#downloaded a demo for a game and saw the title had the creator name in it. had to look it up to see if it was real

[nexus-nebulae]

"American McGee" sounds like such a fake name i can't believe this guy is a real game dev

[awfulcomingdown]

Nintendo Switch Demos Review (Or, “Without a Paddle, I Might Add”)

Introduction

Over the past couple of weeks, or maybe months, I’ve downloaded some demos on my Switch that I’d intended to eventually play. And then I didn’t play them, which led me to believe that I might never do so.

And then, a couple of days ago, I found my self drunk, alone in the darkness of my sister’s home office, while her and her fiancee slept in another room. While drinking and staring out the window into the unfamiliar street, an idea hit me. I should play all those demos, right now.

And so I quickly walked down the hallway, as if afraid the inclination to really do this might dissipate as quickly as it’d formed, to my temporary bedroom where the Switch was laying on a nightstand, and brought it back to that dark office. I then proceeded to do it. I played all four demos, writing and becoming progressively more drunk as I went, until typing itself seemed an impossible, or at least undesirable, task. And then I went to sleep. 

And now, I’ve taken those somewhat less than clear notes and formed them into a mostly comprehensible summary of my feelings on those games. And here they are. 

The Touryst

I heard about this game for the first time in a Nintendo Direct, I think. It looked goofy. It looked too goofy for my liking. I planned to not ever think about it again. And then I didn’t for some time.

The next time I thought about it, it was because a Youtube video extolling the virtues of this game’s beauty and graphical prowess scrolled past my eyes on the Youtube homepage. I didn’t click on it, and I didn’t think much about it. However, I did think some about it.

Then I saw this demo, and I figured, sure, let’s try it.

This demo is very short. Well, at least, it felt very short to me, sitting in my sister’s makeshift home office, a couple of drinks in to what would eventually become a too many drinks to be having alone night. It flew by.

As soon as the game began, I was struck. It’s beautiful, in what feels like an extremely unique way. 

It’s bizarre. The background is completely blurred, and you’re running around what feels like a tiny, static world that’s been put together by hand and pushed out to sea. It all feels very still. Apparently the people who made this game have been making video games since 1999. I feel as though they may have learned some very worthwhile things in that time.

The other thing that struck me as significant while I played this short demo was the fact that I had managed to ignore and look down on this game for so long. How was it that nobody was grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me, and screaming “The Touryst is a fucking masterpiece, idiot. Just because the main character has a goofy mustache doesn’t mean this whole thing’s a joke. Play it. Fuck you.” 

Now, that might not be totally fair. I mean, that Youtube video I saw about the game was literally titled “The Touryst is Stunning: Switch Game of the Year Contender?” which, to be fair, is a very funny thing to name a video. I would like to know who made the call on adding that question mark. Wild stuff.

And, again, to be fair, if you search “The Touryst” into the old Youtube search bar, you’ll come up with dozens of videos (okay I actually only saw three, but I didn’t scroll that far) making similar claims about the game’s greatness (funnily enough, all three of the videos I saw ended with a fucking question mark. That’s not a joke. Like, they really wanted you to be tempted to click the video just to find out if the game is, in fact, a contender for Switch game of the year. What a time.).

So my point is maybe less that there weren’t people talking (or, asking?), about this game, and more that it doesn’t seem as though anyone was giving this supposed masterpiece the respect that a masterpiece deserves. Which is to say, after watching exactly four minutes and 37 seconds of the first of those videos, I was able to conclude that not a single video on the entirety of Youtube had a single interesting or worthwhile thing to say about the game. And this seems...shitty.

If this game is a masterpiece (and sadly it seems as though we’ll never know, but, by god, we will continue to ask), then maybe it deserves something more than a Youtube video of a dude talking about its “tight gameplay” and “excellent soundtrack.”

Maybe we should do more than that. Maybe we should treat masterpiece video games with the same respect that a masterpiece film or album receives. 

Maybe we should be writing thousands of words about the brilliance of said masterpiece, and actually attempt to discuss what exactly about the game makes it so noteworthy.

