Games You Played Today VIII: Journey of the Cursed Poster

[Tegiminis]

“Better” is a fool’s errand, as is thinking that things “progress” aside from perhaps a medium’s general maturity (read: literal/metaphorical tools available to the people who make things). I’ve played many FPS games and very few of them are as good as Doom or Quake; same for RTS games and Command and Conquer; same for “search action” games and Symphony of the Night or Metroid. Outside of games, I find that there is lots to love about movies, books, and music older than I am.

There is no specific objective quality ideal in art to strive for. Except perhaps sales numbers, which as anyone on this forum can tell you mean nothing to a game’s ephemeral “quality”. Design, sound, visual fidelity are all deeply subjective and dependent on the person experiencing them. Art is not a straight line rising forever upward, it is an endless ocean of human desire, impossible to map in its entirety.

[iguferon]

The installer for oblivion lost remake 2.5 is a great game in itself

[AutomaticTiger]

The idea of progress as absolute thing is absurd in every arena, including video games.

Who gets to decide what counts as an advance? Did the Aztecs have more advanced art than Japan in the 1500s? Than Iran? Who’s measure are these wildly varied styles compared to? Europe’s?

Is A Fistfull of Dollars a worse movie than Iron Man because there isn’t any CGI? Is The Secret of Nimh a worse movie than Cars because it was animated on Cels?

What if the companies that have money to
Make games don’t want a deep story? What if you tell a story using visual novel tech less advanced than VNs on the PSX? But still had a bigger emotional impact on me than Uncharted 3?

Which medium is better for art: Movies or Theater?

Does Crusade of Centy making me feel like I did an atrocity at the end stop making me feel that way because Control has RayTracing?

Was the totality of human experience and expression before our present moment futile because we have moved so far beyond it? Only the technology we have truly what defines art, and not the intention and craft it was made with?

These are all questions implied by your argument here. It just plain doesn’t make sense if you approach art as expression instead of as a tech demo.

[LaurelSoup]

As someone who would be hard pressed to pick a top five game newer than the early 90s, there’s flat out things that might be someone’s main draw to games that come from technological leaps or the constant dialogue between projects that progresses design.

I know folks whose primary interest is exploring large 3D sandboxes and something like Hunter is too primitive to scratch that itch.

On a non technological standpoint, something like Monster Hunter World’s wheels within wheels of upgrade systems is born out of (outright sinister) stuff like FarmVille and absolutely would have been something that could have been tacked onto an old game but the concepts had to get hammered out and refined into the awful junk food approach people, like me, crave.

Why aren’t all the Doom folks going as hard for Wolfenstein 3D or Xybots or Berzerk?

[LaurelSoup]

Sure you could have edited your 1920s silent film like a Michael Mann movie but there’s a bunch of technical, financial, and social reasons that wasn’t happening. None of that makes silent movies definitively bad or inferior, but those newer developments are the hooks that appeal newer works to a lot of people.

[MintyJuffowup]

You should watch the Grey Automobile if you want to see something kind of close to a silent era Michael Mann.

[anothergod]

I mean yeah but also lol. It’s really hard to take this seriously when you’re talking about two games whose legacy is about advancing video games. To push it further are you saying it’s absurd to say there is progress between Adventure and Demons Souls? Is it comprehensible when you hear someone say that we’ve advanced past Wolfenstein?

I think the strongest argument for subjectivity isn’t that things are incomparable in terms of progress, but that there are so many measurements of progress that it’s impossible to qualify one multitude wholely as better or worse than another. So, yeah, if you value X thing in Wolfenstein then many newer FPSes won’t compare. But on the other hand, almost everyone making a video game values older games and wants to make a new one with a new feature that is, we hope, better than previous games in at least one measure.

[shelter]

there’s a difference between saying that any vital modern art has to contend with the current state and history of the medium and do something new and saying that things have gotten better and improved and that current works are more successful as a result. this distinction is especially pronounced in a medium dominated by aesthetically regressive corporate interests.

[anothergod]

Ah yes the hellscape of corporations with regressive aesthetic values will come about because people compared Z64 and Demons Souls.

[LaurelSoup]

Yeah, the video games as constantly improving consumer tech thing is always a bad approach. I had to check out on a certain podcast after a hearing a certain host utter the phrase “4k, 120 frames per second” 108 times too many.

[COINTELBRO]

@LaurelSoup

Why aren’t all the Doom folks going as hard for Wolfenstein 3D or Xybots or Berzerk?

doom has better movement, sound and level design than those. how the pieces of something fit together to great an entire impression is more important than visual fidelty or the sheer complexity of game systems. doom is fast, and you can go faster by moving diagonally. the guns are punchy, the enemy designs are distinct and the composure of an encounter can be read instantly and a plan for dealing with it can spring into your mind fully formed, then you execute and in a satisfying series of bloody explosions, or you fail to take everything into account and lose resources or die. it has an unusually tight and rewarding gameplay loop, like tetris. why do you think people like doom, because it’s old?

[LaurelSoup]

My point was that Doom was itself the culmination of advances like you’re saying, but you’re free to suggest I’m a dumb dumb too.

[drastic_bb]

imo doom is one of those things that people still seek out and enjoy specifically bc it isnt “advanced”, like i think people still like the original star wars in part because it has cheesy 70s sci-fi rubber suits, that’s not a detriment, that’s the appeal

[LaurelSoup]

Something that the discussion of Stalker and Fear’s control schemes above speak to.

