VICE US - WaypointGames by VICEhttps://www.vice.com/en%2Fsection%2Fgames%3Flocale%3Den_usenThu, 27 Apr 2023 13:00:00 GMT<![CDATA[LG's Pricey Adjustable Curve OLED Flex Is a Multi-Class Specialist]]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kxbpg/lg-oled-flex-reviewThu, 27 Apr 2023 13:00:00 GMTThe LG OLED Flex is, at the most basic level, an LG C2 TV with one important special feature: a 42-inch flexible screen. It sits on a large adjustable stand containing the motors that can take the screen anywhere from being a perfectly flat TV to holding a 900R curve, meaning that at its most dramatic curve the screen would represent a slice of circumference for a circle with a 90 centimeter radius.

What this means in practice is that when you are sitting in front of it at your desk it wraps around you like an old IMAX screen and almost fills your peripheral vision. Its MSRP was $3,000, though it is discounted to $2,500 these days, which means that even now it is about three times the cost of its TV equivalent and almost double the cost of the 42-inch LG C3 TV that has begun to replace the C2 this year. For around the price of the OLED Flex you could buy both the new C3 and Alienware’s ultrawide quantum dot OLED monitor, the AW3423DW.

If that sounds like a terrible value proposition, you are not the only person to think so. When I was†researching what display to put in my new home office, I found a link to Digital Trends’ review of the display, which was the first I had ever heard of it. Editor-at-large Caleb Dennison’s final evaluation of the item was fairly measured, especially in light of its cost, but his framing was dangerous to me personally when he described the OLED Flex as a device that is attempting “to be the best of both the TV and monitor worlds. The end-all, be-all of personal displays. Dare I say, the ultimate display?”

A mocked up screenshot of a fake racing game with an old 1960s style F1 car racing down a brightly lit mountain highway, projected on a curving TV screen with the legend LG OLED Flex on it.
LG OLED Flex promotional image courtesy of LG

As someone who has never failed to ruin an RPG for himself by constructing a hopelessly compromised multi-class character, and who finds maximalist, over-engineered technology inherently fascinating, it almost didn’t matter what Dennison said for the rest of that review. He could have said the Flex had become sentient and killed his family and I would have thought, “Maybe they ironed that out in later production runs.”

So I messaged my colleagues with a link to the LG store page for the Flex asking a simple question: “Am I a mark or does this sound awesome?”

Nobody I’ve spoken to, with the important and decisive exception of my wife, has thought this device sounds awesome. Yet I gave into astonishment and ordered one, then waited over a month for it to arrive, daydreaming about how perfect it would be and how many problems it would solve.

Emanuel's thoughts.PNG

I don’t do hardware reviews here, I have neither the technical expertise nor the equipment to make a definitive statement about things like color accuracy and response times. But here’s the thing: there are basically no long-term reviews of the OLED Flex from people who live with the damn thing. It is sold and often described as an incredible all-in-one device that comes with decent speakers, cool bias lighting, a special “game center” feature (that it shares in common with the C2), and LG’s Multi-View feature that lets you throw two video sources on screen side-by-side. Taken alongside all that, the adjustable curve becomes the cherry-on-top of a multi-purpose ice cream sundae of a display.

I loved the idea of not having to mount a TV to the wall to adjust viewing angles or distance, of not having to run speakers around my office, of getting bias lighting that threw complementary sprays of color across the walls around my TV in sync with the display without having to mount a bunch of weird Gamer Shit alongside my TV. I fantasized about how Multi-View would let me play games on one side of the display while watching the Cubs, Bulls, and Bears lose on the other half [my editor informs me the Cubs are good now, but I know a false dawn when I see one]. The Flex part of the equation sounded like more of a neat gimmick than a valuable convenience, but taken together the whole package would be perfect for my needs in a way that almost justified the cost.

Then it arrived, followed closely by regret as those daydreams ran headlong into reality. I will tell you right now, most of those features are underwhelming at best and bullshit at worst. The LG OLED Flex is a TV whose display can adjust to function better as a computer monitor. It doesn’t do anything else much better than a normal LG TV, and there is absolutely no way I would have bought it if I had understood that from the start. Which would have been a mistake, because it turns out I made a great choice, just for all the wrong reasons.

Disillusionment came quickly. Within 30 seconds of powering the TV on for the first time, I realized that Multi-View is incredibly restrictive in terms of what it lets you do. On the C2 and on the OLED Flex it basically lets you watch one HDMI source input alongside either over-the-air TV or alongside the YouTube app. Crucially not the YouTube TV app. If I want to watch YouTube TV, I have to sneak in through a menu option inside the YouTube app, one that appears to launch YouTube TV inside the shell of the normal YouTube app.

It’s a strange and clumsy implementation of what sounded like a great feature, but at least it salvages from complete irrelevance because YouTube is just about the only app that works with Multi-View. If you want to watch anything that’s not on YouTube, like say the Hulu or Peacock apps, you’re out of luck as far as Multi-View is concerned. It supports Airplay but as I don’t have iOS devices that was pretty much moot for me. A reader tried that functionality on their C2 and had a pretty dispiriting experience, which makes me think it would not perform much more reliably on the Flex given how much they share in common.

The new LG OLED TVs that just came to market, the C3 and G3, can apparently do split screen between two different HDMI source, which could solve all of these issues if you have a PC and a console hooked up to the same display, but until they release an updated OLED Flex based on the newer TVs, this functionality will be something I can only dream about.

A split-screen mode on an OLED TV shows a BMW driving across a gravel road on the lefthand pane, which is showing Gran Turismo 7, while on the right hand pane a group of Boston Celtics players look gravely toward the camera during a close playoff game on YouTube TV.
Gaming and taking photos proved impossible so here is Gran Turismo 7 running its "scapes" idle mode alongside a frustrating Celtics game.

You’ll see a lot of references to the OLED Flex’s 40-watt Atmos speakers. Turns out, that wattage mostly means they can get very loud while remaining deeply mediocre at best. At worst, LG’s awful “AI Sound Pro” audio setting will produce some of the worst sounds you have ever heard in your life. I don’t have any misophonia sensitivities but AI Sound Pro produced a couple reactions that were pretty close to what I imagine people’s experience of it is. Any of the other presets (Standard, Music, Cinema, etc.) is preferable to whatever evil artificial intelligence is powering AI Sound Pro.

At their inoffensive best, the speakers are fine for watching things like sports but for music and movies it doesn’t take long before the absence of bass and a pronounced sibilance that ruins a lot of singing will have you reaching for the headphones. Fortunately, the OLED Flex’s base has a (poorly shielded and annoyingly noisy) 3.5mm jack as well as the expected Bluetooth support, so you can get away from those speakers pretty easily. While they might compare favorably to the speakers on LG’s regular OLED TVs, the OLED Flex’s Atmos speakers could easily be bested by a sub-$200 pair of speakers.

The built-in bias lighting, likewise, is underwhelming. There is an X-pattern of LED strip lighting on the back of the Flex, which feels like a clever way to make use of the Flex’s enormous and highly adjustable stand. But the lights point straight behind the Flex so the light they cast will be almost entirely hidden behind the screen itself. They are nowhere near bright enough nor angled enough to create the wash of color that the advertising materials will show you, especially if your walls are painted anything but white.

A pale wash of red light spills from the darkened shape of a monitor stand against a wall while the screen shows an image of Darth Vader against a red backdrop
You basically have to stand next to the screen to really get much of an effect from the LED lights.

So the OLED Flex made an awful first impression. My goal had been to buy a device that did everything I could imagine wanting in my office, and that impulse had led me to buy the F-35 of TVs: an expensive, awkward oddity that wasn’t particularly good at any of the secondary roles that were such a huge part of the argument for buying it. What I was left with, then, was a TV with an adjustable curve. Which is probably what I should have expected from the beginning.

