@dukest3: all kicking, all the time.

You want Giant Bomb coverage of Hatred? Listen to the podcast. Basically, Jeff's opinion on the game: we are all stupid again for falling for this game's trick for getting publicity. I will repeat, Jeff's back of the box quote for Hatred: "people are stupid".

What percentage of sales comes from allowances, do you think?

All that clip needed was a Slipknot or Papa Roach song playing in the background.

YES!! Someone with any video editing skills and a free moment: YOUR TIME IS NOW!

I cannot currently find this video, but some smartass used the MGS4 song "Nuclear" in their own edit. I know we've got some talented duders in the Giant Bomb community who are awesome at video and sound editing. I like this idea. I like it a lot.

What is strange to me is that everyone is trying to put this game in its place as if it has crossed over some invisible line that we as gamers simply cannot abide. It's an average shooter with an interesting art style - yet - the way people phrase this is always with complete disdain. Like oh it's a shameless Postal rip-off, and not even a good one at that. The GameSpot review states that it's an average shooter with a nice art style but it gets boring and then goes ahead and gives it a 3/10 just so that we all know that WE don't condone this sort of thing. If it's just an average game wouldn't it score something like a 5? Especially when Call of Juarez: The Cartel got a whopping 6 and that game is a lot more offensive for a variety of different reason.

It's really weird seeing this rubberband reaction from the associated games press like Hatred needs to be buried because it has gone too far. It's especially weird since a ton of "mediocre" games come and go, are scored accordingly and you never really hear much about them. So it's really interesting to see that something can still hit a nerve with so many people. We have all been completely desensitized to violence in gamesover the years so seeing something with such simple graphics rile the entire industry up is truly fascinating.

I don't mind if GB doesn't cover Hatred at all, what they cover is their choice, but let's at least be honest with ourselves that it would pretty clearly be a conscious decision to not cover it. It's not like they have nothing to say about it, or have been utterly disinterested in the game when it comes to news cycles. This site dredges the shit lake known as Steam's New Releases for anything they can squeeze twenty minutes out of, but they just have no possible content to make out of Hatred? Sure dude.

If they don't want to cover it, I'm not upset by that at all, but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking the decision to not cover it isn't conspicuous.

@humanity:

The Good

Impressive visuals;Simple, functional isometric shooting

The Bad

Fails as satire, catharsis, statement, and fun; Virtually zero gameplay variation across levels; Novelty wears off in a matter of moments; Extremely short and one-note given the cost

Seems like a fair score to me. Then again, Gamespot was the site that gave Twilight Princess an 8.8.

I really hope not. Maybe Alex can play it on the bad games feature they debuted on the BLLSL.

I don't know, seems like no one would have a good time with this game. Danny sounded somewhat enthused but from what I sort of briefly read, the game lacks variety and, well, substance. Maybe a UPF showing could make it entertaining.

@gaff: I hate to be the advocate for this game since I don't think it really warrants defending nor do I think it looks all that great from a pure gameplay perspective, but the (har har) hate thrown at it seems kinda hyperbolic. You know whats another extremely short and one note game? Gone Home, and that was $20 and it was about 90 minutes long. Nobody wants to cut Hatred the slightest bit of slack, and probably with good reason, but I think it's really influencing peoples sound judgement when discussing it. Jeff talked about it on the Bombcast today and he was very harsh. Say what you will but the graphic treatment and destructible environments actually do look pretty good, and for Jeff to simply dismiss it all as shitty looking seems to be evocative of the mindset people adopted for this game from the moment they saw the first trailer.

But hey, if thats how he feels about it then sure, thats his opinion and all I'm not arguing against that. Let me reiterate that I'm not trying to defend anything about it. We can all tell that this was done with a very specific agenda in mind. I just think it still deserves some degree of professionalism when discussing it instead of this "blargghhh suck bucket!" response it has been getting from the media. If we all lean so heavily on the negatives because we don't want to like something, then how far are we going to lean on undeserved positives when we want to like something else?

I thought the same. The game doesn't look shitty. It doesn't look like fun, but the tech behind it looks good. The lighting effects and destructible environments look good. Saying it's all shitty just seems like people are being angry at the game and not wanting to have to say "well, this part of the bad game is ok". I agree with your other posts and points as well. The game is getting thrown under the bus and being reviewed with a lot more scrutiny than other games seem to be. It's an average game that should get an average score.

