Ocarina of Time and the Manufacturing of the "Gamer Canon"

[anthony]

Hollow Knight is one of the most recent additions to this canon. The whole game, from the aesthetics to the combat to the level design is boring and forgettable, and yet it was showered by praise from reviewers and has been called one of the greatest games of the 2010's. It tries to combine elements of a "metroidvania" and a "soulslike", while not understanding what made either of those kinds of games enjoyable to begin with. It also has a sizable speedrunning scene, not unlike another trooncore indie game, Celeste.

Speedrunning, and the emphasis on "gameplay" (treating video games as games) over the aesthetic experience (treating games as multimedia art) in general is something that the troon and the third worlder have in common (for example, see the popularity of fighting games among groids).

I got hollow knight for free somehow and still have zero desire to play it. It just looks stupid and boring.

[BillyONare]

Wrong. Hollow Knight is a great game.

[anthony]

This looks like it does for two dimensional video game conventions what Doom: Eternal did for "first person shooters". Absolutely vomitive.

[parsifal]

i found hollow knight pleasant aesthetically. in retrospect it didn't have a lot going on mechanically, but what it did have was refined as to never detract from the experience. what sticks in my memory is the music, visuals, and atmosphere.

[anthony]

i found hollow knight pleasant aesthetically. in retrospect it didn't have a lot going on mechanically, but what it did have was refined as to never detract from the experience. what sticks in my memory is the music, visuals, and atmosphere.

"But it looks ugly."

[Guest]

i found hollow knight pleasant aesthetically. in retrospect it didn't have a lot going on mechanically, but what it did have was refined as to never detract from the experience. what sticks in my memory is the music, visuals, and atmosphere.

I thought it was drab and ugly. The character designs are especially hideous.

[parsifal]

most of the game is spent interacting with the environment, not the NPCs. i don't think the level design is ugly at all.

[anthony]

most of the game is spent interacting with the environment, not the NPCs. i don't think the level design is ugly at all.

I hate it.

[GraphWalkWithMe]

Hollow Knight is one of the most recent additions to this canon. The whole game, from the aesthetics to the combat to the level design is boring and forgettable, and yet it was showered by praise from reviewers and has been called one of the greatest games of the 2010's. It tries to combine elements of a "metroidvania" and a "soulslike", while not understanding what made either of those kinds of games enjoyable to begin with. It also has a sizable speedrunning scene, not unlike another trooncore indie game, Celeste.

Speedrunning, and the emphasis on "gameplay" (treating video games as games) over the aesthetic experience (treating games as multimedia art) in general is something that the troon and the third worlder have in common (for example, see the popularity of fighting games among groids).

I'm coming out of my egg - I liked Hollow Knight and Celeste. I also played almost 500 hours of Into The Breach, my preferred character was the adult-aged latinx orphan who would express wonder about how her foster mother would feel about a turn action.

The most total autists among us observe video gaming through a lens that removes almost everything but the "gameplay". Aesthetic elements like sound effects, etc. can make actions more satisfying in felt impact, but are ultimately functional window dressing.

[anthony]

A guy I know with generally excellent taste enjoyed Celeste. He makes Super Mario World romhacks. Enjoys the craft of these things. Celeste developer guy came out of that scene, but made some unfortunate friends along the way. I could believe that Hollow Knight is a solidly crafted "2D Metroidvania with soulslike characteristics" or whatever the fuck these insects were going for. But it remains ugly and stupid looking to me. A toy which is too viscerally ugly to pick up.

[BillyONare]

It’s okay to find Celeste fun if you are autistic (I admit I have played it and enjoyed the platforming HOWEVER while listening to podcasts or lectures or doing other things at the same time, not sure if I could bear just playing it for more than half an hour…many such cases with these indie games, people are not honest about how they engage with them) but it is an ugly game. Hollow Knight is nothing like Celeste; it’s genuinely good, not nu-good or platformer autism. Into the Breach is good too despite some ugly characters. Maybe someone can mod those out.

---

Hollow Knight is a good looking game and I have to say that I agree with the guy in the shoutbox saying that trailers don’t do it justice. It strongly benefits from a big HD monitor or TV and nice headphones.

[Illustrious]

If your game looks like a flash game, I won't play it, no matter how good you say it is. Hollow Knight is one of those. You will say it looks a lot more intricate than a flash game because you're easily fooled by post-processing. Don't you hate how indies rely on post-processing to hide the fact that their games are ugly?

[BillyONare]

It does not.

[Starn]

I liked how Hollow Knight looked. The environments are blatantly in a much better artstyle than the characters, but they could still be 'cute' at best. Importantly, the Player Character is. I can't agree with calling it viscerally ugly.

They really should've made the character art in a more interesting style Though... It's not disgusting, but they played it too safe. It's nothing to me. Like looking at the pawn from a standard chess-set. At least the lighting effects improve them a little.

