The HotSpot - Episode 371

I just have to laugh when people, including this podcast, complain "The launch lineup is nothing! No games!" right now, but when November comes around, it's gonna be like "omg why is everything coming out at the same time, I don't have TIME to play ALL these games, and why are they 30+ hours long? Games are too long."

Supposedly, all of Sony's first-party lineup shown at the June event is targeting the first year of PS5. No dates given, because Covid could delay things, but obviously they're planning to space them out throughout the year. It is not a problem if only Spider-Man comes out at launch. There are going to be tons of third party games anyway. Personally, I'm probably gonna be busy with Yakuza 7 at launch (PS4 version on PS5 via back-compat), which will take me like 1 month to finish anyway. Plus AstroBot, which I don't even have to buy.

Anyway it's premature to be complaining about launch lineups. Neither company has confirmed it yet. Even Spider-Man isn't confirmed for launch, it's "Holiday 2020" and people assumed it. And, again supposedly, Sony still has game announcements to make in August.

Edit: Finished watching, and regarding the PS5 needing a Knack-like game.. I think AstroBot is exactly that, except it's free this time. AstroBot is literally made to showcase the features of the DualSense. And I think the controller could be a big selling point of the PS5, but it's just not easy to convey that without putting it in your hands. Supposedly.

I don't disagree with @jeff and the sentiment that big games being made are hugely avoid any sense of risk for big blockbuster hits - but if anything that just means why we need to keep criticizing and elevating loud voices for more risky projects. ESPECIALLY when it comes to increasing diverse cultural representations of race, gender, and sexuality.

In the case of Ghost of Tsushima, sure, maybe it wasn't created to be a deeply representative Japanese samurai art piece- but it sure as fuck uses my Asian sensibilities and exoticism to the fullest to attain that level of risk aversiveness to get that mainstream blockbuster appeal - and I think that can surely be exploitatively shitty. And if we all stay quiet about that, large-scale projects will be nothing more than that.

@heatdrive88: I think the point that Jeff was trying to make was that it’s like criticizing Inglorious Bastards for not being a historically accurate representation of WWII. Ghosts is obviously styled after Kurosawa films which themselves are highly stylized renditions of samurai and the period. It makes less sense to be critical of a game of not being true to a set of standards it was never aiming to meet.

I got a new SSD rig in march so...*shrug*

@knoxt: “ Anyway, I am glad there exists at least in these comments one case example for someone who represents a market for these systems”

I think you underestimate the number of people that play games but don’t know the first thing about PCs or have the desire/know how to get a gaming PC going. I’m a weird case in that I’ve been building gaming PCs for a long time and am just tired of the whole PC thing.

Anyways you said that PCs are simpler and less problematic now, that’s true but there are still all kinds of problems. It seems like every time I go to play a new game on PC (including recently) there’s some nonsense I have to iron out to get things working right, especially if the game came from the windows store or the Xbox app which is kind of what this whole conversation is revolving around.

@humanity: True, I understand that viewpoint and the interpretation that Jeff is trying to convey, but I think this viewpoint is significantly interrupted when we have many WW2 movies of many, MANY kinds that can approach a vast array of lenses and approaches around WW2, fictionally or otherwise. As such, the range of movies are vast and wide in their choice of representation, scope, and viewpoints.

While yes, Ghost of Tsushima is not the only video game to ever use Japanese samurai and this particular period of Japan as the subject matter, the range of representation, scope, and viewpoint are often very limited when approaching it because video games choose to be so "risk averse". I know it's becoming a bit of an overwrought example, but we all know that "Kurosawa Mode" is far from a representation of the samurai films that Kurosawa created, let alone his filmmaking approach (even if the Kurosawa family had given their blessing for the usage of the family name) - and further highlighted by the shock that most people felt when gameplay was finally shown of Ghosts of Tsushima, when compared to the marketing material that gave impressions that this game was going to be something else.

@heatdrive88: The Kurosawa mode in particular is a gimmick that for better or in this case worse, simply is what it is as a result of games being what they are. I’m not entirely sure why many are placing such a strong emphasis on it as realistically speaking what more could they have done? You can not replicate framing and shot composition in real time. It’s basically a photo mode filter that you can play the game with. I mean don’t get me wrong, I understand why some are upset that a lifetime of work of a legendary movie director is reduced down to a monochrome filter with film grain. At the same time, it’s just a filter you know?

