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When Being a Contrarian Becomes a Shtick on the Ragged Edge of Mania
Fast Fact: Exposure to Metroids Can Induce Severe Dementia in Gaming Pundits
Listen: I like Malstrom–I think he makes a lot of good points about ‘disruption’ and the foolish direction that much of the gaming ‘biz’ seems hell-bent on pursuing without reason or forethought–Hell, I even agree with the, up until today, over-emphasis on meaningless, absolutely terrible, cinematics in Other M–but once you start believing your own hype and shtick it can, if you’re not careful, leap right over constructive and headlong into shark-jumping “batsh*t insane”:
You have to laugh at how many people don’t even know the difference between a teaser trailer and a gameplay trailer. A gameplay trailer is footage of someone playing the game. A teaser trailer is little more than cherry picked parts placed in a montage that doesn’t really show the game being played.
No, a gameplay trailer is anything that shows gameplay but, even if it weren’t, who thinks this is ‘funny’, even in a sardonic, petulant, sort of way??
But wait, the hair-splitting continues…
Where is the gameplay footage? There are only flashes of a montage strung together. Only at the end there is footage that is longer than two seconds and even that is nothing more than to show Samus bouncing around with auto-aiming doing the weapon work.
So, is he annoyed that they aren’t showing gameplay (they are) or is he annoyed at the auto-aim mechanic? And, uh, those “flashes of a montage” contain…gameplay footage.
Nintendo has had people play the game. Why not actually show them playing the game? What is the harm in just watching someone play it? Why is there so much darkness over the game?
Because the vast, vast, vast majority of us, not living in Malstrom-land, DO NOT WANT to see someone, in the frame, blocking/obscuring/diluting the video. We want to see the game not some fat/skinny/ugly/hot (OK, maybe hot) person flailing away at the controls–we want to see what the game, played by someone that knows what they’re doing, looks like.
(If you want to see raw ‘footage’ of people fucking up while they play, well, there’s always IGN.)
The marketing strategy for Other M appears to be selling the game on its style as opposed to its substance. With Mario games, they show gameplay footage. With Zelda games, they show gameplay footage. With the Metroid Prime games, they even showed gameplay footage.
They’re showing gameplay footage here. Again.
But, in addition, the game still isn’t out for several months and it’s pretty typical marketing practice (even on games like Mario and Zelda) to gradually ladle out the good stuff in measured doses to build hype.
What’s more is he surely knows this implicitly and pretending this isn’t how it’s normally done or that this is some bizarre departure from SOP is a little…disingenuous?
Also (and bear with me, as this might sound “batsh*t insane”), maybe the game wasn’t in complete enough shape, until very recently, to show off anything except cinemas? Is that a possibility? Maybe? I’m pretty certain Malstrom has never done any development work before1, but I (and anyone working in the biz reading this) can attest to how a lot of games don’t really ‘come together’ until the 11th hour. (And it even happens to the wunderkinds at NCL once in a while.)
(Even beyond that, it isn’t like people that haven’t worked in the ‘biz’ haven’t been regaled with all manner of horror stories about the monstrous ‘crunch culture’ that is part and parcel with this biz and, hell, even Hollywood these days where it’s pretty normal to work on a film up until days from its release.)
Other M’s teasers have been so cinematic heavy that people are confusing no cinematics to mean ‘gameplay footage’. Gameplay footage means showing the substance of the game. It means showing someone playing it as is. It does not mean cutting and pasting a montage of three to six second clips intermixed with yet more flashes from the cinematics (cinematics are still highlighted in this trailer). Gameplay footage means footage. Three to five second clips are not footage in any shape or way.
OK, maybe it’s just not getting through:
Footage: a motion-picture scene or scenes: newsreel footage; jungle footage.
Hmm, looks like footage, by definition, to me.
Anyway, this continues for another thousand or so, rambling, words as it gradually moves away from flogging the ‘what is footage/is it a trailer or teaser’ (‘you’re a moron for calling a teaser a trailer…moron’), foaming-at-the-mouth, near-mania (into other, foaming-at-the-mouth, near-mania), and then this kinda jumps out at you towards the end:
So what is going on here? Why all this Metroid batshit insanity? Why the hostility to people who hold disinterest?
I dunno, Malstrom: you seem to have most of the answers already, but might I suggest, just this once, that the answer you’re looking for might lie in the mirror?
Edit: I should also note that Malstrom holds anything but “disinterest” in this game as this post, ironically, drives home with the fury of a 20-ton hammer: he’s been going on and on and on (and on and on) about how this game is violating his childhood since it was announced (which has morphed into pedantry over what makes up “footage” and a “trailer”), so bemoaning that the lunatics on the other end of the spectrum are pissed off would seem to be Internet physics2 in action.
(No, I am not saying it’s OK to kick his ass, but, really, how lacking in self-awareness does one need to be to state that he is ‘disinterested’ when all the evidence–from his own pen!–points in the opposite direction, i.e. he’s ‘disinterested in Metroid like I’m ‘disinterested’ in Big Macs or video games or chicks with sizable, err, endowments. If he doesn’t want to be picked on–like everyone with a strong opinion in human history–he needs to either tone down his over-the-top rhetoric (I probably wouldn’t, but I’m thick-headed on such things) or he can just ignore the clowns giving him grief and, voila!, most of them will stop, but the surest way to egg them on is to feed the bloody fire–this is elementary and, again, he surely knows this.)
Here, by the way, is the offending (not) footage:
1 A commenter notes that Malstrom has been in development, which actually makes this worse.
2 Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction–which is basically the law that keeps the seething pit of mental illness that is the Internet going.
Samus (Finally) Struts Her Stuff
Lookin’ good, girl:
And…not so much:
