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"Against the cult of simplicity" - Craig Stern on how the indie clique hates complex games

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
Papers Please, finally a game that's less fun than filing your tax return.
 

Raghar

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What? Do you have something against a class 8 apartment in Artoszka? Aside of paying rent of course.
 

shihonage

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I lived in class 8 apartment in Arztotzka.

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Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
God that looks like my "first day in school" picture from East Germany, right down to the dilapidated concrete.
 

TheGreatOne

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EDIT: I wouldn't bundle Papers Please with the others, but that's me.

That's precisely why I'm asking for an explanation. Papers Please has actual gameplay, the other "cancer" titles do not.
Even if it does have gameplay, it's not really the same as playing a game like Knights of the Chalice or Super Meat Boy. That's not say you can't make point&click adventures, mystery games and other games like that where there isn't as much interaction, but I'm grouping it there simply because indy twats love pretentious shit like that. "The premise is so unusual it must be good!" Zero Punctuation refused to review Original Sin (even IGN reviewed it and gave it a 9/10) "because July is a gaming drought and no one has released a single good game this month" but took the time out of his calendar to review that piece of trash. Because Papers Please was such a hyped game with so many people eagerly waiting for the release date that he had no choice but to review it. And not just that but he has praised it in his other interviews like it's up there with Portal as one of the greatest modern design achievements in video gaming and a great example of how indy developers are making "innovative, fresh new games" which are "the cure against the stale AAA gaming industry". But he sure as hell never reviews any gameplay oriented indy games or games of actual "mid tier developers" who are still struggling on, making niche games while having big enough of budgets to make the kind of games that those indy developers could never make. Those developers actually need the support and as much coverage as they can get so more people would hear about their games. But of course you never see Errant Signal devoting entire episodes to those kind of games. Making a complex strategy game, CRPG, tactical RPG or a challenging bullet hell shooter is old news, those games existed before the indy boom. But making a game where you stare at a mountain, or play border police, those games are treading new ground and by virtue of being innovative deserve all the recognition and exposure they can get.
 

Jasede

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It's just navel-gazing. If those idiots really loved games they'd want more AAA games, more sequels that refine and make more complex a game's underlying mechanics, bigger budgets, better hardware, etc. And they'd encourage actual quality indies, like Crimzon Clover (just check out the work that went into every sprite; the damn thing took more than half a decade to make) to charge higher prices (as the good indies indeed do; only the shovel-ware hipster games are cheap so they can get into their cocksucking review website circlejerk as 'wow, so many sales' games)
 

buzz

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TheGreatOne About Yahtzee, he said this about D:OS in his Extra Punctuation column: "Force myself to play new games that aren't really my 'thing' and just leave me bored with nothing interesting to say, like Divinity: Original Sin? No, I don't think that helps. "

Honestly, I'd rather have him shut the fuck up about things he doesn't appreciate/understand than talk out of his ass, like he did with the Witcher games. For one thing, he doesn't even like the isometric perspective, made a piece on that (here's the article if you want some rage, he says some of the stupidest things of his career, which is a feat if I ever saw one) .

Of course, he shouldn't have said "gaming drought" to begin with if he just refuses to address certain games, but I think he meant more about AAA stuff.

That said, I don't agree with you. I think Papers Please deserved most of the praise it got, it really is a pretty neat game.

This is a typical problem with criticism of anything related to art and entertainment. Which one is worth praising, the generic thing that required talent, skill and dedication to make but it's ultimately a polished (sometimes inferior) version of things we've had before or the new, unique thing that's incredibly flawed and stupid?
I've asked a similar thing about anime in some forum, if people enjoyed something like Nozaki-kun (generic shoujo/romance comedy but it's fairly entertaining) or something like Zankyou no Terror (relatively new and neat idea in many ways with decent animation and OST, but really stupid characters and plot).

Crimzon Clover looks like a neat bullet hell game, problem is it just looks like pretty much any bullet hell game in existence. So naturally the artsy fartsy guys will not give a shit about it, especially since most of them can't into video games in the first place.
 

