Crouch-walk as a concession to handheld play is fine but it’s a game about hanging out prone in tall grass.
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That’s definitely a cool touch that would have been lost on me. I almost never left the 3d on for too long in any game as my eyes start to hurt after time spent focusing on the top screen as it tries sync up with my movements and fatiguing.
but what part of you thinks that the person who made the latter would be capable of creating what you think is evident in the former
do you not think people are capable of making both good and bad/flawed art over the course of their lives? the best parts of death stranding clearly evince the industrial technician who was in the right time and place with the right approach, team and experience to make two masterpieces in a row in the late 90s and early 00s and two very good games after that in mgs3 and mgs5. around the mid 00s something absolutely changed in kojima’s approach to his own games, coupled with shifts in team personnel and industry standards/expectations, neither of which should be understated. it turns out that people who are capable of doing great work under specific circumstances aren’t necessarily as successful in other contexts, but i see the same basic skills that enabled him to thrive under those earlier conditions in his later games, even if i’m sometimes mixed on the results. except mgs4, fuck that one. even if it has the best yaoi
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my dude
sure, but you’re arguing for a bit more than that. you said that both mgs2 and death stranding are incoherent, but that the incoherence of one is intentional and cordoned off from some greater systemic brilliance that needs the incoherence to function, while the other is unintentionally incoherent and so messy and bad that it isn’t functionally competent. that’s a very wide gap that would seem more easily filled by occam’s razor
I think we both agree that the timing of MGS2 has served it well critically in hindsight, but MGS2 does not have much to say about what it has to say, for lack of better phrasing. I’m going to attribute more to timing than you are as a result.
edit: and yeah, I’m with parker on fukushima
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Death Stranding’s length has a big role to play in the discrepancy. MGS5 is similarly stretched thin but doesn’t push the player’s patience and tolerance for idea/theme churn quite so much.
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do any games have much to say about what they have to say
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no, it doesn’t matter whether the incoherence is intentional. it plays its role whether kojima likes it or not - criticism should be concerned with what a work does rather than what it says it does or what its creator intends. i don’t think he’s a genius and i don’t care about him as a person, though i’m frequently interested in what he does. there’s no occam’s razor implication for one game failing and another succeeding.
i would agree with that! that was my primary thesis until testing a hypothesis yesterday to see if it worked; i still believe that it thematically succeeds only through its formal revision of mgs1’s design, and that its pleasures are sensuous and structural-mechanical rather than textual and “message”-y. i don’t think it offers the sociopolitical insights people seem to think it does, and my test hypothesis from yesterday remains in the general view of mgs2 as a primarily formalist work (and so maybe frustratingly empty or navelgazing if you look at it that way).
sort of, i think mgs2’s timing has served it well critically only insofar as it enabled a pretty weak and lazy evaluation of its merits to become the standard one. like, i think it’s a better game than a zeitgeist-capturing moment.
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yes, some games are reflective. mgs2 wrote about social media and the nature of truth in 2001. it also wrote about pedophilia, fat guys on roller skates, child soldiers, homosexuality, women being naggers, how tranquilizers work, american imperialism, and masculinity. it didn’t have much to say about any of those things, they all exist as an elaborate checklist of things that kojima had been exposed to. there is no coherence. the game doesn’t take a stand on anything outside of its own existence as a sequel, which it does well, because kojima doesn’t have any insight on anything outside of media.
I bought a ps3 just for that game and love it for all its flaws and continuity porn/obsessive thirst to intertwine and resolve every single loose end in the series that I never got enough of. Just, I can’t get over how the mgs3 codec team turned out to be dementia-addled supervillains whose souls were programmed into the super AI gone amok and fueling the PMCs running an eternal war. And that there is a TV miniseries of content in those act briefings explorable by your mini-Metal Gear drone.
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I’ll join other MGS4 fans coming out of the woodwork. The game is a chaotic mess but there’s some neat bits in it. For some reason I just love the vibe aboard Snake and Otacon’s plane.
