The time at college that we stayed up all night playing Quake and then decided to go get breakfast when the cafeteria opened and I saw my friend walk up to the omelette bar and I instinctively strafed behind a pillar.
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glad psychonauts 2 seems to be recieved well but part of me will always wonder if the delighted response to games like this and control is just bc “slightly middling AA console game with some good ideas” is like the ur-subject games criticism was built specifically to unpack and people are relieved at the chance of returning to a familiar mode. well, i do look forward to it eventually when i finally get around to finishing the first one.
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i think part of the response is that this is actually vanishingly rare. i will put up with a fair amount of garbage for “some good ideas”
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i think it’s rare for games at that budget level and increasingly common the lower you get from there BUT there’s a converse thing where very few people have figured out how to write well about interesting but cheap games without feeling the need to wrap it in a framing of, like, “it’s only 5min long so you can play it on your work break :^)” “costs less than a cup of coffee :^)” and i think people get extra effusive when they don’t feel like they’re crushing someone’s dreams by just being ordinarily critical about a work
which is natural but also a bit dispiriting when it feels like part of what really gets people enthused about something is the sticker on the side of it reading 100% LARGE MYSTIFIED COMMODITY - NO PITY NECESSARY. GUARANTEED
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40 posts were split to a new topic: the blaster-rifle shot heard 'round the world
not helped that many of the micro-budget games people effuse about often do not have many good ideas, so its hard to sift through to the good stuff, as it were, even though there’s far more good stuff at that level than AA stuff, it feels like there’s surprisingly fewer cults of personality attached to basically-decent AA games than to whatever doc burford shits out (to pick a low hanging fruit)
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oh, i’m definitely talking more about just weird little joke and horror games where the authors are having fun and surprising themselves instead of the aspirational indie layer of guys who want to build their own content sausage machines so they can upskill themselves into consultants giving talks about how to fix other people’s content sausage machines.
it’s weird since i do feel like the format has so many good and weird things just sitting out in the open, like whenever i feel burned out i just search for random windows 3.x or amiga games and invariably stumble on something that feels like a genuine breath of fresh air - but there’s this whole cottage industry claiming that to have your thoughts and ambitions warped into unexpected directions by the material process of making art is some kind of freakish moral failing instead of like, the point
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Oh 100%
I have to actively remind myself its not a moral failing to let the things I make go in unexpected/unplanned-for directions
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a videogame thing i think about a lot is the zombie “awake” noise from quake 1, which is a downshifted cat growl
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The cadence of “It’s hot as hell in here.” Besides being a really cool story moment in SH2, the camera work in this is so bizarre and expressive. Floating above the two, playing off the extreme incline of the stairs, and then that weird first person bit. SH2 may be overrated–maybe–but it’s really wonderful at any rate.
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Silent Hill 2 gets a lot of mileage out of stilted, badly-paced line readings
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One of the interesting things about Fortnite’s almost accidental level of success is how it turned Epic completely towards it and away from almost every other project bar the Unreal Engine. Unreal Tournament 4’s unceremonious cancellation feels like a ‘yeah this shit just doesnt do it any more, what were we thinking’. The chaos that comes with a gold rush.
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silent hill 2 is the best video game adaptation of a community theatre horror stage play.
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And Epic’s internal game development team was pretty hollowed out by that point, too. Fortnite had been in production hell and the Gears team had largely left Epic – I thought they were going to focus on the engine exclusively and use external partners like People Can Fly and Chair as their engine testbeds.
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Remember when Fortnite was supposed to be a wave based horde mode thing? That still seems like a game I would play, theoretically
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It launched like that and still exists, and they half-heartedly try to drum up interest in it every once in a while
“Save the World”, they call it, and it’s waiting for YOU to convince your best buddies to play it together
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No thanks
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aw
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c’mon
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You know how some game engines tie really basic things to objects within the 3D space of a level, like cameras, skyboxes, things like that. I think it would be cool to have this be something players can interact with and, like, possibly destroy or move out of one place into another. It would be cool, for example, and for no good reason, to have music tracks associated with objects in the environment so that you could bring in like the bass line from a previous area’s environment if you carried it into a new on like it was the gnome from Half-Life 2 Episode Two. Or if you destroyed the third-person camera object and… something happened. Or if you brought the third-person camera object into a space where there was already one and something happend too… If you found the HUD object from a section of a game where you were racing, and you took it else where so that the laps were still showing up in the corner when you were in another area and talked to some NPCs, they’d be like “yo!!! are you racing right now?? no time to chat!”
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