Using a special version of LG’s now-familiar Magic Remote, you can set the flex at 5-point intervals from Flat-to-100. Once you give the TV a setting, motors in the stand drive its arms to push the screen’s edges into position. The motors themselves are pretty quiet but occasionally you hear clicks and pops as the thick, plasticky screen is bent into its new shape that will absolutely feed any underlying anxieties you have about the OLED Flex’s longevity.

When you turn the TV off, the arms bring the OLED Flex back to its flat setting, which makes me wonder about which part of the Flex LG is protecting by releasing this tension: the arms or the screen. Based on what options you choose, the Flex can go back to its previous curvature settings on startup or wait for you to make adjustments. Plus, it will store two preset curve settings for quick changes.

As I said, it’s all impressive, but I wasn’t sure it was more than a gimmick, especially since the display was underwhelming in so many other respects. I was set to return it but I needed to sit with it for a few days and just try it as a flat display before I made a decision. And across those few days, using it only as the kind of regular 42-inch TV I’d get to replace it, I realized that a flexible screen is way more impactful and comfortable than I ever would have expected.

Let’s talk for a second about my use-case. I have a nice home theater system with an LG CX OLED screen and a 5.1 surround system in the living room that awkwardly doubled as my office for the last four years. I just built a dedicated office in a corner of my loft, which meant that my workspace was moving away from the shrine to hi-fi AV equipment that I have built at the center of my home. The scenario I wanted to avoid was having the “good” home theater setup still located in the living room while feeling like my office was a lesser alternative, because one reason we decided to build this office was so that my work and video games would stop monopolizing the living room. So I wanted to have something in my office that would feel both as good as playing games in the living room while also feeling distinct from it. Yes, I am aware we are approaching Bourbon dynasty levels of privilege and self-indulgence.

For streaming purposes, I needed a 16:9 display to avoid having the kind of weird window sizes that cause so many issues when streaming from a widescreen monitor, which ruled out a lot of interesting new monitors. Yet the display had to support variable refresh rates and G-Sync for gaming, the latter of which has become truly indispensable. I wanted an OLED because my vertical alignment (VA) and in-plane switching monitors (IPS) have always been so markedly inferior to my OLED TV in terms of lighting and color.

Above all, it had to be a display that was just as comfortable to use when sitting right in front of it using a mouse and keyboard, or when I was sitting a few feet away playing racing games with a wheel and pedals, or when I was sitting across in a lounge chair in a corner of the office. In other words, it needed to be as good at being a monitor as it was at being a TV and transition gracefully, without hassle, between those setups. Any 48-inch TV was ruled out by how impossibly overbearing it would be at desktop distances, and most smaller monitors were ruled out by how hard they’d be to see from distances greater than that.

What I noticed after using the Flex as a flat display was that, for one thing, I never stopped noticing the convex appearance of the image after using the curve. The minute I flattened the screen out, the image looked bowed toward me, like I was looking at it through a fisheye lens. I assumed that would go away once I went a few days without curving the screen, but it never did. The effect of having the edges of the screen so much further from my eyes than the center was not something my brain simply re-adjusted to. The sense of distortion was persistent once I had noticed it, even days later.

More subjectively, I found it way easier to work and play with the curve than without it. It was easier on the eyes, perfect for longer and more focused sessions. Likewise, when I had the curve at its maximum and was sitting up close, it really did cut out a lot of distraction. I’m someone who can’t help but look up and engage every time someone enters or leaves a room, but with the screen wrapping to the edges of my field of view, I was completely absorbed. I don’t know that I buy the notion that a curved screen makes you feel that much more immersed in a game’s action but from up close it definitely makes your surroundings less intrusive.

Meanwhile, what is filling your vision is undeniably a tremendous image. There are a countless reviews of regular LG C2’s from people who can better speak to what sets it apart from other TVs, but what’s maybe the most revelatory thing about the Flex is that you are often looking at a great 4K screen from only a few feet away and the image doesn’t feel like it loses any clarity or sharpness. In terms of viewing angle the Flex looks bigger to me than the TV in my living room looks when I am sitting on my couch about six or seven feet from the screen, and yet that size doesn’t reveal any weaknesses in the display, nor does it feel like I am sitting too close to the front of a movie theater. It just rewards you with more detail.

That’s a double-edged luxury in games like Fortnite, which looks absolutely phenomenal at 4K with a ton of fancy graphics options enabled. The busier graphics and the huge screen size introduces a lot of distractions, like the too-vivid and arresting wildlife that will constantly pull your eye toward it when you are scanning for movement in the distance. It’s embarrassing how often I’ve checked to see what caught my eye and, through a sniper scope, seen a fuchsia butterfly carelessly flitting over a bed of flowers. But the perfect detail and legibility is a necessity for strategy games, with their info-rich displays and reams of text. While playing games like Total War and Steel Division has always been a fun novelty in the home theater setting, they’ve never quite felt right. I always felt like I was simultaneously too far from the screen and yet also too close to see what was going on. That problem disappeared with the Flex, which is what decisively sold me on it. If the Flex can make playing Crusader Kings 3 just inches away from a 42-inch display not only not ridiculous but perhaps more comfortable and convenient than a regular monitor, then something special is going on.

As for doing work, I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it was to be writing on the Flex’s 4K display, but I was even more delighted by a feature that is unique to the Flex in LG’s lineup: in addition to changing aspect ratios like the rest of the C2 TVs, the Flex can also scale its display from 42-inches to 32 and 27-inches, effectively leaving the edges of the screen black while shrinking the display area to a more typical monitor-like size in the middle without losing any appreciable fidelity or clarity. This proved to be just about perfect for writing and office work, one of the few unique Flex features that truly lived up to its promise and did a lot to eliminate the tradeoffs between a TV and a monitor. Writing late at night in a dim room, it felt like I was just working on a typical 27-inch display, so completely did the unused margins of the OLED Flex disappear.

A split display of a discord window and a text document side by side in windows across a 27-inch dispay area withing a 42 inch screen.
Look getting an exposure value where you could make out the display and the shape of the black screen was hard, okay?

Likewise, when I changed the aspect ratio on the Flex to an ultrawide setting (like the C2, it supports 21:9 and 32:9) my graphics card detected the new resolutions as native options so I could basically turn the screen into different types of ultrawide display without much hassle and surprisingly little distortion, great for those times when I need to have a ton of windows open and visible across the screen. Whether there are long term concerns about pixel health if you use this feature extensively, I couldn’t tell you, but these are great now-and-then options to have. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’s like several displays in one but it’s capable of doing a hell of a lot more than any one display I’ve ever owned.

So is it worth it? It’s a unique device and one that is tailored to really unusual requirements or preferences that have already ruled out a lot of the obvious alternatives. Most people need either a monitor or a TV and, if they do need to split the difference, a good wall or desk mount can provide most of the important adjustment options people need to enhance the usability of a TV or a monitor. Even the most lavish setups in this vein will come in for less than the OLED Flex costs. However, those will also still come with a few compromises that the Flex does not, and if you can’t or won’t make those compromises, the Flex suddenly becomes one of the best selections out of a very small set of options (many of which are just LG OLED screens in different form factors or wearing different badges).

Ironically, I think the people for whom the Flex is perfect are the ones least likely to ever drop this kind of money on a display: folks living in small apartments where a room has to pull double duty between being a workplace and a leisure center. This thing would have been a godsend in the little one bedrooms and studios we lived in when we first moved to Boston, clearing up a lot of horrible clutter and bad room layouts, but it also costs more than I ever paid in rent in any of those places. It might well have paid for itself in terms of convenience but there was absolutely never a time I would have felt good buying something like the Flex even if, in the end, it had felt like the perfect response to the problems posed by a small living space.