I do think MGS2’s biggest success is being a sequel about sequels that thoroughly sequeled MGS1. I think my personal preference is for thematic coherence and a degree of holistic or gestalt unity amongst game elements which I feel 3 achieves much better. This thread has been really useful for understanding perspectives on 2 and the series generally. I imagine it’d be really interesting to play through it with SB and just let the discussion flow forth.
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oh wario ware fucking rules, it’s got like 250 microgames but somehow manages to feel like a coherent whole. much of that is down to the sound design - many of the sounds are reused between games to give this very specific sense of gross whimsy: fart noises, sproings, splats, crunches, screams. it’s great. But they also reuse a few graphics so it can become this game of “spot the sprite” and connecting narratives between different minigames.
it also reuses a bunch of sound effects and music from Wario Land 4 so is delightful to me in that way. My favorite is when they use the “Mr. Fly” CD from Wario Land 4 as the title “music” for the flyswatter Mario Paint minigame. Spoilers: the Mr. Fly CD is just the sound of a fly buzzing around while someone tries to swat it with increasing franticness. They just removed the swatting sounds for Wario Ware.
It is also one of the most accessible games I can think of - just the d-pad and one button. And everyone is at equal disadvantage because most of the games don’t make any sense at all. We’re all going in blind. It’s very Katamari Damacy in that way, but moreso.
I love Wario Ware very much. I think Twisted is the peak of that series because it has the extremely unique rotational thing with the rumble that makes it so satisfying to do. And it has a bunch of weird toys.
Wario Ware DIY is also the only true successor to Mario Paint.
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I like that Warioware spins up game interactions out of absurdity like picking a disembodied nose. Wanted to bring up that I liked how the NES/SNES game sections boiled down older games that are mostly unapproachable to me into their dopamine-releasing essential chunks. I know that the NES Remix games are all of this, but the 9-volt sections are a sort of break in between the absurd microgames and gamified real-world activities.
I’m not a creative person so I can’t really look at the games in this way but, uh, maybe they would be helpful in a game dev context as a way to help someone get into the mindset of what is satisfying to a player in a given game loop, and to try to cut away anything inhibiting that satisfaction. But typing that out then it sounds like I want all games to be cut down to bare essentials, which, not really but maybe it would be a helpful exercise/thought experiment.
Maybe there is value in the original frame story/narrative of Wario getting together a bunch of mostly non-gaming culture immersed friends to make their own games featuring mundane objects and physical interactions, as if the game is welcoming anyone regardless of skill into game development? Wario put this all together as a ploy to steal his friends’ games and profit off of them, maybe it’s saying (coming from the pov of a giant multinational) the underlying motive of game creation shouldn’t be money, but the stimulations and satisfactions (or lack of) around playing games?
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Yeah WarioWare DIY takes this to the next level and provides a full suite of tools to make your own microgames, and it works surprisingly well! I think that the seed was there from the start, because these games are such bizarre reflections of their fictional creators.
Plus it’s fun to mess around with interactions that would be horrific for any longer than 5 seconds, y’know? Just like, jump over a car, but sometimes the car jumps instead, and sometimes the car is tiny and just bounces off your feet, and sometimes the car stops halfway and turns around and leaves…is a horrible game. But a great microgame.
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SPELUNKY
vs.
DISCO ELYSIUM
bluuurrrghhh
there was a tigsource game jam I went to, where my game was blowing saliva through hollow plastic penises at a target. it was called spitpenis. at this same game jam derek yu was showing off spelunky multiplayer for the first time, so i got to play that with derek and a couple other developers. i told him spitpenis was more innovative and transgressive but spelunky will be a darling. disco elysium has real writing though, so it gets my vote. oh also i suck at spelunky, i dont like the gun or the way the dog/person sounds when you pick them up. i should see if i like the art in the new one more
RESIDENT EVIL (2002)
vs.
