The Gamer's Quarter

[Harveyjames]

Big topics only ok

[Nana Komatsu]

Who's hotter, Vincent from FF7 or Balthier from FFXII?
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[SuperWes]

Does the iPhone have the capability to take over Nintendo's dominance of the portable gaming market?

-Wes
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[Nana Komatsu]

Not at $500 with a two year contract.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Perseus]

[Shapermc]

X-Death is the greatest boss name ever.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Persona-sama]

[Ethoscapade]

i just realized tonight that my beard is concave

[Harveyjames]

This sucks.

[dhex]

[Mister Toups]

sup forum axe



wait a minute
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[Nana Komatsu]

[Harveyjames]

I just wanted you to have some deep and meaningful discussions about game design theory ; _ ;

which I could read in my spare time ; _ ;

it's a field I'm interested in!

[Nana Komatsu]

That sounds like the sort of thing you'd be looking for at Select Button.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Harveyjames]

Select Button intimidates me somehow.

[Nana Komatsu]

Yes but there are actually debates there, and they do get heated!

Well maybe that's not true, I haven't actually read any of the threads at Select Button but given the people who participated from Insert Credit and the types of discussion that was held there, I assume it's more of the same.

Maybe read the Insert Credit Forum Archive?
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[raveneyesnola]

which is hosted at select button! I think. well there's links. or something.

hi toups

~b
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first katrina, now ic(again)..what's next?

[Swimmy]

Well hey, how about this: pining for novelty.

When my friend got FFXII for Christmas, he was daunted by the new battle system, the gambits, the license board, and so on. He saw all of the people around the town and skipped talking to any of them. He couldn't even read the map in the corner of the screen well enough to make it around. He's been out of videogame practice for a while, so it took him a while to get adjusted, and even then he went out and bought Wes's guide just so he didn't have to deal with it.

Unfortunately I saw right through it. The gambits, the battles, the licence points, the town, the characters, the puzzles, all of it. It just felt like a million videogames to me, and I didn't want to think about it. The whole game felt, to me, like a series of boxes filled with important and unimportant switches, and that I could tell which was which at a glance was intensely boring. So I run around looking for novel experiences, games that obscure their switches.

But when you think about it, it's not that hard to be novel. It's damn hard to carefully craft a well-balanced and beautiful game, no matter how cliché it is. In pining for novelty, I'm turning into this guy, who argues that Mozart sucked because he wasn't revolutionary. Well, no, stfu douchebag Mozart was a brilliant composer. Yet, FFXII's first few hours bored me so much that I kind of want to hate the whole game on principle. I know that if I just gave it a few more hours it would probably get better, and that if I let myself get sucked into the story the blatant videogameness would mostly dissolve, and that I shouldn't obsess over novel experiences. But at the same time I can't deny the way it, and all too many recent videogames, made me feel: bored.

So, I don't know, discuss the futility (or superiority?) of pining for novelty in the face of well-crafted cliché.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[helicopterp]

I would argue that the only well-crafted cliché is the one that knows exactly how cliché it is, and even then should be novel because it subverts its own legacy somehow. Reiteration is boring and pointless; reflection, response, and revision cultivate clichés into genres, which are (though anything but static) very aware and novel within their own structure.

I have not played Final Fantasy XII, nor have I played most other Final Fantasy games, so I can't be of much use discussing that specific example.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Mister Toups]

[Scratchmonkey]

Man, I was thinking about novelty in videogames while I was driving home.

More specifically, I was wondering about the spectrum of hitting a button repeatedly to do some simple task many times over the course of the game vs. having a game constantly change what's going on in terms of gameplay/control scheme. They're both pretty bad and they both have their good points.

Even more specifically, I think it's related to the importance of performance and individual expression in games.

[dessgeega]

[dizzyjosh]

is it just something cultural that makes it harder to play a game that's awkward for a good reason than it is to watch a movie that's awkward for a good reason, or do you think that comes from some control/frustration thing in our heads*?



