Amarna Forum

I didn't make this thread last night but apparently none of you had trouble finding the videos.




It's fun to contemplate the boring badness of this game. Much more fun to think about than to play. I see people want to think about this already so let's have a standing thread in which we can all talk about it. I get a bit distracted from the game (very easy to happen) in this first video, and I'm aware the in these the game sound is a bit loud. If I do more I'll fix that.




This one seemed interesting to talk about for a few reasons. One being the contrast with the other "First Person Shooter" I'm playing. Another being its spiritual sickness. A third being how many examples of awfulness and stupidity looking this game up brought to my attention.




For your consideration. This is the first guy I found just playing the game when it was new and I was looking it up. This man is absolutely disgusting to me. He is an argument for a Moldbuggian "rewilding" of humanity. This man should not have the internet. He should not be literate. Literally any point I skip to in these videos he is saying something disgusting, obscene, completely retarded, meaningless, I struggle to believe he is real. He was also a significant factor in the creation of the "I Hate Memes" thread. Bransle and I discussed this guy a bit. The way he just says things which are memes at various points. Look at the way this guy talks in response to what's in front of him and tell me he's sentient.

As I say in the Halo thing and elsewhere, I want to record games to be the change I'd like to see on the internet. It really is just about impossible right now to look up a video game and hear something intelligent. Or even bearable. On one hand we have this guy. And on the other we have video essay brain, where poserdom and genuine appreciation fight in the minds of video creators and audiences to such a violent degree that the two become inseparably smashed together and people only know how to think in bad inherited terminology which was created to obfuscate. At best you have sincerity working within unworkable forms. At worst you have outright liars trying to mindrape you for money and attention.

Just some thoughts you don't have to engage with. Thinking out loud a little here. Feel free to just talk about the game.

The violence is on the same level of Terraria. The enemy is just kind of *poof* and is gone. 

All of the layout is uninteresting and unappealing to look at. Also I don’t really know what’s happening from the video, like you usually have some vague idea of some theme but the lack of person style gives it this atavistic generic look. If you asked an AI to make a shooting game with bad graphics it would compile this.  

Also the pace, or rather lack of feeling or progression. The most interesting thing in the video was when that frog thing attacked you, everyone else kind of just shoots in place, that frog jumping up was interesting. Without a feeling of finding new things, which is because it lacks style in the first place, there is lack of any compelling reason to progress in a game, in the first minute you pretty much Play it all. A drastic change in theme of area is interesting and prevents you from getting bored. The game is simply too simple. 

Also nice voice, it’s better than mine.

I might record more video tonight, but in the mean time I can post some supplementary material here. Someone on the heavensite (discord) in a kind of related discussion said to compare the trailer for Brutal Doom to the trailer for Boltgun.




Extremely sociologically important comments.



I love Retro. I love Doom. Etc. Do these people strike you as the Doom audience? Or people who really like saying things like "Really hyped for this wholesome retro shooter for us boomer shooter folx"?

Now here is the reason that this game was possible, and why first person shooters aren't just Counter Strike and Call of Duty forever.




Do you see the difference? There is a genuine vital fire in this. It is not carried by inertia and affectation. You can feel the creator's fascination with the subject matter driving him forward. The bizarre and idiosyncratic details that could only have come from a desire to realise something that didn't already exist. Despite being built on the bones of a far older game (unlike boltgun, which is in Unreal or something) Brutal Doom is a shockingly forward looking game. The bones are old, but the beast is new. Opposite is true for Boltgun of course. New parts bent towards a tired and spiritless faux-old thing for people who wish they were older so they could tell kids that fun isn't real and back the claim with experience.

I love Brutal Doom. I despise Boltgun.

I was linked to this specimen's channel and noticed a familiar game in one of his thumbnails. This is the target audience:

(07-12-2023, 04:40 AM)Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote: [ -> ]I was linked to this specimen's channel and noticed a familiar game in one of his thumbnails. This is the target audience:

Look how much more elaborate his channel is, but I'm winning on views. I guess that's good news. I was expecting big numbers. As you say, this is gaming culture.




"I hate... video games..."

The way that they render the player's weapons is pretty interesting. It's being rendered as a separate image, then moved up and down as though it's a sprite. Seeing that combined with dynamic lighting is really neat. Not sure why they did that, considering the look they're going for, but it's a cool technique.

The entire look is pretty bizarre in general, especially the 2D sprite-objects. I don't remember seeing that in many games with this kind of complicated 3D environment, because it looks fucking bad. The style of heavy shader effects paired with pre-shader texture rendering looks bad every time I see it.

