Niddhogg’s extremely abstract, minimalist visuals left a lot of room for the player to project their own imaginations onto them. Niddhogg 2’s visuals say “actually, you were reading this entirely the wrong way.” I liked my imagination better.
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That would actually be my argument as to why Nidhogg 2’s aesthetic on its own is bad.
I guess I had a backwards way of saying that I appreciate something to chew on with the sequel’s aesthetic after the original’s aesthetically agnostic approach. To me it works in a time and space where too many indie games have gone out to say nothing. Just make a fucking choice. Even if it’s not “perfect”, it’s still totally clear and consistent and overall just more palatable.
Essentially minimalist aesthetics are the ranch dressing of indie games.
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clicked the blood potion button so hard my finger fucking exploded
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wait so there are gravity rush and nier demos today??? oboy!!!
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i could honestly use a gravity rush demo thanks for the heads up.
sumo digital’s monkey ball snake game looks about 900000 times better than yooka laylee
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Does 2017 have any promising 3D platformers coming our way?
that one is tops for me, followed by gravity rush 2. yooka laylee looks like a pretty dumb inheritor to a dumber legacy. sonic is in reasonably good hands though and there will probably be a mario launched with switch.
this looks lovely, brings back memories of kaa in the disney jungle book
Having just remembered that they’re doing stuff this month, I will shift some of my hype over to Freedom Planet 2, which could possibly come out at some point in the calendar year and it’ll probably be good and we’ll know anyway because demo by the end of the month
Time to start writing that games as art column!
yeah, that’s the real answer, but I already owe like 3 EC episodes and I didn’t get any done over Christmas break…
I’m kind of entertaining the idea of the controller interface as one of the most limiting things in terms of engaging with a “space”, which makes games as Art (the institutional sense) difficult because engaging with other kinds of art spaces doesn’t require a hand-eye coordination test just to begin to experience the work
(Art as an Institution is definitely not the only way to fund/legitimize games, I’m just thinking through why just putting a controller and a game in public is somehow even weirder than putting a board game out in public)
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Directly relevant! I brought the Vive back home for Christmas and it was fascinating to watch 70-year-olds and 4-year-olds handle it with equal aplomb. “Reach out, grab, stack” are universal verbs and go a serious distance to bridging that gap. I watched my uncle give a tour of Florence by flying around Google Earth and the preschooler stack a bunch of star-stuff beams into logs to support a chimerical moon blanket
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even the idea of interacting with a video game space through discrete “verbs” is something that a controller interface informs, which probably explains the excitement and subsequent disappointment and sub-subsequent interest in motion controls
but if you reference other media there’s a much broader vocabulary for how to interact (and thus, create) with it because there’s a much higher resolution as far as interactions go
It’s crazy how many abstractions we use in games are revealed when you get a fully-functional touching interface. And I was very surprised at the fidelity of actions it opens up – when sorting through items on a table is not an incredible chore but close to natural-feeling, you realize that a controller or mouse gives you only a very blunt fist to do it with.
It’s similar to touchscreens versus mice, except only multi-touch offers entirely new interactions. It’s similar with the loss of fast response in exchange for dropping a simplified model of interaction (pointing).
As far as interacting through verbs, I found myself thinking through design like that not as much because of inputs but because of programming, because I think of features I need to add and how much they’ll cost vs the richness they add.
Well I guess that is GOTY 2017 wrapped up already 
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not yet mentioned in this thread though they’re both guaranteed to be a great time: original sin 2 and rock of ages 2
Giving you a half-full blood potion
(I didn’t find Rock of Ages particularly appealing, but OS is neat and OS2 looks amazing)