The Use and Abuse of Old Game Styles (REBONE!)

[PIGSAW]

"The Use And Abuse Of Old game Styles" was my favorite thread on Amarna I, and I finally ran into something that pissed me off enough to force my hand in recreating it:

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer



https://store.steampowered.com/app/19310...he_Slayer/

Frank Howley: [...] your girlfriend's been stolen like the Psykos have invaded...

Danny O'Dwyer: *laughing* "your girlfriend's been stolen", the idea of her being stolen- that's a word you use for property [...]

Danny O'Dwyer: Ah-so okay I-I get the vibe, it is a, uh, Build Engine throwback.. that is taking place within.. this world eh it is referencing a lot of '90s bullshit, in a way that I appreciate, the music is kind of kicking in now and it's like nu-metal-y. Is it any good Frank?

Frank Howley: Yes, so I'm-I'm a big fan of this new wave of like "retro shooters" er "Boomer Shooters"? [...]

The Frank in question:




But a lotta the shit on his TL is pretty un-pozzed:



Spawn (and McFarlane) figure, framed desaturated image of whores.

In general, decent amount of lust (Hook-Ups, hentai, etc.) and wrath (Spawn, Slipknot, etc.), which is surprisingly unrepentant ("edgelordism") for a Millennial.

https://twitter.com/FrankHowley/status/1...8365815809

Posts a lot of (good) old convention images:




..and he seems to genuinely like Japanese games— I saw him mention killer7 and Chulip.
Okay, for an '07 Twitter account followed by SomethingAwful and someone who was part of Mega64 (Consolevania is better) this isn't that bad— discounting the Juggalo furfaggotry.

But I wanted to make a similar point here to Gaming Dysgenics, which this will be the "sister" (they're both men) thread to.

Back to "SLAYERS X", this shit is more retarded than Powerup:



Let's note the year on that— 2007. Who the fuck cares (30 going on 50 faillennials) about a parody of the '90s in 2023? Holy STUCK, this is fucking revivalism of "Remember the '90s" revivalism from the early '10s on Tumblr (which isn't surprising considering they made Hypnospace Outlaw).

This was also a LONG running trend:



Again, 2008. OLD. (Though I thought Gaming Guyz was pretty funny, I always liked the Flash Tub.)

Though aesthetically SLAYERS X is more like Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff:



Since it's meant to be more like ironic post/FYAD Blingee edit shit, which was very popular on Tumblr.

Still more to discuss about the "people" talking about this game:

https://www.destructoid.com/reviews/revi...he-slayer/

I did not spell the title wrong

We take for granted how difficult it is to do a bad thing well, especially in video games. There are plenty of bad movies intentionally made to be fun to watch. Digital marketplaces are full of bad games made badly and good games made poorly, but creating a game that is intended to reflect bad design but is actually fun to play; that takes work. [...]

[...] If you played Hypnospace Outlaw, you’ll no doubt remember Zane. He was a teenager during that game’s events and was an accurate reflection of a certain type of internet denizen that still exists today. He was a very self-centric type who mistook his alienation as a sign of being above everyone else and destined for greater things. [...]

Gee, it sure is crazy and UNIMPORTANT these SPECIFIC details keep coming up in everything I talk about. Well, nothing to see here— so let's move along!

I don’t know if it was specifically a millennial thing to have a phase where you think you’re due for some world-changing event to prove yourself in, but I definitely had something close. The whole setup is intensely familiar to me. I even had a notebook back when I was a kid, where I was outlining the design of a game. Not strictly a self-insert thing like Zane did, but definitely an edgy shooter that I tried to replicate in Duke Nukem 3D. Slayers X just speaks to me at a core level.

"Duke Nukem" where have I heard that name before?

I'm definitely over thinking it and thanks.

I know he was designed as the typical action hero with no intention of him being gay or bi. What I'm unclear on is if he's a parody or not. My Duke gaming is limited to Duke Nukem 3D and Duke Nukem Forever. I tried a demo of one that was side scrolling but didn't get into it. Manhattan Project?

If, for some reason, my theory panned out, it wouldn't be pandering if it just happened. Just have him faced with an alien that is trying to kill him but, to us, it looks like it's trying to kiss or mate and have Duke say a line like "I fuck women and I fuck guys but I draw the line at alien shitbags!". That's literally all they'd need to do. They wouldn't need a 45 minute cutscene of Duke crying in the shower as he struggles with confusion about his sexuality or add a Pride Parade minigame.

Although, as I said, it's just a fun theory I like. It wasn't their intention when they created Duke, I know it's not canon and I'm not calling for him to be rewritten as gay or bi.

Is sexuality still a hot issue? I thought it had become mundane to media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dukenukem/comme...bout_duke/

Oh, that's right! The guy who canonically hates Thomas777:



https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/...5665321984

(I actually did ask Thomas and he confirmed that this could only be in reference to a group of about 10 guys, including him.)

Can we get an early life check on Zoey?



Just as I suspected, Canadian.

Before I move on, let's Thing: Japan Duke Nukem:

Although GAMER IYAPOPO is one corner of Present IYAPOPO, it was the independent site which treats the user MAP for DUKE NUKEM3D from the first. And DUKO was the cover girl.

Full name is DUKO NUKEM, and the American of the 4th Japanese origin. Her age is unknown. Her occupation is a pro's monster extermination business. She is making shooting training and physical strength, when there is no monster. Short brown hair and black glasses are trademarks!
This is the gallery of DUKO.

Right, so from here I'd like to point out that "Boomer Shooters" but especially "SLAYERS X" is edgelord-camp. Let me show you what "SLAYERS X" should look like, by the parameters it's set:







https://www.vidlii.com/watch?v=g7MXHmISUzu

https://archive.org/details/abyssal_anti-social

I've been playing DOOM II and looking into DOOM .wads after reading about the MyHouse.wad, which lead me to dig around for anything controversial. "SLAYERS X" should look and feel like this— like Madness Combat, Hellsing, The Matrix, The Specialists... not like fucking Conker's Bad Fur Day:



Issue is, since they can't (not like they'd want to) get away with doing it like Postal 2 (which is basically still libtard bullshit anyways), they have to dial up only the scatological ZOGshit 'cause the "waycism" (and violence, SLAYERS X only uses dumbass fake guns to further undercut violence) would be a no-go. 

[...] Sociologists observed, usually with a suggestion of disapproval, that working people seemed to have no ambition. According to Lloyd Warner, who studied Newburyport in the I930s, working-class housewives set the dominant tone of cultural conservatism. They adhered to a "rigid" and "conventional" code of morality and seldom dared to "attempt anything new." They took no interest in long-range goals. "Their hopes are basically centered around carrying on [and] take the form of not wanting their present routine disturbed—they want to continue as they are, but, while doing so, better their circumstances and gain more freedom." [...]

