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| Dean's milking this one for all it's worth. by Good for him. 09/08/2017, 4:35pm PDT | ||||
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| The DeanBeat: Our Cuphead runneth over
I can't help but sympathize with Dean again, just like I did when he called Mass Effect "Mass Defect" almost a decade before gamers decided that was acceptable. He says he's pretty good at real-time strategy games and fucking awful at side-scrollers. I can relate to that! If someone sat me down to preview Age of Empires IV, I'd probably just start building little cities like it was Caesar V, and the first time another journalist sent soldiers to mess with me I'd threaten to come over there and kick his chair out from under him. (He'd be properly cowed, too, because they're all Dean Takahashi types, whereas I'm indistinguishable from press photos of Van Damme when I snap my bicep just right.) I think the mistake gamers are making here is assuming side-scrollers take less skill than real-time strategy games. Some of them do, sure - Nintendo's built an entire industry around platformers the whole family can enjoy, games most of Dean's detractors probably grew up on. But side-scrollers, in general, simply require a different set of skills than other genres. Kind of like chess and curling; in theory, it should be easier to slide a few pieces around a board than to slide a 19 kilogram rock 45 metres with guided missile precision; but in practice, they're both Olympic sports. (As could be FIFA and NBA 2K soon, further distancing those titles from "real" video games.) It took me 2.5 minutes to get through that tutorial. After a full 26 minutes, I still wasn’t done with the first level. What if it took an hour more to beat that level, and then I turned on the recording? No one would have called me out for being a bad gamer. And it would have been so dishonest, like many polished gameplay videos on YouTube. I have received many secret expressions of relief from other bad gamers, who admit that they are bad but aren’t comfortable saying that publicly. My critics have said I’m like an outsider, a game journalist, who doesn’t play games. I am looking down on them and disparaging their hobby. They want someone “authentic” instead. This is the part where I finally get on board the Dean's a crazy idiot train. If you play a game enough to get good at it, you're not bad at it anymore, you're good at it. The unbelievable secret of hard games is they're not hard once you understand them (unless they're broken, which would be nice to know). Playing a game well is how a critic validates his opinion on it, just like a mathematician validates his opinion on how many times one number goes into another by turning his paper upside down and solving the problem backwards. (You want to talk about hard? The only authentic answer to long division is "fuck off.") I understand Dean wasn't acting in the capacity of a critic for his Cuphead preview, but rather something even more useless: a doughy bro playing games he doesn't like, badly, on internet video. Which is an actual service that sites like Giant Bomb charge a premium for. This post is aimed more at his defenders on social media, who have overreached on certain points. As is their fashion. |
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