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godtier · 4 months

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so i wasn't gonna make a separate post about this but @sapphire-weapon had a post (that i reblogged a few days ago) in which someone mentioned that they think it was a missed opportunity in RE6 for jake to not have spoken to wesker. i had a p long conversation with sirea about it and my thoughts about that sentiment, but it was also nearly 3 AM my time when that happened so i dunno if i was even articulating my thoughts properly lmao

and yes... this is technically a meta post and i know i said i was gonna do the mmx meta post first... but this one isn't gonna be nearly as long (i hope) and i gotta get the brainworms out before i die

(quick edit note: i reworded the list item below from saying he was "likely a drug addict" to "likely a recreational drug user" because i feel like that better encompasses what i'm trying to get across

(another edit note: i made another post regarding jake's usage of drugs that stemmed from this post! it's marked as mature bc of drug usage, so it won't show up in tag search. if you're interested in that, look here!)

so the idea that wesker being alive in OG RE6 would have brought an opportunity for jake's character is kinda, imo, antithetical to the purpose of jake's character in the first place.

when we meet jake, we know a few things about him, right off the bat:

he's a mercenary

he's likely a recreational drug user or at least heavy/risk-taking user

he doesn't give a fuck about anything but making money

his whole character journey is going from this selfish, money-focused dickhead to someone who actually cares about doing something good, just because it's the right thing to do. at the start, jake refuses to simply give his blood away when sherry mentions needing it for a vaccine. no, he wants a cash payout. 50 million dollery-doos for a pint of his blood. by the end, he lowers the price to a mere 50 dollars. one could argue that was symbolic and he actually didn't care if he was paid or not, but that's neither here nor there.

but why was he like this? because his childhood was shite; his mother was sickly, he had no father figure, and by 15-ish, jake had to learn how to hustle to keep food on the table. and by "hustle" i mean "do a bunch of mercenary work and killing people." and when shit went south with his little group of mercenaries (their entire group was sold out by a heel-turner), jake basically went "fuck alla y'all" and lost all sense of conviction or morals.

during the game, he expresses his bitterness for his father, wesker, pretty clearly. even though his mother still loved wesker, tried to raise jake to respect him despite never knowing him, it didn't matter to jake. he hated that guy. well, really, who doesn't?

we're not gonna talk about excella rn ok

jake's entire character arc is built up around this hatred as well as a subconscious fear of becoming his father. the fear part doesn't show up until later in the story, after he and sherry were captured by the Big Bad's organization. they were both experimented on for several months, during which jake overheard the researchers talking about his father, wesker. this gives jake a sort of "explanation" as to why he is the way he is; he takes the "nature" side of the nature vs nurture argument.

ofc sherry scolds his ass and basically tells him "grow up and take responsibility for your actions."

and here's the thing... this fear, narratively, works just fine without wesker being there.

(since this got obscenely long, pls continue below for the actual explanation lmao)

jake eventually comes to the conclusion that yeah no it's definitely up to him to not become wesker, not his genetics. he does this without wesker being there. that's the entire point of his character journey. in order for an interaction with wesker to even matter or have any sort of impact on jake's character arc, his character arc as a whole would need to change.

see, imo, wesker being there diminishes a lot of the power of that journey. in the game, he isn't there for jake to scream at, to question. all those thoughts in his head that might be circulating around, like why he left his mother, why he did what he did, etc, cannot be answered. this is not a bad thing in a character arc as this is shit that happens to people all the time. people don't always get the answers they may want from family members because those family members are dead. they have to learn to move on without those answers or they have to rely on people who knew that person to fill in the blanks. this is what jake already does in game. he has to rely on sherry, and by a smaller extent, chris, to fill in those blanks for him.

but we as players, observers of the narrative, already know the answers to some of those questions. why wesker did what he did, primarily. anything else is only pertinent to jake and him knowing those answers doesn't change anything for his character arc as it is.

if wesker was there in the game, what would that even add to jake's narrative? a scene where jake yells at his dad? asks him "why did you leave?" when wesker wasn't even aware that he had a kid in the first place? remember: wesker had no fucking idea that he had a child. there would be no reason for wesker to even believe jake in the first place. sure, there could be a scene where he goes "well i'll be damned, ig he really is my misfired chromosome," but... then what? what does that add?

