Amarna Forum

One of the key reasons I post here is to contribute my own thoughts, feelings, and perspectives on things that I care about. I'm very grateful to Chud for maintaining this place. It gives me a place to do a lot. Now and then I post about how I like moderate to long form (by internet standards) text discourse as I believe it's an approach that's generally far better suited to exploring what I care about than the more common options generally taken online. I like writing, but it's not all that interests me, and I don't think it's the best approach for everything.

I have a new idea now. You've all probably noticed I love video games. I write about them a lot. But I want to share more. I believe that there are ideas on my mind and perspectives I would like to share with you that I might struggle to get across in writing. And it seems obvious to me that the best way to bring my thoughts and experiences closer to you all is through a shared experience. So for a little while now I've been creating this. A kind of Let's Play of Halo: Combat Evolved.

The idea is explained as best as I'm able off the cuff within the first video. I intend to put together something casual, personal, sort of halfway between a conventional let's play and a walking tour of a virtual space. Treating the game by turns as a game and a museum. I have many thoughts on Halo which are very idiosyncratic, which I have often not expressed before. And rather than stumbling through the abstraction of writing while thinking about the game in my head, I am experimenting with describing the thing as it is immediately in front of me. This allows me to point at details, demonstrate phenomena, be reminded of and even forced to consider every part of it at least somewhat as I go.

Again, I say all of this in the video in an attempt to be thorough, I tried to make these before it occurred to me to post them here. They're meant to stand alone. Not really a scheme to take over youtube. At this point more like mental exercise and something to show friends. So far feedback has been positive and I enjoy making them so I think I'll keep sharing them and keep doing them. I have a lot to say about Halo and video games in general. I wasn't sure before starting but I know for sure now, I can speak over video games indefinitely. The issue is not finding things to say. It's finding space and structure to say it all.

I've gotten lots of feedback already, mostly personal from people I've been sharing these with. Please share any thoughts you have on these here. I greatly enjoy hearing peoples' thoughts.



https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...UvVRcSI5QV

The videos should be in the playlist. The first video is embedded alone. If youtube doesn't suggest the full playlist to you you should be able to find it by clicking my channel.

And I think I'm going to keep doing these with different games just for the fun of it. It feels like getting stuff done and I have many more thoughts on so much more than Halo. Might be a very fun excuse to start more video game threads.

I didn't expect you to have such a silky smooth voice, Anthony

(07-11-2023, 09:59 AM)Handi Wrote: [ -> ]I didn't expect you to have such a silky smooth voice, Anthony

I sound awful tonight, throat got all closed up. Hopefully the videos from other sessions are a bit better, and I'll try to present a bit cleaner in the future. It's something I'm very conscious of and unhappy with at present.

edit: Thank you if you are being serious, but either way this is still kind of a sore spot for me and something I want to improve at.

(07-11-2023, 10:22 AM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]I sound awful tonight, throat got all closed up. Hopefully the videos from other sessions are a bit better, and I'll try to present a bit cleaner in the future. It's something I'm very conscious of and unhappy with at present.

edit: Thank you if you are being serious, but either way this is still kind of a sore spot for me and something I want to improve at.

I was! I may be listening with "accent goggles" but you have a strong voice and an even, controlled delivery. Better than many who do this sort of thing for a living even.

---

If you make it big on YT, I'll give Amarna a couple of months until it receives the Nic treatment (complete nuking of the forum)

I knew nothing about Halo and don't play this sort of game but this was still surprisingly entertaining and insightful, watched the first 5 videos and will hopefully finish it later.
Discussing your surroundings as you walk around in the game is more comfy and engaging than the standard video essay style of gameplay footage arbitrarily pasted over the top to stimulate the viewer. Switching between old/new graphics also worked well for this format.
I do think the first video is going to turn people off and it almost turned me off. I understand if you don't want to edit or script any of it but that could help a lot for the intro. Maybe I should have skipped through it.

(07-11-2023, 11:48 AM)Handi Wrote: [ -> ]I was! I may be listening with "accent goggles" but you have a strong voice and an even, controlled delivery. Better than many who do this sort of thing for a living even.

