The Executive showed me that making sequels to a low-budget horror flick was a terrible idea and that audiences craved a Bicentennial Man rip-off - Related to terrible, sequels, miku,, man, rps

Monster Hunter Wilds players have already recreated Bob Ross, Ronald McDonald and Hatsune Miku, and it's not even a day after launch

Monster Hunter Wilds hasn't been out for even a day yet, and. Already the character customisation is being manipulated in ways I didn't expect so soon. It was only a matter of time before we saw recreations of characters from TV demonstrates, other games, or even memes and. Pop culture icons like Ronald McDonald.

As soon as sliders are involved, creating a character feels like a more challenging process than it should be. No matter how long I spend changing a face shape and carefully selecting a haircut. I always end up looking for inspiration in other players' creations or researching character codes. Even if it's just a foundation for me to slightly change, I'd rather rely on presets than be left to my own devices. Which is why communities of players sharing their creations, no matter how silly, are worth checking out for a game like this.

The MHSliders subreddit in particular has been a hub for all the wacky and. Wonderful creations made by players. If you're looking for some inspiration if you're yet to create a hunter, this is somewhere to go. We've seen suitable fits for the series, like Geralt of Rivia who we already know is a fierce hunter after his appearance and. Collaboration with Monster Hunter World. But there are certainly some creative curveballs too. I wasn't expecting to see someone create Hatsune Miku in the FashionHunters subreddit, but now I have I'm sure tempted to recreate my hunter.

I have to give a special shoutout to this Bob Ross lookalike. Too. I never thought I'd see the day everyone's favourite painter is unleashed into a world of beast hunting, but there's a striking resemblance here. And I can't deny it looks good. The paintbrush Palico is definitely a choice, but you have to give points for the attempt. This also goes to show that with Palicoes also having a pretty in-depth customisation system too, they aren't exactly free from the creativity of players either.

I think a lot of players would be quick to recreate their own pets. Or at least some sort of fierce-looking feline to accompany your beast slaying adventure. I tried to make my dog, but obviously that's a bit hard when your model is a cat so I take no pride in the final product. One player took unleashing the beast a little too seriously, creating a Palico basically branded by Monster Energy.

Even though I feel jealous about lacking the creativity to make my own whacky characters, it's reassuring to know that everyone is so keen to share their creations and. Character codes. With subreddits like these, I don't doubt any character you can think of will be created in due time. Plus, you can even request certain characters to be made for you to download or recreate yourself, and. It seems players are more than happy to put in the time. If you're like me and you've already made a character and you don't want to restart the game, fret not. You can change your appearance too, letting you go back to the beast slaying in no time, which is probably what I'm already doing by the time you've finished reading this as everything I create always looks like a monstrosity.

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RPS Verdict: Monster Hunter Wilds

Is it wrong to eat a dinosaur that wants to be eaten? What if it asks you to make a little hat out of its gall bladder? What if the gall bladder has different opinions on the matter? Discover the answers to these and more as our merry band of conservation enthusiasts/trophy hunters discuss Monster Hunter Wilds.

Nic: Life, the absolute bastard. Has kept me away from the Monst. Let me experience it through you. What's the best Monst so far?

Brendan: I am fond of the squiddy critters that slop about. The Nu Udra is a giant gloopy octopus that feels like a stand-out fight partly because of its many, many arms. But also because of the environment you fight it in. It's horrible (in a fun way) to wade about in the oil of this region, and. Try to avoid the flames that inevitably start to spread. Another later squid-like beast has some horrible knifey hands at the end of its tentacles, but. I'll let the readers discover the rest of that creep's tactics by themselves.

Ollie: I'm partial to the Yian Kut-Ku myself. It was the very first monster I ever fought in any Monster Hunter, back in the days of Monster Hunter Freedom on my PSP. And all these years later, I still recognised all its moves, and it made the whole act of beating up the big fire-breathing chicken even more enjoyable and satisfying than it already was.

Brendan: Oh. It's a good one. I like the way it soars between areas, limping through the sky on holey wings. Shame it only arrives at the end of the lengthy story, mind.

Jeremy: The Lala Barina, an early game spider monster that exudes a web of scarlet flower petals and. Fluffy white poofs of fur, is one of my favourites. This came as a surprise because I usually veer on the side of disliking spiders in just about everything. I think it’s just a splendid design that somehow manages to make one of the dullest video game bosses - the giant arachnid - compelling and. Even beautiful. Also, all of its weapons are sleek, refined, and kind of princess-like, and. You can get a frilly dress as one of the armour pieces that makes your hunter look like a Nier character. I feel very pretty wearing it.

Nic: Are some of the later monsters still exhausting to fight? That's something that stopped me getting into the last one as much as I wanted. Just realising I'd have to carve out 40 minutes for non-stop wailing.

