Yesterday I saw a tweet from Danny Baranowsky which lead to this story from the creators of That Dragon, Cancer. The short story is the creators of TDC where contacted by youtube streamers who had been hit by content ID claims for the music in the game. The youtubers (who I can't mention because their names have been blocked and I don't want to dig) complained to the developers that "it sucks other people want to make money off my videos." and the explanation from the developers that their game still hasn't made them any money and one primary reason is because of people uploading it to youtube. You should go read the story for yourself, it's not long.

While reading through it, the story reminded me of this comic from The Oatmeal.

While "exposure" works for some games being streamed, which Danny Baranowsky admitted, it really only helps games that have a high replay value. Sandbox games, rogue likes, creation tools. It doesn't help games like Firewatch, Gone Home, The Dragon Cancer. Games that are short experiences with tied heavily to a narrative.

Its interesting to see a developer comment on this. They've also sort of "backed down" and took away the content ID claims. Maybe they just wanted to get their message out?

Personally I think if you're making money off streaming someone else's game, a portion of your money earned should go to that. Licensing would work for this. And not a big percentage either. A token percentage. Something that will allow the developers to continue to make games. Perhaps Twitch and Youtube could do a better job. Twitch for example track what games people are playing to some degree, so as long as you're streaming say Factorio, Factorio's developers get a single digit percentage of your earnings. Because in all this, the only people potentially not earning anything and even potentially losing out are the devs.

I'm not an artistic or creative person but I've many friends who are. And lots of them can relate to the comic from The Oatmeal, when they do work for someone and they get stiffed or have to argue that what they did has a value. Exposure, in every case, does not put food on the table.

I thought 2015 was a great year for games. I think it has enough stand out titles in it that it'll go down as one of those years. But now we're in 2016 and from the middle of 2015 there's been bits of information coming about games that we might be playing this year. Looking forward I think we're on to another winner of a year for video games.

Here's what I'm looking forward to this year. It'll be interesting at the end of the year to look back and see how it all turned out.

We got a great big convoy!

The first title scheduled for release that has my interest is American Truck Simulator. I'm not really into these kind of job simulator games but Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a fantastic game. It had so much more going on that I expected. If you've never played it, let me paint a picture. You start off as Joe McTruckin (at least I did), a man (or woman) with dreams of owning a trucking empire. But a man who owns no truck. So you do some jobs for shipping companies, driving there trucks around Europe bringing oranges from Madrid to Glasgow and then you pick up a job in Glasgow to deliver bags of cement to Berlin. Eventually you save up enough to buy your own truck. Then you start hiring people to drive supplies around. The game becomes part truck driving simulator, part business management. It helps too that the driving feels really nice. There's something relaxing about how the trucks handle, about listening to real world radio stations as you drive around different locations and about that first time you turn your head out of the cockpit of your truck so you can back up into a loading bay.

I expect ATS to have all of that but with BIGGER TRUCKS because that's what you Americans do right? Driving down the interstate of California in my big 18 wheeler listening to classic rock? Yes please.

What. Is. Firewatch?

Three games journalists, personalities, what have you of this very site still have yet to explain to us exactly what is Firewatch. By the looks of it, you play as a character from a Pixar movie in a very picturesque woodland setting and communicate with people via a radio, but there's a mystery going on. I wanna know what that mystery is. Is my character insane? Is it aliens? Is it a set up? Will Canadian Screen Actors Guild version of Jason Voorhees rise from the lake to murder some fun having teens?

Spinning a yarn

I don't know if it started with Sony and the PS4 but in the last two or so years, big publishers have been giving some of their precious E3 stage time to small indie guys. And that's great. That's something I hope to see continue in the future. Of all the games that caught my attention at the last E3, Unravel is one of those games that I'm most looking forward to. I love the style it has going on, I was interested in what the designer of the game had to say about its creation and where it came from and I'm hoping that the game will invoke the same kind of joy that things like Journey have done previously.

Tiger Uppercut!!

