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Insert Quarter: Konami Tried To Kill PT and Silent Hills, But the Internet Fought Back
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Konami would prefer it if gamers everywhere just forgot about PT and the game it was promoting, Silent Hills. The publisher removed PT from the PlayStation Store in late April and then officially canceled Silent Hills a day later. Now, Konami has completely removed PT from Sony’s servers, preventing players from re-downloading the demo if they delete it from their PS4. Needless to say, fans are unhappy with Konami’s treatment of the franchise and the three men who were working to bring it back (Hideo Kojima, film director Guillermo Del Toro, and actor Norman Reedus).
Others, like Offworld’s Leigh Alexander, are lamenting the death of the Silent Hill franchise as we know it. Specifically the weird and off-kilter little town that was created by weird and off-kilter people. The Silent Hill series may continue, but it won’t be the same:
We just don’t have that anymore, now that video games make so much sense, so much business sense. They are so eloquently risk-averse, these days. For fear of needlessly glorifying a prior era, though, a couple of years ago I played through Silent Hill 2 again, to see how it ‘held up.’ I expected its quirks and flaws to loom large with time. I expected to be a little embarrassed at how much it had transported and impacted a younger me.
But somehow it was better and more beautiful.
And in a rare Insert Quarter two-fer, Polygon’s Nick Robinson looks into the efforts fans are going to to keep PT alive, including selling the game on eBay (actually, selling a PS4 console with the game installed on it). Robinson also muses on how Konami’s attempt to kill it has only made PT a bigger part of the conversation among gamers:
Of course, P.T. isn’t actually going anywhere; the game was downloaded over one million times, which means it’s backed up across over one million hard drives and SSDs in over one million PlayStation 4s all over the world. In reality, the game is not going to truly disappear — at least not until those hard drives start failing. But even then, Konami’s attempts to restrict access to P.T. are foolish, because copies will be made and encryption barriers will be broken. The coolest part, though, isn’t just that Konami failed — it’s how spectacularly the company’s plan has backfired.
Both articles are available for your perusal at Offworld and Polygon.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PS4
Tagged Silent Hills
Insert Quarter: Should Mega Man Make a Comeback? Maybe We Don’t Need Him…
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
With Shovel Knight, 20XX, and the upcoming Mighty No. 9 giving the gaming populace their fill of homages/spiritual successors to Mega Man, some people have started to wonder if a new game starring the original Blue Bomber is even necessary. GameRadar’s David Roberts is one of those people.
According to Roberts, Capcom is so handcuffed by the Mega Man formula that we might just be better off with the imitators. I’m not sure I agree, but he makes an interesting case:
It’s been nearly five years since Capcom released the last official Mega Man game. Mega Man 10 was just like all the other Mega Man games (Mega Mans?) that came before it; crunchy 8-bit graphics, a series of themed robot bosses, and soul-crushing difficulty. Since then, Capcom has released a fan-made Street Fighter/Mega Man crossover and let the Blue Bomber fight against a stable of Nintendo characters in Super Smash Bros. That’s all Mega Man has to show for the last five years; everything else has been cancelled. And you know what? Maybe that’s for the best.
The full article is available for your perusal at the GamesRadar.
Insert Quarterly: The Best Game Writing of Winter 2015
Maybe it was the blanket of snow that covered the world over the last three months, but Insert Quarter took it slow in Winter 2015. But that doesn’t mean our showcase of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet came to a complete standstill. Have you ever wondered why Sony chose X-Circle-Square-Triangle for the face buttons on the PlayStation controller? Or maybe you’re worried that Batman: Arkham Knight killed the Teen rating?
The answers to those questions (and a few others) can be found in this edition of Insert Quarterly, which catalogs our favorite game writing from the last three months. (more…)
Posted in Features, Insert Quarter, Top Story
Insert Quarter: Axiom Verge’s Creator Talks About the Journey From Idea to Finished Game
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Axiom Verge is Tom Happ’s baby. The developer is the Programmer/Artist/Designer/Composer on the title and he essentially put the whole thing together by himself over the last five years. Happ’s persistence paid off as the PS4 launch earlier this week was met with enthusiastic reviews (including our own) and great sales. But what was the journey from scrap of an idea to finished game like? Happ wrote about this recently on the PlayStation Blog:
I didn’t start off with Axiom Verge fully designed in my head. It really more started off as an exercise in game design. I wanted to deconstruct my favorite games from my youth and see what would happen if I took the best elements of each and put them together. The Yo-Yo weapon of Rygar and the grapple hook of Bionic Commando in the setting of Blaster Master and Shatterhand. What would fit together? What wouldn’t work?
The full article is available for your perusal at the PlayStation Blog.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PC, PS4, Vita
Tagged Axiom Verge
Insert Quarter: What’s the Deal With Video Game Tie-In Novels?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
It’s no secret that a lot of gamers look down on the dreaded “tie-in novel.” Even when they’re not poorly written, your average video game tie-in doesn’t have much going on below the surface. Or do they?