@slag: You should probably take a look at some things hitting consoles that are passing cert. Hell, AAA games with all the budget in the world are passing cert on consoles only for people to discover that "hey, I'm not getting any xp from these missions!" or "hey, all my progress was deleted".

Having said that, the lighting effects are the best part of Hatred, and from my understanding they're just using stock UE4 tech for that, so good on UE4.

From Jeff's Tumblr:

Gone Home was a game that told a story that games almost never tell in a manner that no other game had really attempted before. It was a unique experience and a departure from a bunch of game design conventions. It isn't for everyone, but it was going for something that really resonated with people looking for a story focused game with tons of atmosphere. Just because you didn't like it doesn't mean the positives were undeserved. It was a really refreshing change of pace for me and apparently a lot of game reviewers.

Hatred is a generic isometric shooter with boring levels, crash bugs, bad writing, a tone that people have favorable compared to the music of Slipknot and Papa Roach, a kinda cool art style if you like grey, and good physics. It was a game that was sold on nihilism and the developers went out of the way to make the game seem as offensive as possible leading up to release.

Hatred got no benefits of the doubt because it is a bad game treading no new ground after running an ad campaign that centered on offending people. The things you cite as positives are secondary to the game playing poorly and the tone being the same middle school edginess that a lot of other, better games employ. Violent nihilism has been explored in games a lot and it has been done better. Gone Home went for something different and a lot of people appreciated that.

@humanity: Eh, I don't know. I actually agree with Jeff completely in that I don't think Hatred looks good at all. Beyond the lighting, the graphics overall are just uninspired and completely average, just like the rest of the game. I posted something about the hour I spent with the game, concentrating solely on the gameplay and mechanics, and I just didn't find any of it to be good at all. I ended the post by saying I wouldn't even recommend this game if it was $5, let alone $20.

The graphics are average, the controls aren't great, the weapons are limited and aren't satisfying to use, the guns don't sound great, the voice acting is poor, the writing is even worse, the game suffers from performance issues even on high end systems, the character is too slow and lacks mobility, feedback when getting shot or when shooting people is poor, I mean, just everything about this game is bad or average at best. The executions, arguably one of the central mechanics and highlights of the game, are mostly all boring and become a chore after you've seen them all, which doesn't take very long at all. The animations on the executions are so poor, and combined with the game's awful graphics, they just didn't have any kind of impact on me and eventually just became something I had to do to regain health.

If this game was skinned differently and there wasn't all of this controversy about it for the last six months leading up to release and all of the civilians were turned into zombies or skeletons or demons or something, it would have been immediately forgotten as yet another shit release on Steam that no one would even be talking about right now. There would have been at most one forum thread about it from the one guy who bought it asking if anyone else had bought it, there probably wouldn't be a Quick Look or any talk about it on the Bombcast, and it would have been 75% off or more within two or three months and never seen or heard from again.

This game is not good - and this is coming from someone who really couldn't care less about the subject matter. I don't find the game offensive at all, it's just a bad game.

I think Keith Stuart summed it up pretty nicely for the Guardian:

Hatred is just a silly shooting game that seeks to tap dance between self-deprecating parody and pseudo-anarchic posturing so that it captures all sections, moods and arguing positions of its target demographic. Postal was here 18 years ago, Carmageddon before that, Death Race before that, all hoping to draw the same idolatrous response from the same sorts of alienated adolescents feeling frustrated, isolated and powerless at the world. Unlike Rockstar’s most controversial games, Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto, it has no obvious sense of cultural guile, no clear determination to explore the concept of player culpability. It’s just a game where you kill people. Being a games editor, it’s something I guess I have to think about, but unless you’re a tabloid writer with a very quiet news day, it doesn’t matter. As with the fury of its online proponents, we can let it slip away, like digital blood down a virtual drain.

@jesus_phish: @humanity:

Q: Are you going to cover Hatred?

A: I dunno, maybe. Talked to Danny about it a bit yesterday and it sounded boring as hell.

Credit: http://blog.jeffgerstmann.net/post/120188356226/are-you-going-to-cover-hatred

I guess this is going to depend on whether you actually believe in Hatred being thrown under the bus because of their "marketing campaign", but...

When a game is boring, there seems to be no difficulty curve besides the introduction of armoured targets, poor gameplay variety, puts aesthetic over function (that dark ass sewer section Danny played, jeez): that does not make it an average game. That's simply bad.

