Doomverse #27 - ID May Be Doomed

Unfortunately, thanks to a lot of terrible crashing in the gaming industry, a very large amount of employees in ID Software have been laid off. The layoffs came as Microsoft are continuing to lose support for the Xbox. Pretty much, after the Revelations DLC was released for Doom The Dark Ages, the ID Software studios are now down to less than half of their former numbers. This was in the wake of new Quake installment rumors floating around, even going so far as to tease a new project in future plans that are now heavily in question. 

Xbox announced that it was going to just keep chugging along with the layoffs, as ID Software is far from the only one affected by all of this. The gaming crash continues to destroy more and more studios. Developers and publishers are now finding out why they need their customer base. This is especially hard, considering ID Software was the one that consistently delivered amazing games. Doom 2016, Doom Eternal and Doom The Dark Ages brought players what they wanted. While TDA didn't perform quite as well as they hoped, they still took out a ton of game developing experience! They threw the baby out with the bath water, seeing has how ID Software was ready to keep going with what they were doing. 

Bethesda also had their big toy, Fallout taken away from them and handed off to Fallout New Vegas team, Obsidian. Judging by how well The Outer Worlds 2 turned out, I'm still not holding out hope. Xbox has been making so many consistent wrong decisions that it's basically too late to save it. To think that they could make a New Vegas sequel or Fallout Spinoff of any kind is rather laughable at this point. 

Sadly, this could also mean it will be a very long time before we get a proper Doom or Quake sequel, if ever. Other gaming franchises have gone ice cold over the decades and it's hard to believe that they would ever put Doom back into the freezer, but that has been the case for a lot of our favorites. The worst thing you can do is panic over this. In the end, it is not worth losing yourself over. Doom is legendary for a reason, as it is ageless. It is one of those fandoms that will always survive because it was made for the fans by true gaming geniuses that loved and respected their base of loyal subjects. However, this is not the time for giving up on it.

The game crash is hitting us where it hurts, but we still have our own libraries full of endless classic Doom levels, Doom 4 levels from the map makers, all of the games we've been collecting over the years are still within our fingertips and we do not need to give them up for anything because they're ours. Remember to keep Deathmatching, playing the single players and keeping the Doomverse alive through pure fandom. It may be a long road for the gaming industry to recover, but now it's time to hunker down and help each other like true gamers should. Either way, keep ripping and tearing, and get some old Doom ports. Then you'll Virtua Shred!!! 

And Then it Crashed...

Well, we should have seen this coming for a while, which we did, but it still isn't fun news. Playstation and Xbox have both decided to stop selling physical copies of games, basically destroying the market for used games, which is half of the market. What this means is a lot of suffering customers and suffering sales. The worst part about it is what it will do to physical outlets like Gamestop and Game XChange, along with many other stores that rely on used games for most of their profit margin. 

It's time like this that I hate when I'm right. I've pushed hard to physical copies and this is the very reason. Without physical discs, that leaves customers vulnerable with their collections being 100% digital from here on. This means that there will be no used games or new games for outlets even like Walmart or Target. All of it will be on their home stores and that is basically putting all of their eggs in one basket. Not only can they inflate prices however they want, they can also delete the games from digital accounts if they so wanted to, which they have made abundantly clear. 

Keeping used games in circulation is more important now than ever before. There's really no telling how long this whole scorched Earth tactic will go on. It could be done and done for, or there is always the chance that backlash and falling sales could change their minds. Either way, this means very bad things for the gaming industry. 

The article I released today was supposed to be released later this month, but instead I released it today because what I was writing about came very true. Again, this is a time to vote with your wallets and make sure that if you want physical media to come back, it's time to stop buying the digital stuff or at least cut down on the spending as a whole. If you're down with physical media going the way of the beeper, that's your little red wagon, but I am all for them stopping this horrible posturing like now they have all of the cards and are ready to deal them on the buying customer whenever they so please. Without the need to create discs and cases, they'll save millions within the first few months alone on game costs. Will we be seeing a duck in prices as well? Oh, I wouldn't hold my breath on that one just yet, Virtua Bro. 

Judging by the discourse against this blatant anti-consumerism that we've been seeing for years, it has reached a boiling point, and a lot of people are waking up to the fact that gaming industries really don't have their best interests or fun factor in mind. All they really have been after was your wallets and purses from the very start. While this was obvious, they at least went to some lengths to fulfill the customer's order. At this point, the industry is basically expressing nothing but contempt for their own audience, convinced that they are overly hard to please simply for having an opinion that their games shouldn't be glitching so bad as to make you fall through the Earth pixels every time you press right on the joystick.

Hopefully, you have some good games to fall back on in what will be coming. This dry spell is going to suck, but that's just the order of things at this point. Much like the crash of the 80's, this one is going to run its course for as long as it takes. Be friendly and be productive. If you don't play your old machines, sell them to a good home or sell them to someone who will give them one. Be thankful for what we are given but reject the things you don't want. As always, they need to earn their paychecks if they want to see their games stop flopping and until then, enjoy some old games. Looks like it's time to make a Virtua Return to the consoles that birthed this site. Keeping it mixed up, but mixing in some classics, as always. Help each other and we'll be fine. Virtua Peace. 

AAA vs Indie #1 - The State of the Gaming Industry Today

Well, it's looking kinda dark for the video game industry, but it's also nothing we haven't seen before. Obviously, priorities got crossed somewhere along the way and now the big AAA industry has proven that it has lost its way. Indie games, on the other hand, have continuously given us surprises and challenges that we are enjoying. Not only are they more fun and inventive than the corporate garbage being pumped into the silo, but they are cheaper and more care has been given in considering the customer. How the industry has taken such a nosedive isn't really a huge mystery. Now that social media is more readily available and individuals have more access to communications with the general public, it has become something of a first grader's view on how to handle that freedom. 

