The pseudo-intellectual fagotry archive

[icycalm]

We post them here one by one, and eventually I will make a gigantic page in which they'll all be copy-pasted back-to-back. If NASA ever makes another Voyager we could include this page in the vault of human (or, more precisely, subhuman) artifacts.

So, I just got back from my day at PAX. There was all sorts of delightful stuff on display, fun things to do, and some very impressive demos in the expo hall. The one game that I was utterly blown away by, however, was not LittleBigPlanet 2 or Duke Nukem Forever or Final Fantasy XIV, but a student game in the PAX 10 called Solace. Something that’s been on my mind lately is the fact that while games, as a medium, have certainly been explored as a vessel for expressive artistic statement, gameplay has not often been a part of that. If you take Braid and remove the text, you end up with a puzzle game involving time manipulation that is barely about anything other than puzzles involving time manipulation. On the other hand, if you took Solace, removed the text, and replaced all the beautiful graphics and superb sound design with rectangles and beeps, it would still be about the five stages of grief as represented through the gameplay of its levels – the message would not be conveyed nearly so brilliantly, but nor would it be lost.

Certainly, there have been games in the past that conveyed an artistic statement through their gameplay. Passage springs immediately to mind, for example. But the thing about Passage is that while it may or may not be effective as art, it isn’t really effective as a game. It merits exploration, and provokes thoughts, certainly, but doesn’t really engage the player on a visceral level. In contrast, Solace is fun, challenging, and engaging. The visuals, audio, and level design are all deliberately tuned to evoke within the player echoes of the emotion that they represent. Not just through sympathetic sensory associations, the way a painting or poem or piece of music would – though Solace uses these idioms as well – but through the nuances of the gameplay. The structure of the game expects, and at times effectively requires, the player to demonstrate an understanding of the level’s relevant emotion in order to successfully proceed through the game – and indeed enables the player to do so, with nothing more nuanced than a directional control and a fire button.

Solace, in addition to being a marvelous work of art in its own right, is a lesson to all game designers of what games have the potential to be. In my own game designs, I have often run into a tension between making my game artistically meaningful and having good, solid, fun gameplay. Solace, by being excellent in both regards, has taught me that this is a false dichotomy. If Portal is worthy of a place on a course syllabus, I believe Solace can be similarly instructive, to students and designers alike.

http://www.tigsource.com/2010/09/09/pax-2010-solace/

Note that this thread is for ENTIRE pieces which contain way too many hilarious fagotistical nonsense to just pick out one or two quotes, and must be read in full in order to be properly relished.

[icycalm]

I hope that the fact that he has said absolutely nothing about the game will not be lost on anyone.

[icycalm]

Review: Limbo (Playdead, 2010)

Available platforms: Xbox 360 (Format reviewed)
Digital distribution only
Price: 1200 MS Points
Key staff (subjective): Arnt Jensen (Concept) Jeppe Carlsen (Design Lead)

It was offbeat of Microsoft to launch the third Summer of Arcade promotion with a monochrome meditation on violent and untimely death; Limbo isn’t a blue skies game. I have to assume they had every faith in the quality of the game to carry itself.

Limbo is an incredible game. By Xbox Live Arcade standards it’s remarkably uncluttered: no tutorials or extraneous game modes: no challenge based replays, no time attack, no multiplayer. In terms of presentation the game contains absolutely no bullshit, with the title screen displaying incredibly strong design and only the options the game needs. The “how to play” screen has three labels: move (left stick), jump (A) and use (X). The rest of the pad is ignored. Limbo feels confident, clean, smart and uncontaminated from the very start, even before you begin playing. This is the approach to design Playdead use for the rest of the game.

There’s no text or speech in Limbo. The game is entirely mute besides the eerie ambient soundtrack, taking a cue from the industrial soundscape used by David Lynch in his existential horror movie Eraserhead. Your player character even resembles a youthful version of Jack Nance, that film’s lead. I had more fun with this game than I did watching Eraserhead but it left me feeling just as unsettled.

