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Private Notes
2017 had some absolute gems, but they were more than outnumbered by this year's horrors, stinkers, and utter flops.
From those games mutilated to earn their publishers cash unabound, to those that simply had no talent behind them, there was much to choose from.
The wine has been drunk, the thinking's been thought, and now we bring you 2017's absolute worst games...
On this constructively critical Jimquisition, we explain how using pre-bought videogame assets isn't inherently wrong, and how they've been put to good use.
We also have a CASH CONTENT going on to reward anybody who can prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that talent is an asset.
Recently we were contacted by an independent game developer from Adelaide, South Australia. Last year this dev was the target of an outrageous news report. Outrageous for all the wrong reasons. The Jimquisition applied more research, editing, production value, and talent to this story than Nine News Adelaide ever did. Now a local TV news station gets to experience life on the other side of the camera.
Following allegations of a fully crap working environment at Quantic Dream, The Jimquisition looks at what's been said and done, and the response from he most often see at the Dream's helm.
Extra Content: Fuck Konami
According to journalists, "angry YouTube videos" have demoralized employees of Electronic Arts and BioWare.
So... let's talk about that anger, shall we?
Games cost a lot of money to make. You need to pay developers, you need to license engines, you need do a lot.
Extra Credits pointed out all of these costs in a recent video, and I'm certainly not going the claim the expenses aren't expensive.
But is it just me, or does the "AAA" videogame industry do a bit too much twisting and turning to make the cost of doing business out to be some unreasonable cross to bear?
There is a constant problem plaguing the game industry, if its spokespeople are to be believed. Games cost $60, and that price doesn't work anymore!
Weirdly enough, The Jimquisition agrees with this assessment. "AAA" games should indeed not cost $60 anymore, and they most certainly have outgrown it.
Dynasty Warriors may be my favorite series - or at least it was - but Tecmo Koei has been taking the piss with it for years.
Much of what's said here could have been said a long time ago, but Dynasty Warriors 9 was its last chance... and we all know how that went.
Oh, and this isn't just about what they DID to Zhang He!
Once again the "AAA" industry thinks it has a golden goose, and once again it's primed to bang that goose until the eggs come out filled with nothing but decaying spunk.
The Yakuza series may not have gigantic open worlds, but they're bigger and better than any sprawling map found in your typical "AAA" game these days.
Extra Content: Fuck Konami News.
Videogames, classic political scapegoat of the 1990s and early 2000s, is back in the spotlight as Trump's bewildered administration resurrects an old blame game.
And a game is what it is. A rigged circus game designed only to entertain and placate the masses. The "violence in videogames" debate is a vapid waste of time, and the time wasters know it.
Let's talk about collector's editions, specifically the ones that aren't really collector's editions.
You shouldn't be able to call a box of garbage an "edition" of anything, but welcome to the game industry, where Bethesda, EA, and Microsoft have been doing just that.
Everybody loves lists, especially people who say they don't. The Jimquisition this week roots through history's garbage to find the ten worst types of DLC in videogame history.
At least until we think of ten more, then we can do another list. Lists are great!
Is Far Cry 5 good? I think so. The problem with Ubisoft games is you can't tell anymore, they're all the same.
It's understandable when a sequel iterates on its predecessor, but Ubisoft is one publisher with MANY franchises all building off each other.
It's making it hard to care, or at the very least view these games as anything other than fluff.
In 2017, the "AAA" game industry went all-in on loot boxes - microtransactions that emulate gambling to maximize ill-gotten gains.
In 2018, new games aren't using them and old games are scrubbing them. Are they done in the mainstream business, or are companies just biding their time?
PUBG might have been a massive hit, but the behavior of the team behind it indicates it's a failure in one very important way.
One from the vaults! The classic 100% Objective Review for Final Fantasy XIII gets some new clothes.
Nowadays it seems "AAA" publishers are giving us fewer games, and consequently fewer options. That's because they are.
In today's all-or-nothing industry, the "middle shelf" game, the kind of game that has a budget but isn't mega mainstream, is a dying art.
Wow, you really do pay Warner Bros. or otherwise watch a helpless child get strangled. That's pretty much the perfect symbol for modern games.
Let's see what one of the worst entertainment companies in the world has done with Harry Potter this time.
There's plenty to talk about with God of War, and I'm going to do it. I'm also going to use Chill Dad Kratos' latest adventure to talk about console exclusive games.
