazon Instant Video playlist of videogames."

No wait; let's not say that at all! Because despite being a legitimately fantastic piece of 21st century entertainment, in regards to videogames "arriving" and breaking out as an art form The Last Of Us is not the answer. It is a fine action-adventure experience, with well-designed encounters that play out organically through stealth and strategy accompanied with a well-paced story and decent writing. However, it was also a first party exclusive for the PlayStation 3 backed with truckloads of Sony cash, so it needed to make sure it could make entire convoys of cash upon release as well. So it was about zombies, and the story played it a little safe, and the ending was a lot limper than it should have been so it wouldn't sully any attempts at a sequel.

Ultimately, what we got was a really good action videogame with a pretty good narrative stapled to it. Naughty Dog chose to do the majority of the major plot and character developments through non-interactive (this includes any Quick Time Events) elements, cinematic camera sweeps and of course cut-scenes. The story and gameplay were tied together by the technical finesse of an incredibly talented developer in building the world where they both exist, but they still largely felt more like pen pals to each other rather than the fiery passionate lovers they should have been.

There's no way to mention this game without being branded an artsy hipster and having dudebros instantly Ctrl + W out of the tab (high five Chrome users!), but Ico sure did care about building a relationship between two characters in a way that only a videogame could. I should make an appeal to the dudebros and mention that I don't actually like Ico that much; but it still conceptually interests me to this day. I find its genuine attempts at making us care about the relationship between two characters through hand-holding and irritating block-pushing puzzles more interesting than shooting some dudes in the face, having the game force me to slow to a casual walking pace for some dialogue, then shooting some more dudes etcetera. Not to be a jerk Naughty Dog, and I'm not even criticising the story itself, but if you're finding that whole "videogame" part of your videogame is getting in the way of your story maybe you should try to tell the story differently maybe!

Now I actually will be a jerk and quote myself from three paragraphs ago, The Last Of Us is "a legitimately fantastic piece of 21st century entertainment" and I have no beef with it. What I do have some beef with is the reaction that came with the game, the sort of unbelievable essays and blogs filling the e-waves about how magical it was and how everyone in the universe was reduced to tears and DEM FEELS BRO. There's also the matter of this promotional picture that is literally just a picture of protagonists Joel and Ellie surrounded by all their perfect review scores. I'm not knocking Naughty Dog for using that as part of their marketing, they did after all have convoys of cash to make for Papa Sony, but when Batman: Arkham City pulled the same thing with its Game Of The Year edition the gaming community just pointed and laughed at it.

Here's the thing, The Last Of Us hit and rocked the videogame world, but the videogame world is not all of culture. While grown men wept at "dem feels" and submitted their own perfect 100% user reviews to Metacritic, the rest of the world sort of let out a "meh". Here's where my issue with the "HBO boxset in videogame form" line comes in...I want that to be true, and hell maybe The Last Of Us genuinely is the closest thing to it...but it just isn't true. Did you guys even watch the first season of True Detective? I know people will get instantly defensive when they read this, because I definitely used to as well, but here in videogame town we don't have anything that is that good. The reaction to The Last Of Us almost smells of giving up to me, like our opinion of it is "HEY! Someone made a videogame that has similar writing and presentation as a television show and it's kind of good too! WE MADE IT!" NO. We still have so far to go! We should be celebrating The Last Of Us as a great development in gaming culture not necessarily as a landmark achievement that validates us all.

Don't take that last paragraph as some kind of attack on the medium, I have definitely spent more time in my life playing videogames than reading, watching TV or going to the movies, but that is fundamentally because the potential of interactive fiction interests me a lot more than non-interactive fiction. With that said, I will always find myself drawn more to the pieces that use this interactive element to their advantage as much as possible over those that don't, even if when they are as fantastic as The Last Of Us is. Have I mentioned enough times that I don't actually hate The Last Of Us yet? Has that come across? Oh well, let's just count that as me saying it again and I'll just move on now.