Anyway, back to that O'Dwyer mick biolib:

https://twitter.com/dannyodwyer/status/1...1572261888



HaHA— oops! That's the wrong video, here's the real one:



https://twitter.com/b0tster/status/1550264605536145411



This part should really go in Gaming Dysgenics, but I need to bring it up here to establish where and WHO "retro" faggotry is coming from:



Just to be clear, no I wasn't trying to learn how to buy a woman's shit— I already know how to do that and it's significantly worse than anything in this video.

This all started for me when I was.. browsing Reddit, posting.. naughty pictures of myself, as a girl looking for a little excitement does and a guy had a request that I thought was sort of funny.. he wanted me to take a poop on the floor and take pictures of it. So I did it, it was a ton of fun and I decided to post them publicly for other people too and it got a lot of attention. It was such a thrill having so many people oo and awe over those pictures that were fairly easy to take.. and so it started this huge addiction for me. [...] and the community is really protective and supportive as someone who moderates some of these subreddits myself we're barely deleting comments you have to protect the little community that you've built [...] and then this one is a personal fantasy of mine the "mean goth girl", I wasn't a goth in high school, but I would've loved to have been one [...]

STOP READING! That last line "I wasn't a goth in high school, but I would've loved to have been one" I want you to repeat that to yourself until you could recite it. That is the skeleton key to understanding what "troons" are.

I'm actually going to end the post here just because of how important the quote from that stupid no-chin bitch selling her shit is, but I'll come back soon because I've been meaning to reply to this thread since it was originally on Amarna I.

[oyakodon_khan]

"It's not low-poly because it's so much easier to make and to use 128p textures on blender, it's because it's a hecking throwback or something"

[Verlion]

i like the style of ps1 graphics

---

i like boomer shooters. i tried the new warhammer one but it felt a bit meh. haven't played the others but modded DOOM is grand.

---

"It's not low-poly because it's so much easier to make and to use 128p textures on blender, it's because it's a hecking throwback or something"

you are haunted by hipster indie devs at night.
i've heard using lower resolutions in art is harder.

[Illustrious]

2 decades of 2D indie pixelshit: I sleep
couple of years of early 3D throwback games: REAL SHIT

[PIGSAW]

2 decades of 2D indie pixelshit: I sleep
couple of years of early 3D throwback games: REAL SHIT

Identical issue from one group of people, retard.

[oyakodon_khan]

you are haunted by hipster indie devs at night.
i've heard using lower resolutions in art is harder.

You've heard that from an indie game dev posting anonymously on /v/ while sipping a soy latte. 
After you complete the Blender donut tutorial, the PS1 graphics tutorial is 5 minutes long.
Pixel art is technically difficult to make as well, but there's a million "nostalgia" pixel platformers on steam.  That's because it's very easy to shit out something low-effort and then claim that it's because you're calling back to a time of technological limitation.

[Peaseblossom]

"It's not low-poly because it's so much easier to make and to use 128p textures on blender, it's because it's a hecking throwback or something"

Yiff in hell, furfag. Go cry about how literal demon AI is unfair to the Wacom monkeys.

Yes, like trad larp, an imitation of a prior style done for it's own sake is a terrible waste of attention and effort. That doesn't mean that frivolous and undirected "innovation" automatically justifies something existing. The landscape of  "art and culture" is littered with this and everybody hates it including retards, although they hate it for the wrong reasons. If an artist considers some generally abandoned or misused method to still offer potential, then what possible reason, besides being a conservative pussy who loves leaving weapons on the table for their enemies to use, would there be to object? The Mannerist movement in painting produced artwork of undeniably enduring value, or more pertinent to this thread, Nintendo following Gunpei Yokoi's principle of making the most of existing technology. What matters is whether what is produced is worthwhile or not. This game shouldn't exist because it is ugly.

this shit is more retarded than Powerup

Powerup is flawed, because the proto-soyjaks who made it just couldn't stop themselves from doing the "my enemy = everything I don't like all at once" thing. It isn't funny, but it does still allude to a type of webcomic that existed at the time. Slayers X, in addition to being unfunny for similar reasons, doesn't really look like anything. It doesn't look like something from Newgrounds. It doesn't look "nu-metal". Build Engine games were Gen X/Xennial and associated with industrial music. I guess all the implied sodomy and anal does make it similar to Duke Nukem. Still, It's an amalgamation of aesthetics from at least three different generations. Maybe the creator would say this anachronism is intentional, to create a nonsensical and manic feeling. Why, then, is this being perceived as a successful pastiche? Are the gamers lying?

The buffoonish protagonist is "everything I don't like" but in a way which is defanged and allows the millenial (?) audience to exorcise and poke fun at their juvenile selves, those shameful days before they were buckbroken Good People. The anti-chuunibyo messaging is clear, but also dumb. Shit and farts and other Garfield/Shreklike things (that they like now in current year) were scarce if even present in Deviantart's golden chuuni epoch. Anime is absent. Where is Vincent Valentine? Where is the racism? If there is criticism of this, it will be mild and focused on how the game provides too much catharsis while not tackling the Very Real Threat of online harassment and the specter of gamergate. Most likely there will be no criticism and everybody will just enjoy the slime, lasers, shitplay, etc. as usual.

[anthony]

i like the style of ps1 graphics

If it were as simple as a style it'd be replicable. I think when people say this they're invoking the standards and sensibilities of the time too, without realising it. And even more particularly those of certain artists. People don't mean Final Fantasy 9. They don't mean Crash Bandicoot. They mean Silent Hill and like three other games.

i like boomer shooters. i tried the new warhammer one but it felt a bit meh. haven't played the others but modded DOOM is grand.

Modded DOOM is not a "boomer shooter". It's Doom with mods. Take your meds. More seriously 'Boomer Shooter' is built on a kind of hallucinatory fantasy of what these games were. Doom mods are great because they're directly plugged into what the games are. More particularly just the one. Doom. It's a living tradition. Not an ignorant fake revival built on memes disseminated by posers. Boltgun is not for people who like DOOM. It's for people who feel insecure about not liking Doom.




Still surreal to me that this trailer got made. Like how Pigsaw's tranny fetish weirdo wishes they were a goth girl, this game is marketed to people who wish they were wholesome grunge 90s cool low-fi people.

"It's not low-poly because it's so much easier to make and to use 128p textures on blender, it's because it's a hecking throwback or something"

you are haunted by hipster indie devs at night.
i've heard using lower resolutions in art is harder.

I do think this stuff is fairly hard. Which is why so many of these projects look awful. When the PS1 was the bleeding edge it attracted bleeding edge talent and experimental and driven visions. Now it attracts a lot of posers and/or people looking for shortcuts.