METAL GEAR SOLID 2: SONS OF LIBERTY
unnnghhh
both suck ass but im never voting for kojima slime. good job resident evil
EARTHBOUND
vs.
SILENT HILL
bleeechhhhh
wow the other horrible to control ps1 its scary because we cant render far game. what EVER. i guess this isnt the rape one though so its better than 2 but i have a mr saturn tattoo because i APPRECIATE earthbound. if all survival horror games disappeared today i would not shed a tear…if earthbound went away id cryyy
SONIC 3 & KNUCKLES
vs.
GIMMICK!
unngngrhthfhh
i like the the gimmick game is against gimmick!
the 32x tower is cool but gimmick has physics that surprise me each time i play it, but i suck at it, BUT GIMMICK IS SO CUTE
SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI III: NOCTURNE
vs.
ELEVATOR ACTION RETURNS
ughhhhhhhhh
last i checked jad the taff wasnt in nocturne. i like nocturne but i like hearig about it from people who love it more than playing it myself…i like playing soul survivor and devil summoner and devil survivor and devil saga
METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SNAKE EATER
vs.
SUPER MARIO BROS.
hooaaaarrrffff
fuck kojima slime. ill take the game they cant stop making
GOD HAND
vs.
EARTH DEFENSE FORCE SERIES (DEVELOPED BY SANDLOT)
hurrrrrgghhhhh
everyone knows selectbutton loves god hand so i dont care about throwing away my vote on it because EDF! EDF! EDF! also its hard for me to vote a single player game against what might be the best couch co op SERIES that stubbornly held on to split screen even though no one gives a shit about it anymore. i love sitting next to a person and learning into them with my shoulder when they do something cool or leaning into them REALLY hard when they do well…guess god hand isnt alexander either
WARIOWARE, INC.: MEGA MICROGAME$!
vs.
LSD: DREAM EMULATOR
wwwaaaaughhhh
WOW FINALLY A HARD CHOICE FOR ME BETWEEN TWO GAMES I CARE ABOUT. ive played every single wario ware game because microgames are the music videos of videogames, i need to see them all. i need to know everything about them. i need to play everything research and development two puts their hands on. i even like the ds warioware, THE BAD ONE because i dont mind that its easy i love being overstimulated by 3 second games no matter the difficulty. its also annoying how few games can pull off the warioware YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT TO DO IMMEDIATELY hook, like that minigame indie collection mcpixel, or rub rabbits, they have to explain the shit out of their games or make the game FIGURING OUT WHAT TODO. i like to just know what to do. i like to see a butthole and to intuitively know to spray it.
I LOVE LSD but its annoying that its become the ‘WHOA SO FUCKING WEIRD IS THIS CONSOLE ON DRUUUUUGS WHOA MAN WHOAaaa’ go to game for ps1 when theres SUCH AN EXTENSIVE LIBRARY OF FUCKED UP GAMES… im also sick of people asking me about it. its also the WHOAAA DAPHNY HAVE YOU HEARD OF LSD. omg yes, play another game
im still undecided on my vote
BLOODBORNE
vs.
DRAGON QUEST III
bleeechhhhh
fuck souls games, im voting for the dragon quest i never played past the fortune telling
F-ZERO GX
vs.
MOTHER 3
uguuuuuu
im picking the game that made me cry over the game that made me laugh but this one depends on my mood for sure BECAUSE GOD THESE CHARACTER MOVIES
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gimmick is great and every time I think about it a different cute thing pops up in my head because there’s just so much.
like, now I’m thinking about the frogs in the mines, which make their little sounds until you stand on them. they look so annoyed! and then they jump into the water to get away from you and you should probably feel guilty for treating a frog like this, they did nothing wrong
it’s a game with a high density of memorable details and it’s weird how joyful it manages to be despite how crushing it is difficultywise
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f-zero GX made me cry too
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yeah im not telling anyone which is which
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