Random Gaming Thoughts

[BoringSupreez]

y'all are higher brow than me, I guess.

Of course we are. We all play our video games with our pinkies out.

Kotaku is clickbait garbage.

I myself only play Tetris and Columns while wearing a suit and sipping on my London Fog.

But seriously, kotaku exists to gather your internet viewing history and sell it to advertisers. It's buzzfeed with game articles.

Their latest story is a GTA V gif, followed by a bunch links to Youtube videos of GTA V. I've seen Buzzfeed articles with more original content and commentary.

They publish random GTA V clips as articles about once per week for the last two years. And they were one of the websites claiming that GTA V was sexist back when it launched, so their love affair is a bit strange. Unless, of course, their outrage was manufactured for clicks... nah, they've got too much journalistic integrity for that.

Some other hypocritical gems: despite the name, which is an obvious play on Otaku, they published this article ripping on Japan for not being like America: Japan: It's not Funny Anymore. Waaa, I can't find my vegan ingredients at a cheap price!

When foreign cultures talk about Japan, they usually talk about anime and / or manga. Usually, it's anime. Anime is terrible. It used to be okay. Now, it's not. It's inbred trailer-trash in entertainment form: Every season's new Japanese animation places one-upmanship of every single aspect of the last season higher on their list of priorities than even "make something entertaining." The same can perhaps be said of all Japanese entertainment, though it's not relevant anywhere else as much as it is in anime. Anime used to answer the questions of kids' dreams: "How awesome would it be to be a world-class assassin / kung-fu master / robot pilot / baseball hero?" Now it's just a bunch of shit pandering to perverts and pedophiles.

And then they reviewed one of the best anime in recent years (Watamote) and somehow missed the entire point that it's a comedy: The Most Mean-Spirited Anime I Have Ever Watched.

This past week, I told you about the five anime you should be watching this summer. To prepare, I asked Kotaku readers to vote on their picks. The winner by a landslide was Watamote. I am dumbfounded by this. Watamote is, quite simply, the most mean-spirited anime I have ever watched.

Dumbass readers, you voted for the wrong anime!

The problem is, this show isn't really a comedy. It's a tragedy. Any laughs you get are due to her emotional pain and suffering. And while this is fine if the character is evil and thus getting some kind of karmic comeuppance, Tomoko, as a character, has done nothing worthy of being saddled with the hell that is her life.

Let's be clear here. Tomoko is not simply a nerdy girl who is a little socially awkward. Given the state of her socialization skills, it seems safe to assume she is a girl with a severe social anxiety disorder. And as all the jokes in the series are at her expense, the show really comes off as “let's make fun of the girl with a crippling psychological disorder.”

I hear people like this show because they identify with Tomoko—that they had similar experiences in school and now look back on those experiences with nostalgic humor. But for me, despite being more than a little bit of a social outcast in high school myself, none of this is funny. It's just reveling in the pain of a mentally ill person—laughing at a girl who is even more awkward than they were in order to feel better about their own lives.

And that is just plain fucked up.

What do you bet this guy got childhood PTSD from watching Charlie Brown? How dare we be amused by the plight of a poor innocent child. We're such shitlords.

Anyway, suffice to say I hate Kotaku and the fact that they are somehow miraculously counted in the ranks of legitimate gaming press. Ubisoft is taking the right action (or rather, inaction).

[KalessinDB]

I was just reminded of the existence of LSD for PS1. I want to play this. I guess that means it's time to chip my PS1, since I'm not dropping the coin a legit copy commands and I don't think Free McBoot will do burned PS1 games, only PS2

Though my CFW PS3 might now that I think about it...

[Luke]

And they were one of the websites claiming that GTA V was sexist back when it launched, so their love affair is a bit strange. Unless, of course, their outrage was manufactured for clicks... nah, they've got too much journalistic integrity for that.

Love you.