[Bransle]

All of these games are "doom-clones". Slayer X may have a "crap-launcher" instead of a rocket-launcher but it's still a reskin of the very recognizable Doom formula, down to the weapon rooster, enemies and level design. If someone made a mod for Slayer X which changed the textures for something more gothic, the sprites of the enemies for chaos space marines and the poopgun for a Bolter you would get Boltgun. And vice versa. It's purely superficially adolescent, but nothing in its shape feels adolescent. Let's compare it with the popular (PewDiePie played it, I think the creators of Slayer X Doom total conversion Grezzo 2, made by an Italian who hates God remaking a Doom .wad he made as a teenager during religion class.



It's not a "good game", but it at least rewards one's interest. Everything is chaotic, everywhere there's noise, and there's no order. Things clash against one another visually, redundancy is everywhere, and all the game is just "and then", "and then", "and then",...  in the words of the author, "this is how the world is for me". What I want to say with this is that form is not a contingency, but carries the meaning of it. Slayer X is, pretty much, meaningless: it's not a parody of anything, it's not a reflection of someone's perspective about the world, and has not even shock or comedic value. It's a parody less of the 90s, but of adolescence, but as said, it's not in any way an adolescent game. It's only sustained through collective hallucination of a time that, supposedly, was.

[Lohengrin]

Modded DOOM is not a "boomer shooter". It's Doom with mods. Take your meds. More seriously 'Boomer Shooter' is built on a kind of hallucinatory fantasy of what these games were. Doom mods are great because they're directly plugged into what the games are. More particularly just the one. Doom. It's a living tradition. Not an ignorant fake revival built on memes disseminated by posers. Boltgun is not for people who like DOOM. It's for people who feel insecure about not liking Doom.


Still surreal to me that this trailer got made. Like how Pigsaw's tranny fetish weirdo wishes they were a goth girl, this game is marketed to people who wish they were wholesome grunge 90s cool low-fi people.

The trailers for this shit piss me off like you wouldn't believe.



In less than 20 seconds this faggot tryhard narrator screams this is a "boomer shooter BLAST FROM THE PAST!" 
None of this feels 90's, none of this feels at all like Warhammer in the 90's. Who talked like this? Like what was said above me, this is just a collective hallucination. It brings to mind that movie Kung Fury. What part in this or the aforementioned Slayers X even remotely resembles anything cool? I suppose it does make me feel like a tabletop miniature piece what with the proportions of the enemies and the generic surroundings, but I want to to be a Space Marine, not a toy. The gore looks so fake and retarded too.

This feels much more real and visceral. The former Boltgun footage looks like a bunch of retarded indecipherable cartoon characters that randomly explode when you shoot your fake toy guns at them. That little goblin from the 90's FF6 wad made by some 10 year old at 1:20 evokes more reaction from me than those demons. If your game is about brutally murdering hordes of people then I expect the author to at least hold such a desire. Slayers X and Boltgun are cartoons about poop jokes and blood mocking their adolescent selves. Grezzo 2 and those mass shooting wads are genuine representations of unrepentant 90's kids, or adolescents, and their views and desires.

[anthony]

This feels much more real and visceral. The former Boltgun footage looks like a bunch of retarded indecipherable cartoon characters that randomly explode when you shoot your fake toy guns at them. That little goblin from the 90's FF6 wad made by some 10 year old at 1:20 evokes more reaction from me than those demons. If your game is about brutally murdering hordes of people then I expect the author to at least hold such a desire. Slayers X and Boltgun are cartoons about poop jokes and blood mocking their adolescent selves. Grezzo 2 and those mass shooting wads are genuine representations of unrepentant 90's kids, or adolescents, and their views and desires.

I played Boltgun with a friend. The phrase "Charles Whitman Simulator" came up. If you aren't interested in performative consummation of your epic fake 90s meme identity module there's nothing to grab you in this. The 40K Space Marine is ostensibly about righteous fury. Yes it's kind of camp, but if you're making a game and advertising it as something visceral that's the obvious thing to channel. But they don't because of course imagine if a cool nigger saw you caring. The game doesn't play around with camp or attempt to stoke genuine bloodlust, passion, or cruelty (something which actual 90s games could be quite good at. Blood is very cruel.). The game is just empty. It's white noise and light toil covered in magenta hued vomit and meaningless noise. "YOU'LL CHOKE ON YOUR FOUL BLOOD, FIEND!" screams space marine man as I kill the fifteenth lesser plague toad in succession by holding down left-click until it's dead, moving in a circle around the ARENA because hardcore gamer that I am I understand that Quake 3 and TRAVERSAL MECHANICS are what hardcore FPS MECHANICS are about, until Halo sent us back to the stone age.

Anybody who says that they felt anything while playing this game is lying. I believe that. That or they're so far gone they don't even know what feelings are and mistake mild alleviation of boredom for passion. It's a completely playable game. You can't make a Doom clone that isn't. But it also has no good reason to exist.

[NuclearAbsolutist]

None of this feels 90's, none of this feels at all like Warhammer in the 90's. Who talked like this? Like what was said above me, this is just a collective hallucination. It brings to mind that movie Kung Fury. What part in this or the aforementioned Slayers X even remotely resembles anything cool? I suppose it does make me feel like a tabletop miniature piece what with the proportions of the enemies and the generic surroundings, but I want to to be a Space Marine, not a toy. The gore looks so fake and retarded too.

"YOU'LL CHOKE ON YOUR FOUL BLOOD, FIEND!" screams space marine man as I kill the fifteenth lesser plague toad in succession by holding down left-click until it's dead, moving in a circle around the ARENA because hardcore gamer that I am I understand that Quake 3 and TRAVERSAL MECHANICS are what hardcore FPS MECHANICS are about, until Halo sent us back to the stone age.

There's some public info as to  why its a hallucinatory fake to anyone with eyes the developers talked to a outlet weeks before release known as wargamer. I find their comments quite revealing especially in light of their end product.   
https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-40k-b...nspiration

Lead designer Grant Stewart talks about the team’s love of retro Warhammer: “I’m really tempted to run downstairs and get all my 90s Exalted Flamers I’ve been painting. We’re all of an age basically where we got into [Warhammer 40k] the first time round in the 90s, in our early teens. That period of Warhammer holds a special place in our heart.”
Everyone in the team collects a Warhammer 40k faction. Stewartsays “no one in the office will let me use my Adeptus Custodes anymore because they keep winning”. Producer Anthony O’Neill has a particularly deep cut: “It’s no longer canon, but the Sons of Malice, worshippers of the fifth Warhammer 40k Chaos god Malal”.

