If the run were shorter I could see that, but only five people have managed a sub-three hour time in the any% no major glitches category. How do you deal with a run that long still having that heavy of RNG?
Coming off of the FF9 speedrun (a 9-hour run where the third-to-last boss can just kill you with his opening move), the RNG in PSIV feels a little more forgiving. The biggest run-killer is the Triplets fight, which is less than two hours in. Even then, the RNG is still more forgiving than Earthbound. Also, there's no rigid step-routing like there is in earlier FF games and while a missed input can be bad, most are recoverable, so it's not as bad as failing slots in an FF6 run or failing stairs in an FF4 run.
If the full run is too much to take on, there's the Zio% category, which can be done in less than an hour and only has one real RNG risk spot.
I finally beat Bloodstained, only to see that my name is not in the credits despite me backing for $120 and filling out the survey way back when. I asked Fangamer and they didn’t know what went wrong. Also I’m not getting the Ayami Kojima poster, and all they could do was say “sorry, we’re out, also part of your pledge was an add-on so you weren’t eligible” even though my email says I pledged at the $120 tier for 2 copies.
(Edit: I should note that at least part of this is that the Backer ID option doesn’t seem to work right for a lot of people, not just me.)
Also the game crashed at least once every two hours.
The base game was fun, but the Switch port and it’s loading/crashing issues suck. There is no ETA for the patch that will supposedly fix some of the issues, aside from “hopefully by the end of the year.”
I’m sorry, I’m just sad and disappointed.
I do have a link for the soundtrack on my survey page finally, at least.
I finally beat Bloodstained, only to see that my name is not in the credits despite me backing for $120 and filling out the survey way back when. I asked Fangamer and they didn’t know what went wrong. Also I’m not getting the Ayami Kojima poster, and all they could do was say “sorry, we’re out, also part of your pledge was an add-on so you weren’t eligible” even though my email says I pledged at the $120 tier for 2 copies.
(Edit: I should note that at least part of this is that the Backer ID option doesn’t seem to work right for a lot of people, not just me.)
Also the game crashed at least once every two hours.
The base game was fun, but the Switch port and it’s loading/crashing issues suck. There is no ETA for the patch that will supposedly fix some of the issues, aside from “hopefully by the end of the year.”
I’m sorry, I’m just sad and disappointed.
I do have a link for the soundtrack on my survey page finally, at least.
I'm really sorry to hear all that. I know how it feels to be really anticipating something and then disappointed, especially when it's something you put money into.
I hope that you find some sort of resolution on these things. I don't know what else to say.
I'm really sorry to hear all that. I know how it feels to be really anticipating something and then disappointed, especially when it's something you put money into.
I hope that you find some sort of resolution on these things. I don't know what else to say.
Thanks, Bigdog
They said they can’t do anything right now, so I guess that’s it. Maybe I’ll get the Steam version someday when it’s on sale for like $5.
They already are, I've seen a few of the models imported into Blender already. The debug free camera also seems fairly easy to access, and a photo mode was one of the main things I wanted from the original game (and CTR)
If you have a Switch but don't have an online subscription, I have one slot open in the family group that I'm sharing with ponygoons. The renewal date's about two weeks from now and your share will be $4.37 if we get it full.
Consider it if you have the monthly subscription (it's a whole year of service for just a little more than one month's cost) or even if you have an individual subscription that's about to run out.
Did a run through of some C-sides to get used to the controls again, then tackled Chapter 9.
I had to use Assist Mode. It was just too much. It’s basically built around using speedrunning tech, and the new gimmicks can be kinda finicky. And the screen layouts are brutal. It’s like a bunch of the hardest B and C-sides strung together.
My hands fucking hurt. I don’t think I’m physically able to do some of the things they want you to do. But I muddled through well enough to see the ending.
Something that's been weighing on my mind lately for no particular reason: You remember way back when Roger Ebert got a lot of flak for saying video games can't be art, and people tried to get him to play various games they thought counted as "art" and never really got through to him? It's been, what, like almost 10 years since that happened, and I'm wondering if even now there are any games that would successfully convince a complete outsider of the merits of games as a medium.