Nintendo finally revealed its Switch Online plans and... they're not great.
Worse than that, they make Nintendo look as clueless and weird as ever.
Green Man Gaming believes it can formulate an hourly price for its games, but this "Average Cost Per Hour" nonsense is... well, nonsense!
Of course. Why wouldn't there be? Ooookay, let's explain to people why rallying around this particularly absurd little product is a bad idea...
Dark Souls Remastered might bring a classic back to life, but it's not been a universal hit among fans.
Let's look at what From Software could've and should've done with the Dark Souls re-release.
It's strange to me that previously accepted criticism can retroactively become censorship the moment something comes along that's deliberately tacky and edgy. Almost as if, to some people, free speech is really only about having the freedom to be a dick.
Anyway, since Valve and YouTube can jettison responsibility for their platforms, so can I.
E3 2018 has shot its glitzy wad in our faces and we must pick through the mess to find winners and losers.
And don't worry, we bring up Sony and the ongoing Fortnite nonsense. We bring it up hard.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is basically despicable and Activision Blizzard is the worst. At least until another publisher takes it place in the rotation.
Waluigi, YEAH YEAH YEAH!
It's time to think about the sad life of the Good Purple Boy.
The Battle Pass is the new hotness in monetization thanks to Fortnite's popularization of it.
Before "AAA" publishers can sink their fangs into the latest scheme, games like PUBG and Paladins have shown them how to do it.
Everyone knows the Xbox One is a bit rubbish. Deep down, we all know it, and it's because Microsoft thinks too much like a publisher.
Time for one of our classic post-mortems. This time it's not about one game, but three games and the studio responsible for two of 'em.
The Culling II abandoned everything to pursue literally the wrong thing, while Boss Key Productions' Lawbreakers and Radical Heights were just... wow.
Two years on, and No Man's Sky is finally living up to a significant portion of its promise. It's not the first game to get a "Megapatch" and it won't be the last.
Games these days are thoroughly mutable, but that can be a bad thing as well as a good thing. Let's look at the things!
God of War recently made $131 million in digital revenue. Octopath Traveler is struggling to meet physical demand. These are just two in a long line of successful story-driven games.
But please, game industry, tell me again how nobody wants 'em.
Nintendo is clamping down on emulation, causing sites like EmuParadise to cease doing business. The game industry hates emulation almost as much as contemporary piracy, so this is good news for executives.
It's just a shame that, in a world without emulators, the industry doesn't care at all about archival, or offering a service that could begin to compete with what ROMs were doing.
A now former IGN editor was caught plagiarizing a review of Dead Cells and got canned for it. That's where the story should have ended.
Instead, Filip Miucin couldn't help making it worse for himself, and encouraged the world to uncover an entire career built off the stolen work of other people. What a tit.
If this video were comprehensive, we'd be here all week. Instead, let Street Fighter from Street Fighter tell you how game companies have set about slicing fighting games apart to make more cash from an audience they've secured leverage over.
From SoulCalibur VI to Mortal Kombat, everyone is here!
Oh, Ubisoft! Europe's EA equivalent has split The Division 2 across six special editions, a recurring habit of a company desperate to make all of the money in the world.
But how does Ubisoft's promise of free updates mesh with DLC, season passes, and half a dozen special editions? Awkwardly, friends. Awkwardly.
2K Games has called premium currency and microtransactions an "unfortunate reality" in gaming.
Overwatch and NBA 2K19 had to remove loot boxes in Belgium. EA refuses to remove loot boxes from FIFA. The "AAA" excuses and justifications are flying thick and fast, and 2K especially is showing its royal rump.
Nintendo is a ridiculous company that cannot simply do something simple. There's always a complication, a caveat, a catch. Even cloud saving, which every other platform has nailed, must be subject to Nintendo's arcane rulings.
So, cloud saves will only work for SOME Nintendo Switch games, not ALL of them. The ones excluded are pretty heavy hitters too. Looks like another Nintendo Move to me!
It feels a little mean to post this, kicking a studio while it's down, but it's not like it's untrue. So here we go, with your ol' pal Jim Sterling's thoughts on the company Telltale Games became before it announced its bankruptcy.
Telltale tried to do too much while not doing enough. Let's take a look at it!
With the sheer amount of cash flowing into games - and don't try to claim it isn't - there's no excuse for an industry that doesn't take better care of its workers.
