Geekscape Games Podcast: Level 17 – ‘Rise Of The Amiibo’

A very interesting topic has come up over the weekend. The entire events and goings on have been collected in this, albeit long, video. If you care at all about video games in the slightest, then I HIGHLY suggest you give this a watch.

http://youtu.be/C5-51PfwI3M

The sites and people implicated in this video are some of the big dogs in the video game journalism industry. It brings up a great topic that needs to be addressed. Accountability and Honesty.

If any of the allegations are true, then we have ourselves a huge problem on our hands. When personal agendas (we here at Geekscape have No Agenda) get pushed through big media outlets, like the ones implicated in the above video, we have a failure of the industry. You as consumers need to keep people like us in check, so that we can accurately cover the topics you hold dear. If this kind of stuff goes on, then you the consumer will be hurt.

One of the interesting things to come of this is the mass censorship of the above video and it’s topic. When it was posted on Reddit’s /r/gaming earlier, it was immediately removed from the page and all the comments deleted. It wasn’t until the video was posted on /r/videos that I found out about the subject. Turns out the head moderator of /r/gaming felt the video was against Reddit’s rules, but the head moderator at /r/videos felt like it was NOT.

What is interesting about this, is that the moderator from /r/gaming in question has publicly reached out to Miss Quinn.

Now this isn’t about if she fucked a couple (5) guys. It’s about her using her relationships with people in the media to affect articles and news to profit. To knock out competitors, or people that she deemed “oppressive”. Its about creating a terrible image for females in the video game industry.

Miss Quinn has said that she won’t respond to anything about this above subject because it’s not about “video games”. What I have to say to you Miss Quinn, is you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You’ve vocally taken a stance on things that do NOT directly correlate with gaming, but pick and choose when that topic is valid. You’ve said that this is just a push to crush creativity. This is NOT a push to crush creativity. This is the start of a movement to keep people like me, people like the folks over at Nerd Reactor, the people at Kotaku and others honest.

The Question of The Day

So the question of the day, the dear readers of Geekscape, is what do you think of this whole incident? Please consume the evidence and form your own opinion. We want to hear from you how you feel about the subject of Honesty in Journalism. How do you the readers think we the Press should be held accountable? Please share this post, share the video and propagate the formula. Honesty.

Addendum

I would like to point out that during the writing of my piece, the video from Mundane Matt had been re-uploaded. His take down was the catalyst for the story getting out. It goes back to the start of my article. When corruption in the industry is rampant, you the consumer hurts. Miss Quinn abused YouTubes DMCA take down policy, and will most likely abuse Twitter’s abuse policy in all of this. Her correspondence with the Reddit /r/gaming mod needs to be taken into question as well. His public response thread is full of questions that aren’t getting answered.

http://youtu.be/Equc1QnQ9rw

Geekscape Games Reviews Fez

by MoreLikeAndyApril 12, 2012

Fez, the latest indie games darling, has been cooking for quite some time. 5 years to be exact. With all that developer Phil Fish went through to in the process of releasing Fez, the hype is in full effect. How does this hype hold up when I sit down to play Fez? One word: “almost”.

Fez puts you in control of Gomez, a lovable, marshmallow-like individual who is tasked with donning the all mighty Fez to save your people and the world from collapsing into time. The Fez grants you powers to rotate and shift the world in order to solve puzzles as well as traverse the environment.

I love how well the game looks and feels like a 2-D game yet is actually a 3-D game. There’s very smart design in how you must think in 3-D while staring at 2-D. My first couple of hours with Fez had me wearing a smile on my face with feelings of the perfect amount of nostalgia I got from the retro-style atmosphere. Cave Story fans will be in love instantly. Even the music was soothing to hear during the areas you explore. The music really brought out the feelings of what it was like to play Echo The Dolphin. I know, it’s not an 8-bit game but damned if I didn’t have flashbacks to Echo The Dolphin when the music first hit my ears.

A couple more hours in and frustration and a sense of hopelessness settled in. For the most part, the puzzles are laid out for you as easy as a Sunday morning. The real challenges comes in the form of trying to make sense of just what Fez wants you to do in the later puzzles. Tasked with collecting gold bits, in later levels when these become a gold cube, they just become more scarce and you become worried that you are not smart enough to solve these more intricate puzzles. Simplicity is a good thing when used correctly but on later stages Fez seems to have overdone it. I was literally left in a world of unintuitive puzzles with little hint or direction, and after hours of playing the game, just exploring the world isn’t enough. Having some sort of feedback or indication system would have saved me a lot of self-doubt and aimless depression.

If some of this hassle was left to the pure completionists that wanted to purue the anti-cubes that are locked behind these advanced mind crushers, I could easily overlook it. But having these puzzles be a required hindrance to actually completing the game is plain terrible. You get a useless map of sorts but that’s not doing Fez any favors in the confusion department. I hated the backtracking that was mostly caused by the poor layout of the map. Not knowing where each door takes me until Gomez is hovering over the entrance is annoying. When looking for the last golden cube needed to get to the end of the game, I was lost for what seemed like an hour trying to find it. By pure luck, I managed to stumble on the last area where the elusive golden cube resided.

The ending had so many crazy shapes flying at me I felt as though I was watching someone’s art project turned screensaver. Afterwards, a nice nod to old school arcades happens. Most should get the reference but if not, it’s very easily figured out if you peruse the achievements. Fez does an amazing thing with the mechanics of shifting the 2-D world to traverse the world and solve puzzles. The music is subtle enough yet soothing at times making it a blast to engage with the environment. I just feel as though Fez was not satisfying enough in the accomplishments I did versus the anger-inducing frustration that I experienced; obtuse puzzles and the lag spikes causing the music to sound garbled and the gameplay skipped just enough to ruin precision jumps that I was in the middle of. Playing Fez just to see its concept and design is not a bad idea, just don’t believe all of the hype (almost).