The point of Public Relations is to hype up the game and sell it to the player. That's it! There should be no other reason to talk to the buying audience than to show off what the game can do and what their experience will be like playing it. It is not a platform to berate and chastise the public for not wanting to buy your game. Once the buyer has decided that they don't want to spend the money, you have lost. Rubbing salt in your own wound and blaming the customer should never be on the agenda. Why do they allow these devs and publishers to speak on their behalf, with their name in their profiles as a constributor to that business? They are literally calling the public names and preaching at them like children, and it is only driving their own name into the ground.

Reputation is not just "who can look the coolest?" It is the way your viewing public perceives you. If you use your business to try and scam your players into purchasing your game, you are showing that you do not have our best interests in mind. You can have the most amazing game with every feature under the sun, but if you start throwing in microtransactions, modern politics and extremely horrific characters both in design and personality, it really should come as no mystery why no one bought the game. If no one cares about the game or likes how it looks, doubling down and speaking against the audience  is not going to make anything better. 

Well, it has already reached a boiling point. Customers are looking at indie games and buying them by the truck loads. When you have a game that is only 20 or 30 spacebucks, you're more apt to open up. When a more graphically appealing but mediocre looking game comes at 70 or 80 virtua clams, it's going to be a much harder sell. Their wallets speak for themselves and nothing will change that. 

The indie developers comment very little on a personal level, besides taking jabs at the industry. They are getting lukewarm reviews by so-called "gaming journalists" but it's obviously because they don't have bribe money. Oh, don't think it's not obvious that gaming websites have been dealing under the table with their reviews. They will obviously prop up the most atrocious trash because they lined their pockets, while games that stand on their own get 5's and 6's. 

Gaming Awards are some of the biggest jokes still left from the old days. They actually meant something at one point, but now someone can just plant a game that agrees with their political views and they're the ones in the running. They continuously snub games that don't go along with their narrative, but the joke is that those are the games that are actually selling. Numbers do not lie and neither does Steam when it comes to the player counts and overall sales of a game. The mere fact that this angers the AAA industry goes to show how trustworthy they are. This whole "Oh, it sold gangbusters, trust me bro" got old and outdated years ago. 

Honesty is in short supply with the gaming industry. So, now if a developer or publisher shows some humility in both pricing and game development, they are drawing the crowd. Not all indie games are even real indie games and the public is snooping out their lies as they comes. It really goes to show how insulting the public's intelligence does not bear fruit. With games taking 5 to 8 years to come out, they are missing extremely glaring problems in their development as the companies rarely keep an eye on public interest. So, when the game comes out and the hundreds of millions of dollars are already spent, the game will often not meet any sales figures and the development team usually goes with it. 

With this very puzzling industry standard, it's obvious that they will start weeding out the teams that are not meeting sales. The development teams will go under and the team will split into more development teams. At some point, this should get the less productive team members to find other types of work, but that is a much longer process than it really should be. Still, the more money they spend on flops, the more we will begin to see the tides changing. How hard will it crash in the meantime? That's really hard to tell, but it's going to come down one way or the other. Everything has a natural order and these dry periods are only going to get worse before they get better. The great thing about indie developers is that they don't quite play by the same schedule, so we may see some games from them sooner rather than later as the AAA corporations either die or wake up to reality. Only time will tell.

So we don't end on a downer note, though, I am happy to announce an idea that came back to the surface. I had an idea for a series a long time ago called AAA vs Indie and I made three articles about it. These articles ended up becoming their own singular entities when I loaded them to this website, but the Sonic Spectrum article, Survival Horror article, and Mighty Number Nein were all part of this series. It's going to pit interesting tidbits and events of the industry fighting between the two ends of the spectrum and see who comes out on top. It's not really a level playing field, but that's never stopped some developers from dominating as the underdog. So, let's take a nice little journey as I introduce yet another series because I feel like it. Virtua Boss.

Doomverse #26 - Music En Memorium

Sadly, on June 16th, 2026, we said goodbye to one of the front runners of Doom history. The man they came to for rocking tunes for their games has passed on. Bobby Prince was to thank for an entire laundrey list of original game soundtracks, especially in the 80's and 90's. They came to him when they were at a loss of what to do with both music and sound effects. Bobby showed them techniques that they continuously used from then on. He allowed them to use his equipment and experiment with his computer programs to distort their voices and make beautiful sound effects that we still remember and love today. 

Thanks to Bobby, we have the rocking metal knockoffs of Doom. Was he supposed to basically copy their melodies almost 1 for 1? No, honestly, they could have gotten into legal trouble. Still, it seems they were cool with it because Doom is awesome. Bobby represented game soundtracks through both ID and Apogee, as he also worked closely on the Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem II & 3D. His fingerprints can be heard throughout the gaming world as people still play all of these games to this day. These games are timeless, and Bobby Prince helped make that happen. 

Commander Keen was one of his earliest works in the industry and he stuck with it throughout the series. This led to his companionship with ID Software through Apogee's founder, Scott Miller. While it may seem like he has a bit of a light library of work, what work he did made an impression on PC gaming as a whole. If anyone deserves a mantle spot in the creation of Doom and Doom II, Bobby Prince deserves a spot of real respect right beside John Romero, John Carmack, Sandy Petersen and Adrian Carmack. 

To Bobby's family and friends, our hearts go out to you. We will remember Bobby for all of his great achievements, but he is also a life lost to the real world. May he rest in power and bring more music to the heavens. Goodbye, Friend.

Xbox One - How Greed can Poison a Gaming Company

Anyone in the videogame zeitgeist can tell you why Xbox lost the console wars. It was not because Playstation was a trustworthy company and it was not because any exclusive game for another console. Microsoft did it to themselves and they are still feeling the stranglehold of that failure years after the eighth generation had come and gone. From the day that it was announced, the Xbox One uncovered just how bad a game console could get even before it was released in 2013. It also showed gamers just how much control they could have over their gaming experience and it was a very disconcerting revelation that made the general public stop trusting Microsoft. 