I wish either Sagat or Juri (yes, I know) came with the initial launch of characters in Street Fighter V. Those two are my favourite to play. Even without their inclusion, I'm hyped for SFV. I haven't gotten a fighting game for my PS4 yet other than Injustice: Gods Among Us which contained a good story but has MK fighting mechanics which I don't like as much as I like Street Fighter mechanics. I think the way Capcom are going about releasing this and the after support of being able to buy characters just by playing the game is a nice turn around from previous years. I'm not good at SF at all but that won't stop me enjoying it locally or playing through whatever story they throw in there. Here's hoping that Evil Ryu and Good Ryu have to team up to fight Mecha Ken.

There is no more Blood. We used up all the Blood. Blood Blood Blood.

Bloodborne was my number one game from 2015. I loved the movement, the weapons, the story, the settings, the music, just everything about it. I still remember the first time I beat Father (Paul) Gascoigne after a couple of hours of trying. I spent two hours getting whomped, took a break for a day and came back and got him on my second try. By the end of the fight I was standing up almost kicking my tv to try make sure he was down. I loved that feeling.With Dark Souls III I like that it looks like they've kept some of the speed from Bloodborne but slowed it down a little to be like Dark Souls.

While I'll always like the speedy combat more, it suits the Dark Souls titles better to be a little more methodical, a little less frantic. Also did you see that giant dude in the trailer?

The Dark Adventures of Cyber Jesus

Thanks to Gamespots own Danny O'Dwyer I'll never be able to look at Deus Ex: Mankind Divided without thinking about that header. I might get this one on Steam just so I can rename it as The Dark Adventures of Cyber Jesus. I liked the "relaunch" of Deus Ex: Human Revolution all the way up until they decided to present me with 4 buttons. I get why Mass Effect 3 got so much stick over coming down to three options but personally I always found the ending of Deus Ex Human Resources to be even worse than that. It was a sour ending to an otherwise great game.

At least this wont be ruined by the presence of George Clooney.

Adr1ft looks like exactly the sort of terrifying adventure game I can get behind. Floating around the wreckage of a space station with limited oxygen supply, trying not to boost off in the wrong direction into the void of nothingness, wondering how the hell you'll survive, if you'll survive. I'm really looking forward to this one. I'm not big on "walking simulators" and this sort of seems like it might be a "floating simulator" but it's set in such an interesting location that I can't help but be interested. And it'll totally have a better space section than Final Fantasy VIII.

I'd murder a cup of tea right now...

Cuphead is a front runner for best style and it's not even out. I kind of wish it wasn't just a boss rush game but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that that is the better way for this game to be. The art style is almost too good to be true. I think this will end up being a short experience but I'll probably end up playing it over and over. If it ever comes to Vita I'm done for.

People in regular clothes don't belong in Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy XV will be my first full Final Fantasy game since Final Fantasy XII. Maybe. It depends. I'm cautiously optimistic that it will be ok? The demo looked fine, the combat seems ok and I'm glad to see it looks like you've got some amount of freedom in the game. Hopefully it doesn't take "twenty hours to get good" because that's way too much of a time investment for any game. The only thing that looked weird was NPCs in regular clothes. This is Final Fantasy. Nobody wears normal jeans or shorts and a t-shirt unless your idea of normal jeans are those ones that come with a bunch of pointless straps that come from Hot Topic.

Dreeeaam, Dream Dream Dream...

Dreams. Media Molecule are nuts. I really like that Sony keep giving them money to keep being nuts. I'm not even sure they've sold me on the idea that this will actually be a video game and not just a toy or creation tool but I was sold on it all the way back at the PS4 announcement conference when they showed it off before it even had a name. I'm not a creative person but I'm still looking forward to whatever the hell this is to try create things. If I've to buy two move controllers to get the best out of then so be it. Hell I might buy them now while they're cheap.

What even is this game?