---

If you make it big on YT, I'll give Amarna a couple of months until it receives the Nic treatment (complete nuking of the forum)

Well, thank you. Very pleased to hear that. I've never put much thought or practice into this, still kind of surprised when people tell me they like how I speak since I'm just trying to casually be myself. 

(07-11-2023, 12:05 PM)Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote: [ -> ]I knew nothing about Halo and don't play this sort of game but this was still surprisingly entertaining and insightful, watched the first 5 videos and will hopefully finish it later.
Discussing your surroundings as you walk around in the game is more comfy and engaging than the standard video essay style of gameplay footage arbitrarily pasted over the top to stimulate the viewer. Switching between old/new graphics also worked well for this format.
I do think the first video is going to turn people off and it almost turned me off. I understand if you don't want to edit or script any of it but that could help a lot for the intro. Maybe I should have skipped through it.

Pleased to hear. The idea is to be pleasant and interesting. And I really don't think it should take too much to be so. I am still kind of bothered by the state of the first video. Maybe I should even create an introduction, I don't know. I'll think about it.

Watched the videos in one go - very interesting. The contrast between old and new graphics on the level prior to the ascension into the alien ship was stunning. The fact that said alien battleship is called "Truth and Reconciliation" can be positioned so neatly in a racialist reading of the game, it's astounding nobody has commented on it (at least Google gives me no relevant results).

(07-12-2023, 01:23 AM)asdf1234 Wrote: [ -> ]Watched the videos in one go - very interesting. The contrast between old and new graphics on the level prior to the ascension into the alien ship was stunning. The fact that said alien battleship is called "Truth and Reconciliation" can be positioned so neatly in a racialist reading of the game, it's astounding nobody has commented on it (at least Google gives me no relevant results).

An idea I've had if I were to ever make edited videos in which I formally present my views on games would be calling them "I am the only one who understands...", or in the case of Japanese games "I am the only white man who understands..."

I genuinely believe this about a lot of video games. It's a complete market void. If anything the more video essays take off the dumber and more complacent everyone gets. I have never seen anybody talk about Pikmin as a clever and thoughtful meta-commentary on the nature of work and adventure. I have never seen anybody talk at length about Silent Hill and Stephen King/Brian De Palma. If you actually think seriously about any particular video game you like there is a very real possibility that you will be the first one to do so.

I may have mentioned that I have tried watching a "Halo Guy's" let's play before and found it completely pointless. He had evidently thought of nothing in that 20 odd years. I have also watched videos "explaining" Silent Hill. When I learned these exist I thought "damn, beaten to it by years". Then I saw them... these people are retarded. The average person's idea of "explaining" a thing is to just build a kind of mental encylopedia/history of things which aren't real with no insight into how it came into being or why it is what it is. The idea of a creative will behind the nature of the thing is not considered. Media just kind of falls from the sky in a complete form. Is what it is and could only be what it is. Knowing the thing means chronology of events and the names of the various fictional parts. And I'm pretty sure they couldn't even get that right. These guys seem confused by the basic chronology of Silent Hill 1's very simple plot. Not even getting into the meaning of the story, which is very Western inspired, and very Japanese. And paralleled in many other famous works of Japanese popular culture. It's really incredible how much there is to talk about when you seriously get going on any video game and how much of it is completely pristine intellectual territory. Most video games have simply never been thought about. Never appreciated.

I think I'm going to have to keep doing these. It all comes so easily. And if I don't do it who will? Plenty more games I'd like to talk about, and plenty of different ways I could augment my presentation.

Thank you for your attention and comment. Every time I see someone seriously engaging with these thoughts and ideas I feel great. I'm so glad to see that I can share what Halo is to me. That others can see what I see. Are willing and able to take these things seriously. Thank you, it really means a lot.

Consider this an extension of me playing Halo rather than its own thing. I only intend to talk about general details in relation to other Bungie games and get lost in a series of tangents and thoughts which I find myself more interested in exploring than the game itself. This may bore you, or you may be into that. I don't know, but either way, here's me actually playing Myth. While kind of talking about it but more around it.




The tangents I think work a lot better in Halo. This got out of hand frankly.

