Okay, I guess I will come out and say it. Steel stop scaring off our members! Your essay posts bash a lot of people and its really intimidating to the new comers.
I try to be civil but then you see post after post arguing in favor of mediocrity so I'd say the risks of someone reading Konix saying "G&D is full of retards" or me saying "ahahahha ahow can anyone not stupid like this" and then being dissuaded from posting is worth the benefit of them listening.
you should be somewhat intimidated! this is not a site that should allow kind of shitty games to be posted and then celebrated. it's not a matter of rights; no ones saying "don't post your generic bullshit anymore". but conversely, don't expect everyone is going to hold your hand and say "gee i like this game with a few twists...its great..."
like, yo check this out. Fatty just posted a rap in the music forum. I don't know how good it is (haven't read it) but I also know fatty isn't the best at English. so I'll probably give him a harsh criticism when this round is up. and I can't predict the future, but something tells me he'll say THANK YOU. people appreciate genuine criticism. but a game featuing
characters from neopets doesn't just get no criticism, it's not even IGNORED.
here's just another example. I chose a game that isn't OBVIOUSLY BAD:
http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=6026.0looks decent but there's plenty to criticize. like GZ said there's a lot of information all at once. why is there so much? okay, for comparison's sake: I just flipped through FF7's instruction manual. did you know there's
no plot in it? there are some character bios, positively tiny compared to what she's provided in her topic.
in comparison, there's a trailer, a plot overview, and a setting overview, and then individual paragraphs for each character.
Malice Areté-
At birth it was predicted that he would bring great evil into the world, and be the fall of his nation. The priests demanded that he be killed, but his father, the king, overruled them and as a result lost his position.
Malice grew up to be an immature, and irresponsible young man, who –after being looked down upon by his elders- took up a laissez-faire attitude.
Used to running from his problems, or else talking his way out of responsibility, he is the very model of what a proper Theiran Prince should NOT be. A constant headache for his parents and his tutors, he skipped most of his lessons, showing up only when he felt like it.
While he is quite popular among others his age –especially among women- he is only truly friends with his cousins, Vertus and Una.
A lover of Xenid’s Epic, he secretly models himself after his hero, Gabriel of Alveus. But history did not go like the poem, and –with no mentor to steer him in the right direction- Malice has taken in not Gabriel’s true spirit, but Xenid’s own ideals and convictions about glory, love, and war.
Though he pretends not to care, he is driven by a need to prove himself to his elders, and especially his father. Like Gabriel in the epic, he claims not to fear the Immortals (or anyone else for that matter), and believes if he fights in the Gracian War he’ll be able to achieve glory and thus prove everyone at home wrong.
Like all Theirans, his native language is Lithian, but he has been educated in Niwan (the continental language). Still, he has a hard time communicating with those from the continent, especially Nichi, and often he cannot make the points he wants to make.
When the stakes get high, and responsibility finally comes to rest on him, he sees it as a chance for glory, and gladly accepts his perceived task. What he doesn’t realize at the time is that sometimes the quest laid out before you, is not the only one that you’re on. The greatest lesson he will have to learn is that –despite what Xenid may say- there are more important things to fight for than glory.
look at all this! look at how much stuff you told instead of shown us? there are two possibilities: that everything she told us here matters and thus should be in the game or more likely, that none of it matters that much, it's just stuff. none of this is story; it's fluff. it's character that we should be picking up from in game, not from a paragraph before hand.
then there's this. we're told the plot will be good...but how?
As such, the main features of my game are the story, the script, the artwork, and the music. The soundtrack features some original music, and much of the artwork is original (check out my facesets!!). As well (I doubt it matters to most people, but…), since it’s the story of a time and place, as much as it’s a story of people, there is careful attention to cultures in the way of dress, features, architecture, languages, names, traditions, attitudes, and religions.
I HAVE enhanced my game a bit, though, just so it’s not like playing every other rm2k3 game. So don’t worry.
A story with lots of intellectual meat (see: allusions, metaphors, allegory)
A game designed to serve a script (not the other way around
Original facesets
Original battlecharacters (not even from a template!)
Original sprites (for the most part)
An original mapping style
Some original music
do I have to tell you what the problems here are? probably. okay first off if the main features are artwork and music, you shouldn't have "mostly" original sprites and music. that's not much of a selling point. but I digress; that's the technical critique stuff I was just complaining about. more interesting is the idea that the game "serves a script" and has "intellectual meat". I don't know why metaphors are intellectual meat (FF7 for instance features a very direct metaphor of the rich literally over the poor, and it's purely visual) or why you'd use allusions and allegory (Emperor Bobama...we present to you the head of the Bushcreature for thy supper with fried chicken and watermelons) and all this jazz when the selling point should be the summary of the story itself.
something that just flummoxes me is how much attention frivolous details like graphics or mapping or sound gets when the RPG exists primarily to convey a story. no one's saying HEH GET RID OF THEM ALL although I know how many fuckers have read my arguments and said that. but the story is the most important thing to analyze, the one you must be deeply critical of, and yet as a forum creed it goes almost uncritiqued.
this isn't about dulcinea; hers at least admits a story focus. but more and more the attitude is "what small technical problem can i assert while maintaining being a 'good guy'?" and the thing is, criticism, honest criticism, requires you not be a good guy.
it requires you. criticism, real criticism, does not begin with "looks good, but I dont like that map." it points out real flaws, not just color shifts or mapping errors. and yes, it requires essay posts sometimes.
here's a post I did in Vanit's topic. I did not make the post to "win". unbelievable as it may be, I could not give a shit what vanit chooses to waste his time on. but it was distressing that so many people were arguing for some type of creative legitimacy in recreating FF7 as close to the original as possible. where other demakes succeed by changing the gameplay significantly (such as a 2d shadow of the colossus or the example of Megaman 7 for nes which put the series back into the familiar ground of megaman as opposed to the half megaman half x catastrophes that were 7 and 8) this was devoted to similarity. I included an argument that if anything this would have the opposite effect of what someone might want; a remake of a game most everyone can play isn't exactly ATTENTION HERE PLAY THIS.
I didn't want to convince Vanit, but I wanted to let him and everyone else know what I thought, and perhaps more importantly, what I thought was based on ideas they might not have considered.
you NEVER see this go on in G&D. look at this guy in the OP! trembling with fucking fear that someone (he might even mean me but I don't know for sure, he didn't quote me at all) might even slightly criticize his work more than "oh you missed a tile".
if a big post that has opinions you don't agree with frightens someone off, good! I'm not going to throw away catamites because he dares to say innovation is more important than how well you imitate RM games just to preserve a few bmx_skatepunks. it's through disagreement, not some doktormartini shiny happy buttfuck, that a community grows and individual relationships are formed. faux niceness which will get you nowhere (hell, medieve and mateui will have that category locked down for years to come; you could kill mateui's family and he'd sigh and say "the lord will provide!") doesn't help anyone.
you don't have to struggle to find flaws in something if you can't find any, but the problem is that in an attempt to be welcoming, you give off a bad image of someone selling shamwows at the local fair; he doesn't care about your product or problem, he just wants to sell you the shamwow and that smile is a crocodile's smile.
ugh I said a lot of words and I don't think I made a good point. oh well.
Also gw isn't completely dying, leafo is working on stuff ;)
dude I don't even believe you and I KNOW what he's working on, a hollow HEH KEEP THE VIGIL doesn't work anymore.
the boy who cried gw6...
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I Can't Be A Part Of This Anymore