Quote from: EvilDemonCreature on September 22, 2015, 05:38:41 am

Unfortunately both of those changes end up coming entirely at the cost of immersion, which wouldn't be too high a cost to pay if it were literally any other series.

The good Zeldas will usually have elements that raise up the game and make it basically more than the sum of its parts, the Fairies in Ocarina Of Time introduce normal fairy fountains, which are like a weird fantasy dimension poking through otherwise mundane locations. At the very least, the fountains make the environment feel as though it's populated with bizarre secrets. The fact that they heal is a pretty small component of their overall character, compared to other games.

Similarly, the collectable spiders in Ocarina are a weird infestation, with the same dark, mystical air of the rest of the game. They scratch around on the side of a barn while the farmer is sleeping and you're out snooping around on his property. They're exactly the kind of thing you need to see to make darkness in the game feel like the dead of night. The atmosphere this builds is realized seamlessly through gameplay and astonishingly elevates what should be a dumb collectable.

The Ghost collectable in Twilight Princess is a standard part of the Zelda recipe and fills out its role nicely, this is where its characteristics begin and end. Actually they're kind of annoying to get because you have to turn into a wolf first and then fight with the ghost. There is bug collecting in both Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, but in both cases they’re both clearly pointing to conventions established by the series' basic formula. It's nothing like Ocarina, where the spider effectively captures the feeling of being out at night and expecting something to scratch around in the darkness.

In TP it seems like they were kind of losing the essence of the prior games as a result of following form too strictly, Skyward Sword and Link Between Worlds and the DS games seems more like semi-intentionally breaking away the muddy, overlapping parts of the games and introducing elements in their place that are streamlined, smart design choices. So the weapons and other elements in Worlds are fixed, but now lack all their holistic properties. Nothing in the game is going to feel like exploring at nighttime, though the different parts of the game may click together all in a very sensible way. Frankly this follows other trends by other Nintendo franchises where the intellectual properties are fully manifested as exaggerated, safe, and reliable representations of themselves. But this isn't all or even mostly an outcome of business, I do think that there are very real creative difficulties in reproducing the qualities of a good Zelda game.

Speaking purely creatively, I don't think it's that surprising that initial attempts at these games sort of hit the mark perfectly. When you have no preconception of how you should approach a game like this, you just have to be honest with how things fit or don't fit the mood/tone. It's later on that you get faint echoes once you establish too strongly a certain formal method of thinking about and producing these games.

Spot on... both EDC and Zizek. I think in general OoT and Majorask did a LOT with light and darkness esthetically. Anybody remembers the existential anxiety the game could induce, eg. the future Kakariko's graveyard race through NEON torch flames in darkness (whyyy???? why NOW, why not earlier or later in the game??), dark hollow ambience instead of merry happy We're Racing - music, all the while trying to process that cool kind gravekeeper is fucking dead and still around to obsessively challenge you to a race??? aaaa. it's like some gloom-and-doom little welcome party, a real "party freak". You're Dead!! Hah Hah, Welcome to the party, says a serious version of Space Funeral.
plus in retrospect the deadlines in that race seems pretty harsh for a kids games, lol. MSDOS-shareware games smile knowingly, winks... fuken hell.
 
Yeah i needed to obsess here because sometimes I do schoolwork while listening to OoT weirdo egyptian temple music, but nothing really beats the ridicilous Aquarium house - theme (That Sitar!) for work.

We've had at least one extremely good Zelda theory thread before

the tru golden ageof sw. we're still there but with less people, I hit +like on all ur posts

to contribute to the thread, I played fallout 4 and I didn't like it. thanks for reading. this wasn't intended at all as an intelligent tangent about fallout 4 being the self-proclaimed champion of the huge detailed world with every offensively prosaic added detail violently attacking imagination, wanderlust, enthusiasm for the setting, immersion, whatever the experience we enjoy is; but this discussion/cicada's post/resurfacing of that old thread focuses my criticisms I had previously deemed 'too boring to share' into a coherent statement:
 
while playing the video game, I always found myself trying to get to the highest vantage point, partially in a vain attempt to understand a sense of scale, get a frame-of-reference of where things are in relation to one another, where I was, how far I've traveled; but also to try and salvage any sense of enjoyment from playing the game. this is something I've always loved doing, ulilillia's bubsy 3D video-style. climb to the top of a row home, jump rooftop to rooftop. somehow, this is now just as boring as modding gun's within the game's deliberately- but barely-hidden, limited parameters. yeah, maybe it's because this is expressly allowed and encouraged, rather than like struggling within the game's limited geometry to platform to see something you're not supposed to be able to see, like inside an upper-floor room a cutscene just played in and there are all the character models just standing there frozen, the glitch jockey's wet dream...but I also think the sheer, mundane attempt at exhaustive realism contributes a ton as well.
 
