Tag: gaming

The Biggest Announcements from the Nintendo E3 Panel

Nintendo’s E3 panel sent fans through a doozy. Packed full with announcements, Nintendo provided both good news and bad news for excited fans, particularly those of Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing.

During the panel, Nintendo announced a full sequel to 2017’s Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which came as a surprise to many. There’s not much on the new game beyond the teaser trailer, but it appears to take on a much darker tone than the original, exciting many. Some have excitedly compared the teased darkness to the darker tones of Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which still stands both as one of the highest rated Zelda games, and one of the most popular.

Banjo-Kazooie was also announced to join the Smash Ultimate game, alongside another hero from Dragon Quest. The DQ hero will be released sometime this summer, while Banjo will come out sometime in the fall.

A teaser for Luigi’s Mansion 3 was released, awing audiences with amazing graphics and revealing a gooey Luigi doppelganger named Gooigi. Gooigi will be available through the co-op playthrough of the game. It’s an interesting turn for the franchise, one that will be sure not to disappoint.

The release date for the adorable remake of Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening was announced to be September 20th. Combining Legend of Zelda and Super Mario, the game has adorable graphics, and will have the option where you can build your own challenging dungeons to play through.

A new trailer for Fire Emblem: Three Houses was released, revealing more of what the storyline is actually about. The new game will take a sharp turn from the older Fire Emblem games, with four different routes that players can choose, and will hopefully see more success than Fire Emblem: Fates. The game is set to be released July 26, months in advanced of the previously set date.

The long-awaited Animal Crossing had its date pushed back to March 20 of next year, disappointing fans that had been eagerly awaiting the game’s release on the Switch. Despite this, the graphics look lovely, and will have many updated features that the previous Animal Crossing game didn’t have.

Last but not least, Nintendo announced the edition of Pokemon plus support for their new games Pokemon: Sword and Pokemon: Shield. Although it is not much of an announcement, the E3 panel comes just a week after the Nintendo Direct reveal of the new Pokemon world, including the reveal of new Galo region pokemon. The game is set to drop November 15.

Returning to the World I Knew Before

I don’t know if I’ve indicated before, but I have a long history of being a huge nerd.

Or rather, a geek (yes, there is a difference). I wasn’t the techy “build your own computer and digs math” type, which would have classified me as a nerd (by stereotypical standards). No, I have always preferred pop culture and literature, preferring to spend my time playing games and dabbling in a bit of anime. But the biggest highlight of being a geek was going to conventions.

The two biggest conventions I went to were Wondercon, which functions as a mini-Comic Con, situated in Anaheim, and Anime Expo, the largest Anime convention in North America. I went to these conventions every year from when I was thirteen until I went to college, when scheduling began interfering. It got to a point where I kind of got sick of them.

But in college, things changed. For some reason, I had it in my head that I should “grow out” of my geekiness, or at least keep it more private. Perhaps it was because I looked around and saw all the other geeks around me at school made me uncomfortable. They were just too stereo-typically geeky. That’s not to say that some of my high school friends weren’t, but these guys just fit the bill too well.

The disassociation might also have been partially influenced by the fact that I never fit the bit for someone who was geeky. Yeah, I wear glasses and at one point cut my hair short and dressed less-than-pleasantly, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about my face, my figure. I looked more like the kind of person geeks and nerds would wish would be into the same stuff as them. And this isn’t out of an inflation of my own ego. I’ve had enough creepy experiences to know exactly what position I was in. I look more like I belong in a Starbucks.

This was a factor that had always plagued my adolescent years. Especially during the height of gamer gate, where you could get called a fake gamer or fake nerd for just about breathing the “wrong way”. They never judged the people that looked like (stereotypical) geeks and nerds. They judged the people that didn’t.

It didn’t help that my Mom and sister would make fun of me for being a geek. My sister has become more involved in the culture herself in recent years, which has lightened her take on it, but my Mom would always roll her eyes. She still thinks I’m into things that I’m not (i.e: she thinks everything I watch is anime for some reason). She didn’t stop me from being a part of geek culture, but she didn’t much like the fact that I was so into it, either.

So for most of my college years, I kind of kept things under wrap. I stopped investing myself in geek culture for the most part, although I couldn’t help having my closest friends know what I was into. Everything was going fine.

But then, I started to miss the geek world. I started to miss being involved in the newest game, and missed going to conventions. I missed being a geek. I wasn’t going to suddenly stop dressing decent, but I didn’t want to let go of something I actually enjoyed. It was a big part of my life, and it was something cool to do. I got to see artists I follow in person, discover new artists, and find new things that I didn’t know before in geek culture.

So I’ve decided to come back. My Dad says he can get us into Comic Con, and I am planning on going to Anime Expo, so I guess that’s a good start to breaking back in. While I don’t have much time to be “full geek” (I have school and work), I do plan on enjoying the things I once did.

The Downfall of Telltale Games

Now, I am a few days late to this whole drama, but that has let me get a glimpse of a little extra content.