This all began in April of 2013 when a Microsoft Studios employee, Adam Orth, confirmed people's dreadful rumor of the next generation console requiring to be always online. He posted on his Twitter account that a console always being online was not a big deal and that people just needed to accept it. This was the first very large nail in Xbox One's console and opened up an entire flooding of negative press and public backlash. He lost his job soon after making the comment, but this was only the beginning of a very long and dreadful launch of a machine that was now in question. 

Adam Orth

The following months only brought more news and more disbelief. It seemed like every single thing that Microsoft revealed about the Xbox One only drew more backlash and public hatred. They announced that this console was not going to focus on gaming and that it was more about being a replacement to your computer and your television. Rather than giving people new games with which to gain hype, they told people that it was going to play BluRay, have cable service and live streaming capabilities that far exceeded all of the others. Rather than a gaming console, they wanted to replace literally every other high level media in a household. The idea was that the Xbox One would be the center of an entire family's entertainment rather than just playing to the niche of gaming culture.

Unpacking this, it still feels like this was a brainchild of both mismanagement and poor planning. Either a family would be required to purchase a multiple Xbox Ones in order to fill every bedroom and living room, or they would have one for the entire family to watch movies, TV shows while also bearing the burden of being little Timmy's way of playing new games. In retrospect, the idea had flaws down to the very foundation. When was the gamer actually supposed to find time to play the newest releases for the Xbox system when the rest of the family was counting on it to play their movies and other forms of media? 

Then they decided to bury themselves in even more controversy and show their true intentions with the console. Not only was it required to be purchased with the Kinect, an item that was already condemned as a meaningless add-on, but it also had a program that would marry one game to one console alone. That's right, you can only play new games in this console and you could not loan out your used games to friends, nor sell them to game stores. GameStop took issue with this, obviously, since the vast majority of their revenue came from used games. Gamers were not all swimming in money. It was quite the contrary in most cases and many collections were filled with used titles that were marked down. Xbox doubled down on this decision, stating that if they wanted to loan a game to a friend, they would need to pay a fee in order to do so. These restrictions were clearly meant to strangle every single customer for as much money as they could, even when it came to reselling the game to "certain retailers". 

One of the worst parts about this was the announcement that this system was always supposed to be online. That may seem arbitrary to some, but there are many out there who do not have a very stable internet connection. If the game console goes offline, you immediately lost the use of the Xbox One and the games you have loaded on it, whether you had the physical copies or not. After an enormous bit of backlash from this, the CEO of Xbox, Don Mattrick, in all of his lack of intelligence, announced in an interview that "for people who do not have an internet connection, there is another machine, it's called the Xbox 360". Once again, more and more people decided to side with the PS4, stating that they got the message loud and clear. This was such a callous and thoughtless comment, it brought about the theory that he was actively trying to make this console fail. Of course, they went from always online to only needing to be online once a day to check in with the Xbox servers. 

Giving credence to the idea that Mattrick stopped caring about the Xbox One altogether, he left the company soon after the controversy hit critical. He hit the road and instead went to Zynga so that he could leave that company as well two years later. This is one very large, glaring issue with the gaming industry as a whole. If things aren't going their way and they find themselves between a rock and a hard place, they can just zipline out of the company while it burns to the ground, taking their ridiculous amount of money with them. Why this man was ever given an opportunity after this blatant show of stupidity is a mystery all its own. 

The Kinect also became a point of concern for many, as it was always required to be on. They said that this was only so that it could have its voice activation on call for when someone wanted to turn on the Xbox One verbally. People saw this as very suspicious and began to wonder how much information they were gathering about each individual customer through both audio and video feeds. To try and reassure people, they told them that none of the data they collected was going to be used for any nefarious things like selling it to outside sources. However, the data was, in fact, being collected. The demand to remove the Kinect from the console was in an uproar, but Microsoft said that the Xbox One and the little camera gathering data were part of the same machine by design and it could not be removed. This was an outright lie, as they did remove it later on after the highest peaks in the controversy. It also had the added bonus of removing 100 space bucks from the price as a result.

Playstation did not help matters in the slightest, when push came to shove. They came out in front of the public and told people all of their features for PS4, which were not even real "features". They were, however, vast improvements over what was being promised for the Xbox One. They didn't require to always be online, they told people that all you needed to do to share your video game is to let them borrow it, they were focusing on making great games for the console, and the price tag for the Playstation 4 was 100 space bucks less. They even made a show of it. Two guys went on the screen and showed you the only step that you needed in order to share your games with each other, and it was just a guy handing another guy a game and him saying "Thank you". Ouch. 

There was another very large nail in the Xbox One's coffin, the price. It was 500 smackers! This was a ridiculous price, especially with how much they were planning to price the games and all of the other accessories that were not included with its purchase. Every single announcement that Microsoft came out with only convinced customers that this was not the console for them and the backlash only got worse as time went on and Microsoft continually failed to see the forest for the trees. By the time they started making the console more affordable and implimenting different improvements and services for it to flourish, the damage was already done. 

They had to race to meet PS4's quality and they even improved it to the point where it had backward compatibility with the Xbox 360 in some of its games. They put in a service called the Game Pass, where people could have an entire barrage of games for a monthly fee and started to focus more on new games rather than every other type of media, but it was all for nothing. The launch for the Xbox One was such a disaster that it became impossible to keep up. The good will that the 360 brought to the community was gone and they were playing catch up years after the Xbone came out. It helped to some degree but they had already lost the console wars.

