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Games doing something different

mauvais said:
Lots of games make you think, sometimes just as much as TV or film.
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more so I'd say. You are the passive observer in film and TV whereas games put you in the drivers seat. Thats why sometimes I am 'to tired' for games. And thats not a euphamism for wrecked on substances either, I just want to watch/read a story. But when you are in the mood to be the story-maker well. Well well well. I'm whistling a dixie theme as I load up on guns and head out to do battle. Sporting a fetching hat, swinging an arcane shotgun and followed by a hound called Julius. When the man comes around.
 
whats the story though? kill someone, jump over something, score some points, collect something, do some other premeditated task. Its just work with a scoreboard for me.

I get how a football match is a story...every time its like an unscripted improvsied bit of story telling. But ultimately the stories follow a pattern. The stalemate, the drubbing, the comeback, the underdog, etc.

Dont really see how any of that makes you think.... you have to concentrate yes - thats a kind of thinking - doesnt actually make you think as in question anything though.
Computer games are games. A bit of fun at best. Most of them feel like work to me rather than fun though. Ive got enough problems on my plate to have to solve some problems a puzzle maker has set
 
ska invita said:
whats the story though? kill someone, jump over something, score some points, collect something, do some other premeditated task. Its just work with a scoreboard for me.

I get how a football match is a story...every time its like an unscripted improvsied bit of story telling. But ultimately the stories follow a pattern. The stalemate, the drubbing, the comeback, the underdog, etc.

Dont really see how any of that makes you think.... you have to concentrate yes - thats a kind of thinking - doesnt actually make you think as in question anything though.
Computer games are games. A bit of fun at best. Most of them feel like work to me rather than fun though. Ive got enough problems on my plate to have to solve some problems a puzzle maker has set
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Then you've not played the right games, basically - but, and no offence intended, what's the point of trying to illustrate that if you're never going to play them?

Nonetheless for example, Firewatch, Gone Home and Life Is Strange are primarily story and exposition. All are great. It's not a new quality either - Final Fantasy 7 sticks in the mind as a fine bit of storytelling albeit mixed in with some repetitive mechanics.
 
Will def read later, have to get up, but i remember when Charlie Brooker was writing all these excited articles how computer games are the new cinema, and an art form that will dominate the next century etc....
I dont think it came to pass and i think he got over excited...maybe in the future though.
If theres one thing i have no patience for in a computer game though its a cut scene :D
LA Noire did look pretty special....i feel a bit burned by investigating type adventures of old though, where youd get quite far and not know what to do next and get stuck as a result. All seemed a bit futile...

Anyhow i didnt start this thread to put down computer games...the opposite, i like to see interesting games and ill check out the ones you mentioned. check them out on a review that lasts 10 minutes when im trying to go to sleep. Ive got no desire to actually play them...too much of a time sap and too much like hard work, is basicaly where im at.
 
ska invita said:
I dont really follow computer games but its getting quite amazing how games look
Ive come across a couple today that really shocked me in the way they look

cuphead - which looks like a vintage cartoon


and Unravel, which looks like a modern animation


any other games out there breaking boundaries? whether in look or gameplay?


do give the thread a bump in the future
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Still just boring platform games. Nothing new game wise except advancements in graphics technology.
 
ATOMIC SUPLEX said:
Still just boring platform games. Nothing new game wise except advancements in graphics technology.
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yeah true enough, and thats why i dont feel fussed about playign them....feel like i a lready have. However the mechanics on Unravel are ingenius - but both do something new in that they push the artistic aspects of a platformer to new levels. Its hard if not impossible to be totally original, but theyre definiltey trying something a little different
 
mauvais said:
Here you go ska invita, this piece is basically for you. From the sadly defunct Grantland, and looping back to LA Noire:

Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noire
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From your link:
"Other, and quite possibly wiser, players have a simpler reaction. “Why am I doing all this?” they ask, and stop playing" :D

and
"Playing L.A. Noire, one cannot help but wonder whether an involved, character-driven story even belongs in an open-world video game. If a game like L.A. Noire is unable to pull this kind of thing off, can any video game?"

its actually quite a critical review that one...
 
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What about This War of Mine

ss_0b30ecb00b3f1d238c977462f628d6d2d78cbb18.1920x1080.jpg


In This War Of Mine you do not play as an elite soldier, rather a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city; struggling with lack of food, medicine and constant danger from snipers and hostile scavengers. The game provides an experience of war seen from an entirely new angle.
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9.03m is a game about the tsunami which hit Japan. You walk around a beach and find artifacts which link to stories about people who died in the disaster. There isn't a vast amount of gameplay and it's short but it's certainly different and makes something that happened on the other side of the world a bit more real.

To The Moon is a game about 2 scientists going through the memories of a dying man to fulfill his final wish. It is a great story, it's sad and emotional and lovely.

