Master Collection and managing the NG addiction.

The master collection has been out one week today, I have been playing it a lot. I will check my total game time before publishing this post. Against my better judgment it has brought me back to the world of streaming and YouTube on the daily and that is something after some time away has hit me how bad it is for me right now. 

I still have things on my mind that I wanted to do but after some reflection on it I realised they are things I only really want to do because I know it's almost guaranteed nobody else will. That highlights the very specific obsession I have with this stuff, when it comes to NG I mainly want to do the things nobody else does only because nobody else does. Instead I should really focus on what it is I actually want to do. Which right now is play Bayonetta and get back to Super Meat Boy. 

I don't want to get too negative on here but this entry is going to be similar to my off my minds in video form but the main thing that has both disappointed me and annoyed me since the master collection has dropped is peoples reactions to it. 

Ninja Gaiden is a hard game, it takes a lot of time to get to a point where you are in control of everything. I am talking years, literally years of play to get to that point. Then once you're at that point you have to keep playing to further develop that control to where enemies just aren't a threat to you. That is the backbone of karma running and ultimately why the amount of people capable of playing for the maximum score is so small. 

What it reminds me of the most is Doom Eternal, another game that is absolutely amazing and rewards investment in figuring out its enemies, mechanics, weapons, patterns, environments and anything else you can think of that makes you a more powerful player. I am a good player at Doom Eternal, I can play nightmare no problem and have even done challenge runs on it. However, compare me to someone like ZeroMaster or Xiae and I am practically a novice. 

When Doom Eternal launched I was so happy to be struggling on my first run, the game was hard and I was enjoying figuring it out. How did most of the gaming scene react? This is where I would insert any one of the videos of people firing the rocket launcher point blank at the Marauder and complaining that they are dying but I'm not doing that because those videos don't need any more exposure. The equivalent of NG would be someone just doing flying swallow, or attempting to but getting helm splitter instead because they haven't figured out that the move is angle and distance dependent or they're doing XX>XX over and over again.

My point here is that when a shooter came out that required you to really think about your decisions moment to moment, keep track of your ammo and resources, take note of your positioning in an arena, prioritise enemies and track multiple enemies at once and pick your moments of offense carefully; the vast majority cried like babies about it and just invented asinine reasoning as to why the game is unfair or badly designed. Fast forward over a year and look at the level of play Doom Eternal has gotten to, those players don't seem to be struggling with all these "poor design choices" do they? For the record there were plenty of people not struggling at the time of its release either. 

Everything I just said about Doom Eternal can be applied to Ninja Gaiden, I did check a few new players via twitch and while the level of play was lower than I expected it was the attitude that was the most disappointing. NG is notorious for being a hard game, it demands a lot of you even on normal difficulty. Seeing people expect to be good and not struggle and then complain that the game is broken was very annoying. It's not a stretch to say that games have become a lot more simplified over the last generation and I think Doom Eternal and the NG master collection are evidence of that. Doom Eternal is a unicorn because it's not a re-release or remake, it's a new game in a practically new IP that gave a massive middle finger to the last ten years of game development and NG is no different. 

Action games like NG are very few and far between these days and the ones that do come out are nowhere near as complex or challenging. Everyone talks about the Souls series these days but the very comparison of the two shows a clear misunderstanding of their respective genres. Even comparing NG to DMC is something that anyone who understands both well, knows that it's like comparing cars to vegetables. If that seems like an exaggeration to you then you might not understand either game as well as you think you do. 

In my experience the old saying "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make the horse drink" is becoming ever more applicable to the realm of gaming. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of videos on my channel about NG and how to get better at the game. It seems as though most would rather just complain though, I think that is enough of the real rap for now. 

Thanks for reading and checking out the streams if you have this last week and I appreciate all the nice things people say. I just need the break to last a bit longer. The last few videos I was sitting on are now live as well, although the odds someone is reading this before seeing those is pretty slim. 

Peace. 

JTB