Because that would be asking a lot of a single game. It would have to be accessible to someone with no gaming experience, for starters, but the gameplay has to be an important part of the experience—it can't just be a "walking simulator" or anything else that would make a person question why it's not just a movie or something instead. Its story and themes would have to assume the player has zero game literacy, so games like BioShock and Undertale that are all about turning common game conventions on their head are right out. And on top of all that, it has to be a pretty damn impressive story. And on top of that, it would help very much to not be terribly long, unless it's engrossing enough that the player (again, assuming we're talking about a skeptical non-gamer) would want to keep at it until it's done.
Does such a game exist? 'Cause I sure can't think of one. At the very least, there are only a handful out of the thousands of games that exist in the world. Which is weird, because you don't have the same kinds of problems with any other medium.
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of...
I haven't read Ebert's columns on the subject in a while, so I went back to find them, and I think this one persuades me that Roger Ebert would never find a game he'd believe to be art because Roger Ebert doesn't play games and therefore doesn't believe any game could move him the way movies do.
He also originally objected to games being art because you can change the outcome of a video game by playing it, so it's not a directed experience presented to you by the artist. His example was whether Romeo & Juliet would be improved by having them naked, or standing on their heads. By that standard, walking simulators would probably be as close to art as anything else.
Here's another article he wrote on the subject, basically admitting that even after people offered him a Playstation so he could play Flower and see if it was art or not, he refused. So I doubt he'd ever change his mind, regardless of the game. He thought games were a waste of time, so obviously he wasn't going to feel like he had learned more about the human condition through them -- and ultimately, he can't even define art in a way that excludes games but includes what he likes.
(That article also suggests that Shadow of the Colossus was the closest the community came to picking an unambiguously "this is art" game.)
There’ve been good essays about games as art. My opinion is that “art” is not a quality that exists free-floating in a vacuum, but is always connected to, and perceived through, its medium. And so any appreciation of art requires, on the part of the audience, some basic familiarity with the medium. For instance, a book of Shakespeare won’t convey much to a person who can’t read. And even a passive medium like film has its own “language” — moviegoers today understand the basic language of cinema as it’s developed, while in 1903 audiences were afraid the guy shooting at the camera was shooting at them personally.
So to the question of “can a person wholly ignorant of games appreciate games as art” I’m going to say: not really, or at least not on more than the most basic and introductory level. You have to start somewhere, and I think you need at least some understanding of how games operate as games before you can perceive what they’re doing on an artistic level.
And by that I mean what they’re doing on an artistic level as games. The fundamentally unique thing that videogames bring to the artistic table is player involvement, that YOU the audience are the ones making this thing happen, to save the Little Sister or sacrifice her, to pull the lever, to move ahead or linger at your own pace.
They can work on other levels too. I think a Roger Ebert could sit and watch someone play Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and say: there is art going on here. But that’s experiencing a game as you would a film, as a passive viewer, experiencing the events as they are presented to you on the screen. The player whom Roger is watching, the person actually moving the controls and making the choices, that person is having a wholly different artistic experience, and one which pretty much only videogames can provide.
Undertale is pretty much the post-modern experimental theater of games: it’s art, but you have to be familiar with the medium and its conventions to understand what it’s doing differently. Like how Spec Ops: The Line shouldn’t be your first military FPS, because it is a commentary on military FPS’s and its power depends in large part on you being aware of that context going in.
So to bring it back around, what would be a good introduction for someone unfamiliar not only with games-as-art, but with games? Hmmm. I’d say Flower is actually a good choice: it’s simple, provides great feedback, and derives emotion from the fact that YOU are making it happen. Stanley Parable too, I’d say — maybe more the original than the remake, which goes heavier on the vidgame references where the original is more into broad themes of choice, happiness and narrative.