Brendan: I got tired of emptying endless arrows into the final boss. I won't spoil the exact nature of it, except to say that it goes through phases which mix up the fight's flavour, but. I still felt fatigue as it dragged on. Battles do get more protracted the further you get into the endgame. There are new "tempered" abominations that are there to act as more challenging fights. Big bruisers who have seen the wars and won't go down easy. That feels like work to me, but I've read complaints that the game feels too easy to long-toothed veterans of the series (it's true that I've only fainted in two battles so far, and. Only properly failed one quest). So where I see a long battle and think "god, just die" a lot of fans will probably stomp in gung-ho, glad to have a lengthy hunt.

Brendan: Ah. Yeah. The geography itself probably would feel layered and interesting, but all the actions you perform within the space remove that feeling. The auto-piloting dino plays a big part in this. Even if you wrestle control back there's still an always-on trail of fireflies leading you straight to where you need to go. I couldn't find any option to turn this stuff off, and I'm not sure how the game would play if you could. It frustrates me that level designers and environment artists have put so much effort into providing a sense of place, but. You quickly become numb to it because you don't actually need to think about the routes you're taking. It feels more like getting on a bus to the next fight, rather than driving there yourself. You don't need to worry about shortcuts.

Edwin: Do people have favourite weapons? I was hoping to do an against-the-grain run as a solo Hunting Horn user, because back in the day. The Hunting Horn was designed quite deliberately for support roles in multiplayer. Sadly, they’ve made it a lot more single player friendly. Though that’s possibly more to do with the other changes to the controls over the years. I might fall back on my old friend, the Gunlance.

Brendan: I read not long ago that the designers wanted all the weapons to be equally "viable". So you can still pile on the hurt even with a traditional support bubble machine. The Gunlance I didn't try (I got scared when I tried to use it in Monster Hunter World and. Could NOT understand the best way to use it). I started with the Twin Blades, which feel like absolute wreckers once you learn to perform the mega twirly sawblade manoeuvres. You roll down a monster's entire spine like a hideous human buzzsaw. But I found that fighting up close made monster movements harder to track and I kept getting knocked down. I swapped to the bow, and it was very satisfying to learn, if a little fiddly at first.

Nic: "This is a story of monsters and humans and. Their struggles to live in harmony in a world of duality". Discuss.

Brendan: This is a comical line of marketing for a game about murdering dinosaurs for high-heel boots. But it is a minor theme of the story. These monsters are simply animals doing what they are naturally compelled to do, we are sometimes told. A small boy comes to relate to a big bad mega monst who once wrecked his village, but. His emotional turnaround is so unconvincing it doesn't land at all. I could scoff and chuckle and wryly fnar-fnar-fnar at how the dialogue and characters try their best to tackle this subject and ultimately fail. But that might just be making a stink out of the game's mild lip service to wildlife preservation. As humans our relationship to animals is an absolutely batshit web of intractable contradictions. My brother's dog is dying and my entire family is currently in bits. But we eat endless cows for supper without thinking too much about it. The natural instinct is to try to scrunch these contradictions until some "right" way of thinking about animals emerges. But it rarely does. All this is to say that preservation and good treatment of wildlife is beyond both the scope of this article, and the scope of a game in which you ride around on Yoshi from the Bob Hoskins Super Mario movie while killing his lizard cousins for their glands.

Ollie: I liked the bit where one of the villagers asked me to deal with a monster that was plaguing their ore miners. I went and clobbered the living shite out of it, harvested its parts for my armour, and then returned to the villager and unveiled "actually, they're really not a threat, you can learn to live with them in harmony".

Jeremy: Generally, I think Monster Hunter as a franchise has made some strides since the early days. Which were really more overt about how the setting only existed as a gameplay loop for you to brazenly brutalise big beasts and carve up their carcasses to craft cool clothes. But perhaps that overtness was more honest? As it stands, the concessions that Monster Hunter Wilds makes to the idea of ecology or preserving life come to a halt whenever you run into a big boss. Your hunter immediately turns to Alma, the latest doe-eyed handler who kind of looks like she stepped out from behind a barista counter. It’s obvious what you want - Guild permission to engage the enemy. And Alma grants it without a second’s hesitation, even when stated enemy is just an ornery toad who’s lashing out because the annoying humans are in its home.

There are moments that hint at alternate worlds where Monster Hunter is less focused on killing. Though. I’m thinking of the Lala Barina again, and how prior to fighting it you’re exploring its ecosystem. Which is a truly gorgeous forest packed to the brim with enough wildlife to justify the game’s entire photo mode. I was reminded of those edutainment ‘90s CD-ROMs I used to play as a kid, about navigating a rainforest or boating down the Nile. There’s potential here to go further in that direction in future installments of the series. Perhaps having hunters navigate environmental shifts or undertake more missions that are about transporting injured monsters or healing sick ones. But ultimately, all of this vanishes when we realise that the Lala Barina has paralysed one of our comrades, so off we go again to beat a behemoth and. Then use its spinnerets to make a switch axe.

