yeah but to call that a dark era you’re overlooking the rise of modern tabletop games and modern indie games which were the necessary antidote to early-aughts game design trends and are great! it was certainly a downturn for japanese and mid-high budget console games though.
ps3 era also has to be the most hideous looking era. fuzzy upscaled resolutions, sub 30fps, ugly menus, slow ass overlay interfaces and psn stores, ads beginning to be plastered everywhere. I’m sure somebody will be nostalgic for it someday though
4 Likes
I don’t think modern tabletop games have much to do with modern video games. There’s basically very little overlap in the design spaces (the most I can think of is that the nu X-Com guy was the designer of Twilight Struggle)
They’re more like a wholesale replacement for modern multiplayer games (come to think of it, world of warcraft came out at the end of 2004 but I really consider it to be a major factor in the following era of video game design, in that it was garbage)
just the director of enemy within, not enemy unknown, afaik
firaxis definitely has board game guys working for them nowadays, but I think it’s a very recent phenomenon in the indie scene, there wasn’t the same crossover in the ~2007-2011 era you indicated, but there was a new type of non-vidcon game on the ascent which I think is useful for context
maybe not coincidental that europe is producing better stuff in the modern indie scene than they have since 80s and early 90s computer games
I do agree that the first half of the PS3/360 era was particularly hideous, especially during the consumer HDTV transition
Ananda Gupta co-designed Enemy Unknown but was the sole designer on Enemy Within, so I guess his sensibilities were most clear in the expansion pack?
designer board games have also been around for a good while before the 2007-11 era and it seems odd to associate them with those years because in some ways it was a step back from the earlier euro game designs (just for a pure euro take, Alea’s big box series definitely declined after 2002 and has only recently started picking back up in quality, though weirdly, the peak of the medium box series was 2008-2010)
Not to mention that the main innovations of indie RPGs happened around 2001-2005 (with the notable exception being the OSR, a trend of questionable value in the last 6 years). I guess I’m not willing to grant that analog games have any strong association with the post 2005 era of videogames. Sure, an overall history of games would probably necessitate discussion of those trends in analog game space but I don’t think it is fair at all to say that 2007-2011 was a good era for games just because designer board games were suddenly popular and Apocalypse World came out.
chocobo hot and cold isn’t so bad
2 Likes
This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
2 Likes
Chocobo Hot and Cold is not a complete failure in isolation (although it does seem pretty cruel that they locked a bunch of nice items etc. behind such a tedious minigame); in contrast to Triple Triad and Tetra Master, though, CH&C is such an uninspired distraction that it feels unable to entice all but masochistic completionists to do more than dabble with it.
So I was playing The Old Blood and somehow got myself stuck in a checkpoint loop where I would start the beginning of a turret sequence on a boat (I mean, you already know how that works) with only 20 health. So I said oh okay I guess I’ll restart the level and suck it up but I guess it turned out even though I’d been playing for a while I was basically still in the same level. So I got sent alllllll the way back and lost like an hour of progress and that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
So I started looking at plot synopses and frankly it sounds like it’s all downhill after the prison break in the beginning of the game anyway so I might just shelf this game.
To be fair, lightning-dodging only counts as a mini-game if you’re already a masochist.
Remember that red and blue butterfly one-off mini-game? It’s in the nice-musicked forest with the spindly branches (still a corridor, goddammit). If you run into a red one (good luck getting a read on the hitboxes of the butterflies), you have to fight a random battle with extra powerful enemies from which you cannot flee.
Yeah, fuck FFX.
Good Jesus, rereading this I am embarrassed by my repetitive sentence structures
1 Like
I remember dedicating hours to playing Blitzball, and not even for the purpose of a prize. I just wanted to play it.
1 Like
No one is playing Aubergine so I have to rep her
Now I have an addiction to a leaderboard that disappears everyday
I swear, I’ll start playing another game eventually
I’ll say this: it was actually pretty clever how they paced the game around your anticipation to experience Blitzball from the very beginning, to the fake-out where you are shown the tutorial right before Yuna is kidnapped, to the optional second tutorial which is still 20+ minutes away from actually playing the game.
Then you get into it and it’s really pathetic and boring and tedious.
But hey, it plays that really triumphant version of Tidus’ theme! That’s kind of nice, I guess. I was really relieved when Wakka came back in the second half to finish up the game, because my hope is that I’ll never have to play that shitty mini-game again!
not unless you want to get wakka’s ultimate weapon for no reason
hope you didn’t miss jecht shot 2
I’ll never get that time back, but I was 14, so it doesn’t really matter
1 Like
I had a lot of fun with blitzball
chocobo hot & cold is some bs and the fact that a good percentage of skills are only available from playing it is the main thing keeping me from revisiting FFIX
although digging for treasure on the world map was a neat idea
Wow where
I played ffix for the first time in at least a decade a couple years ago with liberal fast forward usage and it was pretty brisk. the only character who really loses out from not doing the chocobo stuff is Steiner (plus you can’t fight ozma), but you can make a respectable endgame party out of amarant + vivi + eiko at low levels anyway.
I don’t remember where I read it originally but here’s one article: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/17/entertainment/ca-bradbird17/2
[quote]
When tackling “Ratatouille,” one of Bird’s first insights was to embrace the “ick factor” inherent in the story of a rat infiltrating a four-star kitchen. The previous “Ratatouille” team had tried to finesse this by making the rats more human, but Bird wanted them to embrace Remy’s outer – and inner – rodent.
“You can buy the fantasy of a rat wanting to cook if there are moments when he feels like a real rat,” Bird explains. “We studied a lot of footage of real rats. We saw that they lead with their noses because their eyesight isn’t the greatest. We showed that particularly on Remy. We thought it was good for someone primarily concerned with the senses to be led by his nose.”
Before Bird’s arrival, all the rats had walked on two feet like humans, but Bird decided to “re-rig them to be on all fours.” Indeed in the film, when Remy’s brother asks him why he’s suddenly walking upright, the rat-artist explains that a chef needs to keep his hands clean. Remy’s posture becomes a barometer of the character’s inner life.
"If he feels exuberant, he tends to be more upright, and his hands pulled back " says Bird, “Later on, when he feels shame in front of his father, and [his dreams] have all turned into disaster, he folds back in again. It’s not just a mannerism. It’s a thing that helps tell the story.”[/quote]
This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.