---

I was just thinking and I decided what I want to do next. I'll make an episode zero, and an interlude episode before the next one of me playing Halo. The intentions of both being to talk in a slightly more formal way over external visuals to speak through a couple of key concepts which I think frankly won't get out as well as I'm talking over the game. Episode Zero will be a cleaner introduction to the intentions behind an appreciation run of Halo, and will probably serve as the home video for the channel, and I'll make a kind of theory recap video for where I'm at in the game in which I'll give a clean overview of what I see as key expressive elements seen in the game so far to begin to formally reveal my impressions of what Bungie were getting at with Halo.

These light-shedding non-gameplay videos I think will be good for me to push myself to do more than record and upload and link raw footage and try a bit harder to express myself in more ways. Develop more skills. etc. By incorporating these sort of light video essays into what is ostensibly a let's play, I'll use the same playlist, I'll create more of a hybrid media final project which I hope will be more interesting. As I probably said at some point, I don't consider methods of presentation other than the raw game bad. Just I think there are strengths and weaknesses to all approaches. I use plenty of text here, I use plenty of raw game on youtube. I think that if I force myself to talk over images and videos I could make it work. My appreciation of the thing is sufficiently grounded for it to not be a waste of time to thinking people. And I hope that by talking in abstract and then showing in concrete I can achieve a kind of reinforcement which will make certain more outlandish claims more plausible and better conveyed than purely through one approach or the other.

And of course like everything I'm doing, the mean reason I want to do this is because the idea genuinely feels interesting to me right now. I'm doing it because I want to. I'll start writing this now and tomorrow and hopefully have some more stuff up soon. And while I'm doing this I might record other stuff like Boltgun or some other stuff I have lying around to keep myself interested and busy. Keep videos moving onto the channel. You know.

All right, some very interesting Halo news. Some guys working with the people at 343 dug up and recreated an old internal Bungie build of Halo. Early days of development before a lot of things were finalised. They put it up as a playable mod. Very damn cool. If you like Halo yourself I strongly recommend taking a look. And if you like listening to me I'll have a quick video exploring it up in about 30 minutes.



Here it is, right under the other extremely important Halo news.

https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/digsite-discoveries

Allegedly they're going to do more of these, like the more famous Halo 2 E3 trailer level. Very interesting stuff. But for my interests in Halo this level is kind of the peak. I talk a bit in this first video but am kind of scatterbrained. Honestly, I'm so fascinated by it I'm probably going to do at least one more. This thing really vindicates a lot of stuff I think Bungie were going for in Halo.

Here we go. A questionably coherent playthrough of some fascinating game history.

Excellent stuff, Anthony. I've been told that Halo is a Bible allegory by midwits without much explanation, except that John 1:17 (or 11:7) is a verse in the Bible and therefore Master Chief is Jesus Christ. The equivalent of that phenomenon of received memes you discussed in your Myth videos. A perfect warrior being led by a perfect wisdom as they are in the Aryan epics of which chivalric epics are an extension makes far, far more sense.

Your discussions on physicality put into words what I think many Total War fans struggled to express about what was wrong with new Total War games, and your discussion of why strategy games died in the Sunlust videos was absolutely correct, too. Total War went from a very physical terrarium of virtual soldiers clashing and bouncing off one another to LegendOfTotalWar Korean meta clicks-per-minuteslop where visually busy giant Warhammer monstrosities phase through each other while surrounded by opposing forces of micromanaged skirmishers running around the battlefield like chickens with their heads cut off. The only YouTuber who touched on this before you was Reynold Sanity, in his critique of Rome 2. Even Volound, harsh critic of modern CA he may be, can only muster criticisms about "balance" and AI, probably because of the same cognitive deficiencies that cause him to enjoy leftist Warhammer subreddits.

Not to take things wildly off-topic, but I'd be interested in your opinions on the Max Payne series, particularly the last entry. I think Max Payne 3 is an ugly and flawed game, yet one that is much more compelling than its predecessors, because the developers set out to make a violent, pessimistic bad cop movie you can play and had the requisite underlying "viscerality", so to speak, to succeed where the older games failed. Max Payne 1 & 2 feel like Quake mods. In Max Payne 3, you feel every impact, which makes it very fun to shoot favela apes. The story is dreadfully boring, many of the themes are unsalutary, and the levels are suffocating in a way I can't fully explain with the limited time I have right now, but it's excellent at conveying that particular feeling the devs were going for. I don't know, you probably haven't played them and don't have any interest in doing so.

