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Story "games"

Started by Blue Jam, October 27, 2017, 12:27:01 PM

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Mister Six


Shay Chaise

Whatever I say, anyone can say 'aaah, but that's only a twist on such and such' and I'd be thinking 'you thick fucking cunt, don't just move the semantic goal posts and say it's not an innovation it's a twist' and I'd end saying something pretty hurtful.

brat-sampson

I mean, if things like Portal, Dark Souls, Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons, Mario Odyssey and The Witness don't count, then nothing will, but I'm ready to be told why I'm wrong.

(I'm not wrong.)

Is Oxenfree good then? It's £3.99 on yer PSN atm.

Shay Chaise

I played about half an hour on PS4, then same again on Switch and found it a total drag. The characters were life is strange tier. Dialogue better but not intriguing at all. I expect you ought to spend more time and develop links with them and you'd care more but it started really boringly. Funnily enough, now I want to jump in bed with the Switch and play it. I hope that's useful in some way.

Ferris

Quote from: brat-sampson on November 18, 2017, 04:45:54 PM
I mean, if things like Portal, Dark Souls, Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons, Mario Odyssey and The Witness don't count, then nothing will, but I'm ready to be told why I'm wrong.

(I'm not wrong.)

Is Oxenfree good then? It's £3.99 on yer PSN atm.

It's definitely worth 4 quid. I'd like to redouble my recommendation of Contradiction which can also be had for buttons.

Anyone ever played Her Story? I'll be honest, I was confused and angered by the interface and eventually smashed my playstation to bits and didn't finish it.

brat-sampson

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on November 18, 2017, 04:50:21 PM
Anyone ever played Her Story? I'll be honest, I was confused and angered by the interface and eventually smashed my playstation to bits and didn't finish it.

Her Story was... interesting. It's a very different style of game. Basically all you do is watch video clips and search for more video clips, but it's all down to you to piece everything together. As such, it doesn't really 'end' at a certain point, the story obviously plays out in a different order depending on which clips you home in on first. You might accidently stumble onto some key information relatively early, or you might feel stuck for ages because you forgot to check for a name that was mentioned once a while ago. I don't think I ever found every single clip but by the time I stopped playing I felt I had a solid idea of what had played out. So overall, it might have been a little over-rated at the time, but for a cheap curio I liked my couple of hours with it.

Z

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on November 18, 2017, 04:50:21 PM
Anyone ever played Her Story? I'll be honest, I was confused and angered by the interface and eventually smashed my playstation to bits and didn't finish it.
Were you playing it with a controller?

Zetetic

I'll confess that with Her Story that I played it until I'd (felt that I'd) worked out what the challenge was and then decided to sod that for a game of soldiers (which is entirely about me than the neatness of the idea).

Zetetic

I find it odd how people get so worked up about the style of the dialogue in Life is Strange. Perhaps I just found it the right kind of odd so that it seemed clearly fictional without it being cloying or distracting (combined with an expectation of a fairly constant level of irony from the characters).

I've put off looking into the prequel precisely because I think it could undermine the characterisation, but I can't begrudge people who thought that the original was shallow in this respect.

Z

Quote from: Zetetic on November 18, 2017, 05:46:47 PM
I'll confess that with Her Story that I played it until I'd (felt that I'd) worked out what the challenge was and then decided to sod that for a game of soldiers (which is entirely about me than the neatness of the idea).
I felt like that was the goal myself. Something you poke around in until you get bored, the ending not really being very important. It probably wasn't worth whatever its initial price was but I'd struggle to recommend against it anything under a fiver, you're almost certainly gonna get an hour or so out of it with minimal frustration.



RE: Life is Strange, the dialogue didn't bother me much at all tbh. It was its attempts at some high concept plot shit and mindless fetch quests where it fell apart. It's very likely the shit dialogue was much more down to the team not being native English speakers than any kind of remotely conscious choice for it to be all odd

Ferris

Quote from: Z on November 18, 2017, 05:44:32 PM
Were you playing it with a controller?

On my iPad, now that I think about it. I liked the idea and worked out the majority of what was going on. I just didn't find it all that compelling.

Zetetic

Quote from: Z on November 18, 2017, 06:01:09 PM
... down to the team not being native English speakers...
And not native teen English speakers at that.

But like I say, I didn't find at all distancing or off-putting myself.

Desirable Industrial Unit

At a stretch you could say Portal introduced something new because it had become technically possible to build a different kind of game around a very old concept.  I've not played Mario Odyssey but there's nothing original in gameplay terms about the others you mention:  Dark Souls in particular was intended to be a 'retro' game and very much is, and there was no end of stuff on the Spectrum like The Witness.

I'm not saying that existing ideas can't be arranged in exciting new ways, but that doesn't mean something new has been forged.  Ironically the last advance in gameplay was the 'walking simulator', and even that was already done in the 80s with Mercenary, if you strayed slightly off the correct track.


Quote from: brat-sampson on November 18, 2017, 04:45:54 PM
I mean, if things like Portal, Dark Souls, Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons, Mario Odyssey and The Witness don't count, then nothing will, but I'm ready to be told why I'm wrong.

bgmnts

Most of the best games of all time are story driven.

Desirable Industrial Unit

Quote from: Shay Chaise on November 17, 2017, 05:42:15 AM
I can name hundreds. I can only assume that you play games on PC.

Actually, that's an odd thing to say, isn't it?  The 360 was my last console to date, but are you suggesting that games released on PC are somehow more restricted in their creative scope than those on consoles?  I know the Xbone SDK became public but let's not go mental, anyone who develops for consoles remains in a cage.

