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View Full Version : Video games are an amazing medium!



JimHolden231
01-02-2016, 10:29 PM
I just finished the Mass Effect trilogy. Before that I just played military fps. I just fell in love with the game's universe and characters. No modern military FPS ever got me to do that. I am now playing Life is Strange. Amazing storytelling! Imagine what games will be like in 10 years. 20 years. Or even 30 years from now. I believe video games will be just as respected as a medium as movies and literature.

Brett Nortje
01-03-2016, 12:23 AM
I just finished the Mass Effect trilogy. Before that I just played military fps. I just fell in love with the game's universe and characters. No modern military FPS ever got me to do that. I am now playing Life is Strange. Amazing storytelling! Imagine what games will be like in 10 years. 20 years. Or even 30 years from now. I believe video games will be just as respected as a medium as movies and literature.

I like strategy games. i like to see how people's imaginations come together to create something that works, while still being quite imaginary.

William
01-03-2016, 01:47 AM
I just finished the Mass Effect trilogy. Before that I just played military fps. I just fell in love with the game's universe and characters. No modern military FPS ever got me to do that. I am now playing Life is Strange. Amazing storytelling! Imagine what games will be like in 10 years. 20 years. Or even 30 years from now. I believe video games will be just as respected as a medium as movies and literature.

I totally agree that video games are the biz, and I looked at Mass Effect (one of my mates has it) but I'm not into RPG, or much into Sci Fi. I like more realistic strategy games like the total War series, but y'know - whatever gets you through the night! :grin:

Doublejack
01-03-2016, 02:11 AM
I just finished the Mass Effect trilogy. Before that I just played military fps. I just fell in love with the game's universe and characters. No modern military FPS ever got me to do that. I am now playing Life is Strange. Amazing storytelling! Imagine what games will be like in 10 years. 20 years. Or even 30 years from now. I believe video games will be just as respected as a medium as movies and literature.

Totally agree.

Grossly more intuitive than any recent blockbuster and the interaction (even if it is a linear based game) is a whole other level.

kilgram
01-03-2016, 06:30 AM
Today is last day of sales in Steam :)

Get some great rpg or adventure games. They have great story telling. Dragon Age Origins, The Witcher series have great story telling and now they are cheap in Steam :)

And yes, video games are a great media to tell very interesting and immersive stories.

Let's hope that next Mass Effect Andromeda (the 4th installment) be as great as the previous ones.

IMPress Polly
01-03-2016, 04:10 PM
I've been hooked on video games as a medium since I first played a demo of the original Sonic the Hedgehog at the mall in 1991 at the age of seven. I quite insistently requested a Sega Genesis for Christmas that year, got one, and my love affair with video games began. Since that time, I've seen the level of storytelling that one can access through this medium improve quite significantly. Some of the best of it comes from interactive movies, I find, so that might be a good basis of measure in general: Not long after I started playing, a game called Sewer Shark swept the public's imagination for its live action cinema scenes interspliced with game play. It's kind of funny in retrospect, considering that both as a movie and as a game, Sewer Shark could be best described as B grade material that borders on "so bad it's good" territory...but one had to start somewhere, and that was definitely a step up from the Dragon's Lair film-game that launched the interactive film genre a decade previous.

By the time 1995 had rolled around though, these live action cinematic games had evolved considerably, as Solar Eclipse demonstrated. Unfortunately, thereafter interactive movies fell out of fashion in favor of the rise of 3D play. However, by the time another decade had passed, we arrived at David Cage's Indigo Prophecy, which he followed up with titles like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, and plans on releasing another interactive drama next year called Detroit: Become Human. These titles can be described as comparable to average-grade Hollywood material narratively speaking and in terms of game play offerings, with the introduction of lots of real drama and player choice into the storytelling. It's into this same category that I would place titles like Life is Strange, incidentally. But with the VR interactive documentary Clouds Over Sidra released this year, I think we can honestly say that the upper echelons of video game storytelling are starting to rival the best that the world of film has to offer in terms of emotional connection, social relevance, etc. A couple story-heavy games I'm currently playing (and so far really liking!) include an interactive drama called Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and a super-innovative, narrative-focused first-person puzzle game called The Talos Principle.