Edwin: It’s sort of fascinating to watch Monster Hunter attempt to carve a coherent throughline from those intractable contradictions. It makes room for a lot of discussion about conceptions of humanity and animality and. How certain categories of human have modelled certain categories of nonhuman to suit their purposes. Monster Hunter’s “ecology” is really just a slaughterhouse mechanism with various outputs; the more they try to simulate “natural” behaviour the more glaring the machine’s overall purpose becomes. Generally speaking, I think Capcom could feel less guilty and/or resist the urge to conservation-wash their simulation. This is fiction, and while fiction can be harmful or reductive, it’s often a way of figuring ugly things out. Not being a Japanese speaker, I’ve never had much luck getting Capcom to talk about whether they’ve learned anything from big game hunting or safaris, but. There’s surely a great interview there.

It’s also just entertaining to watch the game try to make sense of its own morals. I’m recycling a joke from several RPS Slack meetings, but I think it would be fun for Capcom to go full Edge Doom review and. Let the monsters talk. Doubtless they would say things like “Oh golly, I’m overpopulating my habitat!"

Brendan: "This will have ramifications to the food chain!"

Edwin: "Quickly, thin my numbers so that the ecosystem can survive.”.

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The Executive showed me that making sequels to a low-budget horror flick was a terrible idea and that audiences craved a Bicentennial Man rip-off

There are lots of tycoon games out there, but very few let players run a movie studio. I instantly think about Lionhead Studios' The Movies whenever someone brings up that concept, but we haven't really gotten anything on that scale ever since, which is why indie studios like Aniki Games are trying to fill that gap.

The Executive is an indie management sim game that allows you to be a powerful movie tycoon who can make big mistakes and. Keep their job, just like IRL. Its visual presentation is quite simple, and the vast majority of your play time is spent inside menus, figuring out budgets, who does what. And whether to sequelize or reboot that one movie project that became a surprise hit a decade ago. I'd say it's a game for the movie industry sickos first and foremost; the people who follow every new development in Hollywood and the biggest releases' box office hauls in order to try and. Predict what every studio will do next. It's me, I'm the sickos.

Things begin simple: You're a nobody with big dreams getting a few million bucks from your rich parents, investors. Or banks. This starting choice will define the overall difficulty of the game moving forward (the money you owe and the conditions to repay it). Getting the first small-budget movies made is also simple. Making an actual profit out of them? Not so much!

For the most part, The Executive is a 'numbers go up' kind of game. It's not very dynamic. You do your thing, try to come up with a winning formula, read the market, convince the distributors to get a fair deal, etc. Rinse and repeat. It takes a while to get into the proper movie-making business and work on bigger productions, but it's just a matter of cracking the numbers and learning how to make the most of the current trends and very wobbly market conditions.

Alternatively, you can just stick to your guns and. Bankrupt your entire movie business because you wanted to make a franchise out of Night Freaks, a low-budget horror flop that struggled to find an audience even in international territories. You don't get to direct and watch the actual movies; you're just running a damn business. Still, this game has some powerful role-playing tools, and being forced into making a sequel to the half-baked 'robot drama' idea that you came up early on is pretty funny.

The biggest negative is that, as off-beat and systematically compelling the game's core concept is. Fighting for financial survival in the movie business as the decades go by and the industry evolves can get repetitive pretty soon. Random unfortunate events aside, there's barely any variance to the loop. You can research new stuff and techniques to put into your movies and expand your operations with new. More specialized workers, maybe even get some sweet new DVD deals for the back catalog. But you don't really experience a tangible change in how the game plays out.

Does this mean The Executive isn't worth your time? Well, it depends on what kind of player you are and how much you care about the movie business. There's some depth to this management sim, but it's rather crude in the way it presents itself and. Doesn't really evolve in meaningful ways besides the targets you set for yourself. In my case, I care enough about the basic premise to continue to check achievements off the list. Past that point, I'd rather be doing something else.

There's also some value in it as a 'generator of funny anecdotes' with names that sound familiar but. Not quite being snubbed at the Romys (not Oscars) while the biggest award of the night goes to the prequel of a reboot of a fantasy series you kickstarted like 40 years ago only because you landed an amazing screenwriter. There's a tint of absurdist comedy in such moments which you can't find in many games. I just wish this game reacted more significantly to my wins and losses. Otherwise, I'm just fighting against myself and looking for ways to break the system before losing interest.

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