Games

[icycalm]

This is the site I talked about in the Replayability thread earlier today. I've spent all my time since on it, and I can safely say it is the third best videogame site ever. It goes Insomnia, Postback, Mystery site. For a few moments I even debated placing it above Postback, but then I thought about it some more and, nah. It's not quite that good.

And then I lolled like a motherfucker when I checked their bio pages and found out that their best writer is from... Spain.

At least now I can safely say that, however much I hate this country, and believe that it sucks at almost everything, it certainly does very well in terms of producing hardcore videogame critics for some reason. It must be something in the water. Or it's like Korea: the country sucks so bad that people take refuge in videogames. However that may be, expect an excruciatingly detailed analysis of the site soon.

[icycalm]

And the motherfucker sounds just like an American. There was not the slightest doubt in my mind when reading him that he was from the states. He even sounds a lot like George Smith/alwaysbeawesome, who is a bone fide American. If you just mixed around some of their paragraphs you wouldn't be able to tell who is which. Weird stuff. Very pleasantly weird.

[icycalm]

So I loaded up my laptop with a dozen of the other guy's reviews, and took it downstairs to the restaurant I sometimes go to when I can't be arsed to cook, reading them while waiting for my dinner.

The other guy is good too. Perhaps just as good as the Spanish guy, only in a slightly different manner. While the Spaniard tends towards autism, this one, who is English, tends towards "indie" bumhood/artfagotry. But this doesn't come off in his actual reviews of actual games. You couldn't tell the "indie" bumhood/artfagotry of his personality by reading any of those. When reading his Skyrim, review, for example, way back earlier today, when I hadn't yet explored the site very much, I didn't pay attention to the byline and had assumed it was written by the Spaniard. So you'd have to read his reviews of "indie" shit to figure the artfagotry/bumhood angle, and they are easy enough to ignore. As long as you do that, he can even be said to be an improvement over the Spaniard because less autism. And he seems to be at least a tad more sensitive to aesthetic aspects -- though in the long run they are both as sensitive to those as blind and deaf bats.

Anyway, more in the actual article, which will be the first real article in my Guide to the Internet series after the prologue dedicated to Recap, written all those years ago (well, just a couple really).

[icycalm]

So the site is called, fittingly enough, as you will soon discover, Scathing Accuracy, and after a relatively lengthy exchange of emails with them, I have obtained their permission to feature some of their content on my frontpage. Now, I would have liked to feature all of it, and even more: I would have liked them to fold their site and move themselves and everything they've written over here, but, as they've told me, it's apparently not something that would appeal to them at the present time. Moreover, they are very strict about allowing me to edit anything, which means I can't feature as much of their stuff as I would like to on the frontpage, because roughly 50 to 70% of their reviews contain at least a little material that goes against the theoretical framework and editorial policies of this site. Most of the time it's nothing too pronounced, just the odd unconsidered comment here or there, or the odd omission which could be fixed with a little direction from me and a couple extra lines. But they seem to be against adding anything themselves as well... so it's a little frustrating. Finally I decided to cherry-pick what I am mostly happy with for the frontpage, and then dump the rest in the forum and pick it apart: what sucks and should be changed, and what is missing and should be added. They seem to be open about receiving feedback and perhaps, if they agree with it, integrating it into their future reviews, but not, unfortunately, about reworking their old ones. So, like I said, the latter will be dumped in the forum and regarded as mere impressions, instead of full reviews, and all of us should benefit from the the detailed dissection (either in the form of red-colored comments added to the text of the review, or additional commentary after the review, or both) which I'll be carrying out.

Perhaps the worst idea contained in their entire site is the idea that, and I am paraphrasing here, "graphics do not, and should not matter at all in videogames", which Shepton seems to enjoy blathering out of the blue in every other review, thereby making it impossible for me to use it :( He even goes as far as to explain that by "graphics" he means the technical aspect: resolution, number of colors, polygons, etc., whereas he seems to have a little more respect for the artistic side. And of course the unfortunate "geamplay" is harped on every other line.