(07-12-2023, 09:24 AM)kirukuni Wrote: [ -> ]The way that they render the player's weapons is pretty interesting. It's being rendered as a separate image, then moved up and down as though it's a sprite. Seeing that combined with dynamic lighting is really neat. Not sure why they did that, considering the look they're going for, but it's a cool technique.

The entire look is pretty bizarre in general, especially the 2D sprite-objects. I don't remember seeing that in many games with this kind of complicated 3D environment, because it looks fucking bad. The style of heavy shader effects paired with pre-shader texture rendering looks bad every time I see it.

Something I think you might actually appreciate (for better or worse, not necessarily appreciate as in like) is The Citadel. A Japanese doujin game which kind of got sold as an "indie boomer shooter" to confused steam users. The primary inspiration seems to be Bungie's Marathon and it's an interesting and very idiosyncratic use of old pseudo 3D styles along with some very un-90s and un-American imagery and sensibilities. Did you ever play or see this one? It was just brought to mind by your comments on how strange the heavy use of sprite-objects looks. This game also looks bizarre, but is very weird and hostile in tone by intention so its extreme uncannyness didn't really feel too wrong.




Here's just a playthrough you can flip through to see any part of it. I consciously chose not to link a "review" because confused soyjaks attempting to make sense of something like this could fill another thread on its own. I just wondered what you'd make of the visuals.

(07-12-2023, 01:50 AM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]The violence is on the same level of Terraria. The enemy is just kind of *poof* and is gone. 

In the comments section I expanded upon Anthony's comparison in the second video between the violence displayed in Boltgun and the 90's 'FPS' games that supposedly inspire it.

Quote:I had always thought Blood was the closest there was to a 'Brutal FPS' in the 90's given the technical limitations. You're given plenty of tools to enact mayhem on your targets who fall in numerous ways befitting of what was used. Your explosives can shatter entire groups of cultists or zombies while Caleb cackles like a madman before proceeding to kick the zombie's head like a football across the field. The cultists will break their enigmatic and arcane tongues into cries of "IT BURNS, IT BURNS! AAAHHHHH!!" as they flail around helplessly after you shower them with flames. Or you could provide them slow and agonising demises through electrocution or even a voodoo doll. Your actions carried a real sense of weight and viscerality that hadn't quite been achieved beforehand, all the while Caleb is still cackling and clearly enjoys this as much as you do. Not to mention the peaceful civilians you can inflict this upon as well.

Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior comparatively are much sillier, but you can still feel violence because the works that inspire them, Hollywood action films and Eastern martial arts films respectively, were still real at the time. In Duke, the Predator aliens can choke on your bullets before expiring, allowing you a choice between putting them out of their misery first or let them agonise. In Shadow Warrior, you not only dismember enemies with a katana, but they even off themselves for having failed to terminate you. Both games (and Blood) feature your character revelling in the carnage they have caused through witty one-liners as you finish imprinting the ground with your bloodstained boots. The developers obviously had fun with what they had created and the characters in which you interact through, which is clearly not evident in Boltgun. Enemies are fired upon, blood spatters about, they fall over. Rinse and repeat. The Space Marine carries on with his objective.

I'll let two gameplay videos of Shadow Warrior and Blood, both released in tandem in the year 1997, explain for themselves.





Now how about some Boltgun?



There's nary a distinct scream that the enemies release when expiring. Just what seems to be some generic ghastly shrieking that not only sounds hardly different from any generic pain noise, but is already drowned out by this exploding fruit or balloon noise when they EXPLODE into red paste. Where's the suffering? Where's the dismemberment? I know that a bolter gun in Warhammer is supposed to hold rounds comparable in strength to standard grenades but was that on the minds of the developers? The Build engine games are restrained and enemies react in accordance with how you much force you dispatch them with. Duke pelts a Predator alien with rounds from his Ripper chaingun and he chokes on his own blood and collapses. Lo Wang slices and dices his way through a horde of ninja oni, leaving them half the men they used to be. Caleb takes a shotgun to a zombie and BLOWS his fucking head clean off. What does the Space Marine in Boltgun inflict upon the Emperor's foes when in his righteous fury? They explode like balloons at simple gunfire or they fall over. Your chainsword (half-sword, half-chainsaw, come on) merely rips some blood out an enemy before they keel over and die. Hooray. Doom can be forgiven in its relative simplicity with the violence, but Boltgun obviously wants to be more than just Doom, of course not too excessively.

