Video Game General

[anthony]

A Max Payne 3 game over screen. There's more style in this incidental shot which emerges naturally from the game's crafted parts than any of its cutscenes.

[Corvid]

A minor Observation made while playing MGSV is that there is no limitation placed on the player regarding how objectives are to be completed, but I gravitate towards nonlethal anyway because it is more rewarding to challenge myself. What do we call incentives like this?

[anthony]

A minor Observation made while playing MGSV is that there is no limitation placed on the player regarding how objectives are to be completed, but I gravitate towards nonlethal anyway because it is more rewarding to challenge myself. What do we call incentives like this?

Freedom? Player directed scenarios? The game not being made by weepy jewish midwit strivers who dream of working for an HBO writer's room?

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Not really related but this makes me laugh every time.

[PIGSAW]

The silver case has my highest recommendation. It's effectively a VN with minor gameplay elements, but it's very easily worth it for the artistic style alone. High-point for that era of japanese graphic design imo - its more a part of the visuals associated with music culture and other low-art than video game culture and is a part of that legacy first and foremost.

【MAD】「The Silver Case」ライブバージョン（『シルバー事件』）

[anthony]

I'll post more substantially on Evergrace at some point, but just wanted to share the soundtrack somewhere for now. As one acquaintance of mine put it, it's all about the "aesthetic harmony" it achieves. It's an absolutely beautiful piece of work. And far more a multimedia piece than anything else FROM have made in my opinion (yes that FROM Software).

[kirukuni]

Evergrace

I have the WOAH sample from one of the songs as my phone's notification sound. It's a shame the game is hard to actually play. It was designed for the PS1 and it shows in the controls.

[anthony]

Evergrace

I have the WOAH sample from one of the songs as my phone's notification sound. It's a shame the game is hard to actually play. It was designed for the PS1 and it shows in the controls.

It's kind of a pain but its simplicity and rough nature mostly errs on the side of dead simplicity, which I like. My favourite parts of the game are where it feels like a walking simulator, with monsters and such just being mild speedbumps. I took some screenshots. Let me get them.



I love the game's opening area. It looks like Majula in Dark Souls 2. Similar aesthetic direction but far stronger and more thoroughly realised, even if it's largely empty space.



It's FROM's orange game. And I love it.

Evergrace 2 is also fascinating to look at, another achievement in aesthetic harmony. Also worth a look in my opinion. It has a soundtrack and aesthetic peaks on the level of the original. Similarly beautiful and pleasant opening orange area with nice nature sounds. And the soundtrack feels like a more elaborate iteration upon the themes of the original.



@kirukuni Do you know which WOAH sample? That's a hard guess since that's about 90% of the soundtrack's vocalisations.

[Guest]

Final Fantasy 8 should be considered if one wants a JRPG...
The best composed art in the genre, the best music, and of course the setting is excellent.
Little else to say...
It begins with a German Fencing match in which you receive your scar of prestige...along with giving one to your rival, your brother.
It also serves as an excellent filter. Story as sequence of events or...Yes that layering of depth that dream one can pass through.
Very long but worth it if one is in the right place.
Play the original emulated...you do not want the HD or whatever they call the remastered version. Your brain should fill in the details from the FMV's.

[kirukuni]

Woah

It's the very very beginning of this song:


To add onto the sperging, Evergrace is immediately foreign and strange. Describing it as 'aesthetic harmony' is good. A lot of 'experimental' aesthetics come off as either very sparse or very incoherent because the other aspects of the work haven't evolved with the elements the artist's chosen to focus on. In Evergrace, the art direction, 2d lineart for the extended media/cover, and setting all fit together with the music in a shockingly cohesive way. It feels like it would have been the culmination of a minor trend that never existed.

I've tried looking into the artist who did the 2d art for the game, but haven't found anything meaningful of his beyond a name and a couple of 240p screenshots of cardgame art he's done. Once I'm more confident with Japanese, I want to message some of the devs to ask about him.

It's kind of a pain but its simplicity and rough nature mostly errs on the side of dead simplicity, which I like. My favourite parts of the game are where it feels like a walking simulator, with monsters and such just being mild speedbumps.

I got frustrated and cheated partway through playing it to make it more of a walking sim. Most games are a lot more fun if you have cheat engine open imo. I'm here to experience interesting things, not watch numbers go up or grind.

What's interesting to me is that the opening area of Evergrace reminds me a lot of the opening area of Elden Ring. It even has a looming tower you enter later on.

[Guest]

I used to play this video game called Space Station 13, which was a shining example of dynamic and emergent gameplay, before it was ubiquitously co-opted by tranny-furry amateur game devs, who now use it as a training ground through which they employ their stultifying philosophies of "game design" onto their players. I wouldn't be surprised if some of you know about it, or maybe have even played it at one point.

[NuclearAbsolutist]

I used to play this video game called Space Station 13, which was a shining example of dynamic and emergent gameplay, before it was ubiquitously co-opted by tranny-furry amateur game devs, who now use it as a training ground through which they employ their stultifying philosophies of "game design" onto their players. I wouldn't be surprised if some of you know about it, or maybe have even played it at one point.