“There is something very special about 90s Warhammer”, Stewart says, but adds that the choice of setting for the game isn’t purely nostalgic: “It’s also particularly suited to a boomer shooter: it’s bright and colourful, and garish and violent and over the top”.

Now I assume not everyone here knows about the early classic period of 40k but it has been fawned over as a time of coolness and attitude. The fact the lead designer called it garish right there is a textbook example of how people do not get at all what they are trying to create these days. I will show the in game enemies and actual units they are based on from the time as to illustrate this (The screenshots are not mine and suffering hence from GAMERS never focusing on things like mob detail but should be good enough.)
"Autogunner Cultists"



"Various Demons"

















"Heavy Bolter Cultists"



"Chaos Space Marine"






"Chaos Terminator"







I'm not going to call the war game miniatures made in a shed and painted some Botticelli that was desecrated but there's a color here which among other things appear to have been left behind. Hearing them speak you quite rapidly see they have what Anthony dubbed when I talked to him about this Kung Fury brain.

O’Neill points to Unreal Tourament’s immediacy and accessibility: “There’s no barrier to entry there. It’s a really easy game to get in… You point your gun and you shoot at things and that’s kind of it really”.
Stewart says for him, it’s all about “guns and gore”. He explains:“I’ve played the original Doom often enough that I’ve had to force myself to uninstall it from all the devices I have it on so that I’ll play something else”.

He points to the “visceral immediate feedback” in Doom as a factor that makes the classic so compelling, and adds “it’s something we’ve concentrated on a lot in Boltgun… we have a lot of very cool Warhammer weapons to work with”, and great audiovisual feedback is essential to doing them justice.

Code lead Chester says that the age of the genre has solved many design problems: “You have a game where you’re progressing through a level, getting keys, killing enemies, and then getting to the exit”. He sees that as a strength rather than a weakness, a starting point from which developers can experiment: “The format is so well established, but each game has its own twist on the format”. 

Visceral, thats what they wanted eh? Lets hear Chester explain his twists on the formula to do this
https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-40k-boltgun/gore

Chester points to his bloody inspirations: “The gore system is inspired by Brutal Doom’s gore system, which was exceptional, and a little game called Jet Force Gemini from the N64 days… that was the first time I’d seen dynamic gore that flies around, hits the environment, and reacts there”. Truly, the blood god Khorne would be proud.

Lead designer Grant Stewart explains that all these drippy body parts contribute to a game that’s surprisingly demanding on computer hardware: “It looks very old but we’ve actually got a lot of very modern systems in it… There’s a lot of fairly smart things the AI are doing and just the sheer volume of them is enormous as well”.

I wish to note there has in all I have seen in the game less animation than the first DooM. Along with nothing but the enemies exploding like jars of pasta sauce and nothing like Brutal Doom which made me feel like a horror villain, but you guys can see unlike gamers so moving on to the last article
https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-40k-b...oice-actor

Boltgun is inspired by classic 90s shooters, the kind where you tend not to talk to the monsters, so Kohli’s voice lines are fairly few and far between. Stewart says “His sole communication is to point and shout Warhammer themed obscenities at enemies”. He adds “We’ve wasted [Kohli’s] talent completely, he just shouts things at cultists before you smash them up with your chainsword”.

Kohli, who has starred in TV series including Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Bly Manor, and provided the voice of the Scarecrow in the Harley Quinn animated series, is very open about being a massive 40k fan. He frequently shared pictures of himself painting miniatures via his Twitter (until he quit the platform) and recently appeared in a video series with the YouTube channel Play On Tabletop.

A modern nerd for the funny lines, because its a FUN game right?

Now we have seen the sausage making process and their own blatant inability to channel the source material one is left asking why. Well there's a simple answer one can look at who made doom and Warhammer 40k


[From a July 1996 of Game Workshops White Dwarf]


And then at the developers of Boltgun

[Friend thought they were Yanks but the studio is located in Bristol UK #Decline]
And leave it at that, but that's not cutting deep enough. Its clear from their own words there's a entire tangle of concepts language and agreed history that lead to a Boltgun or any other abuse of Old Game Styles. I hope they can be further untangled and this post acts as a pointer to what these tangles are.

[Verlion]

O don't know about the discourse online, but I'm fairly certain "boomer shooter" as a term actually refers to the nu vidya inspired by Doom 2016. Doom 1993 is not a boomer shooter.

[PIGSAW]

i like the style of ps1 graphics [...]

What do you mean, actual PSX games or faux-PSX? My complaint is that faux-PSX is furfaggotry/troonery:



https://twitter.com/DTstat_/status/1544785891528507394

[...] i've heard using lower resolutions in art is harder. [...]

That's the other part of my argument— actual PSX graphics in contrast could look fucking awesome:



I think Baroque for PSX actually looks better than the remake for PS2:



Not that this looks bad (it looks awesome, especially the anime OP), but the tone in the original feels darker— partially because it's in first person (extremely rare for a Japanese game) but also that PSX Baroque uses the same sprite technique as DOOM:





..of photographing models (in the case of DOOM, they were imitating Phil Tippet's work on things like RoboCop) and toys to create higher detail sprites than they were able to do manually:

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Models




https://www.legendra.com/blogs/blog_tick...id-45.html

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~IH9K-YNMT/KODO/bqtower.html

https://twitter.com/e_kitoh/status/1627238848299433984

https://nervetower.neocities.org/download

[...] I do think this stuff is fairly hard. Which is why so many of these projects look awful. When the PS1 was the bleeding edge it attracted bleeding edge talent and experimental and driven visions. Now it attracts a lot of posers and/or people looking for shortcuts.

Another good example (since Anthony already brought up Silent Hill) is Vagrant Story:



However, no one back then wanted limitations like "low poly" or jaggies, or any of that (not that I necessarily dislike any of those things, I like a lot of things that look extremely digital). There is a different feeling to those graphics which can achieve effects higher fidelity struggles with (though I'd like to see it more), like what was done in Petscop:



But I consider Petscop to be a much more expressive use of faux-PSX graphics, in a way which accurately captures the depth of surreality from that zeitgeist (it helps he was channeling Inland Empire during The Return airing on HBO while working on Petscop). It also doesn't really make me think of "PlayStation" as much as "3D technology" as this new-but-primitive and frightening thing, more similar to Worlds.com:





I took tours with Nexialist back when /v/ and Tumblr had found Worlds, but before those dipshits scared off the one Boomer who hosted 90% of the fucking game.






The main thing to me with understanding this "style" (though I'd rather it not be reduced to that, as you don't have to do old to do weird) is that it was generally understood back then that what computer graphics could do naturally was make fake things look real and real things look fake: 




The Boomers who made these (I assume it was Boomers rather than Gen X because of the aesthetics in Worlds) like the desert because they like Route 66, but the purgatory quality to the desert is extremely relevant to "virtual worlds" (and some of them are probably aware of that and like it too).