you could argue that wesker could use jake, maybe try to manipulate him into doing shit for his plans, but... that wouldn't work with the way jake's characterization is mapped out. his entire characterization would have to change for this to work in a satisfying way.

jake already hates wesker without ever meeting him. he would not willingly participate in anything wesker offered to him. he already knows that wesker nearly destroyed the world multiple times and had a hand in destroying an entire city. even if jake has no moral compass at the start of the game, by the time he learns about what wesker really did, who he really was, he's already showing that he does have one, it was just dormant up until that point. he's clearly disgusted by what wesker did. what foothold would wesker have that wouldn't immediately result in it just falling flat?

given how wesker is, i could see him perhaps belittling jake, maybe saying "wow you suck for being my spawn," or something during a fight with the intent to rile him up. would that work? no, not narratively nor not in the way jake is characterized. again, jake doesn't want to be like wesker. why would insulting him and saying he's not "as good" as wesker expected him to be motivate jake or even anger him? it shouldn't, because jake doesn't want to be anything like wesker. if anything, it may annoy him, but that's kind of a lame reaction, right?

if anything, the most i could see culminating out of this would be jake standing over wesker after he's defeated again (because it's resident evil and obviously wesker can't win) and having a "wow idk what i was worried about" moment. that's it.

but he doesn't need that. having a scene like that cheapens the weight of him figuring that out himself, without wesker there as "proof."

because the point of his story, of his character arc, is that he figures that out on his own (and with the help of sherry and the events he witnesses) because he has to. he doesn't need wesker there to spoon-feed that to him. he figures that out by working with sherry, by seeing the effects of the C-Virus on everything that it infects. wesker being an abstract entity in his life is enough, because the frustration of not seeing him, not being able to put a bullet in his skull himself, fuels the rest of his journey.

this is where i think that people who make these observations or criticisms (primarily those who think that jake's character would have been improved if wesker was there) need to understand the difference between what's good for a character as a person and what's good for their arc.

interacting with wesker would be good for jake as a person, in that he would no longer need to wonder about it. the answers would be spelled out for him, and he wouldn't have to do any wondering about the what-if. he wouldn't have any doubts left that he'd need to untangle.

but in doing that, it cheapens his arc; it would do more of a disservice to it, imo, than anything else. it would make his journey more formulaic and boring.

it would also clutter up the already cluttered narrative of that game. you have him not only struggling with his heritage, struggling with the fear of becoming his father, struggling with needing to be the "savior" by giving his blood, struggling with his moral compass, but now also struggling with seeing his father for the first time in person?

it makes his arc top-heavy. in that scenario, you could easily replace him with another, completely new character who has zero ties to wesker and the story wouldn't change in any meaningful way. the reason why it works the way to does now is because wesker is already dead. it creates that internal conflict, that internal frustration, that jake has to learn how to deal with since he cannot take that frustration out on his father in-person. he has to make peace with that struggle in other ways.

now, that's not to say there aren't ways that adding wesker into the story of RE6 that don't disrupt that balance. primarily, when it comes to a potential RE6 remake, the writing team can (and hopefully will) rework aspects of the entire game to make the plot more streamlined. this could include adding wesker in and redoing jake's characterization and character arc entirely.

this would be the only way i could see it working out. if jake's entire motivation was changed, his entire backstory was tweaked, then wesker being around could probably work! an interaction between them could be made to make sense and not bog down the rest of the plot as a result.

sirea also mentioned to me in our conversation that adding wesker in to RE6 remake could actually help streamline the plot and i do agree with that. she mentioned that all of the main characters have a tie to wesker in some way, which is absolutely true. having him there would neatly tie their campaigns together in the plotline and make the game as a whole feel less disjointed and messy.

this is especially true when we consider there are 4 fuckin campaigns that all run alongside one another and intersect at random points. it gets so fucking difficult to page through and figure out when certain things happen in the plot. you'll see them happen in order in chris's campaign, for example, then you go start leon's campaign and have to start over again and try to remember what happened at the same time during chris's campaign and so on.

