Unseen... and Unheard

One of the things that has been bothering me ever since the Nintendo's E3 press conference is the sheer amount of vitriol lobbied at them for their supposed 'disappointing' conference. Although I agree that Nintendo probably should have outright explained to us how they were distancing themselves from E3 (Again) and thus didn't really want to show a lot of big content, the show itself was fine. I understand I'm in the minority here, but I really feel as if the whole "Nintendo is doomed!" Song and dance is way overdone.

Why am I bringing this up, exactly?

Namely, due to the way in which certain parties are jumping on the 'Nintendo sucks' bandwagon in order to get clicks. I am referring, of course, to the recent antics of Unseen64.

For those of who are unaware, Unseen64 is a YouTube channel dedicated to uncovering the development process of unreleased games. That's unreleased as in cancelled, not in upcoming releases. But for some bizarre reason, one of the writers for their website has been releasing a lot of statements concerning Nintendo's current plans for the next year or so. These include a claim about the NX, details about Devil's Third, and other little tidbits.

However, the events over the past few days have shown that Tamaki, the writer at Unseen64 who is releasing all of this information, is pulling it all entirely out of his ass. I have, of course, been keeping a close eye on this particular person ever since he declared he knew someone who had information on the NX. However, he was unable to provide proof, and outright began talking down to people who actually asked him questions about anything. How he got the information, what the NX actually was, how he was allowed to do any of this, all of that. Although I knew almost immediately that something was off, I was put off by the sheer amount of people on /v/ who kept telling everyone the same thing: He's legit, guys. He's reliable. He's leaked information before. He's someone who knows people.

In hindsight, this was obviously Tamaki himself, masquerading as 'fans' of his to promote his own content, since I now know he spends a lot of time of /v/ and made a lot of tweets trying to talk down to us for not immediately believing everything he says.

These people almost immediately disappeared about a day after the Devil's Third video released.

The Devil's Third video is a three minute long piece that Tamaki released talking about his supposed 'findings' about the game, and how NOA is not publishing it here due to quality issues. Those are his two points: "NOA isn't involved in releasing the game' and 'The game simply isn't all that good.' Both have been proven to be untrue statements, although it has taken a bit of legwork to establish an argument against each of his individual points. Due in large part to the very vocal outcry by fans, both Itagaki AND NOA confirmed that Tamaki was full of shit.

Although there are those who continue to insist that Nintendo is simply damage controlling the situation, I disagree. If there was another publisher involved with releasing the game, Nintendo would have confirmed it by now. It simply isn't a big enough deal to try and lie about it, especially since the game is launching soon anyway. The way they phrased their official tweet confirming their involvement in the game also suggests that they were planning on talking about the game soon anyway.

Even if Nintendo weren't publishing the game, this certainly isn't the huge disaster that Liam tried to make it out to be, especially considering games like The Last Story and Pandora's Tower launched here because of Xseed's involvement, because they are the greatest company ever. It would still launch here and still be an exclusive, and Nintendo will presumably eventually cover the game in a Nintendo Direct anyway.

In short, there's nothing to really suggest that Nintendo isn't the publisher except for some half baked theories from a couple of fraud journalists, and the fact that the game wasn't at E3, and didn't get a spot on the eshop page as a result. Real convincing, guys.

The other problem, and I think this was much more important, was how Tamaki tried to push this idea that NOA wasn't publishing the game due to it just being plain bad, citing his various friends in the game critique field who have gotten the game early.

First of all, what do those two things have anything to with each other? Are you really saying that NOA will refuse to publish games just because they don't like them?

The examples he cites of them doing this, Disaster: Day of Crisis. and the much more well known Operation Rainfall Games, were much more related to how much of a tough sell those would be in America, as opposed to their actual quality. I'm sure Xenoblade in particular would have been a monumental task for the Treehouse to tackle, for a relatively niche game.