If the guys at America's premier knock off site of Gamebomb.ru can't even explain what Firewatch is then they've no hope of telling us what the hell What Remains of Edith Finch is about. I thought The Unfinished Swan was a neat game that kind of maybe went on a bit too long. But this new game from Giant Sparrow looks right up my alley. It's another "walking simulator" looking type game that I think I'll enjoy. Now is the time that people are expanding on things like Gone Home and Dear Esther. Games that many years ago had the internet in an arms war about "what is games?" that some told us where the blue prints for things to come. It reminds me of Austin talking about that studio that made Sunset and how that wasn't so much a game for gamers but a game for developers to give them an idea and let them run with it. With no more content coming out for Bloodborne it looks like What Remains of Edith Finch will be my 2016 Lovecraft nightmare.

Will every day still be great at your Junes??

Persona 4 Golden was a game that I stupidly put off for about two years of owning a Vita because "that shit is anime stuff, I won't like that". Then I finally caved and bought it. At first I didn't know if I liked it. I was just some school kid, making friends in a new school and walking around a town and studying. This didn't seem like a good game. Then it became a great game. Suddenly even doing things like studying was fun! Persona 5 can't come soon enough and if it doesn't come out in Europe in 2016 I'm buying a copy from the US and shipping it over.

"He's always bloodying hanging off things"

Back around when Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception was being released my girlfriend worked in a game retailer and the store was full of posters and tv screens and display stands and they nearly all depicted Nathan Drake hanging off of something. Every trailer had him dangling by one arm off the back of a plane or something. We watched the trailer for Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and he does it again! The man has great upper body strength I'll give him that. I've still yet to play an Uncharted game. I skipped owning a PS3 last generation. I think this game looks great though. The demos they've shown looked outstanding. The Last of Us is a game that comes close to being near the best game of last generation (Red Dead Redemption) and I liked every Crash Bandicoot game that Naughty Dog, Inc. have worked on. Between now and the release of this game I'm going to spend a couple of weekends in a crash course with the Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection to get up to speed.

"Now she's doing it too!"

Tomb Raider was a very good game that didn't have nearly enough puzzles in it. I know that Rise of the Tomb Raider technically came out in 2015 but not on a platform I own. After hearing how good it's apparently turned out with them turning the combat down a notch and the puzzle platforming and story up a notch it sounds like a hell of a time. I've already heard the ending but I'm looking forward to seeing and playing my way to it.

Blizzard where not prepared to kill one of their best characters...

I got into World of Warcraft back just as World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade was being released. Again, similar to Persona 4 I had put it off as something I wouldn't like. Within a weekend of playing WoW I'd already started to convince other friends to try it out. I got myself into a raiding guild and one of the highlights of playing it was the Black Temple raid. We killed Illidan Stormrage and I even made (but sadly lost) a terrible POV kill video of it. Fast forward to 2016 and now I'm really only interested in jumping back into WoW at the release of an expansion, playing for a bit, giving it a couple of months for all the content to release before buying more time to check it all out and then doing the same thing over and over. World of Warcraft: Legion will probably be no different.

But they're making a dope looking shooter!

What. Is. Overwatch? A dope looking shooter that's what. I already said so in the header. I'll admit it that I like Blizzard's work. I've bought every collectors edition of every game since getting into WoW that they've released. All the Diablo ones, all the WoW ones bar vanilla and tbc and all the StarCraft ones. If there was a Heroes of the Storm one I'd probably have bought that too. Overwatch will probably be the first game I buy from them that I won't splurge out on the CE unless I get to play some sort of extended demo. But unless I start a streaming channel on twitch and amass a large following or I get blessed by the Blizzard Lottery system that's not going to happen. I look forward to spending hours shooting dudes in this great looking shooter. Blizzard have never been good at coming up with original concepts but they're one of the best at taking other ideas and tweaking them into some of the best games in the genres.

<Insert Jamiroquai lyrics about virtual something here>

VR is something I'm really interested in but it's already been a bit of a wave for me. At first it was exciting. I tried out an early Oculus devkit and because the concept was new I didn't mind just playing tech demos. But then two years happened and it all looked a little bit like the Kinect. Roller coaster tech demos only get you so far. But now that we're in 2016 and we know the production models for at least two of the three or four major pieces of hardware are hitting this year it's become exciting again. I probably won't take the initial bait on any of them. I need to see prices, to decide which one is best and also to see if they're going to be another Kinect or another Playstation Move.