Of course, those are all what we might call alternative games: a mixture of cult hits, indies, and casual games. That's the gaming scene I belong to these days though. I've given up on the world of pop games. I find that alternative games are where all the innovation is because, unlike pop games, alternative games are the sort that don't revolve around fan service. They're made like video games used to be when they were just getting culturally established and the companies were relatively small in general. They didn't have game testers and stuff like that back then because the companies weren't big and wealthy enough to hire that many people. Rather, people tended to simply make games that they themselves, the creators, liked and that was the test that went to market. I find that massive corporations though, which the industry clearly is a collection of at this point, lose touch with that and depend on long-term planning that's based on market testing and such and it leads to less flexibility and more uniformity, especially with the sheer amount of money being invested. Companies don't want to take risks with zillion-dollar projects. That's a basic failing of the capitalist system right there.

In short, I feel that the main problem with popular video games these days is that they're no longer created by hobbyists; that the game business has been taken over by venture capitalists, stock market shareholders, and hedge fund managers, and these are the people who determine the contents at the end of the day. Alternative games are the exception to that rule; the kind that take risks and are often created by hobbyists. That's why they have the same innovative feel that older games did and it's also probably why there's so much overlap between the retro-gaming and alternative gaming scenes.

The mainstream game industry has become very boring to me. 2015 in that scene to me felt like a whole bunch of only superficially different versions of the same game more or less. BioWare (responsible for franchises like Dragon and Mass Effect) represents what I consider the most positive version of the fan service model because they interpret fan service in a holistic manner that includes ALL fans, not just the majority, and this inclusive ethic leads them to break new ground in terms of characters and representation. Unfortunately though, BioWare is an island in a sea of mediocrity in that regard. Other major companies just don't approach fan service that way.

Anyway, I don't know if pop games are actually evolving at all writ large these days, but I do feel that the alternative gaming scene will soon be regularly churning out stories that are more compelling than those of even the best films precisely because they are equally believable (believable here being distinct from, and more important than, realistic) and actually interactive on revolutionary new levels that can truly compel empathy.

kilgram
01-03-2016, 04:14 PM
I've been hooked on video games as a medium since I first played a demo of the original Sonic the Hedgehog at the mall in 1991 at the age of seven. I quite insistently requested a Sega Genesis for Christmas that year, got one, and my love affair with video games began. Since that time, I've seen the level of storytelling that one can access through this medium improve quite significantly. Some of the best of it comes from interactive movies, I find, so that might be a good basis of measure in general: Not long after I started playing, a game called Sewer Shark swept the public's imagination for its live action cinema scenes interspliced with game play. It's kind of funny in retrospect, considering that both as a movie and as a game, Sewer Shark could be best described as B grade material that borders on "so bad it's good" territory. By the time 1995 had rolled around though, these live action cinematic games had evolved considerably, as Solar Eclipse demonstrated. Unfortunately, thereafter interactive movies fell out of fashion in favor of the rise of 3D play and polygons. However, by the time another decade had passed, we arrived at David Cage's Indigo Prophecy, which he followed up with titles like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, and plans on releasing another interactive drama next year called Detroit: Become Human. These titles can be described as comparable to average-grade Hollywood material narratively speaking and in terms of game play offerings, with the introduction of lots of real drama and player choice into the storytelling. It's into this same category that I would place titles like Life is Strange, incidentally. But with the VR interactive documentary Clouds Over Sidra released this year, I think we can honestly say that the upper echelons of video game storytelling are starting to rival the best that the world of film has to offer in terms of emotional connection, social relevance, etc. A couple story-heavy games I'm currently playing (and so far really liking!) include an interactive drama called Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and a super-innovative, narrative-focused first-person puzzle game called The Talos Principle.