But dear Shepton, in all these years of playing games, it never occurred to you to realize that graphics -- and especially the technical side that you so contemptuously dismiss -- are an integral, inseperable part of the "geamplay"? Do you think that RTSes with hundreds or thousands of units running around are possible on machines with puny resolutions like the Odyssey or the Intellivision or whatever? Or FPSes, or 3D action games, or or or? Was your first machine a PS2 or something? Nothing is more important in the "geamplay" than the graphics -- nothing at all! For what are the graphics if not the game's reaction to your input? And the more complex you want your input to be (i.e. the deeper the game), the more complex the graphics have to be (i.e. more high-tech) in order to depict the gameworld's reaction. And you have to go and litter half of your otherwise excellent reviews with this asinine chatter, and then refuse to retouch anything :( What am I gonna do with you two guys? :)

Anyway, let's clear a couple of other things up.

The dudes use an 18-point rating system (A to F with three gradiations of each). Yet another huge groan :( See here for the reason:

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/how_good_ ... s_perfect/

At any rate I need to convert the ratings to my system, at least for the frontpage and the review index, because I can't suddenly have As and Bs and Fs along with all my star ratings -- the frontpage would look like shit. So in the actual review pages everything will be as on their site, and the converted rating will work sort of like Metacritic, so you can safely leave that to me. But if any of the star ratings seem fishy to the authors, they can let me know after taking into account my rating scale, explained in the aforelinked article, and copy-pasted here for handy reference:

***** Highly recommended
**** Recommended
*** Good, but has been done before, and much better
** Playable, but without much merit
* LOL

What else? That's all I can think of for now. I will be linking all their material that I import to Insomnia in this thread, so that no matter across how many frontpage articles or forum threads it ends up scattered, people will be easily able to find all of it by visiting this thread. Finally, please note that most of my comments will be negative, for the simple reason that, if something's good, as most of their stuff indeed is, there's nothing to say about it. The mere fact that I am going to all this trouble to feature this stuff here means that I love it -- it would be pointless for me to say anything else on top of that (see also section 20 here). If I am not saying anything on something, then that means it's good. That's it for now, more later.

[icycalm]

So here's the content that we have so far:

Darksiders review:
http://culture.vg/reviews/in-depth/dark ... 0-ps3.html

with some comments from me here:
http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=17936#p17936

Metroid: Other M review:
http://culture.vg/reviews/in-depth/metr ... 0-wii.html

with some comments from me here:
http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=17940#p17940

And finally the Bayonetta review which has been extensively annotated and discussed by me here:
http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=17935#p17935


And that's it for now. Those who've enjoyed this stuff and don't want to wait for me to post the next articles up can go to the dudes' site and start reading: there are upwards of 100 reviews and articles on there, and believe you me, they are all worth reading; I went through pretty much everything in a couple of evenings. If, on the other hand, you don't have that much free time, wait for me to post everything alongside with my comments, so that you won't have to go over the same stuff twice.

[icycalm]

And seriously now, is there anything more ridiculous than people falling over themselves to prove to you that they are "above" aesthetics? How could anyone be above his own senses? "I don't care about looks" -- and neither do bats and pigs, so you are in good company. In all previous times people were falling over themselves to claim that they had higher aesthetic taste, and today we have a crop of people who are proud to claim the opposite.

Or they say: "I don't care about beauty in a woman -- the only thing that matters is the 'womanfuck', the mechanics of my dick moving in and out of her vagina".

O rly?

But if the woman is ugly enough you can't even get an erection, and what will happen to your mechanics, to your "pure womanfuck" then, eh?

The truth is the exact opposite to what you contend, and there are indeed people who will ejaculate with the mere thought of a beautiful woman, with practically no need for mechanics at all; whereas if you don't at least have an IDEA of a beautiful woman in your head, you can rub your cock against a rock all day long and nothing will come out. Aesthetics -- beauty, in other words -- are above mechanics in every aspect of life, even in videogames. "Pure mechanics" is pure nonsense, as I have explained in my 36-page essay on autism. But it's not online, so if you dudes want a copy of that book email me your addresses and I'll have a copy sent to you so you can learn what's up.

