The Errant Signal Thread

[Infinitron]

Codex cannot into anybody who doesn't partake in EXTREME CODEX RAEG (with MCA-drawn emoticon).

 

[DraQ]

Codex cannot into anybody who doesn't partake in EXTREME CODEX RAEG (with MCA-drawn emoticon).

Apparently.




...

 

[Xor]

Contrast those "not exactly nice things to say" — which are the kind of painfully obvious things that shouldn't need to be pointed out — to the start of the video where he spends a minute or two explaining that he's not saying, not at all, that HL2 is bad but probably a little bit overrated.

As much as the Codex might want to think otherwise, HL2 is not a bad game. I would say it's overrated, though.

 

[UserNamer]

problem with hl2 is that they were too anal about gameplay balancing, and the result is that the game often seems to be paranoid of the player having fun... rockets? You can carry only three! Death orbs who disintegrate everything they touch? Oh you can only bring three as well.

While hl was much more outrageous and funny... you had weapons with over the top killing power like the satchel charges, the gauss gun which could drop an helicopter in one hit if you knew hot to aim, and the gluon gun. You could run as fast as a feline predator, and sometimes the difficulty spiked, and you had actually difficult encounters with marines or aliens (mostly near the end as they swarm black mesa and when you face them in the alien dimension).

But hl2 felt a lot more polished and impressive

 

[Oriebam]

Even then, he was incredibly afraid of hurting anyone's feelings with HL2. He can be interesting but the way he does things I doubt he'll ever do anything of depth.

He seemed extremely critical in the video, and I don't even like HL2 (or 1).

When talking about Alyx:
"...facilitating Gordon Freeman as a masturbatory aid for the player."
"...she still just exists to circle jerk the player into feeling good about themselves."

Are not exactly nice things to say, especially given how into Alyx most big HL2 fans I know are.

I dunno, they sounded like minor criticisms for me, if you consider we're talking about GAMERS and the guy's kind of imitating other much more "vocal" celebrities the language is probably not really strong...

and that's not mentioning the disclaimerfaggotry he pulled, as mentioned before

the gauss gun which could drop an helicopter in one hit if you knew hot to aim

where were you supposed to aim?

Codex cannot into anybody who doesn't partake in EXTREME CODEX RAEG (with MCA-drawn emoticon).

Apparently.




...

It doesn't help that most of his jokes aren't funny, it's a good thing he's not constantly trying to be funny though

 

[Oriebam]

Would he be a worse character if Jennifer Hale Mark Meer dubbed him

 

[Gragt]

Contrast those "not exactly nice things to say" — which are the kind of painfully obvious things that shouldn't need to be pointed out — to the start of the video where he spends a minute or two explaining that he's not saying, not at all, that HL2 is bad but probably a little bit overrated.

As much as the Codex might want to think otherwise, HL2 is not a bad game. I would say it's overrated, though.

Then why not state plainly that it is a mediocrity instead of trying to reassure his audience first that it's an influential and important game? Why even spend time blogging on HL2 in the first place then, and not on something truly important that dares to do what he advocates, like The Void?

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I would assume he simply doesn't know that something like The Void even exists.

 

[Groof]

It isn't.

It's the same with say, Wizardry 8 or Divinity 2 - those games are corny as hell, have lackluster derpy plots, derpy worlds and derpy characterization. If they were soulless products of design by committee I would probably not stand them for single full playthrough, as they are, in their quirky "heh having fun riding mah imaginashun while making this game" way, I want to replay them time and time again.

Yeah whatever. But if they were soulless products of design by committee then they'd be different. And you're better off pointing out what that difference is than what you imagine is the cause of the difference. And you're better off acting as if it is that difference that is important rather than that imagined cause.

If this labor of love thing is any important it is because it leads to better games. The way this Errant Signal guy is putting it, it's almost as if he thinks it's some kind of other way around. That it's just inherently a big deal that these guys made a game for this reason and those guys made a game for that reason. The way you're putting it, I guess it does at least give the impression that you're ultimately kind of interested in the game and how it plays and that. Maybe. In the videothing it's a little much "it's good because you learn to know what these people are like."

I watched a couple of his videothings, and I guess they're fine ish. He talks a bit much about this kind of non-game kind of not very relevant stuff. With the Half-Life thing and the GTA IV thing and whatever it's kind of all right because it deals with all this bullshit praise those games have gotten. The DOOM thing suffers more from it.

 

[DraQ]

DLC:
http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=199

Yeah whatever. But if they were soulless products of design by committee then they'd be different. And you're better off pointing out what that difference is than what you imagine is the cause of the difference.

The problem is that this kind of difference is kind of hard to pinpoint.

I can imagine almost exact clones of Wiz 8 or ED/DKS I'd quit and uninstall under an hour in.