[Guest]

Hollow Knight is good, but it's not worth enshrining in some "video game canon". While the exploration in the game is excellent, nothing else is really as good or even great. It feels like a very shallow game, with not much that really stands out, and almost every aspect of it that's hyped up is nothing close to what it's biggest fans say it is. In terms of metroidvanias, I prefer Rainworld.

Celeste is absolute garbage. If you actually enjoy it, you are in some way mentally deficient. None of the levels are entertaining or interesting, no idea in it feels utilized well, the entire game is a pity party for some retarded loser who "learns to embrace her demons" or whatever therapeutic message the dev wants to push. I honestly cannot see what separates it from any of it's peers in the platforming department (besides the tranny protagonist). It's the sort of game that you play to waste time, basically on the same level as a shit tier mobile game or clicker game or whatever. Seriously awful.

[Starn]

It was mentioned earlier, but yes... Celeste is a gayer, dumbed-down(despite seeming to have more 'mechanics.') version of a SMW romhack, at best.
If you want a mindless platformer, then you're better off grabbing any hack that Raocow's played before.

[Peaseblossom]

The most total autists among us observe video gaming through a lens that removes almost everything but the "gameplay". Aesthetic elements like sound effects, etc. can make actions more satisfying in felt impact, but are ultimately functional window dressing.

Why bother with video games at all if this is the case?

[Bransle]

A topic I've been thinking a lot recently is, to give it a name, the "negative canon" of media. The topic of my fascination is less near-universally panned media that I consider misunderstood, poorly appreciated or hated despite its qualities (as could be, for example, Michael Mann's Blackhat or the Star Wars prequels), than media I cannot think has any particular difference with other similar media. This came to me when remembering Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - a movie I saw at a time of my life when I was the ideal viewer for this sort of film. I consider this movie to be everything Indiana Jones movies have always been about: adventure films with many action setpieces and light comedy. It's a bit different, and Harrison Ford is old, but I can't think it being a radical departure from what came prior: just putting it on a slightly different context (you can't have Indiana Jones on WW2 anymore, so some references are changed). I can understand not liking this movie: I cannot understand despising this movie and thinking the Indiana Jones films are masterpieces. 

But then why is it so denostated? Is it as if it was in a canon of bad films, and as firmly settled in it as Don Quixote is in the canon of the novel. If you say that "it's a decent film" you're a contrarian, even when the only reaction against it is pointing out at different moments in the film and asking "WHAT THE F*CKK?!". Why is this scene bad? Why doesn't it belong of the Indiana Jones saga?



I was today reminded of William Shatner's Tekwar (no relation with the Kantbot's podcast). A frequent mention on "worst videogames of all time". I haven't played it, it looks "outdated" but interesting, but what makes this game specially intolerable compared with, say, Wolfenstein or Hexen? It's not an easy game to get running: to my knowledge, there's no source port for it, you're gonna have to play it with Dosbox. The game was ahead its time in many ways: second big project to come out from the Build Engine (the first is the also denostated Witchaven, from Capstone, the same company that made Tekwar), it had very open, realistic levels populated with NPCs, and in order to complete it you had to fulfill a concrete goal rather than just reaching the last button. It cannot be lack of creativity, nor negative impact on the industry, which makes it deserve its infamy. It looks antiquated, maybe a bit ugly, by modern standards (but, as I said, there's also no modern source port for this) but why is this game bad and Wolfenstein, which despite of its historical interest is extremely hard to enjoy nowadays? Has anyone who hated it ever given an answer?



Back to the start of this thread: What does it make Call of Duty a far worse game than Counter Strike? Is predictable spray patterns what separates Good from Evil regarding multiplayer FPS games? I will come back to this, but I encourage you to ask "why exactly is this bad" to any piece of media that is infamous despite you being mostly indifferent towards it.

[Guest]

I've noticed the same thing too. I think a lot of it has to do with conformity and e-celeb culture online in particular. There are a lot of games I have enjoyed that only later I found out that people hated, and in part due to what some YouTuber or similar e-celeb said about it.

The AVGN and the whole "angry gamer" craze in particular comes to mind, especially when he was playing the NES games of his childhood. Everyone else on YouTube was trying to get in on that craze, and some people from that era (JonTron for example, his first review of Daikatana was very much an AVGN bootleg) formed their own distinct style and there were a lot of e-celebs who got big from shitting on whatever was on the worst game ever list from Wikipedia/Seanbaby (that AVGN hadn't or wouldn't touch). There were also a few infamous AVGN ripoffs who became notorious for basically ripping his style off to the smallest details including even ripping off the skits, including the Irate Gamer and the "Game Dude".

Sometimes the reception of a video game is tainted because of the fanbase expecting a specific game, or a genre change. This reputation continues years later peddled by gaming press and YouTubers. This results in the interesting thing of hearing from people who enjoyed games feeling like they were the only ones who liked it or sarcastically asking if they were supposed to hate it.

[Illustrious]

I suppose Breath of the Wild has replaced OoT as the defacto GOAT in the gamer canon



One day we need to talk about Nintendo fetishism.