However, there are scenarios where you want a good monitor for your desk and a good TV for the room your desk is sitting in. The OLED Flex doesn’t make you prioritize one over the other, and for the moment that seems like it makes it unique in the space. It’s not a cost-effective solution but multi-classing never is. But it sure is nice to be ready for any kind of adventure.

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7kxbpgRob ZacnyJason KoeblerGames OpinionLG OLED FlexOLED MonitorsOLED TVsCurved screensGaming TVs
<![CDATA['Star Wars Jedi: Survivor' Is Coming in Very Hot, But Dark Souls and Star Wars Is Still Fun]]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkapyz/star-wars-jedi-survivor-reviewWed, 26 Apr 2023 15:01:38 GMTThe problem with reviewing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is that a chunk of my experience feels less relevant now. I was cautious on progressing because I was warned that a major pre-release update could break my saves. It didn’t, but the eventual patch did make Survivor a better game…but one I haven’t had much of a chance to play. It’s a weird feeling, where the game I played (and enjoyed) had serious caveats that might no longer exist. Poof! In fact, what I can say with confidence is the review process for Survivor is sadly archetypical of modern games and the compromises they force on critics, and then by extension, you.

But we’ll get to that later. For now, you probably want something like a review before the industry navel-gazing begins. So, here goes:

Cal Kestis is back, baby! [pauses for applause] Cal…who? Maybe ol’ Cal Kestis, despite the fiery red hair, wasn’t the most memorable Jedi the galaxy far, far away has ever known, but the combination of Dark Souls, Dark Forces, and Metroid proved a favorably potent combination in 2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. It felt extremely good to smack the block button and send blaster fire back at waves of stormtroopers, and parry the attacks of enemies who dared strike you. It was more than a gimmick—it was good. So would you be shocked to learn a bigger, deeper version of that same formula, now called Jedi: Survivor, is also good? 

At least what I’ve played so far, which amounts to 10 hours and escaping its grandiose first planet, Koboh, an area defined by gorgeous mountain terrain, pesky raiders picking on the very much not-Jedi residents nearby, and tiny bird-like animals called the Rawka that the game defines as an enemy, forcing me to kill dozens of them to continue. I’m sorry, poor Rawka, but if you charge at me with an unblockable attack, I will toss your cute ass off a cliff. I could have easily spent another few hours poking at Koboh, before realizing the last few hours beyond that wouldn’t even be accessible until I came back later with more powers. 

Which, you know, is how it usually goes in these games, for better and sometimes worse.

Survivor is defined by its peeling layers, whether it’s the intertwined landscapes in front of you and the goofily arbitrary gatekeeping defined by upgrades you don’t yet have, or access to a slew of welcomed combat nuances, including stance options that change your saber moveset. I’ve settled, for example, on dual wielding a lightsaber broken in two that specializes in breaking stamina for one-on-one fights, and a double-bladed lightsaber for crowd control. It’s sick. And that’s without talking about slotting perks, which provide some further customizability for your playstyle, the absolutely endless fashion options for Cal and your lightsaber. (You can give him—Cal, not the saber!—a mullet. But the red hair stays.)

Cal-and-BD-1-seek-out-a-safe-haven_Logo.png

It’s been fun. I’ve had a good time. It’s also been a time marred by gnarly performances issues on my PlayStation 5 copy of the game, resulting in…well, that’s where this whole review conceit falls apart. See, I could give you two paragraphs of the frame rate issues that partially defined my 10 hours, but those issues seem to have largely disappeared when a last-minute patch for the game dropped. Frame rate hiccups bother me less than other people I know, but still, they did notably impact my ability to play the game, and those experiences affected my impressions of Jedi Survivor. But it all happened in a version you’ll never play?

Part of the reason I capped myself at 10 hours was because I was told the patch might break my save. That’s admittedly unusual for the review process—usually patches during the review period don’t post any danger to your progress. But I was faced with the choice between sprinting through the whole game before the patch came out, or possibly replaying a ton of the game after losing my saves, or I could just wait and see what this patched version was going to be like. I tried to split the difference, and I’m not sure who it helped.

None of these is an ideal scenario for the reviewer, the developers who worked on the game, criticism as a form, or interested players wondering how it all turned out. And it’s not even really anyone’s fault? The folks who offered me the game early were frank, honest, straightforward. There was no deception. The system has just sorta arrived at this place that puts everyone in a weird spot for a game clearly coming in hot and the developers trying to make it sing better at closing time. (They seem to have done it, even if you should wait for Digital Foundry to give a real analysis.)

And frankly…look. I also only played 10 hours because I’m human, and it seemed ludicrous to whip through a game that one colleague told me took them 52 hours to finish (they did a lot of side quests). I’d be racing through a version of the game that nobody but reviewers would ever play.  Marathons don’t cultivate enjoyment, let alone being able to develop meaningful feelings about what I’m experiencing. It’s not how many people play games.

This piece has, admittedly, gone off the rails, but if this had been a straightforward review, and at the end, I put an italicized section that said “based on 10 hours,” what would you say? If I’d finished the game but confessed at the end that the patched version was importantly different from the one I’d spent my time with, what then? Which review is worth more?

JEDI_Cal_Merrin_Logo.png

I can’t tell you if, over my 10 hours, Survivor will end up sticking the landing on its story. Right now it’s barely gotten airborne. The opening hour is rough, featuring a bait-and-switch cast of potentially interesting characters, before the game aimlessly wanders towards a strange plot involving elements of the High Republic era. The gameplay has firmly grabbed me, but the story, at least so far, feels like fancy window dressing for the cool gameplay that surrounds it, while I patiently wait for Fallen Order’s charming gang to get back together and rock. That might change 40 hours later, but it doesn’t change where I’m at 10 hours in, and man, 10 hours is a pretty long time!

The deputy editor at Edge, Chris Schilling, tweeted this earlier in the week. I’m not sure if he was referring to Survivor or not, but it’s irrelevant, because it’s about the broader point here:

My response, now with the ability to fix an embarrassing typo: “TV reviewers drop reviews of shows without having seen the entire season. Feels like we need to move games in the same direction. It’s not fair to play games that fast, nor judge them played at that pace.”

Last December, HBO sent me an email out of the blue with a link that made me very excited: “hey, if you want to watch basically every episode of the The Last of Us TV show right now, you can.” But the link came with a pretty important caveat that gave me pause: the show wasn’t done yet. Important elements of the visual and sound effects, unarguably key to a spectacle show about a zombie-like apocalypse, might look unfinished or missing altogether. 

I gambled that the pilot, at least, was mostly done, and watched it with my wife. We enjoyed the heck out of it, but made the mutual decision to wait until the episodes were properly airing, when the creators had done as much work as possible before the episode had to air. 

I’m glad I made that choice, but I’m also not a TV critic!

Reviews for The Last of Us that dropped at the start of the season were written with these caveats. Nearly across the board, TV critics, like Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall, praised it.

(Side note: Watching screeners for movies and TV ahead of time is an aesthetic nightmare. With some The Last of Us episodes, for example, my name and e-mail address was plastered on the screen the entire time. It was so distracting that I couldn’t engage with it.)

Survivor also seems great. But the version I played wasn’t fully cooked, and it sometimes made the combat and platforming, key to what makes this game work, feel worse. A better version showed up at the last second, but I’ve spent less than an hour inside that world.

Games are not movies, and the technical performance of games—for playability reasons, for accessibility reasons, because it’s cooler—is important. But it also feels weird to handwave away issues, and squint at what’s possible. Importantly, I don’t have an answer to all of this.