Last week, Telltale games declared that it was going to be shutting down, laying off most of its staff (who were expecting an eventual closure, but not so sudden). Official reports argue that a failed round of funding (the last backer abruptly pulled out) caused the shut down. The company is only staying open in order to finish the Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix, then is shutting down permanently. This puts a halt to the much anticipated final season of Walking Dead and trashes the production for a Stranger Things game.

While officially, financial problems led to the closure, this development was a long time coming. Telltale games exploded onto the mainstream scene with the insanely popular first season of Walking Dead, released in 2012. Every gamer who was played that game, with streams for the first chapter popping up. As the game had promised that the endings would change based on your actions, people were trying to get the best ending possible. The first season was pretty good at making it seem like it changed based off actions, as well.

However, people quickly realized in the second season that this was not the case. Major events occurred no matter what, taking away the purpose of trying to find different outcomes. Another problem as well was the fact that the only character that remained consistent was Clementine (and later the child), while all other characters seemingly disappeared. Even the spin-off game was a dead end, with none of the characters making it into the actual game. This made it so there was too many characters to get invested in, turning people off.

This also ruined interest in Game of Thrones and Batman, two games that were reportedly good, but too long and unchanging for people to really be invested in. It only goes downhill from there, as Telltale keeps releasing more and more games, none of which had anywhere near the same popularity as the first season of Walking Dead. As a result, the company was merely digging itself into its own grave.

But, it didn’t let that on to its employees. In fact, the company had just hired people weeks before they had the massive layoff, with people even moving across the country in order to come and work. As a result, a massive class-action lawsuit has been filed against the company, as with the sudden layoff with an almost immediate cut-off of benefits, they have violated California labor laws. Some argue that in suing a bankrupt company, they are wasting their time, but it’s important to solidify that these laws apply to gaming companies, who might otherwise think they’re exempt.

The Saturation Complex of Geek Culture

I had mentioned in a post earlier that there is a prevailing idea that misconstrues how geek culture came to be. I can’t really say where this came about, although I strongly suspect that films and TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s paired with gendered conceptions surrounding geek culture are to blame. Whatever the cause, it has fueled this conception, leading to a sort of alienation complex as the geek community shifts and changes.

As a result, there is this saturated version of history, which relies on the idea that women and minorities have not been a part of geek culture until very recently (as in, within the last decade). As a result, there has developed a constant push against women and minorities joining in on geek culture, with particular “tests” placed against women in order to test if they’re “qualified” to partake in the geek community. These blockades grow increasingly pointless as geek culture continues to gain popularity, and yet for some reason persists. Perhaps I can explain why.

You see, it all starts at the source of geek culture: Science Fiction (Sci-Fi). In the saturated version of geek history, the first Sci-Fi author was Jules Vernes, best known for his book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. As a result, this causes men who believe this start to think that women and other minorities have no real right to enter and write about Sci-Fi.

However, if you make one quick Google search, you’ll find that this version is incorrect. While Jules Verne was one of the earlier Sci-Fi writers, the real first Sci-Fi author was Mary Shelley, who published Frankenstein in 1818, a whopping fifty years before Jules Verne. This makes the Sci-Fi genre not a “boys only” club, but a club founded by women.

Shelley wasn’t the last female Sci-Fi author, either. Well-known ones include Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Suzanne Collins. Sci-Fi has never been a “boys only” club, although it is often pushed to appear that way.

Comics, by contrast, didn’t really diversify until recently. In its early days, the comic industry was very much “boys only”, mostly outright refusing to hire women and other minorities. This isn’t unusual, however; the entertainment industry as a whole was that way.  That isn’t to say that women and minorities weren’t in those realms, but it was very difficult to break in, particularly from the 1920’s-1970’s. This realm makes it a whole lot easier to promote the saturated history. Since women and other minorities were barred, it was easy to say that they didn’t belong and exist in the space. Despite the fact that the majority of comic readers in the present era greatly outweighs the “traditional” readership (white men), there is still this stigma that pushes women and minorities away.

The same goes for the video game industry. Women and minorities were mostly barred in the early days (as they were discouraged and stigmatized from getting STEM degrees in college), meaning that they couldn’t break in until more recently. This has created a frictional environment that extends beyond game development and into game playing, leading to online harassment and common claims of not being a “real gamer” to anyone that doesn’t fit the geek stereotype. To be honest, the “fake gamer” argument is ridiculous: if you play games, you’re a gamer. You don’t have to be best of the best, but if you play video games as a hobby, then you qualify.

The reason there is such a push back against diversity entering geek culture mostly stems from a victim complex among the “traditional” geeks. Despite the fact that geek culture has been gaining continuous popularity over the last two-three decades (exploding after the premiers of Walking Dead and Game of Thrones), the news for some reason has not hit the geek community. Or, rather, it has not processed.

The “traditional” geeks seem to be in denial about just how popular geek culture is, moaning and groaning how they are such victims and such a minority, while at the same time fighting against anyone that doesn’t fit their own characteristics and pushing them away. They like to act like they’re still the kids that get severely bullied, although just about any kid with a computer nowadays has access to video games and anime. It’s a bizarre complex that sticks out like a sore thumb.