Of course, those are all what we might call alternative games: a mixture of cult hits, indies, and casual games. That's the gaming scene I belong to these days though. I've given up on the world of pop games. I find that that's where all the innovation is because, unlike pop games, alternative games are the sort that don't revolve around fan service. They're made like video games used to be when they were just getting culturally established and the companies were relatively small in general. They didn't have game testers and stuff like that back then because the companies weren't big and wealthy enough to hire that many people. Rather, people tended to simply make games that they themselves, the creators, liked and that was the test that went to market. I find that massive corporations though, which the industry clearly is a collection of at this point, lose touch with that and depend on long-term planning that's based on market testing and such and it leads to less flexibility and more uniformity, especially with the sheer amount of money being invested (companies don't want to take risks with zillion-dollar projects).

In short, I feel that the main problem with popular video games these days is that they're no longer created by hobbyists; that the game business has been taken over by venture capitalists, stock market shareholders, and hedge fund managers, and these are the people who determine the contents at the end of the day. Alternative games are the exception to that rule; the kind that take risks and are often created by hobbyists. That's why they have the same innovative feel that older games did and also probably so much overlap between the retro-gaming scene and the alternative gaming scene.

The mainstream game industry has very boring to me. 2015 in that scene to me felt like a whole bunch of only superficially different versions of the same game more or less. BioWare (responsible for franchises like Dragon and Mass Effect) represents what I consider the most positive version of the fan service model because they interpret fan service in a holistic manner that includes ALL fans, not just the majority, and this inclusive ethic leads them to break new ground in terms of characters and representation. Unfortunately though, BioWare is an island in a sea of mediocrity in that regard. Other major companies just don't approach fan service that way.

Anyway, I don't know if pop games are actually evolving at all writ large these days, but I do feel that the alternative gaming scene will soon be regularly churning out stories that are more compelling than those of even the best films precisely because they are equally realistic and actually interactive on revolutionary new levels that can truly compel empathy.
CdProject did it too.

Отправлено с моего Aquaris E5 через Tapatalk

The Xl
01-03-2016, 04:33 PM
Outside of sports titles, I find myself playing older games nowadays, the most advanced system being ps2

IMPress Polly
01-03-2016, 04:39 PM
PlayStation 2 had lots of great offerings! Beyond Good & Evil, Okami, Psychonauts, Persona 4, Final Fantasy X, Indigo Prophecy, Rule of Rose, and Ico all immediately come to mind. Of course lots of these also fall into the category of cult hits, but...such is it.

The Xl
01-03-2016, 04:43 PM
PlayStation 2 had lots of great offerings! Beyond Good & Evil, Okami, Psychonauts, Persona 4, Final Fantasy X, Rule of Rose, and Ico all immediately come to mind. Of course lots of these also fall into the category of cult hits, but...such is it.

Got the Xenosaga series for Christmas. Loved Xenogears to death, never got around to the Xenosaga series though. It got wildly mixed reviews, hopefully I'm one of the ones who enjoys it.

IMPress Polly
01-04-2016, 05:49 AM
It'll depend a lot on exactly what you liked best about the original Xenogears because the Xenosaga trilogy isn't really as philosophical as Xenogears (to which end Game Spot once ranked Xenosaga Episode I as "the most pretentious game of the year"), but if you're willing to overlook that, you'll probably enjoy the general storyline and characters even though there's only a limited amount of actual character development. (The appeal of the characters comes from the fact that they're simply more believable than most others in PS2 era games.) As for the technical details, all three Xenosaga games are sound in terms of the basics, though there is some unevenness. Episode II is the weakest link in the chain. In particular, with regard to Episode II, I frequently use the mute button to cover up the terrible, B grade soundtrack that never logically matches the environment and I have a mixed view of Episode II's battle mechanics as well.