I saw the decline first hand along with the scant tries to save it. SS13's history as far as I know stands like no other a proof of the errors of simpleminded gamers not taking tranny jannies seriously the entire misshapen corpous of game design and the pitfalls of open source like no other. Still pains me to even think about it, maybe one day I can do a postmortem but not today.

[Guest]

https://twitter.com/samuni_ps1/status/16...7225625601

Regarding the matter of retro 3D graphics in contemporary game design, which inspired me to design the AI models that imitate original examples of these graphics.

What the hell is going on above? "Demakes" have been discussed before by some of you, and insightful things were said. This goes further than that, from what I've found. "Haunted PS1" has been a theme on itch.io for a while now. The tag "PSX" has been flooded with new indie developers over the last year, or at least it seemed so to me. This Google Trends result confirms it: https://i.imgur.com/Dhn4H3z.png. That's quite a spike.

I see now, that's the exact release date of the Bloodborne demake, which has "PSX" in its title.

I've had some thoughts about this matter. It's different the way these new developers approach these aesthetics. This can be traced all the way back to vaporwave, to Vektroid, James Ferraro, and maybe OPN, but none of their millennial irony and despair can be found here. There is an existential confrontation behind most millennial art, one that often fails completely. The irony of longing for lost forms of fakeness over current ones seemed to be an intentional part of vaporwave. It's not a brilliant joke but it's deeper than what is going on with these games.

What you have here is a meme. That's all it is. Retro graphics. Kanji. PSX. Standard Definition TVs. Scanlines. VHS. The Weather Channel. I suppose this is the price of drowning your shriek of pain in a joke. Ironic rhetoric lends itself to commodification - 'let's meme this'. Autistic children come along and strip-mine the carcasses for the few unique contributions remaining, then set up t-shirt stands. "Power in misery". Some people are making clones of Cruelty Squad!

But the problem is that they don't even get it right. To return to Samurai Unicorn: depth of field effects? Is that bloom? It looks like 60 fps. What annoys me the most is that the "low poly" models are shittier than actual PS1 game models. It's insulting. Look at in-game models from Biohazard, 1996. The facial features have been detailed with greater care despite the limitations. It would be silly to complain about how nostalgia is disempowering - there's no genuine nostalgia here, no feeling at all. The past has been fully interpolated, anti-aliased, all jaggedness removed, all anxiety smoothed over, nothing left to remind you that an illusion of continuity is being produced - that fact of self-conscious human experience we call art. Immersion produced on a budget through the power of trend dynamics. You'll own nothing and be happy, etc.

So I made my models, because I wanted my fantasy "PSX" game just to my specifications, and I found something interesting - the neural network does it better than them. It reproduces these forms with greater accuracy, as if it had a strange kind of honor. I trained models on the internet ray-tracing archive, on frames ripped from every episode of MTV's Liquid Television, even on the UI designs of Kai Krause, renowned for his suite of Photoshop filters and other graphical applications from the 90s. It converged on all of them with little guidance. It's as if it sees the world-spirit of the time these things were made in, without longing, without petty resentment, just as they are. It's extremely satisfying in the way that no remake has even been for me.

[Guest]

Who here has played Vampire - Bloodlines? It's notoriously known for being a broken, buggy, and all-around jumbled mess of a video game, but it has a certain "je ne sais quoi" appeal to it that is unmatched by anything else in the medium. I have never seen it mentioned within this online space of ours - most anons have pretty normie-core tastes, from what I can tell - but if you like action RPG with character-driven story-lines and multiple endings, it might be worth your time; try it out, see if it grabs you - you'll know pretty quick if it's not for you. It's my favourite video game of all time. I could say more, if pressed.

Apéritif: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQIBT-a6jog (the entire OST is incredible)

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i will add that the soundtrack is best experienced in-game so don't spoil yourself if you intend on playing it

[anthony]

Who here has played Vampire - Bloodlines? It's notoriously known for being a broken, buggy, and all-around jumbled mess of a video game, but it has a certain "je ne sais quoi" appeal to it that is unmatched by anything else in the medium. I have never seen it mentioned within this online space of ours - most anons have pretty normie-core tastes, from what I can tell - but if you like action RPG with character-driven story-lines and multiple endings, it might be worth your time; try it out, see if it grabs you - you'll know pretty quick if it's not for you. It's my favourite video game of all time. I could say more, if pressed.

Apéritif: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQIBT-a6jog (the entire OST is incredible)

I know of it but never got around to it. I strongly dislike "action RPG(s) with character-driven story-lines and multiple endings".

[JF_]

I've played Bloodlines a bit. It's an intriguing game, full of White Wolf's typical humor. I have sympathy for any developer that gets branded "edgy" by mindless consumers who pretend to enjoy their purchases more than they really do.