@mb: Sure. I haven't played it myself so I can't rightfully sit here and argue any of those points. I still do think that people exaggerate their negative opinions about it, even if that was not the case with your personally.

@thatpinguino:Well see thats the thing. You really enjoyed Gone Home and so you extol it's virtues in a really positive light. For you it was refreshing and a departure from conventional game making. It could just as easily be described as repetitive and lacking any significant gameplay depth with a very singular focus that doesn't evolve from beginning to end during it's very limited runtime. Both opinions are objectively correct, but it's your negative or positive emotions towards it that determine how you'll choose to portray it.

@humanity: Just going "all opinions are objective and therefore nobody can be wrong" is an absurdly reductive viewpoint. Gone Home had very clever and rarely used before ways of telling a story. A story which was simple, well written, well executed and again, something rarely touched upon by video games which made it extra-notable.

I'm not going to rant about Hatred because I've not played it. I'm certainly not going to be buying it just to go "hah, I was right, this is a bad game". Reviews have been generally negative, and aesthetic just holds no appeal to me. Watching the stream that Danny & Andy did over on Gamespot I won't lie, I had a bit of a chuckle at some of the "finishers" in the same way that watching MK10 Fatalities is funny. But that element quickly becomes incredibly tiresome, and if as they suggested you need to do that every time you need to regain your health that's going to get tired super quickly.

And honestly, I'd prefer to forget that there was a time when this dumb game would have appealed to me because I was a dumb, angry teenager once. It doesn't seem particularly offensive, and the point Jeff made on the Bombcast ring true for me: it's Postal redux as a twin-stick shooter. It's not even Manhunt.

Surely, there must be a line of people waiting to complain about certain games not being covered on the site. Feels like a myriad of Mobas, MMOs, sports games, JRPGs, grand strategy games, indie titles etc. etc. goes unnoticed all the time.

I want Wings of Vi covered. Get in line.

@forkboy: I wasn't saying all opinions are objective at all. I was merely pointing out that sometimes in gaming there are two sides to the same coin.

@humanity: Sure if you ignore any and all context around both games, the quality of the writing, the scarcity of the subject matter, and the relative innovation of both gameplay styles then both games are a hashbrown out of 10 because game scores then have no meaning at all (I think scoring game reviews is reductive on the whole, but it isn't completely valueless depending on how you use the scores). Moby Dick and Harry Potter 7 are comparable length and people seem to like both, so they are comparable novels! It sure seems like more people have read Harry Potter so that is probably the superior novel, but all opinions are subjective so we'll never know! Moby Dick is deeper, but Harry Potter is more accessible so I see the argument for both books.

Edit: Comparing two works targeting different audiences, with different goals, and different mechanics because they are the same length and you seem to think that one isn't getting its fair shake and the other was the beneficiary of unfair praise is really reductive.

Yep, and a GBeast QL with Alex and Vinny would be good also. With Alex doing his best sarcastic moral gags and Vinny just taking the piss out of the voice acting.

The amount of people acting high and mighty over this game is weird though.

@thatpinguino: The thing is those elements I mentioned don't require context to be comparable. I took two pure gameplay mechanics and compared them to one another which is about 10 steps removed from your wildly exaggerated example. I'm not going to argue the differences between Gone Home and Hatred because thats obviously preposterous, and I was simply using the former as a very tangential comparison for the latter in terms of how we can view the same game in a different light because our predisposition towards it.

I'm not trying to start a fight with you or anything, I respect your opinions on Gone Home and fully accept that plenty of people really enjoyed it. I simply came into the thread to say "hey guys I think a lot of people are making this game out to be a lot more shitty than it is simply because it has a shitty premise" and most people have told me "no, it's really shit" and since I haven't played it I'm just going to say ok and move on.

@humanity: But you can't just treat games as pure gameplay without context. If you could then Puzzle Quest would be definitely better than Bejeweled because Puzzle Quest layers additional systems over Bejeweled. Papers Please is a terribly tedious game with limited progression if all you examine is the mechanics and ignore everything else. Destiny is the game of the year if literally all you care about is shooting mechanics. Premise and context matter a whole lot in how a work of art is evaluated so trying to strip them away to make your point is a flawed way to argue. I'm not trying to defend Gone Home. I'm pushing back against the idea that games can be meaningfully examined by ignoring context and zeroing in a purely mechanical evaluation.