Writing for GamesRadar+, Benjamin Abbott tracked down Karen Traviss and learned all about the nitty gritty that goes into creating a tie-in novel. Traviss, who has lent her pen to the Gears of War and Halo franchises, revealed that authors of tie-in novels are given much more freedom than the average reader might expect. It’s this freedom that often creates a pretty decent book:
Tie-in novels in particular suffer from growing franchise cynicism, leading to something of an image problem they don’t always deserve. Presumed to be b-side lunges at tertiary publicity, it’s tempting to dismiss them out of hand, but to do so is to misguidedly tar them with the same brush as the million cheap movie novelisations that came before them. Celebrating gaming’s capacity for storytelling is currently in vogue, and for very good reason. Consequently, books set in these worlds are contradictory blends of potential and stigma. Such projects carry potential that their inspirations simply can’t, making them ideal for expanding those universes in meaningful ways. If people will just give them the chance to.
The full article is available for your perusal at GamesRadar+.
Posted in Etcetera, Insert Quarter
Insert Quarter: The PlayStation’s Face Buttons Explained At Last
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Have you ever wondered why PlayStation controllers use X-Circle-Square-Triangle for the face buttons instead of the more traditional B-A-Y-X that Nintendo has employed since the Super NES days or the mirrored A-B-X-Y that Microsoft overlaid on the Xbox controllers? It’s OK, it’s kept me up at night too. Why? Why? Why?
Thankfully, Kill Screen’s David Shimomura went looking for an answer and he found one by talking to Teiyu Goto, the developer who originally designed the PlayStation controller for Sony back in the mid 90s. Goto revealed that he named the face buttons what he did in a nod to symbolism and semiotics. However, American and European players didn’t have the same connection to Goto’s symbols as a Japanese player would and it caused all sorts of friction within Sony:
Goto wanted to be memorable but he also wanted to make sense, at least in his own mind. “I gave each symbol a meaning and a color,” he states in the same interview. “The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one’s head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink.” So far so good, sort of. The triangle is reminiscent of an arrow or a direction. It has directionality to it and, even though it’s equilateral, it must point somewhere. The square is a little looser but the connection between a page and the square are strong, at least for Goto. One can construe it as a box and use it for inventory or some other kind of menus. But then things got weird.
The full article is available for your perusal at Kill Screen.
Insert Quarter: Did Batman: Arkham Knight Just Kill the Teen Rating?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
The gaming world was a tad surprised when Batman: Arkham Knight was awarded an “M For Mature” rating by the ESRB earlier this week, but no one has taken up the “Won’t someone think of the children!” mantle just yet. And that’s probably because the way that gamers treat a Mature-rated game is much different from the way moviegoers react to an R-rated film (to say nothing of the dreaded NC-17).
You might even wonder if this has signaled a shift away from the ESRB’s Teen rating (which has always been considered equivalent of the much-more-popular PG-13 for films). Few games carry a Teen rating in 2015 and nearly every critically acclaimed title of the past decade (BioShock, Red Dead Redemption, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto V, and many others) has been slapped with a scarlet “M.” Paul Tassi of Forbes believes the “T For Teen” rating is dead and that it’s unlikely anyone will notice or even care:
Unlike the movie industry, however, a game being rated M is not all that big of a deal. Movies will bend over backward to cut themselves down to PG-13 from an R in order to have a chance at dramatically increasing their box office haul, and there’s only one R-rated movie in the top 25 highest grossing films of all time, The Passion of the Christ. There are 16 PG-13 movies, by contrast, including the first four of the top five.
Gaming is a much different story, with rating hardly seeming to matter at all. M-rated games are routinely best-sellers, and comparatively seven out of the top 25 highest selling video games of all time are rated M, all split between Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty titles, with the non-M games mostly coming from Nintendo ’s E-rated stable. In fact, there isn’t a single T-rated game in the list.
The full article is available for your perusal at Forbes.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Batman: Arkham Knight
Insert Quarter: It’s OK That The Order: 1886 is Short… But It’s Also OK to be Annoyed
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
The length of The Order: 1886 has been a hot topic around the virtual watercooler ever since a Let’s Player posted a video “confirming” that the game is only five hours long. Of course, not everyone plays games the same way. A professional streamer might be able to polish off The Order in five hours, but the average gamer playing an hour or two after work every night might need ten hours or even twenty. But that fact remains that paying $60 for a game that could be completed in five hours is not a great value proposition.
Polygon’s Ben Kuchera understands the length vs value argument, but he also believes that some games work better as shorter narratives. So who comes out on top of this rather silly debate? Actually, it’s everybody as it’s OK for games to be short, but it’s also OK to be annoyed at how short some games are:
The Order: 1886 has many, many problems, and its relative lack of length is not the most troubling.
But the pre-release stories about its supposed length, and what it means for its success, were passed around and fretted over endlessly among the gaming press and social media. The question of game length, and what it means for players, is a contentious one.
[…]
The Mona Lisa is, after all, very small. Does that mean it’s a lesser work of art?
Here’s the secret: Everyone is right.
The full article is available for your perusal at Polygon.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PS4
Tagged The Order: 1886