i stopped my replay of oracle of seasons when i got to the dungeons and saw the larger rooms that were essentially layouts that would have worked on a single screen
13 Likes
After making Neopets: The Darkest Faeiry. Idol Minds made this for the PS3
14 Likes
glad to see them continuing a theme
11 Likes
apparently, pain was the all-time most downloaded psn game as of january 2009. making it a candidate for the just-invented-by-me âjames cameronâs avatar awardâ for works that were allegedly successful, but no-one remembers or cares about them even slightly
14 Likes
I learned about it while reading the wikipedia page of Andy Dick and his many many many crimes, heâs a playable character in Pain for some unknown fucking reason
5 Likes
My friend downloaded Pain and we played that sucker for at least 12 hours straight.
4 Likes
There was no getting away from Pain and its copious DLC in weekly browsing of the PS3âs PSN store back then = o
3 Likes
theres discorse on the âI want shorter games with worse graphicsâ ideology thanks to someone making a thread of "these are games that are examples of âshorter games with worse graphicsâ " and they chose Slay The Spire and Potionomics, both games where the teams crunched super hard for months, and also games which are hyper popular.
My own feelings on this, having made a âshorter game with worse graphicsâ will be ignored because the numbers on my end arenât great. The lack of numbers means that making a new game is much harder, and the fact that theyâre relegated to side project work also means that making them is much harder. When I started my new project file 2 days ago I was hit with a huge wave of trepidation: do I want to start this journey again?
20 Likes
âThe fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh.â
10 Likes
theyâre right that Slay the Spire is ugly as sin at least
8 Likes
Yeah not exactly a stunner. Helluva game tho
2 Likes
pretty sure there was a download code for pain with the ps3 i got back then
2 Likes
it just feels like a social media sentiment/statement of intent about what a person likes that doesnât translate to anything material about the game space. itâs too broad and stupid of a meme to have any real material use and itâs easy to redefine âshorter games with worse graphicsâ as basically anything thatâs not a tentpole AAA release. itâs easy to say you hate current mechanisms in culture and politics at large but thereâs no real sense that they can be changed so it just comes down to a statement about your consumer identity.
it feels the same way youâd see huge swaths of journalists and critics talk about how âimportantâ niche indie games were to cover but eventually all stop covering stuff entirely because media companies failed and they couldnât maintain steady readership. and now stuff thatâs only ten years old is disappearing from the consciousness completely and stuff that used to exist is being redefined out of the space. you hear big youtubers and stuff doing that now too (i.e. talking about how âimportantâ it is to support âthe indie game development communityâ)⌠once again, it doesnât mean anything most of the time. unless theyâre covering something that already has a chance to be clouty and successful - and then they can congratulate themselves for being morally good by supporting âthe indie communityâ when itâs just them covering stuff like Slay the Spire or whatever.
9 Likes
shorter games with worse graphics meme is the sort of thing that makes sense until you actually try and break it down yea, one thing that bugs me about it is it usually isnât actually used to mean like time convenient aesthetics and seems retrofitted to a certain set of tastes more than anything else, like the meticulousness of getting perfect shadows and animation and emotional eye sheen etc is just moved to meticulous historical replication and fine tuning the Jank to be perfectly disaffected. in a lot of ways the Real âworse graphicsâ would probably look more realistic (high quality asset packs are easier to acquire and less time costly than bespoke low poly stuff for example)
18 Likes
one thing to remember about the meme is it originated from moshboy, who is one of the few people who actually does tons of research into no-budget indies. for many developers he may be the only âmarketingâ they will ever get.
iâm not sure what discourse swirls around it, i havenât really seen anything on that thank god. seems like the phrase somehow escaped the limited context it was meant to be taken in: sincere appreciation of what snobs might call âoutsiderâ or âtrivial artâ, and a desire for anyone who makes art to make a living doing it.
as for web publishing, as one of the OG indie games coverage people from back in the day of TIGjam, yeah itâs just impossible to get paid for it. only reason i was able to was bc my boss was hogging all the âeasyâ stories so i had to diversify to make money as a freelancer lol. in the end i developed an appreciation for the oddball and made a lot of lifelong friendships, but it was deeply impoverishing materially. i was very far below the poverty line for a long time.
would be a dream to support a website like that but i think whoever runs it would need to basically be okay with being an arts patron since (as someone who has run a middlingly-popular website, 300k uniques and 3m+ views per month in its heyday) itâs unfeasible to make a living doing. maybe if you founded your own ad network that caters exclusively to indie developers idk.
25 Likes
9 Likes
longer games with even worse graphics
14 Likes
moshboy has done a lot of great stuff and raised awarenes of a ton of games that would otherwise go completely overlooked or uncommented on (and, disclosure, moshboy has included my games in collections and promoted a handful of them over the years). i really respect moshboyâs work and fervent dedication to being a voice shouting from the rooftops about stuff very few people care to hear about.
moshboy was also responsible for coining the term âtrashgamesâ to refer to the games he highlights, including products of glorious trainwrecks, various somewhat clunky ludum dare entries, intentionally frustrating or ugly ten-minute experiences, garish but beautifully crafted masterpieces by thecatamites, projects uploaded to itch by mostly anonymous people with no followers, etc, etc, etc. he went so hard on this branding that IGN even bothered to cover it in 2017:
Cook, who goes by moshboy online, has dedicated his time over the years to curating âtrashgames,â an effort he describes to me as âwandering through old abandoned ruins, looking for things that other people somehow missed.â His use of the term âtrashgameâ is one of endearment â an unconditional acceptance of a side of gaming the mainstream neglects and discards. To me, it also feels like a bold reclamation â trash is messy, cheap, hard to classify, and sometimes unpleasant, but are those always inherently bad things?