And everything else!

There's a tonne of other games set to release this year that I'm looking forward to checking out. World of Final Fantasy looks like a fun distraction to play on my way to and from work. Hyper Light Drifter looks stylish as all hell and with a name like that it has to come with a great soundtrack. The Technomancer will be rubbish but in a good way and has my favourite stupid name for a video game. No Man's Sky might be interesting if there's something to do in it but like VR it seems like that game is impossible to demo or they're just doing a bad job at it. I don't believe for a second that Horizon: Zero Dawn is actually coming out this year so I haven't included it above but that's about the coolest looking open world game I've seen in a long time. Even it if has Guerrilla Games trademark meh story telling it has their trademark awesome design. Mass Effect: Andromeda is also totally not a 2016 game but I'm ready to be a space cowboy in a Mako (which totally handled fine in Mass Effect). Hellblade (awful name) seems promising as Ninja Theory make great action combat games. And I look forward to seeing what else Devolver Digital put out this year besides EITR and Mother Russia Bleeds.

That it! We'll check back in at the end of 2016 and see how it all turned out. Hopefully pretty good. If you made it this far, thanks for reading - unless you just skipped to the end.

So what are you looking forward to this year? Do you think 2016 might be better than 2015?

That's the best title I can come up with. I'm not very inventive.

Anyway. 2015 was a bumper year for video games. It was the first time in a long time I felt that there was maybe too many video games happening. Between indie titles and triple A's there was something new happening every other week. So much so that there are a tonne of games from this year that I wanted to get around to but just didn't have the chance. And 2016 looks like it'll be just as good if not better.

Spoilers may follow.

10) Super Mario Maker

I don't own a WiiU. I haven't bought one yet either. But I've gotten such a great amount of enjoyment out of this game. Watching the GB community levels, watching Patrick vs Dan and just seeing how people took this thing and went with it. The levels that are being made are not Mario levels at all. This is Mario mixed with Dark Souls. My one complaint is that people keep using the wrong tile set, the correct set to use is Super Mario 3 although I understand they're using World because of the abilities.

9) Destiny - The Taken King

If you asked me two weeks ago would this game be on my list I'd have said "fuuuck nooo". I liked the mechanics of Destiny. The shooting was good, the movement was good and it looked good. But the game was a mess and didn't have enough content in it and I never bought into the season pass so by the time TTK came out it was going to cost me as much to catch up. Then the game went on sale and I could get up to speed for about €20 and that was a price I thought was ok. And they fixed a lot. The quest system is simple but guides you. The Dreadnought is full of secrets and challenges that I always wanted from Destiny. The loot system is actually a loot system. I'm not sure how long I'll stick around and I'm interested to see how the game continues into year 2 and beyond with them saying they're dropping big expansions but I'm still enjoying my time with this almost daily since buying it.

8) Undertale

I was never sure if I was going to like this or not. I'm not big on "those" sort of games but I liked Undertale. The music was great and I enjoyed the combat, though could have used a bit less of it and thought it spiked in places at moments that seemed a bit unfair. I still need to go back and play it but there were a few moments in it that really made me laugh and others that really made me go "oh shit". On my first play through I killed Toriel because I couldn't see any other way. At the end of the game after the fight with Asgore it dawned on me that she was married to him and how upset and pissed he was going to be. Then Flowey killed him, the game shut down and the next time I opened it a fight straight out of Binding Of Isaac happened. I've decided to go back and keep playing to see what happens

7) Grow Home

Grow Home is the best Assassins Creed game ever made and it drives me mad that Ubisoft are able to make great small games like this, Child of Eden, Valiant Hearts and to an extent Rayman but they can't figure out how to make AC good (at least for me). But here's Grow Home, a game about climbing stuff and collecting stuff, which is a lot of what you do in AC games but Grow Home makes it enjoyable. It has great controls, even if the robot walks like a drunk and the upgrade system really pushes you to want to go grab just a few more crystals and explore every nook and cranny.