Maybe we should take the time to say whether or not it is a masterpiece, and not just ask the fucking question.

Dragon Quest Builders 2

As I finished the very short demo of The Touryst, I decided I would play the demos in whatever order they happened to be lined up in on my Switch homepage. As I scrolled to the right, I was struck with fear when I saw Dragon  Quest Builders 2 was next up.

Despite being too drunk at the time to notice that the game icon literally says ���Jumbo Demo,” I still knew, having learned from the Dragon Quest XI demo, that this demo could literally take the rest of my life to finish.

“Fuck,” I wrote. “I really didn’t want to play this one next. For all I know, this demo lasts eight and a half hours, and I’ll be here ‘till sunrise. It’s been loading for 30 seconds now, and I’m scared. Dear god.”

Some amount of these fears were quelled when the game finally finished loading, and the music began to play. Despite having never owned or really played a Dragon Quest game, I fucking love Dragon Quest music. Sure, it’s beautiful, but it’s not just that. Something about the music makes me feel as though the music has no idea as to how beautiful it actually is. It feels as though the music doesn’t know how profound it really is, and this only serves to make it that much more affecting. I feel this is a part of the charm of the series as a whole: Dragon Quest games never go out of their way to let you know that they know how brilliant they are.

Anyway, I grabbed another beer, bringing the Switch along with me to the fridge so I could continue to listen to the title screen music while I did, and began the demo. The beer was stronger and more expensive than anything I would’ve bought - and I doubt it was my sister who bought it, it was probably some bizarre house warming gift - and tasted to me like a mixture of apple cider and rock salt. It was palatable.

The game, DQB2, as it will henceforth be known, opens with a character customization screen. Now, I may have just been drunk then, and I may just be an asshole now, but the minimal amount of customization one can actually apply to their character struck me immediately, and continues to strike me now, as profound.

All that you’re allowed to change about the character is their hair colour, skin tone, and eye colour. Along with this, you’re also allowed to choose their name.

This small amount of change that you’re allowed to make to the character makes it feel as though you are inserting some very small amount of yourself into this pre-existing character. Like, the character you’ll be controlling is their own living, existing being, and you’re now just a part of that being. It almost feels like a tidy summation of what it is to control any character in any video game you’ve ever played. Which is to say, these characters always exist, having been made long before we gain control over them, before we come into contact with them, and as such we are incapable of actually fully putting ourselves into them. No matter how much character customization or character control they (the creator) allow, the player will always only be meeting them halfway, as the two of them work, isolated from one another, to create what is now a unique being. 

Okay, I’ll stop now. But I’m serious about this.

Anyway, the opening of this game is pretty terrific. You wake up a prisoner on a large, monster-ruled pirate ship, and are immediately let out of your jail cell in order to help fix some things around the monster ship. You are enlisted for such duties as the result of your known designation as a “builder.” The skeleton pirate who frees you from your cage makes it clear that while you are a shitty, unimportant builder, that’s still enough for you to be capable of handling the small jobs they have for you. So, you help the monsters clean up the ship, and this acts as the first of what I assume to be many, many tutorials.

The dialogue during this opening section left me legitimately shocked. Nearly every thing that every monster said to me managed to make me silently laugh and/or over exaggeratedly look around the room as if to ask “Is anyone else seeing this!?” (nobody else was - everyone else was asleep and not thinking about video game dialogue).

In order to not write out fifteen different things, I’ll put here what struck me as the most clever of the writing. After asking the skeleton pirate who originally woke you up who he is and what you’re all doing on this ship, he answers:

“If you’re that desperate to find out how far up the creek you are - without a paddle, I might add - go and talk to those five monsters beneath the flag over there.”

This line in particular, along with the majority of the rest of the lines, led me to think about the absurd amount of time it must have taken for the localizers of this game to craft such a great translation.  I mean, yeah, obviously the writing was terrific to begin with in Japanese, but the fact that they were able to translate that into such immediately brilliant English text is insane. I’d like to meet the people behind this translation, so that I could ask them what drives them to care so deeply about what they do.