Portal is also art, I think, for the way it begins as pure, nearly abstract gameplay and gradually introduces context. The twist of Portal’s story is that there is a story, and coming to discover that in what you thought was just some Orange Box extra content ... experiencing it brand new and unspoiled was amazing. And I think what Portal offers artistically is accessible to gaming newcomers.
Honestly I just subscribe to "Anything is art if it has meaning", and while that is subjective, I'm taking a super broad approach here so that "Anything that someone derived meaning from is art" as my objective basis. Heck, if someone got meaning out of Elf Bowling, it was art.
Now whether that art is GOOD is up to interpretation, but I think the silliest argument is to shut down discussion of a creative topic because it 'isn't art' or 'has no value as art'. That variety of art thought seems a lot like gatekeeping to me, instead of anything productive. You can argue the merits of a piece of art, and analyze it, but it seems silly to just reject it out of hand.
Of course this does mean that I consider a lot of terrible things art, but they're just terrible art of little merit, rather than 'not art'
I enjoyed the Blackwell Series well enough but Unavowed feels like a huge advancement from that in writing and character. The best character is of course KayKay but everyone is layered and really likeable.
I finally beat Bloodstained, only to see that my name is not in the credits despite me backing for $120 and filling out the survey way back when. I asked Fangamer and they didn’t know what went wrong. Also I’m not getting the Ayami Kojima poster, and all they could do was say “sorry, we’re out, also part of your pledge was an add-on so you weren’t eligible” even though my email says I pledged at the $120 tier for 2 copies.
(Edit: I should note that at least part of this is that the Backer ID option doesn’t seem to work right for a lot of people, not just me.)
Also the game crashed at least once every two hours.
The base game was fun, but the Switch port and it’s loading/crashing issues suck. There is no ETA for the patch that will supposedly fix some of the issues, aside from “hopefully by the end of the year.”
I’m sorry, I’m just sad and disappointed.
I do have a link for the soundtrack on my survey page finally, at least.
Fangamer got back to me as to why things are screwed up: because somehow my pledge got changed at some point from a single $100+ tier to 2 $60 tiers. I don’t know if I did this or they did. Oh well. I’m pretty fucking dense I guess.
Anyway, enough whining and complaining from me! Currently playing Final Fantasy Adventure, aka the first Seiken Densetsu/Mana game. This sure is a 1991-vintage Game Boy action RPG. The sprites and very stilted localization (thanks to memory and rom limitations) are charming. Having to stop every 5 seconds to pause and change what’s assigned to the B button is
Anyway, enough whining and complaining from me! Currently playing Final Fantasy Adventure, aka the first Seiken Densetsu/Mana game. This sure is a 1991-vintage Game Boy action RPG. The sprites and very stilted localization (thanks to memory and rom limitations) are charming. Having to stop every 5 seconds to pause and change what’s assigned to the B button is
I'm also playing through that these days. The B button stuff is annoying, but a lot holds up surprisingly well, especially for a pre-Link's Awakening time.
I'm also playing through that these days. The B button stuff is annoying, but a lot holds up surprisingly well, especially for a pre-Link's Awakening time.
Yeah, it’s very impressive for such an early effort! It’s fun when I don’t have to stop to re-equip a Mattock, then switch back to spells or healing items (if there’s poison enemies around).
Playing Jonathan Blow’s The Witness and it’s quite my jam.
It’s a really pretty Island and the whole island is chock full of puzzles, and every so often you get a quote about philosophy or Islamic scholarship or what have you. And everywhere you turn there’s another puzzle, and it feels good to peel away another piece of this island-sized puzzlebox.
Playing Jonathan Blow’s The Witness and it’s quite my jam.
It’s a really pretty Island and the whole island is chock full of puzzles, and every so often you get a quote about philosophy or Islamic scholarship or what have you. And everywhere you turn there’s another puzzle, and it feels good to peel away another piece of this island-sized puzzlebox.
Just you wait.The game does a really phenomenal thing that you may or may not catch on your own before the endgame, but it will make sure you realize it and that moment feels brainmelting.