6) Until Dawn

This is another game I didn't play myself but I sat with my girlfriend as she played through it all the way through. I'm not good with horror games, I get scared easily by jump scares and freak myself out by worrying that one is coming while she loves horror. I didn't think Until Dawn was going to be very good but it really was. It's a David Cage game that doesn't shit the bed half way through. There's a few twists that are telegraphed a bit and are easy to figure out before they happen but they're still satisfactory. The only thing neither of us liked was that my girlfriend managed to save everyone but two people right up to the very end and then everyone but two characters died because we didn't realize they where all too stupid to run out of the house from the gas explosion. I hope there's more like this from that team.

5) StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void

I don't think there's going to be a StarCraft 3 although if there is I really want to play as Alarak and not any other boring ass Protos. The game took way too long to come out but the campaign missions where really enjoyable and I liked the special campaign abilities. The story was just the stupid sort of ending I wanted for StarCraft. I'll go back and play through it on a harder setting in time and chip away at the co-op missions when I get a chance.

4) Fallout 4

I haven't finished this game yet, because I've spent a lot of time wandering around looking for resources to build my towns up and exploring everything I come across. My buddy Nick Valentine and I have been bringing peace to the Wasteland a couple of bullets at a time. I don't get peoples hang ups on what Fallout 4 is. It's just more Fallout 3 sure, but that's all they sold it as. I don't get annoyed at Crusader Kings 2 for not being what I want it to be because that game isn't for me and they never tried to sell me on it otherwise. I accept Bethesda's games warts and all because nobody is out there doing what they do on the scale that they do it on. The changes to shooting, vats, crits, rads and power armour are all great and I love that junk is actually useful now. And I really, really enjoy spending time fixing up my garage. I've got my magazine rack, my flag behind my power armour, the radio playing. I've a kennel for Dogmeat with a seat next to it and a cooler of beers. I've a shotgun that I customized for maximum damage at minimum range under my pillow. I can see myself playing this game for a long time to come.

3) Cities: Skylines

This is what Sim City should have been. The moment that this game totally clicked for me was when I thought I had it figured out. My city was growing, doing well, making money. But then I discovered that my roads where too small so garbage trucks had some trouble getting down them. So people got sick because the garbage couldn't be collected. So then the ambulances got stuck, which causes people to die, which made more people sick, and then suddenly I had an epidemic and 80% of my city was wiped out. The sewage system got backed up and it looked beyond repair. So like any good sim-mayor I loaded up a new zone and started again. That one went much better. I bought the expansion for it but I've yet to play it, I just wanted to give the developers some more money for making such a fantastic city builder.

2) Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

The best playing game possibly ever made? Great combat, great music and a pretty good story if you like Metal Gear. I don't think there's anything I thought of trying to do that it wouldn't let me do. "Hey I wonder if I can shoot a rocket off the back of this horse... WOW I TOTALLY CAN!!!". It's a shame that this game wasn't perfect, that the second act feels thrown together. If that wasn't the case then it would've been such a perfect end to the series. I didn't see the twist coming but I liked it. I like that Venom Snake is not the real Big Boss. I thought it was a great way to reinforce that Big Boss is actually a massive dickhead.The soundtrack was so enjoyable, it was like mixing your action movie fantasies with The Wedding Singer.

1) Bloodborne

The first Souls game I properly got into. I wasn't playing console games much when this came out and I'd heard so much about how janky the PC version where that although I own a copy of Dark Souls I didn't play it. Bloodborne though hits all the right boxes for me. The audio is great with music being so memorable. The visuals are great too. I've seen a lot of complaints about the city looking too similar which I feel is a weird complaint. That's what they where going for. I didn't think the city melded into each other, I could navigate my way around the map, through zones and identify landmarks in it without any real problem and the visuals really made it look like this was a real city. The combat moved quick enough, the weapons were interesting and fun to use. I mainly used the saw cleaver for most of the game and the kirkhammer for farming. The story is hidden just enough to make me interested in trying to uncover it and once I saw that the game wasn't just about werewolves and monsters and had this full on Lovecraft thing going on I was sold.