As for movies and games - film will always have the upper hand over games in this regard because film doesn’t have to compromise its vision due to outside interference. A Kurosawa film wouldn’t be as impactful if you as the home viewer could simply swivel the camera around at any moment. Games are constrained by gameplay which is why we have so many similarly styled experiences that vary slightly by tone. There are tons of WWII games out there and they all more or less concentrate on the same theaters and the same heroic last stands because the video game adaptation of The Pianist simply doesn’t work. You can only do so much when at the end of the day you have to be able to play it and enjoy it. As Jeff mentions, once you go so far down the path of storytelling where gameplay is a tertiary aspect of the experience, you would be better served choosing a different medium better suited that purpose. A realistic portrayal of feudal Japan with real samurai probably wouldn’t really be all that interesting to play just like a realistic WWII shooter where you march for hours on end and maybe shoot your rifle twice is not an exciting experience. Interesting? Yes. Risky, surely. Fun? Profitable?

This was the most fun and enjoyable content you guys had ever since the lockdown started.

Honestly more interested in the fact that I can play my ps4 games on a better system probably with improvements then new games. Like I think you are under selling how much that means to some people. Playing Ghost on my base ps4 that sounds like someone is fucking murdering it makes me want the next system.

@humanity:Regarding "Kurosawa mode" - I'm glad you understand the sentiment about the reduction of his lifetime of work (and hopefully the proudly Japanese identity that it also carries because of the influence of his work). But to exactly follow that up with your own words:

At the same time, it’s just a filter you know?

That is exactly the root of the problem.

And yes, of course I absolutely agree with you that the surrounding concentrations of experience around film in comparison to video games is significantly different around the many factors of which you've identified, but I do not agree that realistic portrayal of feudal-era Japan needs to be limited to simply film, nor would it need to so heavily neutered by the confines of what a "profitable video game" would pejoratively entail without seeing someone try to do something more with it. I am of course, not a video game designer, I do not know what that entails exactly by any stretch.

If I was to pull an example that is closer to home for me so I can explain, the best video game I can pull from would be Sleeping Dogs - a third-person open world action game that in a lot of ways, can absolutely be seen as subjectively mundane like many GTA-clones of the modern times, but in actuality held a very positive overall public sentiment. Sleeping Dogs was over-the-top, it had drama, it had comedy and parody, it had bullet-time and all kinds of fetch quests - it is no exception to the definition of, "video game as fuck".

But on top of this, it did an impeccable job at representing Chinese culture with an immense amount of detail and accuracy - I was personally floored every time it was able to get its references right, from the Cantonese-language colloquialisms and honorifics, or even its usage of Cantonese language and inserted-English phrases into the writing, to the accurate localization of all the Cantonese speech, to the food, the back alleys and markets, to the radio, and even breaking barriers in a portrayal of a sexually-desirable Asian-male lead and more.

How Sleeping Dogs even remotely nailed that can only be imagined as a complete fluke for myself, because of how few big-budget titles in that space have even remotely attempted cultural representation like this. It felt literally like a one-in-a-million shot, that happened to hit its mark in the face of the norm.

Now obviously, anyone can subjectively dislike that game, but it did indeed almost sell 1.5 million copies in 2012. Is that enough to recoup the costs of the game's development, let alone Square Enix's turmoils of sales expectations in that era of their company? This is something I never really found the answer for that I wish I had more insight to.

I am really glad that Brad brought up Red Dead 2 and Last of Us 2 when Jeff was being crazy about new games not having interesting unique stories. That is what I was saying to myself.

@heatdrive88: That is a very interesting example and one I can't really speak to a whole lot. I enjoyed Sleeping Dogs quite a lot and it was, as you put it, a video game as fuck. Honestly I would have expected a lot more errors crop up in that game, especially due to it's incredibly long and rocky development cycle starting as one game and being completely reworked to be something else as it changed hands like three times I think. I know even less about authentic HK culture than I do about feudal Japan so if it was met with praise then sure. At the same time, Japanese games media also praised Ghosts for it's look and feel. Sleeping Dogs also didn't challenge the status quo of Chinese culture when it comes to popular media. It was a very over the top, John Woo, action crime experience.