[captainlove]

Tried out the Playstation Accessible Controller (PAC), mainly doing set-up and testing with Like a Dragon Gaiden cos it was there. I’ll probably use it a lot for FFVII Rebirth and Like a Dragon 8 since RPGs tend to mesh well with these kinds of controllers. I feel like it’ll struggle with any kind of aiming stuff. Anyway @meauxdal and anyone else interested, here’s some first thoughts.

The size of the thing is good but there are a few awkwardnesses that might be ironed out through long-term usage. The stick is always nearby (it extends about two inches out maximum) and I get the impression it’s designed for two handed use or for you to mount the regular controller somewhere when you use the PAC. Both can be simultaneously active for a single player’s input and you don’t have to do any finnicky set-up which is nice, especially since you can only buy one PAC to begin with. So if you wanna play with two analog sticks you have to make space for the PS5 controller.

The buttons of the PAC are good in that they click nicely and don’t require large amounts of pressure to depress. The different caps are useful because the way it wants you to rest your palm means that you can create a miniature mountain range where the different peaks make contact with resting fingers or the palm and balls of the hand.

I’ve opted for the face buttons to be in a comfy ‘default’ with everything else being reachable with the hand edge. I’ll probably set them to toggle either in the controller config or in whatever game I play e.g. hold R2 to shoot.

I had to keep remembering that the central black disk is the entire X button (as I’ve set it up), not just the central white button label. There’s only two of the ‘long’ caps that poke into the middle bit (that I’ve used for square and triangle here) which is annoying since I like to create a mini-piano keyboard of the most common buttons but only having two of them and the rest of the buttons arranged radially means you have to get creative. I don’t really want to move my palm around if I can help it but it feels like I can hit everything else with the edges of my palm fairly naturally.

The stick has three options and the default (bottom right of the three above) is the best for me, it’s got a broad top and easy to control with an index finger. The ball stick feels extremely light (slightly cheap feeling) but would be best if you want an extremely sensitive stick. The top option is equivalent to a PS5 analog stick. You can orient the controller in 90 degree increments but I feel like having it on the left of the main disc (default) works for me. Everything is super easy to swap since it’s all magnetic and even the button labels are neat little rubber pegs rather than permanent stickers.

The PAC is also wireless and has a chargeable battery. It doesn’t share the PS5 front port either so you can charge both simultaneously. Despite my gripes with the radial layout it does feel like they’ve considered little conveniences aside from just the controller itself. Like the XAC you can set up three different profiles to switch through and the PS5 menu for it is pretty simple and easy. You can bring up a clear layout at any point with the profile button beneath the stick.

I played Like A Dragon Gaiden and ran around and did some fights. It felt pretty natural but I use the XAC a lot so have decent muscle memory for new layouts. I think the size of the buttons helps a lot though. They feel textured and chunky so it’s easy to remember ‘your place’ when figuring it out for the first time. I have to have the PS5 controller nearby and was using a lap-high table on coasters so adjusting things was pretty easy to get comfy.

I think it’s probably worth the money if you want to have a proper set-up on PS5 but aside from the PAC investment (and the money needed for this giant white whale to begin with), you’ll likely want to invest in a proper surface to have it on. I’m planning on getting a velcro lap pad from Trabasack Curve Connect - Trabasack - Lap Desk and Bag in One as well as repurposing some of the Logitech additions I got for my XAC. If you’ve not bought any of this before or can’t jerryrig something, you’re looking at pushing £/$200 at least. The second analog stick is the trickiest challenge but when it’s set-up it works very well. It also depends a lot on what you wanna play but if you also have a Switch/PC I’d probably save the XAC for more complex control schemes and just rely on accessibility options baked into big Sony games or more beefy multiplatform stuff.

You can’t use it for PC or remote play so it is not as good as XAC in most ways. The only way PAC is better is that it can be wireless and feels very ‘premium’. Oh also it’s the only real option for PS5 so

I don’t dislike it as a piece of hardware as much as I think the circumstances around it are kinda scummy. Will feel it out more when FFVIIR2 drops.

[COINTELBRO]

didn’t mean to call you dumb, it genuinely wasn’t clear to me why you were saying people liked doom more than wolf3d or berzerk.

i wouldn’t call it a culmination of advances, the advances in rendering techniques and storing level geometry just happened to be available to them. nuclear throne hits pretty much the same way as doom but it doesn’t have raycasting or variable floor heights. generally, better technology has allowed studios to articulate the mediocrity of their artistic visions more completely

[LaurelSoup]

@COINTELBRO

generally, better technology has allowed studios to articulate the mediocrity of their artistic visions more completely

I like this.

Nuclear Throne doesn’t use fancy rendering tech but even a low res screen flickery version would have been unlikely in 1993 since what it accomplishes is in response to DonPachi, Diablo, and Doom (lotsa Ds). Before you bake an apple pie, you have to create the whole universe, right? There’s a parallel development of game design concepts that’s not totally shackled to technological improvements but aren’t independent of them.

[COINTELBRO]

yeah i can’t articulate a clean dividing line between technology and technique but the latter seems more important, maybe that’s an overreaction to the way the gaming press has always talked about technology though

[LaurelSoup]

1000%

[AutomaticTiger]

Yeah? I broadly agree with you?

I probably phrased it badly last night but my argument is literally that new tech doesn’t automatically make stuff better. I’m not sure how this is counter to my argument at all. ^.^;