Here's something I shouldn't have waited until the word count entered the thousands to mention: Rockstar. Ever since I first heard the concept of "the HBO of videogames", Rockstar are always the company my mind jumps straight back to. Broadly speaking, what would you associate with a typical quality HBO show? Solid writing, fantastic character development, an immersive well established setting and fundamentally adult entertainment ("adult" here is a reference to the sophistication required of the viewer and not boobies/blood etcetera, although there is usually also plenty of that). So what we need here is a videogame that is the equivalent of that inside its own medium and not simply trying to emulate it like The Last Of Us was. When we have something like that, then we can celebrate the true arrival and legitimacy of videogames within popular culture, until then there's still work to do.

With the fantastic polish and attention to detail Rockstar put into the setting of basically all of their games in the last decade (excluding the god awful Manhunt games. Just as a little side note, any compliments I give to Rockstar products as a whole self-insert the phrase "with the obvious exception of Manhunt" in your head as you read it) combined with the character focused story arcs of Grand Theft Auto IV, LA Noire and Red Dead Redemption it looked like Rockstar were serious about working their way to something that good. Videogames becoming more than videogames is a concept that's getting increased discussion all the time; more people are rolling their eyes at the Call of Duty’s and the Battlefields along with the general hurricane of hyper violent dudebro shooters that plague the mainstream market. Pseudo-art games like Bioshock come out and some people suggest "Hey, I bet something like this would be awesome with no combat in it!" then The Fullbright Company release Gone Home and prove all those people right. We are daring to dream here! Our tongues are pressed against the glass ceiling and the condensation sure is starting to taste like sweet sweet progress.

Then Rockstar release Grand Theft Auto V, a silly videogame for cynical jerks, and now the dream only feels further away.

I should clarify once again before I start getting e-mails from reactionary fanboys about how I support baby cancer or whatever, no I didn't hate Grand Theft Auto V. I played it, I played the heck yeah out of it, the attention to detail to the map was even better than ever, it made me laugh a couple of times and I'm not going to say I didn't enjoy some of the missions. I beat the story mode within a couple of days and then wasted a few more days doing god-awful sidequest stuff just as an excuse to keep hanging out in the world. And I'll tell you what, if it had a matchmaking system that didn't sniff its own farts I probably would have never stopped playing 8 vs. 8 cops and robbers style games online. Grand Theft Auto V was yet another technical achievement for Rockstar North, it just wasn't a design achievement in the way GTA IV was.

I find Grand Theft Auto V inherently disappointing because so much of its failure comes from giving in to the reaction to Grand Theft Auto IV; a game that in many ways the world wasn't ready for. Oh sure, everyone lapped it up at the time, critics splouged all over the graphics and as ever consumers got caught up the hype. So everyone played it, but not everyone really "got" it. There were the obvious Rockstar pluses, high levels of polish, great world building, variety of missions and so on and so forth; along with the great work that went into creating a huge open and explorable sandbox that also functioned as a collection of set-piece orientated (mostly) well designed missions.

There were negative views of other aspects of the package though, a lot of people didn't like the grittier tone, or how you couldn't look around and just find a jetpack in some bushes any more. Internet meme culture was starting to bubble up out of the pits of hell and people openly mocked the relationship system in the game, because man, that Roman guy sure did want to go bowling a lot. I don't want to be confrontational here, but was getting phone calls in GTA IV ever ACTUALLY that annoying? Did it seriously pain you to have to occasionally hit the B or Circle button every so often? If you didn't care about the relationship system there was no punishment for ignoring it whatsoever, and you could even put your phone on silent for god's sake. Then there are weird common complaints that often come from people who pretty much exclusively play videogames in their spare time and little else. Complaints such as "why do all the cars feel so heavy?!?" Because it's a car you jerk; when so much attention has been put into making Liberty City almost like a real place don't you think it would be jarring if Rockstar dunked F-Zero style driving or something into the game? I think the cars feel great in GTA IV (and even better in GTA V), and I have actually passed my driving test in real life too so I'm a state-recognised authority on this, so there.