Though I do imagine Tony studied (and likes) Net Yaroze:



But I consider Net Yaroze to be less like "PlayStation" and more like a memory of PlayStation, the quality is different (in a lot of ways I like more, because it feels unreal).

[...] you are haunted by hipster indie devs at night. [...]

You're correct, but anti-hipster is anti-white; hipsters are the solution, not the problem:



Before Hotline Miami, Cactus was still making faux-retro games, except unlike his TIGSource faggot contemporaries his interest was punk distortion of retro graphics (like SUDA51):



Amon26 is another one I like:







Irregular sprite style, multimedia video (which I wish was incorporated into the games themselves, it'd elevate it), and most importantly being an "edgy artfag" (although he suffers from terminal Troll's Remorse, most commonly witnessed on Twitter).

I'm posting these examples because my complaint was not and never will be some lazy ass reactionary "hurr RETRO graphics BAD durr" but "retro graphics" becoming a type of luddite/conservative-libtard method to drag videogames down to the quality of the craft table in the "artist alley" at a furry convention.

[...] More seriously 'Boomer Shooter' is built on a kind of hallucinatory fantasy of what these games were. [...]

On the subject of hallucinatory quality in games:



I think if you're going to use "retro graphics" you should do it like this (as in, completely fuck with it in ways that weren't possible in the past), which I consider to be (accidentally) in the same vein as Cactus. Making something that doesn't look (or work) like a real game, but more like a distorted memory or daydream of one.

[...] Let's compare it with the popular (PewDiePie played it, I think the creators of Slayer X Doom total conversion Grezzo 2, made by an Italian who hates God remaking a Doom .wad he made as a teenager during religion class. [...] Everything is chaotic, everywhere there's noise, and there's no order. Things clash against one another visually, redundancy is everywhere, and all the game is just "and then", "and then", "and then",...  in the words of the author, "this is how the world is for me". [...]

I saw Grezzo 2 come up when looking into DOOM .wads, I haven't played it yet, but I had similar thoughts to what you described looking at footage. It reminded me of "French Erotic Film":



..and the general (ANCIENT) trend of "Animutations":



This retarded shit is what people who made Flash animations about mass casualty events thought was funny, it's the spastic counterweight to the hyper-serious trench coat logic.

Because what Animutations were was animated collage art, and what many highly modded or doujin games share with it is being video game collage art (again like 51). If we are going to go back to the past and mine it, I think it's much more interesting to find ways to really utilize what is different about those things, as well as to expand on them in ways not possible back then (due to more primitive thought or equipment).

---

And I have a new thing to complain about wrt SLAYERS X:

https://twitter.com/pitayascastle/status...0343093250

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/groverhaus

Not that "Groverhaus" isn't funny (I think most old SA antics were), but for this game to have been made by goons or goon-adjacent means they did in fact live through the '90s and '00s consciously and should have a better understanding of these eras than I do (since goons are on average older than me).

[PIGSAW]

Lead designer Grant Stewart talks about the team’s love of retro Warhammer: “I’m really tempted to run downstairs and get all my 90s Exalted Flamers I’ve been painting. We’re all of an age basically where we got into [Warhammer 40k] the first time round in the 90s, in our early teens. That period of Warhammer holds a special place in our heart.”
Everyone in the team collects a Warhammer 40k faction. Stewartsays “no one in the office will let me use my Adeptus Custodes anymore because they keep winning”. Producer Anthony O’Neill has a particularly deep cut: “It’s no longer canon, but the Sons of Malice, worshippers of the fifth Warhammer 40k Chaos god Malal”.

“There is something very special about 90s Warhammer”, Stewart says, but adds that the choice of setting for the game isn’t purely nostalgic: “It’s also particularly suited to a boomer shooter: it’s bright and colourful, and garish and violent and over the top”.

Now I assume not everyone here knows about the early classic period of 40k but it has been fawned over as a time of coolness and attitude. The fact the lead designer called it garish right there is a textbook example of how people do not get at all what they are trying to create these days. [...]

I would agree with calling it garish (because 40k is extremely kitsch)— but he's still wrong for the exact reasons you point out later.

Funny thing is, with Anthony's complaint in mind too:

[...] The game is just empty. It's white noise and light toil covered in magenta hued vomit and meaningless noise. [...]

..there's a faction in 40k that's EVERYTHING they wanted for this:




The Noise Marines are the peak of kitsch 40k— they're EVEN purple tranny flag colored! Campy '80s glam rock Ultramarines, it's perfect— except it's not, because then it would be a "spinoff" and what Boltgun wants is to be the capital-O Official Space Marine retro FPS, whereas the reality is the capital-G Gay cash-in on sanitized DOOM prosthetic nostalgia— which is to say the same thing Anthony did, that this isn't for people who like DOOM but people who feel like they're supposed to.
This is maybe what I find the most egregious about the project— is that it exists as an acknowledgement of how RETARDED it was for it to NOT have been made in the '90s.

In comparison:



While Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is still lacking the severity and chaos that makes 40k worth looking into at all, it fully acknowledges that it was being made in the present, uses a contemporary reference of Gears of War, and revels in the violence the same way Gears did. None of this is to say it's an amazing game (it's okay), but that it's at least an honest and direct effort— which leads to a less retarded product.

[...] I will show the in game enemies and actual units they are based on from the time as to illustrate this

[examples of how stupid everything in Boltgun looks] [...]

Of all of these, y'know what really stands out to me?



This one— but not the models:



This part— there's absolutely nothing in Boltgun that looks or feels like this bootleg Simon Bisley 2000AD emblem. Which is my complaint with it, and even the older 40k games— they're never severe enough:





The "Flayed Ones" were one of my favorites when I used to paint 40k models when I was 12 or so:




There's a variety of reasons no 40k game can be 'allowed' to look like my references, one is because these are all high effort custom jobs by white guy traincels that live for this— which is an issue since they don't want yet another exclusionary white-guy space/hobby. They want it to be a more totemic camp for the masses.

Thing is, this shit is still campy and kitsch— yeah, "Ghost Rider" marines with hot rod skeleton paint.. that's fucking retarded, but it's retarded the same way Spawn and DOOM are— which is what 40k is about. It's never about being smart, it's about being cool— and the British trying to 1-Up Americans at their game of overkill:





Very Boomer-cool, awkward, retarded, but again— retarded cool, like Warhammer.

