So I got a job at IGN.com, which is where you’ll find almost all video game related content from me. Actually, probably all of it. Definitely all of it. Other writers ’round these parts may still be writing stuff, if’n you care to read it, which you should!

Podcasts: Dead/on hold/hiatus, whatever word you want to use for “not doing any at the moment.”

mitchdyer.tumblr.com is eventually going to be a personal blog. Maybe? I don’t know. I have it, and am planning to use it for non-games stuff.

For the 12 of you who stumbled on here because one of the posts say something like “anime porn,” I can feel your heartbreak.

<3

Oh wait.

People: You need to read this.

“Criticism isn’t science. Don’t call someone a “hater” because they thought your game was great, just a bit less so than you’d expected. It’s an unreasonable and childish response, and one that shows no respect for people who clearly enjoyed and recommended your creation. Even if some notably lower reviews pop up in the coming days, these people aren’t your enemies, nor are they wrong. They just see the game differently. Just as average players will next week.”

– Andrew Hayward

[Spoilers to follow]

I’ve already addressed my main issues with its gameplay — so cancerous were they that I couldn’t stand to finish the game before harping on it, apparently. These were small irritations, though. An inconvenient map and problematic upgrade system were hardly my deepest concerns by the end of my experience. The directionless hub worlds persisted in their lifelessness until I was torn from them altogether, mercifully, and sent to facilities with immaculate layouts. The multi-tiered mazes in Singapore and the Arctic have terrific, divergent designs. The tension in these stages rivaled Dead Space and Condemned for me — all three games gave me the those burning butterflies in my stomach as I narrowly escaped alerted enemies. The last quarter or so is where Deus Ex is at its most Metal Gear. This kind of stealth game speaks to — screams at — me in a way no other genre can. From the start, I tailored my play style to accommodate the fantastic, if entirely familiar, stealth sections that make up the DNA of Deus Ex.

I’ve made a terrible mistake.

Ben Kuchera served up some strong points on Ars Technica concerning the struggle with boss battles. He argues for the Tyrant characters as great additions to the game. He articulates the game’s personal power-struggle in a way I hadn’t thought of, and it softened the frustrated rage borne from my inability to succeed. He also draws on Star Wars, which is the key to my heart. What turned me around was this:

Just as characters created with a gift for violence can’t open every safe, characters aimed at stealth or social skills will have more of an issue getting past this boss. To the game’s credit, that’s realistic: the designers clearly want to put you in a situation where you’re backed into a corner and have to fight your way out, and no matter how smart or sneaky your character may be; that’s bound to happen every so often in his line of work. Sometimes your luck runs out, and you have to fight.

By the time I reached the second super soldier, Kuchera’s arguments collapsed and couldn’t hold me up anymore. I endured Barrett, but, as someone trying to take a non-lethal approach to through the campaign, I was, it seemed, physically incapable of taking down Yelena in Montreal. I was only able to kill her (using a stun gun) when she glitched into a piece of geometry and froze in place.  I suck at games in the first place, plus I chose this path, but the boss problem runs deeper than my handicaps. Human Revolution simply doesn’t give players enough time to understand what it’s presenting before it bends us over the table.

I restarted the Namir fight close to 20 times, dedicating almost an hour to failing. By the end of the Human Revolution I’d given up on my non-lethal methods and adopted the laser rifle like it was a starving infant. I eventually succeeded here in a way I suspect the game didn’t mean for me to. I hid around a corner and blind-fired a laser beam straight into the asshole’s face until he died. Once I’d gotten the lay of the land, dodged his immediate attack and memorized his patterns, I humiliated him. In the final fight, I opted to hide behind a pillar while waiting for my nemesis to electrocute herself to death. Running around the dangerous floors, fending off crazed augs and dismantling robots? Forget it. These encounters are abusive until you solve them, at which point they become an effortless exercise clocking in under a minute.

When I wasn’t adoring the phenomenal facets of my favorite new universe, Human Revolution was busy undoing itself. From the start, I’d committed to the story these assassins set up. Getting revenge for Megan Reed’s death leads to rescuing her, and I supported Adam’s emotional drive all the way. Everything else — stupid side quest or main mission — was really just an obstacle on the way to discovering that truth. None of what I wanted from the game’s plot comes together or concludes in anything resembling a satisfying way. When I found Reed, she brushed me off and split. The last time I saw her was when she called to say we have important things to talk about. That talk never happened. She took off in a chopper with Faridah Malik, a character whose relationship with Jensen is also ignored. This is particularly strange given their growth together, especially after I saved her skin in the most intense, large-scale enemy encounter in the entirety of Deus Ex. I get a thanks, a cute nickname, and then nothing more than a “I’m taking Megan now, peace!” at the end.