Please make more videos. If audio mixing is a problem, it might be worth getting OBS and creating separate audio channels for your mic and output, so you can tweak them as needed.

(10-17-2023, 02:52 PM)cats Wrote: [ -> ]Excellent stuff, Anthony.

Thank you very much. I greatly appreciate all the nice and thoughtful comments. Makes it all feel worthwhile.

Quote:I've been told that Halo is a Bible allegory by midwits without much explanation, except that John 1:17 (or 11:7) is a verse in the Bible and therefore Master Chief is Jesus Christ. The equivalent of that phenomenon of received memes you discussed in your Myth videos. A perfect warrior being led by a perfect wisdom as they are in the Aryan epics of which chivalric epics are an extension makes far, far more sense.

I'm glad the picture is coming together despite the fact I haven't really laid it out too clearly in one place yet. I think my most coherent effort was a comment under a youtube video made by this furry guy who kind of half got it but didn't go far enough. I've said now and then that a few people actually half get Halo. They recognise some of the allusions, they find some coherence and intention behind them, but nobody can (or is willing to) put it all together yet.

Quote:Your discussions on physicality put into words what I think many Total War fans struggled to express about what was wrong with new Total War games, and your discussion of why strategy games died in the Sunlust videos was absolutely correct, too. Total War went from a very physical terrarium of virtual soldiers clashing and bouncing off one another to LegendOfTotalWar Korean meta clicks-per-minuteslop where visually busy giant Warhammer monstrosities phase through each other while surrounded by opposing forces of micromanaged skirmishers running around the battlefield like chickens with their heads cut off. The only YouTuber who touched on this before you was Reynold Sanity, in his critique of Rome 2. Even Volound, harsh critic of modern CA he may be, can only muster criticisms about "balance" and AI, probably because of the same cognitive deficiencies that cause him to enjoy leftist Warhammer subreddits.

I find your phrasing here quite funny. Again, I'm glad you've clearly understood where I was going. I often worry that I'm circling the ideas too much and losing them. And it's funny you should mention those two particular youtube guys. They both say a fair amount of more or less correct individual things, but on the whole manage to be very wrong and confused people. RS is an Australian who thinks what we need is some kind of Socialist program (hah, this place is doomed), while Volound is of course some kind of weird rationalist leftist warhammer guy. I think there's an Anthonycore insight we can reach through this. I imagine the venn diagram of interest in Warhammer and Total War overlaps very heavily, lots of people in the middle. And I think what heavily drives an interest in both things is something that also would naturally lead to leftism... or warehousism. That being that both are very deeply male, but distinctly neutered male interests. Warhammer is the heroic tradition and WW2 rendered plastic and silly. Total War is a grand, but ultimately weightless power fantasy devoid of anything that feels like a masculine drive. I imagine there is little overlap between true Total War fans and appreciators of Sengoku Rance (a superior strategy game, I'm not kidding).

I do believe that you're correct with your comment on "cognitive deficiencies" here, just the deficiencies may also be spiritual. That part might even be more important.

Quote:Not to take things wildly off-topic, but I'd be interested in your opinions on the Max Payne series, particularly the last entry. I think Max Payne 3 is an ugly and flawed game, yet one that is much more compelling than its predecessors, because the developers set out to make a violent, pessimistic bad cop movie you can play and had the requisite underlying "viscerality", so to speak, to succeed where the older games failed. Max Payne 1 & 2 feel like Quake mods. In Max Payne 3, you feel every impact, which makes it very fun to shoot favela apes. The story is dreadfully boring, many of the themes are unsalutary, and the levels are suffocating in a way I can't fully explain with the limited time I have right now, but it's excellent at conveying that particular feeling the devs were going for. I don't know, you probably haven't played them and don't have any interest in doing so.

I've actually posted about Max Payne here before at least once. I agree with you that 1 and 2 feel like Quake. They remind me particularly of Star Wars: Jedi Academy. Very physical body. As Pigsaw puts it when we talk about this, its innovation is being a guns and shooting game which is about playing as a body holding guns rather than being a gun. You are physically present in Quake too, but it's far more visceral when you can see your guy and throw him around with these relatively grounded and weighty maneuvers. Beyond that, aesthetically it's a kind of light campy take on Noir which in the first game more or less works on the pace and momentum of its simple plot of one night of escalating apocalyptic violence. It's fine.

