Moderator: JC Denton
by icycalm » 24 Nov 2011 00:45
by icycalm » 24 Nov 2011 16:12
by icycalm » 26 Nov 2011 21:45
Fuguist wrote:Yeah, it always cracks me up whenever he tries to act cultured. Didn't he refer to French New Wave as the progenitor of Natural Born Killers? lololol
by icycalm » 27 Nov 2011 16:54
by icycalm » 29 Nov 2011 00:50
by icycalm » 29 Nov 2011 00:58
by icycalm » 06 Dec 2011 18:02
by icycalm » 14 Dec 2011 19:14
EJR Tairne wrote:Something just occurred to me, Alex.
You know those horrible racist caricatures that become popular during wartime? During World War II there were those bright yellow Japanese people with slanty eyes, and buck teeth, who bound women's feet and ate dogs. Take your pick of war and opponent.
If some other species were to come down from the stars and develop a grudge against humanity, their horrible caricature of our species would be indistinguishable from you.
Truth wrote:That's a pretty weak comeback for something that took a week to come up with.
by icycalm » 21 Dec 2011 18:11
DinofarmGames wrote:You know... I went through a phase with that guy. He's definitely smart, although not right on a few things. However, the worst part is that he's horribly racist and sexist and just kind of an evil fucker in general.
novriltataki wrote:Watching this movie really makes me feel like paying the fee to subscribe to insomnia.ac 3.0
insomnia.ac/commentary/massage_my_ass/
insomnia.ac/commentary/for_artfags_only/
riles666 wrote:Do it, it will be worth it. I've been reading that site for a few years. Another good link: insomnia.ac/commentary/on_the_genealogy_of_art_games/
novriltataki wrote:I read it already a long time ago. Twice even.
Riposte8 wrote:I don't want to be on this planet anymore
ym21280 wrote:Man, this was painful to watch. Especially hearing Leigh Alexander's unlearned gibberish.
I'm an amateur game designer but I want as much distance between me and these indie "designers" as possible. I've played thousands of video games, and I can tell you that the indie crowd is doing NOTHING new. All the indie "designer" does is explore the shallow cavity of their cranium for things that were old by the late 1990s.
I'm an amateur, but at least I'm not claiming to be something I'm not.
Anonymous wrote:Never trust a man's word on beauty if he does up all the buttons on his blazer.
Anonymous wrote:As someone who just got banned essentially due to Icycalm's complete fucking paranoia, I still have to vouch for the guy. I love pretty much every article and review he's ever written, and the way I look at games and gaming culture, not to mention philosophy, is completely different from before I found his site.
He's just a little wild and completely tired of dealing with bullshit of any kind. And I can relate with that, the whole reason I still hang out on 4chan is because I find the politics and people on most video game forums completely disgusting. If he's going to shut out guys like me to avoid the riffraff, more power to him.
Anonymous wrote:icycalm is a butcher, no one can defeat him.
by icycalm » 29 Dec 2011 16:58
All right, which one of you geniuses wrote this article? Everything from the writing style, to the form of the arguments, to the impenetrable walls of vitriol hurled at artfags is utterly brilliant. Thanks for linking this in the last "artgames" thread:
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_the_ge ... art_games/
...it's the greatest parody of /v/irgin idiocy I've ever seen! The way he squeezes "artfag" into every other sentence, the way he spends 15,000 words ranting at them instead of actually talking about video games, the way he puts everything on a linear scale of quality leaving no room for subjectivity or opinion... it's all so perfect.
I especially love the mixture of nostalgiafaggotry and elitism in his analysis of art history. I can just imagine him trolling a 1920's-era 4chan, sagebombing /paint/ and screaming CASUAAAAAAAALS every time an expressionism thread pops up. Or maybe visiting /auto/ and talking about how carfags just don't have the skill to ride or appreciate a good horse. Oh man.
It just doesn't let up. When he condemned the elitism of the artfags and then segued immediately into an explanation of how only the most enlightened connoiseurs can recognize the great works of a medium (he, of course, being capable of recognizing the great works of EVERY medium), I almost lost it.
His closing line is just icing on the cake: "[the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child's play as compared to those raised by the film] ... which in their turn are mere child's play compared to those raised by videogames -- but thankfully for you, dear readers, it just so happens that there's a real philosopher around today to solve them for you!"
Thankfully for us, indeed. I haven't read anything this funny in months.
I like that guy, though.
He makes good points, is literate , educated, and is interesting to read.
Sorry, I cant agree with you, fellow anonymous.