âIâm a big David Lynch fan,â Cook explains. âI enjoy getting lost in things and contemplating what the **** I just played. I like to be truly unsettled. Itâs one of the strongest emotions that media can evoke from me.â
i hated that turn to âtrashgame,â to be honest, as a person whoâs associated with, cares about, and knows a few people in those scenes. i didnât like that one of the if not the most visible advocates for small, personal games that existed outside of even the mainstream âindieâ scene, had decided that âtrashâ was the moniker to sell them (or fail to sell them) to the world with. i get that itâs endearingly used, but i donât like these games being called âtrash.â that works for a specific punk-rock-aesthetic-uber-alles zine-brained all type of person who already hinges their identity on such associations.
âshorter games with worse graphics,â like all slogans, effectively means roughly nothing of substance and is most often used as a contrarian assertion of identity (postured vis-a-vis âthe industryâ) and also as something of a blunt, balnd cudgel. beyond moshboyâs own feed, itâs clear that as itâs taken on an independent life where no one agrees on what it means either, which is part of why it means nothing. iâve seen people who see it as advocacy for better labor conditions in the AAA industry, or as advocacy for throwing away your consoles and rallying in the streets making âtrashgamesâ (which advoacting for making more isnât necessaryâthere are 68 million of them alreadyâand actually playing them would be the thing that isnât being done that maybe arguably should be done), saying Switch is superior to PS5, âhaunted PS1â itch-dot-io frontpage supremacy, or asking your favorite streamer to play more Celeste.
itâs catchy, so we can keep saying it. but why. iâm not sure what conversation itâs a part of. i donât know where it gets us. i donât know whoâs trying to advocate what values to whom to what end. iâm tired.
22 Likes
reading stuff like this makes me wonder how i can make myself better known. iâve written about plenty of indie games no-one else has, and iâm at least respectful of them, even when i donât like them.
i guess my version of the âworse graphicsâ slogan is my honest belief that dlsite is better (or at least more interesting) than steam
(i mean it is defintely better, in that itâs just a website and you download your purchases as .zip files instead of being some weird obfuscation layer like steam is, but iâm referring above to the libraries and how easy it is to find new games iâm interested in playing)
6 Likes
iâm thinking about a friend who said their games used to be covered by people like Chris Priestman throughout the 2010âs and eventually at some point it just stopped. the current mechanisms of online media didnât support this kind of writing whatsoever and eventually some of the really committed people just finally burned out. i think a lot of people on the creative side unfortunately donât really understand that it was just a handful of extremely committed people propping this stuff up in the first place, and that those people have limited energy and resources. i wish there was a lot more mutual communication there between the people who talk about games and the people who make them certainly and a lot less of just wishing and expectation. i fell out with one game developer friend over the pandemic by basically asserting that people who write for Kotaku are human beings with their own motivations and conditions. also there was a sense from a writing side that you were like, obligated to be a blandly positive âadvocateâ for the space as a whole to counteract the gawking youtuber fan mobs or something, which i think helped no one. because now the youtuber fan mobs are the only ones most of the niche games people are trying to lobby to get noticed by now anyway.
that also might have been why there was so much effort to brand this kind of work in new and different ways, to try and create some momentum behind it. stuff like Offworld or the Arcade Review were really committed to it before running out of steam. before âtrashgamesâ it was âaltgamesâ or ârentpunkâ or whatever also. but thereâs just too much different stuff with wildly varying intentions and audiences to really fit under one category. in some ways the space for non AAA games is kind of like the top 15% or so vs. everyone else. and like thereâs utility to aesthetics people think of as âtrashyâ ofc but it also has real potential to reduce the really interesting and unique levels of artistry a lot of the best stuff in the 85% or so operates at that are often not reflected in higher visibility games at all. a lot of people have different perspectives and visions that are just not at all compatible with each otherâs.
but anyway i do believe there is and will continue to be a growing niche for more stripped down, unconventional and highly personal games and thereâs potential there for more media covering that stuff in the future in an intelligent and engaged way. weâre just not yet to the point where enough people who see the value of that stuff are connected to each other for it to coalesce into a coherent âthingâ - itâs all in various discords and subcommunities right now. right now it feels like everything sort of speaks its own language of whatever micro community itâs part of and is not remotely aware of its connection to other things. a lot of it is under the umbrella of stuff like âPS1 horrorâ or whatever like you said. people are increasingly unaware of the worlds and discussions that are happening outside of them. but i think some of those people will eventually grow tired of that and start to branch out. and hopefully theyâll carry their audiences with them. it might not always look like people want it to look like, but i think the interest is there.
9 Likes