Here's to 2016!

I still have an old PS2 hooked up to my TV. I have a few old games for it that I never wanted to get rid of. There's an old games store near where I live in Dublin (it's called The R.A.G.E if anyone's interested) and I happened to have some credit for their store. So I popped in yesterday and picked up a copy of Tony Hawk's Underground - the last of the main series that I really truly liked before I started to think "Ok guys, maybe give it a year off". I also picked up Rage Racer and Die Hard Trilogy. Side story - as a dumb kid I never realized that Rage Racer was just a Ridge Racer game. So I used to just get annoyed at Namco for not making another Rage Racer and shunned the Ridge Racer series forever. Also that Ridge Racer 4 controller looked super dumb.

I was like many people, hopelessly fooling myself that this time Robomodo wouldn't screw it up again. Tony Hawk: RIDE and Tony Hawk: SHRED are different. They had to try make those games work with a weird controller that was probably better suited to an arcade machine than it ever was to home use. The HD collection was pretty bad though. But when we all saw that this one was called "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5" a few of us foolishly thought it would be a return to form. 5!! That mean's something. That number is important to anyone whose followed the series because apart from Tony Hawk's Project 8 it's the first proper numbered sequel in the series since Pro Skater 4. Project 8 wasn't called Tony Hawks Pro Skater Project 8, it was Tony Hawk's Project 8. That's different.

Yesterday as I finished creating my skater (after picking from many more options than 5 has available) who would go on to impress Chad Muska with sick tricks around the abandoned pool outside the high school and immediately got back into the grove of endlessly spinning, flip tricking and grinding my way to high scores while listening to Clutch, Mastodon and Busdriver I turned to my girlfriend and asked, "How did Robomodo screw this up? Have they never played these games before? How does this still feel so good all these years later and yet someone they've managed to take something beautiful and ruin it?".

THUG is not a perfect game. As soon as it told me to get off the board and start collecting bits of my friends skateboard that bad drug dealer dudes threw up onto the rooftops of New Jersey before throwing me into a car to control I remembered that this is almost when the wheels started to fall off. But THUG had the trick system. It had really well designed levels to skate around. It had a great soundtrack. Getting off the board was fine, it was just kind of dumb what they sometimes asked you to do when you where off of it. And I get it. The folks at Neversoft Entertainment had to do something to try keep the game fresh even if honestly I would've just been happy to get an updated trick list and some rad new levels every year. And even when it does ask you to do stupid stuff like race a car it's mostly inoffensive. The car handles in the most boxy way ever but it's fine. It's not fun, but it's not difficult to control it and you don't spend ages retrying the objectives over and over. And soon it's over and you're back to pulling back to back 900's while spine transferring off the top of a hotel before you turn it into a manual that you start combo-ing into fliptricks and handstands before grinding your way on every rail, fence and 90 degree angle and if you mess it up who cares, just press start, down, x and you're instantly giving it another shot.

The thing that really gets me about 5 is just how the destroyed all that. How is it that with the power of the PS4 and the Xbox One can I not just skate up to a dude, get an objective and instantly be loaded to whatever location it is in the stage that I have to do it in, or that the objective instantly loads in and out once done? One of the first objectives when you get out of New Jersey and into Manhattan is a dude asks you to pull out grind combos on two boxes. You skate to him, get the objective and instantly those boxes are there, highlighted to say "yo use us!" and a timer is running. The second you finish all the combos, the boxes instantly de-spawn and you continue skating as if nothing has changed. How is that still not a thing?

It's a shame that this is very obviously it. This is all we're getting. The final nail in the coffin. Activision are unlikely to care enough about getting the rights to Mr. Hawk again unless he's SUPER cheap this time around. Our best hope is that someone starts a Kickstarter project that gets funded with an expected release date of 2018 but ultimately we won't see until about 2022.