If there was any generation of consoles to win, this was the one that needed it the most. Not only was the gaming industry becoming more and more competitive, the culture of digital games was blooming and that meant a big shift in the industry as a whole. Xbox One missed the mark, and that meant that all of the digital games that were sold for the console were not going to be bought for the next generations of consoles. If you bought games digitally for the PS4, there was very little chance that you would even consider moving over to the Xbox Series X for the next gaming experience. The digital library is fairly locked in by this point and all of it was made playable on the PS5. All of that revenue Microsoft could have gotten for people buying a new console under the Xbox banner was up in flames. 

As of the writing of this article, the Xbox is still feeling the effects of this gigantic misstep. The gaming industry's greed is still ever present, but never has it been so clearly unmasked in the public eye. They did everything to try and make up for their attempts to syphon money from their customers, but they lost all of the trust they had garnered in the years before. No one can blame the public for siding with Playstation on this one. Sony may also be greedy and constantly lie to gamers, but at least they do it while selling a product people actually want. It's a very sad notion that we need to catered to by thieves but that's the reality we live in. The gaming industry is hitting a gigantic low point because of it, but all we can do is hope for a brighter future and remember to drink water.

The Age of Concord - How Bad Can it Get?

 I was not part of the populace that wasted money on this game, nor was I willing to waste my time in buying it while subsequently getting an obligatory refund for said game. I was one of the vast majority that watched this game come and go like a terrible fart in an elevator. It can hardly be considered a fart in an elevator, it was gone 11 days after its release! This should have been an amazing example of what not to do when creating a game, and yet it seems to be the example that so many developers and publishers have followed ever since. 

There are so many aspects of Concord that led to its extremely short lifespan: Catering to activists and their insecurities, releasing it with a $40 pricetag when its superiors were free to play, spending $400 million dollars and ten years to develop it and coming out on social media to shame their audiences for not wanting it, all of it should have been setting off alarms in Sony's head. This was a failure on such a colossal level, people barely even remember why we hated Atari's E.T. in the first place. This stomped every single competition on the road to the very bottom and it did so with such amazing ease that they never even bothered to rerelease it as free to play. 

No one has come to the conclusion that, perhaps, they should have been listening to the public. You would think that there was a PR department looking through the comments and gamer buzz to see what players were doing at the time. The problem was that this was all developed in the vain of Overwatch because of its amazing popularity and the fact that it made Blizzard all kinds of money. The fact that Blizzard still ruined Overwatch and fired all of its lead developers in the process doesn't even enter into the equation. The fact was that the moment they made the decision to try and remake Overwatch when it was popular meant that they were already behind the times. Gaming culture changes like the wind and waiting ten years to release a game to catch the "current" zeitgeist of entertainment is like trying to grab water on its way out of the faucet. By the time Concord was released, that ship had left the port years prior. 

The greatest games come about when a developer or a team of developers share a vision to bring something to gaming that wasn't there to begin with. Even if it's not an especially unique idea, if the vision is strong enough with the gameplay, there is a very good chance that it can be a huge success. These are games that come from a desire to exceed expectations in both design and aesthetic, making a vision come to fruition and polishing that game to a beautiful sheen. 

So, why is it that there are spiritual successors to Concord already? The game bit the dust and we're already seeing others come out of the woodwork that look eerily similar. Not only are they creating disgustingly unimaginative characters and boring as hell gameplay, but they are also doing the same cardinal sin of going after the gaming public that they need to sign their paychecks. If you do not have gamers playing your game, your game is going to fail. Period. 

Highguard made the same mistakes in spades. Every single aspect of Concord was brought back to the table, including the fact that they had no idea what gamers were asking for. They certainly weren't asking for a 3v3 hero shooter with gargantuan maps that they can't populate properly. Every single character basically plays the same aside from arbitrary abilities that unlock every so often. Beyond that, you get cookie-cutter weapons and ride horses that are astoundingly difficult to shoot from. The characters are unimaginative as ever. They either have modern day haircuts and/or look like they belong to other games, only made worse. 

Whoever is signing these developers' checks should make a clause in their contracts that obligate them to shut the hell up on social media! These people look so pathetic when they go on the internet and just whine and cry about how they wasted half a decade or more making this game. They will swear that the game they made was awesome, but then go into how they never got any outside influence of any kind, so they had no idea that no one was asking for it. After the ridiculous fallout of Concord, that should have set off some serious bells that this was all a very bad idea. Even if they were so deep into its development, they should have cut their losses or at least not put so much into it from then on. 

No one forced them to put the game at the end of the Game Award Show. They thought that including elements of every popular hero shooter was going to win them fans, but it just made it more generic. It made it fodder for memes and gamers coming out and calling it a sequel to Concord. This should have come as no surprise but it caused their development team to go radio silent soon after the Game Award announcement. All of a sudden, all of the echoes in their chamber started to truly doubt their creation. The release started with a promising 100,000 gamers playing it, but that number was brought down to a dismal 1,000 to 2,000 players within weeks. They accused gamers of not giving it a chance but that's all they gave it. The game was apparently so boring that people couldn't even make it past the tutorial which is REQUIRED at the beginning. It's evident that no one on the team had played a game in their lives or someone would have told them that this was a huge mistake. 

If one live service game wasn't bad enough, now they've announced the gameplay and character roster of Horizon Zero Dawn's new game, Hunters Gathering. In this post apocalyptic world, apparently it's fruitful enough for one woman to eat her way to a diabetic amputation. The characters still look amazingly generic and unappealing. Nothing was learned from Concord's cataclysmic failure. Of course gamers aren't going to give this game a chance, nor should they. It already released trailers and every single one of them is just getting disliked at an amazing rate. The publishers can stick their fingers in their ears and go LALALALALALA all they want, but no amount of blaming gamers for their failure is going to make up for the money they are about to lose. This is not making assumptions at this point, this is just common sense and gaming Darwinism at work. 

