Holy shit, that video of him playing Cuphead was hard to watch. Dude was strugglin. Reminds me of that Polygon Doom video from last year.

This blog is quite pertinent in light of the whole Cuphead brouhaha around him.

I'm sure the internet has been nasty to him as the internet do, but it seems like he has a history of being pretty out touch with the subject matter he's supposed to cover in a professional context. He also infamously gave the original Mass Effect a bad review because he didn't realize you could level up your character.

PS sorry for commenting on this old blog and effectively bumping it in the forum, I didn't realize blog posts show up in the forum.

Maybe he is trolling?Or he's never played WH40K.Either way GOW and 40k do both have space marines and space marines are about as generic as they come I don't really see why you had to write a lenghty blog on this.I guess you just wanted to get your anger out in cyberspace.Of course I don't see what kind of response you would want.So I guess this is a more interesting one.
 
@ryanwho said:

Warhammer being the pioneer of some lame shit doesn't make it less lame.

@ryanwho said:

Warhammer being the pioneer of some lame shit doesn't make it less lame.

What a cock like thing to say.

Warhammer being the pioneer of some lame shit doesn't make it less lame.

Warhammer being the pioneer of some lame shit doesn't make it less lame.

Yeah the dudes a dick. You'd think you'd wan to do some research before publishing an article like this. Also, even if Space Marine did rip off Gear of War, who fucking cares? Darksiders ripped off a whole bunch of games and it was still awesome.

The dude is just flat out ignorant. Even if Space Marine's setting wasn't from 1987, effectively ruining his entire argument, his comparison would still be worthless because:

GoW is a cover based shooter. You hide behind chest high walls and shoot people.

Space Marine is a shoot'em up / beat'em up adventure. Think Fable, but with fully automatic rocket launchers, chainswords and jet packs.

Actually, I think that a lot of this can be attributed to how poorly Games Workshop has stewarded their Warhammer 40,000 IP within this medium - beyond the Dawn of War games (which I remember getting similar criticism, but with Starcraft as the originall), there has not been very many good Warhammer 40,000 games (Final Liberation?)- which is why so few outside of the table-top crowd are aware of what Warhammer 40,000 is. 
 
I kind of understand where Mr. Takahashi is coming from - there's a cyclic dependency going on here,  Space Marine, the game, might not have been a thing if not for Gears of War, the game. But Gears of War, the setting (possibly more?), might not have been a thing without Warhammer 40,000, the setting.
 
While Space Marine is clearly... very inspired by Gears of War, it seems like a Gears of War-esque game is the obvious choice for a Space Marine game. 
And Dean Takahashi, while not someone I've heard of previously, is probably in a better position to comment on the likeness of the Gears of War and Space Marine games than most of us, as most of us have only seen trailers for Space Marine so far :)
 
I do wonder, though - does this article indicate that Space Marine is good enough to gripe about the similarities to Gears of War? Or is this article because that's all there is to say about it?

 When his explanation/apology ends up longer than the article itself, I think he knows he was way off the mark. 

Well they are indeed very similar , specially to folks who may not be informed of the differences .... not everybody knows everything about everything ya know  Edit: But after thinking about it perhaps , he being a gaming critic ,  he should've researched about the Warhammer lore and art direction before making those claims , but as I said not everyone can be that informed all the time

Well they are indeed very similar , specially to folks who may not be informed of the differences .... not everybody knows everything about everything ya know  Edit: But after thinking about it perhaps , he being a gaming critic ,  he should've researched about the Warhammer lore and art direction before making those claims , but as I said not everyone can be that informed all the time

Well they are indeed very similar , specially to folks who may not be informed of the differences .... not everybody knows everything about everything ya know
 
Edit: But after thinking about it perhaps , he being a gaming critic ,  he should've researched about the Warhammer lore and art direction before making those claims , but as I said not everyone can be that informed all the time

I think we already had a thread on this actually.

Dean Takahashi wrote an article about Space Marine and how it's ripping off Gears of War. You should probably go ahead and read it.
 