Here's the thing though about GTA IV being gritty and depressing and whatever; I would actually go so far to say that it's actually the most optimistic entry into the series. Without going too deep into Niko Bellic's character which is a whole essay in of itself, he is an angry man with a scarred past coming to America to escape his past life and buried in that somewhere is some satire about the "American dream" and so on. As events develop Niko finds his past makes it difficult for him to adjust to social relationships, his desire for revenge leaves him empty inside even when he finally achieves it, and his choices rooted in anger and selfishness lead to the people closest to him suffering the consequences of his actions in extreme ways.

You were actually a character in that game, maybe even a potentially real person, and you were free to interoperate that character however you wanted. GTA IV did a decent (not good, and certainly not great) job of contextualising the violence within the story; usually Niko was killing people in self-defence in situations that escalated beyond his control, or doing bad things for reasons that he had clear personal motivation for, or at the very least killing people who were significantly bigger jerks than he was. You were presented with a character with social anxieties who struggled to connect with other people, and had the ability and the psyche to kill people but not necessarily the willingness to. The subtle difference between Niko and other GTA protagonists is that it was just as easy to believe that he wouldn't kill someone as much as it was easy to believe he would go completely psycho. The true spirit of an "immersive open world game" lies somewhere within this little detail.

Grand Theft Auto IV wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I absolutely love what it was trying to do. Here's one of the more stand-out lines from GTA IV that does a decent job of summing up of Niko Bellic's struggles as a character:

"After you walk into a village and you see 50 children, all sitting neatly in a row, against a church wall, each with their throats cut and their hands chopped off, you realize that the creature that could do this doesn't have a soul."

 So Rockstar gave you a character with that back story and put in an entirely ignorable relationship system to allow you to explore Niko's own sociopathic nature with an entire collection of different colourful (and sometimes not so colourful) characters. You could ignore that, you could hang up on your stupid fat cousin and go shoot pigeons in the park by yourself instead, but it's there. A videogame lets you explore a characters own struggles and shortcoming at your own leisure in a way that a movie or TV show never could. Don't get me wrong, in regards to GTA IV Rockstar get like a C+ for execution, but there are seeds of LITERALLY THE BEST THING EVER there. Instead, it was laughed off by the same sort of people who claim the series is better if "you just ignore the missions dude!" and just wreck things, but as stated above, 2008 wasn't ready for what Grand Theft Auto IV was trying to do.

Ultimately, what I really like about GTA IV more than anything, and the reason why I say it's more "optimistic" than other entries in the series is because it fundamentally believes in people. Money, revenge, violence, aggression and selfishness bring Niko nothing but misery and emptiness, only when he begins to allow other people back into his life does he begin to find potential for happiness. The ending (regardless of which one you get) is perhaps a little too miserable, I'd say a little hypocritical also, but GTA IV was definitely on the right track towards something amazing.

Then five years later Rockstar release Grand Theft Auto V, an equally high quality product, but one that has a burning contempt for all the human beings within its world and more importantly...the ones playing it.

Grand Theft Auto V is the videogame equivalent of a douchey white male teenager thinking he's above all of popular culture while simultaneously respecting the most horrible parts of it (in other words, me around about the time GTA IV came out, I'm not really sure anything has changed really other than not being a teenager any more). The sort of person who, for example, thinks he's so clever for watching 5 seconds of The Jersey Shore and proclaiming "OMG! This show SUCKS; I hope all of them die." Not realising of course that shows like The Jersey Shore are perfectly produced to get that exact reaction, and that the show itself is sneering at the cast as much as the audience is. There's the target audience of people who genuinely like that sort of thing who provide a fanbase, then there's all the jerks that will roll their eyes at it and talk smack about it to look cool on Twitter. When that starts happening, shows like this stop being "popular" and become cultural events; so even people like me who have literally not seen more than 5 seconds of The Jersey Shore will talk about it for a paragraph in a post about videogames. Television producers don't only see these people coming; they're counting on them.