Bloodlines is a tribute to what I assume was already a fading image of UseNet Goth/80s BDSM club culture, then continued in things like LiveJournal and MySpace. Rivethead and related aesthetics are what cyberpunk should look like...I can't stand the appearance of 2077. They put the synthwave colors on everything. There should be a lot of two things: black and red, like anarchists, or the SS. It feels like a cynical move to sell a homogenized vision of cyberpunk to teenagers. Maybe you could use the word revisionist. The film Hardware was panned for its seeming unoriginality from the standpoint of a blockbuster thriller, which is I guess true, but it's a perfect example of cyberpunk aesthetics to me. I still haven't seen the new Blade Runner and don't intend to.

I played as Clan Nosferatu the first time in Bloodlines. A difficult choice. You're forced to eat rats in the sewers for what may be the whole game. I love when something takes an absurd premise all the way. I'm not a good judge of gameplay, it took me a while before gamers told me in High School that I liked bad games. It's about graphics and sound to me. Horrid voice acting will make me shut a game off faster than difficult control systems. I remember getting stuck in Bloodlines at a boss fight in a manor basement. I never progressed beyond this point.

There's some sort of porno set level behind an internet cafe, if I recall correctly. Like with G4's programming, a tendency to self-referentiality and an exuberant prurience.

Another early 2000s game that I have been playing recently is Chaser, a shooter with a plot almost entirely stolen from Total Recall. This cutscene is the coolest part: https://youtu.be/ypcWxMK-VyY?t=2268. The consensus is that it was a shitty game and of course you can find more than one Angry Video Game Nerd cum Mystery Space Theater 2000 type dissection if you look around. The level design is so confusing in some places that I laughed at the thought of how it is indeed like a Philip K Dick novel. I like it a lot, it's my thing.

The cinematic ambition of games from around the turn of the century is something that has been milked for humor online since...as long as I knew about games. It's true that Quantic Dream is a disaster. Daikatana was mediocre. Deus Ex is a little overrated. But I still love this ambition, this seriousness, the will of the developers to indulge themselves as much as they wanted from the beginning, now that they had financial security. The story of Shenmue's protracted development and release, how it failed to turn a profit despite being a bestseller and a critical success, fulfills the requirements of a Greek Tragedy.

[anthony]

Bloodlines is a tribute to what I assume was already a fading image of UseNet Goth/80s BDSM club culture, then continued in things like LiveJournal and MySpace. Rivethead and related aesthetics are what cyberpunk should look like...I can't stand the appearance of 2077. They put the synthwave colors on everything. There should be a lot of two things: black and red, like anarchists, or the SS. It feels like a cynical move to sell a homogenized vision of cyberpunk to teenagers. Maybe you could use the word revisionist. The film Hardware was panned for its seeming unoriginality from the standpoint of a blockbuster thriller, which is I guess true, but it's a perfect example of cyberpunk aesthetics to me. I still haven't seen the new Blade Runner and don't intend to.

I love Hardware. A few people who get  that movie scattered around. I think you're totally right that it got this more right than any of the official genre-labelled movies that followed.

The cinematic ambition of games from around the turn of the century is something that has been milked for humor online since...as long as I knew about games. It's true that Quantic Dream is a disaster. Daikatana was mediocre. Deus Ex is a little overrated. But I still love this ambition, this seriousness, the will of the developers to indulge themselves as much as they wanted from the beginning, now that they had financial security. The story of Shenmue's protracted development and release, how it failed to turn a profit despite being a bestseller and a critical success, fulfills the requirements of a Greek Tragedy.

Absolutely. I love that stuff.

[zazzle]

i liked fallout 1 & 2 despite being gen z. i love older games with that sort of atmosphere. wish they didn't go first person. top down looks way better, tried playing " underail " which is suppose to be similar but the story is meh..

[kirukuni]

This looks cool.

[anthony]

i liked fallout 1 & 2 despite being gen z. i love older games with that sort of atmosphere. wish they didn't go first person. top down looks way better, tried playing " underail " which is suppose to be similar but the story is meh..

I dislike crpgs but got something out of Fallout 1. Broke the combat using Luck so I wouldn't have to try there, then it was fun to mess around in this dusty junkworld for a while. Something these games could do well was a certain kind of visual style. Or atmosphere I guess. It looks cool. They can make junk look more real from that perspective and that level of fidelity. In Fallout 3 all the junk and dust looks like painted plastic. In Fallout 1 everything looks like proper rust and sand.

[zazzle]

i liked fallout 1 & 2 despite being gen z. i love older games with that sort of atmosphere. wish they didn't go first person. top down looks way better, tried playing " underail " which is suppose to be similar but the story is meh..

I dislike crpgs but got something out of Fallout 1. Broke the combat using Luck so I wouldn't have to try there, then it was fun to mess around in this dusty junkworld for a while. Something these games could do well was a certain kind of visual style. Or atmosphere I guess. It looks cool. They can make junk look more real from that perspective and that level of fidelity. In Fallout 3 all the junk and dust looks like painted plastic. In Fallout 1 everything looks like proper rust and sand.

i made a melee build and read some guides b4 hand. you gotta know alot of these older games people bought in person and they always came with guides and helpful shit. thats the main reason alot ppl struggle with older games besides random difficulty bs.. u should try fallout 2 and just steal someones meta build off the internet. most ppl think 2 is better, but i think both r good