Definitely would’ve been Elagabalus’s favorite game
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It’s a good game for something to do with your hands while you’re baked and want to listen to music
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i just googled tetsuya mizuguchi’s peggle and it exists
peggle effect
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Can a mod split all the criticism.
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I played this in my dorm room in 2008 on my softmodded DS very frequently. It was… really good! I did in fact primarily play it while listening to music baked.
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i’m definitely being judgy here but i looked at the list of interviewees on here and audibly exclaimed “barf”. so normie. so incredibly normie. there are several people with more interesting insights to give on this very forum. also feel similarly about Doug Wilson’s podcast: Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games
i have often found that just because you have some design chops it doesn’t make you immediately insightful on the nature of games. esp in a space that actively marginalizes so many kinds of people who don’t meet a certain threshold of like commercial respectability or whatever. also it tends to be the same handfuls of people getting interviewed and interviewing each other and it’s tiring!! really feels like a circlejerk at times. that stuff has pushed me out of that space so hard.
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ugh god i hate this too if you’re going to work in games you could at least write your expert commentary so that it’s fun and not the most boring thing imaginable
like one of my least favorite things is listening to game designers talk about game design
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ahaha I’m sorry
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What you mean you’re not impressed by the profound insights of notable deep thinker Ashly Burch?
lmao. it is funny how much the same names came up in these things over and over and over again. i felt like every “indiestry” type thing had her or a handful of other people involved in one way or another when i joined the games world and that hasn’t changed. tho tbh she’d probably bother me less than some other people in there because i doubt she positions herself as this expert guru of design in a way that certain other people do.
I think you’d rather read Posts because at least people who Post (here, anyway) are capable of properly explaining the texture of the games they play. When there’s no attempt to speak to an audience, just trying to wrangle the concept in a way accurate to your feelings, you get honest personal appraisal. A critique like that is worth a hundred mainstream ones. It’s the stuff most designers live for, I feel like. Because it’s the one time the industry isn’t trying to push you into financial viability or crowd pleasing.
This isn’t even to mention that most people have zero memory about past games, so drawing the lineage and overlaps (through arbitrary genres or otherwise) is something only the truly passionate care about.
All of this is to say: I feel completely disillusioned by mainstream gaming, sounds like you are too, and I’m guessing that’s a sentiment shared by literally everyone who posts here. And that’s why the Post reigns eternal.
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Just a reference. I think creators and readers never get inspired by commentary. But commentary could cure the writer himself.
I ran a criticism blog from 2018 to 2021 with one of my friends. At that time, we hated the mainstream gaming market and devote to digging up the best hidden jewels. In the beginning, we spit the rage on AAA games, stupid indies and F2P. All my dissatisfaction with the game commentary was satisfied at that time (I even wrote a provocation comment to blame a friendly mobile gamer in this thread, sorry @notbov). We got a group of active readers, and more and more angry gamers started to join us. But after the passion, me and my friends seem to get peace. We only write the good parts of games. Our posts are not angry, sharp, or worried anymore. Readers and new writers are starting to leave the blog, but we dropped our responsibilities (self-feeling), shut down the blog, and are happier about gaming things than in 2018.
My friend recommended Arcaea these days, I think this is a game we’ll never try to open it 4 years ago.
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Discussing and writing about games on here has helped me develop a better sense for what it is I like in games, and I have a much better filter for my time and attention now than I did a decade ago when I joined the forum. The consequence of that is that I have a lot less negative things to say about games because a lot of games I would have played and complained about incessantly don’t make it past my filter anymore.
I care more about negative opinions and criticism if they come from someone who is passionate about the thing they are criticizing more than if it was manufactured by someone playing games they knew they were going to hate. There are a billion thumbnail face YouTubers out there waiting for games with microtransactions to yell about, but I like to think that as someone known around here for being unhealthily obsessed with how the Gran Turismo series reward economy works, my disappointment in GT7’s inability to capture the mechanical identity of the series is a more interesting data point than some surface level “Polyphony Digital is greedy” shit.