I’ve already had a few moments where I — to keep it spoiler free — discover a puzzle that is not immediately apparent as a puzzle. And now I walk around like a crazy person looking for puzzles everywhere.
I don’t yet have a unified theory for all the stuff that’s in this game (if indeed there is one), but I don’t feel like I need to either; for now I can keep perfectly busy just solving puzzles without straining my brain on potential larger themes. That’s why I’m surprised some describe this game as pretentious; to me it feels very accessible and un-pretentious, if anything.
Witness manages to be a bit pretentious in its unpretentiousness, but it's nothing like the guy's other games when it comes to the level of... uh, pretension.
The philosophical points are not entirely threaded well with the gameplay itself, they're moreso kind of thrown in as a mental distraction on top of puzzles that are already drawing attention from your brain. There's also a couple bonus puzzles that are just. so. agonizing. to complete, completely rife with scantly-related philosophical droning that actively makes the experience worse, but on the whole those are still not as mad as some make it out to be.
I'd argue that the only truly pretentious part of the game are the secret endings. Those are pure smarminess.
EDIT: Oh, and that one bonus puzzle. If you know The Witness, you know which one I'm talking about. That puzzle is pure shite in its execution.
No, not that challenge run, that's at least interesting. The hour-long movie one.
That’s why when I’m not playing The Witness, I’m playing either Dawn of Man (a prehistoric city builder where dialogue is monosyllabic grunts) or Oxygen Not Included (a base builder where dialogue is theremin squeaks). Balance is so important.
You can ignore most of the dialogue in Witness though, the only ones you have to sit around for are the Connections guy's rant about how art is meaningless and you should SCIENCE and the ending of that one russian film and a 1 hour long lecture but to be fair you don't have to pay attention.
yo sorry to necro a like 3 week old post but can I get a citation for this, 'cause it sounds hilarious
New media, when taking its first experimental baby steps, often begins with a style and language inherited from older media. Take webcomics, for instance. The earliest webcomics were just the same as print-medium comic strips, the only difference being you read them on a screen instead of a newspaper or magazine. Many are still just that, of course; but we also have webcomics that take advantage of the electronic format and the "infinite canvas" it allows, as well as incorporating multimedia, animation, hover text, etc. Homestuck could not possibly exist in Section 3 of your Sunday newspaper.
In the case of motion pictures, the influence was the stage. Many early film directors got their start in theater productions, and performers often crossed over from there as well (not always successfully, since as would become apparent, stage and film acting require different skills). So it's not surprising that the look early films defaulted to was "stage performance, but filmed". Long, stationary wide shots, events occurring in straightforward real time -- it's just like you're watching a play, except projected on a screen! Audiences' brains were comfortable with that, and so were filmmakers'. The language of cinema -- the understanding of the possibilities of the medium and how to leverage them to tell a story -- was still being worked out, and there weren't many camera tricks unless you count "leave it running" as a camera trick. To some extent the limits were technological, but just as much the filmmakers had yet to discover what they had in their toolkit.
Take, for example, the humble closeup. These are a standard fixture of visual media and as viewers we pretty much take them for granted. Yet at one time they were new. Experimental. Someone had to invent the closeup. Stage performances don't have them; the actors are on the stage and the audience is in their seats and there is always a fixed distance between them. Closeups are a thing that can only really exist in a filmed, edited medium, and it took a few years for filmmakers to realize it was a thing you could do and that you could incorporate it into your storytelling. You can focus the audience's gaze on a character's face to say "notice this, it's important"; you can get right in there and see the performer's expression in intimate detail, every batted eyelash and quivering lip, a luxury simply unavailable in a live-theater format. And of course, with these new possibilities come the need for new performances. On a theater stage nobody's going to see your quivering lip; stage acting requires projection and movement and even your subtleties have to be, well, theatrical. But bring those habits to the relative intimacy of film or TV and it just looks hammy. So as the medium adapted, the people who worked in it had to adapt as well.