regarding those limited item parameters I just mentioned: in previous fallout games, similar to the Zeldas but maybe even more pronounced, you'd at least have the pleasure of stumbling upon some weird unique item in your persistent roaming. fallout 4 removes this experience by mashing it up with a very limited form of a roguelike-like adjective system (stumbling upon heaps of enemies all with compensated powerful pipe rifles) and a "legendary" system, which I think is probably derivative of Borderlands without really knowing anything about that series. "legendary" items, obtained from regular enemies randomly anointed "legendary" and given more health points, add an additional, rare, but perceptibly from a limited pool, adjective to the item. unlike roguelikes the adjective is always a bonus, which purportedly somehow makes the already unlimited and easy gameplay-travel experience intangibly better.
 
 
contemporary games are sort of in this state of limbo between the constrained and unlimited, which is why they are so awful and keep getting worse:
 
in older games like both the 2d and 3d zeldas, the constraints of the medium, interpreted by the player, inflate the world to a larger-than life setting. the constraints are effectively what facilitate the immersion, the suspension of disbelief in that what happens within this universe is real within this universe, and the feeling that what happens within this universe matters.
 
conversely, roguelikes dissolve limitations beyond the player's ability to comprehend, so that the player must scrap together their own framework for understanding a complex world in a way that parallels or comments on real life. the sense of opaque limitlessness is what facilitates immersion, the sense of inexhaustible possibilities, and the feeling that what happens within this universe is a real, unique benefit/detriment to progression within/the ability to understand this universe.
 
this is probably a dumb oversimplification, but I think what's happening with the structure of contemporary games, fallout 4 in particular, is that they blindly take inoperative vestigial parts of these phenomena and mash them together without any understanding what makes them compelling in the first place, so all that remains is this sort of vague allusion and dumbly-nostalgic, contrived exuberance.  

i never really played it but this is why goat simulator appealed to people i think? huge open world/physics engine used for a bullshit game that knows it's bullshit

Played Undertale. I'm going to demonstrate that I have the biggest balls on the internet and say that I didn't like it.
 
Didn't think it was funny, didn't find anything interesting about the characters, and as far as I can tell the rest of the game is just an assortment of subverted tropes and meme-level humor. The game endeavors to have this sincere streak to it, which I didn't personally buy after seeing how smug the game gets when you stop playing it the way it wants you to, extremely hard to swallow that the story really means it when it spends so much time being exceptionally ironic.
 
So I must be missing something? Maybe I'm just too old and jaded and just don't understand the value of metafiction. It feels a bit like what Quentin Tarantino did back in the day, where he just made a career SOMEHOW out of demonstrating that he has an expansive knowledge of semi-obscure film, and that he could blend them together semi-intelligibly.  DON'T WORRY about the fact that the stories aren't really about anything, TASTE THOSE JUICY REFERENCES.
 
I didn't finish the game, but I'm told that I needed to play through the thing two or three times to get the TRUE ENDING or whatever, which absolutely wasn't happening after how laborious it was to make it through three or four hours of the game. I acknowledge that I may be missing something important here, but I haven't really seen or heard evidence of this beyond the deafening cries of unintelligible love people have for the thing, so I'll just dismiss this into the dustier spaces of my brain.
 
 
Also played Fallout 4.
 
Eh......
 
I'm slightly torn about the game, as there were some things to like about it, and a lot of things to really strongly dislike about it. I stuck with the thing even though I wasn't having a particularly good time as late at 10 hours into it, but I found the game had some life when you get some of the worthwhile companions to be stumbling around the game with you. It was a surprise, as Bethesda's dialogue and character design are almost invariably awful and without positive merit, but a couple of the companions in F4 are actually pretty interesting people. The whole companion/party dynamic in Fallout is something that they rarely have done particularly well, even when rather talented writers have been at the helm of the project, so it was pretty nice to actually see characters IN A BETHESDA GAME OF ALL PLACES that I honestly wanted to know more about, and actually had some interesting character arcs. In general, it was exponentially more rewarding going around the world with someone like Deacon or Hancock, and getting interesting perspectives of the world that you wouldn't have otherwise come to. Most of the value of all of this is just pure backstory, nothing that is physically happening to you in real-time, just Nick or whatever dropping an interesting sentence on you in an otherwise totally uninteresting location, but I found that it kinda worked and gave the game a backbone that most games of this type are missing. Keeps you in the experience more, which is nice since Bethesda oftentimes goes hours and hours and hours without any concern for what the world is supposed to amount to.
 
Totally run out of nice things to say about Fallout 4 though. There were a small fistful of rather interesting quests, and an exponentially larger amount of totally dull fetch quests, dragging you off to locations you were better off not going to.
 