Max Payne 2 I liked least because it felt like it could have been more but instead chose to heavily pull its punches. It was shaping up to be some really dark and evil neo-noir early on, then it pulled the rug out from under all of that and seemed very eager to assure me that it was actually lame and nothing cool was actually going on. At first it feels like it's a game about investigating The Finders or something. Then you're just fighting generic goons and all mysterious behaviour is explained in very petty and mundane ways. Nothing of substance happens to Max, his characterisation and plotting go from camp to insult and the whole experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Finally Max Payne 3 was my favourite. Again, undercuts itself on the narrative front, Max's characterisation is boring, the plot toys with Neo-Noir and taking cues from gritty modern cinematic takes on exotic crime, Miami Vice, Man on Fire, City of God, but ultimately gives us camp at best and at worst seems to mock the idea that we should expect them to actually try on this front.

But despite that, the game is an aesthetic success in my opinion. At every point where those elements fall away and the game starts to feel and handle like a music video based on itself, it's fantastic. The game peaks when music is pounding, max is diving, things are speeding up and slowing down, the camera is dramatically cutting away to heavily dropping corpses like Killer7, this is what Max Payne 3 is about. And when it's in its zone it's fantastic. It just really makes one wonder why they even bothered with the rest. I want to say it's the Miami Vice of video games, but it puts too much weight on its bad story. The Miami Vice of Video Games is a title I have to give to Kane and Lynch 2, despite its technical inferiority.



Point that never gets brought up enough in talking video games, and something western games tend to measure up particularly badly on, graphic design. It's all multimedia. And thankfully Max Payne 3 is very conscious of the fact it is multimedia. It's a movie game in the good sense. And its menus and death screens feel like posters. Well thought out graphic effects that actually play with what you're doing, like this death-screen I got here. Great stuff. It's no JRPG, but it's a great effort for something white people made.

And on that note, here's the tv trailer for the game. Probably the peak of the whole experience. The game is at its best when it feels like this:

Quote:Please make more videos. If audio mixing is a problem, it might be worth getting OBS and creating separate audio channels for your mic and output, so you can tweak them as needed.

I've gotten several nice comments and expressions of interest recently, so I would like to make another video tonight. And I'm trying to err on the side of caution with audio mixing now, would rather you can't hear much of the game than you have to strain to hear me.

Max Payne 3 playing like a "music video of itself" is a genius way to describe it. I'm glad there are people out there who understand my love for that game, flawed it may be. Rockstar would have produced infinitely better games post-MP3 if they had stuck to making linear games that feel like playing a movie, which is evidently what the team at the time were interested in producing, rather than what the yenta apes on Mongolian basket-weaving forums have them doing now. I don't know how to fully put into words my disgust with the aesthetic of GTA V, but really, the terrible airy gameplay speaks for itself. The /v/ Mexicans succeeded at getting Rockstar to put jets and WACKY! vehicles back in their GTA games, just like their favorite one with the goes-hard negro, at the sacrifice of GTA IV's attention to detail and weight, which would cut into time they could use to develop their epic heist setpieces with meaningless "choices" that appeal to the aforementioned yenta apes. And RDR 2 suffers from the same "one million little levels of no consequence that you have to walk between" syndrome as all the rest of the open world games produced today, with an added, incredibly boring "immersive" crafting system that makes me feel like I'm in one of those WeChat videos where there are Chinamen chopping wood and building bonfires to roast squid on, or whatever. RDR 2 feels like a bitter Rockstar employee saw the Crowbcat video comparing IV and V and so dialed the weightiness of earlier Rockstar games up to the level of parody, where even walking across the street becomes a chore. Dropped it after three hours.