The Banner Saga is a viking saga about leading a group of villagers to safety in a dying world. The battle system is familiar (although parts of it are certainly novel), but the story is epic and the artwork is amazing. The ending is... affecting. The artwork is based on Eyvind Earl.

2014-01-10_00019-100225413-orig.jpg
 
DotCommunist said:
How hard can it be to make a port goddamit
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In the case of RRR, very hard indeed. The production was a mad crazy crunch and the engine was a semi upgrade of the old GTA4 engine with some bits of the GTA5 engine strapped on, all done by the San Diego studio, who don't handle the main engine development. No PC version was maintained during development (as it was for GTA4 and 5) and it would be a horrible job to go and unpick the mess.

Red Dead Redemption coming in 2017 according to Dev

RRR2 will almost certainly have a PC version. They're just not announcing it now.
 
Another Grantland piece for your reading library, btw, this time about Spec Ops: The Line.

Again this is a flawed game, that at times is indistinguishable from the usual on-rails shooters like Call of Duty. And it's not always very good at that.

But the story it tells is remarkable, because it's Conrad's Heart of Darkness, translated to Dubai. That doesn't work perfectly either - like I said, it's flawed - but fundamentally, it exists, it's doing something different and it certainly gives you cause to think - or write about it.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Shooter
 
I really really enjoyed Inside recently.

inside-game-achievements-guide-640x325.jpg


Inside-Ending-2.jpg


Nominally, it's a platform puzzle/adventure game, but it has a fantastic atmosphere; oppressive and intriguing. The animation is top-notch too. But it also has layers of themes to do with control and agency, and once you've reached the end you look back on the whole thing with a completely different perspective. Fairly short (you could do it in one sitting if you cleared an evening) and pretty cheap too.
 
Another way of looking at this whole thing is the inverse - what isn't innovative, and what isn't novel.

For some people's money, Half Life 2 (2004) was the last first person shooter to do something new, either in terms of serious mechanics or in experiences. Personally I'd argue a couple of exceptions, like Superhot (SUPER! HOT!™), and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - you might exclude either from the genre I guess - but it's actually a surprisingly difficult argument to counter.

Then there's the overwhelming number and volume of certain pattern-moulded games, like the Ubisoft favourite of collect-em-up open world games (Assassins Creed etc), or overlapping with that, any franchise that puts out a version every few years.

So if you focus on those - the genre of FPS, the market of AAA games - you will experience something stagnant and conservative, in large part thanks to the very moneyspinning nature of it. But obviously, my advice is: don't do that.
 
My mate buys FIFA and COD every year and that is all he plays.

He's a fucking weirdo.
 
mauvais said:
Another way of looking at this whole thing is the inverse - what isn't innovative, and what isn't novel.

For some people's money, Half Life 2 (2004) was the last first person shooter to do something new, either in terms of serious mechanics or in experiences. Personally I'd argue a couple of exceptions, like Superhot (SUPER! HOT!™), and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - you might exclude either from the genre I guess - but it's actually a surprisingly difficult argument to counter.

Then there's the overwhelming number and volume of certain pattern-moulded games, like the Ubisoft favourite of collect-em-up open world games (Assassins Creed etc), or overlapping with that, any franchise that puts out a version every few years.

So if you focus on those - the genre of FPS, the market of AAA games - you will experience something stagnant and conservative, in large part thanks to the very moneyspinning nature of it. But obviously, my advice is: don't do that.
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I think mods have been remarkably innovative for fps games. Operation Flashpoint/Armed Assault was quite unique on its own but Day Z has spawned and entire generation of imitators, and Day Z itself was inspired by the hard core STALKER mod scene.
 
Well, Op Flashpoint and especially ARMA are basically military sims rather than FPS. I'm not sure what to call DayZ, it's possibly an FPS again.

All of them are a good examples of interesting games outside the AAA mould though.
 
mauvais said:
Another way of looking at this whole thing is the inverse - what isn't innovative, and what isn't novel.

For some people's money, Half Life 2 (2004) was the last first person shooter to do something new, either in terms of serious mechanics or in experiences. Personally I'd argue a couple of exceptions, like Superhot (SUPER! HOT!™), and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - you might exclude either from the genre I guess - but it's actually a surprisingly difficult argument to counter.
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What about the glory that is Splatoon!?

WiiU_Splatoon_02_mediaplayer_large.png
 
Nintendo is always good for new experiences. In the past few years I can recommend Super Mario Maker, Splatoon, Nintendoland, and The Wonderful 101.
 
mauvais said:
I'd never heard of this before, so :cool: - but: third person shooter, and an arena platformer as compared to e.g. Half Life's serious FPS.
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Well, it's doing something new in the realm of "shooters" anyway. Even if it is in third person/inkling, you get the same kind of fun playing this as you would with Quake III :)
 
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