The rest of this demo - or, at least, the rest of it that I managed to play that night* - was made up of me doing menial tasks (talk to monsters, learn to craft, learn to fight, etc.) until I finally decided that I simply could not play any longer, and left it at that for DQB2 for the time being.

*(note: I was really loving this demo, but decided that I needed to move on to another game, as it was already 1:16am and, as I wrote in my open google doc that night, I was “already pretty fucked up.” I played through the beginning of the demo again the next day while sober, and it took me about two minutes to get to where I made it to in like 45 minutes while drunk. Gotta love it.)

I’m mainly really curious about how a game like this gets made. I don’t know what the sales figures for this game were like in Japan, but as far as I could tell, very few people in North America really gave a fuck about it. The thing is, it seems really, really well made, and I know for a fact it is ridiculously large. I have questions about how something this big and seemingly great (and definitely carefully made), gets created, released, and then ostensibly immediately forgotten about. Art and commerce are weird. 

Anyway, I doubt I’ll ever play this game. It is too big, and too chill, and I have too many other things that I need to be doing, or at least I often feel as though I do.

Ape Out

I literally can’t think about this game without referring to it as “Ape Escape” in my head. I’ve never played Ape Escape, but that is definitely a better freedom-seeking-ape based video game name.

Anyway, this game is beautiful, in a really jarring way. It’s beautiful in a way that I guess can’t be communicated through trailers, because something about this demo immediately struck a chord with me that no trailer for it had done.

This game is electric. You play as an ape, making your way out of a poisonous building, murdering any human who gets in your way (which is to say you play as an ape who is attempting to escape).

You can move with the left stick, aim with the right stick, grab with the left trigger, and throw/punch with the right trigger. And then you just fucking kill.

The music is an absurd mix of smashing drums and symbols, getting hit in time with your launching of men into walls, turning those men into limbs and torsos (which you can then pick up and throw at other men to stun them), and turning those walls into red paint splattered canvases.

Playing this game makes me really want to play the rest of this game, if only to see how far they can take this kinetic energy that pulses throughout the first three stages. How long does the novelty of having a drum hit perfectly coincide with a body hitting a wall and becoming a corpse last? Or, should I say, what did the developers (Gabe Cuzzillo, the game says, is the creator) do to make it so that fucking pulsing excitement deep in the players sternum lasts for the entirety of the experience? 

I feel like this is a game that I could beat over the course of one delirious, sleepless night, though for now we can all only sit and hope that when I do finally purchase and play the full game, it forces me to do so. 

Cadence of Hyrule

The music is so good. It sounds like you’re standing in an alternate universe Legend of Zelda elevator, a universe in which the Legend of Zelda isn’t a video game series, but is instead a religious belief.

Remember when this game got announced, and we were all like “What the fuck!?”? And then it came out, and some people were like “This is really good!” and other people were like “I like real Zelda better…”

Anyway. We should appreciate things more.

You know, I bought the first one of these games, on sale, for $5, and it really just did not click with me. Something about having to move on beat really bothered me. Like it was always the game’s fault, and not my own, that things were going wrong. It always felt like my Guitar Hero guitar was missing one battery, or like my Wiimote was miscalibrated, and that was causing all the troubles. It always felt like I was missing some peripheral accessory. It’s not a feeling that feels worth dealing with these days.

This just...isn’t as fun, and doesn’t feel as good, as any of the other three games I was playing. Specifically, I can’t stop thinking about The Touryst and DQB2. I thought that I didn’t like many 3D games, but fuck. Those got me. 

The End (Closing Thought That I Wrote Immediately After Finishing These Demos)

This was cool, and this was good. We might even say that I “really needed this,” or, at least, “am really happy to have had this.” 

But I’m sobering up, and a remix of some old Zelda song is playing, and I love it, and it’s time to go to bed. Tomorrow, one of my friends will come pick me up from my sister’s house, and I will return home, indefinitely, for now. Everything is fucking weird. But I’m going home. I can’t sit in the darkness of my sister’s home office playing Nintendo Switch demos forever, sadly.

