Yakoob on 16/6/2011 at 15:56
Yay meaty reply time :D
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REALITY HAS SHITTY CONTROLS
I don't know what you are talking about, my reality has awesome controls and full force feedback . I even came to regard my near-sightendess as built-in anti-aliasing :cool:
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No, wait. I told you it was a terrible game. That's the point!
And here, I guess lies the crux of our disagreement as you outlined in your next sentence. For me, that *point* is stupid. What you are basically saying is: "I made a shitty game
on purpose therefore it's OK for it to be shitty." That doesn't seem like a good justification at all. Heck, it's not a justification at all when you think about it. Yes you really show high aptitude and excellence in the art of making shitty games, but that's not really an accomplishment, is it?
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Yes, but the fundamental difference is that your example is unwatchable and meaningless, whereas the Path isn't
unplayable per se, it's just about painfully playable, and it has something it wants to say.
A bunch of flashes are not
unwatchable, just about painfully watchable. See what I am getting at?
There is a difference between "painfully playable" in the sense that "I have an uneasy feeling that makes me question my life/morality/memories/whatever" and painfully playable in "I want to throw my controller at the face of the game developers because the shit controls are hampering me from actually
experiencing the game" sense. I know the RPS review totally hailed The Path as being in the former category but, personally, it didn't for me. It did little to make feel tediousness of reality; it felt more like tediousness of crappy game design. But I think we are just getting into utterly subjective field here there probably isn't much point in arguing any further :/
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Also it would be missing the point. Remember the first Alone in the Dark? It had various off-kilter camera perspectives and terrible controls. A lot of the horror came from struggling with Carnby to make him do something you wanted him to -- the actual enemies you faced off had a laughable polygon count and looked like little more than shaded blobs. The game used other techniques to get the horror out of the situation.
I never played AitD, but honestly it sounds like a case of rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. Yes the controls were crappier then, but so were the standards back then; people expected less from games so they were more forgiving. If you tried to create a new game with the same mechanic today (not affected by nostalgia) I would bet you would hate it. There is a difference between innovation and technical limitation.
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The Path uses similar tricks because if the game were easy to control and could be finished in five minutes like EDtSD,
And that's better than copypasting the same level 5 times in Halo to artifically extend gameplay how?
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I'd wager it'd be even more boring and would actually become sort of pointless, because better controls and a better camera would cut right through the tedium and the sense of being lost and home straight on in to the climax.
Doesn't that actually
prove how shitty the game is? I mean, if you need to
break the whole control scheme in order for the game to gain meaning (and last more than "five minutes"), you are effectively distracting the player from shitty game using an even shittier control scheme.
I know you say the shitty control scheme is the whole point of the game and I see where you are coming from... but I just don't think that it, in and of itself, makes for a valuable experience that warrants the tedious slog.
Another thing is, the tedious slog could at least be warranted if there was something to be taken out of it. I guess you might have, but I didn't take anything from the experience. You know why? Because I quit after an hour of utter frustration. You said yourself the game does things too well; it would be a different story if I got frustrated just as I finished the game, but I quit well before even experiencing 1/7th of it. In this case, the craptastic controls did not enhance my gaming experience; they hampered me from fully experiencing it.
I guess you COULD then say that what I took out of this experience was "frustration" and "tediousness" and that the game, thus, worked, because it invoked those feelings in me. But then again, I can punch a wall to invoke the feeling of "pain" and "Im a dumbass" but that doesn't mean its a good idea, does it?
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Conveniently, there's a bit of an article linked from RPS on Sunday which relates to this:
Ugh, this is where our subjective opinions disagree. You find the meatloaf scenes deep and meaningful. But I find it lazy, and taking the easy way out. "How do we make the viewer feel tediousness of her life? Make the movie tedious! A-HA!" How much more fulfillng would it be if you were, instead, actively engaged in the movie, not bored to tears; and yet, at the end, when you leave the screening room, you leave it with a heavy sense of pointlessness. Yes it's hard, but there are movies that accomplish just that (Shindler's List is a good example of a movie that had me glued to the screen but left with an uneasy feeling, or even David Lynch if you wanna go more artsy and abstract route). It's kind of like "show don't tell" - making the viewer stare at the meatloaf for 40 minutes feels like
telling them "this is tedius, feel tedius!" rather than properly showing it in more symbolical and evocative manner. Its so... in-your-face obvious and easy.
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That's pretty much a parallel to the sequence of events for each girl in The Path. If you don't have the initial grounding in the situation, the power and meaning of the final sequence is lost.
Again, I never got to the final sequence because the game is just too broken for me to bother trying. As you said yourself, it does things too well. There is a difference between mucking controls to make them feel uncomfortable, and downright fucking them up to the level of sheer unplayability.
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I'm also a little dismayed that you chose The Path as your example game. I realize it's good rhetorically to choose the most extreme example (in which case, why not just go with The Graveyard?)
Cause it's the most recent example I can think of. I havent played Graveyard so I cannot comment on it. And I also mentioned Eternal Darkness, Same Dream Different Day and MSG as examples where the "artsiness" and breaking conventions is done right, as a counter example to The Path. So I am not dismissing experimentation in games at all :)
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Also, you act as if The Path was universally well received by everyone interested in games from a non-technical standpoint. It wasn't.
Might be my misconception here but pretty much everything I heard about it boiled down to "The Path is horribly broken and that's what makes it great!" But only half of this sentence is true...
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To put it another way: we can learn and understand many things about Metal Gear Solid 2 from a technical standpoint, but ignoring the narrative aspects would be folly if one were seeking a complete understanding. It's not an either/or situation.
Oh definitely, that's why I never commented on the narrative of the path. It was a bit too artsy-fartsy half-finished for my taste, but I can see why others would appreciate it. My problem was that the technical aspect were so broken they prevented me from experiencing the narrative, rather than enhancing it. At the and of the day, it's a game; the two have to compliment each other.
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I haven't played The Path and cannot comment on how pretentious it is or is not - but any medium that isn't given free rein to try out things, no matter how silly, outlandish or indeed pretentious they may end up, is a medium that isn't exploring its full potential.
Oh by all means I am not saying we shouldnt have experimental games :) We should. Some succeed, some fail in what they set out to do. My sole argument is that The Path was one of the failing ones, and yet many elevate it to some highly enlightening experience which, in my opinion, it was not. And much like in inde film scene, the "ITS ART" has been slowly becoming an excuse for just plain bad or generic games.