What really sets the game back is the fact that the world is entirely uninteresting and not really worth exploring. Working against the experience of the whole thing is the settlements dynamic, where you can take towns and build stupid, useless shit there and get boring stock quests and non-stop complaints when your asshole settlers get attacked by raiders or don't have enough basketball hoops or whatever. This completely flattened the world out compared to the previous Fallout games, as you can't ever go to these places and expect something interesting going on or to find anything worthwhile to do apart from the worthless town-building dynamic that gets old insanely fast. Like you can walk in any direction in Fallout NV, or even Fallout 3, and find something remotely interesting to do, some CONTENT tailored to that location to justify your exploration, but because so much of Fallout 4's real estate is devoted to what amounts to a shitty, repetitive minigame, actually finding interesting stuff to do can be a challenge. The game is really more about going to hubs and getting missions instead of actually stumbling onto interesting stuff on your own. Some of those quests you find ARE rather interesting, but they're spread out so far, and can be so challenging to find that it genuinely negates the worth in exploring, since you can expect to go long periods of time without anything interesting to do. I found the game unplayably dull without use of a walkthrough, which isn't something anybody should be ok with.
 
They did some reasonably neat things with the guns I guess, customizing guns is a whole lot more interesting than the old method of having to constantly fix broken guns, but they missed a lot of interesting opportunities in making the upgrade pieces change the essential function of the guns. There is SOME of that, so it's not like they blew it entirely, but it's a system that doesn't really stay interesting long into the game. You'll very quickly know what to expect from each kind of gun, so even rather early in the game you'll be familiar with virtually every noteworthy weapon combination. They also had a similar thing with power armor, but I didn't give a shit about that and went through about 99.9% of the game wearing random junk or upgraded pieces of clothing.
 
The overall story is generally pretty bland and forgettable, and the choices you'll make in the game will come down less to making tough decisions when faced with some overarching moral dilemma, and more about selecting the faction you find the most/least annoying. I did, however, like the Railroad as a faction, as you get some neat stuff to do, and I think the way they presented that was generally pretty cool, but because none of the other factions were at all compelling, there didn't exist a whole lot of interesting dramatic conflict throughout the game. They were really banking on the whole FIND YOUR SON idea to be something people would give a shit about, so while they probably squeezed as much out of that as they possibly could, it was still ultimately pretty unrewarding. Beyond that, some quests were cool, but most were a general waste of time. The Silver Shroud quest was buggy and somewhat annoying, and I've seen enough bullshit superhero stories for several lifetimes, but I liked that it was ACTUAL ROLEPLAYING in a role playing game. I remember liking a couple others, but they must not have made much of an impression on me, as I'm struggling to find anything interesting to say about any others.
 
They have a new dialogue system in Fallout 4 which is there to make conversations awkward and with diminished dramatic effect. I guess this is more realistic or something? Because most people in reality are awkward and with diminished dramatic effect? I would try to get to the bottom of why the fuck they did this, but I've thrown enough words at this post and don't exactly enough of a shit to try figuring out why someone would handicap the writers that much. It was a STUPID IDEA THAT DIDN'T WORK, and it's a miracle the dialogue in the game is ever interesting.
 
And there are some DLCs out, though the first two they've released are truly awful. One is just more stupid shit to build in your settlements, hidden behind the thin guise of a horrifically dull, two hour long story campaign, while the other is the ability to build cages in your settlements to trap people and monsters. The former was bad enough, but I don't know who the fuck played Fallout 4 and thought WOW WHAT THIS GAME REALLY NEEDS IS A SLAVERY MINIGAME. There's supposedly still some more DLCs on the way, and that Far Harbor one might be worth playing, but the first two are pretty shamefully worthless stuff and makes me not want to play Fallout anymore.
 
I dunno. The best you can hope for in the game is to have a couple worthwhile moments. For every interesting quest, there are going to be ten that nobody gives a shit about and are thoroughly forgettable. You CAN have some fun with the game, and I think there are enough worthwhile moments to keep me from dismissing the game entirely, but you kinda need to figure out how to approach it right. Still, not a game I would suggest to anybody who isn't really hopelessly interested in the Fallout series and doesn't has a ton of free time to spare. And even then, you need to expect a game where you have to figure out the fun yourself rather than just hope to stumble onto it.
 
 
This is a really negative post, so I'm going to leave with a positive and say that I also recently played the Hotline Miami and Phoenix Wright games and thought they were both very good. Richter from Hotline Miami is one of the best videogame characters in recent memory, and what they did with Phoenix Wright in the Apollo Justice game pretty much justified the whole damn series for me.
 
So I can still be a nice person despite the fact that I have all this negativity that I'm incapable of swallowing without bitching to an internet forum about it.

While I don't agree with the conclusions you draw, I certainly respect how you came about those conclusions when it came to Undertale. For instance, you were right in inferring that the story isn't really about anything, I just kinda assumed that must be the  point. Without some overarching need to pursue some grand narrative, you are given more freedom to find relevance in the moment-to-moment interactions (boiling that down to "HEY CHECK OUT THIS OBSCURE REFERENCE! HOW COOL IS THAT?!" is a rather glib interpretation, but I see how in it's presentation how hard it is to not get that distinct impression). I dunno, I just found it a bit disappointing how you gave Fallout 4 much more of a chance before dismissing it simply because it was built in a way to require that much more out of you before you.
 

