When I decided to schedule my blog posts, I falsely believed that every week will have news as shocking and as interesting as the Oculus VR acquisition by Facebook last week, and while there was a fairly big news story this week, it certainly didn’t explode like the acquisition did. However, there was some other things that happened this week, as well as a couple of new trailers. I will also talk about Mercenary Kings too, as I’ve had an hour or so with it and I want to talk about it without reviewing it in full. Now, with that said, the big news story of the week.
As you may of heard, Brendan Eich is essentially anti-gay, and has been known to contribute money to anti-gay charities. Now, while that is just minority suppresion because why the hell not, it’s not why Eich was in the news. Yes, to the great joy of all Firefox users now that they can’t be branded homophobic by stupid people anymore, Eich stepped down as CEO of Mozilla. Some may agree with his beliefs, many will think he is an archaic idiot. However, hopefully we can all agree that people are happy that others will now shut up about Firefox users.
You can read Mozilla’s official blog post about Eich’s resignation here.
A rumour developed recently that 4A Games were working on a next/current-gen compilation of their two Metro games. This rumour was also supported with some presentation slides and mock-up box art. However, on the 31st of March, Deep Silver posted on the Metro series’ website, confirming that they working on the remakes. I gained a tremendous amount of respect for Deep Silver after they confirmed the leaks were legitimate, and they even mentioned they could’ve just went with the standard “not commenting on rumours” stance. I am very much looking forward to seeing what Redux looks like on the next/current-gen consoles. It’s also worth noting that this will be the first time Metro 2033 will be on PlayStation.
You can read Deep Silver’s blog post here.
In other news, it has been announced that Pure Chess is being brought to PS4 and looks beautiful. It’s been a while since I was excited to play chess, but there you go. A new trailer was also released Always Sometimes Monsters, which looks like a cross between Hotline Miami, To the Moon and IMVU. The violence in the very chibi-looking world as actually very unsettling, and as the game seems to have many story branches, I’ll keep a very close eye on this project. I should probably also mention that Phil Spencer has been promoted to head of the Xbox brand, but I’m a vitriolic PlayStation fanboy, so why would I do that.
In the movie world, the big trailer, and I think the only big trailer, from this week was of course for Lucy. According to the incredibly unreliable synopsis featured on Wikipedia, Scarlett Johansson’s character Lucy gets used as a drug mule for the Taipei mob, but she accidentally absorbs the drugs and can now absorb knowledge instantly, move objects with her mind and doesn’t feel pain. Yes, this does mean that Johansson is playing a character that is more of a superhero than the actual superhero she does play. Also, Morgan Freeman has a role, because of course he has.
However, you all keep up with the news, so I want to talk about Mercenary Kings for a bit, as I haven’t played it enough for a review but I have played it enough to form an opinion. I went into Mercenary Kings expecting it to be a new age Metal Slug with customisation elements. But, this game should not even be mentioned in the same paragraph as Metal Slug, and I am technically insulting SNK right now. Mercenary Kings is actually a quad-directional shoot-em-up with scavenging elements, insultingly basic crafting and the worst level design I’ve seen for bloody ages. For a game which has a strong focus on its customisation elements, why the hell am I limited to two predefined characters that have four different colour palettes each. Oh yeah, and you can also rename them, that really make a whole lot of difference. It’s not like it would be hard to implement some sort of character customisation considering the game is basically the most stylised thing ever released.
Also, if having two predefined characters was so important, the character could have at least been interesting. Unless they were characterised in the pretentious Metal Gear tribute/rip-off codec sequences, which I skipped because a reference to a prolific series that doesn’t end is not funny, then they are essentially blank slate anyway so character customisation may as well be a part of it. Also, while we are at it, the gathering and crafting system is just poorly implemented. There isn’t any way of getting a steady stream of actually valuable resources like steel, which in turn means it’s irritating to actually create a decent weapon, which again turns into a system so pointless they may as well give you pre-defined weapons you can switch between on the fly. Don’t make me provide materials and money, especially when the gunsmith is meant to be part of your actual team/army/something or other. If the real army made each individual soldier provide metal for their guns as well as money for the crafting of them, nobody would sign up. Maybe Mercenary Kings was developed just to try to dissuade people from going to war, ironically.
I should probably finish up this rant before it turns into a review, but I would last like to go into a little bit more detail on the appaling level design I mentioned earlier. I still haven’t got passed the first area for reasons that we’ll get to in a minute, but the main level they use for most things in the first area is just a big open space with lots of doors that lead to random places, which in turn leads me to remember Fez, which had terrible level design but was at least very pretty. Now, I stopped playing Mercenary Kings after my second attempt at the first boss, because I really didn’t want to try again. The boss starts in what I assume is a constant position, and then wanders off when it gets bored and spawns in one of three other places, each of them being a pain to get to. There were also several instances where I searched every possible place, and found out that it can move while you are looking for it, which is bad design, and just plain stupid. In conclusion, buy Metal Slug 1, Metal Slug 2 or Metal Slug XX on PSN.
Anyway, I’ll see you guys in a few days for the Monday review, which wont be Thief again because I spent too much time trying to have fun playing Mercenary Kings. If I can get around to it, the review will probably be for Burial at Sea Episode 2. If not, I’ll just review One Finger Death Punch or someting. So, another week closes and another begins. My predictions for the following week are that Octodad gets a PS4 release date, Iwata says “please” at some point and twelve more indie games are announced for the PS4, with at least eight of them being on Steam already.
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