Secondly, how exactly did you jump to this conclusion? Your 'insider' certainly didn't tell you this. All he (Supposedly) told you who has they had no faith in the game. That could mean any matter of things. Considering the way the game plays, I'm almost certain that he meant that it wouldn't be appealing to a wide audience, the way Splatoon has been doing.

Thirdly, and this is a bit of my own superiority coming through, but why exactly am I supposed to believe a bunch of game critics when, over the years, they have established themselves as an unreliable source of information? I'm thinking specifically of the way titles like God Hand or The Wonderful 101 here, which were attacked by critics, despite actual fans of the games considering them absolutely stellar action titles.

It's not surprising to me in the least that in the list of complaints Liam rattles off that the one he puts the most emphasis on are things related to it's presentation. Sure, you have the token quote going into detail about how the game doesn't play well, but the most emphasis, like a lot of the criticism lobbied towards the game, is about the visuals and voice acting.Particularly ridiculous is the claim that the game looks like it was released 'two gens ago' which just makes me roll my eyes. If anything, I want more games that play like they were released two gens ago, because games today are terrible.

In conclusion, I really felt as if, even before Itagaki and Nintendo outright came out and proved Liam's statements wrong, that something was seriously amiss was with the video. Not only did a lot of statements just not make any sense with what we already knew, it didn't present any real information about the game. In fact, his source at Nintendo didn't even confirm they weren't releasing it! He was just making shit up!

...

Or, perhaps, and understand that this is just my theory, he took shitposting on /v/ way too seriously.

The comments he made on Devil's Third, to me, makes a lot of points that look as if they were taken directly from shitposts on 4chan. I think that's a big part of why the video was such a big deal there:  he was using arguments we had seen before to corroborate his 'insider' information. That whole thing about the game not being on the eshop (Never mind that that particular section was dedicated to things Nintendo showed at E3, and the game wasn't at the show, probably so the development team could prepare for it's release) and the whole theory of the game not being published by Nintendo at all HAD been brought up on 4chan, and was one of the many points people used to suggest that Nintendo had a terrible E3.

For comparison's sake, the same exact thing happened to Yarn Yoshi and SMTXFE. When Nintendo didn't spend a lot of time covering the games, people assumed they were just quietly canned. There weren't quite as many conspiracies about these titles, (I remember FEXSMT was rumored to have been cancelled following Atlus's acquisition by Sega) but those theories didn't pan out.

Liam, to me, probably felt as if he could just get away with making baseless accusations, just like he did with all of his other leaks. Generally, whenever he is proven 'wrong' about something, he just says that they must have changed their plans because of his leak. This is ridiculously arrogant, and really demonstrates his own self importance,

However, that strategy simply isn't going to fly here. Both Nintendo and Itagaki were very quick on the draw to dismiss all the rumors about the game. Sure, there are retards like Siliconera and Emily Rogers who are trying to say that this is just damage control, but let's face it: Why would they need to lie in the first place? It wouldn't be that big of a deal if another publisher brought it over here.

In short, I feel as if Liam's reputation has taken a huge nosedive with this little stunt. He embarrassed himself so many times during his little crusade, trying to prove himself right, it's unbelievable. His twitter, up until he protected it from people who were rightfully calling him out on his shit, was entirely composed of him trying to fish from sympathy from the sort of people who make these kind of things up for a living. It was really embarrassing seeing him trying to act as if came out on top during his little spat with Chris, the guy with the Aeris avatar.

Thankfully though, I think the majority of people have realized that this one person was just riding off of Unseen64's reputation to promote his bullshit. People know who Liam is now, and they won't be so quick to believe anything he says.

Video Games Awesome: Not.

It has been a very long time since I last updated my Yahtzee critique blog, and for good reason. I have lot any and all interest in covering his material. Perhaps it's because there is just so much worse stuff out there. I've already talked about at length about how pleasantly surprised I was at how Yahtzee is willing to stand by his own opinions, even if I don't necessarily agree with him. He's not a backstabbing, hypocritical liar like a lot of other current and former contributors on The Escapist (I'm thinking specifically of Jim Sterling, Extra Credits, and Moviebob) and his opinions are, to put it simply, not taken all that seriously outside of his core group of fans.

