Devil's Third -- Title Screen
In case insect-ridden apocalypses aren't your thing, how about a revelation of a different sort? This is "appropriate" for a couple of reasons, because not only does it involve the threat/fallout of a looming post-apocalypse of global proportions, it also had its OWN real-world armageddon... that is, the online servers have shut down as of December 28, 2016, just days ago.
This game has had a longer and more sordid history than most will ever care to know, but suffice to say that it's the brainchild of highly divisive gaming industry figure Tomonobu Itagaki, perhaps the most highly-visible head of of Team Ninja, leading it in the creation of the Dead or Alive series as well as rebooting Ninja Gaiden to more modern design sensibilities. He's somewhat famous (for those who care about such things) for giving very opinionated interviews and espousing rather uncompromising and unapologetic viewpoints on various things from industry politics to game design to strange tirades on history and mathematics now and again. So if you know who he is at all, chances are you probably have a fairly polarized opinion on him, or at least his works.
Devil's Third is no exception, it being the first work to see the light of day from his independent developer, Valhalla Game Studios. That said, most of the divided opinion here comes postmortem, as a variety of factors coalesced to cement its inevitable status as cult classic at best and abject failure at worst... y'know, depending on who you ask.
Personally, I think there's a lot to admire here for the effort... in point of fact, it's NOT a triple-A game, whatever that actually means to most people, but it was literally made at great pains by an independent studio and has been fighting for console generations (plural!) for its right to exist... and here it is. To be fair, it plays the part rather well, aspiring to be something beyond the usual and occasionally diminutive "indie" label, and you could honestly be fooled into thinking it WAS "AAA" material, if that's the kind of thing you consider a compliment.
Devil's Third blurs lines rather uncomfortably, trying to be many things and not always succeeding ...but failing? Hardly.
The real failure here is, in my mind, the critical thinking skills of the gaming population and even humanity as a whole. Sure, that's a bit of a lofty accusation for something JUST so rather insignificant as something so relatively minor as a video game flaring into and out of existence with not so much a warm welcome and fond farewell as an undeserved cacophony of dismissive and angry voices parroting one another.
It happens a lot, actually... you know that one game you actually really like, but everyone says is horrible, but none of the people actually bothered to play and formulate their own opinions? Well, this is like that, except the number of people who even know it exists is already pretty low, so any hope of it catching on and being tried by more than the few who jump on that bandwagon are next to nothing. Fun, right?
If you want to get even deeper into it, it most often starts to cascade from the already-questionable non-journalism that has built itself around the gaming industry and just sort of builds like an echo chamber around that... but it can be something as small as that one angry and outspoken friend of yours saying something off-the-cuff negatively about a work and letting that be the entirety of your (un)informed opinion on media in general. I heard that movie was terrible. That book? It should be banned! I hate you and all the bands you like!
But that's not what we're doing here. That's a discussion on a matter I'm frankly too weary with to bother dedicating any more time to than I already voluntarily have as a point of reference and at least partially a convenient boogeyman to lash out against, because it'll never be QUITE that simple, and there's so many more things one can complain about in a day. Instead, let's learn from this game's example and actually dig deep and see what it was all about in life so that we can send it off with a proper Viking funeral! (Who brought the oil and torches! Itagaki-san has already furnished the elaborate vessel in which to deposit the remains!)
---
As for this video... and it might seem a bit selfish of me to have TWO no-gameplay videos in one day after months of NOTHING... but... what are YOU gonna do about it, huh? Complain in the comments, why don't ya! Most people won't even be watching this on the day of its publication, so the joke's on YOU!
...but yeah, this is just an excessively long look at a fairly and somewhat contrarily understimulating title screen. I was actually curious as to how long it would go, and this is about as long as I felt it necessary to stick things out. The space wreckage is NOT procedurally-generated, in case you were curious, but it's still fairly interesting how MUCH of it is scripted when I figure fewer than 30 seconds on average spent on this screen.