Leah's Gaming digest, 24th October

So what have you got for us?

It’s a quieter week for gaming this week, a couple of releases but no wild news to really report on, so we’ll keep it fairly brief.

• This week Elgato announced a new product, the Elgato Prompter, and while it may seem quite niche, it has the potential to be used in a number of ways in and outside of content creation…

• Possibly the worst videogame release of the year coming in hot…

• Final Fantasy and Fall Guys did WHAAAT?

Insert prompt here

Elgato, and I’m saying this without trying to sound biased, do release some bloody good stuff. I’ve been in the content creation scene since 2015, and if you made online content, gaming or otherwise, before or around that time, you’d know the struggle. Trying to find webcams that didn’t look absolutely awful, fitting a camera plus 2-tripod lighting solution plus 3-monitor PC desk setup into a tiny little UK box-bedroom, finding a capture card you didn’t need to manually sync, or de-syncing your webcam and microphone to match up with the live gameplay… it was a budding industry and there were a lot of tech teething problems.

Elgato looked at all those problems and with a measure of canny said ‘aight’ and start presenting solutions. From internal capture cards to slimline desk lighting solutions, multi-4k webcam capture and dedicated hardware, they’ve brought out a litany of products over the years that just make making things so much easier. And well, to put it mildly, they charge a high price point, but most of the time that is the price of convenience; their ingenuity and market research spawned a whole host of knock offs and fakes all over Amazon, but truly I’ve never had an issue shelling out for Elgato products as they’re nearly always worth the cost.

This isn’t an advert, promise, I just think it’s good to get a bit of context about how far we’ve come, and how much Elgato have innovated in this scene. Their newest product is something I wish I’d had years ago - a Teleprompter system that plugs into your PC and essentially functions as an additional screen.

It has mounts for your webcams or cameras to work with the screen and mirror and touts itself as being highly adaptable, and the screen isn’t limited to just being used for prompter script software, you can put literally anything on there and have it reflected up onto the mirror, so you can watch whatever the hell you want while staring down the barrel of the camera.

Now obviously, if you often spend time cringing at the sound of your own voice as you record your own clips to the camera for whatever reason, you’ll already know this is a gamechanger. But it’s interesting how Elgato are choosing to market this to an atypical audience, showing the option to use it for twitch chat, so you can stare DIRECTLY into the camera while talking to your audience, which to be honest freaks me out a little bit - please don’t stare directly into my eyes, my insides start itching. They also show you using it to watch football, or having discord open, and I like the idea of a person spending £279 (yes, £279) on a prompter just to look like they’re paying avid attention during a meeting, just to have the footy on instead.

And as mentioned, the price is steep, but if you look into industry grade teleprompters you will quite quickly get an appreciation for why that is. Camera gear in general is wildly expensive, but most prompters come into the multiple hundreds of £££ before they even have a device that displays the script you’re reading - many of these prompts are simply mirrored systems you set up yourself and you need extra £100 screws and carbon rods to affix them to a tripod. After that you usually need to buy some sort of ipad or tablet plus prompting software to even be able to utilise it. It does make the eyes water a little, but you’re essentially getting a tablet, prompting software and mounting solution all in one with this thing, and though it’s smaller than a commercial setup, most use cases for this only require a compact sized bit of kit anyway.

Either way, I said what I said, Elgato stands as being one of the most innovative content creator brands at the moment and this product is no exception, I ordered one literally as soon as it came out and maybe I’ll provide a full review in the next issue (it claims to be on pre-order but mine arrived today on the 22nd!).

Along came Kong…

Look, I played Lord of the Rings: Gollum when it came out, full of hope and joy (ok, well… cautious curiosity at least) and it was one of the only games I felt comfortable openly disparaging live on stream. There were almost zero redeeming features to the whole experience - it was dull, buggy, awful looking, boring and glitchy as hell - I fell through the (middle) earth multiple times during my short 3 hour stint until one final abyss-fall lead to the game soft locking and making my decision to quit playing for me. I truly, truly, did not think it would be beaten this year in terms of sheer terribl-ocity.

I may have been wrong.

Flying straight in under the radar, a little game called ‘Skull Island: Rise of Kong’ released this week to not much fanfare. Immediately folks of the internet noticed something a little off with the whole thing. You might forgive the graphical style for being ‘stylistic’ in its comic-book esque visage, but well-made games have a way of making that style look deliberate and thoughtful, and this was… not the case for Kong. The environments look chunky, akin to the PS2-era games and any attempts at style fall flat. The protagonist himself, mighty King Kong, looks to be made of play-dough, and honestly some of these scenes might be kinda funny if they were deliberate, but it’s difficult to believe they are. I WANT to believe it though, because at one point when you’re confronted with some beast, as you stare back and forth in disbelief a JPEG image pops up instead of an animation of the creature itself. Again. Hilarious. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like everyones is in on the joke, and unfortunately whether the devs (GameMill) are or are not, it just looks lazy and fucking atrocious. Oh, and they’re charging £35 for it.

Truly incredible.

GameMill have been responsible for some pretty mediocre-at-best IP tie-in games in recent memory, but it seems their name is perhaps more on the nose than I would usually charitably interpret, and according to actual journalists, the game took only a year to make and was unfortunately pushed out by harried devs on a tight schedule, no surprise there.

Spider-Man 2 - they actually did it!

And by that I mean, the game came out! And my friend Will completed it 100% in under two days (which doesn’t surprise me, he does love Spider-Man) but it seems in order to platinum the whole game it takes around 25-30 hours at most. Now, to me, this seems reasonable - having spent 60+ hours in many games at this point I find myself torn between wanting to explore brand new worlds and also just not having the damned energy to commit to one thing for that long, I get FOMO for the real world. So 25 hours seems entirely reasonable to me, but when you’re paying upwards of £70 for a Playstation game these days it’s understandable that you may look over at Baldurs Gate 3 for example, with over 100-150 hours needed to ‘complete’ a playthrough, and think perhaps you’d rather spend your money elsewhere.

With that said, in my mind quality triumphs over quantity, I’d rather have a shorter, memorable experience than a long game I ultimately never end up finishing, but I try not to use myself as a ‘regular’ use case, because frankly I don’t think I am. How do you feel about marathon length games these days? Does the thought of sitting down for hours a night for a month to play through a game excite you, or fill you with a bit of dread these days?

Fall Guys rendezvous’d with Final Fantasy 14 and it looks…

I’ve gotta be honest it looks weirdly terrifying. The Gold Saucer is introducing a new minigame that looks just like the world of Fall Guys has been transplanted directly into Eorzea.

There's just something about it... seeing all these FF14 (the critically acclaimed MMORPG from Square Enix with incredible free trial) players in a world where previously only strange jellybean creatures inhabited, it’s… dare I say it, cursed. A Halloween treat, then. There are multiple Fall Guys-esque levels on offer as well, obstacle courses and objectives and all sorts to keep you occupied, and once you get over the jarring-ness it’s actually kinda awesome. FF14 are really upping their game with their collaborations, perhaps coming for Fortnite’s crown, but they always seem to blow it out of the park with the offerings - not just half assed costume setpieces but fully realised raids, worlds and adventures to check out.

And that’s about all I have for you this week! No point in dragging it out if there’s nothing much coming to mind. Have a good one, catch you next time!

NB: In the last issue I mispelled ‘Moomin’ multiple times, my sincerest apologies to all affected, but yes indeed in the UK it is ‘Moomin’ where in other European markets it is ‘Mumin’.