All of which is to say, in the early days of cinema, a lot of the language of the medium -- even the really really basic stuff like closeups and panning the camera -- was still being pioneered, and to an audience accustomed to the language of live theater, these techniques were pretty wild. Which brings us, at last, to The Great Train Robbery (1903), a landmark in cinema history for a number of innovations, such as being one of the first films to attempt an actual story. Let's watch it now! (it's only 12 minutes which was epic in those days (or just skip to 11:25 for the scene we're talking about))
Whoo boy. Okay, at 12 minutes that still feels draggy as fuck. You can tell "editing" wasn't really a thing yet. But some techniques were already in the works. Like, did you notice how at 8:10 we cut back to the tied-up telegraph operator as if to say "meanwhile, elsewhere, this thing is happening"? A technique known as cross-cutting? Which is now so fundamental we don't even think about it? Yeah, that was new. This film pioneered cross-cutting. The scene where they have the camera on top of a moving train, that too was pretty novel.
So, this being the bleeding edge of the cinema experience in 1903, you can imagine how it might've felt to be sitting in the audience in your bowler hat or whatever and, at the end, suddenly there's a bandit staring right at you, drawing his gun and SHOOTING.
1903 audiences: HOLY FUCK
I'm not saying everyone had heart attacks or ran screaming from the building. Maybe some did, I dunno. Regardless, though, this is an iconic moment in cinema history. And again, it's a thing you can't replicate on the stage. A stage actor might address the audience, he might even point his gun at the audience, but he can't make every single member feel like he's shooting THEM personally. But in film you can do that.
This shot is so iconic that film nerd Marty Scorsese homaged it at the end of Goodfellas:
in case you ever wondered what that was doing there. He was referencing the original cinematic jump scare.
New media, when taking its first experimental baby steps, often begins with a style and language inherited from older media.
And sometimes it doesn't, which can lead to interesting results as well. When director Gus Van Sant was working on a movie about the Columbine shooting, he decided to examine the issue of video game violence, and decided to play a video game himself as part of his research. And instead of coming away from it with any kind of insight about violence, he was struck by the novelty of a medium in which everything has to unfold in real time. No cuts or time compression made for the sake of conservation of detail; if you want to get from point A to point B, you have to walk the whole way there.
The result was that when he made his next movie, Gerry, based on a true story of two guys who got lost in the desert, he decided to convey the monotony of their predicament by devoting the vast majority of the run time to very, very long and drawn-out one-take shots of the two leads just walking, silently. It garnered the film some notoriety among critics in a genre (arthouse film) already infamous for long shots and slow pacing. But it did exactly what it was meant to do. And the director would never have thought of it if he hadn't been exposed to a medium that has a radically different presentation style by design.
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of...
By the same token, if you had a video game that was edited like most films are, it would feel really jarring to the player. Movies are full of shortcuts; scenes don’t last longer than they need to and transitions are quick. A character will say “Let’s get some lunch” and you instantly cut to everyone sitting in a booth eating. Your brain instinctively fills in the gaps — the characters presumably got in the car, drove to the diner, sat down and ordered their meal, but we’re not shown any of that because it’s not important. Filmmakers learned after 1903 that you can safely leave that stuff on the cutting room floor.
In video games, though, players still expect those transitions. Jump cuts and such feel really abrupt; they tend to be relegated to cutscenes, where we are explicitly in “movie mode”. Jump cuts that happen while the player is in control? That’s a thing horror games do, to connote disorientation, madness and loss of control.
Video games have tried to emulate films from pretty much the instant the technology made it possible. But the language is different. A video game edited like a film would feel disorienting, and a film edited like a video game would feel redundant and mundane (although it totally makes sense Gus Van Sant would dabble in that (and that’s not a diss on him)).
A Hearthstone champion expressed support for the Hong Kong protesters in an official interview, and Blizzard went ballistic. They revoked his prize money, banned him for a year, and fired the interviewers.
Very math.
There was a link here, it's dead now and I'm sad.
moments where I — to keep it spoiler free — discover a puzzle that is not immediately apparent as a puzzle. And now I walk around like a crazy person looking for puzzles everywhere. 