Sorry if that seemed a little too tangential, but I can't stress enough how genuinely awful the "satire" in GTA V is. Some reviewers praised it because it attacks "everything" about Western culture and "leaves no prisoners" (this is not a real quote from anywhere, but I'd bet real money that someone used those exact words) which translates to me as "there's a lot of it so therefore it must be good." GTA V takes lazy jabs at issues such as social media, reality TV, terrorism, torture and feminism (incidentally Rockstar, your decision to go for multiple characters that you switch between was already mostly gimmicky, there really wasn't any reason you couldn't have made one of them a woman) but that's all they are: lazy jabs. GTA V has nothing to say about these issues other than simply mentioning them, pointing and laughing, then moving on in the least provocative way imaginable. GTA IV wasn't exactly Stephen-Colbert-at-the-Whitehouse ballsy either, but at least there were some real jokes in it. GTA V, for all its efforts, only has one thing to say to us: People are crap; life is crap, so let's just kill each other I guess. Also LOL. 

Maybe this is something no-one ever thinks about, and maybe it doesn't matter any way; but has it occurred to anyone how badly GTA V is going to age? San Andreas is currently 9 years old but it feels like it's 30, it's almost unthinkable now that it was getting 10/10 or even 99% reviews and being held up as the benchmark for all videogames. At least people remember San Andreas for its RPG elements and other weird little additions, what will anyone remember GTA V for once its no longer technically impressive and we have an actually playable version of Grand Theft Auto Online? The torture scene? GTA V is a product of its time and future historians will scratch their heads at the response to it. But once again, this probably doesn't matter, plenty of great games have been products of their time, so let's get back into the meat of GTA V.

There's also the cynical choices in both playable characters and the story. The storytelling focus of GTA IV was swept away almost entirely, there's still a lot of talking (and a lot of it is still decent too!) and cut-scenes and whatever, but it's kind of just a bunch of stuff that happens. Honestly, I've beaten the game's story mode in its entirety and I wouldn't even know where to start summarising the narrative as a whole, I guess the best you can hope for is go through it character by character. First there's Michael, an ageing white guy (super appropriate for this game actually) who's frustrated by his life because he has no relationship with his horrible family, and he feels guilty about his privileged lifestyle because he got it through doing bad things. His "arc" is wrapped up him returning to his past lifestyle to do even more bad things, and then trying to stop doing those bad things for the sake of fixing his relationship with his horrible family. Then there's Franklin, the straight-faced man who's supposed to be a nice guy or whatever, but much like CJ from San Andreas the game completely undermines any attempt at making him sympathetic. You can try and make Franklin as normal as you'd like Rockstar, but the second a human being starts shooting people they don't know in the head, for the sake of other humans they barely know for some kind of non-specific financial gain they have officially entered the realm of psychopathy and I'm not going to like them. 

Then of course there's the main attraction: Trevor, the "nutty" one. Presumably Rockstar went for a character that was "crazy" and "random" because that's their vision of the average Grand Theft Auto player, so they wanted to create an avatar to compliment that. There's a huge paradox here in terms of balancing the free roaming nature of a "sandbox" and actual game design, stick with me here because this might get a little abstract.

In the possibly fictional land of "Australia" they have a well-intentioned but nonetheless incredibly stupid law where it is ILLEGAL to not vote. Not voting in an Australian election will get you a fine of $20, granted 20 dollars of Australian money is probably only enough for a Chupa Chup and a hand job on the bus home, but you can still get a criminal record for this. This has always struck me as incredibly undemocratic; surely the right to vote and an obligation to vote are vastly different things. Forcing a citizen to vote shackles them to a system they might not support, or to vote for one of the options even if one feels none of the options represent them. For me, not voting is an admission of ignorance, and sure you can say being ignorant at the time of an election is socially irresponsible. But forcing me to vote won't make me less ignorant, so what next, you make a law forcing people to go to town meetings to listen to party manifestos or something? Is this starting to sound creepy at all yet? It gosh darn should be. 