 

[Average Manatee]

Huge pussy deathly afraid of offending someone. Unable to make a point without a spending 4 minutes on how his point isn't important beforehand and 4 minutes afterwards giving virtual hugs to anyone who wasn't happy about it. Amazing that he doesn't seem to realize that the "negativity" online is itself a reaction to the ridiculously more pervasive infantile positivity about anything with a million dollar advertising budget. I would almost be convinced that his videos were some kind of meta joke if there weren't so many of them.

Most of his actual game critiques seem to have almost nothing to do with the game itself (minus egregious examples like DX:HR bossfights) and are purely his silly storyfag/artfag crap applied to games who clearly want nothing to do with either of those. I mean seriously, the worst thing about HL2 was that one of the NPCs following you didn't have a personality and that it was linear?

 

[reaven]

Huge pussy deathly afraid of offending someone. Unable to make a point without a spending 4 minutes on how his point isn't important beforehand and 4 minutes afterwards giving virtual hugs to anyone who wasn't happy about it. Amazing that he doesn't seem to realize that the "negativity" online is itself a reaction to the ridiculously more pervasive infantile positivity about anything with a million dollar advertising budget. I would almost be convinced that his videos were some kind of meta joke if there weren't so many of them.

Someone having manners on the internet? SACREBLEU! You have to deliver all your points screaming and being as rude as you can am I right?

 

[Infinitron]

https://twitter.com/#!/Campster

Campster Chris Franklin
@shamusyoung Totally just found a forum post where we are both referred to as "game design hipsters."

EDIT:
Left a comment on his blog:

Hi Chris.

I thought I ought to clarify. What I was referring to on the Codex, when I wrote about “walls of text”, wasn’t necessarily about narrative. In fact, the RPGCodex is a critic of games that emphasize narrative over gameplay.
What I miss is *verbosity* in games. I miss the days when a serious game was expected to have user interfaces like this:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...f-amalur-reckoning.68502/page-11#post-1941166

Words are detail. I like detail.

Anyway, I’m loving your videos. Keep up the good work.

 

[Average Manatee]

Huge pussy deathly afraid of offending someone. Unable to make a point without a spending 4 minutes on how his point isn't important beforehand and 4 minutes afterwards giving virtual hugs to anyone who wasn't happy about it. Amazing that he doesn't seem to realize that the "negativity" online is itself a reaction to the ridiculously more pervasive infantile positivity about anything with a million dollar advertising budget. I would almost be convinced that his videos were some kind of meta joke if there weren't so many of them.

Someone having manners on the internet? SACREBLEU! You have to deliver all your points screaming and being as rude as you can am I right?

If you spend longer apologizing for a minor critique of a game than my president did for getting blow jobs in the white house, you need to cut the bullshit and get to the point already.

 

[DraQ]

problem with hl2 is that they were too anal about gameplay balancing, and the result is that the game often seems to be paranoid of the player having fun... rockets? You can carry only three! Death orbs who disintegrate everything they touch? Oh you can only bring three as well.

I was actually pretty happy about them limiting ammo capacity in favour of pickups.

I know it was probably done to help 'tards who would burn through all the ammo in under several minutes and then have to negotiate half of the game swinging crowbar, but it also worked for me for opposite reason:

I am a hoarder, in a typical FPS I will be using whatever weapon I have the most ammo for unless it's really inefficient in given situation (like anything but tesla/voodoo against stone gargoyles in Blood, or firearms against Apaches and Gargantuas in HL), so was it not for extremely limited capacity, I'd run around for most of the game with crowbar and popgun, while having my inventory full or almost full of ammo. Thanks to limited ammo capacity and ample pickups I could forget about long term hoarding, so I used different weapons much more often and short term ammo management was actually a gameplay element for me.

 

[Oriebam]

 

[Lyric Suite]

Campster Chris Franklin
@shamusyoung Totally just found a forum post where we are both referred to as "game design hipsters."

So we were found out huh? Douchebag game design hipsters should come here and get a good dose of tr00 Codex rage, if they have the courage.

 

[Groof]

The problem is that this kind of difference is kind of hard to pinpoint.

Yeah, it kind of is. And ultimately you can't explain exactly why this or that game is exactly this good and so on, and then it's fair enough to end up chalking things up to the game not being soulless and being made by people who gave a damn and such.

It's just. He touches on Wolfenstein 3D not being the classic that DOOM is and he touches on modern FPS games not being that much like DOOM. Either would be a fine starting point for saying stuff about DOOM, but he just kind of rushes past that in order to get to the "labor of love" part. There's a ton of game-stuff to talk about and mostly he doesn't. (I mean, even if you're going for "trivia-focused" you might want to swing by the word "deathmatch".)

Most of his actual game critiques seem to have almost nothing to do with the game itself (minus egregious examples like DX:HR bossfights) and are purely his silly storyfag/artfag crap applied to games who clearly want nothing to do with either of those. I mean seriously, the worst thing about HL2 was that one of the NPCs following you didn't have a personality and that it was linear?