Anyways, a 40k game worth anything should look, sound, and feel like this (which isn't American or British, it's Swedish— including the cover by Kristian Wåhlin):

[From a July 1996 of Game Workshops White Dwarf]


And then at the developers of Boltgun

I can cut the Boltgun faggots a little slack— because in comparison to the White Dwarf photography, well, White Dwarf clearly sent a fucking photographer to make them look good.
But anyone who knows anything about "MySpace photography" (which this is the is predecessor to) knows that these guys wanted that, and they would've taken (or tried to take) pictures of themselves and each other like this left to their own devices— and that's really the problem with the Boltgun lineup.. that these people want to work in the arts, but they don't want to be cool.

---

...And the gift that keeps on giving!— I have EVEN MOAR to bitch about with SLAYERS X:



https://twitter.com/kitty4prz/status/166...6103924737

I'm not suggesting something as retarded as it's "gay" to be nice to children— no, obviously in the real-life version of this scenario this is cool, putting a child's art in some project you're working on.
But that's not my point— my point is that this is the "indie" equivalent to Chungus "dad gaming", like that new Bald of War where you take care of your (absent? dead? whatever) wife's son. Not only is the Zane character a sitcom-styled 'doofus' edgelord (i.e., a young man with no agency who, incorrectly, believes he does or should, as this is the joke) but he's also domesticated and a "good dad".
Right, so the biggest issue here is that most likely everyone who worked on this or supports it also want 4-year-olds on mandatory HRT— while the "point" seems to be a nostalgic desire to go back to the "simple times", which as everyone has pointed out— is something which never existed. These "people" want to "go back" to the current year, in 199X (this is why trannies love all this shit, performing historical revisionism on themselves).

That detail is one of the most important pieces of why this shit pisses me off so much. Historical revisionism for the sake of making everything worse— since they know "Nazis" tend to like "old things" which were out of reach from the current faggot regime. But where there's a will there's a way, and these retards love to stay busy:



Man, I should've just watched this video before I made this thread— could've saved myself writing all that TL;DR shit and just quoted this faggot:

[...] Ah, yes, Slayers X... it's reflective of a very particular time and place, two or three years at the turn of the century and if you're between the ages of 30 and 35, I bet you'll vibe with this game, like I do, and by vibe with this game I mean... it will remind you of a time when you were a person you hated, a child, born of shame and steeped in cringe, listening to your censored Wal-Mart copy of Limp Bizkit's Significant Other, and you have this idea for a really cool game starring a total badass who says cool things while he shoots people with two guns! [...]

This is perfect; let's break it down: Troll's Remorse (obviously), Self-Loathing (again), Wal-Mart, Limp Bizkit.. but we need a few more from this other quote:

[...] Imagine you're a child at the end of history and you were raised on PC games, like you were way too young to be playing Duke Nukem 3D, and it taught you that women are objects that you can use as currency when the aliens invade so that you can afford steroids and really cool sunglasses, or whatever, and then it's 1999 and The Matrix comes out and we're Americans who live in the middle of nowhere so we haven't seen any John Woo movies yet so the bullet time and fight scenes rock our balls off, [...]

Duke Nukem 3D.. but more importantly (though related)— "Americans who live in the middle of nowhere". There's our answer: the hicklib. This recontextualizes Wal-Mart and Limp Bizkit a lot better (lumpenprole)— no wonder this guy has Troll's Remorse, he was clearly a faggot in 1999 too (who the fuck wants to be limp? who the fuck wants to be a biscuit? Vanilla Ice did it better and first, though Limp Bizkit had cooler videos but that was just 'cause of video trends at the time being a combination of urban and surreal). It kind of helps me understand WTF is going on with these people— everything I liked as a kid was cool, and I only found more cool shit as I got older (not to venerate aging, but unfortunately it costs time to do anything) and got money plus learning how to pirate. Whereas this guy was a faggot when cool shit was falling out of the sky— and happily maintained himself as a conformist all the way into the present.

This retard has 411k subscribers on YouTube and going off of his description of what I have to assume is himself, he's some flyover state faggot who was force-fed self-awareness by ZOG. According to this Redditor he was born in 1987, so he's older than me— but like the people who made this stupid fucking game seems to functionally have no memories from before Obongo was elected (The American Great Reset).

I hadn't actually watched any more footage of this game after that NoClip vid I linked to— I didn't realize this game is like 80% LITERAL shit (I understand Peaseblossom's comment about anal a lot better now).

[Lohengrin]

The Noise Marines are the peak of kitsch 40k— they're EVEN purple tranny flag colored! Campy '80s glam rock Ultramarines, it's perfect— except it's not, because then it would be a "spinoff" and what Boltgun wants is to be the capital-O Official Space Marine retro FPS, whereas the reality is the capital-G Gay cash-in on sanitized DOOM prosthetic nostalgia— which is to say the same thing Anthony did, that this isn't for people who like DOOM but people who feel like they're supposed to.
This is maybe what I find the most egregious about the project— is that it exists as an acknowledgement of how RETARDED it was for it to NOT have been made in the '90s.

There was such a project being made, in fact.



Warhammer 40,000: Agents of Death was developed in the late 1990's by Polish developers and scrapped by 2000. Standing on the shoulders of giants such as Quake, Half-Life, Unreal, Goldeneye, and in the shadow of the much-hyped upcoming Duke Nukem Forever, had this came out I imagine it would have been quickly forgotten (much like its more-successful replacement Fire Warrior), yet fondly remembered for the architecture and design that was pulled off.







Now compare to any Boltgun footage or screenshots.





It's like night and day. As Agents of Death was never finished, we will never know the extent of how far they would have depicted the Warhammer 40,000 setting, but we can see a glimpse in the beta footage with cathedrals, temples, Imperial Navy ships, Imperial Guard bases, industrial towns. I feel immersed by its honest portrayal, much like the aforementioned Space Marine game. Comparatively Boltgun is an eyesore, what am I looking at? Why is this so intentionally ugly? Perhaps its the silence and ambience of the beta video that has no enemies and the player is simply strolling around the levels that does it some favours, because I want to stand in awe and appreciate the world around me. I do not get such an instinct from Boltgun, in fact I receive what amounts to visual noise in regards to the gaudy, cartoonishly-proportioned, pixelated architecture and blood heaped about.

Man, I should've just watched this video before I made this thread— could've saved myself writing all that TL;DR shit and just quoted this faggot:

I watched this video shortly before this thread was produced to give myself a primer on what this game is about. I think he does a good job at summarising in a succinct manner enough about the games he reviews in what amounts to a combination of traditional Let's Play and video review styles before you get annoyed at his retarded voice and close the video. It's worth noting that he's a fat cripple, and most likely bald, in addition to being a faggot and a retard. Throughout the video you consistently see sewage and fecal matter in an attempt to replicate the alleged "gross-out culture" that supposedly permeated the 90's. I'm appalled that this retard and the faggots who made this game visualise their childhood like this against all else.