But that's what Rockstar is doing by presenting you with Trevor in Grand Theft Auto V; they're forcing you to vote for something you might not necessarily support. Maybe you won't want to play GTA V like a psychopath, maybe you like the idea of going for long strolls or opting for taxi rides everywhere instead of stealing cars, but Rockstar have opted to make this choice void. Even if you did try to hang out in GTA V as if it was a real place for a little while, Rockstar have already declared that Trevor is just "random" and "CRAZEH" and any roleplaying either way is completely irrelevant. You are irrelevant.  A true "sandbox" is a living city should allow the player to interoperate the character however they see fit, not make them into an impossible-to-relate-to murderer right out of the gate and slap them on the back. "Don't worry bro, just go nuts and be horrible, it doesn't affect our narrative anymore because now the entire game is about people who are horrible and nuts anyway!" Oh...nice...I guess...

Again, I don't hate Grand Theft Auto V as a videogame; I just find it endlessly disappointing and a little frustrating. The shooting is better, the driving is better, it looks great and the city is realer than it’s ever been. But the fact that all of this is being used purely as a backdrop to a mean-spirited, psychopathic, incredibly cynical and misogynistic "satire" about horrible people who have no aspiration in their lives other than to shoot people for money makes me feel that maybe the entire videogame industry needs to go flush its head down the toilet and think about what it's done. In 2008, Rockstar started off their franchise game with a short driving stage establishing the relationship between two characters and their aspirations for the future; in 2013 they started the game with criminals shooting 200 cops in the face. That's the progress we've made in five years apparently. 

I criticise Rockstar, and I have focused primarily on the differences between GTA IV and V, because as the title suggests I believe in them. I'm just worried that Rockstar are starting to not believe in themselves any more, and maybe that cowardly bit of self-doubt that made them put cover shooting in L.A. Noire and have the game end in a sewer setting gangsters on fire (for god's sake) has overtaken the entire company. The release of a new main entry Grand Theft Auto title is a cultural event now, not even Mario or Zelda can claim that anymore, so if there's one franchise that we should be hope to highlight some of the more positive elements of the games industry it may as well be that one. They don't need to appeal to the horrible dudebro demographic by making games like GTA V; they already have everyone's attention. Sure some jerks laughed at GTA IV, but everyone looked at it, and people still got excited for the next one. All things considered did the experimental elements of GTA IV really go that badly at all?

Maybe you find the earlier discussion about the juxtaposition between Niko Bellic's depressing character and the optimistic nature of including relationships unconvincing, maybe that was just an accident. But that's also a big part of the reason to get so excited about Rockstar as a developer; they create worlds with such a high degree of polish that sometimes accidental genius can crop up just by random things rubbing against each other like that. They've proven with Red Dead Redemption they can produce strong narratives that take place somewhere that the player might actually want to go to. They've proven in Max Payne 3 they can make games that centre around a really strong core mechanic. And now with Grand Theft Auto V they've outdone themselves again in terms of creating fantastic worlds. 

We have the world now Rockstar, what you need to do now is find ways of exploring that world, and not just rely on wowing us with sheer scale and craftsmanship. Make more buildings enterable, make more things more interactive, design more story missions to have branding paths and alternative methods of execution (incidentally, GTA V is insanely restrictive in this regard and has some of the dumbest fail states I've ever seen in a videogame). I'm not suggesting that a series like Grand Theft Auto should have no violence in it, that would obviously be ridiculous, but there's no reason why it shouldn't make more sense and there's definitely no reason to not have alternatives to violence; at least in some situations!  I think that's all I have to say about Grand Theft Auto for now, I just hope GTA VI will take more inspiration from IV than V is all I'm saying, but more importantly I hope it's good enough to make both of them completely irrelevant.

At time of writing, another E3 has just passed and it was yet again an endless parade of meaningless violence, stab wounds and buff white dudes holding a lot of guns...so maybe videogames still aren't ready for "the dream" that games like Gone Home are reaching for just yet. Then again, games that got a ton of buzz on Twitter were things like Cuphead and No Man's Sky, and people sure did love that Nintendo conference, maybe some people just lack the imagination to see what the future could be. Maybe it just genuinely doesn't occur to some people that it would be entirely possible to see a completely non-violent videogame with the level of polish that a Grand Theft Auto comes with. Shooting dudes in the face is a pretty good game mechanic, I just wish more people would realise it's not the only good game mechanic. Imagine Rockstar taking all their tools and making something like Game of Thrones, or True Detective, or maybe even The Last Of Us. In his writings' Tim Rogers has made several references to wanting to see Rockstar make their own romantic comedy, and my god I love that idea, and I don't even like romantic comedies.