After The End

I’m home now, and I’m tired. Everything is bizarre. I am definitely going to play all of The Touryst eventually, and I am almost definitely going to play all of Ape Escape eventually (I actually wrote the wrong name here by accident, and didn't realize it until now, a day later. They should have just named it Ape Escape. Fuck it.). As for DQB2 and CoHR, they were chill,  and I will remember them, and the drunken night we had together, fondly. But I suppose this is the end of the road between me and them. 

Anyway, I’ve got four essays due in the next 10 days, and then some online essay after that. I’m also playing through a very long and old JRPG right now, and I think I love it. All of that is to say that I won’t be playing any of these games any more for the time being. So for the time being, I’m thankful we all had that one night together. One night of repose, and of lonely drinking, in a house and a town I’d never been in before, in a room that was not my own, staring at a street that I couldn’t recognize. I’m home now, for some amount of time, and hopefully that time is good.

Goodnight.

[jmsebastian]

Demonstrating Confidence

One of the trends that’s started to come back in a big way is the video game demo. Once the CD era of console gaming really took off, demos of upcoming games started to become a bit of a genre unto themselves. Since the physical medium of the compact disc made large storage capacity both easy and fairly inexpensive to reproduce at high volumes, developers and publishers saw a golden opportunity to get players excited for games still in development. What better way to get hyped on a title by your favorite publisher than to sit down and play the next big thing for an action packed thirty minutes?

For consoles, CDs were the necessary piece of the technological puzzle to make demos a viable option. Outside of the data storage and relative ease of printing, discs were also cheaper to package. They weighed considerably less than the plastic housing and circuit board that comprised cartridges. Plus, they were flat. The physical dimensions of the disc made them perfect for wrapping in plastic and taping to a magazine cover, making purchasing one of the several publications that shipped with one more enticing. Their robustness of the platform also made for a reliable product. So long as the disc wasn’t significantly bent, there was little worry that they would be damaged after packaging.

It was common practice for multiple game demos to be placed onto a single disc, meaning players could get a taste of a wide range of genres and developers in one go. Alongside demos were often promo videos or behind the scenes type interviews geared toward making the games presented look as appealing as possible. They were pretty effective. So effective, in fact, that demos had the power to sell copies of games that might not have had much of an audience without them. Capcom used a bonus demo disc of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis to push sales of its new sister survival horror series, Dino Crisis. They even doubled down on this strategy by including a demo of Dino Crisis with copies of Resident Evil 3 (the games were released just two months apart in 1999).

The convenience and efficiency of demos was already well known among PC gamers. Shareware, the practice of giving away a chunk of a game for free with an option to pay for registration of the full release, had built up many of the early giants of the industry, such as id Software. This method was well suited to smaller developers who couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money on traditional marketing. Instead they relied on the quality of their game and the praise of that quality being spread by word of mouth. The theory was that the game would essentially be good enough to sell itself. If players could get a little taste of the experience, they’d be so hooked they’d have no choice but to cough up the dough to keep their high going.

What the console demos and shareware culture of the 1990s shared was confidence: confidence in the games that were being made, and confidence that players were going to like, and thus, buy those games once they’d had the chance to play. This confidence, of course, didn’t come from nowhere. Gaming was becoming a larger and larger business. Likewise, technology was changing the very foundation of what made games appealing. Where before players were excited by the idea of being able to play games at home like they had in the arcade previous, as the medium matured, so did the players. Creating exciting new games meant pushing boundaries, showing players things they’d never seen before, aiming for a more complete representation of what the imagined game was. New graphical displaying techniques and modeling methods meant that the virtual space could more accurately depict our own. Game makers had a lot to be confident about as they promised to deliver on these lofty ideals.

That confidence, naturally, turned into complacency. Once players could no longer be wowed by how many polygons a computer or console could render on screen, and once the characters made up of those polygons crept toward the uncanny valley, many game developers kind of lost sight of what had gotten them to such great heights in the first place. The promise of “the next big thing” was still being lofted up to maintain interest, but it was no longer being delivered on. As games failed to be innovative simply by being pretty and 3D, the response to bold claims about new experiences became less enthusiastic, more skeptical.