If all you are saying that expectations play a part in reviews, then sure that seems to be true. But I don't think that Hatred is the victim of some unfairly negative reviews by biased reviewers. I think it courted controversy, talked a big game, and when the time came to put up or shut up, it shut up.

People bought it just to make a political statement. The highest-rated reviews on Steam haven't even played the game for an hour. Good job getting duped into a crappy game, dumb-dumbs.

Yay! They talked about it on the Bombcast! That's all I wanted. :)

@sweep: Even so, it wouldn't be the first time they've done a quick look of a boring title...

I don't quite understand the hatred surrounding this game either. People upset by it certainly have the right to be, people that enjoy this kind of game certainly have the right to do so. I look at it in the same way I do the Hostel movies, I have absolutely no interest in watching them but I don’t give a shit if someone else wants to. It's great that Hatred exists for those that want to play it, I never will. At the end of the day all the fussing didn’t really accomplish much. This game pretty much came and went, no one died, the games industry didn’t disappear and the developers seemed to benefit quite a bit from the negative press they got. End of story.

The thing that is sort of shitty for me personally (not gonna lose sleep over it or anything) is that I saw some cool ideas in Hatred that I won’t get to experience. The destructibility of the environments and the general aesthetic of the game are pretty cool. On a technical level it interests me. I just wish the developers had taken the time they spent making the game “edgy” and provided an actual narrative. Oh well.

Quick Look incoming according to the front page. Hoping we get Jeff or Vinny or whoever covers it laughing at the dumb speech the guy makes at the beginning. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

It's already uploaded on Gamespot for some reason. EDIT: Ah, seems to have been taken down. Wasn't a particularly funny quick look, though. Brings to mind the Duke Nukem Forever QL tonally speaking.

I was expecting it to be a Gbeast QL. I wonder why we haven't had any this week.

theyre still getting used to the new office.

watched the ql when it was up on GS. It seemed way too forced with them trying to shit on every part of the game. I didn't think it looked amazing or anything and I have no intention of buying it but it looked a lot better than a lot of the garbage games they look at all the time and they never spent as long trashing those games.

Even when the kinda cool looking destructible environment stuff happened and Dan asked about it you could tell he was trying his hardest to not say anything positive even though he's always talking about how much he likes that stuff. Whatever, just a weird tone in the ql.

Its almost like the game is meant to be made fun of and is in turn mocking the people who are way into it.

Pretty sure you can hear Drew or Jason laugh at the shitty dialogue from the control room.

Man, you gotta divulge. How you do the mind-reading shtick? I'd really like to know.

From what I've seen it doesn't really look like the devs are in on the joke.

Didn't need to read anyone's mind. Dan said himself this was the first he's seen of the game and then a couple minutes in he was already parroting what other people had said instead of making up his own mind. When someone sees a game for a few minutes and then says something like "this already seems boring" in the first level of a dual joystick shooter with the game set to easy it's pretty clear they were gonna hate it no matter what.

welp. looks like we are getting a video.

I hope its vinny and alex

If they made this same game but instead you were killing nazis I would be all over it.

It's Dan & Jeff.

Is anyone actually offended by this game? I am not saying people should or shouldn't be offended, that's up to the individual, I just mean I haven't actually seen anyone complain about anything other than the game being boring. I do remember some controversy about it when the game was announced, but it seems to me that the game came out and everyone just went 'Oh, ok then.'

Like what? I'll admit that young love between non-standard couples isn't a common theme in video games and the game gets some points for that, but the way Gone Home implements the storytelling is hardly unique. You're collecting logbooks/journals. An implementation that's in almost every popular video game ever made.

I felt the same way. The entire quick look just seemed like a bash fest. I'm not saying that the game is good or not, as I haven't played it, but Dan seemed to have his mind made up before he was even given enough time to see what there was on offer. The aesthetic was appealing to me and the destructible environments were interesting, but over the course of the quick look, it didn't seem like the gameplay really had anywhere to evolve—for that reason I'm out. It would be hard for me to believe that the media's general response to this game didn't have an overwhelmingly large influence on how the tone of this quick look played out.

Since there is a Quick Look now, in the interest of consolidating the conversation into a single, more manageable thread, let's continue on in the QL comments. Thanks.

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-hatred/2300-10232/