EDIT: I wouldn't bundle Papers Please with the others, but that's me.
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.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.
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)
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) .
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.
logic fail.Arcade games are not story-driven. All story centric games are bad. Hence, arcade games are not bad.
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.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.
Machocruz summarized this quite well on the other thread in news&contentThis 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.
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)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.
Zero Punctuation is a comedy column, who cares what he does or doesn't review?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.
logic fail.Arcade games are not story-driven. All story centric games are bad. Hence, arcade games are not bad.
""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.
Here's stuff that Phil Fish has actually said about Japanese games: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.
"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.
Very controversial stuff obviously.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.