Alas, we're pretty far off-topic. Bringing it back around to Halo and received memes, I would really like to ask what people who think Master Chief = Jesus Christ think he does that reflects that religious figure. He doesn't proselytize. He doesn't have disciples. He's not bringing a new religion to the people unless you count the Elites, I suppose, but that's not really his doing. He does not sacrifice himself to redeem the world. I wouldn't be surprised if some video essayist or (more likely) /v/ greentext said this and they just adopted this belief uncritically. At least there's compelling evidence that Myth's story was, indeed, somewhat inspired by the Black Company (which I am partial to since I read it at a young age and the idea of "dark fantasy" was cool and new to me then). I suppose this is self-flagellation, to some extent, because I've certainly done this in the past as a consequence of being immersed in the status-jockeying environment of /v/ during my formative years. I think your videos have finally given me the impetus to break free of Mandalorian IGN review-brain and actually think about games as a multimedia experience.

I'll end this here, as I have things to attend to. I'm still getting caught up on your Halo videos, but I'm glad you made another video on the subject.

(10-17-2023, 02:52 PM)cats Wrote: [ -> ]Excellent stuff, Anthony. I've been told that Halo is a Bible allegory by midwits without much explanation, except that John 1:17 (or 11:7) is a verse in the Bible and therefore Master Chief is Jesus Christ. The equivalent of that phenomenon of received memes you discussed in your Myth videos. A perfect warrior being led by a perfect wisdom as they are in the Aryan epics of which chivalric epics are an extension makes far, far more sense.

I had quickly caught onto Master Chief's name as a reference to Stallone's character from the film Demolition Man, "John Spartan".



John is an exceptional officer who's often the only man capable of taking on the worst that Los Angeles has to offer.  As the result of a costly encounter with Wesley Snipes' character, John is cryogenically frozen as punishment by his commanders, only to be unsealed decades after to combat Snipes again.  Sound familiar?  John Spartan wakes up to a soycucked faggot libtard future that can't find anyone else but him to rely on to stop Simon Phoenix and the deadly criminals he's galvanised.  Our hero in Halo, John-117, the SPARTAN super soldier is merely a component of a whole system like this, cryogenically frozen and left dormant until battle commences.  The society in Halo is decidedly not libtarded, and the Master Chief and his SPARTAN brethren find solace in battle as the most exceptional warriors the UNSC can muster against its foes, most especially the Covenant.

I'm not certain how much of this is intentional or coincidental, but it certainly fits the pattern Bungie followed with inspiration from Hollywood, that of science-fiction action films (The marines are the marines from Aliens, the Elites are Bungie's take on the aliens from Predator, etc.).  I'm more likely to believe this than I do the Biblical reference narrative.  And what a coincidence for my next thought, doesn't Wesley Snipes' character look like a black version of Duke Nukem?  Who made Duke Nukem?  3D Realms, and guess what game they contributed to.  Max Payne.

(10-18-2023, 04:29 AM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]I've actually posted about Max Payne here before at least once. I agree with you that 1 and 2 feel like Quake. They remind me particularly of Star Wars: Jedi Academy. Very physical body. As Pigsaw puts it when we talk about this, its innovation is being a guns and shooting game which is about playing as a body holding guns rather than being a gun. You are physically present in Quake too, but it's far more visceral when you can see your guy and throw him around with these relatively grounded and weighty maneuvers. Beyond that, aesthetically it's a kind of light campy take on Noir which in the first game more or less works on the pace and momentum of its simple plot of one night of escalating apocalyptic violence. It's fine.

Finally Max Payne 3 was my favourite. Again, undercuts itself on the narrative front, Max's characterisation is boring, the plot toys with Neo-Noir and taking cues from gritty modern cinematic takes on exotic crime, Miami Vice, Man on Fire, City of God, but ultimately gives us camp at best and at worst seems to mock the idea that we should expect them to actually try on this front.

But despite that, the game is an aesthetic success in my opinion. At every point where those elements fall away and the game starts to feel and handle like a music video based on itself, it's fantastic. The game peaks when music is pounding, max is diving, things are speeding up and slowing down, the camera is dramatically cutting away to heavily dropping corpses like Killer7, this is what Max Payne 3 is about. And when it's in its zone it's fantastic. It just really makes one wonder why they even bothered with the rest.

