Always happy when one of my random pokes ends up prompting some AYP (actual yeso posting).
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@“yeso”#p153067 adult brain and reads actual books and watches actual movies instead of just nerd shit
You know very well I'm 100% on your boat when it comes to pointing out the rampant infantilism we suffer in this particular medium, but I would clarify that the nerd shit is not bad per se, and I think it has its space. Very good games like Disco Elysium, Pentiment or Umineko feed directly from the nerd culture in some regards (Disco Elysium world was developed via tabletop-RPG campaigns on a custom D&D ruleset that the team had been playing for years) and rather than detracting from the whole thing, it adds texture and provides richness to the tonal breadth of those games.
With cases like FFXVI the vibe I get is the vindication certain types of games such as this one end up experiencing comes from the marginal nature some niches of audience go through, fan-fiction adjacent communities, tumblr people and a specific type of anime/manga fan who is into cosplay and other generally frowned upon stuff (like the furry fandom). Those communities perceive games such as FFXIV, XV, XVI, Baldur's Gate 3, Dragon Age, etc. as "made for them" and rally under their banner to make a statement regarding their niche interests VS. the broader internet culture. The problem I see, same as yeso, is confusing an extreme and uncompromising corporate product as an identitarian flag. Very successful and convenient for Square-Enix to be able to cater to these groups (against which I have absolutely nothing! I AM myself an otaku nerd in some regards), but very bad for us as consumers in terms of disabling any kind of possible critique, or at least putting those under the risk of scrutiny of being seen as attacks towards those fandoms etc.
Another point for Yeo is that he convinced his unemployed 55 year old dad to learn pixel art. He's been doing the Kunio style character work since Ringo.
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@“JoJoestar”#p153079 the nerd shit is not bad per se, and I think it was its space.
Yeah, the Yeo games are still very much Video Games. You still play a beat em up and fight hundreds of people (in Stone Buddha and Fading Afternoon anyway. I couldn't get into the high school setting in Ringo but do mean to give it a real try at some point).
Tim’s reaction to Hi-Fi Rush’s aesthetic is exactly how I feel about Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s so viscerally unappealing to me I genuinely hate looking at it. I get they were going for the schlocky 80’s fantasy novel cover look to it but the graphics are way too high fidelity for it to even look “bad on purpose.” Every scrap of voice acting I’ve heard I also really don’t like. The music kinda goes tho
@“JoJoestar”#p153079 Those communities perceive games such as FFXIV, XV, XVI, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon Age, etc. as “made for them” and rally under their banner to make a statement regarding their niche interests VS. the broader internet culture. The problem I see, same as yeso, is confusing an extreme and uncompromising corporate product as an identitarian flag.
This is -- more or less -- exactly the point I end up making whenever someone successfully baits me in to talking about the dang _Super Mario Bros. Movie_ from last year. Usually, any and all criticisms get hand-waved away with "yeah, but my kids had a good time watching it". I think there is a strong analogue here: nobody is claiming kids don't have fun with the movie, nobody is claiming that people that feel like these games are "made for them" are not enjoying them. However, these groups should want things to be better! Kids certainly deserve better than 90 minutes of flashing lights and sounds as provided by the _Super Mario Bros. Movie_; the groups you mention here certainly deserve to have some genuinely excellent games made for them also.
These games (and that movie) are like fireworks; they are pretty to look at sometimes, but ultimately unfulfilling always.
Pretty bummed no one mentioned Lunacid. That game totally owns, dude.
Seriously tho, I think Tim would really vibe with it. @exodus you *might* like it. It's a *Kingsfield* inspired game, but handles a lot better (especially after turning the camera sway off) and is pretty breezy in the beginning.
It has some stuff tho, and a couple genuinely spooky moments. Makes sense, it was developed by one of the people behind *Spooky's House of Jumpscares*
@“CaseyBat”#p153087 Tim’s reaction to Hi-Fi Rush’s aesthetic is exactly how I feel about Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s so viscerally unappealing to me I genuinely hate looking at it.
Ok I don't think I hate it as much as you but you saying that made me realize that I kinda hate looking at it too. The character designs in particular are like ... they kinda look like generic high fantasy cosplayers. Don't get me wrong, they look like the high effort upper middle class, 3D printer having, semi professional cosplay model kind of cosplayers. But still, I don't know if I get a real sense of place or aesthetic cohesion and identity from anything of the game I've seen so far. I really have to kind of stare at them and think for a while when I see a screenshot of the game without prominent UI elements to be able to determine it's a screenshot of _Baldur's Gate 3._ I mean, it could be worse, it could be a Blizzard game and have a cohesive and identifiable overall aesthetic that is ugly lol. But I think maybe part of the reason why I see screenshots or footage of it and it just kinda slides off of my brain moments after seeing it is because a lot of it looks like they took a mountain of concept art from lots of admittedly talented fantasy artists, then popped it in to a food processor and hit the pulse button on high speed a few times.