I don’t want to be a zeitgeist critic. I want to write things stemming from my own disappointments, and there just aren’t a lot of them because I’ve gotten so good at identifying what I’m going to like and what I won’t.
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Sorry to circle back on this, but I dunno if I am the only person here who has actually had to run a games crit website that was trying to make money but: I had to do that at one point in my life and it was horrible. I was very bad at it. There’s a lot of reasons why it’s hard to do in general but also I was bad at it for a couple reasons I discovered after a lot of work.
- The general gutting of journalism and media has had the side effect of destroying newsrooms. There is so much turnover, and so few media enthusiast websites with a physical office, that it’s much harder to get mentorship and learning resources than it seems it was in the past. Producing content at a high rate in a professional context requires a lot of skills that blogging does not require; being seen as “a journalist” requires you to write in different ways and be aware of different things. If you just hire people who are good at writing an article, they still don’t have the skillset to actually run the site, make choices about hiring and pay, etc. The learning is lost. I sent emails to like ten people who ran sites begging for advice and only two responded. I had to hire a guy to teach me to run a website and I didn’t learn enough fast enough, and it was too expensive to keep paying for people to teach me, so we had to dissolve that relationship.
- The entire business model of web media makes no sense and does not work… but nobody has proven out a new one!! I subscribe to Defector even though I’m not a huge reader of their stuff because I aspirationally hope that subscriptions can return, even though I’m sure that they won’t. Programmatic ads/ad blockers/ad blocker blockers/ etc etc etc are all just an unbelievable nightmare. I am never gonna work in this field again because I am not smart enough to invent a whole new business model, and that’s really what the problem requires. Even though some sites are paying for themselves, it’s still too hard for sites to make it. You need an entire ad sales team and shit if you want to be ad supported. If you don’t, you’re probably a side project. And…
- …Side projects are no replacement for full time work. like everything, you get way better at shit way faster if you do it full time. You can get a more diverse slate of writers if you pay them full time, too. If we could give people the comfort to do this work full time they’d get good at it and teach each other and shit. So few situations like this exist that the total number of skilled mentors with time to teach and budgets to hire newbies is much too low.
- The people who invest in media don’t actually know anything about media, because the people who run websites don’t get rich anymore. The people with the money are all outsiders, and they don’t always trust and respect insiders to manage their own teams. Some investors would rather hire a producer from the tech industry (because they see their sites as tech investments!) than trust an EIC with experience. As recently as four years ago, investors still hadn’t learned that “pivot to video” was an actual scam perpetuated by facebook. I was still fending off “pivot to video” initiatives years after the actual content of the scam, the actual math about how it was executed, etc, was available in the freakin Columbia Journalism Review. The people who invest in stuff like this have no idea what’s being studied and learned by journalists and they do not care. Totally uninterested in the subject matter expertise of the experts they rule.
I don’t see a future for journalism, period, in any domain, until it becomes much more easy to start a financially solvent media outlet with a full time staff including accounting/ad sales/editorial/content production. That’s what you really need to function and learn and grow and we just don’t have it.
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I also subscribe to defector
damn. yeah. I have tried to bridge the gap between what I do in my fulltime job and side projects where I do actual game design, and it’s uncrossable.
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I have built my entire career on side project work and it’s pretty brutal. I used to pull eight hour days on weekends working on side contract work and it broke me. Loads of friends I’ve lost contact with because I spent so many years with no social life at all.
I don’t miss working in an office, but I think working with a group of people you learn from all day long is very easy to get in person, and very possible to get with remote work. Side projects just don’t seem to offer that to most people.
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yeah one reason why my side project game has been 6.5 years in development is because I hang out with my friends regularly. its…a tradeoff I guess
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if shufflepuck cafe had dating elements it would be the most successful itch.io game of 1988
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Hey @Rudie you were correct, Carrion is pretty damn good. A joy to move around in. The way it handles your powerups/found abilities is smart.
I think when trailers for this originally came out years ago I dismissed this game as just being a gore-fest/reverse horror but that’s selling it short.
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