Galaxy Brain level take but I think Wii U was my favorite console that gen. Bayo 2, XCX, MK8, DKC:TF and BotW made it worth the price of admission for me.
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I bought this game a while back after hearing the same thing. Haven’t got around to playing it yet. Maybe that would be a good game for a SB meetup, since I think you can have three players, each assigned different jobs.
Pikmin 3 was one of the games that sold me. I found it fun and graphically impressive even if it didn’t vary that much mechanically from the rest of the series. (Though my WiiU was free so I guess I didn’t think of it in terms of value.)
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i liked game & wario 
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Gamer was ok but I really couldn’t get on with the rest of it.
I should say I recommend Affordable Space Adventures! Made good use of the gamepad and has an inventive, plucky quality to it that many indies now lack.
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I agree with this, and to build on it: I’m actually increasingly skeptical of the idea that a game employing one narrative conceit means that it’s pointless for it to ever be implemented again.
A big thing I’ve noticed about games that do narrative conceits is that those conceits are more important than the narrative. Same with gameplay elements. I’m increasingly convinced that the actual path forward for games is less complete novelty, and more utilizing the ideas that we’ve developed to actually create the kind of layered narratives other mediums use.
Like instead of thinking about a fourth wall break as ‘a thing that’s been used up’, instead think of it more like chekov’s gun: Nobody using a chekov’s gun in anything would be accused of being derivative. It’s a narrative convention that can be used in a lot of different ways as a deeper part of the story.
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Tchia (PS5) - flawed, but the highs make up for the lows relatively convincingly.
pros: great traversal, well-designed world, exploration is rewarding, swimming mechanics are excellent, the ukulele is extremely fun and powerful (major/minor/augmented/diminished chords! accidentals! up/down strums!)
cons: diving board challenges suck ass and combat gets extremely tedious later on, ultimately it’s a big ol’ collectathon lawnmower-sim thing
i’ve come around on the music, i mainly just dislike the main theme and one of the prominent traversal themes. however, the underwater theme is lovely and there are some other nice tunes in the game as well.
Zombi (PS4) - finished this on standard, working on a deathless survivor run for the platinum trophy now. hard to summarize this game. the conceit is excellent, and it has tons of great ideas and fantastic atmosphere. however, it’s excessively buggy. there are items you can’t pick up, flickering textures, animations that cut off or play out at warp speed, UI issues, game-breaking progression bugs… just all kinds of nonsense. still, i absolutely love the core gameplay, it’s vaguely in a PSX resident evil vein of resource management and survival horror. the scanning and methodical gameplay is just so satisfying. this game really needs a sequel/remaster. it has incredible potential, especially if they flesh out the asymmetrical multiplayer aspects that were present in the WiiU version (before the servers went down, you could find your zombified friends wandering around your game)
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Zombi was one of the few games that really got the potential of having a second screen, having to physically look down/away from your main PoV and not having the game stop meant that inventory management was just a deliberate choice a any other action
well, we won’t see anything like that again until VR is mainstream
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I think more narrowly, sometimes a piece of media gets something so right that nobody needs to do that exact same thing again.
So in this case, The Stanley Parable is the perfect deconstruction of narrative tropes at the time, specifically around how player choice or authorial intent make for “good stories” all on their own. I don’t think anyone needs to do this exact kind of parody/analysis again. In a way, I think it made the dichotomy of “player choice matters/doesn’t matter” seem so ridiculous that the idea itself basically died.
Like, I think what I’m saying is that even though it doesn’t really have too many obvious descendants, The Stanley Parable was so influential amongst a certain crowd that it practically killed an entire genre. between this and Gone Home it seems like much of that space has been mined and nobody needs to go back there.
This is still sort of a half formed opinion though and frankly I was disconnected enough from games at this point in time that I don’t really have a lot of knowledge RE: the atmosphere.
Still pondering this game though, it seems like one of the few times in any media where the piece of media sort of disdains the person partaking in it but also invites that person to an almost obsessive level of deconstruction. It’s a real tightrope walk and really wonderfully done.
EDIT: ALSO I absolutely love that the narrator’s personality shifts drastically depending on what ending you move towards. It’s such a great nod to the frailty of creators and their creations, to the self-consciousness and weirdness that being an artist carries with it. The confusion ending is wonderful too, as the narrator himself gets caught up in how dumb the story is, how frustrating it is to be railroaded into a foregone conclusion, lack of control etc.