I'm delighted to find my opinions on Max Payne largely replicated here.  The games were primarily aesthetic experiences for me, something I found to be finally fulfilled with the third game, in spite of all the retards decrying it over all its faults.  Max Payne was designed to feel like an action film, in fact, most 'shooting' or 'FPS' games at the time held such heavy influence.  Doom can be described as Alien or Aliens with Hell.  Duke Nukem 3D can be described as experiencing an Arnold Schwarzenegger film first and foremost conjoined with numerous other popular films at the time.  Blood's an interactive horror movie so to speak, Shadow Warrior wants to be John Woo and Jackie Chan with a pastiche of everything else Asian(in a loving way).  Max Payne also wants to feel like a John Woo film.





Extremely flashy, jumping and sliding everywhere. Bullets all over the place, automatic and semi-automatic guns firing at the same pace as rain splattering the ground.  You can tell Max Payne wants to be this.  Actually-modelled bullets instead of hitscans flying around that Max can dodge, dual-wielding pistols, the gritty, dark locales each mission takes place.  And of course, the game's third-person perspective in allowing you to actually see Max do all these cool moves you could only imagine yourself doing when playing Quake or any of the aforementioned 'shooting' games.  Unfortunately, the game falls flat in regards to many other elements at play, enemies themselves feeling lifeless and taking entire magazines of bullets dumped into their bodies to take them down (unless you want to imagine they're doped up on the drug that incites the story).

(10-18-2023, 03:11 PM)cats Wrote: [ -> ]Max Payne 3 playing like a "music video of itself" is a genius way to describe it. I'm glad there are people out there who understand my love for that game, flawed it may be. Rockstar would have produced infinitely better games post-MP3 if they had stuck to making linear games that feel like playing a movie, which is evidently what the team at the time were interested in producing, rather than what the yenta apes on Mongolian basket-weaving forums have them doing now.

In spite of everything retards say about the third game, I thought it was the fulfilment of everything the first had been trying to do.



This is the (in)famous airport shootout sequence from the final level.  Perhaps the last time an AAA gaming company made anything I found cool.  The game feels awesome and visceral the whole way through, especially ignoring Max's comically astronomic self-loathing and other annoyances (the 'cutscenes' aren't so bad especially watching favela apes burned alive).  Everything here feels very John Woo, the experience is realised here finer than perhaps any other game (that I've played).  Everything feels like interfacing with the coolest of action films, and as with the other games, you get to play and watch your character interact with it all, bullets in the enemy's face (that you get to watch up close), bullets in your face (that you also get to watch up close).  I love this game.  I suppose I ought to get around to Kane & Lynch soon.

(10-18-2023, 04:29 AM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]Total War is a grand, but ultimately weightless power fantasy devoid of anything that feels like a masculine drive. I imagine there is little overlap between true Total War fans and appreciators of Sengoku Rance (a superior strategy game, I'm not kidding).

Amusing you mention this as I've had a blast playing Sengoku Rance as of late after having greatly enjoyed Kichikuou Rance, amazing all they had to do was take the simple premise of Koei's Nobunaga's Ambition and apply that to a 'visual novel' where the hero is a serial rapist warlord who has his fun for every province you conquer.  "Middle Age Pervert" in a way.  A game where you're rewarded for all your violence, conquest, and rape.  I write 'visual novel' there in quotes as it's much more than that, a simple 'strategy game', or a "porn game", it's multimedia that really tries to sell you the experience of being someone like Rance.  And it's fantastic.  Heil Japan as always.


As for Halo, I want to thank Anthony for inspiring me to finally start playing, or rather, experiencing these games due to his thoughtful videos, which I enjoyed all throughout, in spite of the seemingly incoherent thoughts you claim to face as I'm myself no stranger to such, and I could still grasp it.  I came to it very late though as I always say, better late than never.  Halo is a very beautiful world, not just materially as represented in the games.  I really appreciate its attempts to be much more than a 'game', with books (I enjoyed Fall of Reach while passing time), live action trailers, alternate reality games, and even a short series of anime.  It's a world which you can experience that the games are merely a representation of.  Feels far larger than anything the games themselves represent.  An aside, does anyone here still remember LEGO's Bionicle?  It's another multimedia franchise I think of that lived the same time frame as Bungie's Halo did in the 2000's and put much effort in setting a massive world with various experiences to enjoy outside the toys these accompanied, largely through short books, films, and the nascent internet.  Danish LEGO business executives offering its craftsmen to fairly standard European and American writers and artists to make something far more out of it.  Far more puerile to Halo's juvenile, but still sold a vision of a familiar yet alien and mysterious world, biomechanics, ancient warriors, clans, history, forerunners, and violence, everything young men find cool, before devolving into endlessly extravagant lore for again, a bunch of toys (not too dissimilar to Warhammer when I think of it).

