Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

And of course Jim's getting people accusing him of making up the bugs, despite including footage of them.

Of course they would do that. They don't like Jim.

Jim's just the scapegoat for everything going wrong in the game industry these days due to his "contrarian attitude" and the fact that he's had an actual (honestly not all that tangible) effect when criticizing games (the aftermaths of his reviews of No Man's Sky and Breath of the Wild are going to live forever in internet lore). If you want to score brownie points with the Zelda fans, just bash Jim Fuckin' Sterling, Son and boom, you've got multitudes of people on your side.

Problem is, it's the job of critics to point out things that are wrong and make a big deal out of them, so that they get fixed. It was literally the job of muckrakers and journalists in the Gilded Age to do just that, and lo and behold, we no longer have to worry about our meat being expired and repackaged.

In short, "video evidence be damned, Jim gave [my favorite game] a bad score, so he's a bad journalist and it's his fault!"

Oh so our old pals Gearbox had at this game then

Swear to god if it turns out We Happy Few's enemy AI is buggered because some "coder" misspelt "tether" again I'm gonna propose we find a way to legislate so that Gearbox is never allowed anywhere near another indie game again.

Christ this game looks like it was barely tested.

These issues were at play before the developers looked for a publisher. They had a bit of change in design, but failed to adress the mechanics. This actually happend with their last game, Contrast. Interesting art direction and world design, but gameplay-wise a lackluster effort that gets tired quick. They really need to improve on the "game design" aspect. As big Gearbox's issues are, I'm not gonna let the developers off the hook.

Edited by UltraWanker on Aug 14th 2018 at 10:57:00 AM

Oh I remember that game.

One of the first games on the PS 4.

Huh they also made that, who would have guessed.

Everyone loves the Caustic Critic as long as they aren't bashing something they like.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if Gearbox's QA department is one person hooked up to a coffee IV.

Jim even pointed out that while the survival game mechanics were relevant when the game was being developed in Early Access, they are now pretty dated.

Maybe the developers ought to transition to adventure games or visual novels. Stuff where the gameplay can take a backseat to the story.

Edited by M84 on Aug 14th 2018 at 11:20:24 PM

Bethesda might not be releasing their Elder Scrolls card game spinoff to the PS 4 due to the lack of cross play.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 15th 2018 at 9:03:41 AM

I saw this on Twitter. It's not from Jim, but FucKonami is a big part of his wheelhouse, so I think it fits.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Aug 17th 2018 at 1:13:03 PM

Well, they ain't wrong. Damn, when Nintendo are the company doing more with Castlevania than the parent company has in years, something's wrong.

I know exactly why they're there and as such the presence of "Yu-Gi-Oh fans" in that picture amuses me way more than it should.

Yeah between the short prints, TCG rarity bumps, increase of cards seemingly under No Export for You status (seriously, Frightfur Patchwork became a meme for that alone)and what's currently happening with Duel Links, it's not really surprising they'd be among of many fanbases with an axe to grind with Konami.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 17th 2018 at 7:47:19 AM

What's the deal with Duel Links? I don't keep up with it, but since it's a mobile/free-to-start game I can only imagine the various ways stuff could've gone wrong...

Yeah, what is happening with Duel Links? I kinda phased out of it when I started playing Fate: Grand Order. I remember the model being more forgiving than most others since you are basically guranteed to eventually get a card from a set if you keep pulling, but I have heard things like Konami silently making gems more scarce.

Huh Yu-Gi-Oh's under Konami?

Never knew that.

Haven't played since the first World Championship event, but from what I've heard, Konami recently nerfed the amount of gems you get in-game, making it even more difficult to buy card packs. And outside of the game's launch, it could often get very slow, obtaining them to begin with. Dunno if that's the sole factor, though.

Edit: Well, I say Konami, but I have no idea how much direct influence they have over Yugioh stuff. At least on the TCG side, apparent;y it's not usually them that hold back on importing cards for years at a time.

Edited by TropayXion on Aug 17th 2018 at 9:56:24 AM

They've been under Konami since the Studio Gallop anime.

@slimcoder: Konami have always been behind the physical card game.