Maybe I'm just bitter because I want to play the CRPG on a C but my C is woefully unprepared to run it at a reasonable level of visual fidelity. I'm sure it all works reasonably well when you're actually playing the game and getting hooked in with the narrative, but from the outside looking in there's very little visually distinctive about it.
I like Baldur‘s Gate 3’s aesthetic because it kinda reminds me of a local theater troupe doing a madrigal sonnet at a community center. I would prefer they dump all the alien/orc crap and just have guys wearing doublets, jerkins, and hose. I can smoke a bowl with the Tieflings though.
i think i said it somewhere before on here, but based entirely on me only watching some hi fi rush trailers and playing the forespoken demo, i feel like all the hate about the dialog in forespoken should have been directed to the dialog in hi fi rush instead
I might be being a bit unfair to Baldur's Gate 3 here because maybe it‘s pretty tough for a lot of those MandaloreGames ass High Fantasy CRPGs to look all that distinct from any other High Fantasy CRPG. You could probably say the same thing about Pillars of Eternity. The Planescape or the old Fallout games games have the advantage of a really distinct setting but it’s probably tough out there for others.
@“sdate”#p153111 you should! It‘s so much like community theater because the characters all chew on the scenery and everything is dramatic. I know it’s hack to say but the fact you can do anything and it impacts the world gives a real improv vibe to the whole thing. The writing feels like good improv. Not as good as a tight scripted movie or book (given the ambition of the the game) but it is enjoyable and everyone is having a good time inhabiting these characters.
@“pizzascrub”#p153068 I agree with this, but with the bent that I think Hi-Fi Rush looks good. They went for something and they hit it! It looks exactly like it was probably pitched as in the planning stages. That's uncommon!
Hi-Fi Rush was my favourite game of last year and honestly the art made me not want to play it, but I did anyway so book cover something something something
Fully agree with Tim et al that the worst way to enjoy Mario Wonder is to play it with someone you care about. You will both have a miserable time. The game is a single-player game and the fact that they say it‘s multiplayer is a lie. This like hurts the game, your experience and your game-playing relationship with your friends and families. I love the game, but I haven’t actually gotten to “play” it yet as it's been with my family which has been a terrible experience.
@“JoJoestar”#p153079 I would clarify that the nerd shit is not bad per se, and I think it was its space. Very good games like Disco Elysium, Pentiment or Umineko feed directly from the nerd culture in some regards
Sure I suppose I’m painting with too broad a brush. I think when things are actually good and reach places beyond just gratification of nerd hobby expectations then they’re not nerd shit to me
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@“JoJoestar”#p153079 The problem I see, same as yeso, is confusing an extreme and uncompromising corporate product as an identitarian flag.
Yes and also I think holding art/media as having some validating function socially or politically is perhaps not a healthy disposition to hold, however well-intentioned. I think maybe part of this situation is: varying degrees of media literacy (meaning varying down to low) by a nerd style audience combined with the games themselves having so little actually worthwhile in them that the only way to talk about them in any satisfying depth is either (1) these meta-conversations about social/political positioning, (2) focusing on technical minutia and trivia/context wrt the industry/medium/history of same, and (3) new games journalism type interfacing games with kinda sorta sometimes related personal essays. These are perfectly fine and can be interesting of course but they’re all just kind of orbiting the stuff, you know?
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@“seasons”#p153086 the Yeo games are still very much Video Games
Right, I think part of why they’re interesting for this forum and perhaps also the attached podcast is because the guy + his old dad and other team members are kind of walking the walk so to speak
I agree that square enix‘s management is not coming from a good place, but I also think yeo is not coming from a great place. The idea of art being torture is a big detriment to art in general, and to dismiss other people enjoying your work because you think it’s imperfect is rude toward and of course dismissive of the people who enjoy it. so I'm not really prepared to hold their ideological approaches up next to each other and say one is good and the other is not.
The point isn’t that it’s torture, it’s that it’s personal rather than commercial, and what’s important about his description of his process isn’t the torturous part, it’s that he has a personal drive to do it. And fwiw about the downer stuff - he’s just being slavic
@“yeso”#p153185 And fwiw about the downer stuff - he’s just being slavic
Maybe! I don't like the kind of conversation it engenders though - my experience with slavs (and being rather Czech) is that the tendency is more to internalize that sort of thing than externalize, but that's neither here nor there. I think maybe social media isn't a great thing for that guy.
@“exodus”#p153189 I’d add a bone dry sense of humor, which is what I’m also detecting. But again the point isn’t who is what flavor of maladjusted on social media, it’s who’s serious and what kind of investment it is, and what’s worth critical attention