It’s really cool that this goofy parody kinda thing holds up really well nearly ten years later.
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speaking of games played well outside their heyday due to finding the key in Humble Bundle years later, I played Her Story last night.
It’s pretty cool huh?
Like, it’s obvious that the point is the ambiguity but my brain can’t help but try to come up with increasingly absurd scenarios to explain all the discrepancies. It’s nice that no theory fits perfectly - I love fiction living in the uncertain and vague.
Still, Immortality is obviously a step up design-wise, production-wise, and narrative-wise. Like, Her Story is a neat detective story but it’s pretty standard in terms of actual conclusions: a murder, an alibi, a twist that calls into question all previous conclusions, a confession, then one final twist to throw it all back into question. It’s not new, and honestly it’s not even the best version of that story.
But I really did like it a lot! Glad I finally caught up on this one. I’m perfectly happy with a tropey story told in an interesting way. It doesn’t do a great job gesturing at any larger themes, but it certainly tries! It’s good.
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they also both came out right after binfinite in 2013. stanley parable might seem conceited now but nothing seems conceited on the heels of binfinite
taken together it was really the coup de grace for twisty moffat-esque shock games. (prey (2017) is a curiosity here but more exception that proves the rule, i think)
if anything i wish gone home had been the more influential of the two
i hope we hear about fullbright’s next game again soon. i’d forgotten it entirely. doing on-the-nose scifi in tacoma after a crystalline period work was unfortunate but i’ll play every one of these
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i’ve never played the beginner’s guide and i’m unlikely to do so now, but i think about that game a lot, stanley parable too. i think they are important games, i guess, though that’s about as far as i feel the need to go
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oh god i forgot binfinite, have never played and will never play.
btw i don’t necessarily think it’s conceited, i think it’s a sniper shot from a mile away. i think it means to kill the genre and is 100% successful at it. it rules.
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oh, agreed, 100%
perfect coda to the two
ow ow ow ow ow
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Beginner’s Guide I might say gets a little too in awe of itself but has some incredibly neat segments that I don’t think have been matched in terms of what they say about creating games through a game. The Stanley Parable I can always enjoy every so often though I’ve played it to absolute death. Even the inert deadness of the setting just ages super well given what its goals are.
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the way i ended my playthrough was to use a console command that bound opening any door to 5 and closing any door to 6, and walked through the game opening and closing doors i was not supposed to. it felt like the perfect way to finish a game that was mainly about doors and hallways
i suppose i should play the newer version as well now
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is the v/o still incredibly abrasive to the bri’ish ear? i imagine it is but i’m curious because that’s the tonality to the thing, everything else is awash in cubicles
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In The Stanley Parable? It’s so pompous that it doesn’t register as grating to me. He’s meant to be kinda hammy and a bit of an acTOR is my reading. He has a nice bassy quality that I like and it works well despite how different some of the endings are tonally. Brighting has range.
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I played thru a friends copy of Call of Duty: Cold War and the end of that campaign has an extended Stanley Parable bit. I feel like that games influence is still seen just maybe not in the games ppl here are playing as much
My perception of the original Stanley Parable mod is pretty connected to it feeling like part of that era of like, small self-referential flash games; You Have to Burn The Rope, Achievement Unlocked, etc. a lot of which seemed to be kind of clearly riffing off of Portal. Circular process of an indie team remaking their own stuff with higher production value in the source engine and it’s influence simultaneously solidifying and losing something in the process.
Also, to ramble a bit, I appreciate that every four years when I try a Call of Duty campaign it’s like I’m playing a series of high production flash games. I wish they weren’t politically incoherent and evil (and overpriced). But u know, I played thru Condemned: Criminal Origins somewhat recently and after getting a bit tired of bashing the unhoused with fists and pipes in the sewers, I tried The Legend of Tianding via gamepass, and by I think literally the second mission in 1909 Taiwan i was directed to go into the sewers and beat the unhoused with fists and pipes. Little bit of an evil medium.
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When I played Stanley Parable it just made me roll my eyes a lot
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Played Warframe and made a few tweaks to my Gyre.
She’s basically the oncoming storm at this point. I fry most rooms simply by walking into them, rarely do I need to cast and rarer still is a need to fire a weapon.
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