There's lots of great little touches, too. Convenient Wikipedia links to obscure artists and complicated terms he uses (preadaptation? WHAT'S THAT?) to help his plebian readership along, referring to them as 'we' the whole time. The fact that he calls himself Kierkegaard. His admission that Pauline Kale is "pretty smart for a woman" (though not as smart as him). His other articles ("Non-games are for Non-gamers", "Leave Ranking to the Experts"). I love this dude.
Why isn't this site already DDOSed?
Oh wow, reading that was almost as fun as playing EVE Online.
>Go to his website
>Persona 3 = 1/5 stars, "Beyond its undeniable stylistic allure, Persona 3 is no more than a piss-poor social life simulator ineptly grafted onto a shoddy dungeon crawler."
>No More Heroes = 2/5, "This game fucking sssssssucks and I fucking hated almost every moment I spent playing it. It's nothing more than an ugly, gimmicky, cheap-ass, third-rate, five-dollar GTA knock-off, whose only redeeming feature is its funky comic book vibe, and perhaps also its at-times slightly amusing dialogue."
>Lost Odyssey 1/5, "Sakaguchi's epic travesty of a videogame"
>Final Fantasy XII 1/5
I like this guy.
To clarify, he said casualfags only ruin them halfway, then they tag in the artfags to finish the job. There's actually a lot of teamwork involved.
NIETZSCHE, KIERKEGAARD AND BAUDRILLARD ARE THE ONLY PHILOSOPHERS EVER: THE WEBSITE
by icycalm » 29 Dec 2011 21:03
Preng wrote:At the endangerment of dragging this topic further into left field, I went and read the Minecraft review that Vert1 had previously posted. I have not played the game and have only heard things about it from forumers and other friends and acquaintances.
I will admit that the review made a few good points. A comparison between Minecraft and SimCity was made in which SimCity was praised for having interactivity and expansiveness whereas Minecraft may be somewhat lacking. For example, a city in Minecraft does not have technical data that makes it continually expand or progress the game on its own; there are limitations. The writer then critques the game as, on the basis of being a fun creation engine, inferior to other tools. These were the main points that I got out of the article.
However, even knowing this, I do not find the writer to be very credible or enjoyable. I have no problem if his opinion differs from what I have previously learned from the game - indeed, some will enjoy Minecraft and others simply will not. Unfortunately, the writer's style strikes me as extremely egotistical and overly dramatic.
The introduction to this article may be a "distraction" that carries no real weight to the critique of the game itself, yet is not something most readers would simply ignore because it effectively marks the tone of the article. I certainly could not imagine asking someone face-to-face about the game and receiving a response such as this:Alex Kierkegaard wrote:It's so easy to see what the problem is with Minecraft, that I almost feel embarrassed to have to come out and say it. But what we have here once more, as with Seiklus, or Flow, or Flower, or Braid, or Spelunky, or any of the other so-called "indie" abortions, is the same old story, and if there's no one left reviewing games today who actually knows anything about them, and such blatant failings can pass by everyone else unnoticed, I guess I am just going to have to take a few moments out of my day to sit down, write a few words, and point them out.
This does not strike me as an article with my best interests at heart, but rather an opinion of a narcissistic author with infallible opinions.
The writer continues in this fashion by lightly mocking those who enjoy the game - later calling them fuckfaces - and ultimately calls Markus Persson a "fat Swedish fuck." Again, these may not have much to do with the actual game critique, but as Cameron likely implies, I feel that with their inclusion, the author's mindset is unfortunately warped which makes me distrust the entire article.
It's okay to dislike a game, and I understand that some of these remarks can and have been used for sarcasm, but after reading the article - even having noticed and reflecting on critical points - I do not place much respect in this article and would not read any others from the same website.
by icycalm » 11 Jan 2012 02:13
by icycalm » 11 Jan 2012 02:22
JLR wrote:because the value of all real art lies in sheer face value
by icycalm » 01 Feb 2012 20:21
Antonis "calm" Nietzsche: An impersonator of Alex "icycalm" Kierkegaard.
functional purp wrote:its real cool. charge that shit, everyone.
also he's got the best forum i've ever seen, a shop for selling the books he hasnt written yet, and like four new reviews. "I put in work, watch my status escalate" - a. kierkegaard, 2011
stake n sheak wrote:Yeah, I don't really care about how big the site is. As I said, it's a question of the reviewer wanting the same things in a game that I do. The big sites are fine to get news or a general idea of a game, but I don't trust them.
I'm not saying everybody should read that site, just that I do, and when they say something, I'm going to read it and give it pretty heavy weight.