Halo truly came into its own after the release Halo 2 and Xbox Live. Halo 3 can be considered the peak of the franchise but I always thought it was lame that they took out dual wielding.

@humanity: A phenomena that's worth noting here I think, is in the differences of epistemological thought around cultural representation and its manifestation into art and entertainment, when we compare how North American audiences interpret cultural representation to how Japanese audiences interpret cultural representation, and the differing kinds of sensibilities those audiences gravitate towards and have deeper ontological connections to.

I don't seek to minimize Japanese games media's praise of Ghost of Tsushima, or any Japanese voices, audiences, or the long strife that revolves around their cultural identities, but for the sake of brevity - I do believe North American epistemology about cultural identity is much more advanced and farther along regarding topics like cultural representation, and offers deeper ontological discourse than most other countries. Why that is, is a huge discussion that is unfortunately far beyond my abilities to condense it with nuance into a couple paragraphs surrounding important historical events, economics, immigration/naturalization, cultural assimilation of minorities in North America, politics, etc.

TL;DR, I'd like to think North American game media/audiences (and the minority voices within) have the capacity for greater ontological critique of cultural representation; as happy as I am that Japanese games media/audiences positively praised Ghost of Tsushima.

Something that also strikes me wild about Sleeping Dogs is the fact that game was made in 2012 - and the fact it could do what it did back then, when the cultural identity discourse was what it was compared to today? Pretty damn impressive.

But something I should note to attach to it is that while yes, it is essentially a story that takes place in Hong Kong and takes on many Hong Kong sensibilities very well, many forget that Wei Shen, Sleeping Dogs' main protagonist, is specifically a Chinese-American in Hong Kong, where he carries a very different set of sensibilities and identity. My personal connection to his character was of course heightened by this, being Chinese-Canadian myself. It's also worth noting that the game was largely developed by United Front Games, a Canadian-based developer based in Vancouver.

Basically what I'm also getting at, is that Sleeping Dogs is at its core, a North American interpretation of Chinese cultural representation and Chinese-American cultural representation. I don't know how international China or Hong-Kong based games media praised/critiqued Sleeping Dogs (if I had to guess, I don't think the Chinese government would have liked Sleeping Dogs at all), but as a Chinese-American story, it absolutely nailed it.

If you'd like some further reading about why I thought Sleeping Dogs got its cultural identity writing and work so on the mark with so much nuance included, I'd highly recommend giving this 2014 Kotaku article from Kevin Wong a read:

What Sleeping Dogs Gets So Right About Being An Asian American

P.S., You and I might be having the most reasonable debate about the cultural identity of Ghost of Tsushima here, and ever.

@av_gamer: The CPU in the new consoles is a massive upgrade on what we have now.

@hynes22: Any comment Jeff has to make on stories in anything should be ignored. He has the tastes of a 10 year old.

@schindigg: I loved YouTube TV. But with how things are now I had to cut it. On the plus side I'm watching more Giant Bomb content!

@arjann: Really? cause 98% of the PS4 library is not on PC.

@humanity: Consoles still are cheaper and simpler, and your claim that everything is on everything is a lie.

Just this year I’ve played Persona 5 Royal, FF7 Remake, The Last of Us 2 and Ghost of Tsushima on my PS4 Pro that cost me only $400 three years ago, and just plugs into my TV.

I highly doubt that figure, I'd say you have it in reverse.

@curufinwe: you’re right I was lying, you got me fair and square so I’ll admit the truth now - consoles are cheaper than PCs. It’s not what I said at all before but it’s a truth I’m brave enough to say online.

I'm just here for the Better Off Dead references.

RIP, Fastlane, you were a great show

Disagree pretty strongly with the vibe Jeff gave off for a bit that people are 'looking too deeply' a lot of big games. There are -plenty- of perspectives of people not doing that, the deeper criticism probably hits his feeds more because he's cultivated a friend/contact group of people that care about that stuff, but it's by no means the majority of game coverage.

And nothing about Last of Us 2 feels risk averse, though stuff like GOT and God of War I can kind of see that stuff. Maybe even Horizon.

@curufinwe said:

98%?! Only if you're counting the themes and avatars, but even then I think that percentage is an exaggeration.

The hottest of spots.

LMAO the whole intro is very very entertaining. "Over" 10 Years strong, I LOVE You guys!