Jim Sterling Is A Fatty Fat

I wanted to write a short little note on my Facebook account after Jonathan Holmes over at Destructoid wrote yet another article that made me want to murder him in front of his loved ones about how much half the Destructoid staff are unfunny, idiotic twats, but stopped writing halfway through because I realized that I was basically just making a list of people I hated and calling them stupid dumb faces. I didn't have much concrete stuff to throw out there.

Leave it to Jim Sterling to toss out something a few hours later that provides a large, ample target to riddle with bullets. First off, here's the link: Read it, and go nuts. Ready? Good, here we go.

He starts off the article saying that while gamers crave different experiences, they keep buying the same old big game sequels every time they come out, leading to a pervading sense of generic-ness. It's a good start if a somewhat flawed premise (which I'll get to in a second) but then he jerks the wheel of his article hard to the left and careens into a tree at ninety miles an hour, totaling the article and ejecting him from the driver's seat.

He then goes on to talk about a couple of subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with the premise of the article: Gamers complaining about Killzone 2's and RE5's controls, and gamers complaining about lack of Co-Op in Killzone 2. Let's address his first point.

First off Jim, you're fat. Second off, not a goddamned bit of the generic homogenization of the games industry is gamers fault. Not a fucking bit. You know why? Because when a good game comes out it sells well, provided it's been advertised well, is on the proper system for its audience, and is priced accordingly. Valve is one of my favorite companies because they're pretty much an unmovable, immutable wall against all the bullshit game pundits tend to toss around. Piracy killing PC games? Valve embraces pirates, calling them "customers we haven't met yet". Gamers won't buy anything different? Gamers bought a 4 hour long first person puzzle game with a sense of humor in droves. Why? Because it was good.

Now, there are tons of projects that are different, good, and don't sell, but there's usually a reason. Beyond Good and Evil didn't sell because it was released the same day as Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Psychonauts didn't sell because apparently no one told Tim Schaefer that platformers died ten years ago, and those that didn't sure as fuck weren't on the Xbox. No More Heroes didn't sell because it wasn't any fucking good. There's the big thing: You can't just be different and wacky and get straight tens, doesn't work like that. You have to also make a game that plays great and is fun too, otherwise I don't give two fucks about your goofy premise.

No Jim, if you could somehow manage to get game designers to crawl out of their shells and make some different shit for once, and make it well, it would sell. They just don't. They're getting BETTER (just look at EA this year) but they're still not I think the firing and blackballing of anyone who's been in the industry more than fifteen years would be a great start to that, Miya-fucking-moto included.

Now, let's mosey onto his next couple of points: The RE5 controls and the lack of Killzone 2 Co-Op.

First off Jim, you're fat. Second off, RE5 has shitty controls. Your character is a stiff wooden board of a person who moves slower and worse than the "zombies" than they're trying to kill. Those are bad controls. Now, I know the de-facto argument for those controls is "it's to add tension", which is a good point, and why Valve made the controls in Left 4 Dead shitty on purpose as well.

Oh wait they didn't, did they? Again, they just made a good goddamned videogame, and they added tension how people normally add tension: by including tense scenarios. Which would you rather have: a situation that's tense because it's genuinely difficult for your badass character, or a situation that's tense because your character's a fucking retard and your AI partner's even worse. Jim, the reason that RE5 has the controls it does is that it was made by Japanese developers from Capcom who A) hate change and B) painted themselves into a corner. They basically evolved the RE series into Gears of War, which is a fucking retarded thing to do to a franchise that's about zombies. In order to keep it from being just a straight up Gears of War clone, they had to keep something different. The one consistant thing in all RE's has been shitty controls, so there you go. Controls don't have to be unresponsive to be shitty. If there's a clear, industry recognized stadard for what you're trying to accomplish and you deviate from it just to be different, and it's less intuitive that what other people have been doing, your controls are shitty. The end.

Third off, what the hell does that have to do with your point of gamers helping along the homogenization of games? RE5's controls aren't exactly a different, bold new step forward, unless you finish that sentence with "...into becoming Gears of War". If they do support something like RE5, well, that makes Capcom disinclined to try anything but sequels. If they DON'T support RE5, then Capcom's disinclined to try new things with established franchises. It's a terrible example.

Then he talks about how people complained about no co-op in Killzone 2, and how it's retarded to expect it in every game because look at Bioshock, that game didn't need co-op or multiplayer! To be fair, he's got a point here. Multiplayer is pretty much the worst thing to happen to videogames ever other than the Wii. Not every fucking game needs a tacked on multiplayer fragfest mode that people will play once and forget about. Mostly because you cannot, repeat cannot have a good story in a multiplayer game. Doesn't happen. No, WoW doesn't have a good story, sorry. Maybe the KOTOR MMO will change that, but the way Bioware's been going lately I'll be surprised if the thing has dialog trees at this point.

However, once again Jim Sterling makes the mistake of making the right point with the wrong example. First off Jim, you're fat. Second off, Bioshock and Killzone 2 are two very different games with very different goals. Bioshock is meant to be an atmospheric trip through a wholly unique dilapidated setting. Killzone 2 is an excuse to shoot your buddies in armor ripped wholesale from anime over PSN, with little thought to story, or innovation, or anything other than being the poster child for just exactly everything wrong with gaming today just as hard as it possibly can. In a multiplayer fragfest game like Killzone, especially one exclusive to the free PSNetwork, co-op should be a given. It should be an out of the box standard issue feature at this point, unless of course you're talking about a game that gives a fuck about story, and then it shouldn't feature multiplayer of any kind.

In short, Jim Sterling's fat and shouldn't have a job blogging. Maybe i'll tear apart one of Jonathan Holmes' articles one day, if I can prevent it being just one big page filled with nothing but RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.