Are we talking about mein kamf re: SM64? Because that book is terrible game design. But yeah, inspiration is worth something. Like wanting to think about a thing and then maybe react in a creative way about/because/for/not liking a thing. Ripples in the pond and all that.
I think it’s The Bad Wizard Books.
I left it open to whatever interpretation on purpose because I haven’t read most Bad Books. I can really only remember reading a couple of pages of 50 Shades and all the other Bad Books I’ve summarily forgotten the titles of
Your suggestion that the interpretation of referenced literature could extend to 50 Shades of Grey only further highlights your hostility towards SM64.
I respect that.
Damn I was 100% sure the bad book was the Bible
I have one (1) criticism against Katamari Damacy.
The « Grab the biggest X » levels only really work as a mean joke. There should have only been 1 of them, we didn’t need 2
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Yeah I mean bad in the sense of low quality is basically the same as bad in the sense of morally evil when it comes to art
(like I said, I’m not taking this too seriously because at the end of the day I don’t really care)
I really liked those levels, but the precision they demanded definitely felt out of place. I disliked the eternal levels much more, those felt like a mean joke for having gotten good enough at the game.
My biggest complaint would be that the World isn’t very open on an average sized scale. My biggest complaint would have been the lack of qol features for thing completionism but I want to step back from that because it seems a little sick
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i voted for sky odyssey having never played it, i think the arguments for it have been more fun to read than it is to play Link’s Awakening
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yeah, me too.
i’m generally of the mind that remakes have no effect on the original work, but that recent link’s awakening one (that i did not play) made me think that link’s awakening is maybe not as good as i thought it was.
I mean, I haven’t played the remake the radical change in art style, plus the addition of smooth scrolling instead of transitions, is going to change the experience.
It might just be a bad remake.
The music was very good but I found Link’s Awakening remake a little dull overall.
i think that i’m happier to let link’s awakening live on in my memories than to revisit it ever again
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it’s true what they say: you can never go home
it has way too many unskippable dialogues
Demon’s Souls and Riven are both stellar examples of show-not-tell in game design. They became phenomenons because of that design and the way it immerses you in a world.
My feelings about comparing these two boil down to a question of quantity. From has dozens of releases with ideas on how a world should be formed. Demon’s was the apex of what they had tried to attempt in terms of how the action felt and the depth of the lore. Even better, it came out at a time when game design at large was in a rut and focused towards removing all barriers of access to the detriment of engaging the player. It enters the accursed argument of core vs casual with gusto, showing just how hardcore modern game design can go.
Riven surpasses Demon’s because it floats above that argument. There are no barriers of dexterity. Progression requires some critical thinking, but observation is most important. It sacrifices none of its mystery or intrigue by making itself accessible. It’s beautiful and engrossing in a way that can only be done in this medium. And there have been very few attempts at pursuing its philosophy of design.
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I wanna see some praise for Ico because feel like that is floating by and I have always been ambivalent about it despite playing through it every 3 years thinking maybe I’ll really like it this time.
I feel like I can only vote for one of demon’s and dark, considering we’ve got them both in the same section of the bracket and they’re both up against personal favorites. idk which one I’m going to vote for though. maybe flip a coin.
hey I did a poor job blabbering about ico a few times the first time it showed up in this bracket. I don’t remember which thread that was, but it’s there somewhere. Ico is Ueda’s best game and I fell for it deeply.
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I feel like I’ve made this argument before but if we are crediting SM64 for inspiring many then I think I have to repeat it once more: I think very few games have likely taken away from what we could have had in games like Mario 64 did.
Very early 3d gaming was full of weird experiments as people grasped with what the heck to do with all the possibilities, and in particular 3d platformers were trying various approaches to figure out what they were supposed to even be. Then Mario 64 came out and in the eyes of most answered many of those questions, setting up what was basically a series of “best practices” likely a few years earlier than we otherwise would have had them. It is no surprise that games like Jumping Flash, Nights and even Tomb Raider were designed if not outright released before Mario 64 was widely playable, and that in that space games like that became much more scarce afterwards.
A world in which Mario 64 came out in the middle of the N64’s lifespan if not at all would have probably given us many more creative, experimental games for that generation, likely ones that would have appealed very much to the typical SBer. Outrun 2 on the other hand likely took nothing off the table.
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Blaming a game for nailing something so well out the gate that it…lebotomised creativity/scared people into a kind of conformity is a weird criticism with a lot of what-iffery. I don’t buy it. I mean, without SM64 we’d have got a 2.5D Banjo-Kazooie and a more linear Goldeneye (the mission structure was directly inspired by SM64) among other things…and they kept making those Tomb Raiders for a while and even a post-SM64 Jumping Flash! game. There was still cool weird shit happening in 3D action: Ape Escape, Chameleon Twist, Glover, Mega Man Legends, Tail Concerto… SEGA still managed to make an operatic buffet of one-of-a-kind bonkery with Sonic Adventure. If devs couldn’t come up with anything in the following years to match, surpass or meaningfully diverge from SM64 (arguable) I don’t think that’s SM64’s fault. But maybe Nintendo ended up resting on their laurels or were too intimidated by the first game to complete the sequel planned for the 64DD. I guess we’ll never know (it sucks we never got it though).
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I like @username’s brand of what-iffery as a counterpoint to the standard upshots that follow from “this game originated x,y,z. It is very influential.” I’m a believer in the saying “if they didn’t invent it, somebody else would,” most of the time. However, it’s probably true that no other developer would have had the same access to technology, time, and resources that Nintendo had in order to iterate on an original concept to that level of refinement.