Back to my point, do you feel any violence at all in the Boltgun footage? Do you feel that your Space Marine deeply despises and wants to annihilate his unholy foes as much as you do? You can keep pressing the taunt key to which he readily professes such a desire. He obviously doesn't, at least, not compared to the Doomguy in Brutal Doom.



Look at that, enemies get their limbs blown off, they fly over, they dismember appropriately. Their blood and guts spill out congruent to your applied force. And like I said later in my comment, they can do the same to you. You can obviously tell the man at the helm relishes in this carnage, can you say the same for Boltgun? Of course not, almost every Western dev in the industry is a faggot. You'll just be numbed forever if you consume garbage like this. To paraphrase in my own and more vulgar wording a point Anthony made; the old 'FPS' games were made by real people who held real appreciation for violence and carnage, 'Boomer Shooters' are made by faggots who only hold a cargo cult-like "appreciation" for such works and hate violence.

(07-12-2023, 01:50 AM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]All of the layout is uninteresting and unappealing to look at. Also I don’t really know what’s happening from the video, like you usually have some vague idea of some theme but the lack of person style gives it this atavistic generic look. If you asked an AI to make a shooting game with bad graphics it would compile this.

Also the pace, or rather lack of feeling or progression. The most interesting thing in the video was when that frog thing attacked you, everyone else kind of just shoots in place, that frog jumping up was interesting. Without a feeling of finding new things, which is because it lacks style in the first place, there is lack of any compelling reason to progress in a game, in the first minute you pretty much Play it all. A drastic change in theme of area is interesting and prevents you from getting bored. The game is simply too simple.

One last point, levels in these stupid games are bloated to significant degrees. Arduous adventures across fields of barren wasteland populated by about three or four enemies before entering the arena zone where you fight many more, then return to the barren wasteland adventure and start the process over. Absolutely nothing happens, ever. Retards told me that traditional 'FPS' games took forever thanks to key hunting. Wow.

(07-12-2023, 11:43 AM)Lohengrin Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-12-2023, 01:50 AM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]The violence is on the same level of Terraria. The enemy is just kind of *poof* and is gone. 

In the comments section I expanded upon Anthony's comparison in the second video between the violence displayed in Boltgun and the 90's 'FPS' games that supposedly inspire it.

I didn't reply but I read and greatly appreciated that. And am glad to see direct visual references here so the point is even more vivid for the curious. It really sounds kind of psychotic to strain this point while playing but it's important. The nature of the violence is one of those nebulous soul factors.

That's something I can maybe talk about in the future. I go on about how we lose elements of video games which nobody thinks of a term to quantify. I think soul kind of accidentally came to serve as a catch-all term for anything which we feel makes a game good that we don't have a particular word for. A good mental exercise I would assign to the goblins on /v/ would be to try to explain themselves every time they say "soul". For their own edification and enjoyment of course. But because /v/ is /v/ this would be taken as some kind of scheme to entrap them and make them embarrass themselves in front of cool nigger.

And as for Blood:



I think it's very cool that of all the levels you linked this one. I strongly recommend people watch it. "Phantom Express". This level is on a train. Conceptually it is way more interesting than anything that was going on in Boltgun. And really most games that are coming out now. The point that can't be repeated enough is that conceptual progress was at least half of the thing back in the day. Within the realm of the technically possible you can completely show someone up just on how you think to use the same tools you both have access to.

The rapid and uneven development of "GRAPHICS" allowed this issue to get very confused. And now we're at the point where the old pioneers were very obviously showing up our new experts who are too busy taking orders from Neil Druckmann and rendering ferns to realise anything cool. The tools are not inherently a problem, but when you aren't doing anything cool they certainly can't help you. One million times zero is still zero. The world's most realistically rendered fun is less fun than the Build Engine monster-train.

I <3<3<3 Anthony!

(07-12-2023, 09:52 AM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-12-2023, 09:24 AM)kirukuni Wrote: [ -> ]The way that they render the player's weapons is pretty interesting. It's being rendered as a separate image, then moved up and down as though it's a sprite. Seeing that combined with dynamic lighting is really neat. Not sure why they did that, considering the look they're going for, but it's a cool technique.

The entire look is pretty bizarre in general, especially the 2D sprite-objects. I don't remember seeing that in many games with this kind of complicated 3D environment, because it looks fucking bad. The style of heavy shader effects paired with pre-shader texture rendering looks bad every time I see it.