Even if Rockstar do just want to make Grand Theft Auto VI even jerkier and more dudebroier, that's fine with me I guess. I've never made a billion dollars in a weekend before so they're way smarter than me. I just hope they don't lose that ambition in all their projects, I hope whoever believed that the company could produce a videogame that was more than "just another videogame" around the time GTA IV was in development hasn't been demoted to janitorial services or something. There's still so much work to do and I honestly believe they were on the right track for a moment there. Companies like Naughty Dog, Valve and TellTale Games will be right on the frontline with them, but if anyone (mainstream) is going to crash through that glass ceiling in a way people would notice and begin the TRUE next generation of videogames it's going to Rockstar. 

Either way, I'm doomed to pay attention to all their projects until the day I die (unless they announce Manhunt 3, in which case I would probably just retroactively edited this piece into one massive sad face and smash all my videogame consoles with a brick) in the possibly futile hope that they'll make something that all of us can legitimately be proud of. Until that day comes, hopefully at least they'll steal someone else's matchmaking for Grand Theft Auto Online so I can actually start playing it again, gosh darn it.

LesmoThoughts: Super Mario 3D World

I wish I hadn't been so lazy lately and written more of these so I start this particular piece off with some wanky "full circle" intro about how Super Mario 3D Land was the first game I wrote about in this style. As is, I've only done a few games in between these bad boys so it would just be weird, fortunately I can just opt for an even wankier intro paragraph where I waste 30 seconds of your life explaining how I couldn't do that but would of instead. Right, good, intros done, now we can go straight into the meat of the matter.

For the uninitiated I wrote a thing about Super Mario 3D Land talking about why it's really good and probably the best Mario game Nintendo have done since Super Mario Bros 3, I also wrote a thing about I just got a Wii U and they're pretty cool. With these two things going for it, does this mean that I also really like Super Mario 3D World for the Wii U? Well let's put it this way; I have four games for my Wii U currently, one of them is that brand new Mario Kart 8 that people are excited for, the first game I reached for was Super Mario 3D World and I got straight into it. It's now a day later and I've beaten it, Mario Kart 8 is still trending on Twitter at time of writing and it's still yet to be touched. I've even taken the seal off it to register the code for my free game download so the job of opening it is already half done and still the disc has not left the box, because I was too busy bouncing my way through 3D World. So we'll file the answer to that particular question as "Yes" for now. 

Structurally Super Mario 3D World is pretty similar to 3D Land and retains most of its good points, just to briefly recap those are: perfect level design, perfect celebration of movement and perfect segregation of content into bite-sized fun packages. There are a few differences regarding 3D World however, unfortunately I'll have to duck the hypothetical 9.7 out of 10 (or something) I'd give 3D Land for its level design to like a 9.2 for containing a bunch of gimmicky levels that don't really work, such as the "touchpad platforms" level previously mentioned in the Wii U post. 3D World gets some points back in the movement department however because I really like how they've handled Mario's speed in this one. Finally they came up with a visual way to indicate full speed in the way the P meter and beeps did in Super Mario Bros 3, as now when Mario is fully revved up there's a little speed boost and Mario shoots forward with a different running animation. It's really neat because the worst part of 3D Land was thinking you were at full speed when you weren't and accidentally doing a tiny bunny hop into a pit, which didn't happen to me a single time while playing through Super Mario 3D World.

Just as a side note, I'd like to point out that 3D World also has an option for manual camera controls now. I bring this up because I didn't notice it until I as in World 5, and even then it as by accident and I never actually used them. I can't stress enough how much of a compliment this is, there are almost no 3D games where the camera is legitimately never an issue without you having to master controlling it yourself, these games have to be given insane amounts of credit for that.