 I stuck with the thing even though I wasn't having a particularly good time as late at 10 hours into it, but I found the game had some life when you get some of the worthwhile companions to be stumbling around the game with you. It was a surprise, as Bethesda's dialogue and character design are almost invariably awful and without positive merit, but a couple of the companions in F4 are actually pretty interesting people.

 
For instance you could have beaten Undertale twice in the time you spent looking for interesting companions in Fallout 4. But I don't want to harp on it because it'd be hypocritical given that I didn't really give Fallout 4 hardly any chance at all. (It's partly an issue of access, I don't have a system that can play it and I don't want to buy a new system FOR it, but even if I had, I am far too jaded to have the patience required by the kind of games where you have to invest a lot of yourself into it before you even get a LITTLE bit of enjoyment back out of it)
 
 
 

I dunno. The best you can hope for in the game is to have a couple worthwhile moments. For every interesting quest, there are going to be ten that nobody gives a shit about and are thoroughly forgettable. You CAN have some fun with the game, and I think there are enough worthwhile moments to keep me from dismissing the game entirely, but you kinda need to figure out how to approach it right. Still, not a game I would suggest to anybody who isn't really hopelessly interested in the Fallout series and doesn't has a ton of free time to spare. And even then, you need to expect a game where you have to figure out the fun yourself rather than just hope to stumble onto it.

 
Small Green Cicada posted a reply as I was typing this up, and I certainly do agree with what he says. I don't WANT to be one of those folks that's just jumping in to heartfeltedly defend this game because of some immutable shell, and that's not really what I'm trying to say here. The game is indeed flawed, and the culture that has sprung up around it is most certainly grating. For one thing, how so much love can spring up for such a set of characters (which for all I could tell, were designed with the DELIBERATE INTENTION of being nothing beyond annoyances for the player character and being a complete hassle to deal with), I'll never fully understand. But it was this part of your response to Fallout 4 that made me feel l had to address how effortlessly you dismissed Undertale, simply because this was the exact same conclusion I drew about Undertale after playing it fully. (maybe replace the "Fallout" with "Earthbound" or possibly more aptly *shudders* "Homestuck", but the "need to expect a game where you have to figure out the fun yourself rather than just hope to stumble into it" is certainly spot on)

If you want to know the meta-theme to Undertale right off-the-bat, it's basically a game that shapes itself around how you approach it. That smug impression you got off at the start was all about communicating the intention as clearly as possible that the "rules" of this game are all shaped by how you approach it as a game (and I admit, lowest common denominator style of design is indeed offputting, but I saw how necessary it was in a game like this, because that kind of thing is so easy to miss regardless of how obviously the narrative tries to hammer it in)
 
I'm not saying you NEED to play it multiple times. I'm just saying if you were able to understand that much about how the game operates, you can have a reasonable expectation that the other playthroughs won't offer you the same kind of experience your first playthrough did, as long you are deliberate in your approach. Even if you don't want to go through the trouble of playing this game to give it a second chance, I still think you should at least look up the other playthroughs online, and spoil yourself on the diverging aspects of the alternate stories. Just to immediately know what the "hidden intention" was, and be able to decide for yourself if spoiling it makes you feel like you've missed out by not playing it firsthand. I'm assuming you'll probably just decide you saved yourself time and trouble by doing so, but I still think it is something worth at least knowing about.
 
(For one thing, if you really do hate the game that much, you owe it to yourself to at least do the playthrough where you kill literally as many characters as mechanically possible. Simply because FUCK that game! FUCK everyone in it! Just fuck it all!)

Awww, was getting my hopes up that I wouldn't have to defend my stance on Undertale. Guess I'll never have nice things.
 
 

While I don't agree with the conclusions you draw, I certainly respect how you came about those conclusions when it came to Undertale. For instance, you were right in inferring that the story isn't really about anything, I just kinda assumed that must be the  point. Without some overarching need to pursue some grand narrative, you are given more freedom to find relevance in the moment-to-moment interactions (boiling that down to "HEY CHECK OUT THIS OBSCURE REFERENCE! HOW COOL IS THAT?!" is a rather glib interpretation, but I see how in it's presentation how hard it is to not get that distinct impression). I dunno, I just found it a bit disappointing how you gave Fallout 4 much more of a chance before dismissing it simply because it was built in a way to require that much more out of you before you.
 
For instance you could have beaten Undertale twice in the time you spent looking for interesting companions in Fallout 4. But I don't want to harp on it because it'd be hypocritical given that I didn't really give Fallout 4 hardly any chance at all. (It's partly an issue of access, I don't have a system that can play it and I don't want to buy a new system FOR it, but even if I had, I am far too jaded to have the patience required by the kind of games where you have to invest a lot of yourself into it before you even get a LITTLE bit of enjoyment back out of it)

Well, to be fair, your proportional math here is slightly off. I played and disliked less than ten percent of Fallout before I started enjoying it at all, while I gave up on Undertale because I was in the vicinity of halfway through it and it became clear to me that the game was not designed for an audience with a zero tolerance stance on pun overuse.
 