Man, the end. What a fucking waste. The four options Human Revolution presents are some of the most impressive moral dilemmas I’ve faced in games. No one result is more desirable than the other, all of ‘em make you wrong. You wait. You stare at the literal choice-buttons for a long time. You exhale and finally make up your mind. The fate of the world is…this horrible future for humanity.

Cue a shitty montage with inconsequential and inconclusive narration!

Nothing I’d done mattered. I didn’t do anything that affected anyone because Deus Ex doesn’t have a future. I mean,  it will in the sequel, but the consequences for my actions, which Adam weighs in on during every finale sequence, do not matter. We’re left to imagine where we’ve left the world, and where David Sarif and Bill Taggert and Hugh Darrow and Megan Reed and Declan Faherty and Eric Koss stand in it. Sure, we get a nod to Megan’s involvement with the original game’s Bob Page, but it isn’t enough — especially if, like me, you didn’t know who he is.

This is one of the laziest conclusions to anything I’ve experienced in any medium.   I enjoyed the experiences while they happened, which is really what matters, but I can’t help but feel like I didn’t need to play this game at all. I was distracted and confused by something that doesn’t pay off at all. The joyous thrills of infiltrating and assaulting my way through this story don’t amount to anything. Human Revolution flushed my meaningless 20 hours down the toilet and didn’t so much as thank me for stopping by.

I’m an irritable person, I admit. I’m hard to anger, but I’m admittedly impatient with trivial and arbitrary things. Why, I find myself wondering every time the “NOT ENOUGH ENERGY” alert pops up, do I need to manually replenish the batteries I bought? I can’t use many of my abilities — whether it’s as complex as a cloaking mechanism or as basic as lifting a box — without the proper amount of energy in my robotic system. It’s an understandable balancing restriction on paper. In execution, it inhibits my enjoyment. It’s also completely contrary to what this world is about. Augmentations are meant to empower the user. Nobody is more powerful because of them than Adam Jensen, Sarif Industries’ super soldier and man-for-the-job. He, and therefore I, can do anything. Until upgrading.

Human Revolution punishes me for choosing to bolster Adam’s ever-expanding roster of abilities. I complete missions, I level up, I earn Praxis points for enhancements, and then I augment myself with them. As I allocate upgrade points to my battery system, I’m required not only to find my own volts, but to find them in specific, limited forms. I need to find a goddamn Clif Bar or buy a tub of protein supplement. One of my five cells recharges on its own, which does me no good considering my current augmentations. Ideally, I’d be able to walk up to a group of guys while cloaked, and then take ‘em out with multiple takedowns. Melee attacks — something as simple as tapping a man on the shoulder and slapping him in the mouth — drain an entire battery. Cloaking sucks the cells dry. Adam Jensen, unless he has a snack handy, is useless. He was better off as a healthy human being — then those assholes who attacked him had to ruin everything. Maybe the humanity movement is right. Born human, stay human; augmentations are wrong.The stronger he becomes, the weaker he is.

I’d rather spend those Praxis units giving Adam a better sense of direction. Objective indicators give me a vague sense of the direction I should walk, sure, but let me buy a mini-map already. Tapping “M” to pull up my map screen shatters the illusion that I’m navigating a real place. Now I’m looking at nothing more than yellow lines and blue Xs. That I need to open it as often as I do speaks to one of two things: My inability to understand a sense of space, or the hub world’s horrible design. Maybe both. I’m frequently lost in the diverging hallways of Hengsha. The recognizable or notable landmarks are few, and I’ve wound up turned around and at a dead end in numerous occasions. Detroit and Hengsha also alarmingly empty. The citizens of China are your usual NPCs, devoid of the world around them and stuck in an animation loop limiting them to the one spot they’re meant to stand in. These cities are lifeless voids. I ignore everything around me as I struggle to make my way to someone who will say something more interesting than “I don’t speak English.”

I appreciate the intent here. Exploration is clutch to Deus Ex — I realize this having played the first game for the first time a month ago. This is a natural, contemporary extension of what the original game did, and there are glimmers of greatness lurking beneath Human Revolution‘s surface. Investigating suspicious murder cases is right up my alley, particularly since I get to go about it like the baby boy of Solid Snake and Bruce Wayne.

So many little things get on my nerves — the atrocious inventory, the out-of-place (and often imbalanced, in my case) boss battles, and the demeaning side-quests — that I wonder how much longer I’ll bother. This is an exciting, exhilarating game with excellent stealth. Even the combat, which felt weird to me for reasons I can’t articulate, is growing on me now. The story has me hooked hard, too. With so much to enjoy and pull me along, I’m surprised by my own discontent.

