icycalm wrote:So which kinds of games are art then?", and the answer to that question should by now be obviously, "The good ones."
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Well, the hoopla is due to the fact that practically everyone who writes about games today is a slobbering, uneducated, mentally retarded fuckwit, and therefore incapable of grasping the simple facts I just explained here.
Well said, friend.
I've played five games that get hyped as "art": Shadow of the Colossus, ICO, Okami, Killer 7, and Rez. The only one of those I would even give a thumbs up to Okami, and even then it's only a mild one.
Shadow of the Colossus looks like shit, has the worst camera I've yet dealt with, seems to build it's hype entirely on the size of the some bosses while ignoring the bosses look like giant teddybears and don't really do anything menacing and many of them aren't even that big, and its riddled with cliches from the "big reveal" at the end to how you beat the first lion to the game's fucking name.
You'd have to be missing a chromosome to be stumped by most of the "puzzles" in ICO.
Okami had some really good moments, but also a lot of fluff. The main annoyance off the top of my head is having to fight the eight-headed snake three times throughout the game, and the only difference in each fight is how many hits he takes. The plot also went all over the place after the first third of the game, which was annoying.
Killer7 was borderline insulting, both being retardedly easy and the ending.
I'd call Rez one of the worst games ever made, but it barely counts as a game.
I don't care if people like these games, but it seems like the only way anyone ever defends Shadow of the Colossus is by calling it "amazing" and leaving it at that, justifying/trivializing the flaws, and with logical fallacies (the favored being thought-terminating cliches like "It's not bad art, it's a style.") Another topic here mentions that 1Up review of Rez that gave it a 10 and basically said "Because it's ART."
While I definitely think there's ground to the Little Johnny trying to justify his hobby to his parents explanation, I think when most people call a game art, it's because they want that game to be more than it really is.