[zinger]

Hahahaha!

[Lord Knight]

When people say they "don't care about aesthetics", I don't think most of them really mean that their enjoyment would be exactly the same if they played a mechanically similar game with Atari 2600 graphics. To me it seems more like a reaction to other people who DO nitpick on aesthetics but do it based on questionable standards.

For example, someone would say "I'd rather play Street Fighter IV than Arcana Heart because AH is anime and I hate anime and it has no male characters". The thing is, despite Arcana Heart being a more interesting game (mechanically), I'd rather look at Arcana Heart's characters than to look at Street Fighter IV's ugly character models. But for many people even the prettiest anime presentation is a no-no just because it's anime. To continue the humorous analogy to women, to me it's similar to hating on a hot Asian chick just because she's Asian, but then going for a fat, fugly Caucasian chick, just because she's Caucasian.

This is not exclusive to fighting games. There are also people who will boycott every Cave bullet-hell that has a flying magical chick instead of a spaceship as the avatar. What can you say to a "Cave fan" who does not want to even touch Mushihime-sama just based on that? Most people's knee-jerk answer is "Don't mind the aesthetics and play it for the mechanics!"

So what I'm trying to say is that "aesthetics are not important" is not a mentality born from within and out of instinct, but a silly mentality born purely as a reaction to a different silly mentality.(That fat, fugly Caucasian women are better than hot Asian women.) That's my theory on the people you can find on videogame discussions on the internet. Maybe I'm wrong and they really are as stupid as they seem to be...

[icycalm]

Fix the paragraph breaks in your post asap. If your post was not as clever as it is you would be banned now, but if you do it again I won't give you another chance.

So yeah, in clever people like these two guys, the "grafix dont matter" fagotry is indeed a knee-jerk reaction -- a reaction to the limp-wristed and braindead fags who judge games based exclusively on their textures. Also, against the ever-increasing numbers of developers who find it easier to ratchet up the aesthetic instead of the mechanical complexity of their games (which is indeed harder and more expensive to improve).

But it is a stupid and hysteric reaction -- you don't have to go to the OTHER fucking extreme (which as I've humorously shown above, and as I've also explained in my autism essay, is even MORE retarded than the fags' fixation on aesthetics) in order to get your goddamn point across. Without mechanics you still have art, without aesthetics you have NOTHING: you are just a dumbass fagot sitting on his couch pressing plastic buttons for no reason at all -- at least a painting or a movie(/pure cutscene) can still give you a lot of satisfaction, but what satisfaction can you get by slapping a couple of buttons around for hours on end with no goddamn audiovisual feedback?

And it's not that the solution lies "somewhere in the middle", either -- i.e. in having mediocre mechanics and mediocre aesthetics -- this is just as retarded as the other two extremes. Rather, you need to ratchet everything up to the maximum, to the full, as far as your talent and resource pool will allow, in order to get the ultimate result, which is to say the masterpiece.

I will develop all this in full in the Aesthetics & Mechanics essay, and will include several more good analogies in there, so I hope that soon enough everyone who wants to resolve all this shit inside his mind will get the chance to do so. But this should be enough to convince anyone that disregarding, never mind frowing upon, the aesthetic aspect OF GODDAMN ART is utterly retarded. As is the allegation that resolution and color palette and polygon count -- i.e. the technical part of a game's art design -- are not related to the aesthetic. If you seriously believe this, every goddamn painter and moviemaker in the world would like to have a word with you.

[icycalm]

SA got a pretty sweet redesign:

Well, by sweet I mean "not quite as ugly as the previous look", I guess.

Hopefully that means more content soon.

The tagline that says "The number one publication in the field" was something I said to Shepton in an email about Insomnia, and I guess he thought it sounded stupid. He had it up in the old site, not sure if he kept it for new one. I refreshed the page a few times to see if I can get it, but he has added a bunch of new ones and it would take ages.