That’s funny because mistaking Spagonia for Generations is why I installed this mod
I don’t really like the sections where it slows down in Generations tbh
Me IMing Sonic
bama_boi: how come I never see u drift
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fully agree with this sentiment with the exception of generations, it proves the rule imo
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hmmm I quite dislike this sable demo so far
it definitely seems like the equivalent of an MFA design trend for videogames – as an aesthetic object it’s moderately novel and pleasant, but it starts out immediately feeling like a hollow hybrid of thatgamecompany x mobius aesthetics, the michelle zauner soundtrack is probably even more zeitgeisty than they wanted it to be, the first dialog tree gives you a bunch of opportunities to earnestly express self-doubt like some real focus tested millennial bullshit,
probably the worst version of itself I could’ve imagined from prerelease media, it’s like a pantomime of a sliver of a fixed view of the sublime. I mention this having mostly played EA sports games, driving sims, and mario XCom for the preceding two weeks, so I’m obviously well off my peak of being willing to consider something that takes itself this seriously, but even compared to outer wilds’ disarmingly twee intro, it’s a bit crap.
even the shader style is more reminiscent of manifold garden than I expected and the geometry is obviously less interesting. the menu design feels extremely perfunctory, like the indie version of an open world game’s map/loadout/settings tabs. I do not like it
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oh no!
and I’m about to turn it on and this shifted the analysis I need to write from curiosity to homework
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you mean it’s just like GRIS meets Journey??? shocker!!! no one could have ever predicted that hyping up selling an indie game based on aesthetics alone where it is very unclear what the rest of the experience is even like would lead to an underwhelming experience! no one could have seen this coming!
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I think there’s a real problem right now where a lot of games turn out as like, the MVP version of themselves, because everything is pitched on such narrow concepts
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I played it too and had a similar reaction, though my immediate feeling was ‘this feels like the breath of the wild player controller but tangibly worse’. I also noticed that the changing fonts and general UX flow made Meg Jayanth’s writing feel annoying to read in a way that her work at Inkle didn’t due to their ux and typesetting expertise. There were a couple of interesting aesthetic moments but even though this game isn’t procedural it had that ‘cultivated desolation’ feeling in spades.
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yeah like Trackmania 2020 is the platonic opposite of this kind of game in every way. it should be terrible but instead it’s fountain of bizarre seemingly accidental greatness.
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I started playing Going Under yesterday and in contrast to the Sable demo I found that the aesthetic gimmicks are treated as secondary and are really charming and add to the idea they are going for. The roguelike dungeon stuff struggles to work nearly as well as the big hitter contemporaries like Hades, but GU immediately won me over by naming their fictional Seattle after the cryptofascist ‘Cascadia movement’, really tells me its on the level and all the jokes follow that up perfectly. I want to like this game more than I do at this moment.
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speaking of “MFA design trend”, watching the NYU Games Center MFA/BFA showcase on youtube is pretty funny 2 see how, intentionally or unintentionally, almost every game concept is pretty clearly 100% derived from “I Live in New York!”
hmmm…this is a narrative-choice game about making coffee in a small cafe, while this one is about having a conversation while riding the L Train, here we have a no-combat metroidvania about being in a large cramped urban city with a lot of verticality, and this is sort of cooking game about being in a bodega.
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I like how the art is somewhat reflective of the corporate Facebook/Grubhub/Google blob people, perhaps intentionally given the subject matter, but even unconsciously it’s great
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Being a shader tinkerer and also having done some of that terrible corporate art professionally, not only is it definitely intentional but there are dozens of tiny details that are really funny and clever to see if you’ve had to work in that hell world.
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i should have thoughts or response to this as someone who teaches at NYU (well as an adjunct… not super involved with the direction of the program) but i guess i don’t really. NYC is a place that’s not super supportive of game development in general due to costs obvs and a lot of the kids who go there are a total fish out of water (international students, etc) so living in NYC might be a really overstimulating thing for them. i more just notice a tendency towards the flat shaded colorful/“wholesome” sort of aesthetic which is trendy now.
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Yeah I mean I really do just think it’s funny. I feel like I wanna give students the benefit of the doubt (even those who can afford NYU) and insofar as students r gonna be new to a medium & academia can be sort of mentally-constraining, it makes sense that (consciously or not) ur initial impulse is gonna be to find ways to replicate your environment. And @ the least it’s interesting to clearly be trying 2 get at some element of personal experience, altho obviously you’d hope that, at some point, the impulse would expand beyond this very very narrow slice of human expression.
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this game is about having a conversation while riding the G train
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We can only dream of a AAA Bethesda open world game where you do nothing in particular in NYC. (Which I would unironically enjoy immensely).
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i think there are students who do that… but when you’re like 18 and are moving away from home for the first time… or even when you’re a little older and taking a chance to go to grad school it’s like hard to know exactly what your creative perspective is for a lot of kids. and also ofc there is an elitism to aspects of NYC (and LA) that are unavoidable. not to mention games being secondary to a lot of the media ecosystem in NYC which is heavily NYC-centric. i don’t think that problem is nearly as bad in games as it is in most other forms of media though.
i do think there’s better ways to teach kids out of this stuff but like the market is a difficult place for grads of these programs if they want to get into further work. a lot of them either want to get into other fields that do really value that sort of autobiographical aesthetic/storytelling a lot, or the ones who do want to get into game dev are looking at the sort of alternative indie/“wholesome” ecosystem because it feels like the one place where they can possibly sell that stuff they wanna do to.
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I 1cc’d GG Aleste 2 today.
Score: 1900820
GG Aleste 2.
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Ruiner off to a bad start
Just doesn’t feel fun
Messed around in the hub, did some side tings, was clicking around in an alley when it loaded me into some kind of arena. Upon walking through a door, I was brought back to the title screen. Upon loading, it seems that I’ll have to do the side quests again?
Why are there games that just don’t let me save, don’t make me guess when the last checkpoint was, or if a save even occured
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