I wasn't a fan of those Super Mario Galaxy games, they're neat and everything and I basically respect them, but they weren't what I wanted a 3D Mario game to be. Super Mario 3D Land was a nearly perfect 3D Mario game, and Super Mario 3D World is nearly a perfect Super Mario 3D Land game, but the proximity of the latter is lower to perfection than the proximity of the former, if you get what I'm saying.

In English: Super Mario 3D World is pretty great, almost as great as 3D Land, but it feels like a baby step away from perfection than one towards it. 

There's lots of little reasons for this, many would say it's that 3D World is too short. To be honest; maybe, but I think there's actually more content in 3D World if you discount the fact that 3D Land was padded out by looping the same level designs twice with different gimmicks. Still, it would have been neat if 3D World has done something similar to that as well, I don't mind these games padding themselves out because it's basically guaranteed that I'm going to want to play them more than once so you may as well give me something to work for. It could be that the levels are a little too gimmicky in places, there's no dealbreakers or anything but there's definitely levels in 3D World that I have no intention of ever playing again whereas I would happily run through all of 3D Land any day of the week 

It might also be those gosh darn garbage Captain Toad levels. A lot of people on the internet go on about games "murdering their childhoods", and I have to admit I felt the top of a blade menacing my childhood's jugular when I saw this kind of crap in a Mario game. Basically, you play as a ridiculously slow Toadstool guy, and you walk across an obtuse straight line in a 3D structure, with no fixed camera angles and no ability to jump (although the jump button still works, it's just that it makes your toadstool guy go WAH and a little thrust instead). The ONLY challenge is to steer the camera so you can actually see where you're going, there is only ever one direction you can go unless you want to fall back to the bottom and start again. If you think anything in these levels is a "puzzle" you are genuinely stupid, I mean no offence or anything, thanks for reading, but I would bet any amount of money that there's strange gaps on your walls where you licked the paint off before it dried.

In a nutshell; Super Mario 3D Land took those Galaxy games that I really didn't like that much, and stripped them of all their fluff and just left the delicious Mario gooey centre that I wanted. Super Mario 3D World for the most part is just more of that, but in 1080p with a mostly horrible soundtrack* and some of that fluff put back into it. Just enough fluff to get up your nose and make you sneeze from time to time, but you'll forget about it when it passes. Overall, I had a good time Super Mario 3D World, and I absolutely definitely 100% will go back to it and play it all over again getting all the stars I missed etc., I'd just say that Super Mario 3D Land was a little better. That's all.

Oh and um....the multiplayer...I guess that's cool too but...I don't have any friends.

*Before I get jumped on there's like 5 tracks or so I really like, but overall I don't like the music in this game SORRY 

LesmoThoughts: Wii U

Well, as of today I have joined the world's most discriminated against minority...people who paid money to own a Nintendo Wii U. I don't even know how to defend the decision; there was a price drop at around the time I got a bunch of money, the Mario Kart 8 free game deal was pretty sweet and there's literally nothing I would play on a PlayStation 4 or an Xbone, so I TOOK THE PLUNGE. Now that I've owned a Wii U for a few hours, I want to write a thing about how it's pretty cool but Nintendo really suck, because that's how I respond to gifts (the console is a birthday present from me to me (thanks me!))

One thing the Wii U has going for it is that it'll definitely be remembered as one of the most obnoxious consoles to setup ever. Almost every stage of the initial set up sequences forces you to do everything through the Wii U controller screen which is a bit of culture shock right out of the gate (more on this later), and before I could really do anything I had to wait for it to download and install huge updates for both the controller and console which took about an hour. Let's not even get into Mii creation and linking it up with my existing Nintendo accounts, I find it slightly concerning that Nintendo's online services seem to have significantly more security than my bank account. Don't ever forget your Nintendo Network ID folks.

I own some games for this thing I guess, but I don't want to talk about those just now. I have played the first three worlds of that Super Mario 3D World and it's pretty cool! But my first couple of hours with an actual Wii U did confirm my own prejudices against the machine, in fact that touchpad controller is really stupid. The only two notable uses in 3D World so far is you can rub the screen to show hidden blocks and coins, and also there was an entire level build around the gimmick of tapping platforms to make them appear and blowing on the microphone to make them move. Goddamnit Nintendo, I waited EIGHT YEARS to play one of your games in 1080p on my television screen, and the first one I get my hands on has levels in it that FORCE me to not look at my television.