Shay Chaise

#75
You dismissed Dark Souls in a word. As I said above, it's easy to move the goalposts however you like with semantic reduction. There's no conversation to be had, from my point of view, if you've never played on the Wii or DS, for starters.

falafel

As any fule kno, all computer game mechanics are just variations on ground billiards.  There has been no real innovation since Lady de Montfort created the Reverse Porcupine Switch in the 1732 Spring Revival. Even then, two of the adjudicators maintained that all she had really done was modify a Sopwith Marmoset Swing with a 7 degree interior twist, but Viscounts Caracas and Robespierre-Delaunay were notorious dandies and had reputedly failed to observe the actual moment of conception, having minutes earlier adjourned to the topiary accompanied by a pageboy carrying a small pot of softened butter and a look of consternation.

Desirable Industrial Unit

Quote from: Shay Chaise on November 19, 2017, 05:57:30 AM
You dismissed Dark Souls in a word. As I said above, it's easy to move the goalposts however you like with semantic reduction. There's no conversation to be had, from my point of view, if you've never played on the Wii or DS, for starters.

No, I called Dark Souls 'retro', which is what it is.  The mechanics of the thing are deliberately primitive, and it feels like something that that should have been on the PS1, in a slightly less pretty version.  Its one major innovation was a throwback:  it had the structure and difficulty of a coin-op arcade game, which is something that 'home' games have moved away from over the years.  Snapping back to that at this point made it peculiar.  I think it's dull as fuck personally, but get why it appeals.

I've played games on the DS and had a brief crack at that sports bollocks on the Wii.  Are you trying to make the argument that the method of controlling the game - not that this applies to the DS - makes its concepts completely new?

bgmnts

Dark Souls has some of the most interesting and unique gameplay mechanics and design I can think of in the past two generations of gaming.

Which sucks because the world it is set in I find dull as shit.

Thursday

Quote from: Desirable Industrial Unit on November 20, 2017, 01:12:02 AM
No, I called Dark Souls 'retro', which is what it is.  The mechanics of the thing are deliberately primitive, and it feels like something that that should have been on the PS1, in a slightly less pretty version.  Its one major innovation was a throwback:  it had the structure and difficulty of a coin-op arcade game,

Nah

Not denying there's some retro elements in it's design, but coin-op arcade game? No way.

Bhazor

If you think videogames are stale you should see books. They've not changed in a thousand years. Just line after line of words and they go on for hundreds of pages, what the fuck is that? Oh sure theres digital versions now but that's just a retro throwback.


Desirable Industrial Unit

Quote from: Thursday on November 20, 2017, 06:34:03 AM
Nah

Not denying there's some retro elements in it's design, but coin-op arcade game? No way.

What happens the first time you encounter a boss in a traditional arcade game - say R-Type or Splatterhouse?  You fail hard, and insert more coins to continue.  In some games you'll carry straight on, but in others you'll have to start that encounter again.  Dark Souls has that format, but it's flasks rather than coins, and you've got a limited number of continues.

Shay Chaise

As I said, semantic reduction means the discussion is dead from the start. You can repeat the trick to equate any game with Pac Man, if your intention is robust enough.

Thursday

Well yes exactly, but also in this instance "flasks" rather than "coins and limited number of continues" doesn't work at all anyway.

Bhazor

Quote from: Desirable Industrial Unit on November 21, 2017, 02:27:49 AM
What happens the first time you encounter a boss in a traditional arcade game - say R-Type or Splatterhouse?  You fail hard, and insert more coins to continue.  In some games you'll carry straight on, but in others you'll have to start that encounter again.  Dark Souls has that format, but it's flasks rather than coins, and you've got a limited number of continues.

That is the stupidest counter I've ever heard in these interminable arguments. So well done with that.

Thursday

I mean a better argument would have simply been "It has bosses in it"

Ferris

Bumping this because I'm midway through Late Shift.

It isnae very good, but is strangely compelling. I get the feeling that I'm being channeled to take certain actions and story beats will happen regardless. I'll be interested to replay this and see how off the rails I can go.

Happily, none of the characters are very likeable so I don't really care if I make a "wrong" decision. It takes a lot of the tension out of the game because if bad stuff happens to them, I'm not that arsed.

Ferris

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on April 11, 2019, 02:00:09 AM
Bumping this because I'm midway through Late Shift.

It isnae very good, but is strangely compelling. I get the feeling that I'm being channeled to take certain actions and story beats will happen regardless. I'll be interested to replay this and see how off the rails I can go.

Happily, none of the characters are very likeable so I don't really care if I make a "wrong" decision. It takes a lot of the tension out of the game because if bad stuff happens to them, I'm not that arsed.

Well I finished, then went straight back in to see if I could "break" the game by doing everything differently, and actually I was impressed at how divergent the story was second time round. Completely different ending, and some of the story beats that I thought were mandatory disappeared entirely, or had a different cast of characters with different options. New story beats turned up to fill in the gaps, and while it wasn't seamless it was still pretty well put together.

I liked the second playthrough (and ending) better than the first. It's still a bit silly, but I enjoyed it anyway. I don't think I'll play through a third time but all in all, better than I expected (without being amazing or anything).

garbed_attic

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on April 11, 2019, 03:56:14 AM
Well I finished, then went straight back in to see if I could "break" the game by doing everything differently, and actually I was impressed at how divergent the story was second time round. Completely different ending, and some of the story beats that I thought were mandatory disappeared entirely, or had a different cast of characters with different options. New story beats turned up to fill in the gaps, and while it wasn't seamless it was still pretty well put together.

I liked the second playthrough (and ending) better than the first. It's still a bit silly, but I enjoyed it anyway. I don't think I'll play through a third time but all in all, better than I expected (without being amazing or anything).

Have you played Shibuya Scramble? Because that's an incredible example of this kind of thing. There's a thread about it on here