The boy can only cry wolf so many times before he loses his voice, and gaming companies are about to learn their lesson one game at a time. These games are not free to make and every single dollar may as well be burned for all it matters at this point. Give the money to charity if you want it to actually make a difference in the world. Stop wasting gamers' time. The only good thing coming out of this mess is the hours of content it is giving youtubers to make amazing videos. If that's the gift you want to give to the world, spend another 100 or 200 million dollars for our ironic entertainment. Stop torturing and crunching your developers and at least buy them some water. They're going to need it.

Suicide Squad - Kill Your Franchise

 

Before you ask, no, I never played this game. My ear was very close to the ground and there was still more than enough content to build an entire series of articles. We'll just be limiting it down to one, though. There are miles and miles of nails to drive into this coffin and my hammer is more than up to the task. When talking about the Batman Arkham Series, many will cite only four games. Even when people are hesitant to mention the highly underrated Arkham Origins, they are far more hesitant to include Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Calling Captain Boomerang "Boomer", pandering and putting women up on a pedastal along with cringeworthy one-liners are the very least of this game's problems. Rocksteady took ten years to create this and with the original head developers leaving in the middle of its making, the fans of the series were starting to worry. Their hesitance was... "justified".

This all came to a head when the game was released and all of its majesty was there for the people's consideration. First, the game charged you seventy space bucks for the root game, one hundred simoleons for the same game with a few alternate costumes and then it had the GALL to ask you to pay for more costumes, extra DLC missions with watered down characters then just about every other thing they thought they could drain your wallet with. If any of you paid full price for any of this, you have my sympathies and the notion that you hopefully learned your lesson. 

Suicide Squad killed itself from the very start with the tag "LIVE SERVICE GAME", which everyone with a braincell can translate to "You play for maybe a year before the servers go down". It already happened to Avengers, why did they think we would fall for it yet again with a terrible idea like this? Then they came out and PROUDLY stated that they will be killing all of our beloved characters with little to no reverence and all around pure embarrassment. The fan backlash was immediate and very harsh, as it should be. 

The treatment of the Justice League was beyond repugnant. They not only killed the Flash and had Captain Boomerang piss on him, but they also killed Batman while shaming him with Harley Quinn's disgraceful monologue. This was the final time Kevin Conroy voiced the Dark Knight and they let him go out with a shot to the head on a park bench. This game deserved far worse than its already abismal fate. If that wasn't enough, Wonder Woman was the only one to be paid any sort of respect when she overcame her brainwashing and stabbed Superman with a piece of kryptonite. The only reason she was paid any reverence was because she was the only woman featured in the Justice League and their bias toward the demographic was as naked as this game's shameful concurrent player count. Women hated being pandered to and men playing were disgusted by the obvious lack of any creativity and trolling of the fanbase. Whoever made these choices should never make creative decisions again. 

 This is especially true when you start to see how desperate and pathetic their attempts were to save this awful mess. The sales were so bad, they started cancelling DLC's almost immediately after release. Whatever wasn't cancelled was given the chop in the budget. Many cutscenes were no longer 3D rendered to match the game. They became flashpoint 2D art that barely moved, if at all. The DLC cutscenes were "augmented" like this to save on money, but it was obvious that they were shooting them out the door as fast as they possibly could. Game glitches were aplenty, the sound kept going out and the more they made, the more they started regretting their numerous bad decisions. The Joker looked absolutely terrible, as if he decided that hard drugs were preferrable over actual food. Mr. Freeze turned into Miss Freeze, and her one-liners were not funny in the slightest, nor were her missions favorably reviewed. Then they brought in Deadshot's daughter, AKA "Lawless" to make sure we understand she is a "criminal genius" with a flair for skating in the moral gray area of being a criminal and an "anti-hero". Spoiler Alert: She was not popular.

The dialogue is agonizing to watch, even when you're catching them on youtube. One can only imagine having to deal with these lines while actually playing the game. Even without doing so, the repetitive nature and the looter shooter qualities are plain to see. Even IGN, who has given some of the worst games a 7/10, couldn't defend the gameplay of this so-called "Arkham title". The obvious toxic political agenda this game tried to present is another gigantic tumor in its engine. If you really want to scare away your entire fanbase, make sure to treat your audience like idiots and then put a place where they can slide their debit cards in for more. That's how successful games are made, right? 

No, as it turns out, Rocksteady (or the people claiming to be them) was destroyed as a result of this game's release. Layoffs, a gargantuan budget, EXTREME gaming bugs and server issues, release delays, expensive character outfits, terrible reviews on the game demo, developers leaving, fans giving the game the finger through ENORMOUS amounts of boycotts and refunds, all culminated in this game becoming an unfunny punchline. It lost them around the neighborhood of 200 million dollars. The player count stagnated to only three digit numbers. They stopped making content for it in under a year and the game is now officially dead. 

As Arkham fans, we can only take these trolls at face value and show them how their C-note game is now being sold for five space bucks. They thought they could spit in our faces and pander to a new audience. Well, that audience of nine people bought the game, but I can already tell you most of their revenue came from youtubers who were more than happy to tear it apart. It is a staggering tale of why you should never take an intellectual property in an attempt to "own the chuds on their own turf". Whether they consider their work accomplished or whether they wasted ten years on a dud is up to their own delusional state of mind. 

Am I enjoying spitting on this game's grave without spending a cent on it? Oh, yes, this is much needed therapy and it is a joyous experience. No Arkham fan in their right mind would ever canonize this garbage, and even if they did, the real joke came at the very end of its lifespan. Of course, in the cheapest cut scene they could muster, they explained that all of these Justice League members killed were all clones made by Brainiac or some crap, I don't care about any of the details. By this point, no one cared and the game's shills were yelling into the void of no players. It was worth a laugh, seeing them try to commit to damage control when no one was playing the game. Even the developers who were chortling at their own wit were finding out that they needed to keep developing content for this turd when it was already belly-up. 