For the past few weeks, my lunchtime has been spent watching episodes of the spectacular documentary series Psych Odyssey, which chronicles the development of Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 in great and excruciating detail. The series is both inspiring and dispiriting, revealing how challenging the game development process is, the unintended ripple effects of decisions made months (or years) before their consequences are truly felt, and how painfully easy it is to have an idea balloon into something bigger, more daunting, and possibly wrong.

It’s almost too much information. 

More than any interview I’ve ever conducted, more than any feature I’ve ever written, it is the most honest depiction of game development I’ve experienced, and helps underscore the basic tenet you’ve heard a million times before about how miraculous it is that any game ever ships. It’s wild, heartbreaking, and the tenet will probably always be true. And sheesh, I could not get it out of my head while playing through this rickety early version of Survivor, knowing a better version of Survivor was around the corner, and weighing my obligations.

Of course, it’s all made easier by the fact that, even if I had to sometimes squint the way TV critics had to squint at their screeners, that Survivor is/seems/feels very good. I liked this formula in 2019, and I like this more complicated version of the same formula in 2023. 

I like how funny the writing is, especially for the battle droids, who are filled with seemingly endless one-liners mulling over their cursed existence. I like how naturalistic the platforming is, as the game makes a genuine attempt to hide its exploration tells in the environment, rather than spilling yellow paint everywhere. And I always like parrying an enemy four times in a row, breaking their stamina, and going to town with a goddamn glowing energy sword. 

And so, after 10 hours, I like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. I’m pretty sure. That sounds wishy-washy. Maybe some mathematical precision will help.

Pretty sure / 10. I think that’s an 8.

There we go. That’s where I’m at. Is that a review?

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com, and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).

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pkapyzPatrick KlepekRob ZacnyGames ReviewsStar WarsStar Wars Jedi SurvivorElectronic Arts
<![CDATA[Square Enix’s AI Tech Demo Is a Staggering Failure]]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7zwqw/square-enixs-ai-tech-demo-is-a-staggering-failureWed, 26 Apr 2023 14:30:00 GMTOn Monday, Square Enix released an elegantly named tech demo, designed to make a case for the emerging uses of AI in games: SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case. The demo is built around a modern port of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, a highly influential Japanese adventure game, onto which they have added a Natural Language Processor.

Natural Language Processors derive meaning from, and then generate, text. ChatGPT, for example, uses an NLP, albeit a much, much more complex one than is on display in Square Enix’s tech demo. NLPs can be broken into two distinct parts: Natural Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation. Natural Language Understanding allows computers to derive information from a text, and Natural Language Generation allows them to construct new sentences based on the texts they have been trained on, and a prompt.

The Portopia Serial Murder Case, originally released in 1983, is one of the most influential Japanese video games of the 1980s. While simple by modern standards, the game’s open-endedness, narrative focus, and use of a text parser, were a significant departure from design standards of the time. It all but sparked the visual novel genre, and led to dozens of copycat detective games for the Famicom, two of which were lovingly remastered for the Switch. Despite its influence, The Portopia Serial Murder Case never received an official English release—at least, not until this NLP-powered tech demo.

A screenshot of the Portopia serial murder case, depicting the player's input
Screenshot by Square Enix.

The NLP that Square Enix is using appears to be one of its own making. Unlike ChatGPT, which runs on OpenAI's servers, the NLP used in this version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case appears to be local, which would explain the game’s surprisingly large 10gb file size. This NLP is intended to make the game more open-ended by allowing players to control the game as if they were talking to a person. While Square Enix claims to have built a Natural Language Generator, it has been disabled for this initial demo, because the company could not stop it from generating “unethical replies.”

Public response to the tech demo has been overwhelmingly negative, with only 12 percent of Steam reviews being listed as positive. This makes it one of, if not the most, poorly reviewed games on all of Steam. Complaints run the gamut from the game’s disorienting art style, to its massive resource load, and barely a single review goes by without mentioning the fact that, despite being a tech demo literally built around the technology, this version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case is absolutely terrible at actually understanding what the player wants to do.

When I played the game, its NLP struggled to distinguish between the phrases “Go to study” and “Go to the study,” but is inconsistent about which of these is the correct phrasing. This is, somehow, a less efficient control method than the original game’s text parser, which relied exclusively on “Object-verb” commands, with appropriate aliases so the player doesn’t have to say the exact phrase required. Even with plenty of aliases, traditional text parsers struggle to accept player inputs—ideally, this is where the NLP would come in, but, for now, it's a complete failure in practice.

The NLP takes your natural language and attempts to translate it into Object-Verb format regardless of whether or not translation is necessary for a given action. And not only does this lead to miscommunications between the player, NLP, and text parser, but also takes a massive toll on your computer’s performance. NLPs are frequently resource intensive programs, which is why the vast majority of them run on the cloud, relying on massive servers to do the actual work before sending a result back out to users. This is not the case for The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which ground my computer to a halt.

A screenshot of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, depicting a woman being interrogated by police detectives.
Screenshot by Square Enix.

These performance issues became particularly problematic when attempting to use the game’s Speech-to-Text system, which relies on your GPU and requires an astounding 5 gb of VRAM to achieve “medium quality.” When I attempted to turn this system on, the game instantly froze, and I was unable to do anything on my computer until I force quit the executable.

If this version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case was intended to demonstrate a newly emerging technology to audiences and developers alike, then it has done so quite elegantly—immediately revealing to anyone who spends more than five minutes with the game how empty the promise of AI in games currently is.

This tech demo is particularly strange in context. You do not need to prove the utility of NLPs in games, because that work has already been done. AI Dungeon, a game entirely built around NLP technology, has been available since 2019—and it is capable of so much more than what is on display in The Portopia Serial Murder Experiment. It, unlike Portopia, is capable of Natural Language Generation. If you tell the game “I walk into the room and stab the King,” it will engage in free-form, improvisational storytelling with the player. In recent updates, the game has included basic AI image generation, in addition to its NLP model. Similarly, there's very little reason for a program like this to run locally on a player's device. There are also many off-the-shelf NLP options that would likely be better at parsing a player's input than the AI that Square has built here. 

A screenshot of The Portopia Serial Murder Case depicting a man who has just been beaten by the police.
Screenshot by Square Enix.

In addition to this basic model, players and developers have created settings upon which the game is trained. These provide world details, tones of writing, and rules within which the AI will operate. They are, arguably, one of the best parts of the game. Stepping into a new world, even one that is lightly traced by a human hand, is a novel experience—at least, until the AI model forgets what has happened so far in the story and everything falls apart, revealing the hollow core underneath.

Sometimes, AI Dungeon will tell a cute or surprising story. Most of the time, it will be extremely generic or borderline nonsensical—because that is what these models are able to produce without strong, human guardrails. Even in its best moments, AI Dungeon is a novelty with a bit of potential. It creates an illusion of depth, and Square Enix’s tech demo cannot even manage that. It is a failed magic trick.

The Portopia Serial Murder Case may be a particularly bad, technically messy port of an extremely influential classic, but it is in no way alone in this. The iOS releases of several early Final Fantasy games and the recently released Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, also made by Square Enix, were widely criticized for their approach to updating the original games’ art. The 2013 iOS releases were cartoonish and blurry, the 2021 pixel remasters were less detailed, with heavy black outlines. In both cases, these remasters were trying to recapture an aesthetic built for CRTs, instead of developing CRT filters which one could apply over the original graphics on modern screens. Given the extreme precarity of archival work, and of maintaining access to older systems and display methods, these versions of the game may eventually supersede the originals in the cultural memory of the video games industry.

This is particularly frustrating in the case of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, a game which was successfully ported to the Famicom—effectively translating the game’s controls to fit newly emerging technology. They have succeeded in this task before. The Famicom version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case relied on a much simpler and much more effective menu system, while still maintaining the same degree of player expression on display in both the original game and this modern, AI fueled port.