And actually, to be more clear, I would still consider my reactions to the two games pretty dramatically different after those two periods, which I didn't mention before as I didn't think I would actually be called out on that. "Dislike" for Fallout 4 at around the ten hour point was probably something I would describe more as indifference or boredom. The game wasn't doing anything for me, and I didn't think it was a game that was organized efficiently, but I didn't really ACTIVELY DISLIKE the fundamentals of the game. I like Fallout! And this still felt like a Fallout game, even if it was one where they forgot to put very much of interest in the first ten hours. I think I had spoken to probably less than ten named NPCs in that time, all generally useless or uninteresting, so I figured that it would be silly to assume I knew enough about the game to write it off so soon. Which was a pretty fair evaluation, as I even ended up really liking one of those unnamed NPCs that I encountered in the first ten minutes.
 
On the other hand, I was far enough into Undertale to know that the game's style and grammar was pretty distinctly unappealing to me, to the point of finding it pretty grating. I kinda need something to hang my hat on when it comes to stories that don't endeavor to convey anything beyond a general knowledge of videogame formulas. I wasn't finding any relevance in those moment-to-moment interactions, and I just don't think Toby Fox is anywhere near the humorist that people claim him to be. I was really left only with questions about his overall structure of the game, but that I already had officially found the game fundamentally unpleasant to play, I possessed no incentive to even continue on with the game. I actively disliked Undertale when I stopped playing it, and I would categorize it as pretty grossly inaccurate to equate that to the general boredom I was experiencing while playing Fallout 4.
 

I'm not saying you NEED to play it multiple times. I'm just saying if you were able to understand that much about how the game operates, you can have a reasonable expectation that the other playthroughs won't offer you the same kind of experience your first playthrough did, as long you are deliberate in your approach. Even if you don't want to go through the trouble of playing this game to give it a second chance, I still think you should at least look up the other playthroughs online, and spoil yourself on the diverging aspects of the alternate stories. Just to immediately know what the "hidden intention" was, and be able to decide for yourself if spoiling it makes you feel like you've missed out by not playing it firsthand. I'm assuming you'll probably just decide you saved yourself time and trouble by doing so, but I still think it is something worth at least knowing about.

 
Yeah, I did look this up, but I couldn't really see what all the fuss was about? I get that you're supposed to deliberately play the game against your natural instincts, but I don't really get what's particularly noteworthy or revolutionary about this. I played through the entirety of Fallout New Vegas in an afternoon speedrun without killing anybody or firing a gun; it was just a product of boredom, and to see if the game was structured in a way where this was possible. There are actually a lot of games where you CAN do this already, I don't know what's noteworthy about a game that encourages/requires you to? It's a somewhat structurally unique idea, but I'm not all that impressed with the essential structure of videogames where that will really do it for me. It's sorta like loving a movie for how good the plot twist is, even though the rest of the movie is generally underwhelming. I would be inclined to argue that games aren't really that intrinsically interesting.
 
And then there's all this consequence based on arbitrary stuff you did in the game, and the whole befriend everybody so they all gather at the end of the game to lend you their strength. I mean, these are things the Mass Effect games and latest two Persona games did, respectively, and I didn't especially care about it then, the value of all of that for me was how much I enjoyed getting to that end point, how it all was written and designed, not the payoff you get at the end. It usually strikes me as little more than the game just championing your completionist effort when it requires you to jump through hoops like that to get some ultimate ending, or desirable narrative outcome. I mean, I'd be inclined to argue that it's not fundamentally less arbitrary than failing to collect all the chaos emeralds in the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, where the game ultimately condemns you for not jumping through those unpleasantly complex hoops. I will admit that I'm pretty overly dismissive of games that sacrifice any sort of creative quality in favor of the illusion of choice or narrative reactivity, however, so I'm probably not the sort of person anybody wants to talk to about the value of these sorts of elements in games.
 
Correct me if I'm missing some greater deeper relevance or if i've missed some useful perspective on all of this. Just before giving up on the game I just kinda skimmed a couple summaries of what this game was about and couldn't piece together a compelling reason to continue playing it in light of the fact that I already found the game fundamentally unpleasant to play. I'd have been keen on this journey if the journey was one I found at all compelling, but I need more than some generally innocuous designer who found some very slightly different way of taking games apart to justify spending several hours on something. Kinda need to dig the game's writer before I can bring myself to play a game that deliberately, as these aren't things that are necessarily worthwhile independent of the game's quality.
 

(For one thing, if you really do hate the game that much, you owe it to yourself to at least do the playthrough where you kill literally as many characters as mechanically possible. Simply because FUCK that game! FUCK everyone in it! Just fuck it all!)

Uh......
 
I'm ok just posting about it on a message board to exorcise my demons. I don't feel the need to endure that many terrible skeleton puns to do that.

wowowowowow I'm double-posting!!! It's like a real message board discussion going on here!!!
 
