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As of today, all of Insomnia's philosophy-related content and discussion has been moved to orgyofthewill.net, making this new website the world's number 1 philosophy destination — while Insomnia continues to reign supreme in the world of videogames and videogame culture.
The best selection is the cinematic scene, the musical note, the splotch of paint, the game mechanic or the written sentence that, out of all the other theoretically possible scenes, notes, splotches, mechanics or sentences "fits" the best. If that happens to be a still-shot of a character thinking, so be it.
The key difference between realism and internal consistency is this: Realism means "Could this happen in our world?" Internal consistency means "Could this happen in their world?"
The so-called metagame is anathema to videogames, but before you can be brought to understand this you must first understand the metagame's allure and the rationale for its creation. And no one explains it better than Michael Soracoe in this article.
Seven reasons why, when a publisher decides not to localize a game, it's usually a good idea, regardless of what the often irrational and, let's face it, practically braindead fanbase might say.
We ask for games with interesting and meaningful consequences. We ask for games to explore every subject, to leave no taboo uncovered. And yet, despite all the things games can say these days, there are two words few people will let them say.
Urgent notice to regular forum users: Start contributing news now, or lose your Insomnia account forever.
"Only the skilled may live — the rest will die"
As part of preparation for a new year every serious newsoutlet and video game website had best of 2011 lists. It is not only entertaining but IMPORTANT to remember the past. A philosophy major life icycalm should know the value of metal gear solid: rememberincing (haha videogame joke).
... with your videogame.
If games had a finality, the only true player would be the cheater.
Everyone knows Konami, as long as we keep it on the console side. You immediately think of the Belmont clan, Solid Snake, the Snatchers, and tons of other games which are cool and whatnot. But not arcade games.
I'm not a holocaust denier myself. I think it's half-real. The camps are real, it's just a fictional world where there were gas chambers overlaid on top of that. We interact with this fictional world through the real rules relating to holocaust denial. See the writings of Jesper Juul as background reading.
But what is most offensive about all this fucking dribble is not really the IGNORANCE or the IDIOCY, but the SMARMISHNESS, the SELF-CONFIDENCE and the POMPOUSNESS with which the little subhuman prick tries to pass off his randomly stuck together junk-knowledge as profundity.
But while having superior execution often is enough to win, it alone doesn't make an expert on the game any more than winning a fist fight by being physically superior makes someone an expert on boxing. Freddie Roach isn't a reigning world champion, but he is an expert on boxing.
There has long been a need for a place where people can discuss Insomnia's views without fear of shunning/locking/banning, and this need was clearly not being fulfilled by Insomnia's own forums (and with good reason), and certainly not by anyone else's.
The Frat Boy loves podcasts, because they allow him an opportunity to sit around with his like-minded coworkers/frat bros and be obnoxious jerks on the company dime. "I'm not being a drunken idiot! I'm generating dynamic multimedia online content!"
Your profits, business jargon, and pretentious accolades are beneath the artform. They're most certainly beneath this site. Your game prints money? So what. Your game got press in Forbes? Eat a sack of dirt. Your game was recognized by the pitchfork rejects/new games journalists as "art 4 realz?" This is us not giving a shit.
icycalm is a cunt. But that's okay — if he is only interested in the truth: it's true Santa Claus isn't real, but telling little kids that makes you a cunt. Telling the truth is beyond good and evil.
But a person cannot be "evil" universally — only from the perspective of a group whose interests he threatens. Similarly, a developer cannot be "dependent" universally — only in relation to other members within the team in which he is operating.
If we got to see them, to be sure, even if only in passing, all these singular bigots and artificial saints, it would be the end of them — and it is precisely because I never read a word without seeing an attitude that I make an end of them...
Let us resolve this issue once and for all. The bums themselves have been farcically unable to provide us with an adequate definition of what they mean by "independence" — and they've had enough time! almost a decade! — so I think it's time someone stepped in and showed them how it's done.
It was time to jump onto the bandwagon. Insomnia is finally offering design tips specifically targeted to indiependent game auteurs.
It all comes down — to make a long story short, and to anticipate our conclusion, which is not fully elaborated in these essays, and with good reason (since it lies beyond the domain of game theory, cutting across all disciplines, to finally end up as the ultimate question of philosophy proper) — to the debacle of meaning.
Art criticism, art theory, philosophy.
For power is not, as the people suppose, something that can be taken but something that must be given — power is suicidal —
The fundamentally nihilistic character of pseudo-criticism, then, reveals itself in this: that the values by which it judges, taken to their logical conclusions, deny the very foundations of the artform that they pretend to champion...
"Equality" for all works is a piece of gross vulgarity, gentlemen! If a Rembrandt or a Shakespeare, or any other genius, had at any time believed in your precious "equality", they'd never have managed to become anything — let alone immortal!
It's everything that the SF2 games were NOT — slow, defensive, tactically degenerate and just ugly enough to make your eyes bleed.
May 2011. It was just barely a month since Super Robot Wars Z2 Hakai Hen had been released, and many people were still playing the game. Then Famitsu drops the bomb — Original Generations 2 announced. For PS3.
As for the plot and writing, maybe they'd be a lot funnier if every single insufferable videogame blog and forum wasn’t littered with quotes from the game ad nauseam. Which isn’t really Portal’s fault, but you have to wonder about the merits of a game that attracts so many cretins.
God of War is a depressing slog of a 3D brawler with boring, button-mashing combat and awful art direction. So of course it had massive "critical" and commercial success, no doubt due to the efforts of Sony’s marketing division.
The year is 2049. Man is back on the Moon and the companies that took him there are reaping huge profits. Their greed soon leads to the largest mining accident in history — a catastrophic explosion that throws billions of tons of rocky debris into near-Earth space, its aftershocks threatening to tear apart the Moon itself.