There's still much more for me to take in, years to ponder on about exactly what Halo is as you do, but suffice to say it's something I'll take great pleasure in doing.  It's unfortunate most people just see these as multiplayer party games or "sci-fi shooter" "weapon sandbox" /v/ "My First FPS" "durr the grenade is its own button" cocksucking nigger faggot retard bullshit, to me, Halo is an experience through a much larger Starship Troopers, Aliens, Ender's Game, Mobile Suit Gundam, M.D. Geist even, some of the best of science fiction.  A racial holy war against an vast and insurmountably superior foe, where the best and brightest of humanity (note the vast majority of our representatives in Halo's fiction are White or Japanese excepting Sgt. Johnson) are capable of flourishing as we become a civilisation capable of taking anything seriously (probably the most unrealistic aspect of Halo).  Large battlefields of chaos and destruction, awesome weaponry and vehicles, a vast universe full of mystery waiting to be uncovered, intimidating and seemingly indomitable murderous hordes of aliens, SPARTAN Aryan supermen in immaculate suits of shining anime armour, the narrative of the Forerunners...  a very cool and inspiring vision, even in Bungie's swansong with Reach where much of the original ideas were diluting by that point, one could still grasp it.


Hail Halo: Combat Evolved, hail Halo 2, and hail the memory of old Bungie.

Quote:Even Volound, harsh critic of modern CA he may be, can only muster criticisms about "balance" and AI, probably because of the same cognitive deficiencies that cause him to enjoy leftist Warhammer subreddits.

Quote:while Volound is of course some kind of weird rationalist leftist warhammer guy.

Volound despises Warhammer and its fanbase. 

(10-19-2023, 01:06 AM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]Volound despises Warhammer and its fanbase. 

This is 56 minutes long. A glance at the comments suggests this is from a kind of warehousey perspective. Anti-consumer, I could run the company better, etc.

Does he hate the idea of warhammer as warhammer, or does he hate Games Workshop?

(10-19-2023, 01:06 AM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]Volound despises Warhammer and its fanbase.

Yes, and if you watch the video, you'll see that he hates them because they're "chuds" and "racists" (hence why God Emperor Trump is in the thumbnail) while also proclaiming his love for some leftist Warhammer subreddit I won't bother looking up the name of.

He hates it for a variety of reasons, and yes it being "right-wing" or "Fascist" is one of them. He also said in the past that he has actively avoided anything Warhammer related ever since he first found out about it when he was 12.

(10-19-2023, 01:20 AM)cats Wrote: [ -> ]while also proclaiming his love for some leftist Warhammer subreddit I won't bother looking up the name of.

It's been a while since I watched these videos of his so sorry if I misremember anything.

Underappreciated aspect of what makes the campaigns' of Halo-era FPSs so repayable is the way they scale difficulty. The Halo games both decreased player health (and regen) and increased the complexity of the enemies players fought. Not only upgrading the Elites to higher health versions/adding more but adding NPCs with higher level tactics (suicide grunts, etc.). Bungie also notably cut the timer on the grand finale to make it more rewarding. 

This isn't to say making Legendary in Halo 2 kill you both in co-op if one player died was a good idea. It decreased the fun factor and due to a faulty checkpoint system (understandable in a co-op campaign) lead to game breaking loops of one of the players dying from a plasma grenade immediately after spawning over and over.

Most modern AAA games will simply reduce the damage a player does to enemies and increase the damage taken by an arbitrary amount, which does more to disrupt the flow of combat than increase difficulty. It also leads to the most common type of death being random AI grenade spam. 

The only challenging aspect of playing Fallout 4 on hard is that you're having to carry around more (i.e. less fun) guns to make up for all the ammo you're going to blow through. And that's better than games which take after Skyrim, just forcing you to play their equivalent of stealth archer if you want to do anything.