Something I think you might actually appreciate (for better or worse, not necessarily appreciate as in like) is The Citadel. A Japanese doujin game which kind of got sold as an "indie boomer shooter" to confused steam users. The primary inspiration seems to be Bungie's Marathon and it's an interesting and very idiosyncratic use of old pseudo 3D styles along with some very un-90s and un-American imagery and sensibilities. Did you ever play or see this one? It was just brought to mind by your comments on how strange the heavy use of sprite-objects looks. This game also looks bizarre, but is very weird and hostile in tone by intention so its extreme uncannyness didn't really feel too wrong.




Here's just a playthrough you can flip through to see any part of it. I consciously chose not to link a "review" because confused soyjaks attempting to make sense of something like this could fill another thread on its own. I just wondered what you'd make of the visuals.

I actually did see this briefly on some tranny's twitter and scrolled past it because boomer shooters are gay. I had no idea it was Japanese from the bit of footage I saw. Fascinating. There are almost no japanese traditional shooters, outside of games that were basically tech-demos or weird side-paths from making dungeon-crawlers.

Has cool creatures too:



It has a cool use of scale. Seeing large things in the distance or just being in a large space. It's one of the areas where modern games are actually better designed than older games, which are usually endlessly claustrophobic. In terms of man-hours, the effect is basically free and looks super cool. It existed in older games, but usually wasn't used artistically, and was instead the domain of things like Serious Sam or Citizen Kabuto.





All of these are cool because things are big and/or zoomed out.

(07-12-2023, 12:16 PM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]

I really like what a wiley coyote-esque figure this character is. Snickering while throwing lit sticks of tnt around corners rules.

(07-12-2023, 11:43 AM)Lohengrin Wrote: [ -> ]There's nary a distinct scream that the enemies release when expiring. Just what seems to be some generic ghastly shrieking that not only sounds hardly different from any generic pain noise, but is already drowned out by this exploding fruit or balloon noise when they EXPLODE into red paste. Where's the suffering? Where's the dismemberment? 

Might be worth it to draw a connection to (spits on ground) Ultrakill.
Many of its tranny followers praise the game for being extremely violent. For having a tagline like "BLOOD IS FUEL," you'd expect something more than the enemies disappearing and turning into red liquid. Many of those same troons, self-proclaimed boomer shooter fans, turn up their noses at Brutal Doom for being "tryhard."
The underlying reason for their love of the game is the hyper, Tiktok-like stimulation that they get from watching it. They think they like the violence because that's what's most prominently shown, but Ultrakill is not meth, it's Adderall.

Unrelated, but you can tell the exact moment that New Blood took over and turned it from some guy's hobby project to tranny fuel. In the second chapter, it goes from a relatively original setting to Walmart Bargain Bin Cyberpunk, and then in the next one they hired some youtube meme VA to voice a major character.

(07-12-2023, 09:13 PM)Spingebill Wrote: [ -> ]Might be worth it to draw a connection to (spits on ground) Ultrakill.
Many of its tranny followers praise the game for being extremely violent. For having a tagline like "BLOOD IS FUEL," you'd expect something more than the enemies disappearing and turning into red liquid. Many of those same troons, self-proclaimed boomer shooter fans, turn up their noses at Brutal Doom for being "tryhard."
The underlying reason for their love of the game is the hyper, Tiktok-like stimulation that they get from watching it. They think they like the violence because that's what's most prominently shown, but Ultrakill is not meth, it's Adderall.

Unrelated, but you can tell the exact moment that New Blood took over and turned it from some guy's hobby project to tranny fuel. In the second chapter, it goes from a relatively original setting to Walmart Bargain Bin Cyberpunk, and then in the next one they hired some youtube meme VA to voice a major character.

I've picked on it before because it needs repeating. Ultrakill looks like the most performative video game ever made. Like it's focused primarily around giving off impressions to those observing people playing it rather than the first hand experience itself. Of course all media has this element today. You sell belonging and an experience that is on some level social no matter what you're selling today. But Ultrakill really seems to go all in on that. It's the crazy ahhh FIRST PERSON SHOOTER for people who are LIKE CRAZY ON METH LOOK AT HOW HARD THEY'RE MASTERING THE TRAVERSAL MECHANICS LOOK AT THAT WEAPON SWITCH TO QUICK-SCOPE TO CROUCH SLIDE TO WALL RUN TO FAST-DILATION.

