oh man now I’m even more excited
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oh weird, from Kenny Sun. i know he’s made at least two triangle-themed puzzle games and a threes broughlike hybrid. feels like a bit of a departure from his usual fare?
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Wish partially granted?
I saw this trend of game footage aping compressed Internet videos first in racing and horror. Signifiers are GoPro-style camera work, overcast lighting and cheap digital camera tone mapping, intense headbob on movement. I can date it to about three years ago? Mostly focused on horror, it really picked up with Unreal 5 and its lighting tech making it very easy to light scenes, and crossed over with the ‘graphics tech demo’ crowd.
It’s striking to me in how much it approaches games as a visual artifact, or really as content on a stream – entirely surface, this is the first attempt I’ve seen to turn one of these into a game. Contrast with the Roblox and prior small.games aesthetics, which abandon visual sense for game clarity first and foremost, and are often unreadable by the commercial game industry as a result.
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Steep did the gopro thing IIRC, and Watch Dogs 2 for its drones.
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Yeah, there’s some disjunct between Dog Days and the mid-2010s professional implementations and what we’re getting now. I don’t know if those ideas of verisimilitude took and are sprouting again, or if these are truly isolated, but it’s been very bottom-up, and it always feels somewhat disconnected from games.
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The bodycam game looks like an amazing technical/graphical accomplishment assuming it is all legit, as noted parts of it seem somewhat problematic but oddly only seems to register as such thanks to the former. Basically I’m not sure I’d want to play this game but a different one built upon what this one is doing could turn out to be something.
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y’know technologically it looks like it would go well with that game idea I had a while back where you’d be hunting around abandoned areas for weird cryptid / ghost things based on my childhood bogeymen, using re-purposed analogue equipment. When you approach the invisible entrance to their lair the camera would go all staticky and then when the screen is completely obscured you’d phase into the creature’s backrooms-ish Twin Peaks gas station dungeon realm.
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the music all in my mind is
I mean dog days is at least as much about what you dont see as what you do see right?. Very few games seem to understand violence as well as that one. its not about fetishistic recreation of high quality murder footage
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I agree, but that’s having played it and fit it alongside IO’s Michael Mann fascination and shared pursuit of hyperreality. I’m not sure how to define the difference between it and this movement from this distance. Cleary IO ingested livecam footage and recreated it in a considered artifical manner. This recent round of shakeycam footage in game engines, in wedding itself to a cutting-edge graphics audience, seems to be targeting something on an edge before any consideration – but I have to check my professional tendency to assume fanworks are naive.
The most common praise I hear of the new style is, “that looks so real,” implicitly defining reality through video aesthetics that signify a lack of editing and professional equipment.
But looking back at Dog Days’ press tours, they began their slide decks with “More Real” and pitched the same fantasy:
That’s why one of the entries on the developer’s first-reveal slideshow presentation is “More Real”. […] These days, reality is found on YouTube, according to IO Interactive - not the animated LOLcats and grannies-slipping-on-roller-skates side of YouTube, but the blurred cameraphone-and-atrocity aspects: the furtively-captured police beatings, and the frantic subway fights seen over someone’s shoulder.
and leveraging a similar cartoonish exoticism:
the setting is videogames’ latest group craze, Shanghai […] “It’s the most urban place on the planet,” says game director Karsten Lund, “the best place in the world to disappear.”
It’s funny because I play the game and it’s immediately clear it has nothing to do with reality and it’s using realistic markers for a specific aesthetic effect for impact, the finality and suddenness of its narrative. But like most developers they don’t seem able to communicate that in words.
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seems odd
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still the greatest game ads
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We apparently need more Jet Set Radio fangames, so here is a free to play one where you have to take down a giant kaiju or something.
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Feels very Sunset Overdrive, too
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