Why does this faggot talk so much? Why do they feel the need to have him drone endlessly in his stupid impression of an adolescent male voice? The voice acting and characterisation of these games have been picked up by all the wrong retards. Duke Nukem is not the "funny quotes man", that's an invention by that castrati goblin Gianni Matragrano extrapolated from videos of people enjoying his one-liners immortalised on early YouTube.

Take a look at his twitter if you dare: https://twitter.com/GetGianni




To summarise, this sodomite is involved in nearly every "boomer shooter" project voicing just about every annoying retard in the game. He seems to have some credits on occasional English Anime dubs across the 90's and 00's, particularly Memories by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame, but that's a different topic. Gianni as a social media influencer in addition to his voicing credits is just as pivotal to this "boomer shooter" plague as Civvie is. Gianni voices and establishes the mood while Civvie recaps and reviews the end result for wider audiences. My only source of relief is that I'm not convinced anyone actually plays this garbage, only video reviewers and streamers who are paid to play it anyways and get their money back for it. Boltgun I can see more people play, because it is a Warhammer game, but Slayers X has a non-existent playerbase. Look up the game on YouTube's search and filter by view count and you'll see little interest outside Gianni and Civvie's videos as well as established streamers Vinesauce Vinny and Joel, procuring as much as 20 thousand views elsewhere. 

I played Boltgun with a friend. The phrase "Charles Whitman Simulator" came up. If you aren't interested in performative consummation of your epic fake 90s meme identity module there's nothing to grab you in this. The 40K Space Marine is ostensibly about righteous fury. Yes it's kind of camp, but if you're making a game and advertising it as something visceral that's the obvious thing to channel. But they don't because of course imagine if a cool nigger saw you caring. The game doesn't play around with camp or attempt to stoke genuine bloodlust, passion, or cruelty (something which actual 90s games could be quite good at. Blood is very cruel.).

I'll end this off by posting an advert for Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, a British-produced title and next foray Warhammer took into the 'FPS' genre in 2003, riding off the coattails of Halo.


It's certainly not wrong for Warhammer to ape what was seen as cool, after all part of its success was channelling everything the creators found awesome and combining that with a narrative greatly inspired by those works (to name a few, Mad Max, Dune, Starship Troopers, Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, 2000AD, Highlander, Gundam even) as well as real history (contra the libtards who say Warhammer was Leftist satire all along), but Boltgun simply doesn't understand any of that. Boltgun makes no attempt to channel any such influence besides shallowly taking elements from Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem and coating it over with a Warhammer shade of paint. It would be more honest if someone simply made a Warhammer mod for any of those aforementioned games rather than produce this junk.

[Hamamelis]

I just saw a review of "Northern Journey":



I haven't played this yet, and won't have time in the near future, but the style makes me nostalgic for how mysterious game worlds used to feel. Maybe one of you will play this and tell us what he thinks?

The general trend of mimicking superficial features of older games is an implicit concession to the fact that the graphics-maxxing of the past twenty years has done nothing to increase the quality of games. Anthony in another thread has said a lot that made me re-evaluate the games I've played in the past few years, and I'd now say pixel-art, low-poly models and low-resolution textures are what he called "game stuff", that is, they're what the indie game devs use to signal to their chosen audience that this is a "true" game, that they're allowed to enjoy this. I'd wager they'd use this even if it were somehow technically more difficult to implement, simply for the signal value. It doesn't serve much purpose for game design at all. I don't think I can name many games of that ilk in which the choice of graphic style underscored some sort of artistic vision. Hotline Miami may be an exception, you could argue that the top-down pixel art fits the feeling of an 80s arcade games very well.

As for Boltgun, I can only say that I knew it would be called fake and gay on here when I saw the trailer. They should stop with the 40k video games altogether. Some source materials live so much off the imagination of their fanbase that any artform as comprehensive as this will inevitably feel disappointing. Space Marines in movies and games will never feel as cool as what you imagine when you paint your minis (I must presume this, I have never painted minis or played the TTWG).

[anthony]

There was such a project being made, in fact.



Warhammer 40,000: Agents of Death was developed in the late 1990's by Polish developers and scrapped by 2000. Standing on the shoulders of giants such as Quake, Half-Life, Unreal, Goldeneye, and in the shadow of the much-hyped upcoming Duke Nukem Forever, had this came out I imagine it would have been quickly forgotten (much like its more-successful replacement Fire Warrior), yet fondly remembered for the architecture and design that was pulled off.

I love how this looks. For a work largely defined by its physicality (tabletop figures) attempts at realising this in video games are fairly limited. I love that this is at that intermediate level of three dimensional where rather than being a kind of pseudo realistic shadow world of superficial detail it's all simple, hard, and physical within its own world. Game elements/assets from this era feel the most physically real to me. The little buildings and characters look like they could be picked up and handled. A miniature reality rather than a pseudo reality.

This is of course was something that Dawn of War also did brilliantly. Being an "RTS" of its time it was able to get away with being intermediately 3D when "FPS" games were transitioning away from that style. In Dawn of War characters look like the bad guy above. Little solid 3D people who look like they could be picked up and handled. The game's army painter feature was so great for this. Not just close inspection but manipulation of detail too. Don't get that anymore.

I love this. It looks like actually walking through the world of warhammer as this sort of simple, abstracted space of crafted objects. It's a tabletop world. Serious question now. If I want to experience the world of warhammer somehow in a game what else is there? Would any be as pleasing and unique as this?

Now compare to any Boltgun footage or screenshots.

This of course by contrast feels like a world made out of paper, but not in a nice Katamari handicrafts way. Paper in the sense of weightlessness, superficiality, how stock it all is. It's ugly, it's dreary, it's about shooting lesser plague toads until they die and circle-hopping through ARENA BATTLES because I'm a real gamer who could totally beat a game from the 90s if I were actually interested in them (I wish I was).

It's certainly not wrong for Warhammer to ape what was seen as cool, after all part of its success was channelling everything the creators found awesome and combining that with a narrative greatly inspired by those works (to name a few, Mad Max, Dune, Starship Troopers, Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, 2000AD, Highlander, Gundam even) as well as real history (contra the libtards who say Warhammer was Leftist satire all along), but Boltgun simply doesn't understand any of that. Boltgun makes no attempt to channel any such influence besides shallowly taking elements from Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem and coating it over with a Warhammer shade of paint. It would be more honest if someone simply made a Warhammer mod for any of those aforementioned games rather than produce this junk.