Fear of televisions seems to be the running theme within the Wii U. On the big screen most of the menus and applications are at a strange resolution which can only be described as "they fit the screen but not quite lol" almost as a subtle hint in itself that you should not bother with anything that isn't the controller. There's nothing wrong with the resolution on any of the games, so it's kind of bizarre that nothing seems to fit an actual television probably on the console's own interface. It really is just stupid, the two screens thing works on the (3)DS because you can always easily see both or either of the screens, on anything you do involving the Wii U touchpad you have to stop looking at your television. Once again, this home console is encouraging me to ignore my (dad's) 50 inch plasma high definition 1080p television to look at a tiny washed out standard definition screen that I hold in my hands.

Going in to it the thing I was most cynical about was this business of being to continue playing games on the touchpad controller so you wouldn't have to hog the TV or something. This seems such a defeatist attitude; ignoring the fact that the vast majority of households have more than one television these days, it assumes that whoever the gamer in the household is at the bottom rung socially (this is probably true, but it seems weird for an international gaming corporation to want to promote this). Other than for little kids this presentation of this gimmick seems basically pointless until you really stop and think about it:

WAIT.

You mean while I'm working and I get writer's block or something, I can just grab my Wii U controller and knock off a level or two of Super Mario 3D World and then hop back to it? I mean I'm not doing that now, this is just bollocks and I don't get writer's block when I'm just writing bollocks, but Nintendo you have no idea how cool that is to me. I'm finding that taking the time to settle in with a mainstream console game is getting more and more difficult, but having the option to have a handheld bite-sized experience with them? ARE YOU SERIOUS? I liked Bayonetta and all, but other than the combat I found the general level design and story presentation lacking, which made it hard for me to play in long sittings. Being able to play it a couple of combat rooms at a time while I do other things if I'm not in the mood to take time out to sit down in my living room and have long sessions of it? That. Is. AWESOME. My own revelation has doubled my excitement in Bayonetta 2.

Note I said "my own revelation", because none of this has anything to do with Nintendo, and that's why they suck. Three years of their marketing failed to communicate to me what playing Super Mario 3D World hands on told me in half an hour, the Wii U is a gosh darn cool thing under its fluff and own bollocks. Sony tried the portable screen thing too with the Remote Play thing the PSP, but that failed due to expense and lack of support, Nintendo have the tools to make it a big thing just sitting there and they never told anyone. How people are even fully aware that the Wii U still comes with a sensor bar, and many of the new games still support Wiimotes and motion controls etc.? The marketing direction has been completely confused and failed to get across any of the cool things about this machine.

Not that I'm saying the Wii U is a great console or anything, I understand why it doesn't but it is kind of unfortunate that the touchscreen controller doesn't support HD...or that it isn't a particularly good touchscreen. It probably wouldn't happen/be possible but personally I would totally buy a HD version of that controller tomorrow. Just steal the screen from the PlayStation Vita Nintendo, I know where the Sony offices are, I'll help you break in. Just get in there at 2am and steal that, they're not doing anything with it they won't even notice, get a nice screen on that Wii U controller.

It could also use a few more games too, but that goes for the PlayStation 4 and Xbone as well so I don't hold that up as a key reason why the Wii U isn't doing so hot. Nintendo have just failed to communicate the potential of the machine. The Mario Kart 8 free game thing was pretty clever, because before then I was thinking there were about 5 games that I wanted to play (if not necessarily love or possibly even like in some cases) on the machine, and those were Super Mario 3D World, The Legend Of Zelda: WindWaker, Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart 8 and Bayonetta 2. Looking at the list of 10 games available for free with Mario Kart 8, I realised I wouldn't mind owning the vast majority of them, and that maybe the Wii U was finally something worth owning. With the touchscreen controller allowing bite-sized gameplay I probably wouldn't even mind playing through that Sonic: Lost Worlds all the way through...but y'know...with like hour breaks between each stage that is...