Good moments aside, the main problem with Syndicate is one it shares with most contemporary FPSes, which is that the majority of the game is just too easy, straightforward, and simple to rise above mindless novelty.
And what about the weeaboos, the neckbeards, the spastics, and Tim Rogers? Let them cling together.
Overall then, I'm very positive about the future outlook of this game. There are definitely things that I find irritating about Diablo 3: the online hassles, issues with the auction house, the cheapness of certain types of enemies, and so on. However, I see these problems as being more than outweighed by the merits of what D3 has to offer.
If I gave a shit about "S-ranking" shit I'd still be playing Donkey Kong, loser.
Borderlands is bland. I mean, it's right there in the name. Bored Erlands. I was excited about and interested in it at first, but when I started up my first game my eyes became blurry and stopped even trying to focus...
Welp, I beat Mass Effect. Let's do this thang. You with me? First off, some perspective...
Human Revolution is a good game. Sadly, for the sequel of the towering achievement called Deus Ex, good is not good enough. Where did it go wrong?
A series of first-person shooters that eschews the narrative, scripting and free-roaming advances introduced to the genre by such titles as Half-Life (1998), Medal of Honor (1999), Deus Ex (2000), Halo (2001), and the Call of Duty and Far Cry series, and carries on the tradition of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom of 100% pure, unadulterated, balls-to-the-wall in-your-face shooting action.
Serious Sam 3: BFE is pure overwhelming chaos, and it's fucking awesome.
So after Retro Studios fucked up Metroid Prime for no reason, Nintendo decided to have Team Ninja make this one. Snrk. Nah, I'm just kidding. Nintendo is way too idiotic to know when something has or has not been fucked up. They just passed it on to Team Ninja for no reason. They had a lottery.
Alright you pack of ignorant fools, it's time once again for Shepton to lay down some serious wisdom. If you choose to ignore it you can go climb a wall of dicks.
It was while "studying" for one of those fluff "interactive media" pseudo-degrees that universities are increasingly peddling to dumbass middle-class losers these days, that Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago met and conceived their masterful scam...
Essentially, whoever sees EVEN THE TINIEST HINT OF INNOVATION OR ORIGINALITY in this game, either got into games last week, and therefore simply doesn't know any better, or IS TOO DUMB TO MENTALLY STRIP A GAME OF ITS AESTHETICS AND MAKE MEANINGFUL MECHANICAL COMPARISONS, period.
After three superb sequels, and one amazing spinoff (and no, we are not talking about Revolution, which we are in fact trying very hard to pretend does not even exist), the ultimate grand strategy series finally bites the dust.
I typed up these thoughts in June of 2010, right around the time of the E3 interviews surrounding Civ5. I held off on publishing them until now, because I did not want to unfairly influence readers about Civ5 with limited information until the game itself released. With the game long out and clearly an underwhelming result, I decided to go ahead and post these thoughts rather than let them languish forever.
So here's the problem with applying the free-roaming model to such a limited genre as the racing game: the end result ends up BORING, no matter how good your racing mechanics may be, because THE ENTIRE POINT of the free-roaming concept as developed by DMA Design in GTAIII hinges around the player being able to do MUCH MORE than JUST RACING, get it?
If there’s one thing that could be said about the original Burnout, it’s that it was fast. Eye-bleedingly fast, in fact. So fast, that one quick glance away from the screen could lead to your vehicle slamming into the side of a bus, or drifting out of control and into a wall.
There is something profound in a man that jumps for joy at the sight of a burning car.
In 2003, PC gaming was undergoing a significant evolution. Deus Ex: Invisible War was among the first titles to incorporate the Havok engine and utilise many of the features in DX9's canon.
Because Japanese gaming is dead.
Super Meat Boy is a game made entirely for our "modern" generation, the generation which has only played old games on emulators using savestates, infinite continues, and hq4x filters.
And that's how Meat Boy plays: whatever is not retardedly easy is basically a crap shoot, which you try, fail, repeat and rinse until you've "made" it, at which point the game autosaves and you are on to the next asinine little "challenge".
Canabalt was made in 5 days, for an amateur game development competition themed around "the bare minimum". It's probably the best a game made under those circumstances is going to get, but that doesn't make it a great game (or even a good one), and it certainly doesn't make it an "instaclassic" (Edge) or "perfect" (Action Button).
Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley is Microsoft's latest collaboration with the "independent" developer Twisted Pixel. The result is another excellent example of an abysmal original XBLA game.
A series of first-person shooters that eschews the narrative, scripting and free-roaming advances introduced to the genre by such titles as Half-Life (1998), Medal of Honor (1999), Deus Ex (2000), Halo (2001), and the Call of Duty and Far Cry series, and carries on the tradition of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom of 100% pure, unadulterated, balls-to-the-wall in-your-face shooting action.
It was while "studying" for one of those fluff "interactive media" pseudo-degrees that universities are increasingly peddling to dumbass middle-class losers these days, that Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago met and conceived their masterful scam...
Only the great writers succeed in painting these mechanisms faithfully, without falsifying them: we have here a system of relationships that paradoxically, or rather not paradoxically at all, has less variability the greater a writer is.
Definition: Subgenre of the on-rails shooting genre in which the player fires his avatar's weapon by pointing at the screen an input device typically modeled on a ballistic weapon.
Definition: Subgenre of the turn-based tactics genre in which the player controls, among perhaps other units, several unique characters who persist and level throughout the game.
HFD says: Don't throw away games if you're losing.
Because dying is good.
Compiled by Alex "icycalm" Kierkegaard with help from the members of the Shoryuken forums community.
Compiled by Craig "BulletMagnet" Gabrielsen with help from the members of the Shmups forums community.
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