Bit by Bit: April 2015

School is done for another year, but things haven't slowed down that much.  My jobs, both paid and volunteer, keep me busy throughout the year especially in the summer.  Speaking of work, you can check out my first published piece for Imprint, the University of Waterloo's student run newspaper.  It is a review of Avengers: Age of Ultron.  I hope you enjoy and share it with others.

On top of work, I have lots of things going on in the coming months.  I have movies to watch (and possibly review), live wrestling shows to see, games to play, friends to visit and a vacation to take.  It is going to a busy yet fun summer.

Don't worry though.  Silver Bit won't be taking a backseat; in fact, it will be front and centre especially when it comes to E3 next month.  I have a lot of things cooking regarding regular content for Silver Bit this summer so stay tuned.

Show of the Month
April has been a month to try new things for yours truly.  I got a chance to feel the pain, frustration and ironic fun of From Software's Bloodbourne, determine for myself if Game of Thrones lives up to the hype and rabid praise (it's getting there), and got back into watching anime.  My renewed interest in anime came all thanks to IGN's Anime Club podcast.  I use to watch anime regularly when I was a teenager, but grew out of it due to my exhaustion with drawn-out plots and my preference for reading manga.  Now, I am scouring used video stores and the Funimation app for shows both old and new in order to expand my horizons.

In expanding my horizons, I took a risk and spent 20 dollars on the Cowboy Bebop complete series DVD set.  While I am still working my way through the series, I do not regret my purchase.  In fact, I am loving it.  Cowboy Bebop is unlike anything I have ever laid my eyes on.  The innovation and stylishness of this anime makes it stand out above all the others.

Cowboy Bebop blends beautiful animations, always on-point humour and fully fleshed out characters.  At first, the show may seem a little off-putting due to how different it is from most anime.  Bebop never holds your hand; it just drops you in its world and lets you experience all its imperfections and quirks for yourself.  Also Bebop's use of music is unbelievable as each episode has its own unique soundtrack that fits its story and tone.  Plus, the opening for the show is thing of beauty.

Out of the 15 episodes I have watched so far, Cowboy Bebop is a really good show slowly becoming a great show.  It does take a few episodes before it gets going and about a good dozen before it starts firing on all cylinders.  Once it starts firing on all cylinders, Bebop is almost untouchable.  Bebop is an incredible show that you should watch, anime fan or not.

Most Anticipated Game of the Month
My love for the The Witcher III: Wild Hunt has been well documented in the annals of Silver Bit.  The game looks absolutely incredible.  I have been looking forward to Witcher III ever since it graced the cover of Game Informer just over two years ago and we are less than a month away until its release.

Just recently, CD Projekt RED announced the expansion pass for the game.  Before you get up in arms over another DLC pass like everybody did with the Arkham Knight season pass, Witcher's expansion pass is unlike other passes on the market.  While most DLC for games nowadays adds a few hours of extra content, this expansion pass will add around 30 hours of content to the already expansive Witcher III.  At 25 dollars, you are getting well over five times more content than the typical season pass.  Plus, CD Projekt RED is offering 16 free pieces of DLC in the year following the game's release.

It may be a lot of money to drop on one game, but I trust the guys and gals at CD Projekt Red to deliver.  I feel it is a worthwhile investment to get the most out of the grandest fantasy RPG ever created and help support these incredible developers create more great RPGs in the future.

Video of the Month
I have a problem.  I just can't stop watching Honest Trailers, be it for video games or movies.  They are just too funny.  I devoured the older ones throughout late March and early April.  Now, I impatiently wait for new ones to be posted.

To show you how great this YouTube series is (and maybe get you addicted as well), enjoy the newest Honest Game Trailer for Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire.