Lyric Suite

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It's just navel-gazing. If those idiots really loved games they'd want more AAA games, more sequels that refine and make more complex a game's underlying mechanics, bigger budgets, better hardware, etc. And they'd encourage actual quality indies, like Crimzon Clover (just check out the work that went into every sprite; the damn thing took more than half a decade to make) to charge higher prices (as the good indies indeed do; only the shovel-ware hipster games are cheap so they can get into their cocksucking review website circlejerk as 'wow, so many sales' games)

You guys can actually play those type of games?

I'm still getting my ass kicked in the original DonPachi and DoDonPachi on mame, though eventually i was able to beat the first in one coin. I tried the more recent Daifukkatsu the other day and couldn't make any real progress. The game is insanely difficult, and the horribly tacky 3D visuals made it hard to even see wtf was going on half the time. Wonder if that's just mame though 'cause i can't believe they ditched the wonderful 2D visuals of the original for that low res crap. Was also disappointed to see animu crap finding its way in. The originals had none of that. :?
 

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
Hey, 1CCing any SHMUP is a feat, so grats on beating DonPachi.

You'd surely love Ikaruga, which is clean, elegant and has no anime graphics whatsoever. It's also more meditative and less hectic, even though it is very difficult as well. Ikaruga is one of the few games that should be preserved for future generations as an exercise in how to distill a genre to its peak, then amplify all its part through careful use of graphics, level design, enemy placement, music and mechanics.
 

Lyric Suite

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DonPachi has a design flaw in that you get full bombs after each stage. This means you only have to survive the level and then you can just spam the bosses with bombs. In fact, the trick is to get to the last stage without losing more than one life, the fourth stage being the hard part. Once you've done that you can just bomb your way to the end. Its cheap, but hey, scrubs have to make due with what they have. :M

Alas, they fixed that in DoDonPachi. :argh:
 

Machocruz

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For one thing, he doesn't even like the isometric perspective, made a piece on that (here's the article if you want some rage, he says some of the stupidest things of his career, which is a feat if I ever saw one) .

It takes him two pages to say "I don't like Bastion and other action games that use isometric. But it's okay for strategy games." It's like he realized his dislike of isometric is irrational, based on feels, but still trying to fool himself into believing he has thought it through. The Facebook comments are even dumber, they don't even distinguish between action games and tactical games.
 

buzz

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It's funny because the second page he's basically talking about the top-down view while pretending he's talking about the isometric perspective. The funniest bit is when he goes to say that isometric perspectives reminds him of chess :lol:.
 

Cadmus

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yahtzee is a fucking retard, which you can tell immediately when you listen to him talk about any decent game. His Hitman review was worse than Hitler.
 

Unkillable Cat

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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Even if it does have gameplay, it's not really the same as playing a game like Knights of the Chalice or Super Meat Boy.

If this is where you're going to start your argument, then your argument is stillborn.

It seems we're pretty much on the same page in regards to "What is game?" and "What is not game?", which is one reason why I found your categorization of Papers, Please so jarring. I'm not going to say that its gameplay is the bestest there ever was, but at least it's a nice change of pace. And unlike so many other (non-)games PP is not pretentious, it is exactly what it says on the box; a dystopian bureaucracy simulator. It is one of the better indie games ever to be released because it manages to break many of the shackles of Indie games. There is gameplay, the game makes you think, the game makes you feel, the graphics are appropriate to the setting, the (lone piece of) music will march through your head for a while and people have been making (positive) references to the game long after they lost interest in playing it. Glory to Arstotzka.

Compare the above to your cancerous titles. How does the Codex refer to them, for example? In a positive manner, I mean? We don't. Just like we look down on QTE fests, games with more cinematics than gameplay and dumbed-down popamole shooters, the pretentious one-trick-pony indie titles get kicked into the mud and laughed at around here. Do you see that here with Papers, Please? I see Codexers that don't want to play it, sure. But even they show it an interest, and a little respect, that's more than the other aforementioned genres get.