[Snatch1414]

I try not to read any of the Gawker-related sites. It's just this mini-conglomerate of bullshit 'news'. At first, sites like Deadspin are refreshing because if nothing else it's nice to see people just writing what they want to write instead of following some kind of journalistic credo on what language you have to use and what to report about. Then it gets old because you realize all these 'articles' are garbage.

That wasn't even what put me off entirely though. At that point I just considered them "just for fun" sites. As in you're not going to get much real news if any, but they point out goofy idiosyncracies in sports, or gaming, or whatever, and it's fun for a minute to scroll through. But then they had to start pimping their other sites. Every fourth entry was a link to a site like Jezebel, or Jalopnik, or some other site I simply don't care about. Not to mention how sites like Jezebel are created simply to take advantage of a trend.

TL;DR Gawker used to be light-hearted, loose journalism. Now it's click baity crap as others have said.

[Erik_Twice]

It's a baffling review, because thinking that "Tomoko, as a character, has done nothing worthy of being saddled with the hell that is her life" pretty much requires to ignore 95% of the show!

I mean, it's not exactly difficult to see that Tomoko is mean, manipulative and ugly. She constantly wishes death on people, thinks her classmates are whores for having friends of the opposite sex and even cheats against 10 year olds in Magic.

I mean, the show isn't called "No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys' Fault I’m Not Popular!" because Tomoko is blameless.

Truly great show. I just realized there's an OVA, I should try to watch it

[Exhuminator]

Friends Of Mineral Town came to Wii U:

http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/t0 ... 0WcelEMxs9

That was unexpected. Nice though.

[Luke]

TL;DR Gawker used to be light-hearted, loose journalism. Now it's click baity crap as others have said.

Yup.

It's been that way for well over two years. The articles aren't worth reading and for some reason they don't understand that I don't want to sign up for shaving razors sent to me in the mail (even at the "awesome discount that ends this week!").

...

Jurassic Park on the Sega CD is the best Jurassic Park game ever made.

[Forlorn Drifter]

I do check Kotaku on certain days for Highlight Reel, and usually look through what else they have, but they are far from good in general. It is nice that they let the writers give whatever their opinion is, but I can think of at least once where they had an article focused on ethnocentrism, and how, in general, you see it too much in gaming journalism... followed by one stating all the "societal issues" in Japanese games.

[Xeogred]

TL;DR Gawker used to be light-hearted, loose journalism. Now it's click baity crap as others have said.

Yup.

It's been that way for well over two years. The articles aren't worth reading and for some reason they don't understand that I don't want to sign up for shaving razors sent to me in the mail (even at the "awesome discount that ends this week!").

...

Jurassic Park on the Sega CD is the best Jurassic Park game ever made.

It was so fun to sequence break that game, or just get through it with the bare minimum. Loved how it always froze and sometimes didn't even work, I say this seriously. It just made my Sega CD experience amusing. I think I had that, Sonic CD, and Ecco the Dolphin Tides of Time which rarely worked as well.

I don't even think Kotaku puts up reviews anymore? It's just like some blog by annoying people usually. I stick to Polygon, RPS, and Silconera mostly thesedays, or random people I follow on youtube.

[Snatch1414]

So the Oculus Rift presentation at E3 revealed the little "not a controller but kind of is" thingies you hold in your hands while using it. I don't know much about the technology, and obviously there was going to have to be SOMEthing you held in your hand, but it just made me think if people demand an addition to the handsets here and there, all of a sudden it's going to basically be a controller. Then at that point wouldn't the whole thing just be a glorified way to sit really, really close to your TV while playing a game?

I have not tried one so I don't know, but the more complicated the handset gets the closer it gets to just being an in-your-face presentation of the same old, same old. Back in college around 2003 a rich kid on our floor had bulky glasses you could wear and we'd hook them up to the Gamecube and play Metroid Prime with them, and it was pretty awesome at least at first. My question is how far have we really come from that in the last 12 years when we really think about it.

On another note: They are partnering with Microsoft which they say means you can stream your XBone games through it. That seems like a no brainer option that would be included on the PS4 as well doesn't it?