june gloom on 21/2/2013 at 11:23
I'm not hating on homages. Amnesia and Penumbra are not homages.
faetal on 21/2/2013 at 11:44
Even derivative games (another zombie game anyone? World War 2 perhaps? An RTS with THREE playable alien races all competing for the same resource!?) or ones which draw from a dessicated corpse of source material have the potential to outdo their origins by being really well done. Sure, the ideal would be for the execution AND the plot / setting to be both excellent and original, but I'll quite happily take any number of games which excel at one of their aspects to the extent that I find myself wanting to double-click the executable.
All that said, while I did kind of like Amnesia / Penumbra - I never got to completing them. Not sure why, may fire them up again at some point.
EvaUnit02 on 21/2/2013 at 14:59
Dethtoll, did you like Prometheus per chance?
Renault on 21/2/2013 at 15:35
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Slavishly aping everyone's favourite xenophobic shut-in (as opposed to merely using one of his ideas and running with it, for example Mass Effect's Reapers and
especially Leviathan) is not conducive to a good, original, or interesting story.
I've never read Lovecraft (!), so maybe that's why the story didn't bother me. They are obviously influenced by him though (Amnesia game engine=HPL), so maybe they consider it a homage. My only reference point for Lovecraft is Dark Corners of the Earth (one of my all-time faves, btw), which had some similarities, but overall didn't seem like Amnesia was and out-and-out copy.
I'd love to hear some more games that are "Lovecraftian," besides the obvious ones with "Cthulhu" in the title, I can't really think of many. The original Quake for sure. What else? Is Resident Evil considered to be in this category? I'm talking about full games here, no just a single boss/enemy like the ME example.
faetal on 21/2/2013 at 15:48
Amnesia / Penumbra are heavily Lovecraft inspired, to the extent that they wouldn't exist if Lovecraft didn't.
That said, you can't play a Lovecraft story, so I'm ok with that.
Kuuso on 21/2/2013 at 16:17
It's a bit silly bashing lovecraftian games, because they're still vastly outnumbered in the department of aping-the-shit-out-of-stuff. Besides, Lovecraft isn't that great of a writer, it's just that his work is a niche. If you want to make a game that involves horror and something fantastical, you're kind of out of luck. Amnesia's story wasn't great, but it served it's purpose. A Machine for Pigs feels like it could be a nice step away from Lovecraft.
Sulphur on 21/2/2013 at 17:53
Quote Posted by Al_B
Think of the children
:(
gunsmoke on 27/2/2013 at 12:25
Jesus Christ, dethtoll... you seem really upset that a writer inspired people to invite his universe into a new medium, games. What's the problem?
Besides, one of your all-time favorites series of games (to the point you're preordering them and buying the spin-offs even) is Metal Gear. Kojima wears his influences on his face. To the point where it's groan-inducing at times.
june gloom on 27/2/2013 at 20:06
Not nearly the same thing at all. There's "influence" and there's "we're creatively stagnant, let's just cut an HPL story from whole cloth over and over." See my above post about how there's as many ways to do cosmic horror as Shub-Niggurath has young.
SubJeff on 27/2/2013 at 20:28
Quote Posted by dethtoll
I'm not hating on homages. Amnesia and Penumbra
are not homages.
No, but Eternal Darkness... ?