 

Indeed the Phoenix Wright games are awesome. I've played through them all about 5 times and it has still not gotten old. The latest for the 3DS is easily my least favorite in every way (crime scenes aren't as good, the cases are EXTREMELY situational and far-fetched) but I still enjoy it enough. I love the characters, and I really love the back and forth with seriousness and playfulness of the series as a whole.

Ah, thank you for saying this actually! I had actually been avoiding playing the 3DS one after hearing that Shu Takumi wasn't involved in it. I loved the Phoenix Wright games, but my interest faded when the series morphed into Ace Attorney Investigations for a while, which is where Takumi stopped being involved in the series, and I felt the writing took a pretty notable nosedive and much of the charm was lost entirely. You've kinda confirmed my suspicions here, I think.
 
I was probably going to go out of my way to play it sometime, but now I'll wait until I can get it cheaply or it falls in my lap, and to just generally keep my expectations in check. Kinda felt inclined to think this way anyway, but you've confirmed it.
 
PS I am an odd hermit, so I don't know if this game's existence is common knowledge or not, but if you really loved the hell out of Phoenix Wright, you probably owe it to yourself to try Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. It's made by Shu Takumi and, while it's really quite different than Phoenix Wright, I think it possesses a lot of the qualities that made Phoenix Wright a compelling series of games. I actually AVOIDED PLAYING THIS GAME because it has one of the most uninteresting titles I've ever heard, but it's actually surprisingly good stuff, charming in much the same way that I thought Phoenix Wright was charming.
 
Like I said, I actually have no idea if this game's existence and ties to Phoenix Wright is common knowledge or not, so accept my apologies if I am eagerly passing forth UTTERLY VALUELESS INFORMATION. All I know is that *I* had actually heard nothing at all about this Ghost Trick game until I accidentally stumbled onto it, which is never some greater indication of whether or not anybody else knows anything about it.

hell yea forum arguments *100% sincere*

I don't know what Undertale is, but I saw the name before and dismissed it based only on that. not to boast. like the name conjures the image of Homestuck Terraria Clash of Clans and I know I'm not the target audience there.
 
re: fallout 4, yeah. there definitely are a few scattered moments in the game that are totally okay experiences. the rest of the game is bland, but doesn't stand out for being exceptionally bad. an intelligent person could play it and not hate it. but part of the reason I hate it is because they've brought the series and all its merits to a screeching halt, and afaik people actually love it.
 
I liked some of the characters too. I think I only got around having Piper, Nick and Deacon as companions, and only Deacon after I already started to hate the game. I also thought their presence felt contrived, though. they're like isolated cinematic moments that don't fit in with what the game poses itself as being about. that's the part I where I thought they were emulating gta.
 
edit: good games: yeah, hotline miami. I also liked the Gianna Sisters: Twisted Dreams, which is a platformer with a gimmick, but I like it.

re: fallout 4, yeah. there definitely are a few scattered moments in the game that are totally okay experiences. the rest of the game is bland, but doesn't stand out for being exceptionally bad. an intelligent person could play it and not hate it. but part of the reason I hate it is because they've brought the series and all its merits to a screeching halt, and afaik people actually love it.
 
I liked some of the characters too. I think I only got around having Piper, Nick and Deacon as companions, and only Deacon after I already started to hate the game. I also thought their presence felt contrived, though. they're like isolated cinematic moments that don't fit in with what the game poses itself as being about. that's the part I where I thought they were emulating gta.

I also thought Hancock and Curie were ok too, though I hesitate to even tell you this because I don't want you to think that you're missing something that's really specifically worth launching the game to experience. It's more that this is something to do if you find the act of playing the game inescapable.
 
But yeah, even though I was able to shake some enjoyment out of what is not a very well designed game, this does leave me pretty discouraged for what the Fallout series is becoming. I think I was able to generally dismiss the whole settlements thing as potentially some isolated incident in the series, but after seeing that the focus of the DLCs thus far has EXCLUSIVELY BEEN the settlements, I'm substantially less hopeful that it was a quirk specific to Fallout 4 rather than a new direction for the series. They're really, actually serious about this apparently, which was something I was more able to give them the benefit of the doubt over before the DLCs. I'm left kinda skeptical that I'm even going to continue desiring to play the series after this unless Bethesda again outsources a Fallout spinoff game to a more reliable company.

Quote from: Elder Chips on May 05, 2016, 01:40:56 am

re: fallout 4, yeah. there definitely are a few scattered moments in the game that are totally okay experiences. the rest of the game is bland, but doesn't stand out for being exceptionally bad. an intelligent person could play it and not hate it. but part of the reason I hate it is because they've brought the series and all its merits to a screeching halt, and afaik people actually love it.
 
I liked some of the characters too. I think I only got around having Piper, Nick and Deacon as companions, and only Deacon after I already started to hate the game. I also thought their presence felt contrived, though. they're like isolated cinematic moments that don't fit in with what the game poses itself as being about. that's the part I where I thought they were emulating gta.