I love Human Revolution. I don’t think we’re meant for each other. We’ll stick it out, though. The strongest relationships are built on soldiering through problems, and I see a beautiful future.

So, to aid in our quest to comprehend this oh-so-difficult subject, I’ve compiled a few key ideas that should help anyone get a grip on game reviews.

1. Reviews are opinion. They are not, nor should they be, nor are they intended to be, objective analyses. If you want an unbiased, untainted evaluation of a game, read the instruction manual. A review is a documented experience. Some outlets review games as products, while others critique artistic merit or cultural impact or whatever. Anything goes, and that’s what makes each one distinct. Without individual opinion, we wouldn’t have a need for reviews at all.

2. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Unless it’s riddled with factual inaccuracies, no review is ever wrong, no matter how hard you slam your keyboard keys. An IGN review isn’t wrong because GameSpot is definitive, and GameSpot isn’t incorrect because GamesRadar “got” the game “better.” You can dislike or disagree with something someone else experienced, but your opinion is in no way superior or inferior to anyone else, full stop, and vice versa.

3. “You just didn’t get it” and “You must be terrible at it” are anything but sound arguments against someone’s experience. This is, among other things, childish, weak, hilarious, embarrassing and nonsensical. I am allowed to experience what I experience; it is what it is, and you can’t “fix” that by insulting me. This kind of reductive logic exists only to distort the reality that you don’t have anything worthwhile to add to the conversation. Don’t ditch discussion just to attack someone.

4. Read the god damn review. Don’t get all high-and-mighty about a score — too high, too low, “an 8 isn’t worth my time” — if you haven’t actually taken in the text. The substance is in the words, the examples, the anecdotes, the stories. Please don’t ask me why my review score is so low if you didn’t bother to actually read what I thought about what I played.

5. Scores aren’t mathematical. I didn’t knock off a point for the missing online co-op, and another for the crummy framerate, only to balance it out by adding two points for its sweet graphics. The final grade doesn’t represent a sum — it represents the whole.

That’s it. Honestly, that’s all you need to know to understand why writers aren’t mentally disabled and capable of doing “right.” This isn’t a complicated system, and the more we complain about writers being wrong, the worse off this industry is. Critics are allowed to have their opinions just as much as you are allowed to have yours. You can have discussions — real conversations, not childlike arguments — about contradicting thoughts. Isn’t that what we’re trying to do? Talk it out, compare notes and exchange experiences?

If we can’t have rational conversations about games, why are we bothering to talk about them at all?

This debut DownWriteFierce show isn’t anything official. I don’t really know what I’m doing with this feed just yet, but it should be cool. The DWF podcast will be a series of shows about my adventures in “games journalism,” or whatever you prefer to call it. I’ve got some sweet ideas about where to go with it. But, for now, here’s the audio recording from my Penny Arcade Expo 2011 panel “Dick Jokes and Die Hard References: The Life of a Freelance Games Journalist.”

Special thanks to my guests Andrew Hayward, Andrew Groen, Taylor Cocke, Andy Eddy, Francesca Reyes, Gary Steinman and Brett Elston.

Super special thanks to Trevor Whatman for his AMAZING recording. This sounds incredible.

Enjoy.

I’m six months late to my meeting.

I had it all worked out then.

The girl.

The gameplan.

Everything is different now.

I don’t know where I’m going, why.

The only person I’ve got is a guy I hate.

He’s the only reason I’m alive and able to go at all.

You should come. It’s going to be awesome. I have an incredible list of panelists joining me to talk about what freelancing is — not so much what you can do to have my job, but so you can understand why I haven’t been fired yet. It’s meant to be informative and helpful for anyone interested in what a freelancer does, whether they’re a writer or a reader or a whatever.

I, Andrew Hayward, Andrew Groen and Taylor Cocke comprise the freelance crew. Brett Elston (GamesRadar, heading to CAPCOM), Francesca Reyes (OXM’s EIC), Gary Steinman (Radar’s EIC; I think Brett left because he couldn’t handle Gary’s majestic hair) and Andy Eddy (@Gamer) are Team Editors. They’ll talk about the freelance/editor relationship, and some other stuff too.

We’re the last panel of the day, so I’m hoping our limited hour will have a grace period at the end for extra talking. Afterward, walk over to the Omegathon finale with us!

Finally, we will be recording the panel and posting it to some podcast feed somewhere once I get that up and running again.

I arrive alone.

I’m sick immediately.

Everyone is an asshole.

I can’t do anything without getting in trouble.

It is too fucking hot outside.

Africa sucks.

I never want to leave.