It's simply not really worth my time or effort to criticize Yahtzee. Sure, he has terrible taste in games in general, but he also isn't directly contributing to the cancer killing video games, where individuals think that it's perfectly fine for them to stream content they don't own for profit, all the while not putting out any original content of their own. I am talking about, of course, the Let's Play community in general. But at the moment, my eyes are on Video Games Awesome Live, a show run by a group of canadian schmucks who don't know the first thing about Video games.

One of the things that really drove me to this show in the first place was the set up. Instead of simply showing game play footage with a couple of voice overs, they have a video recording them on the couch, with the gameplay sitting in the corner, with a visible chat feed below. At the time, I was busy looking for some Ace Attorney related noise to play while I was working, and came across their video.

I didn't have an immediate dislike of them. They seemed like a normal group of friends playing a game together, and I honestly had fun watching them react to my favorite bits. But over time, the producer of the show, Frasher, began insulting the game. "This is so stupid, guys." He would keep telling us, over and over again, as his girlfriend, Becky, reassured us that they actually LOVED the game.

One of the things that bother me about this show is just how willing they are to lie to their viewers about how they feel about anything. There are times when you can tell they are promoting a product (Octodad, Transistor, and various other indie games come to mind) and when they aren't actually profiting from a game at all. This latter bit has become especially pronounced in recent years, now that YouTube and game companies, particularly Nintendo, are finally starting to put these kinds of people in their place.

This has led to a situation in which Video Games Awesome HAS to cover Nintendo Direct ("Because we're fans, just like you!") Despite not actually being paid for them. This has led to a bit of an icy attitude towards them. Frash has always been openly 'critical' of Nintendo in that ridiculous, Shokio-esque way of always acting disappointed by everything they announce, but he was willing to play Nintendo games on his show and pretend to have fun, while he was getting paid.

Not anymore.

These days, the vast majority of big Nintendo titles don't even get a show. Xenoblade, Codename S.T.E.A.M, Majora's Mask, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse... The only videos I can think of that they did cover was for Mario Party 10 and Splatoon, both of which they shit on. Mario Party 10 is kind of understandable... I'm not the sort of person who outright hates the game, but it could have been so much better.

But shitting on Splatoon, one of the most innovative shooters in recent memory, Nintendo's biggest new IP in years, and the game that's getting people worldwide to buy Wii U's? Are you fucking serious? I was planning on writing an entire blog post about just that video: there was so much wrong with what he was saying. One of the very first things he did was complain about the tutorial... for a game in a new IP that he's never played before, and then went on to struggle with the controls for the rest of his time with the game.

That video was a huge reason as to why I decided to expand my blogs into covering e-celebs in general, and not just Yahtzee. Virtually all of them are cancerous, tasteless scum who will attack good, even great games just because it's not profitable for them to do otherwise.

I'm not the only one to feel this way: threads about these guys have been popping up on /v/ for a while now, usually late at night, and they're always met with the same, scandalous, "How big of a faggot IS this guy?" With examples popping up throughout the playthough, demonstrating his incompetence at playing the game, his opinions on why the game isn't worth buying and why they don't make any sense, and just plain stupid shit they complain about. The threads always get deleted eventually (Supposedly, moderators from their forum come on and try to do damage control which leads to the threads being deleted, but I haven't seen any of that firsthand) but there really is an underground movement of people who are sick of their shit outside of their bubble. It's not quite at DSP levels, but that's probably because they don't insult their fans at every given opportunity.

They're certainly not someone worth respecting, at any rate.

If you want to put a stop to them, it's up to you. All you have to do is talk about why they suck, and why they absolutely should not be watched. Everything they've done is on camera. It's not exactly hard to demonstrate why they're hacks.