So rest in peace Tony Hawk games. You where once a staple on my Christmas list to my parents. I spent many hours with you and after I finish THUG I think I'll go back and dig out the rest from my parents house. I know I have 2 and 3 in their place somewhere unless they made their way into a box that took a trip to the charity store. And Aggressive Inline, the best non-Tony Hawk Tony Hawk-like game.

And if nothing else, thanks to Robomodo for getting me to replay Tony Hawk games, even if they're not the ones Robomodo made.

Other than kickstarter projects this is probably it for skating games. Or Skate 4 happens. God let that happen. I'll buy it with a $40 season pass or whatever you want EA.

PS - Rodney Mullen had the best skate videos in all Tony Hawk games ever.

I'm just coming out of "finishing" Arkham Knight (I didn't get all the Riddler trophies) and immediately it made me think "Maybe they should stop trying to make everything a trilogy...". Technically this is the fourth game in the series, no matter how much Rocksteady's marketing department say - there are a tonne of references to Arkham Origins in this game that show they absolutely count that game as continuity but for this post I'm counting the Rocksteady only games.

Throughout this post I'll be spoiling the Mass Effect trilogy, the Gears of War trilogy, some of the Dragon Age trilogy and obviously the Arkham trilogy.

What went wrong?

Without trying to mention the story too much, because I think the story is too subjective of a thing that you like or not I think the easiest element to point to for each series is that they all got too big. They all added too much in or built too high. And when they did it, they didn't know what to do with it and when to stop adding.

Gears of War 3 jettisoned some of the main characters of the series away on a side quest that you never saw and it did it only to add in some other characters. Now, those other characters were either already in the games previously in different roles or they had been written into the lore through books and graphic novels but it led to the problem of there being too many people in the final story. I hope you didn't like Cole or Baird or wanted to see what they got up to. I was convinced that there would be DLC based on them going off to get reinforcements but it never came.

Mass Effect 3 suffered a similar problem. Too many characters. Most of them relegated to just standing around waiting for you to make idle chat with them. An even bigger problem it had though was bloat. As many of you reading are probably all too aware, Mass Effect 3 was sold to us with the promise that all that stuff we've been doing since Mass Effect 1 would matter. And in the end? In the end it came down to three (and after a patch four) choices of how to end the game.

Nothing you did ever mattered. Just press the the button you want, all choices are available to you. It was crap enough when Deus Ex Human Revolution also did this but at least that was just one game, not a series that was meant to be inter-weaved all the way to the end.

Now onto Batman. What went wrong with that? This is almost a weird one because I think there's actually fewer characters in Knight than there is in Asylum but Asylum was so tightly made where as Knight feels, disjointed by comparison. Knight has two big problems that made it fall a bit flat. The Batmobile (which was alright but shoehorned into way, way too many sections) and the problem of being open world and thinking that to get the most out of being open world they have to use what I like to call "The rule of three".

"The rule of three" is a game design idea that I really hate. It's that thing designers do when they make you do the same thing at least three times before you finish something. Anyone whose ever played a Lego game will be familiar that nearly all bosses follow the rule of three. Perform the same series of actions three times and you've finished the boss. In Knight - the rule of three is used for almost every side quest there is and sometimes its expended up to six, twelve or eighteen with very little if anything changing. Capture Manbat three times. Scan these bodies three times each. Complete these three races, each one has three laps. Stop these three bank robberies. Chase Firefly three times. Arkham City had a lot of this too, but it's side missions felt better and there was more of them with more variety to them. It had a lot more characters too and used them better.