I have no idea about the video games, but they have not managed the tabletop game well at all. In retrospect, they really, really bungled it, and since they changed the rules so drastically from how the game was initially presented in the fiction, they don't have the excuse of having to maintain consistency with the manga; heck, given how the manga and anime changed to more accurately match the rules of the physical game, it's quite the opposite.

It wasn't too bad at first. Sure, it didn't have anywhere near the tactical depth of Magic: the Gathering, but it was still fun. There were imbalances, but for the most part they weren't absurdly severe, and it was possible to bounce back from a losing position. However, as time went on, power creep ramped up to absurd levels. Monsters of a given level became increasingly strong. Every single set was superior to what was already available, and there was little room to make interesting new strategies with existing cards; if you want to win a game, you have to keep buying new booster packs. New mechanics were introduced in a set and dropped a couple of sets later, and Konami insisted that every monster in each new archetype have a different type and attribute, meaning you had no choice but to use the cards the way the designers intended. (Since I stopped playing, they appear to have rectified this). New Extra Deck mechanics were constantly added, each strictly better than what previously existed.

Oh, but the problems were there from the beginning. Playtesting failed to turn up the potential for infinite loops in cards like Pole Position, for example.

But the original sin was in the nature of summons, the most basic mechanic of the entire game. In Magic and Pokémon, there is a consumable resource used to bring out fighters and activate effects. Not so in Yu-Gi-Oh. Sacrificing monsters to summon high-level monsters sounds decent at first, but people quite quickly figured out that there was no reason to include any monster above level 4, with the possible exception of Summoned Skull. It also meant there was precious little to limit absurdly broken cards like Raigeki and Dark Hole, while a game like Magic can simply put a high mana cost on cards with such destructive effects.

And this could have been solved so easily. Say, each player starts with a number of 'star points', and they gain one or two every turn. Summoning a monster requires giving up star points equal to its level; monsters on the field can be sacrificed to reduce the cost of a summon by their own levels. That would make things more strategic and force a wide range of levels and point spreads, but Konami decided people would play the way they wanted, strategising be damned.

So back in the heyday high-level monsters were considered too costly? Funny how that's changed, since the modern metagame's about shitting out as many high-level beaters as possible for as few cards as possible. If your Normal Summon doesn't set off a chain of events that fills your field before the turn ends, you're doing it wrong.

The game moves way too fast nowadays, not to mention that special summons have become the opposite of what the name suggests since it happens so often. The extra monster zone did slow things down a bit so that you couldn't instantly have a field full of extra deck monsters, but players are pretty much still forced to use certain cards if they even hope to win.

Yugioh just got too complicated for me, and that's on top of the incredibly shit balance. I'm sure fans here remember Nekroz.

Edited by Aquaconda on Aug 17th 2018 at 10:14:29 AM

Remember that Spyro download debacle from awhile back? The Reignited Trilogy is getting delayed to November so Toy for Bob can actually put the other two games on the disc and polish things. They apparently fought Activision for this.

Edited by Karxrida on Aug 17th 2018 at 8:48:31 AM

Oh shit, goodness won for once!

Awesomtacular!

I'm such an old-timer I gave up on Yu-Gi-Oh before Nekroz was even released; heck, I was playing when Spell Cards were still called Magic Cards, and Normal Monsters were actually normal. I know, right? There used to be more Normal than Effect Monsters.

Yeah, back in the day, the game was a lot slower, and Special Summons were actually special. Heck, Fusion and Ritual monsters were almost completely worthless because they needed too many specific cards to line up just right. This is why high-level monsters were considered too costly; since you're limited to one Normal Summon per turn, summoning a level 4 or lower monster meant increasing field presence and doing more damage overall since you had more attacks. A high-level monster could defeat more of your opponents' monsters, but you couldn't make any more attacks each turn, which turned it into a disadvantage.

As I said, Summoned Skull was an exception, because it had the most attack of a 1-tribute monster until Frostosaurus came out. Blue-Eyes White Dragon did see some use because it was the most powerful monster in the game, but since it's level 8, summoning it meant giving up field presence. Dark Magician was actually considered the worst card in the game, because it requires 2 tributes and didn't do anything Summoned Skull couldn't.

Granted, I do think the game was a bit dull and too slow in the very early days. Not to mention that strategies were simple, and things were often the matter of which monster had more attack points. But Konami took it and created the exact opposite problem.