In that climate, game demos started to fall away. They never disappeared completely, of course, but they weren’t the standard marketing method anymore. In their place stood TV (and online video ads), press conferences, video game industry events, a more traditional media circus. Companies didn’t need to ship out tens or hundreds of thousands of demos to regular consumer players, or include them with other retail releases. Instead, companies could just have some journalists play a very tailored and guided segment of a build at a private event, or show off some footage that may or may not actually represent the game during a press conference. Companies wanted more control over what information was available, and the removal of demos was a way to curb bad word of mouth. For those of us who relied on the demo to help slightly bolster our game libraries, and used them to shape our buying decisions, having demos disappear felt like game developers lost connection with players and no longer considered them when making their games.

It has been a genuine surprise and delight to see demos on consoles returning with such gusto. Part of that return is driven by another leap in technology. Like PCs before them, consoles now live largely on the internet. Where CDs were a relatively cheap way to create more game copies for less money than had been the industry standard previously, delivering games digitally lowered those costs even more significantly. This shift relied heavily on the speed of internet increasing for the average consumer. It’s all well and good to have your Playstation 4 hooked up to the internet, but if your download speed is in the single megabytes a second, downloading a four gig demo sure is going to take a while, nevermind a full Blu-ray capacity game.

With the technological hurdles largely being stepped over, an attitude change was likewise needed to return to the demo model of the ‘90s and early 2000s Why is it that Dragon Quest: Builders, Nier: Automata, Resident Evil 7¸ Gravity Rush 2, and Nioh all had exciting, impactful demos? P.T. certainly seems to have had something to do with it. Despite being a demo for a game that never materialized, P.T. struck a chord with players. It had a lot going for it. Hideo Kojima, one of the most auteurist game developers, pairing with acclaimed film director Guillermo Del Toro, was enough to get people talking on its own. That talk would have amounted to little had the demo itself been unspectacular, but the creative team delivered in a big way. It felt new despite being a first person horror exploration game, not exactly a genre lacking in titles. It felt exciting, partly because it portrayed a beloved game series in a way players hadn’t seen before, but also simply because the production quality and attention to detail spoke to its ambitions. It was confident.

Kojima and Del Toro have had incredible careers in their respective industries. Though P.T. was a bit of a meeting in the middle for the two creators, it was obvious that they felt good about what they were doing. They knew what they wanted to make and excited to let players get a taste for themselves. The eventual fallout with Konami may have doomed the game, ultimately, but it did manage to drum up a ton of coverage and a lot of player interest. P.T. proved that the demo was still a valuable piece of marketing. The name, an abbreviation of Playable Trailer, obscured its ties to the storied Silent Hill series, providing some evidence that an interactive teaser like P.T. could carry weight and marketability all on its own. Given the success of that demo, it’s no surprise that Capcom ripped the page right out of Kojima’s book with the demo for Resident Evil 7 that took the form of the first person horror adventure.

That confidence, the one that had helped foster interest and sell mega hits like Final Fantasy VII, has started to make its way back to more developers and studios, especially those in Japan. Square Enix knew it was making a great game when it released the demo for Dragon Quest: Builders, just like Platinum Games knew it was making a great game when it put out the demo for Nier: Automata. Even with the Resident Evil 7 example, Capcom is showing some swagger, whether justified or not. That confidence is at odds with simultaneous trends of game developers refusing to put out release copies of games for fear of bad reviews eating into their sales. At a time where video game sales are good, yet many developers are still struggling to stay open, the existence of demos has the larger impact of showing players and the industry at large that these developers are proud of what they are working on.

(Capcom was a little less subtle with their teaser than Kojima.)

That counts for a lot. Perhaps some of the innovation is still missing in games (though virtual reality might be the remedy for that lull), and maybe the foundation shaking switch from 2D to 3D can never be replicated, but there’s something different about some of the companies making games right now. They don’t seem so afraid to be making them. They know that if they focus on quality, that if they try to do something a bit different, and if they let players actually get a chance to try it out, people will want to play them. Hopefully that strategy pays off and that confidence will be rewarded so that developers can go on to make the next game.