Finally I'll talk about Dragon Age. I haven't finished Inquisition yet. I've put it down twice for other games (Bloodborne and Arkham Knight). But already I can see it's problems. They made it a single player MMO, rammed it full of Ubi-game collectibles and broke the story up into a manner that makes it feel a bit silly and poorly told. Every time I send someone from my war council off onto a twenty-four hour mission I just think "It's a good thing Corypheus is cool with just chilling out and not ending the world so I can find out whose been peddling bootleg copies of Varrics books." I loved DA:O and I even liked DA2 despite the changes they made to the combat and that they only modeled a handful of locations. I think it's an early indication of my overall impression of the third entry that I've put it down twice. I like it, but I don't like it.

The final hurdle and sticking the landing.

Ultimately all of these series had their best games as either the first or second in the series. Mass Effect 1 or 2 are the best games in that series depending on who you talk to and their love of micromanaging equipment upgrades. Gears 2 is the ultimate Gears game both in single player and multiplayer. Dragon Age Origins is still the best Dragon Age game. And Arkham Asylum or City is the best of the Rocksteady trio depending on if you like a metroidvania or open city. But Mass Effect 3 is not the best game. Gears 3 is not the best game. Arkham Knight is not the best game. In some cases, they're not even second best - they're the worst.

It's a problem that these story driven games seem to face. I personally feel that just adding more story and maybe tweaking and improving features is enough. There's no need to put massively overhauled mechanics into the game. There's no need to ram games full of Ubi-game.

I like all these series and there's elements of all their games that I like. But so far, there hasn't been a trilogy of games that stuck the landing. Gears has probably come the closest because they didn't mess with the mechanics too much - but then they also left a bunch fo stuff out of the story that seemed like it needed to be answered.

So what should happen? Should games stop trying to make trilogies and just make series? Look at the GTA games, Elder scrolls and Fallout. Loosely tied together but all separated and they're all great series in their own right. Should Dragon Age just be a series of games that takes place in that world? Should Mass Effect just tell stories set in that universe? Should the Arkham series just have been good Batman stories?

I have never played a Persona (or Atlus) game before in my life. In general, for a long time I had very little interest with anything from Japan. Anime, manga and anything with that art style. My experiences with JRPGs comes solely from Final Fantasy games. I've owned a Vita for probably a year and a half now and in all that time everyone has told me that P4G has been the game to play. It went up on sale on the PSN a while ago for twenty euro bucks so I took the dive and went for it.

In this blog I aim to chronical my time with it as someone who knows nothing of what to expect from it from either an Atlus game, an anime(?) game, a JRPG that isn't Final Fantasy and someone whose unfamiliar with most of what I imagine the culture the game comes from.

I'm about 12 or so hours in, I've just finished up getting Kanji out of the TV realm. I'm enjoying the story so far. I didn't really think the idea of playing a game as a teenage boy with my time divided up into at most 4 periods a day would be that interesting but it is. I decided to focus on studying, drama and took a job as a translator, which ended up syncing up well so far.

I think I'm enjoying the story and the "real" world a lot more right now and that mostly comes down to my biggest complaint about the game. Which is the music. Not all of the music. Specifically the battle music. I hate it. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have repeating lyrics. The actual melody is fine but the vocals just drive me mad. Especially since you can wind up in very short fights. I'm already sick of hearing "It's a war out there everyday" and having the fight end around the line "It's time to make history, yeah!". Combined with Teddie constantly telling me things I'm aware of it makes the dungeon/combat part of the game pretty irritating.

The combat itself is enjoyable though and I like the little things they've put in like "1 more", team up attacks and when Chei punts an opponent to oblivion. I hope there's a few more actions like that in it. And the flow of dungeons is just right. Several times I've felt like I need to go back out to Teddie and leave it for the day but then I end up getting some more SP and I'm good to go on. I really appreciate that there are no random encounters and that for the most part you can straight up avoid fights.

The characters all seem interesting. Yosuke and Chei make for some good comedy. Not too big a fan of Yukiko. She's not terrible, I just don't have much of an interest in the story of a good looking girl set to inherit a successful business but whose not happy with the cards she's been dealt.

I can definitely see myself playing more of it, I dunno if I could do a second play through though. That will all depend on how tolerant I end up becoming of hearing "It's a war out there everyday" over and over.