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Author Topic: And we think the Forge is bad . . .  (Read 2924 times)

J Arcane

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And we think the Forge is bad . . .
« on: June 18, 2008, 10:38:07 PM »
One of the guys on the Evil Avatar IRC runs a user-submitted game review site.  He just linked us to this rather incoherent review of Killer7, partly because he didn't know what to make of it.  

Quote
Rook.

Killer7 is a great step forward for games. This is not to say Killer7 is a great game. Comparative analysis gives little traction. The metrics are broken. The technology producing the experience is nothing special. The controls providing entry into the experience is nothing special. The game at the core of the experience is nothing special. But the experience is special. Like being strapped down and having your eyeballs tickled with feathers.

 

Vision.

Equivalent to the sin of forgetting the past is that of being too dependent on it. The possible sources for reviews is insanely large. There is print, both magazines and newspapers. Go online and you can find a fountain of contradictory opinions of varying quality and sanity. Even television and podcasts are dumping verdicts into our laps. The one thing all these sources have in common? They have no idea what to do with a game like Killer7. The critical apparatus isn’t there. The comparisons to previous games become so convoluted and obscure as to be useless. Attempts at quantification are kneecapped by the game’s gleeful violence towards convention. In the end, it comes down to the reviewers who hated it trying not to be overly harsh and the reviewers who loved it trying not to oversell it. Both know their failure and both attempt to ignore it, like a man in a public bathroom ashamedly slinking away from a clogged toilet.

 

France.

Systems are a key. Isolations mean nothing. A lightgun game without the gun. Enemies without intelligence, artificial or not. Trivial and unbalanced character leveling. Nonsensical and simplistic puzzles. Jagged and stark graphics, without even an attempt at beauty. Incoherent and crude dialogue and storytelling. Outside of its context it means nothing. Within its context it means little. Within the context created by the systems and the player it can be assembled into nearly anything. Like a judgment on a man in Texas callously using the lives of others but afraid of pilgrims armed with freedom and vision.

 

Kyushu.

Should Killer7 be reduced to political allegory? Freedom allows advocacy of whatever you can make persuasive, but a smile doesn’t show if teeth are sharp and stars should not be handled by their edges. Control requires a delicate grasp and sometimes a balletic adaptation to momentum, just surfing chaos and falling sideways. Crowns can be constructed from any pointed object, even of roses with or without petals, but blood must go into the ground before it comes out, and fire can take the good with the bad. Post reactionary rejection of the ending, it is clear neither path is desirable, however bright, and no one seems to learn from the shadows burned on the wall. It is easy to forget how sensitive we can become in certain areas, like a hooker after a long night’s work.

 

Kikuchiyo.

How do you characterize a man? Choices taken, traits acquired, assassinations completed? Skills integrated, souls collected, personas assumed? Ways of avoiding barriers, be it going over, going under, blowing through, or spinning into a Piledriver? As the blood accumulates and you carve out your tactics and methods, the choice between finesse and brutality emerges through the tools you use. Mind, the grave judges not the means of candle trimming, whatever the use the grave sees. Embrace all killers, shield some from the consequences of amorality, as you wish. While obstacles may frown, the inevitable mechanisms of humanity will continue to arm themselves for futility and shrug aside redirection. An antitank shell doesn’t care if your hand is blocking the way, or rather, if something that was formerly a hand was blocking the way.

 

Ryu.

When Nintendo talks of their next console, the Revolution, they approach it from the perspective of the interface. They consider it important because of the way it opens up and changes interaction. While this is not the place to speculate on the nature of Nintendo’s ‘revolution’, or how successful it will be, it is worth noting that even the last few years have seen major steps in interface, despite no major technological changes. The analog stick has been present for quite some time, yet only recently have we seen it used as Tiger Woods or Fight Night does. We have had dual analogs for quite some time, yet we rarely see an analogy as intuitive as Katamari Damacy. Meanwhile, the reaction to the controls of Killer7 demonstrates how rigid thinking has become. Let me be clear: the controls to Killer7 will take getting used to. They are constructed on a fundamentally different paradigm and rooted more in early dungeon crawls than modern 3D games. However, while strange, the controls accomplish their aims quite elegantly. Parts of the game would not be feasible with typical third-person controls. In most games it is obvious the experience was built around the level design. Killer7 architects the world around the experience, and the method of movement gives them almost unlimited freedom to do so. The controls for the first-person shooting elements is acceptable. There is nothing new or remarkable, but they are responsive and accurate and the differences between the characters are effectively conveyed. The hallucinatory collision of Resident Evil and Metroid Prime.

 

Uzume.

Marcel Proust built a massive work from his memories. An entire cycle filled with minute details, quarried from his past, with elements repeated, inverted, reinterpreted, a life as Bach fugue. Proust was a freak. Very few people can bring back the quantity of minutiae and barely-consequential tidbits necessary for ego-run-amok work. Even ego-fueled reconstruction and reinterpretation would be sorely tried, even when fortified with amphetamines. Most will be lucky to remember the key events and most important lessons of their lives, like a butterfly in a jar or a horse on the run. As individuals turn to groups then to societies and to nations lessons become more and more fluid and diffuse, like tears in rain. Messages from angels somehow become more important than the events of thirty, or even ten, years ago, and the toys go marching on. Once our constructs return to haunt us and we are forced to dispose of the products of our arrogance and greed, we find ourselves unexpectedly trapped in the roles we have created, like an origami puppet toppled and abandoned.