It's a lot easier just to pretend that this game was never made. Sure, WB spent hundreds of millions on it to cram it into Arkham canon, but when has that ever truly mattered? One great thing to come out of this was many fans went back and decided that Arkham Origins really wasn't that bad. It was no masterpiece but playing the entire game was a far more rewarding experience than even glancing at the cutscenes for Suicide Squad: Kill Me Now, Please. As fans, we hold that power and the fans of the original Rocksteady creations used that to its utmost. The "New Rocksteady" has already dug its own grave, having lost more than half of its staff as a result of the botched game they released. They're trying to convince the public that they're working on a new single-player Batman game, but their reputation is already in the toilet. Whether they learned their lesson or not, the road to redemption is very long and costly. Perhaps it would be wise to never let this happen again. Virtua Bat Glare...

For Kevin

Death Binges - How GTA 3 Actually Stole our Hearts

DISCLAIMER: I shouldn't need to say this, but certain individuals need it spelled out for them. This article obviously does not condone the real life act of shooting firearms in public places. All acts of violence expressed within in a positive light are fictional, digital and thus not real. As much as people like to pretend that video games cause real life violence, the truth is that mental illness and real life violence cause real life violence. There are millions upon billions of people in the world who do not commit these acts of violence and yet they have played and enjoyed games such as these as well as video games that are far worse. If you have any concerns of moral ambiguity on games rated M for Mature or video game codes of ethics, you are free to close this window or move on to the next article. Thank you for your time. 

Everyone has their own flavor of sandbox games to choose from now. If you wanted to have powers and be able to kill random people with lasers and fire from your hands, there is Saints Row 4 and Infamous. If you like westerns, there're Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. If you just want a blank slate world with different continents and islands built in, there's Minecraft, Ark, Garry's Mod, the list goes on. Now days, you can do whatever you want in these worlds, and it all began on the streets of Liberty City. 

Grand Theft Auto 3 and its direct successors brought about immersion on another level. While you weren't able to go into every building, you could drive on every street, steal whatever cars you want, so long as there are no cops and/or it's not locked, and you can drive over people by the dozens, so long as you're ready to start racing the fuzz. While there was a main line mission to get to, there were also people who still draw breath. 

A lot of people like to just put in the cheat gunsgunsgunsgunsgunsguns and that will be enough to get you an arsenal with which to destroy entire crowds of bystanders. Now, this may sound easy, but once the police begin to barge in with their cars and their guns, it's suddenly a shootout and you need to be in cover. The AI of old was not great, and if you have the high ground with a railing (much like the one beside the hospital) you will have the advantage. The police can still shoot you, but it's much more difficult for them now, as the idea to go up the ramp doesn't occur to them very often. 

Depending on your choice of weapons, this can be pretty devastating. Employing the molotov cocktails and burning groups of people can hold some benefits. The problem is that if you release them too lightly, the fire will catch onto you. Now, this is also true for grenades, and those have a higher chance of killing you. The flamethrower for targets nearer to you is a way to go. It cooks and it's nice and clean so long as the people don't approach you while they are on fire. You need to keep at least some small distance but they will die very quickly. 

If you were wanting to go a more subtle route, there is the sniper rifle. This will literally take an NPC's head off. It may even kill two or three if you line them up correctly. Another horrifically awesome way to distance kill is with the AR-15. It shreds in this game! The AK-47 gets the job done but the AR-15 will even take down a helicopter after about a full clip. Usually, helicopters are best with the rocket launcher. 

Oh yes, dear reader, there is a rocket launcher and it is to be used with caution, as all rocket laucnhers are. This one is a bit more devastating than usual, though, and there are times when helicopters come in a little too close for comfort. One rocket will make people fall to pieces in large groups, though, and its power is not to be overlooked. You may also need it if you ever get tanks or other armored SWAT vehicles. It gets rather nasty.

Speaking of tanks, there is another cheat called giveusatank and you get one on the road immediately, destroying any vehicle beneath it. That's what this does. It takes the action movie cliche of cars exploding on impact to a new level. Every single car you hit, boom! You can drive down the street and fire off the cannon, sure, but you really only need to drive. Cop cars will run directly into you and explode immediately. This doesn't last forever, though, and once your tank lights on fire, you'd better exit, or you will find yourself faced against the word, WASTED! 

This is basically GTA 3's bread and butter and it has been for a good number of years. Other video games have broadened this idea and even improved on it. Saints Row 2 even put minigames where it keeps score on your progress of knocking civilians. There's no shame in enjoying this, sometimes it's just nice to take some anger out on some digital nonplayer characters. Just keep it in the digital world and drink real water.

Stadia - How Consoles can Eat Themselves

When the console wars reach new generations, sometimes we start seeing some very strange runners in the race. Every so often, they can be mega billion dollar juggernauts that smash our faces with awesomeness, like Nintendo's initially questionable Switch console. However, sometimes, there comes a console that has everyone scratching their heads, wondering where people came up with these... things. Sometimes the consoles just... aren't there. They were so proud of the fact that you do not have the console in your home and you could play your... thing on any screen in your house. It could be any screen far away, in a hotel. Tablets, smart TV's, phones, anything with access to the internet and some sort of controller feature could be used to play the games you... well... that's another problem. 

Problems, that is a big word you can use when you talk about Google's new project, Stadia. Once the platform launched November 2019, all you needed to do was pay one monthly fee. Well, there was also a $129 bill on top of that, which had people a little confused. You see, this whole "no hardware" deal they had with the console was all based around freedom to play it anywhere, no matter what, so long as it met the specs. Now they're telling customers that there is hardware you need to buy, the controller for the console was still required to be Stadia hardware. This seemed foolish because people already had universally praised Xbox controllers that they hook up to pretty much anything and play. There were a number of ways Google could allow people to use their own controllers, but they still needed that, on top of a connection link that you needed to input. 