I kind of said this already, but. I agree, but the thing with Alyx being made out to be "a step forward for women in games because she has small tits and a gun" makes it almost-relevant. He's not really talking about the game and what it plays like, but at least it's like fair enough to point that stuff out. And it's not like it's that interesting to talk about what Half-Life games play like anyway. With the DOOM video it feels more like he could be saying interesting things but instead he's just somethingorother labor of love blablabland they liked some movies and music and things.

 

[Lyric Suite]

To be fair, he talks about level design, which is something that gets glossed over by many today, even tough its a pretty fundamental concept.

The labor of love argument is pertinent, he just fails to follow the obvious logical leap here. Games are creative endevours , and if you put creative individuals in a cold, industrial environment you are always going to get shitty results. A lot of companies still think of video games as canned products, mere commercial artifacts the production of which you can control by following industry standards and trends. Obviously, it doesn't work that way.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

One aspect of Doom's legacy that I think he may be overlooking, is the impact Doom had upon the gaming market.

Doom showed that you could become stinking rich by making video games. Granted, the odds of that happening are pretty slim, but the guys at iD Software not only pulled it off, but pulled it off in a part of the market that had, up until that point, been generally considered to be unprofitable: The PC gaming market. When Doom was converted to every single active gaming platform around at the time, the money signs only got larger. Do I even have to mention Doom 2?

Marketing people took notice. Publishers took notice. Other developers took notice. Suddenly everyone thought there was gold to be had in PC games, and the safest way to make money is to try to cash in on other people's success. The concept of the "me too"-clone was not unknown before Doom, I've lost count of how many "save the critters"-type games were released in the years following the success of Lemmings. For every somewhat successful title on the PC, there's at least one other title in the same vein released within 18 months. In fact, some FPS games were being developed alongside Doom as a part of the "me too" wave following Wolfenstein 3D. Blake Stone, Corridor 7, Rise of the Triad, to name but a few examples.

But with Doom this went to a whole new level, and a lot of these clones had a far bigger budget than had been previously been imaginable, as publishers thought (and still think) that the more money you sink into a project, the more of it you'll see in return. Even gaming advertisements changed drastically around the same time, but whether that's because of Doom's success or not, I cannot say for sure.

 

[Infinitron]

To me, an interesting thing about Doom is that it temporarily halted the slide towards games with a cinematic aesthetic, that had in fact already begun in the early 90's, for example in some Sierra and Origin games.

For a few years, iD remade the gaming industry in their image, and substance (however trite) ruled over style, until the rise of the heavily scripted WW2 console shooter brought back the cinematic aesthetic in a big way.

 

[Sceptic]

Doom showed that you could become stinking rich by making video games. Granted, the odds of that happening are pretty slim, but the guys at iD Software not only pulled it off, but pulled it off in a part of the market that had, up until that point, been generally considered to be unprofitable: The PC gaming market.

Wolf3D had already shown this; it was the game that paid for all of id's Ferraris. Doom sold even more, and made them even more money, but the model was already there. Also, I'd say Garriott had already shown you could become rich with computer games waaaaaay back; granted he came from a pretty wealthy family to begin with, but unlike others later on who made their money by selling the company, Origin allowed Garriott quite a few eccentricities even before that.

The concept of the "me too"-clone was not unknown before Doom

Again, as old as Ultima. Hell Questron was so similar in some aspects to Ultima that they needed a license to make the game. JRPGs owe pretty much the existence of the entire genre to their first ones being Ultima me-toos.

a lot of these clones had a far bigger budget than had been previously been imaginable, as publishers thought (and still think) that the more money you sink into a project, the more of it you'll see in return

Quite the contrary, the vast majority of the me-toos were shovelware. Go have a look at all the FPS released between Doom and Quake; aside from the ones done by Raven (which were produced by id anyway), Apogee, or Dark Forces, just about EVERYTHING else was pure crap. For every ROTT there were dozens of Fortress of Dr Radiaki, Operation Body Count and Isle of the Dead. Even the ones with potential like Witchaven were generally ruined by laughably bad QA.

To me, an interesting thing about Doom is that it temporarily halted the slide towards games with a cinematic aesthetic, that had in fact already begun in the early 90's, for example in some Sierra and Origin games.

I don't think it did, FMV era was at its peak in 94-96, right after Doom. I think this was another reason the FPS genre took off so well actually: at least they were games, unlike the 7-CD extravaganzas that held a grand total of 15 minutes of gameplay in-between hours of just watching videos.

 

[Infinitron]

You're right. It's more correct to say that Doom offered an alternative, that eventually won out by the late 90's - the beginning, perhaps not coincidentally, of the "PC Golden Age".

 

[Lyric Suite]

The PC golden age was between 1984 and 1993. I'd call the Doom era the "silver age".

I mean, fucking newfags, you should know this.

 

[Gord]

One could also say that Doom actually brought the downfall of the "arcade" shooter upon itself
It's huge success resulted in such a huge number of uninspired shooters that eventually everyone was fed up with it.
Along came Half Life - finally something new and refreshing.