The original text parser and modern NLP do not, as some hope, actually increase one’s capacity for expression, they only create the illusion of a world that can react to anything you say. It is this same illusion of a more expressive, but ultimately empty, world that leads to games increasing in fidelity and decreasing in legibility, year after year, begetting remakes of games removed from their context.

The Portopia Serial Murder Case is, like the original Final Fantasy games, an essential part of the medium’s history. And I hope the failure of this tech demo is a lesson. The use of AI in updating the game for modern hardware sets a dangerous precedent, one in which we hand the history of our developing medium over to algorithms and language models, which have proven time and time again to be little more than novelties and particularly competent parrots.

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k7zwqwRenata PriceJason KoeblerGames Opinions
<![CDATA[Inside the Chaotic World of Kids Trying to Play Video Games on School Laptops]]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3mxkj/inside-the-chaotic-world-of-kids-trying-to-play-video-games-on-school-laptopsMon, 24 Apr 2023 13:00:00 GMTGeometry Spot is a simple-looking website that, on the surface, is exactly what it advertises: a place to learn more about a form of mathematics that haunts many high school students. “Why are compasses needed in geometry?” reads one article. “What is plane geometry?” reads another. But on the fringes of the website, tucked away in the upper right corner, is a link marked “activities.” Clicking on activities reveals Geometry Spot’s secret underbelly: it’s a website where kids can play a mixture of legal and legally dubious video games at school.

Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old.

What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games.

“One kid kept opening up game sites” said one high school teacher who asked to stay anonymous, to protect the identities of their students. “I would wait for them to open one, add it to my list of blocked websites, refresh my settings, and then they would get locked out of it. Then they would open a new tab, find a new game site, and the cycle would repeat. This happened over and over over the course of about half an hour. At that point, I watched as they opened a new tab and searched ‘how to get a teacher fired.’ It gave me a good laugh.”

A look at the website Geometry Spot.
A look at the website Geometry Spot. Image by Patrick Klepek

Geometry Spot is run by 16-year-old Jerry Klamm, who attends high school in New York. This is one of many smokescreen websites that Jerry runs, a practice that dates back to middle school. At the time, Jerry had been trying to build up a personal YouTube channel.

“I was at school,” said Jerry during a recent interview with Waypoint, “and someone said, ‘That's a cool website, but why don't you add games to it that we can play in school?’”

He did, and suddenly, a lot of people at Jerry’s school were visiting his site—to play games. A typical cycle would then play out, with Jerry making a website with embedded games for fellow students to play during and between class, before the school caught on and banned it.

Now in high school, Geometry Spot is the latest in that chain, a website that’s done well enough that it now includes ads, and generates what Jerry’s father, Chris Klamm, calls “real money.”

“I'm happy for him,” said Chris, who helped Jerry set up an LLC and start having conversations with advertisers who wanted spots. “He's got a lot of success. We're going through it together, I guess. I'm proud of him. I just want to make sure everything's legit.”

Jerry said his teachers have a good sense of humor about his work, and at one point the vice principal talked to him about was, it seemed, pleasantly surprised about the LLC.

“I was at school, and someone said, ‘That's a cool website, but why don't you add games to it that we can play in school?’”

“I have geometry [class] first period,” he said. “I was in class, and some kid was on my website. I'm like, ‘Oh, are you on Geometry Spot?’ My geometry teacher looked up, and I was like, ‘Oh, I made that one.’ And then my geometry teacher asked me, she was like, "You write stuff about geometry?" I'm like, "No, it's a gaming website,’ and she started laughing.”

The “articles” on the website, Jerry told me, are mostly written using AI tools, and so far, Geometry Spot has not been banned at his high school. That is unlikely to last forever.

“The data shows that the average number of websites blocked per month more than doubled from 2016 to 2017 across grade levels,” reads a 2018 report by GoGuardian, one of the most popular software solutions by schools to filter and block websites on computers used by students. “The average number of sites blocked per month grew 193% for elementary school students, 140% for middle school students, and 173% for high school students.”

GoGuardian did not respond to a request for comment by Waypoint for updated data.

There’s a whole not-so-underground market for getting around software like GoGuardian, like the YouTube channel IrwinTech, where it’s kids explaining to other kids what to do.

“Kids want to bypass stuff on their school laptops because the laptops are given to them to use for school,” said Dylan Irwin, the creator of IrwinTech, in an email. “But sometimes in school they have an opportunity to play games like during lunch, when finished with work, or at home if they don't have a device of their own.”

Irwin started the channel in the midst of early COVID lockdowns, when the vast majority of school children were attending school at home via their computers. Irwin didn’t respond to a request asking how old he is, though it seems from the videos he’s, at best, in middle school. 

He also claims he’s “never gotten in trouble” for producing the channel and publishing the workarounds, but noted “a few teachers that found out about it thought it was cool.” His parents also, apparently “know about my channel and are very proud of it and like it.”

As a parent of two children, I can vouch for this sentiment: I would be very proud of it, too.

According to the GoGuardian report, the five most blocked websites were Cool Math Games (games), Typing.com (typing lessons), Facebook (social network), Crazy Games (again, to play games), and SparkNotes (aka everyone’s favorite way to read without reading).

“We know that we're often blocked in schools from emails that we get and from a report by GoGuardian,” said Raf Mertens, co-founder of Crazy Games. “We don't have any specific knowledge of kids getting around IT departments, but I assume that some of them try to use a VPN [virtual private network, a way to skirt restrictions]. We don't have a way of checking how many of our users are on a VPN. I'm on a VPN myself actually, since the co-working space I'm in belongs to a corporation, and the corporate network blocks games sites.”

That’s more than a little ironic.

Mertens told Waypoint he grew up playing Flash games in high school, which eventually led to him playing around and making Flash games himself. (Flash used to be the predominant tool for building web games, before it was essentially wiped from the modern internet.) He claims Crazy Games “hasn’t been contacted by schools or teachers at all,” and described the website’s primary demographics as “very wide-ranging” and from “teenagers to retired.”

Websites like Crazy Games, while aesthetically overwhelming to browse, are largely legitimate enterprises, featuring original web games, ports authorized by the original developers, or tools for companies to demand copyrighted content be removed. It’s far wilder on places like Geometry Spot, which purports to feature ways to play Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and a game called “GTA 2023” that ultimately wouldn’t even load in my browser.

It’s also common to see shady versions of popular indie games like Getting Over It, which designer Bennet Foddy told Waypoint he didn’t know about but, interestingly, encouraged it.

“I wasn't aware this was happening with Getting Over It 'adaptations' like this,” said Foddy, “but I was aware that it happens with my web games. I think it's hilarious! I'm glad the next generation of kids is getting a version of the experience I had—being that ingenuity and resourcefulness are required to even just get to play games, and they are bringing it.”

Jerry, the kid behind Geometry Spot, told me it was common for students to come up to him and ask for new games to be added. One of the recent requests was for a game called Drift Hunters, which the website drift-hunters.com describes as “a completely free online drifting game where you have a chance to meet various supercars and proudly glide through them.” 

A screen shot from the video game 'Drift Hunters'
A screen shot from the video game 'Drift Hunters' Image by Patrick Klepek

It’s true that Drift Hunters is a “free online drifting game,” but its designer, Ilya Kaminetsky, has nothing to do with drift-hunters.com, or the many other websites that have copied and pasted their game and spread it around the web.

“I noticed that the game began to be copied just a few months after the release on Itch.io,” said Kaminetsky during a recent interview. “I did not see this as a problem, since initially I made a game for mobile platforms with ad-based monetization. I released the web version as an experiment and to gain some popularity for the mobile version of the game. As a result, the sites that copied the game helped to build a user base for the mobile version.”