I've gone through his article (now updated, btw) and tried to pick out all his arguments. He claims that he's just talking about the video games themselves and the gameplay, not the actual universes. We'll see what valid arguments there are. Mind you, I'm not even a fan of Warhammer 40k, I've never played the tabletop game or bought a single sourcebook. I was always just a BattleTech fan. But even I can see this is retarded.

He says:

-Grunts in GoW are copied from the US Marine Corps, and Space Marine is copying GoW.
-Both games have oversized armor and body-builder physiques.
-Both games have a large target reticle, so Space Marine is copying GoW.
-Guns are huge and you can have a chainsaw blade, just like the chainsaw bayonet from GoW.
-Blood spatters are similar.
-Guns shoot in a similar fashion.
-Space Marine has a thunder hammer, just like the gravity hammer from Halo.

The first one is about how the characters in both games are derivative of marines in the US Marine Corps. Well, I'm not sure what this has to do with actual gaming. It seems like a story or lore element, doesn't it? Doesn't factor into the gameplay of either game. The Space Marines came much earlier, and they've always been portrayed as meatheaded hyperaggressive soldiers, so... yeah, no copying from GoW here.

The second argument is that visually, Space Marines have oversized armor and bodybuilder physiques, just like in GoW. Again, not really a factor of gameplay, it's purely an art aesthetic of the universe, created back in 1987. They've always looked like this.

Both games have large target reticules. Now, this is certainly in the realm of video games, there's nothing in the universe of WH40k that specifies a specific reticule size. I haven't seen any gameplay video of Space Marine that actually shows the HUD, so I guess I'll accept his word that the game has a large reticule. Large reticules in third person shooters apparently all come from the Gears of War games.

He also argues that both games are similar because they have large guns and a chainsaw-like melee weapon. Well, the large guns visually are just another aesthetic of the universe, so that doesn't have anything to do with the gameplay. The chainsaw-like melee weapon is a gameplay component however, so let's take a look at this. In GoW, you can rev up the bottom of the gun and chainsaw people with it, one at a time. The chainsword in Space Marine is a melee weapon that allows you to perform lots of fluid sword slashes to quickly slaughter multiple enemies. While the chainsaw bayonet is rather slow and only works one on one, being completely ineffective against an entire horde at once, the chainsword is shown to be quick enough to slice and dice between multiple targets in close succession. It feels like much more of a dedicated melee weapon, while the bayonet is more of an afterthought. Of course, it's also different in that it's a sword and not connected to any gun at all, which limits you to melee only. And it's been part of the lore and tabletop game since the very beginning. So... yeah, I don't think this is them copying GoW.

Blood spatters are similar in both games. Well, this is kinda vague. It's true, both games have blood spatter, and they seem similar. There's nothing in the WH40k universe that says much about blood spatter, except that it exists. We can chalk this up as a strong visual element of video games.

Guns shoot in a similar fashion in both games. I'm not even sure what this means, other then that both games have guns that shoot bullets towards the center of the screen? And there's recoil involved? You shoot the gun, and then feel some recoil from shooting the gun? Is that what he means by guns shoot in a similar fashion? Well, shooting is an important aspect of any third person shooter, so yeah, it's a video game argument. You also do shoot from a behind the shoulder perspective in both games, though GoW didn't come up with that, Resident Evil 4 did.

Finally, Space Marine's thunder hammer is a lot like the gravity hammer in Halo. Well, first of all, it should be noted that Halo is a first person shooter. Dean seemed to be comparing the similarities of Space Marine and GoW as third person shooters. First person shooters aren't generally known for their melee combat, so it seems hard to compare it with the third person melee-centric gameplay of Space Marine. The thunder hammer also came from the universe of WH40k, back before Halo was created. I think the existence of the hammer and its use as a melee weapon is due to the lore and universe, and not the copying of a gameplay element from Halo.

So... ultimately, the only real video game arguments he has are:

-Both games have a large target reticle, so Space Marine is copying GoW.
-Blood spatters are similar.
-Guns shoot in a similar fashion.

If Dean Takahashi is truly upset by Space Marine because of these three points, well... he needs to be criticizing a lot more development studios than just Relic.