Looking Past the Surface: The Pros & Cons of CG Trailers

The biggest news to come out of this past week was the announcement of Batman: Arkham Knight.  As the final Batman game in Rocksteady's trilogy, Arkham Knight is being hyped to be more expansive and epic than the previous two entries in the series (one of them being easily the best superhero game of all-time).  Scheduled to release this October, WB Games decided to release a trailer for the game.  Considering the game is less than year away, it would have been nice to see how exactly Arkham Knight would run on the next generation systems with a gameplay trailer.  What we got was a computer-generated (CG) trailer that did a decent job of showing what the game would be about, but did little to impress this writer.  In fact, this trailer got me thinking about the video game industry's love of pre-rendered CG trailers.  There are pros and cons to CG trailers which I would like to discuss in this article.  Personally, I lean more towards the con side of this debate, but I can see the pluses of CG trailers as well.

As the video game industry has evolved, trailers have been given much more prominence than in the past.  Video game trailers are so prominent nowadays that websites dedicate obscene amounts of time dissecting each frame and highlight every big trailers on the front page.  There is even a website which focuses solely on highlighting game trailers in GameTrailers.  With a lot more importance put on game trailers nowadays, game publishers want their trailers to be the best even if the game is not ready to be shown yet.  These publishers employ animation houses to make a trailer that best captures the ideas of the game.  When the game is early development, a CG trailer works as an appetizing teaser for gamers.  It gets gamers excited for the upcoming game as they see all the grand possibilities which they can eventually play.  These trailers work as a great way of eliciting gamers to pre-order the game well in advance.   As a money making machine, CG trailers serve their purpose well.  Another pro of CG trailers is the quality as most of them can easily rival that of Hollywood's best.  The quality of these trailers can produce great amount of hype no matter the actually quality of the game.  The CG trailer for Dead Island is an excellent example of this type of situation.  It easily produced enough hype to put Dead Island as one of the most sought after games of 2011.  CG trailers are a very profitable business for game developers and serve as a form of entertainment for gamers.  They will definitely be the norm of the video game industry well into the future.

While there are plenty of pluses to the use of CG trailers, they are not all that they seem to be.  With CG trailers, the quality can serve as a double-edged sword which many a game have fallen to.  Sometimes, the CG trailer is too good that it overshadows the quality of the game when it finally releases.  Dead Island fell into that trap as the game was marred with numerous glitches, some that even halted gamer's progress indefinitely.  Another example is Killzone 2.  The infamous trailer shown at E3 2005 had such amazing graphical fidelity that Guerilla's game could never achieve those great heights.  The expectations brought on from Killzone 2's first trailer caused many gamers to feel betrayed by Sony and Guerilla Games.  As these CG trailers are created by animation houses outside of the actual developers, it is easy for these trailers to include certain aspects such as supposed mechanics or weapons that are not even in the main game.  This mixed messaging can deceive gamers into believing that exactly what they see in the CG trailer will be in the actual game and most of the time that is not true.  As much as CG trailers can help boost the hype and possibly sales of the game, they can be just as damaging if games rely too much on them.  As game graphics continue to advance, an argument can be made that in-engine graphics can be used without hurting the quality of video game trailers.  Already there have been many games that use in-engine graphics for their trailers to great success.  Every trailer for Grand Theft Auto V including the very first one from 2011 was produced with in-engine graphics.  Mass Effect 2 and 3 used in-game graphics for both of their launch trailers and produced some of the best video game trailers in years.  The Mass Effect 2 launch trailer was the sole reason I hunted down a Collector's Edition of the game the weekend after launch.  Using in-engine graphics for trailers might not always be a possibility especially earlier in development, but they can alleviate some of the trappings of relying on CG trailers to convey the concept of the game.

 Although this writer would love to see in-engine gameplay trailers become the norm, CG trailers are not going anywhere.  In the early years of this new console generation, CG trailers will become more prominent as publishers build hype for games that are years away from completion.  As CG trailers become more prominent, gamers need to become more critical of these trailers rather than taking them at surface value.  Gamers need to stop blindly getting excited for a game because it had a great CG trailer.  Instead, they need to start taking them as they are, just proofs of concept, and waiting on gameplay footage, previews and possibly demos before making a definitive decision on how these CG trailers represent the game they are promoting.