Unfair hours, low pay, and constant developer burnout is simply not justifiable. Not when other industries have had to deal with treating their employees well, and managed just fine. In the wake of Telltale, we need to discuss the rights and benefits that developers are long overdue.
Once again people with the money want to fiddle around with the Internet in a way that won't end well for the people with less money.
The European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, specifically Article 13 and Article 11, is vague, overreaching, and looks ripe for abuse. In a world where ContentID and copyright protection is already an outdated mess, this won't make anything better.
Not for us, anyway.
The excuses people make for multibillion dollar publishers have to stop. They ignore so many ways in which the "AAA" game industry both makes money and takes shortcuts.
From tax havens to worker mistreatment, from the avoidance of royalties to the sheer amount executives make in compensation, the game industry actually has it EASY while pretending it's got it hard. Let's look at all this.
As we approach the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar has found itself in controversial waters yet again. This time it's regarding crunch, and the now infamous "100 hour work week" interview.
Yes, it's time to go back to the crunch!
The "AAA" game industry loves its lavish detail, from intricate gameplay systems to dazzling graphics. Can they go too far though? Absolutely they can.
Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 are impressive productions, but all that detail can get in the way of the entertainment. Let's look at which games go so far that they produce what I call "Holy Grail Fog."
When Toby Fox released Deltarune, everyone asked to keep quiet about it for 24 hours. Obviously that didn't happen. Elsewhere, Kotaku has a neverending source of leaked information for games like Assassin's Creed and Fallout.
Let's not forget that time Randy Pitchford called an accurate report on Borderlands 2 "shoddy journalism."
Most recently, Rockstar and Take-Two managed to get over a million quid from a website for leaking accurate Red Dead Redemption 2 information.
Publishers believe the media's job is to help them. The media doesn't always do that when news needs reporting. Let's talk about it.
Diablo Immortal was announced to an audience that ranged from apathetic to furious, as a mobile Diablo game turned out to be exactly what Blizzcon attendees didn't want.
Activision Blizzard couldn't have read its audience worse if it tried, and now we're in a perpetual backlash machine as angry fans and exasperated pundits go back and forth, tearing each other apart.
In this breakdown of the situation, The Jimquisition gets to the very heart of the matter, and why the initial backlash is just fine n' dandy.
Bethesda has created some of the most enduring power fantasies of our time, and there's a good reason why The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a game that refuses to die.
However, Bethesda isn't known for stable experiences, or welcome decisions, or not screwing up in massive ways.
With Fallout 76 coming out and being rubbish, let's look back at some of the notorious goofs from a company that goofs hard and often. By no means a comprehensive list, but a fun one!
Ubisoft, by way of a PR rep, has defended loot boxes after people found them distasteful in Trials Rising. They hammered through both usual and unusual excuses, and did so in a way that truly offended my senses.
AAA publishers are not just riding this gravy train into oblivion, they're actively lying and insulting our intelligence to justify it. And as problem gambling is on the rise, the game industry needs to start admitting fault... or fault will find them.
We've all heard the story. "AAA" game comes out, "AAA" game is a critical and commercial success, "AAA" game disappoints its publisher for failing to meet expectations.
When you pull back and see just how often this dance is performed, it paints the picture of a panicked and desperate industry, a rotten swan kicking its decaying legs frantically across a poisoned swamp. Because that's what it is.
The industry is a rotten swan.
The problem with piracy is the measures employed to combat it showcase utter contempt for the paying customers.
This is something Ubisoft once directly acknowledged, before tanking the performance of Assassin's Creed Odyssey with a double layer of DRM.
Denuvo, meanwhile, is embraced by the game industry despite a laundry list of problems and failures. Let's look at why Denuvo is rubbish.
Capcom has decided to embarrass Street Fighter V with ads, or "sponsored content" as they're calling it.
Today, let's talk about that, give a brief history of product placement and ads in games, before having a bit of a whinge about the potential future of ad-support videogame garbage.
Shut up and listen, for it is time to give out awards! The Jimquisition Awards 2018 have arrived, with five winners to argue about. We have game awards! We have corporate sponsors! We have world premieres! Watch and wonder!
2018 was the long, long year, but finally we are at its end. At the End of Time, there is only one thing to do... look at the shittiest games of the year!
Join Skeletor as we look at a year in which high profile stinkers ruled the roost. From Fallout 76 to Dynasty Warriors 9, we have some obvious - and not so obvious - games to look at.
