Games You Played Today ##RELOAD

King of Posters
#4612

i dunno man, NitW seems genuine to me. It’s definitely part & parcel of a particular “hip” youth aesthetic that’s popular right now, but mayhaps you’re confusing a project infused with appreciation for that aesthetic for some kind of cynicism?
i recall you knocking Undertale for similar reasons. i hope saying that doesn’t make it seem like i’m digging up stuff to dunk on you, but maybe you just aren’t super into this particular flavor of zeitgeist?

i super am. i def see myself as a disaffected, distraught, confused 20-something and those kinds of projects resonate with me a lot. What i like about Undertale and NitW is that they are celebratory, but also self-conscious, re: people in my space. i think characters like Mae are supposed to be likable, and sympathetic, but misguided. The kind of ennui they express is a real thing, and worthy of sincere appreciation, but equally deserving of criticism, because these are ultimately Young Folk’s Problems that need to be worked through, and not stewed in.

i’ve related Night in the Woods’ aesthetic to that of Cate Wurtz, admittedly, partly in a tongue-in-cheek way because they are both about hipsterspeak cartoon animals in dingy, dead-end towns. But there’s a sincerity there that i think they truly share, and that rings true to me, a scuzzy queer 20-something furry.

3 Likes
#4613

good lord, how have i never noticed Tifa’s goofy clown shoes before now.

#4614

sleepy do you follow some-triangles on tumblr/follow the Talk Simulator 2 youtube podcast thing? because the former takes part in the latter and boy does he love crow cillers. you’re both the people that come to mind when I’m reminded of it. There’s definitely at least one TS2 episode where the guy just talks about the beauty of crow cillers.

#4615

I also think NITW is full of people with material problems even if Mae is oblivious to them.

#4616

Man I played more Nioh and the maps and getting winder and winder…

#4617

i dont, but i sure will now!!

1 Like
#4618

I happen to agree somewhat with @jodeaux in regards to the over-saturation of indie development that either spends too much time in fusing existing mechanics from separate games that have a prestigious following, or spend too much time attempting “quirky” and/or retrograde aesthetics as a means for artistic expression.

Either/Or misses the magic of what made great games great in the first place.

As I said earlier, I just played Super Metroid for the billionth time and I am still awed by its brilliance in design. I would consider it the Vertigo of video games. It’s not really doing anything new, either, but happens to have a clear vision of what it wanted to express to the player.

I find a lot of indie games prove one way or another that there is a vast potential and world of ideas that are yet to be realized in the realm of interactivity, but falls short by being distracted by the aforementioned qualities (mechanics/aesthetics).

I think at the very least, @jodeaux brings to light something that might prove how the descriptor “indie” might become tainted in the same vein as what the post-modern hipster is to what the original hipster was back in the 40’s.

I think that’s worth discussing.

#4619

literally cannot think of anything more obnoxious or less interesting to talk about than hipsterism

As if this conversation hasn’t happened a hojillion times already in every conceivable context

" I can’t relate to this piece of art at this time therefore I must assume the person who made it is a big dumb stinky attention-seeking liar oh and lazy too "

3 Likes
#4620

most artists are merely stinky

1 Like
#4621

If you want your life to be happy and free,

avoid the bathrooms at an art college

#4622

the bathrooms at my art school either smell like hamburger helper with no hamburger or dr. bronner’s

i’ve been playing berserk musou and i’m very satisfied. i wish there was a regular-ass endless band of the hawk mode where i killed medieval dudes instead of monsters in scary eclipse world. also why isn’t any susumu hirasawa music in the game? i think the choir from forces is part of the main menu sfx but thts it.

1 Like
#4623

It’s not a musou unless soul-draining buttrock envelopes everything

I also don’t care for “disaffected hipster” stuff but who cares. It’s nothing that could make its way onto any list of Things that are Destroying the World. There are a trillion other targets in videogame trends that are worth a person’s ire

1 Like
#4624

Yeah i dont think i can get on board with stylized dialogue-heavy indie adventures being indicative of some broader problem with [independant] games.

i also think disaffected hipster is a little reductive w/r/t to Night in the Woods but to be fair i did use both of those words in my post about it.

idk, didn’t we decide years ago that “hipster” was basically shorthand for “stuff some young people like that makes other young people feel old and cranky”

#4625

The word has definitely lost potency through over-application.

#4626

So I ended up going back at it on hard and then expert, unlocking every racer and even the last two races before petering out at about 212 stars. I think that’ll do, I don’t have the heart to press on with especially hard traffic or tank battles.

I started up The Fall and had to restart a couple of times due to the game always crashing at a certain point (error has been in there ages, devs never bothered to fix it but at least their quick fix suggestion still works). It is an interesting little thing but I have the same worries I do with any adventure-type game that decides to include iffy gunplay.

#4627

the worst thing you can say about people aping super metroid is ‘man this isn’t as good as super metroid which the creator clearly loves’

that’s… okay tho

it is the nature of great art to inspire a bunch of not-as-great art and that’s how creators learn their craft

my high school lit teacher used to advocate writing out famous passages to get the feel of the words. he’s a published (nyt best-selling?) author and poet now so maybe he was on to something

1 Like
#4628

I knew you would. The game is just that good. I stopped around 212 too.

#4629

Well that escalated quickly…

I wouldn’t either, for I was using it as a comparative analogy and keeping consistency (as @sleepysmiles used the term) with a streaming dialogue about the indie scene’s creative integrity. I mean, use whatever analogy you like if it helps you sleep at night.

It has? I’m new here, so I wasn’t aware that it has been discussed in every conceivable context.

You’re being facetious, right? You know no one thinks like that, yea? It’s just a personified caricature of your frustrations with others not being confluent with your worldview, true?

Aping is not the problem regarding the indie scene as a whole. It’s not about being as good as Super Metroid either. Why try to match it? It’s something more deeper than that, a lack of vision and having a powerful message. Or as @jodeaux put it, soulless.

I used Super because I recently played it and it was fresh in my mind. I could have used an indie game as an example too, for I’m not against those games or the community itself, it was just that Super came to mind. That’s it, that’s all.

#4630

It has a distinctly pre-Trumpian connotation now imo

#4631

[quote=“Silverboy, post:4629, topic:68, full:true”]Aping is not the problem regarding the indie scene as a whole. It’s not about being as good as Super Metroid either. Why try to match it? It’s something more deeper than that, a lack of vision and having a powerful message. Or as @jodeaux put it, soulless.
[/quote]

sure but this goes back to this

all art and all artists (except the truly exception, cf. prince) start out derivative of their forebears and grow into themselves by practice, refinement, and in some sense life experience.
b) there’s a lot of ‘soulless’* art out there but those creators generally still wouldn’t have anything interesting to say if their art took any other form than the one it did. sturgeon’s law applies here: 90% of everything is crap, and to me it’s a bit trite to complain about it.

*(if you want to use soulless as a definitive, i personally try and avoid it bc the term assumes the speaker has a sort of objective viewpoint that isn’t actually possible.)

anyways this is a long-winded way of saying i’m not super fussed that bad indie games exist, there’s more than enough good ones to justify it. not having a go at you! just thinking out loud

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