No. I just remember seeing ads for it in magazines and thinking it was some humorless Giger-esque game.
oh man
humorless it ain’t! it actually has fairly great dark/surrealist humor that’s aged pretty well. makes earthworm jim look even more embarrassing
the manual alone is one of the funnier game manuals ever written, as it’s in character as the journal of the mad scientist character, with occasional inserts from the other two characters (the six limbed dog and the space janitor main character)
There’s something about Burning Rangers bulging at the seams of the Saturn that contributes to its intended sense of an unstable, volatile world.
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Like a fine bridge between Nights Into Dreams, and Phantasy Star Online
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More recently I’ve really gotten into the aesthetics of early Monolith’s Jupiter EX engine. F.E.A.R. moreso than Condemned, namely because the latter is reprehensible and confused whilst the latter is a stone cold classic of the genre. That style probably counts, right?
I don’t remember Fear as much, but I especially remember the second Condemned having really weird proportions
lords of shadow 2
I love both games, and I like the aesthetic of Condemned (basically wants to be a David Fincher film) but yeah, it’s pretty problematic. Condemned 2 is flat out a pile of poo, though.
ACTUALLY, Condemned 2 is awesome B)
I appreciate how weird it gets and the strange places it goes to without any apparent rhyme or reason but it still makes me wish it was better.
As a sequel it’s about as strange a direction to go as Highlander II was.
I did appreciate how weird it got and how full on they went into the Tetsuo metal fetishist direction, but it sure played like horseshit
So here’s a fun example of a grotesque game getting rebooted into something totally generic (imo)
GRR KILL COLLECT BLOOD KILL BITE explore puzzles KILL SMART BOMB RAGE BUY UPGRADES BEAST MODE
Shadow of the Beast originally was interesting for its surreality. Little context, few landmarks, bizarre enemies coming in at weird patterns who simply appear to “leave the screen” when defeated, and some nice, contemplative tunes.
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That HUD is pretty grotesque!
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Sorry, this is all my fault
Giant multipliers and medal rankings are my fetish
ps3 games are grotesque to me and brand new state of the art videogame quantum break is the most authentic ps3 experience on pc.
“check out that map on the wall” a character says
not only are you wandering around warehouses shooting people and looking for switches to turn on elevators just like in max payne from 2001, it also looks like max payne from 2001. the game is upscaled from 720p and also does some thing where it can only use 5/6th of your monitors frame rate, and there’s motion blur effects on everything that moves. every shoot out is a slide show and reminds me of always trying to run games that were too new for my computer when I was a kid. there is no quit button anywhere either.
the actual game is busted ass blurriness but they made sure to make it an always online game so you can stream the tv show shit in nothing less than crystal clear herky jerky stuttering 4k. and the tv show seemed to immediately dump the main characters to focus on some nobodies played by much cheaper actors doing meaningless stuff in the background.
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oh yeah, this reminds me that I’m willing to argue that PS3/360-era Unreal Engine games are almost uniformly grotesque. that waxy, glistening sheen on everything…
It’s not even a good kind of grotesque 
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Ninja Gaiden Sigma on the Ps3 looks like a plasticine toybox
also I would like to elect any of the early and later and pretty much all of the musou games for having a certain kind of muddy, repeating and flat ugly contrasted by the relatively high detail of the player models
dynasty warriors did grey and brown way before 2006;
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it will be fetishized by our children’s children
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fuck this (i love it)
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