Some time back, Kaminetsky was searching YouTube for videos of people playing Drift Hunters, and noticed students were playing it when they were very clearly attending school. Like the designer behind Getting Over It, Kaminetsky was inspired by these kids’ actions.

“I don't think we should ban games or other things that might distract students,” said Kaminetsky, who grew up and lived in Kyiv, Ukraine until just before the recent war. “Rather, the problem is that the educational process is organized with the expectation of the same perception by students, but it's not effective for everyone. I don’t know how much the educational program for these children differs from the one I studied. But during all the years that I was in school, my classmates and I were quite often distracted from the learning process during the lessons. It seems to me a very natural redistribution of attention.”

Some teachers who’ve grappled with the increasingly shiny distractions computers and phones provide in the classroom have fallen on Kaminetsky’s side: lean into the distraction.

“I don't think we should ban games or other things that might distract students. Rather, the problem is that the educational process is organized with the expectation of the same perception by students, but it's not effective for everyone.”

“If I am trying to instill good work habits in students, and one day, they will become adults that will have access to these devices in the workplace, they need to learn how to practice moderation and restraint now,” said one teacher, who asked to be anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “This goes hand-in-hand with how I usually give students plenty of time to get their work done during class. So if that means they choose to spend that time playing stupid browser games instead of getting their work done, then they’re giving themselves homework and hopefully they learn from it for next time.”

Kaminetsky said school was difficult whenever it didn’t feel “valuable,” which is what led to distractions like learning how to program video games. That “distraction” turned Kaminetsky into a video game developer all the way back in high school, centered around an attraction to racing—drifting in particular. In college, Kaminetsky would often find themselves leaving lectures to hang out in the library, where they’d work on their game and show it to people. 

“I could meet people, show what I'm working on, get their opinions and get advice,” said Kaminetsky. “I believe that the social aspect of this process has given me more than lectures, the content of which I can get in the best quality at any time on the internet.”

Released on iOS, Android, and on the web with ads, Drift Hunters started providing Kaminetsky with an income equivalent to a “middle-level programmer” in Ukraine. Copycats played by bored American kids in school and elsewhere have funneled people back to the original game, full of improvements after six years of work. It now makes Kaminetsky “more money than if I worked as a senior-level developer in the top IT companies in the world.”

Websites like Geometry Spot have, if only by accident, proven a boon for developers like Kaminetsky by acting as an accidental form of marketing. What’s rarer is a website like Geometry Spot directly working hand-in-hand with one of the games featured. But that’s exactly the case for Shell Shockers, a first-person-shooter where players fire cartoonish guns at other players, who happen to look like eggs, which has proven huge among kids.

Shell Shockers did not start out as a ploy to make a game popular amongst school kids.

“A couple of years ago, one of the developers that I work with said "I was playing around this thing, I think I can make a 3D shooter that plays in a web browser,” said Blue Wizard Digital CEO Jason Kapalka, who co-founded Plants vs Zombies developer PopCap Games and was the original designer of the highly influential tile-matching puzzle game Bejeweled.

Blue Wizard Digital was founded as a way to try things more experimental than what was possible at PopCap, which is how you end up with a developer making Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle and something like Shell Shockers. (Nothing to do with this story, but please check out Blue Wizard Digital’s excellent website, a throwback to the late 90s era of websites.)

When it was first published online, Shell Shockers was not a hit, and merely “puttered along and got mediocre traffic.” It’s incredibly hard to gain traction with a web game because the audience isn’t looking at reviews on IGN, and a place like IGN probably isn’t going to review the game, anyway. But again, it was just an experiment. Then, the team rolled out engine optimizations to kickstart the frame rate and, out of nowhere, the game found an audience.

A screen shot from the web game 'Shell Shockers.'
A screen shot from the web game 'Shell Shockers.' Image by Patrick Klepek

“Honestly, we didn't even know who they were,” said Kapalka. “At first, we were like, ‘Who's playing? I don't know.’ And then it took a while before it dawned on us: "Oh, they're all in ChromeOS. What's that?'“

ChromeOS is the operating system for Chromebooks, which due to their durability and low cost, have become the de facto computer for schools to hand out to children. According to the market research firm Futuresource, it’s estimated that in 2018, 60 percent of computers being used by kids in grades K-12 were Chromebooks. 

Chromebooks also famously run like crap. They’re plastic monitors with the ability to run a web browser. And very specifically, that means they aren’t really meant to play video games.

This wasn’t the only hint to Kapalka that something was up.

“Other stuff started becoming clearer once we started looking [closer],” he said. “Huh, strange that the hours all seem to coincide with school hours. That's kind of strange.”

Everything clicked into place the increasingly confused developer when a kid wrote in asking a simple but pointed question: “My school blocked your game, what can you do about it?”

Initial versions were more realistic. The game always featured players as eggs, but the guns the eggs were carrying around were toned down, once it became clear the majority of people playing the game were kids—in school, no less. The sound effects were changed a bit, too. 

“Once we were aware that was the audience, we did our best to make it reasonably safe,” said Kapalka. “Teachers don't necessarily like it, but I think if there are kids in class who are going to be playing some sort of violent shooter, I think they'd prefer it to be eggs, than people blowing the heads off of realistic humans or whatnot.”

Knowing the Shell Shockers audience was school children, Kapalka had to decide what it would do about the fact that school administrators would very much like their students to not play it. Would Blue Wizard Digital side with the students or the faculty? It was easy.

“I don't feel too bad,” said Kapalka. “It feels like continuing the long tradition of kids goofing off when they can on school devices.”

To be fair, the developers of Shell Shockers are doing a little more than just catering. They regularly register new proxy websites where kids can play, until they’re inevitably banned. The proxies are listed on the Shell Shockers website, and currently include real bangers like mathdrills.life and yolk.rocks. The game has a rollicking Discord with more than 150,000 members, which is where the new proxies are often distributed first and then spread.

“We get a few [teachers] that are charming in their naivete, I guess,” he said. “‘My kids are playing the game when they're supposed to be studying, can you please give me a list of all your proxies so I can block them?’ Well, that was a very straightforward request. But no.”

Sometimes, though, a teacher will write in and mention the game as an reward to students who get their work done, and the team will send them merch, like Shell Shockers t-shirts.

Shell Shockers doesn’t make a ton of money—Kapalka pegged its quarterly profits in the “low seven figures”—but it is profitable. The web stuff is weird, he noted, because it’s almost entirely reliant on ads. School children rarely have a credit card attached to their account, which tosses in-app purchases out the window. Beyond the fact that they’re often playing in secret, their playing habits are entirely driven by the hours they’re locked away in school.

“The other thing with the web games is that they have a certain natural life cycle that we've seen, which exactly corresponds to the school year,” said Kapalka. “So spring break, usually kids aren't at school, it [traffic] goes down. Summer break, similarly. Then, they come back and so on. It's a very different pattern than you would see for normal video games.”

Christmas, the time of year when other kinds of video games are huge? A dead zone.

But Shell Shockers has proven interesting enough to push Blue Wizard Digital to make more web games, including the simple but increasingly popular basketball game Basket Bros. 

Can you guess a website that lists Basket Bros. as a game you can play? Geometry Spot, of course, which currently describes Basket Bros. as “a geometry math activity where students can learn more about two-column proofs, triangles, and more.”

What teacher could argue with that?

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com, and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).

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z3mxkjPatrick KlepekEmanuel MaibergGames FeaturesWeb GamesShell Shockerschromebooks
<![CDATA[Square Is Turning a Classic Visual Novel Into a Natural Language Processing Tech Demo]]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5d9ben/square-is-turning-a-classic-visual-novel-into-a-natural-language-processing-tech-demoFri, 21 Apr 2023 19:17:01 GMTFriday, Square Enix announced a new, free port of its deeply influential, 40-year-old point-and-click adventure, The Portopia Serial Murder Case. This new version will have dialogue powered by AI-driven Natural Language Processing (NLP), where players can type or say whatever they want to NPCs.