“Fun” might not be the right word. Limbo is compelling and enjoyably so. There are moments when the game throws up complete horrors - all seamlessly integrated into the mechanics of the puzzles that comprise the entire game - that left me itching and crawling in my own skin. They’re usually pretty subtle but nastier for it. I kept playing through my disgust and felt satisfied. At every moment the game is working your platformer muscles - not just the ones that let you pull of twitchy, pixel perfect jumps but the ones that you need to plan and execute those jumps. I beat the game in three relaxed sessions, stopping only because my brain was too tired and fucked-out to plan ahead properly. The game is short but never padded out with mediocrity. It stops before it runs out of things to do or say.

Limbo proves you don’t need tutorials to understand a puzzle game. You need a consistent physics system, graphic design the player can understand instinctively and a control scheme that never varies while staying as intuitive and simple as possible. You will die often and violently, but this is almost as rewarding to watch as overcoming your current trial and moving on to the next. Physics based death is sick fun and the animation touches are superb - one brilliant idea was to represent the player character’s dead/alive status simply by making his eyes glow constantly until he’s killed. A fair checkpoint system encourages you to learn from each dismemberment and keeps the game flowing forward.

In terms of videogame design this is lean and flawless. Compared to other puzzle platformers like Nintendo’s genre-leading Donkey Kong 94 and 2008’s Summer of Arcade predecessor Braid Limbo is superior; the subtle, ambient design choices Playdead made really show Braid up for the embarrassingly overwrought and sickly package it is. If game designers (especially indie designers with something to prove) want to take a lesson away from Limbo’s design it should be to show, not tell.

Limbo contains no backstory other than the strapline: “Unsure of his sister’s fate, a boy enters the unknown”. The simple shadow puppet graphics build on this idea in subtle, suggestive ways. In basic terms the game takes you on a journey from a forest through a city and impersonal, automated factories while the composition and design of the puzzles add context and narrative. You’re free to interpret the game however you see fit.

It’s really great, really challenging, no longer than it needs to be and never patronising. Limbo is definitely something that can stand alongside the best horror films and literature without ever compromising itself as a pure and playable video game: an important point most of the bores making “art games” have long since forgotten.

Recommended.

http://ambienthadoukens.tumblr.com/post ... ydead-2010

[icycalm]

Among many other things, he says the game is "challenging" in almost the same breath in which he says that he beat it "in three relaxed sessions". Fagots are always going on and on about how they need a brand-new vocabulary to talk about videogames, a "videogame lexicon" as they like to call it to show that they know the Greek word for vocabulary, and this should be the very first term on it:

challenging (chal-in-jing) adj. = anything that can be beaten in three relaxed sessions

Maybe we should start another thread for the lexicon. Because THEY only TALK about it, as usual: they need someone else to come in and do it for them.

And note this lexicon is absolutely necessary in the long run, since the language the fags speak has absolutely no relation to standard human tongues. For example, here's how a human dictionary defines challenging:

chal·leng·ing (chal-in-jing) adj. = Calling for full use of one's abilities or resources

[icycalm]

Note also the irony of the dig at "art games" in the end, in a review which does exactly what these "art games" do: elevate trash above real masterpieces by inventing spurious arguments.

Note also the date of the review: several weeks after the first part of my article on the subject. The fagot who wrote it posts on SB, and practically all of them read this site religiously.

[icycalm]

http://www.portalofevil.com/single.php?poeurlid=44992

Insomnia | Videogame Culture

09/23/10, 23:50 fluffy
Computers & Internet Games
0 Comments
Detailed and angry rants about how much the video game stuff you like sucks, unless it's either from the 80s or is mind-numbingly difficult.

Aside from the complete misrepresentation of the site, we can see once more how the subhumans keep inverting the meaning of human words. Because it is the easy stuff that is supposed to be "mind-numbing", since it does not exercise your brain which thus becomes "numb", whereas we see the subhuman here use the expression "mind-numbing" for difficult things, which are in fact the opposite of mind-numbing. They might be frustrating, especially if you are subhuman, but they can never be mind-numbing.