The whole idea was that you could play this anytime anywhere and use games from a distant server that held all of your games, now that idea was obscured. This did not look good on them, especially when the console launched and there were... other problems. Users were starting to see this distant server gaming idea as more of an issue than a feature, as connectivity to the controller was very lax. People's input when they pressed the button did not match what was on the screen and there was a half second, sometimes even two or three second delay, depending on connectivity. 

On top of this, the lagging issues with servers and the capability of hardware was starting to show its cracks in their sales pitch. People were seeing strong issues with not simply turning off the Stadia, turning around and switching on literally any other console or PC and playing that way. In a world where you can play classic, beloved titles from your phone, Google was trying to shove their ways into people's hardware with not only terrible connectivity issues, but also a very limited library. 

This Planet Virtua has talked about the issues with people being patient with consoles and building their libraries. Playstation 4 had issues getting games out quickly and that hindered some in their sales, not that it mattered in the end. Stadia, however, was coming out with a brand new "console" with only a handful of current titles, fifty or so older titles, and one single exclusive...  This is not even stating that they had twenty or so games when it actually launched. They needed to play catchup and it felt like they never got any steam going when it came to what people wanted: The GAMES! It was 2019 going into 2020 at a time when people were having to stay in doors and they couldn't pick up the pace to try and strike while the iron is hot. They were still "releasing" games from 2016! 

Gylt, Stadia's one real exclusive game, was a middling game with passable reviews, and that is the one single title that they are trying to sell us on? So, your server "power" doesn't really mean much if the hardware isn't up to specific requirements, that limits the consoles considerably. Then, your library is floundering from the start and never breaks a hundred until WAY into its lifespan and are played far better on other consoles. 

That was what kneecapped this system from the very start. It brought no innovation to the table, it was selling you back your old games, (which cost money, strangely enough) that people already owned and the experience playing on it was so wonky. One moment you're cruising no problems, then your game starts lagging and the controls go to crap. Stadia never truly fixed the control problems throughout its four year lifespan. The very idea that this bundle of horrible mishaps went on for four years is an abysmal notion. That's like dying from several bullet wounds but still trying to win the 5K run as you fade, this was not healthy for Google. Nor was it good for their cleaning bill.

They proved to be a terrible company, once again, upon Stadia's ending days. Google was going to pull the plug and they made the announcement public. Then game devs and people who worked at Google, on Stadia, found out about it along with the consumers, in September 2022. These people were going to be out of a job and they were given no prior notice to find another job. The console never reached any good heights, it never sold well, and even people who were dedicated to its success admitted that it never reached any real peaks. It was pretty much all valleys. 

They tried to tell us that this was just like Steam, that this was the platform you needed to get because it could be played anywhere on any screen, which made it better. This was going against a company and a platform that was tried and true from the get-go and started modestly, eventually turning into a gaming titan with its own issues. Stadia started out with issues and tried to show us gameplay that still needed processing and work. The technology sounded great on paper, but the execution was absolutely dreadful and unfinished. It just wasn't there. It officially became not there in January 2023. It's still not there. It's just not.

Give the Gift of Physical Media! - Planet Virtua Christmas 2025!

Well, as is the tradition, we'll be opening our presents on Christmas Eve, and we'd really like them to be wrapped in paper and topped with a bow. That's right, this year, we're going to be giving the gift of physical media to those who wish to keep their games safe and on the shelves. Shelves are not so bad, sheet books for discs, or just flat out stack them in the old CD-R containters. Digital is not the devil, and it has its place, but always remember to keep your discs. 

It astounded me that they even thought to make a PS5 that is wholly digital, especially with the size of those games in the old storage that can balloon in both space and price very quickly. It's like they want you to just prepay for the 1TB or even the storage extensions. Or, you know, you can keep the majority of your library in cyberspace and hope and pray that your internet stays in tact or, God forbid, one day companies decide they want to stop leasing out their games to your library and POOF they're gone. 

No, I'm not saying that is an inevitability, even if it very well could be, but it is rather disconcerting that they would flat out tell you that you should become comfortable not owning your game. Yes, our comeback of not owning meaning pirating is not stealing is very witty and clever, but that doesn't stop the fact that the word "comfort" became very ironic, as the comment stirred up a great deal of discomfort. 

Physical media is our dragon horde, and it is much better when you are able to cover yourself and sleep within it. Yes, that is weird metaphor but the intention is the same. Yes, you must put up with the fact that you can lose your disc and cover box, needing to store it in whatever as said previously, but at least you know it's there in that comfortable space where you can reach it and pop it into that good old Saturn or PS2 or Gamecube, whatever is your jam. 

The Christmas tree, stockings or gift pile looks so much better with colorful boxes and retro media of all sorts. Give the gift of DVD and Blu-rays new in the box and let them fill someone's home with old school joy. Give a child a Dreamcast and show them the ways of Jet Grind Radio as it was originally intended (of course buying it for 5 bucks on Steam is also a viable option, but let's stay on topic). They will thank you and possibly beat your score and cause deep resentment. Family is fun! 

Above all, whether it be digital or physical, remember to be safe and happy however you can while keeping warm with those close to you. Remember to find your player 2, whoever they may be, as long as they bring you joy for the holidays. Bring them joy and beautiful 32-bit games you can put in your console. Have fun, take some time off and decompress. That's what games are for. Make some time and it would help if you shared it with someone special. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Planet Virtua! 

Virtua Dasher!