*may require science or dueling anecdotes in order to be an actual conversation piece

[simplicio]

1. Fran > Basch, though if Basch were wearing flannel and carrying around a woodaxe or something this might change. His colorful frilly garb does him no justice.

2. X-Death vs. Psycho Mantis? I say tie. Final Fantasy totally blew their chance by not naming him X-Deth. Though on that note, I feel like there must be some NES/SNES/Genesis platformer badguys that blow them both out of the water at once. I have no idea what they are cause I didn't play those games.

3. I really like selectbutton, but this is mostly due to the frequency of conversation in a few select topics on the general board. Honestly, I've hardly been playing games at all in the past month so I'm not paying much attention to gaming discussions right now.

4. Serious point: If double jumping is generally reviled in proper gaming society, what is thought of crouching? Should one be able to move and crouch at the same time, or is that uncouth? Does one really slide along the floor when going into a sudden crouch from a sprint? I imagine a more likely scenario being tumbling onto one's own head. If Mario tumbled onto his own head I'd be doing that all the damn time. I suspect this may be the reason Mario 64 introduced the element of sliding headfirst into walls, to at least approximate the experience.

5. I really don't care for the axe but hell, look at me now. I guess there's a bit of that in us all.

6. dizzyjosh, no, that's just relative positioning and movement in our heads as translated from optical input through physical familiarity to tactile output and back again. I'm assuming you mean: "what's wrong with the controls in resident evil?"

[dessgeega]

hey josh.

i'm not totally sure what you're getting at, but i think videogames ask a lot more of their audience than movies. you can watch a movie without really engaging with it, but you can't really play a game without playing the game. a movie will progress whether or not you've got a handle on it, but a game typically won't progress unless you have an idea what you're doing. the typical movie asks for less time, too, where you might go into a game having no idea how much time the game expects from you.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

How does watching a tool assisted run of Double Dragon 2 through an emulator factor into all of that?
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[dizzyjosh]

t dess: dangit, i know this is totally defeating the point of the thread, but I think you're right -- you can't suspend your inability to complete a section till the mechanic becomes clear, or fast-forward through the suck of having to walk all the way back through a bunch of rooms. the only scene i've ever fast-forwarded through because i got too uncomfortable and kept watching afterwards was Irreversible, and I'm glad I did stick around for the end, although I'm not sure I could ever watch it again.

I guess what I was getting at is "even though I can watch half of a brutal and disgusting rape scene for the purpose of more or less my edification, why will I never ever finish Silent Hill 2, even though from hanging out around IC too long I think I know why I'm moving slowly and can't jump on top of things" and it feels like the same bucket of reasons why even though I like Krystoff Kryslowski that i'm going to have to settle for the blue/red/white trilogy and not touch the Decalogue until i'm trapped in a room with them and a huge bag of pot and no books for a weekend:::

i'm only a stickler for some kinds of punishment, and probably something about just how much dang time I have to be invested in it. I'm pretty sure time and frustration increase in direct proportion to each other until you either quit or win.

so no! it's not just the brain, and it's probably not just culturally being ok with letting things slide in film; it's the obvious middleground answer, the medium itself.

t simplicio (you joker you): the only resident evil i've played for more than half an hour is RE4 on the gamecube, which has an abundance of excellence particularly with its controls. I don't think I got frustrated once. I think here I also know what you're talking about, and while it's slightly different from my Silent Hill story I'm guessing it's not substantially different. But what do you mean about physical familiarity to tactile output? it's not that I couldn't figure out what buttons did what, I just didn't like the way they worked and didn't want to go through the hassle of continually doing something I didn't like to see what point it made when i got that point. in Irreversible, as fucked up as it made me feel (a billion times worse than James' slowness did), I felt like I needed to see the end in order to get anything other than nauseated, whereas I more or less chickened out on Silent Hill and said 'at least 20 more hours of this? and i forgot what i'm supposed to be doing already? eff it".

also, wait, wtf, double-jumps suck? I just put double-jumps in a game guys, and it's going to be a lot of work to make platforming in em work. what's the harshing on doublejumps?
i fucking *love* jumping. i play these action games in order to have fun moving, and jumping is fun. but for sliding, dude, i never play sports and i've managed to slide into home base and take out the shins of some poor fucker.

t harvey, not much of a heated debate here. sorry to disappoint.

edit: i took out two typos, wanted to make something make more sense, read the whole post again, gave up on that.