Just for example the major sites all gave Mario Galaxy very high scores. Good ratings, good reviews, slobbering all over it for many paragraphs. So I bought it. I played for four or five hours. It seemed very poorly designed. I spent most of the time just wandering around until I would stumble onto a star or a boss or an exit, or whatever. On top of which jumping on goombas is hard in 3D. I don't know why, I have no problem controlling or navigating in other 3D games. But for some reason to me Mario just belongs in 2D. All of the same problems I had with Sunshine persisted in Galaxy. In fact I found it worse in Galaxy, despite the near universal panning of Sunshine and praise of Galaxy. I really tried to get into it and like it, but couldn't regardless of what "reputable" sites say.
I appreciate depth and reasoning in a review. The IGN review tells me what it's like to watch the game, whereas insomnia.ac says more what it's like to actually play it. Call me crazy, but as cool as it sounds to "trap an enemy in a tire, stab him several times with street signs and then slam him into a wall of spikes," (IGN, page 2), I find it more important to know that "the only skill this colorful display of cruelty requires is being able to press the A button at the right time. Press A to pick up candelabra, press A to cram it into an eye socket. Repeat until you grab the enemy (Protip: A button) and shake the remote to throw him forward into a pit of spikes." Suddenly it kind of sounds like no fun.
So I really respect the opinions and writing on insomnia. It's real criticism, instead of simple description. The big sites have proved multiple times that their positive reviews mean nothing in terms of me actually liking the game. So I don't care what they say on the positive side when making a choice to buy or not.
novriltataki wrote:Videogames, like all art, are all about glorification. Which means the men will be badasses and the women will be hot and there will be war in some form. Who'd wanna play as an over the hill single mother working another day at the office to feed her little crumb crunchers? (I mean besides Leigh Alexander.)
by icycalm » 10 Feb 2012 21:20
by Agentx » 11 Feb 2012 00:06
Another thing he complains about is close scores like, for example, 76/100 and 77/100. His position boils down to "I cannot imagine myself making very precise judgements about games, therefore it is impossible." It is a laughable position. Alex seems to have a habit of confusing the negligible with the actually non-existent: Just because it's hard to see that 76 to 77 difference, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I agree that if you are really using a score system with 100 values (or worse, decimals!), you should probably think again. But that doesn't mean it's inherently bad, and it doesn't mean there can't be some guy out there who really can review games so finely that he can discern a 1/100 difference in quality (although, most that score out of 100 probably can't do it). This part is also tangential to my purposes.
by icycalm » 11 Feb 2012 20:59
by icycalm » 11 Feb 2012 21:08
by icycalm » 13 Feb 2012 22:19
by icycalm » 21 Feb 2012 23:30
calm wrote:This is the problem with subhumans: they are, litterally, a physical manifestation of a disease: corrupting any human unfortunate enough to stumble upon it, "converting" him into one of the subhumans' own, wretched brethen (except for the most immune of humans, such as Nietzsche and, of course, myself) -- which, by the way, is the exact same thing that happened with John Romeo and Jean Baudrillard. SUSPECTIBLE "human beings" (most likely subhumans themselves, or were already infected with subhuman cancer prior), will find nothing inherently wrong with a subhuman, and will gladly welcome him or her to the suspectible human's little circlejerk, dribbling nonsence with the subhuman back and forth. IMMUNE human beings, on the other hand, only need to examine the subhuman's PHYSICAL AND MENTAL DEFECTS to realise that he or she is NOT WORTH ANYONE'S TIME -- an abortionate scumbag who should be rightfully put in a mental hospital -- or better yet: WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH. Clearly, and startlingly, Ikeda-san was one of the former when he chose to hire Watanabe and Umemoto -- a mistake that will inevitbly lead to his company's DOWNWARD SPIRAL TOWARDS OBLIVION. Perhaps, then, it was a blessing that Umemoto deservedly died before he could cause some more irrepearable damage to the company -- but if only the same could happen to Watanabe...
by icycalm » 25 Feb 2012 02:54
by icycalm » 25 Feb 2012 02:58
by icycalm » 26 Feb 2012 23:20
Ray Scarlet wrote:i'm trying to write about AOD but all I can think of is seeing people's lulzy reactions to icy. DAMMIT ICY YOU MADE AOD RETROACTIVELY SUCK
あずまやアル wrote:Icycalm retroactively sucks. I think of Icycalm whilst writing about AOD. Ergo, AOD retroactively sucks. Nice syllogism lol :V
by recoil » 27 Feb 2012 04:35
Ray Scarlet wrote:So against my better judgment, I decide to go to insomni—I MEAN culture.vg and…his articles are subscriber-only.
Oh, I get it, icycalm. You don’t want people to counter your points (which, however good they are, are coated with pretentious inflammatory bullshit) so you hide behind making people do a monetary commitment.
icycalm go eat a million icy dicks plz.