The Portopia Serial Murder Case follows the story of an unnamed detective as they and their partner investigate the death of a successful banking executive. The original game was released for Japanese PCs in 1983, and then again for the Famicom in 1985. The PC version relied on a very basic text parser, into which the player could input commands for their character’s partner to execute upon. Commands could contain an object and a verb, allowing for some freedom of player expression, while still maintaining a limited set of actual commands to have to worry about. However, like many games which relied on text parsers, some players were frustrated by their inability to correctly phrase a given command, which, in addition to control issues, led the game’s Famicom release to eliminate the text parser in exchange for a more traditional menu system.

The use of NLP in the latest port is one of the bigger experiments a major video game developer has done with the technology that powers buzzy AI chatbots, but, notably characters in The Portopia Serial Murder Case will not use generative AI to respond. In other words, players can say whatever they want and the game will attempt to understand what their intent is, but the NPCs will respond using prewritten dialogue.

In the game, the simple object-verb system is gone, and is instead replaced with an NLP capable of determining player intent from significantly more complex sentences. The use of NLPs in text parsing adventure games is arguably one of the most compelling, and least controversial, applications of the technology seen in video games to date.

Square Enix refers to the game as an “educational demonstration,” suggesting that this is not only a pitch for the company’s own technology, but for the broader utility of Natural Language Processing in games. Its Steam page goes on to breakdown the technologies on display, with one notable exception that is absent from the game itself: Natural Language Generation, which the company claims to have implemented in a previous version of the game, but which is not included in the current release because they couldn’t find a way to prevent the language model from generating “unethical replies.”

“Unethical replies” does not, apparently, refer to depictions of police brutality, which are not only included in the game but advertised on the Steam page. In one screenshot, the player is shown to have told their partner, Yasuhiko Mano, to beat a suspect, which he then does. Instead, it is likely that “unethical replies” refers to replies which would either break the game, using specific prompts to get an NPC to openly reveal the killer for example, or those that contain discriminatory content. In the game’s Steam description, Square Enix states that, upon developing a version of the technology that is capable of filtering out unethical replies, it would consider reintroducing Natural Language Generation to the game.

"This tech preview originally included a function based on Natural Language Generation technology, where the system would generate natural replies to questions that did not have a pre-written response," Square Enix wrote. "However, the NLG function is omitted in this release because there remains a risk of the AI generating unethical replies. We thank you for your understanding. We will consider reintroducing this function as soon as our research succeeds in creating an environment in which players can enjoy the experience with peace of mind.

While still a relatively simple tech demo, the choice to use The Portopia Serial Murder Case is interesting. The game never received an English official release, meaning that this tech demo will be most people’s first exposure to one of the most influential games in the history of Japanese game development. Moreover, by choosing The Portopia Serial Murder Case for this experiment, Square Enix may be trying to implicitly tie the influence of a game that arguably birthed the visual novel to the potential influence of NLPs on the future of game development.

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5d9benRenata PriceJason KoeblerGames News
<![CDATA[‘Otxo’ Is the Noir, Blood Drenched Child of 'Hotline Miami' and 'John Wick']]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7z8ya/otxo-is-the-noir-blood-drenched-child-of-hotline-miami-and-john-wickThu, 20 Apr 2023 14:29:52 GMTIn Otxo, a recently released top-down twin-stick shooter with roguelike elements, you are a dancer amid violent white lines. You throw your body, time and time again, into walls of gunfire. Or you push your character’s back against a pillar, while desperately hoping you have enough time to reload. You kick open doors, and attempt to kill three men before they have the chance to react. Otxo is a game about constantly remixing and re-arranging familiar moments of choreographed violence.

You play as an otherwise unnamed protagonist known as an Otxo, meaning wolf. Otxos are deathless, amnesiac killers bound to a supernatural, threat-filled mansion until they find the emotional core that was taken from them, and that they have since forgotten. In your character’s case, that lost core is a romantic partner. It is a classic revenge story—someone was taken from you, wrongly, by this place, and you will unmake it to get them back. Your player character is not the first to do so, nor will they be the last. Loss, and violence to undo that loss, is the core of the mansion’s supernatural power.

That mansion is staffed by a handful of other characters, each of which carry an air of refinement or professionalism, immediately recognizable to fans of noir films, John Wick, or the recent Hitman trilogy. An alcohol importer in a white dress, from whom you unlock new upgrades. A groundskeeper who has come to terms with his place in the mansion’s little world, who provides the game’s tutorial. A bartender who serves your character drinks which provide significant upgrades to your abilities, which you will definitely need, because Otxo is a genuinely difficult twin-stick shooter descended almost directly from the brutal 2012 indie classic, Hotline Miami.

A screenshot of Otxo depicting a player firing a handful of SMG rounds at an enemy hiding behind a pillar. There are several bodies littering the floor, with used weapons surrounding them.
Screenshot by Lateralis Heavy Industries

Otxo is described by the game’s developers as “Hotline Miami-esque,” and for good reason. Hotline Miami, after your first desperate and stumbling attempts to finish a given level, becomes a game about choreography. The house, which you have memorized, has seven rooms. In those seven rooms, there are twelve men. If they hit you, you will die. You grab a bat, and kick the door in. Two men. One you hit with a swing of your bat; the other is too far away. You throw the bat, and his head, bloody, is cracked between the wood of the bat and the plaster of the wall. You grab his gun, which he did not have time to fire, and kill 10 more men with the same, brutal speed. Everything is neon, bloody, and practiced.

Otxo carries some of this energy forward, but exchanges Hotline Miami’s 80s inspired stream of color and stimuli for a stark black, white, and red color palette, reminiscent of Sin City. It has the same quick, reflex heavy shooting, and its levels can be partially memorized. The layout changes every time, but there are basic building blocks that you can learn. However, the enemies in Otxo have significantly better reflexes than those in Hotline Miami, and are just as accurate. To make up for this, your character can take significantly more damage, and has access to “Focus,” an ability that allows the player to slow down time.

Like the John Wick films, one of the greatest strengths of Otxo’s fight choreography is your protagonist’s capacity, and need, to take a hit. John Wick, like the titular Otxo, cannot avoid every hit. Instead, he accepts glancing blows to mitigate damage instead of risking a clean hit from a failed dodge or block. This leads to a feeling of attrition and exhaustion that Hotline Miami lacks. By the end of some levels, you will see yourself with only a sliver of health and a handful of enemies left to take out. Your character does not literally limp, but it is best to slow your movement in these moments to avoid risky dashes around corners. Even if the game does not afflict you, the sudden threat of death will adjust your behavior in the same way that limping does.

A screenshot of Otxo in which the player, holding a handgun, passes by an open doorway, pointing their gun into the room where a body lies bloody on the floor. Their handgun has twelve rounds, and an enemy is approaching from the bottom right of the screen.
Screenshot by Lateralis Heavy Industries.

In addition to changes to the player’s abilities, enemies are unable to open doors in Otxo, although they can hear gunshots through the walls. This means that, as you move from room to room, and blow open doors with stray bullets, you are creating routes for enemies, and more importantly their bullets, to reach you. Moving through levels effectively means being intentional about which pathways you open.

Finally, Otxo encourages you to play with a level of aggression, precision, and creativity that Hotline Miami facilitates, but does not demand from the player. To acquire upgrades to your character, you have to collect coins from dead enemies. The higher your combo meter, the more coins that enemies drop. The more you vary your methods of murder, the higher your combo meter goes, encouraging the player to constantly change weapons, and to attempt more creative methods of execution like kicking open doors, throwing firearms, and using riskier, limited use weapons like throwing knives and grenades.