Fortunately I can skip the rest of your wall of text because it focuses on a Stroppy Git not catering to your tastes, but if he took the time to review Papers, Please... that has to count for something, right?
 
Last edited:

Cadmus

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I agree that if you want to call the games "non-games" you should be honest with your criteria. I watched a video of PP and found it interesting. I won't fucking play it, but it is a game with gameplay.
 

CSM

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
In this thread: people railing against made-up boogeymen.
 

TheGreatOne

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It seems we're pretty much on the same page in regards to "What is game?" and "What is not game?", which is one reason why I found your categorization of Papers, Please so jarring. I'm not going to say that its gameplay is the bestest there ever was, but at least it's a nice change of pace.
Fine, you got me. I resent Papers, Please for irrational reasons and for what it represents, so I lumped it together with all of those other games for a clear cut good/bad dichotomy.
This is the Quake 3 vs System Shock 2 argument all over again. It seems people who vouch for Japanese games seem to care more about the type of game design that goes into making a game like Quake 3, where as strict PC gamers are more concerned on how stimulating a game is on a purely conceptual level, whether it pushes certain boundaries (in a real, non-pretentious sense), and so forth.
Machocruz summarized this quite well on the other thread in news&content
The worst Mario sidescroller is a clinic in expert design in comparison to indie output. The arcade masters weren't trying to make "art," at least not in the Modern sense. They were more like the M.C. Escher or Renaissance artists who were learned in mathematics, physics, architecture, design and applied those disciplines to their work, or even worked in those disciplines directly.
I consider old CRPGs, strategy games and other PC genres to follow the same design philosophy. PC games are generally about strategy and mentally winning the game and arcade/console games are twitch based and about player skill, which makes all the polish in refining controls, jump arcs and things like that to perfection essential (same goes for Quake 3)
 

CSM

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Even if it does have gameplay, it's not really the same as playing a game like Knights of the Chalice or Super Meat Boy. That's not say you can't make point&click adventures, mystery games and other games like that where there isn't as much interaction, but I'm grouping it there simply because indy twats love pretentious shit like that. "The premise is so unusual it must be good!" Zero Punctuation refused to review Original Sin (even IGN reviewed it and gave it a 9/10) "because July is a gaming drought and no one has released a single good game this month" but took the time out of his calendar to review that piece of trash. Because Papers Please was such a hyped game with so many people eagerly waiting for the release date that he had no choice but to review it. And not just that but he has praised it in his other interviews like it's up there with Portal as one of the greatest modern design achievements in video gaming and a great example of how indy developers are making "innovative, fresh new games" which are "the cure against the stale AAA gaming industry". But he sure as hell never reviews any gameplay oriented indy games or games of actual "mid tier developers" who are still struggling on, making niche games while having big enough of budgets to make the kind of games that those indy developers could never make. Those developers actually need the support and as much coverage as they can get so more people would hear about their games. But of course you never see Errant Signal devoting entire episodes to those kind of games. Making a complex strategy game, CRPG, tactical RPG or a challenging bullet hell shooter is old news, those games existed before the indy boom. But making a game where you stare at a mountain, or play border police, those games are treading new ground and by virtue of being innovative deserve all the recognition and exposure they can get.
Zero Punctuation is a comedy column, who cares what he does or doesn't review?

Divinity: Orginal Sin received 57 reviews according to Metacritic by the way. That Mountain game people here seem to be obsessed about received ... one. Papers Please, which actually is an innovative game and totally deserves the praise it gets, received 40.
 