now imagine that not with just two campaigns but four. it gets gross quick. sure, there are parts where the characters run into each other and that helps ground a general timeline in your head, but as far as time elapsed... it's so fuckin hard u guise

there's a reason why it's so hard to summarize the plot of RE6. it's because there is just so much going on in that fucking game.

anyway, that's my rant/sort of meta analysis about why i think wesker didn't need to be in OG RE6 and probably would have made jake's entire arc stupider than it already was

#resident evil #resident evil 6 #jake muller #albert wesker #meta analysis #pls don't look at me i only write posts about characters no one cares about #stay tuned for my meta analysis on HUNK next #(may or may not be serious about that)#(also this post is the epitome of tl;dr)#(u been warned)#text post

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godtier · 8 months

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skull island: rise of kong – apparently no one remembers what games actually looked like back in the fifth gen

so if you do the Vidya Gaems, i'm sure you've already heard of the skull island: rise of kong game that came out last week.

needless to say, it's getting brutalized in reviews and by content creators/streamers, as it should be. it's a shit tier game and looks rushed and buggy as all fuck.

but one thing that i've noticed is people comparing the game to an N64, PS1, or other low-res polygonal game from the 90s/00s... observe:

so on and so-forth...

and it got me thinkin....

"do... do these people not remember what those games actually looked like?"

so out of total boredom and nothing better to, i decided to do a little bit of a "refresher course" on how games from the 90s actually looked compared to the dogwater that is skull island.

"but godtier!" you declare with marked concern, "i'm sure they were just being hyperbolic!"

and while yes, you'd be right to assume such things, i don't actually care because it gives me an excuse to look at old shit i played as a kid.

(also it's reddit and i would not be surprised if most of these weren't jokes.)

but from the informative angle, i have also noticed many, many young people who've never played a 90s/00s game thinking this is a legitimate comparison to make in general. so just think of it as a tour in a museum of graphical advancements.

what's the plan?

my goal here is to illustrate and educate about the generation of consoles that truly changed the way i viewed video games: the fifth gen. for the first time, i realized games could look real. it blew my little mind.

but in hindsight, a lot of these games can look laughable. by contrast, some people seem to misremember just how low res or outright bad the fifth gen of games look compared to now. some people seem to think games like the gollum game and the king kong game (today's specimen) are comparable to PS1 titles with how poor they look graphically.

i'm hoping to shed some light on that for those who didn't experience it themselves or never bothered to look.

how it works

i'll be using side-by-side comparisons with skull island next to whatever game in particular we decide to examine to highlight just how low res the fifth gen of gaming and CGI were compared even the wettest of farts from current gen.

note that since skull island is brand new, getting insanely high-res screens of it is not something i can do easily without buying the game myself. and i sure as shit am not buying a dog garbage game about king-goddamn-kong for 40-fuckin-dollery-dos just to illustrate graphical changes since the 90s and 00s.

instead, i've taken screenshots from YT playthroughs at 1080p. they should suffice.

in addition, i will be using cleaned up/clearer versions of the screenshots from the fifth gen games as opposed to direct rips that i'd come across back in the day. this is for the purpose of showing detail without upscaling too much and blurring everything more.

screens ripped from games in the fifth gen were primarily in 240i. therefore, the image dimensions were largely around 320x240 px on a computer screen. back then, that wasn't an issue since the maximum resolution i ever had in the 90s/00s was 800x600 px. but nowadays, that would look like a blur of mush on most people's screens. of note, i will not be using upscaled or remastered versions of these older games if they have them.

and finally, since this post intro is already really fucking huge and a lot to read through, i will be scooting the actual analysis under a "read more" for the moment. expand the link if you dare.

anyway

let's start with the N64!

part one: THE NINTENDO ULTRA 64

released in 1996, the N64 was a cartridge-based system, for those who don't know. this meant that the loading times were super-fast compared to disc-based systems, but the actual storage on the cart was abysmal.

back then, carts were still using ROM, as opposed to SD flash that you'd see used with a nintendo switch game card. this means there was hardly any room for things like FMV (full-motion video) or even voice tracks.

to compensate, developers had to choose between graphic fidelity or audio fidelity; they could not have both in most cases. textures were downscaled or removed, the resolution was as low as feasible, FMV, in-engine cutscenes, or audio (such things that might have been present in another version of the same game) was removed outright in order to make space on the cart for the game functionality itself.