Again, as I said in the Boltgun thing, I don't believe that video games were ever really built around "first person shooting", despite the term. This doesn't mean these games have to be inherently bad or that nobody can build games around this now. Doom wasn't really consciously built or solved as an architectural tool or maze-challenge experience, and that's what its modern WAD makers enjoy. Video games often evolve this way, people decide they like a part of a thing and run off with it. What was a branch becomes a whole entity. This is fine. I somewhat enjoy "competitive RTS" in the form of Age of Empires 2. Nobody making it thought the game would become what it is today. But it's interesting, so I don't mind.

So why am I such an asshole towards Ultrakill? Because it's not interesting. Not interesting to me. And I also get the creeping feeling that it's not that interesting even to its own "fans". Of course if it were truly devoid of appeal it wouldn't have any. More particularly what I mean is that its "fans" are fans of being Ultrakill fans. Not fans of Ultrakill.

I like Dusk

(07-13-2023, 05:47 PM)BillyONare Wrote: [ -> ]I like Dusk

A government euthanasia expert has been dispatched to your home to assist you in navigating your future options.

Just a minor thing to add, but you touched upon the /v/ yenta tranny worship of "circle strafing" and "mechanical mastery" in your Sunlust series. Related to that, I find it interesting that one of the biggest modding projects for Quake 1, Arcane Dimensions, has, among a long list of changes, completely removed "hitscan" enemies from the game, instead making them fire physical, slow-moving projectiles. The hitscanner is, of course, the bane of the circle strafing WEBM-posting /v/ troon, because it means that he cannot solve every problem by strafing while showing off how quick he can switch weapons. That this was an intentional design decision by the developers is lost on them. It's a very amusing retroactive "correction" to make. The retrotranny saying, "no, no, the original developers have it all wrong! Quake is like a bastardized mix of Touhou and Sonic! It's not a game where I have to think about where to put myself and in what order to do things!" I wouldn't be surprised if a similarly tranny-infested project has done the same for Doom.

A side note: I read some Adolf Loos articles after hearing you talk about him in one of your Halo videos. Quotation of interest from one of his journalistic pieces: "Draughtsman today are taught that, before they can design a chair, they must know the five orders of Greek columns. I would hope that these draughtsman instead know something about sitting!" Fairly surface-level quote, but I think it demonstrates the issue, to some extent, with these retroclones. All of the mastery of making games that look like Doom or Quake, none of the understanding of why the developers made these games the way they did.

(10-18-2023, 03:23 PM)cats Wrote: [ -> ]Just a minor thing to add, but you touched upon the /v/ yenta tranny worship of "circle strafing" and "mechanical mastery" in your Sunlust series. Related to that, I find it interesting that one of the biggest modding projects for Quake 1, Arcane Dimensions, has, among a long list of changes, completely removed "hitscan" enemies from the game, instead making them fire physical, slow-moving projectiles. The hitscanner is, of course, the bane of the circle strafing WEBM-posting /v/ troon, because it means that he cannot solve every problem by strafing while showing off how quick he can switch weapons. That this was an intentional design decision by the developers is lost on them. It's a very amusing retroactive "correction" to make. The retrotranny saying, "no, no, the original developers have it all wrong! Quake is like a bastardized mix of Touhou and Sonic! It's not a game where I have to think about where to put myself and in what order to do things!" I wouldn't be surprised if a similarly tranny-infested project has done the same for Doom.

A side note: I read some Adolf Loos articles after hearing you talk about him in one of your Halo videos. Quotation of interest from one of his journalistic pieces: "Draughtsman today are taught that, before they can design a chair, they must know the five orders of Greek columns. I would hope that these draughtsman instead know something about sitting!" Fairly surface-level quote, but I think it demonstrates the issue, to some extent, with these retroclones. All of the mastery of making games that look like Doom or Quake, none of the understanding of why the developers made these games the way they did.

"No hitscan" is the "no jumpscares" of video games. Or one of them at least.

The whole appeal of 40k was that it was like WH Fantasy but in Space. You could have your cool knights with swords AND laser guns, a simple concept that yielded results because what was then known as "Science Fiction" was very much inspired by fantasy. Earlier titles bringing this franchise to the digital medium (Chaos Gate, DoW, even Space Marine) understood this. Your guys with swords shot at each other and then fought other guys with swords. Blades clashed blades, sundered armor. Even Space Marine's very anemic "Stun then QTE" combat understood how to make it at least passable.

Where is that in this game? There is no weight, everything has to be floaty zoomtroon garbage because having to actually manage the mass of being an 8 foot tall supersoldier would lead to exactly what you talk about, not being able to replicate the movement of le ebin pro-Quake Rocketjumpers. They want EZmode skill movement because they can't into bunnyhop/airstrafing. Most zoomers dont even know what a crouch jump is.