I also thought Hancock and Curie were ok too, though I hesitate to even tell you this because I don't want you to think that you're missing something that's really specifically worth launching the game to experience. It's more that this is something to do if you find the act of playing the game inescapable.
 
But yeah, even though I was able to shake some enjoyment out of what is not a very well designed game, this does leave me pretty discouraged for what the Fallout series is becoming. I think I was able to generally dismiss the whole settlements thing as potentially some isolated incident in the series, but after seeing that the focus of the DLCs thus far has EXCLUSIVELY BEEN the settlements, I'm substantially less hopeful that it was a quirk specific to Fallout 4 rather than a new direction for the series. They're really, actually serious about this apparently, which was something I was more able to give them the benefit of the doubt over before the DLCs. I'm left kinda skeptical that I'm even going to continue desiring to play the series after this unless Bethesda again outsources a Fallout spinoff game to a more reliable company.

I'd be champing at the bit for a spinoff handled by Obsidian again, or whatever companies guys like chris avellone and j.e. sawyer work for now. I guess even a spinoff would be bound to use the clunky incredible ground-breaking settlement and item modification systems, though that might not be terrible. I was actually kind of excited when I first heard about settlement customization, as one of the things that slightly annoyed me in F3 and NV was the lack of options in player housing (I roleplay characters I guess, eg if I'm playing a low-intelligence, low-charisma hermit who suffered severe brain damage from Benny's gunshot, I want my character's residence to reflect that). it's just that instead of expanding upon the concept player housing as was maybe initially intended, settlements ended up being a faceless and repetitive fort-building mechanic tied to the boring, annoying, and non-roleplay-friendly settler minigame. gotta scrounge up resources to built another turret to defend another settlement of stupid one-liner npcs. whoops, turret's destroyed, build another one. it's fun
 
this turned into a stupid rant just to say that settlements could be okay to neat in capable hands for a future spinoff or dlc. that said, it's fascinating that they continue to blow it with the DLC. it could be that the DLC was already fully developed before release, so that they never really had the time to realize what a huge misstep they made. on the other hand they probably actually love it, and it probably sells well too.

HUNDLEY JUST POSTED #hundley_just_posted

Quote

Anybody remembers the existential anxiety the game could induce, eg. the future Kakariko's graveyard race through NEON torch flames in darkness (whyyy???? why NOW, why not earlier or later in the game??), dark hollow ambience instead of merry happy We're Racing - music, all the while trying to process that cool kind gravekeeper is fucking dead and still around to obsessively challenge you to a race??? aaaa.

I get what you mean. I don't want to make this the Zelda thread, but... here I, Zlavoj "Zelda" Zizek, make a pr post that I had to even print for myself (as so ever eloquently describes some new shit... man how do you do this writing stuff? how do i manipulate people like my text???"

listen to the fuckin man!!!! i actually had whole lot to say than this but i spent +½h reading the rest of the posts so gulp you are a victim of good posting season i guess. we'll get right back some day...
 
well oh yeah, we can say this: we can make a goddamn justin bieber X ghostbusters game with simplified presentation etc, so we can't really just make it a simple rule and call it a day lol. but i think what u said generally touches on what i said about games giving existential crises & basically you are trying to make a sense of your experiences or try to figure out how everything relates with each other ... like uh, MEANINGS. you try to figure out what everything means. Unfortunately you are given random or arbitrary data to work with ahhahahah. this is why i'd spend ages trying to get into the panorama box outside mario's castle in mario 64 because of COURSE you MAY be able to get inside, i read it from the gaming magazine... yoshi is there...
 
fuck now all thoughts are just a blur or one big blob so dunno which is dumbtopic or this topic but fuckitall fuckitalllllllll ah hell!!! ah hhhecccck!!!!!!!!
 
 

The combination of aiming the industry at children + the graphical and system limitations are huge factors to what made older games so evocative/afforded them such bizarre and unparalleled experience, and why games nowadays rarely capture similar magic.
 
it's harder to do interesting things with a video game world that is meticulously modeled to look like a movie or like life unless you bring in something totally out of place (e.g. head popping out of ground nightmare scene in that n64 flying game, the glitches in red dead redemption where the wildlife and people get their models and behaviors mixed up). i and probably a million other nerds have said this [in our nasal, whining voices] and i'll say it again: virtually everything past gamecube level/2007-ish graphics, commensurate with increasing recency, looks like complete dog shit. it just looks really bad to have super fucking detailed models and shaders, looks like literally nothing, not life or even like a video game, and i feel like some aspect of gamers has evolved and left me behind, because the vast majority of modern games completely lack any sort of style whatsoever and i don't understand how anyone can be satisfied by them. games should look strange as fuck, not like thousand dollars worth of dolls and dollhouses made in maya. i think humans conceptualize better games when they are regarded as disposable immature faux-medium outside the sphere of artistry (so that every meaningful/well-concocted/inspiring moment seems like an outlier/pleasant surprise, makes the rare moving vidgame moment all the more poignant).
NES black as a concept vanishes; games now have nothing "behind" them at all. (some... GTA has bluescreen, now the best you can hope for is a distinctive skybox...) Glitches are less likely to emerge as the result of irregularly designed systems colliding and more likely to emerge as boring bullshit. I watched some glitch videos for more recent games ie 2013 tomb raider and such - it was more on the level of "a weirdly long canned killing animation concluded with the generic enemy guy ending up on top of a nearby barrel". therefore, everything's boring bullshit. qed
 