CSM

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
""It seems weird to me, with no hook, no novelty and no tutorial, the game feels… Well, like a 90s game"
Can't have competently made video games (emphasis on the word video games) ruining their screen saver circle jerk. That quote alone says it all, using 90s in an almost disparaging manner when it's the golden age of gaming. "how 90s", that also sounds very effeminate, something that the guy (I thought he was a butch lesbian before I saw hair in his neck) in that picture would say. "Video games? Like where you collect points, kill enemies and there's a boss battle at the end of the stage? How passé.... how 90s.... our medium has evolved past that... "
Also funny how these people (Phil Phish etc) consider Japan to be "behind the times" when they themselves shit out bad pixel "art" platformers that are poorly designed and can't touch Japanese platforms.
That's odd, i thought the hipster crowd had a Japanese fetish. Not as big as weaboos, but i thought it was there.

Japanese games being "behind the times" is actually their strength at the moment. Somebody should get one of those indie faggot devs to play a manic shooter while being filmed for our amusement. Would love to hear their screams of frustration.
Here's stuff that Phil Fish has actually said about Japanese games:
"Could you tell me what you think about recent Japanese games?"

Phil Fish: They suck. [Audience laughs] I'm sorry, like, you guys need to, get with the times, and uh... make better interfaces, and like, update your technology uh... [the audience "ohhs" and chuckles. Edmund McMillen cracks up] We're totally kicking your ass. Back then you guys were the king of the world, but... your time has passed. [audience and panel are laughing] I'm so sorry [laughs].

...

[Someone says "Street Fighter 4"]

Phil Fish: Yeah Street Fighter 4's pretty good. Yeah. But I think the Zelda comparison's pretty good. I mean if you look at the first Zelda, and the latest Zelda, the first Zelda, it just drops you into that world, and it's a completely open non-linear world and it's dangerous and it's hard, and you have to like, learn, from your mistakes, and figure things out, and there are these secrets and the secrets are not obvious at all, which makes them... "secret," and interesting. And then, you play the latest Zelda, and it's the most, like, it's just a straight corridor, everything's just holding your hand the whole time, uh... all the secrets have like an arrow pointing at them, that says like, "You can break this wall, with a bomb," [laughter] because there's a little crack, and there's a... all the surprise, and magic, and like danger, and mystery, is just gone, completely. Because of this obsession, with like, tutorials, and making sure that the player knows about everything. Like it just, it kills it for me.

Jonathan Blow: But what's awesome about that, is it's really easy to convince yourself, that that's good game design, right? Like, of course we have to put an indication --

Phil Fish: Oh yeah! You have to clearly communicate things to the player!

Jonathan Blow: Yeah! It's like, you have to communicate affordances, right? So therefore, all the blow-up-able walls have cracks on them. Right. And it's just... being logical about game design is too easy to take too far, and then you have nothing. You have a joyless husk. Right? [looking to Fish]

Phil Fish: [Jokingly solemn nodding] Joyless husk.
When I asked Fish to expand on his antipathy for modern Japanese titles, one thing cited specifically was how the technology pipelines in Japanese development have been short-sighted and inefficient. "All these companies made separate engines for different games and then when Lost Planet and the first Dead Rising use the same engine, for example, it gets treated like this big revelation." Fish thinks that something's really wrong with that mindset.
Very controversial stuff obviously.
 

TheGreatOne

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Motherfucker's done a single game worth of note in his entire career and he's already a big enough gaming celebrity that he has panel appearances in conventions and people pay to see him talk? And apparently people care about this douche bag enough that his inanities actually elicit a response from some people


What the fuck man? It makes me fucking sick that these indy developer nobodies (Quinn, Phish, Sarkeesian etc) become "famous" by making one average/shitty game (if that, like is the case with Sarkeesian) but when some actual designer legends voice their opinions, only basement dwellers pay any attention (see: matt chat's popularity, how little views videos like "Looking back at Looking Glass" garner....). Even actual contemporary AAA designers don't seem to get the kind of attention that these people do, though not being aggressive attention whores and having actually accomplished something in their lives might have something to do with it.

On his actual opinion: I wouldn't call it "totally kicking their ass" when Japanese games don't dominate the American market anymore. Western games still aren't a big thing in Japan, and presumably they give 0 fucks about pretentious indy games that circle jerking American and English game "journalists" love.
 

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