Goodbye, Playstation 4 - With a Fondness

As of October 6th, 2025, Playstation has officially stopped producing new games or new hardware for the Playstation 4. It really seems like only yesterday, they had just come into the market, and that was a little over ten years ago. Was that a long enough lifespan? Well, yes and no, but it was a long enough life to have some very memorable games come out for it in the generation. From Spider-man's greatest game to Resident Evil's seventh mainline entry, the memories are seemingly endless. This is the console that holds Doom 4 and Doom Eternal and those two games alone hold hours upon hours of gameplay in them. 

Now, I'm being sentimental, I know. I've already talked about my grievances with the lifespans of the Sega Saturn and its worthy successor, the Dreamcast. I'm no stranger to the death of great consoles. Playstation has had a long list of great consoles, despite my semi-joking mocking of the first console in the line. The Playstation 4 had some serious shoes to fill, given the awesome Playstation 3 and its capabilities. It succeeded. 

The eighth generation was very unique in several, SEVERAL ways, and that's mostly due to the Xbox One. While Playstation was going about business as usual, wrangling up all of their games and all of their game console features in line, Xbox was... not doing that. Instead, for some reason, Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to sell you a box that did television and movie streaming, music, basically anything a PC would already be more than equipped to handle. Oh, but THEN they were going to get to the games, you know, eventually. People were pretty baffled.

That's not even CLOSE to the worst part, though. They were starting to rattle off features like, ALWAYS ONLINE, the massive privacy camera on the front of the Xbone was always on, once you loaded the game from the disc into the console, the two were married now and you could NOT share your game with other console users. This meant that they were effectively erasing the used games aisle in every single gaming store. People saw this for what it was. While they were angling it as a more personal touch and a way to be closer to the customer, it actually came off like they wanted to get more money out of you so you could only buy new games, while also keeping you online to keep up full access to their online store while they watch you constantly with their camera and get all of the marketable information out of you they could. This was an absolute travesty of a mess. 

To say that Playstation 4 won the console wars for the eighth generation is underselling it. People went to Playstation straight from Xbox 360 and they started buying PS4 games, leaving Xbox in the metaphoric dust. This KILLED Xbox sales to the point where not even offering free digital games through their Xbox Live service could make them catch up. It helped them along for a little bit, but Playstation won, hands down. 

This spelled the absolute death of Microsoft's Xbox console, and we have been seeing its deteriorating state ever since. They almost straight up cancelled the Xbox Series X and the tenth generation console is still in heavy question. The problem was that the eighth generation was the worst generation to lose, and the Xbox lost so substantially, that it hurt their sales even MORE with the PS5. All of those PS4 games the customers had, both digital and physical can very comfortably be transferred to the PS5 with no sweat involved. It's takes a little over an hour and you are ready to play your old games on the new console that has already wiped the floor with the Series X system. 

Playstation convincingly put on the good guy mask in this situation and that immediately won them the war, even granting them victory laps. The video where they show how you can share games on the Playstation 4 has to be one of the funniest things they could have thought of and it probably sold them a couple million extra consoles as a result. The Playstation 4 came out on top because it focused on GAMING. Losing focus on gaming has killed many a console (though, I am hesitant to count the Philips CDI among them) because people are here for the sharpest gaming edge they can find. It gave us that and in great quantities. So, here we say goodbye to another console generation with the Playstation 4. It was a true gaming console, despite the other features. The Blu-Ray player, the streaming apps, playing old DVD's, all of it was there if you wanted it, but I'm here for GTA V because I have the urgent need to kill digital people! What? You all do it!

Remake for Panzer Dragoon II Zwei Announced

And the crowd goes mild. There is a very good reason why I have never really reviewed the Panzer Dragoon remake officially, and that's mostly because I forgot it existed. Seriously, this remake left such a huge non-impact on me that I never really even put finger to keyboard and stamped out any real thoughts on it. There really weren't many other than it was bland, ridiculously easy and flat out pressure washed the graphics to what looked like high definition, textureless polygons. The scenery was nice, but the Dragoon looked so generic. 

Panzer Dragoon, as a series, has left a huge impact because of its gameplay, its graphics, controls, enemies and vast, beautiful 32-bit terrains. It literally pushed the boundaries of what the Sega Saturn was capable of, and it's still celebrated to this day. Well, of course it is. Why else would they bother with remakes? The fact that they are making remakes for the Saturn is great, obviously, but I'm really hoping the Panzer Dragoon II remake doesn't go the same route as the first. The graphics should never be so smooth and flavorless. The grainy graphics were part of its real charm. 

The Quake remakes understood this. While it isn't a perfect job, they kept the core graphics the same, while making them look sharper. They never lost their dull edge, though. It still had the mud colors because of the graphics limitations it was presented. Going full 3D forced them to make the graphics more gothic and macabre. Much like Quake, Panzer Dragoon was rough around the edges in graphics, especially when it came to their horrific and amazing looking bosses. 

The next point is that, while maybe adding a difficulty meter is preferable, you should never make such a notoriously difficult game sooooooo blatantly easy. Panzer Dragoon itself is a very short game. The point is that you need to finish it in one sitting, but not at twenty minute sitting. It's made that difficult so that people can get more bang for their buck and require they try harder to beat a challenging game. Sanding off the edges of difficulty into rounded point plastic scissors barely able to cut a single construction paper is just taking away from the experience and often leaves one feeling like they could have spent their money elsewhere. 

Not everything about the remake was terrible, but it certainly didn't leave an impression and it's kind of a point of pride to say that Zwei has always been my favorite entry. The setting, the bad guys, the difficulty but also the adventure just gave the game life for me. Translating that into Steam and PS5 would be awesome, but hopefully they won't tinker with an already great game too much. It's great for a reason, and if you polish it to be too shiny you may ruin the paint! Do not make it bland and please give us a few more angles to look from, then this could be an amazing remake. We're keeping our Virtua Fingers Crossed.