Of course one serious problem with this is that they don't seem to be passionate about games. This is less fun and ambitious than brutal doom, which is a mod made by one guy. Not even getting into Brutal Doom's successor mods. The other serious problem is that they aren't apparently very passionate about Warhammer or anything else. Warhammer wasn't made by Warhammer fans, as you say it drew from a relatively wide pool of culture and history. Warhammer was the excuse to put it all together. Boltgun is sparse and functional as a game. It's also just sparse and functional as warhammer media, and as media/art in general. Which part of this did they think was cool? Probably that stupid ad where they rip off toy story and larp as "90s kids".  That ad is horrific, but it's the only part of this which doesn't feel like the bare minimum thing the project had to be.

And you mention mods, this is a good excuse for me to talk about something I'm passionate about. X-Com modding. I think the original X-Com, UFO: Enemy Unknown, is one of the greatest video games ever made. Largely for the amount of fairly high fidelity systems it can simulate at once which all work more or less perfectly with each other. This makes it great fun as it is. The robustness and interconnectedness of all of its rules and systems allows you to work out and execute very sensible strategies and tactics and have them play out in a way which makes sense.

Then 20 something years after the game's release we get openxcom. It finally runs well on new operating systems and we can play around with its parts. Not just that, we can add new parts. Then give it a few more years... Total Conversion Mods. New games built on UFO. Among them, a Warhammer 40k game.



This project started out life with some guy replacing the base game's soldier sprites with Ultramarines for fun. Then someone else adds working weapons, then another guy adds appropriate transport for them, from there it's easy to see the picture coming together. Aliens become Orks and Chaos, new research tree and threat escalation, objectives, weapons, items, endgame, some guy adds an entire new game within the game by then replacing the space marines with the imperial guard, who have their own versions of everything.



Openxcom is an incredible thing because it's like the Doom of strategy games. You can just drop stuff in and it works down to a very fine degree of detail. How do you put space marines and their bolter guns into a game about skirmishes between human soldiers and grey aliens? Well the game just reads entities, player and enemy and so on, and they have items with their own characteristics, armour which effects how things interact with them, etc. It's all very simple. A space marine is a player controlled entity with great stats and great armour and his bolter is powerful and pierces armour. The game doesn't just run on hit points. It models directional armour strength and status, and weapons have characteristics which impact differently against what they're hitting. A powerful weapon might glance off of armour and so on. It's possible to create a robust and sensible approximation of warhammer within this game's systems just by dropping in warhammer stuff with intelligently and faithfully defined characteristics.



This game wants to work. You just put stuff in and tell the game how it is, and it'll model all the proper interactions between the things.

Why I'm going into this much detail here now is that this game, in its own way, really puts you in the world of warhammer in a way boltgun doesn't. There are more ways to make something feel real and alive than rendering more realistic ferns. Openxcom has a very dated and idiosyncratic look which some people dislike, but under that it's full of detail that's real. Detail which works. This game has simulation-power behind it which is to this day still not just impressive, but arguably cutting edge. There is no clear successor to UFO beyond OpenXcom. If you put something into OpenXcom it feels alive. OpenXcom 40k is a world where bullets and lasers bounce off of power armour, men use static heavy weapons to take down monsters, a machine of infernal logistical complexity constantly grinds forward to throw human mass against endless looming danger. All of this isn't just shown, it's modelled and simulated, and you step into it to secure the win.

Maybe a bit indulgent of me to write all this. I want to write just about X-Com somewhere soon. But I hope it's of some interest and you see why it comes to mind. This is what living tradition and ambition look like within the world of video games. Use of an old game's style rather than abuse. The realisation of a world rather than it's stolen veneer.

[obscurefish]

This part should really go in Gaming Dysgenics, but I need to bring it up here to establish where and WHO "retro" faggotry is coming from:



Just to be clear, no I wasn't trying to learn how to buy a woman's shit— I already know how to do that and it's significantly worse than anything in this video.

This all started for me when I was.. browsing Reddit, posting.. naughty pictures of myself, as a girl looking for a little excitement does and a guy had a request that I thought was sort of funny.. he wanted me to take a poop on the floor and take pictures of it. So I did it, it was a ton of fun and I decided to post them publicly for other people too and it got a lot of attention. It was such a thrill having so many people oo and awe over those pictures that were fairly easy to take.. and so it started this huge addiction for me. [...] and the community is really protective and supportive as someone who moderates some of these subreddits myself we're barely deleting comments you have to protect the little community that you've built [...] and then this one is a personal fantasy of mine the "mean goth girl", I wasn't a goth in high school, but I would've loved to have been one [...]

STOP READING! That last line "I wasn't a goth in high school, but I would've loved to have been one" I want you to repeat that to yourself until you could recite it. That is the skeleton key to understanding what "troons" are.

I'm actually going to end the post here just because of how important the quote from that stupid no-chin bitch selling her shit is, but I'll come back soon because I've been meaning to reply to this thread since it was originally on Amarna I.

Still surreal to me that this trailer got made. Like how Pigsaw's tranny fetish weirdo wishes they were a goth girl, this game is marketed to people who wish they were wholesome grunge 90s cool low-fi people.

This reminds me of the trailer I saw for Secret Little Haven, which is a retro-themed visual novel where the player character is a teenage "trans girl". They even pick the same year, 1999.


Secret Little Haven Release Trailer

[GraphWalkWithMe]

This is probably obvious to everyone, but the self-conscious aspect of modern video games really puts a brake on the quality they can reach.

The first Super Mario Bros. seems almost slapdashedly put together in a lot of ways, at least visual-aesthetically: "So our game's protag is the gaijin-plumber of our office space, because it's funny. Throw in a bunch of other colorful weird shit like mushrooms and flowers and turtle-monsters to attract the kids, OK now let's get down to business and design the actual mechanics of the game." The enourmous success of the product snowballs into the NECESSARY NEXT PRODUCT they understand themselves to be obliged to pay priors to. The player still should be playing the same Mario, Mushrooms et al, but the mechanics need to differ slightly. The software systems they're dealing with may or may not have increased in complexity. The top-down demands RE: visuals, etc. at this point are another monster, little time to think about it.

This phenomenon is definitely outside the scope of this thread, but it's clearly observable across movies and basically all mass-consumer media products. The snowball has accumulated to a dead-end wherein no genuine progress can be made - "the next Mario" is out of the picture at this point, and so is the next Master Chief or Don Corleone.

What I'm getting at is that the "Indie-game genre" is so much of an attempt of ressurecting the past. It's largely "reactionary" in the worst sense. Plenty of "Indie games" are fun imo, and basically improvements on their priors, but the mass of them basically fail to achieve any genuine innovation in any direction beyond a "streamlining" of numbers systems and game-physics. They almost all amount to a retrograde sort of cargo-cult attempt at resurrecting "what was better than now".