I agree with your post…but Kane and Lynch 2, I guess?
the limits of control
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d-dos espressos?
Just wanted to say that this became one of the prime reasons I ended up liking the game much more than I ever expected I would. Do give Left Behind a try, and if you like it, consider seeing the full game through.
I did enjoy how I felt like I was fumbling through survival in this game. None of the violence felt particularly celebratory to me, nothing my character did really felt ‘cool’. You get the sense through vocal performances and animations that all these characters are sort of just trying to persist in a crumbling world. I never walked away from a TLoU play session feeling happy about it, and I really liked that.
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First @broco ended up playing it again because it came with my PS4. Halfway through the experience I did think “lord I should have given this code to someone.”
It is not about Pure Videogames more than it is about standards. In terms of overall quality I think we (on this forum and across the medium) give video games a bit of pass compared to all other media. We are a bit harsher, but how many of us have heard a gamer say a game “has a great story” and you want to tell them to read a book, any book.
While music is more subjective I think we have also all heard an “amazing” piece of specifically game music and responded with really?
I am fine being forgiving with video games and judging them against other video games. If they are running towards being excellent art in the field of video games then I’m judging them against my life experience and other video games. If you give me long portions where I am not pressing buttons and just sitting there watching I start judging them against film and television. I’ve seen plenty of excellent excellent film. There are very very few games that come close to touching that. They can aim for as Cuba mentioned Middlebrow HBO. That’s an alright aim. It is not going to impress me.
The final shot of The Last of Us is effective in the language of passive entertainment. The final bit of gameplay is more QTE than video game. I don’t remember who but someone here pointed out you HAVE to shoot the doctor. You still have to pull the trigger but feels disappointing.
Meanwhile in a cutscene Joel pulls the final trigger.
So I thank y’all for this convo. I can make peace that my viewpoint is my own and more or less the consensus is it is comfortable entertainment.
writing this out I started thinking about Alpha Protocol which succeeds at a lot more of what I want of a video game even though it is much messier.
I also never thought TLoU looked as good as everyone else did.
I wouldn’t tell anyone that cause that makes no sense because the “story” in a videogame doesn’t exist suspended in a void or as text on a page, there’s a million other things going on, with the music, the way it plays, just that your an interactive participant and it’s happening to you (even if you happen to be watching a non-interactive sequence that is setting up and informing the next playing part), how it feels with the way all these things ends up coming together etc. It’s not “giving it a pass,” it’s because videogames and movies are in no way comparable like that, you can’t just say “this videogame is bad because the story is bad because it’s not as good as the good story in this movie or book” and I don’t know why people are still trying to
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what’s a highbrow videogame
everytime someone says “this is just basic whatnot 101” I want to know what the doctorate level shit is. where are they hiding that stuff at
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i like to think that in the same way that a doctoral thesis isn’t “fun” to read for most of the population of earth, a highbrow game isn’t “fun” to play in the same way:
If you dig what it’s about, invest the time to understand it completely, it’s of course possible that it can be the best experience™ you’ll ever have when playing a game, and not just being a fun time (a premise that most games are based/sold on anyway). Recommend it to anyone though and most will walk away wondering what it is you see in it, because it’s “boring/convoluted as hell and by no means fun!” as you promised.
Then you’d have to explain that you didn’t anyway having fun, it’s about experiencing something that’s more than “just” a game, and -
you just give up and move on. That’s what I did a long time ago, and consume games the way they are mostly pitched to us - as a means for having a good time.
*disclaimer: this post is written by someone that considers Split/Second being a good game. All Hope Is Lost
That is a good game though (I was always just frustrated that the AI cars were immovable objects)
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I mean, early cutscenes were awful and it’s pretty clear why they became a focus of criticism. In FF7 the game fades out, makes you wait a few seconds, then shows you a blurry, unskippable, tedious conversation scene where every character has temporarily transumuted to being made out of smooth plastic spheres.
I agree with you it’s a mistake to look at this problem and decide, “the solution is to always keep control with the player”. That’s not viable in games with cinematic plots – HL2 tried it and every player reacts by ignoring the scene and clowning around instead (though it didn’t matter because the HL2 conversations don’t matter, future game designers conspicuously haven’t imitated HL2). But I still think the “formal sin” way of thinking is valuable in other ways. The loss of control actually isn’t the worst problem in bad cutscenes: the jarring interruption in camera and the change in visual look are at least as bad. TLOU is extremely aware of this and although it has H264 video cutscenes, their visual look is carefully tuned to be almost indistinguishable from in-engine gameplay. And UC4 reportedly has no out-of-engine cutscenes at all.
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I don’t agree with this from a narrative point of view. I think they show the dynamic that Ellie and Joel establish, that they’ve reached a kind of cohesion as a team that plays off of their unique abilities (or at least, differences in stature). They settle into an easy rhythm of exploration and terrain traversal that I think reflects their relationship. They both know what’s expected of them and what they can expect from the other. Maybe that’s a charitable reading, idk.
This seems like a fairly contentious claim? Even just for incidental dialogue and linear level designs…
I actually think that the last of us is closest thing to a successor to half life 2 that we’ve gotten, in terms of a compelling escapist narrative style game. it has the same kind of pacing and narrative styles. it just does everything better than half life 2 did. more intelligent, more classy, more subtle, more substance. never mind that the gameplay style is very different. these kinds of games are not defined by their play style entirely. and why should they be? there is a tendency now, with the best developed games, to transcend their “play genre” and instead deliver a more literal role playing (not in the D&D sense) experience. in the sense that like, this is a game designed to give you a certain kind of experience, some kind of adventure or journey, and we’re going to tailor the game mechanics to that goal. in my mind these kinds of games are like shenmue, except competent. (not to dog on shenmue, which is great despite its flaws!)
I would argue that the souls series falls into this category too, but that’s a different conversation
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What
As in “this piece of game music is amazing a++ 11/10!!” and then you listen to it and you think “really?”
you are intimately familiar with this as a longtime youtube comment regarder
Now I’m even more confused
I feel like there are two main forms of inferiority complexes people who play videogames have about the medium
- Person who wears a 1UP mushroom t-shirt and gets mad if another person refers to a console as a “Nintendo”
- Person who thinks no videogame yet has been valuable, and who invests this concept with notions of Greatness
I think both of these complexes are dumb
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I’m just over wringing my hands about how some videogame might not be as Important as an award-winning film and am content to let my idea of what a good game is come from the impression it makes on me and what sorts of thoughts it can invoke. My impression of people who have the second inferiority complex is that there is this implicit or explicit push for games to reach some plateau of greatness in their lifetime because games are a new medium and/or they see games as the ultimate empathic medium (and also Gesamtkunstwerk), which, well, lol to that.
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Are you trying to academic insult me for having expectations?