We've had at least one extremely good Zelda theory thread before - i just missed it - so i'd love to hear anything else people have to think about it. that's a really stellar thread to read through anyway. I don't have anything to add about zelda but i love to read people who grew up with it bloviate. oh, i can add this: My first experiences with Zelda were playing it through Zelda Classic on my pc, so i permanently expect the game to start up with screenful of animated flames + crackling sound.

I had to copy this post just because SOMEBODY JUST GREW ANOTHER PAIR!!!! *plays ACDC like SUPER LOUD outside famous utubers house, all glasses break at the same time in neighbourhood*
 
 

Undertale, edc, hundley, guana... all...

 
ya i watched playthu from beginning and ya its a boring metagame, what gives? all the same reasons cicada hundley said. @guana, curiously also lost interest at the skeleton introduction time, maybe there's a pattern here? maybe it was the time when you get a final solid proof that the writing/dialogue is going to be at that level for the rest of the game, same for the structural / gameplay elements.
 
 

earthbound

 
...m-maybe we need another topic for this one...*GULP!*... ya i think mayb the game wouldn't go down that easy today but hey, i think main issue is really the difficulty and amount of battles? i totally enjoyed the story and characters but i had to give up with the game with heavy heart around the time of fourson sewers, so i even missed out 1/4 of the game.
 
and yeah, im gonna take a hit for this but I didn't like Mother 3 all that much when it came down to it. there's lot of really neat stuff implemented well in the game, stuff on the level that it probably won't be seen in other games maybe forever, but maybe u guys recognize when I say that there's a bit too much of that fan service-y "earthboundiness" in there (like, in terms of just making a very different type of game, or mature game, or realize full potential of Mother 3's own stuff) and perhaps Itoi really isn't the best when writing serious shit? like earthbound was just a collection of crazy locales with crazy people with crazy events... where the Main Title exists just to scare the fuck out of children and intro is likewise a bit too intense for kids... It Does Make You Think.
 
 

fallout 4

 
hundley you should give your characters +20 constitution and 4 intelligence because holy shit at your resilience with some of these corp vidcon series ... nay, dont worry, its almost admiration though, "what integrity, what willpower to dredge thru his beloved interests, this man certainly has the balls to live his life... maby u goit high wisdom as well...
 
ok well i again wanted to say stuff but i think it pr much misses the point of new vegas (im not even bringing up earlier games) but hey it's skyrim makers so i don't think it's a surprise and fruitful convo to continue further anyways?
 

PS I am an odd hermit, so I don't know if this game's existence is common knowledge or not, but if you really loved the hell out of Phoenix Wright, you probably owe it to yourself to try Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. It's made by Shu Takumi and, while it's really quite different than Phoenix Wright, I think it possesses a lot of the qualities that made Phoenix Wright a compelling series of games. I actually AVOIDED PLAYING THIS GAME because it has one of the most uninteresting titles I've ever heard, but it's actually surprisingly good stuff, charming in much the same way that I thought Phoenix Wright was charming.
 
Like I said, I actually have no idea if this game's existence and ties to Phoenix Wright is common knowledge or not, so accept my apologies if I am eagerly passing forth UTTERLY VALUELESS INFORMATION. All I know is that *I* had actually heard nothing at all about this Ghost Trick game until I accidentally stumbled onto it, which is never some greater indication of whether or not anybody else knows anything about it.

 
!!! I'm pretty sure... well, i HOPE...*sweats profusely* i PRAY... that people know that game was one of the top games of our times? i spend some two days just watching the longplay of it (the guy playing it knew every puzzle and only messed up few times). fuck cave story fuck fez fuck undertale, this is the shit. it's uh a pretty left-field surprise but wasn't it like that in the old days? somebody has an vision and own way to do things, then pulls it out... unsuspecting poor sucka-kids stare at Darklands cover and make the worst decision of their lives there and then...
 
btw as a background: prior to watching the game i barely had any working experience with what kind of art or story or interaction style Shu Takumi has... i just think the game stood really well on it's own merits. very little metagaming shit or self-conscious stuff, just some really nerve-wracking, addicting episode structure...
 
ALSO: here's betting millions of dollars that somebody is going to make a retrospective review of the game in future, include it in the Unofficial Gaming Canon of 2010, then lots of people flock in to first say "they were there" and then make tons of copies of the thematic or art style or gameplay of the game. like, somebody does Pitchfork etc styled kingmaking affair like what the indie crowd did from grassroots to stuff like Fez and Undertale, but this time it's top to bottom. Well Of COURSE The Germs Is Equally Important As Michael Jackson You Dimwit.