one game i saw thrown around a lot in comparison to skull island was turok 3. a good lot were saying it looked about the same or worse than turok 3.

but does it really? let's take a look.

round 1: skull island (PC) vs turok 3 (N64)

welp. as we can see, there's really no comparison. skull island's environments, while drab and uninspired for a current-gen title, are wholly and objectively better-looking than turok 3's environments. even the character models are night and day. at least you can see kong's individual fingers, rather than the lumps of flesh they called hands in turok.

it is quite misleading to claim with seriousness that a game like skull island could pass for an N64 title. it could not, not even remotely close.

there's really little else to say about this. the images speak for themselves.

round 1 results: really guys. really.

next, the PS1!

part two: the sony playstation singular ballin

coming out in 1995, we got one of the best-selling consoles of all fuckin time, the playstation. compared to the N64, the PS1 blew it out of the water in every technical field aside from loading times.

graphical fidelity was higher, audio fidelity was higher (actual, literal CD audio on many games compared to the bit-crushed fare on the N64) and storage space was massive for the time. you'd think out of the two contenders so far, the PS1 would have the better shot of looking superior to skull island, right?

well, yes and no. it depends on the era. while most N64 games that were going for realism looked like varying degrees of mush, the PS1's graphical quality varies wildly depending on when during its lifespan the game came out.

since turok 3 came out in 2000 for the N64, i'll pick another game that also came out in 2000 to make sure we're on as even a playing field as possible.

round 2: skull island (PC) vs vagrant story (PS1)

here we can see just from this singular screenshot that vagrant story is absolutely gorgeous for a PS1 game. and i would say that's because it was a game released towards the end of the PS1's original lifespan. devs by 2000 were fairly familiar with working on the hardware, and vagrant story was a squaresoft (now square enix) title, who released a crapload of games on the system. they were one of the developers that really knew how to push the PS1 to the limits of its capabilities.

however, they were still pixelated and blobby when it came to actual character models.

"but godtier!" i hear you howling in despair, "the backgrounds for vagrant story look so much better than kong's crazy island!" and you'd be correct! those backgrounds are banger af.

but the argument to be made in this post isn't "which one actually looks better." the argument is "compared to another game contemporary to the fifth gen of gaming, could skull island feasibly pass for the same gen?"

the answer is no.

round 2 results: skull island could not pass for even the best-looking of PS1 games, sry2say.

part three: 90s CGI horrors

for the next segment, let's also consider the typical CGI of the era. someone mentioned beast wars in my above screenshot, so fuck it, let's use that next!

beast wars was a transformers-universe off-shoot TV show that was entirely CGI. i have very fond memories of the show, but even i know that the way it looks is ... rough. so we're gonna put that to the test: does optimus primal really look better (or at least comparable to) our good pal king kong skull island?

round 3: skull island (PC) vs beast wars (probably silicon graphics computers, idfk it was a TV show)

oof. once again, for as ugly and bad as it is, we can actually see detail on the kong model, as well as light and shadow that the technology used in beast wars couldn't produce in a convincing manner at the time. optimus looks kinda weird, really.

...come to think of it, everyone in beast wars kinda looked... weirdly... wet or otherwise gross in that show.

...anyway!

as badly rendered as kongus dongus is in skull island, i'd say he looks a fair amount better than ... pretty much anyone from beast wars. there really isn't more to it than that; even when the show was new, i knew that beast wars just looked weird.

round 3 result: kong could not blend into a beast wars episode very well or convincingly, even in beast mode.

part four: into the beyond times

so, i think i've fairly made my point about the game not looking like it's from the fifth gen... but what about other gens?

personally, if i had to place bone island: dongus kongus in a particular "vibe" of a game generation, i'd probably slot it somewhere between a wii title and a wii u title. it is definitely higher fidelity than a PS1 or N64, but it has a certain "wii shovelware" aura around it, especially when seen in motion.

let's see if that susses out!

tag-team round: skull island (PC) vs monster hunter tri (wii) & monster hunter 3 ultimate (wii u)

now THIS is interesting!

the original MH3 on the wii definitely looks washed out and faded, certainly low-res compared to skull island. not terribly shocking there, considering the wii's maximum resolution output (on the models that supported it) was 480p (aka: standard definition/DVD quality).

but MH3 ultimate?

i dare say we have a contender here. the models look so much better, the environments are actually comparable in quality to skull island, it's quite uncanny, really. hmm.