[simplicio]

Oh, the traditional argument against double-jumps is that once they're acquired, they typically only mean you're going to have to go back to the beginning of the map and redo everything to collect the arbitrary items that have been inaccesible along the way. Or, if they're available from the beginning, they hold no purpose at all other than to require an additional button press to get across a longer gap, or allow a "save" to get to a platform that was probably the product of poor design in the first place. So the fault lies not with double jumps themselves, but with the lazy, uncreative developers who employ them.

re: Res Evil- no, the 4th fixed the input issues of the first games mostly, which was essentially terrible control to emulate the physical inability of any standard victim in a horror movie to escape their gruesome death. I like to think, in my more absurd moments, that the whole "Square blue crystal unlocks the basement door" thing was similarly just an extension of the old can't-get-the-keys-into-the-car-door-in-time gag.

dizzy, even though I'd argue you missed some of the point of Irreversible (calculated extreme, near physical shock clouding and overshadowing the innocence of the rest of the narrative), you did just reference both Noe and Kieslowski in a silly videogame discussion. please continue posting! Also, the Double Life of Veronique is available on DVD now; you could at least go that route if you're still holding out on the Decalogue.

EDIT: Winged Assassins, that probably just serves to inform you that you will never be good enough in this lifetime, right?

[Harveyjames]

I just realised how the word 'heated' seems to imply I want you all to be screeching STFU!!! into your keyboards and falling out over why Treasure are over/underrated.

Actually It's a reference to a British chat show called The Mrs. Merton Show where once per show they'd say 'Let's have a heated debate!' The joke was that because the audience were all over 75, the debate was always rather civil and subdued, and about trivial topics.

So I guess if you're not au fait with that reference, a more accurate thread title would be 'Let's have a nice in-depth discussion about interesting things'. OK thanks.

[dizzyjosh]

[Nana Komatsu]

[Shapermc]

[helicopterp]

Nana, speaking of not getting involved in Gunstar Heroes debates, how are you enjoying Gunstar Super Heroes?

I would like to submit my own personal enjoyment of the double jump in most games I have found it in. In Psychonauts, though, it blows.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[simplicio]

[Dracko]

Oh, Irréversible is fantastic. I did a presentation on it back in high school, along with A Clockwork Orange and Un Chien andalou. It's brutal to be sure, but perfect evidence that extreme cinema is of merit.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[SuperWes]

[dhex]

i was pretty cataclysmically drunk when i played wii bowling, but i'd point to it as an excellent example of novelty in action. the more invested gamer folk tend to associate novelty with superficiality (or timewaves, if you had a lot of fun in college) but with games it's a pretty important facet of what makes something compelling.

the other facet being "doing it well" as there are going to no doubt be a bunch of rather hackneyed games using the wii in not so great ways, novel or otherwise.
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[ApM]

[Ketch]

[SuperWes]

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

the funniest line in visitor q is "i call it 'True Bullying'."
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[dark steve]

the long version of man bites dog is too long
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[simplicio]

If you're really worried about it, start with Noe's I Stand Alone and see how you deal with that.

[dizzyjosh]

[helicopterp]

"Help!" is on Help!
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

[Shapermc]

Oh, you never got it? Damn I sent it with a disc of "Look around you" on it. Same time I sent the disc to Sergei, and he got his, I forgot about sending it to you.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[FortNinety]