Are we still talking about kids in school choosing to make portfolio pieces or art games? Most people where I’m from spend time and money on school to get a job, and most game jobs here depend on portfolios.
Are you saying that many people you know 1) make and sell art games full time 2) are not wealthy 3) are not employable in other ways? Like, that shit is wild to me.
Most of the non AAA gamedevs I’ve met are engineers or some other tech job working in their free time or people living with their parents or family. Are the people you know that do art games full time mostly working online? Are they former gamedev students that can’t seem to focus on any other job? I guess I’m just so far removed from this I kinda am just looking for context.
Mouthwashing - wasn’t sure what I was getting into, and I didn’t hate it but the parts people are praising about it really did not thrill me. The writing is pretty overly verbose and I can really only describe as “this is a good story for a game”, not a thought I like to have. The plot is kinda like that movie David Bowie’s son made called ‘Moon’. I think it relies on a feeling of player complicity that I was onboard with until the primary player character is revealed to have raped another main character, driving the central plot . While this is not a bad story beat it feels like it runs counter to the kind of creepy “doing this with my own hands” feeling the game is going for by separating me completely from his perspective and de-mystifying the remainder of the game. Combine that with some extremely boring monster chasing in the second half and I am left with something I think ends up being pretty bloodless, but it is pretty and sounds good.
whats that joke in marx or someone about how the little bit of extra money a business would lose from a wage hike miraculously always turns out to be EXACTLY the difference between their economic survival and having to close up. its like that in videogames but for the concept of having any kind of taste.
anyway i gotta get back to hitting the button that drops hardworking aspirational young people in an acid tank. they call me igf judge jury and executioner >8) thanks for the discussion everyone youll find a copy of george batailles the accursed share in the goodybag beneath your seat
Like many games, it makes more sense as fodder for couch co-op, in this case alleviating some of the fatigue of playing solo.
A strategy for getting past the challenge of the controls that I can vouch for is to work as a contract programmer on the game for a year during its development. The controls get really easy if you do that.
really not a fan of metaphor: refantazio’s english version… learning “monk → kung fu master” class tree was localized as “brawler → pugilist” immediately made me suspect that I don’t share the translators’ sensibilities. just like in unicorn overlord, the JP voices are basically unusable with how aggressive the script changes are. and while some decisions are neat and considered and so on I think the form is ultimately overwrought for what is essentially still a very straightforward story for teenagers at its core, constantly forcing me to focus on lines that are not stylistically impressive enough to convey something new and worthwhile but elaborate enough that I can’t just spam X very fast. when I see a haughty army captain with a simple face going “an aristocrat? here?” taken by surprise, but the subs go “a blueblood, are you… understand the army’s no place for velvet-swaddled lordlings”, I have Thoughts. and all those speech bubble manga style onomatopeias that were changed to stuff like “CHAT CHAT CHAT”, “HEY… HEY… HEY…”, “MUR MUR, MUR MUR”… feels like a first messy iteration of the chatter visual that someone should have revised the moment they saw how it looks in-game.
idk, I bought granblue fantasy relink on sale and while that is localized just as aggressively it doesn’t annoy me half as much, it feels like someone has actually looked at how the English text functions in the context of software. same with recent yakuza/LaD titles, and judgment actually offered me a separate subtitle track when I picked japanese voices. checked out the social media and predictably every discussion about this translation is terminally boring entirely vibe-driven uncurious culture war nonsense where no two people really ever talk about the same thing, ah well.
Honestly I read this as them trying to avoid typical class names which I think can contribute to something feeling more conventional than what they want.
Then again they got Mage and Thief in there so idk.
I feel like every subsequent installment of the Dirt series gets farther away from what I want them to be. Which is basically just “Rally racing light-sim with fairly forgiving controls but not straight up arcade”.
Lately these games are like, a compendium of every racing discipline vaguely related to rally and it all feels a bit bloated. I also think I could stand for the presentation to be a little more dry. I’ve got to find another rally series to dip into.
I totally agree and FF16 and Eiyuden Chronicles were two other recent examples of the English script having wayyyyyyy too much mustard. English translators seem to still be in Marvel mode where every line needs to be a bit or a “joke” or characters busting each others balls, even when games like M:R seem to be more earnest in their emotions. It does lead to a bit of cognitive dissonance when playing these games.
Also I wonder if having to write for the dub, instead of just translating the script, is why so many games (and anime, come to think of it) come with such heavily overwritten English scripts these days. I think putting in a more straightforward a->b translation seems very difficult to deliver and not sound weird when dubbing, but I also don’t think the solution is to make every game have several characters talk in a cockney accent.
this is why Dirt Rally exists. EA Sports WRC is also technically the latest dirt game and while I haven’t played much of it it only had rally and rally cross while trying to mimic the presentation of an actual WRC broadcast. the original games really peaked with 2 though I hated all the dumb crashing into foam shit in 3 even though I have a soft spot for 3.
I think this specific instance is related less to localization preferences and more to corporate DEI-style terror of cultural appropriation. D&D recently had a big revision and their monk class got a change from having “ki points” to the more generic and more annoying to write & say “focus points”, presumably for the same reason.