...okay, okay. i know i technically said i wouldn't be using upscaled or remastered versions of the games in my comparisons, so in the spirit of fairness, i will also add a surprise third tag-team member into the fray:

surprise match!: kong-dong island (PC) vs xenoblade chronicles x (wii u)

hoo nelly

alright so i am a Certified Wii U Enjoyer ™️ and i know full-well that the system is more than a bit underpowered compared to the other consoles from its gen. its maximum resolution output was 1080p, which was more than sufficient on its own, but it severely lacked the oomph in its components to make good, consistent use out of that. a lot of wii u titles look fine compared to other consoles, and some are even downright gorgeous, but performance was always a bottleneck.

but forgetting about all of that, xenoblade chronicles x just wrecks skull island.

however, we're not done yet. XBCX (or... however y'all abbreviate it) is definitely a better-looking game than skull island, but so was vagrant story. again, the true argument here is "could you feasibly mistake 'skele rock: kong's wild ride' as from the same gen as the game it's being compared to?"

and i think here we have our answer.

take a look at all the other keng kang screenshots from the previous rounds and place them next to the screenshots from the wii u titles. if you had no idea that skull island was released just last week, you cannot tell me in all honesty that you wouldn't think "oh a wii u shovelware game i've never heard of."

if you try to tell me that, you're a liar and should be ashamed.

the environments, the lighting effects, the graphical fidelity, the vibe... it all just looks weirdly familiar. it looks like a mid-to-low tier shovelware crap game that would have come out on the wii u and immediately sold for 20 bux in the budget releases section.

so that being said...

the final verdict: skull island: rise of kong does, in fact, look specifically like a wii u title. we have found its true home at last.

part five: is it over now? (mostly)

whew! what a ride, amirite? now that we've gone through this heinous, completely unnecessary journey, what did we learn? well...

we learned that the fifth gen of consoles was nowhere near as powerful to create the effects and fidelity as seen in skull island.

...and we also learned that just because a game is older and at a lower res than a current-gen game, that doesn't mean the older game is uglier or looks worse.

we learned that people clearly don't remember how the fifth gen varied wildly and was capped at 240i at best, meaning all the games were at low res and blurry af.

...and we also learned that having that nuance is meaningless when it comes to discussing things objectively.

we learned that games that are bad and ugly for current gen can also look better against games that you may have loved as a child.

...and we also learned that pointing out that a shitty game that's buggy af and shouldn't have existed in the first place looks better than your favorite game from your childhood doesn't mean your favorite game from your childhood is bad.

we learned that if you have enough time on your hands and are stubborn enough, you can make an entirely useless post that no one will read because it's too damn long and uninteresting.

...and we also learned that bulleted lists are only useful for text that doesn't overlap into the next line. oops.

anyway, i hope you learned something, even if you didn't ask for it! being that i'm old enough to remember all of the games above when they were announced, i tend to notice when people make dumb-ass claims that don't make sense a lot quicker. some games really did not age well (turok 3) and others still look fantastic to this day (vagrant story). but claiming that a game like skull island is comparable to or worse than something i actually grew up playing is just silly.

probably just as silly as this post, really.

it was just a very bizarre and arguably quick blip in time that i don't think many other people of younger gens really understand when looking at it from the perspective of internet being available 24/7. that simply was not a thing when i was a kid. and going from pixelated games with chiptunes to crash-goddamn-bandicoot was such an abrupt jump in quality that i could honestly write another post about how it felt to experience that all on its own.

but i won't. not yet, anyway...

so that's it! i answered a question nobody asked. do i feel satisfied? no, not really. i mean, if i'm being honest, i feel like i wasted several hours of my life just to prove a point.

so yknow, a normal weekend for me

byebye!

#skull island #skull island: rise of kong #video game analysis #long post #text post #image heavy #i'm very sorry to anyone who followed me recently #this is the caliber of horseshit you signed up for #enjoy your stay!

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