All of these factors come together to produce a very particular rhythm of violence. You move, as quickly as possible, from room to room, trying to improvise as you go to keep your combo up. In its best moments, Otxo feels like a good John Wick fight.

While holding a pistol, I kick in the door to a room with three men. I fire two shots into the first, and he drops his gun. I activate focus to slow down time, and hurl my pistol into the head of the second man, who is stunned for a moment, allowing me to close the distance and kill him with a quick melee attack. His gun starts to fall to the ground, and I catch it mid-flight. It is a silenced pistol with seven rounds, two of which immediately find a home in the body of the third man. I do not have time to collect myself as the combo meter ticks down.

I burst into the level’s central room, and chaos breaks out as bullets shatter doors, and the room is flooded with enemies from several directions. My pistol clicks, empty. I throw my back against the pillar, and I slide my second and final magazine into the gun. I focus, and swing. Seven shots. Two bodies. The pistol clicks again. The bodies are within rolling distance, so I hurl myself across the room, grab a submachine gun from the floor, and two bursts kill two men. The gun clicks, and I throw it aside. I roll, pulling a throwing knife from my pocket, and embed it in the chest of a man who doesn’t even have time to pull the trigger as he emerges from a doorway. There are still six enemies left. And it is in these moments, with low health and no resources, Otxo’s improvisational, dancelike combat shines.

In the 10 years since the release of Hotline Miami, it has been hard to imagine a game successfully building on, or even matching, its affective power and style. Otxo is the first game to get close. Sure, it can get a bit repetitive—sometimes you’ll have a few runs with boring enemies in a row—but it manages to, at the very least, carve a bloody, black, and white hole in the shadow of Hotline Miami.

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k7z8yaRenata PriceJason KoeblerGames Reviews
<![CDATA['Dead Island 2' Keeps It Simple, Maybe Too Simple]]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3akq7b/dead-island-2-keeps-it-simple-maybe-too-simpleThu, 20 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMTPatrick and Rob have set their clocks to island time early, as they’ve both been checking out Dead Island 2, the long-waited follow-up to the 2011 zombie game. The crew then laments the death of Media Molecule’s Dreams, and wonders about the future of Halo, following the departure of 343 leader Frank O’Connor. After the break, Rob and Ren have been checking Wartales, a tactical medieval mercenary game that has you balancing the books and emotions of a band of mercenaries. Then, we dip into the question bucket to wax nostalgic over lost bits of gaming culture, and to learn about the secret rules of hockey fist fights.


You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. If you're using something else, this RSS link should let you add the podcast to whatever platform you'd like. If you'd like to directly download the podcast, click here. Please take a moment and review the podcast, especially on Apple Podcasts. It really helps.

Interaction with you is a big part of this podcast, so make sure to send any questions you have for us to gaming@vice.com with the header "Questions." (Without the quotes!) We can't guarantee we'll answer all of your questions, but rest assured, we'll be taking a look at them.

Have thoughts? Swing by the Waypoint forums to share them!

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3akq7bRicardo ContrerasPatrick KlepekGames PodcastsWaypoint RadioDead Island 2PodcastsWartalesdreams
<![CDATA[Space Shooter vs. Magic Shooter: 'Everspace 2' and 'Immortals of Aveum']]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5d9bdd/space-shooter-vs-magic-shooter-everspace-2-and-immortals-of-aveumWed, 19 Apr 2023 14:52:42 GMTRob gets caught up with Redfall after seeing a lot of anger over the lack of a 60 FPS mode for the console version of that game. Patrick’s seen some early footage of Immortals of Aveum, a game that asks “What if COD had magic instead of guns and dragons instead of helicopters.” Cado’s been whacking robots to the beat in Infinite Guitars, the turn based RPG meets rhythm game with a killer soundtrack. Ren’s opinon on Everspace 2 is [NBA JAM announcer voice] HEATING UP, and Patrick has finished what might be a surprise GOTY contender: Bayonetta Origins. Then we take a dip in the question bucket to talk hobby holes and how to dig out of them.

Discussed: Redfall performance mode delay 0:42, Dead Space 24:39, Immortals of Aveum 27:50, Battlefield 2042 41:24, Infinite Guitars 42:33, Everspace 2 1:00:59, Bayonetta Origins 1:14:05, The Question Bucket 1:16:48


You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. If you're using something else, this RSS link should let you add the podcast to whatever platform you'd like. If you'd like to directly download the podcast, click here. Please take a moment and review the podcast, especially on Apple Podcasts. It really helps.

Interaction with you is a big part of this podcast, so make sure to send any questions you have for us to gaming@vice.com with the header "Questions." (Without the quotes!) We can't guarantee we'll answer all of your questions, but rest assured, we'll be taking a look at them.

Have thoughts? Swing by the Waypoint forums to share them!

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5d9bddRicardo ContrerasRob ZacnyGames PodcastsWaypoint RadioPodcastsEverspace 2RedfallInfinite Guitars
<![CDATA[Mario Dominates at the Box Office]]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/88xnnk/mario-dominates-at-the-box-officeTue, 18 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMTPatrick and Cado both saw Natalie Watson’s Mario Movie, and Patrick is psyched it passed the “can I watch this 6 million times” parenting test. Ren is checking out Everspace 2, a promising arcade-y space combat game, and an ambitious fan-made expansion to Darkest Dungeon, Black Reliquary, that goes in a different direction from the sequel. Of course, Rob’s got buyer’s remorse around certain office upgrades, alongside some doors he hasn’t opened in Resident Evil 2 Remake. Separately, Patrick wrapped up the Resident Evil 4 remake, where Ren is absolutely loving her choice to play the game on hardcore difficulty.

Discussed: The Super Mario Bros. Movie 1:23, Everspace 2 25:32, Black Reliquary 46:24, Rob’s System Woes 1:04:21, Hunt:Showdown 1:31:56, Resident Evil 2 1:45:40, Resident Evil 4 1:53:23, The Question Bucket 2:06:24


You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. If you're using something else, this RSS link should let you add the podcast to whatever platform you'd like. If you'd like to directly download the podcast, click here. Please take a moment and review the podcast, especially on Apple Podcasts. It really helps.

Interaction with you is a big part of this podcast, so make sure to send any questions you have for us to gaming@vice.com with the header "Questions." (Without the quotes!) We can't guarantee we'll answer all of your questions, but rest assured, we'll be taking a look at them.

Have thoughts? Swing by the Waypoint forums to share them!

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88xnnkRicardo ContrerasPatrick KlepekGames PodcastsWaypoint RadioPodcastsEverspace 2The Super Mario Bros. Movie
<![CDATA[What the World Needs Now: a New Sony Handheld]]>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxj55z/what-the-world-needs-now-a-new-sony-handheldMon, 17 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMTSony’s at it again with rumors of a new handheld console floating around. This time they’re looking to tether it to the PS5 as a remote play machine, but is that enough of a use case to justify its existence (let alone what it might cost?). The crew then discusses April fools joke games, learning to cope with Mr.X in RE 2, revisiting Breath of the Wild, and take a quick dip in the question bucket to answer some vintage questions.


You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. If you're using something else, this RSS link should let you add the podcast to whatever platform you'd like. If you'd like to directly download the podcast, click here. Please take a moment and review the podcast, especially on Apple Podcasts. It really helps.

Interaction with you is a big part of this podcast, so make sure to send any questions you have for us to gaming@vice.com with the header "Questions." (Without the quotes!) We can't guarantee we'll answer all of your questions, but rest assured, we'll be taking a look at them.

Have thoughts? Swing by the Waypoint forums to share them!

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wxj55zRicardo ContrerasPatrick KlepekGames PodcastsSonyvitaBreath of the WildThe Murder of Sonic the HedgehogWaypoint RadioPodcasts