WB And Atari: Where’s The Hate?
Every year, gamers everywhere pore over that year’s video game offerings and lay their claim as to which of those games are their favorites. They will also lambaste the games that they thought sucked harder than a Thai prostitute during shore leave. And like clockwork, gamers will spew bile when mentioning what I have come to call the Troika of Shit, the three game publishers that seem to piss off the entirety of gamedom every year. These publishers, of course, are EA, Activision, and Ubisoft.
Now I’m not going to defend any of these shit peddlers. These publishers have fucked up more fan-favorite franchises than Shaq has fucked up free throws! (For the non-sports fans out there, that’s way more than 20.) I have a deep-seated hatred in my soul for those mouth-breathing jizz slurpers. But there are two publishers that I hate just as much as the Troika but fly under most people’s radars.
I’ll ask this simply: why does everyone bash EA, Activision, and Ubisoft so much, but seem to give a free pass or, worse, totally ignore the dickery on display at WB and Atari?
My hatred of WB is simple and straightforward: they’re arrogant shitheads. Most people have played WB games like Mortal Kombat X and Batman: Arkham Knight, and probably think I’m doing bath salts or something, because, well, they’re kinda good on consoles. But I guarantee that those people have not played those games on PC. If they had, they’d be sharpening their pitchforks and lighting their torches right along with me.
Arkham Knight might…but not on PC
WB’s contempt for PC is near-legendary, but what’s worse is their utter lack of concern for the contempt. In the case of Arkham Knight, WB got bitten straight on the ass. The PC port was barely playable, even on a high-end PC. The framerate oftentimes struggled to reach 30 fps, let alone the 60 fps WB and Nvidia promised, and the game stuttered more than Jimmy on caffeine high! Steam had just implemented its refund policy when this game limped to out of the starting gate, and PC gamers were all too happy to send that buggy pile of rat carcasses back to the circle of hell it came from.
Thank goodness Steam enacted its refund policy when it did. If not, Arkham Knight would have been as much of a monetary sinkhole as Mortal Kombat X was on PC. The PC port of THAT game was just as bad, with bad netcode that made online matches nearly impossible to play and more terrible performance. The game is marginally better to play on PC now, but WB’s recent decision to exclude the PC from Mortal Kombat XL and Kombat Pack 2 content shows that WB doesn’t care about supporting PC, only raking in money from PC gamers.
And it’s not like WB has treated console gamers with more respect. Mortal Kombat X’s Easy Fatalities and Unlock All Crypt Items microtransactions may be par for the course nowadays, but they’re still shitty on $60 AAA games. And the decision to lock Goro as on-disc DLC for preorder was a dick move. Oh, and stringing Xbox 360 and PS3 gamers for months, grabbing as many pre-orders as possible for those systems before swiping out their legs from under them, was not exactly cribbage. But hey, at lease Mad Max didn’t completely suck…right?
Atari is a different beast altogether. This Atari is not the fabled 2nd-gen console manufacturer that got many people my age hooked on console gaming before fucking it up with more bad decisions than a drunken Congressman at a strip club. That Atari died long ago; what remains is just as fetid, but won’t go away! The rights to Atari, Inc. were purchased by Infogrames in 2008, and if you don’t know who they were, don’t bother looking it up. Suffice to say that they would have been the French EA if Ubisoft wasn’t already the French EA. The Infogrames name died in 2009 when they formally changed their name to Atari, and their dignity died soon after.
Haunted House on the 2600: Iconic?
Since then, all they have done is release some disastrously bad games that try to cash in on whatever nostalgia gamers have with old Atari properties? What, you don’t remember the “iconic” 2600 game Haunted House? Well, Atari rebooted it anyway, and it shit the bed. Not content to fuck up just one property, they released a reboot of Asteroids, a game that IS an iconic 2600 game. And they fucked that one up, too! Asteroids: Outpost is a base-building FPS with no asteroids. I’ll let that one sink in.
Worst of all is their treatment of what is arguably the father of survival horror gaming: Alone in the Dark. The Xbox 360 and PS3 reboot of the franchise was bad, but it at least TRIED to not be shit. But with Alone in the Dark: Illumination, the only horror you feel happens when you start the game. It turns a single-player survival horror classic into a multiplayer co-op cover-based shooter where you use light to defeat the enemies that will overwhelm you. Yes, as the great “Jim Fucking Sterling, Son” says, “This is an Alone in the Dark game where you are neither alone, nor in the dark!”
If you’re a fan of the classic Roller Coaster Tycoon series, you will be happy to know that they plan to destroy your love for that series as well. Roller Coaster Tycoon World promises to take all the joy you had playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 and 3, stomp on it with mukluks, and sell you what remains via microtransactions. Oh, and did I mention there’s a mobile game, Roller Coaster Tycoon 4 Mobile, that will make you even more nauseous?
I hate what Atari has become, not because of my nostalgia for the 2600, but because of my love of gaming. This incarnation of Atari takes what memories I have of the once-great company and smears dog shit on it! And there’s more potential dog shit to come: Atari Vault has been announced for Steam, which will offer up 100 classic games. So far, they have mentioned true classics like Centipede, Asteroids, Missile Command, Tempest, and Warlords, and they promise online leaderboards and online & local multiplayer. But are they the arcade versions, or the 2600 versions? I can probably get behind arcade ports with online high scores and controller support. But the 2600 versions? I have my original 2600 for that, and I don’t think adding online multiplayer to Combat will make me abandon my console for the PC.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree that WB and Atari are shit, or do you think I’m blowing this out of proportion? Comment below and let me know!
