okay this isn’t even a video game thing anymore but
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fascinated by all the games with this exact same thought process of, ok, let’s not ask people if they’re a boy or a girl, we should be more thoughtful than that, what should we do instead? i’ve got it
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sometimes it’s the thought that counts
i personally appreciate the Random Choice option
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i just realized this controller makes hitting the start button with your left hand canonical
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I sometimes think about IC/SB1 sacred cows such as Killer7, God Hand, Bumpy Trot, Radiant Silvergun that we simply never mention anymore.
I think a lot of that is due to now-accepted reevaluations of the PS2 era as a bit of a dead end despite getting credit for having mainstreamed epiphanies and the sublime in videogames (not enough people played or were capable of replicating mother 2 or prince of persia 2 previously, which is fair) – these things are hard to design for on their own, and cheapened by it.
wrt those examples in particular, I don’t think RSG was ever an sb thing so much as a widely accepted classic shmup; bumpy trot was mostly remarkable for being an early, confident, japanese open world game; god hand is still utterly great and probably not widely known enough compared to clover/platinum’s other output though I know we talked about it wrt the new god of war; and killer7 is if anything taken for granted as the one time that suda’s aesthetic instincts didn’t get in the way of his ability to execute
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I feel like I say that sort of thing explicitly on occasion and a few other people like BustedAstromech and just now you have said it, but did this reevaluation truly happen on a conscious level? For the most part it goes unsaid and the critical assessment is only implied by the passing over. Like nobody feels the need to critically attack the era because nobody cares about the era in the first place
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Yeah I’m curious to understand in what ways this reevaluation has been performed. If anybody these days is designing “for” something accomplished by a PS2 game, I can see that as one way the reevaluation happens. Calling a whole generation a dead-end is an interesting thing to say, but I just can’t get a grasp on exactly what it means.
But on the level of feeling, playing games released from the past 15 years and noticing an ambiguous difference or lack of PS2ness, I probably get what you both are alluding to.
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Well, one concrete thing that comes to mind is the commonplace that everything is influenced by Dark Souls nowadays. The early Souls games felt like bracing out-of-left-field outliers. (Demon’s still provides this experience today, because it wasn’t as influential as Dark Souls.) The sudden rush to imitate them instead of continuing to evolve then-dominant styles shows how a dissatisfaction had grown over the state of videogames.
Part of the conscious critical reevaluation must’ve happened around the From Software water cooler. They brought back out-of-fashion influences like 90s CRPG mechanics/atmosphere, and retained the beloved parts of the PS2 era (Ueda-like desolate beauty and Ninja-Gaiden-like combat) while discarding once-pervasive tropes like cutscene-driven narratives and QTEs.
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Demon’s/Dark Souls is definitely a very concrete example.
This is more of a PS1 thing, I I think, but the question may imply something about PS2 platformers, but I’ve always thought it was comically stupid how much Crash Bandicoot is in Uncharted. Compare these and see they are exactly the same:
Now, I think that this kind Bandicoot chase-cam platforming sequence stuff is probably the one thing triple-A didn’t cling onto after Uncharted 2 got big (except with Tomb Raider, which just cloned UC), but if this is just the most obvious trace of PS1 naughty dog stuff, then where did we see Jak 2 and 3 and Ratchet and Clank evolve into during the 2010s? Because that has to have influenced something, right? Maybe Crackdown, Saints Row, hmm…
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Just for Bumpy Trot it’s ambitions are exceed it’s execution and though cut back severly AAA video game fills the niche it was.
But also we don’t talk that much about old games period anymore collectively. Outside of ZeroRanger the shooter thread is definitely X posting alone.
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just want to point out, Ninja Blade came out a week before Demon’s Souls in 2009 and features an ungodly amount of QTEs
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I think that (god help me) Felix has the right of it here. There’ve been plenty of linear developments on and attempts to recreate most of the old sacred cows, but their ineffable, epiphanic qualities were basically accidental and all the people who’ve tried to reclaim them on purpose have failed. Even the Japanese A (as distinct from AAA) game has lived on in one form or another (Vanquish, Binary Domain), which is the thing I most immediately associate with “PS2-ness”.
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i actually checked two weeks ago whether my aqua blue PS2 still kicks or has kicked the bucket… and it lives!
took some screencaps of the performance of my cheapass SCART-to-HDMI converter:
Steambot really has some awesome fontart that not even a bad upscaler can blur so badly that it gets hard to figure out what’s written there.
now to the cool stuff:
vs
is clearly won by the ICO retro-filter.
exhibit #2:
is clearly won by the PS4 rema- jeeeez, did i mix up the order here?
j/k, the PS2 version clearly wins this one.
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thinking about the smt4 demon ‘chemtrail’
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