 

Rectitude.

Couldn’t this be reduced to just a few words? Should you buy this game or not? Reduced to simplest form, all nuance and richness boiled away, if you want me to tell you the answers to those questions, you probably shouldn’t buy the game. To enlighten, a final analogy: Killer7 is like a transsexual. Imagine a man coming home from a bar with a beautiful woman. She gives him the best head of his life. He fondles her fake tits. As he pulls down her panties he finds this model of woman comes with a bonus accessory. Some guys will just toss the bitch out right away. And some will think ‘hey, two out of three holes is plenty.’ Post booze-and-bacchanal some will think ‘That was interesting. Let’s stay away from that bar from now on.’ And some will think ‘That was interesting. Where can I find some more of that?’
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Pierce Inverarity

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« Reply #1 on: June 18, 2008, 11:45:52 PM »
I'm just sorry for his parents. They paid thirty thousand dollars p.a. for his college education, and that's what they ended up with.
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Fritzs
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And we think the Forge is bad . . .
« Reply #2 on: June 19, 2008, 12:25:02 AM »
And wahat does this have in common with Forge...?
You ARE the enemy. You are not from "our ranks". You never were. You and the filth that are like you have never had any sincere interest in doing right by this hobby. You're here to aggrandize your own undeserved egos, and you don't give a fuck if you destroy gaming to do it.
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KenHR

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« Reply #3 on: June 19, 2008, 01:47:32 PM »
Quote from: Fritzs;217378
And wahat does this have in common with Forge...?


Overblown jargon?  Personal opinions and unsubstantiated judgements dressed up in pseudo-academese and presented as fact?  Deliberate obscurationism?  Not making any real cohesive sense in the end?  Being the mental equivalent of masturbation with sandpaper and habanero peppers?

Take your pick...
For fuck's sake, these are games, people.

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Engine

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« Reply #4 on: June 19, 2008, 01:53:23 PM »
I can only pray the author was mentally handicapped, or that the author's first language was not English. That's some painful, and amusing, reading. "Systems are a key. Isolations mean nothing." Uh, right.
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Seanchai
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« Reply #5 on: June 19, 2008, 02:07:40 PM »
Quote from: Engine;217585
...or that the author's first language was not English.


I'd guess this.

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Engine

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« Reply #6 on: June 19, 2008, 02:14:43 PM »
It does read rather like highly-educated Engrish.
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J Arcane

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« Reply #7 on: June 19, 2008, 02:21:19 PM »
Quote from: Engine;217595
It does read rather like highly-educated Engrish.
My advice to the site host was to create a free email account, and email it to himself to see if it got blocked by the spam filter.

Sadly, as much as I've like to believe this is the result of one of those heuristic text generators, I've seen the guy posting the EvAv forum, so unless this is an elaborate prank, he's all real . . .
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Engine

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« Reply #8 on: June 19, 2008, 02:27:33 PM »
File under: "When Humans Fail the Turing Test."
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KenHR

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« Reply #9 on: June 19, 2008, 02:28:57 PM »
Timecube guy turns his hand to reviews, perhaps?
For fuck's sake, these are games, people.

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Pierce Inverarity

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« Reply #10 on: June 19, 2008, 03:40:22 PM »
An important point. We've had Ken Whitman post here, Roger Sanger, and some legendary rpg.net trolls. But not Mr. Timecube.

He does frequent forums, you know. He posted on rpg.net once, in a Timecube thread. It was spooky, man.
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KenHR

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« Reply #11 on: June 19, 2008, 03:49:46 PM »
Wow, I missed Timecube guy actually posting on rpg.net.

I do remember the other guy who would post convoluted formulae to show how his RPG modeled reality...and he always referenced Marvel comics, too, for some reason.  Gah, what was the name of that...one of the guys from rpg.net hosts his ramblings, too.
For fuck's sake, these are games, people.

And no one gives a fuck about your ignore list.


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J Arcane

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« Reply #12 on: June 19, 2008, 04:34:59 PM »
Quote from: KenHR;217626
Wow, I missed Timecube guy actually posting on rpg.net.

I do remember the other guy who would post convoluted formulae to show how his RPG modeled reality...and he always referenced Marvel comics, too, for some reason.  Gah, what was the name of that...one of the guys from rpg.net hosts his ramblings, too.
Hybrid guy.  Oi.  IIRC, RPGnet eventually instituted a ban on discussion of Hybrid, simply because discussing it invariably seemed to summon him from the internet, and the mods weren't comfortable with enabling the mentally deranged, or the mockery of such.
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KenHR

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« Reply #13 on: June 19, 2008, 04:58:29 PM »
Hybrid guy, yes!  He used to clog up Usenet with his posts, too...
For fuck's sake, these are games, people.

And no one gives a fuck about your ignore list.


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Pierce Inverarity

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« Reply #14 on: June 19, 2008, 05:11:44 PM »
That's him! Hybrid Guy!

Sorry for the confusion, Mr. Timecube.
Ich habe mir schon sehr lange keine Gedanken mehr über Bleistifte gemacht.--Settembrini