whatchu playing now

it's a modern dream career for sure

it's kind of a cultural downward churn where streaming and gaming all the time means all their references and jokes are to streams and games

and i get to feel very old

a decade ago i wanted to be a video games journalist (tm) if i was still young and full of pep, i'd definitely want to be a ca$h money streamer. seems to easy, have fans, meet cute girls etc

popular twitch streams are fascinating to me and also terrifying. they make me feel old too, forks, because my initial and sustained reaction is that i want it to stop and i think it's bad for humanity.

i just mostly feel jealousy

that is literally the last thing I feel!

things that you might get:
fame/notoriety: thought I wanted it at some point in my life. seems bad now.
ability to play video games all day: my hands hurt just thinking of this
get paid to play video games and just talk: great, now video games are my job and not a fun thing I do

guys we have a thread for twitch bitching

Get paid to play video games = the bit I'm jealous of

k thanks tom!

it would be hell to have to play video games all day every day. some of these people do marathons where they stay up 24 hours playing games. at that point how do you even enjoy it anymore?

as much as it sucks to have people donate so that someone can say your handle and that you've been a subscriber for 6 months and attribute the guilt for the treadmill running away of their lives on you in some twisted consumer echo chamber of throwing up and regurgitating experiences. actually makes sitting down and playing a game yourself in your own free time seam genuine and personally meaningful.

nobody play Phantasmagoria. I'm struck by how many things in this game are wrong, not just by today's standards but by universal ones. Like, obviously the graphics are shit and the controls aren't very impressive and the gameplay is straightforward, but even beyond that, the actors' reactions to things are very incorrect (nonchalance toward supernatural phenomena, overreaction to mundane things), there are too may inconsequential interactive objects in the game that do nothing to further the plot or flesh out the game world (as if they decided there wasn't enough to do and just added things for no reason), the first real "scary" scene doesn't occur until halfway through the game after several hours of pretty mundane gameplay, there are no real puzzles (apart from trying to randomly guess which object to use in a given situation without any real indication), everyone's outfit is egregiously bad... it feels like a game full of so much missed potential, where drastic improvements could have been made within the same budget.

It truly is something you should just watch some clips of on YouTube because playing through the entire thing is an entirely unnecessary slog

Oh yeah, I played that at the time because I would play all adventure games I could get my hands on, and boy was it tedious.. Although I was generally hyped for all sorts of cool new graphics back then, I remember the ugly 3d rendered backdrops + FMV characters looked absolutely hideous.

Did the game have some thing at one point where someone is force-fed entrails through a funnel? Pretty sure that was the point I was too disgusted to be willing to go on with the game.
I did like the faux-Carmina Burana theme a bit.

The whole FMV fad was a pretty lame time in gaming overall. Still don't know why anyone have fond memories of the goddamn 7th Guest, beyond the camp pleasures of spookily exclaiming "feeling ... loooonely?"

FMV is ripe for ironic kitsch resurgence. it's the perfect storm of 90s nostalgia and green screen cheese. the games themselves sucked (i owned 7th Guest and played it maybe 4 times total) but the camp is ripe for the picking.

oh there is already a FMV resurgence iirc, and yeah this is the game w/ the entrails through the funnel. It's weird bcz the game is so toothless for the first ENTIRE HALF and then it goes into full overdrive w/ super depraved gore??? spread that shit out ffs

haha, I played through Phantasmagoria in its entirety last year and basically loved every second of it for all of the same reasons Stevie hates it. I would never recommend it to anyone else though because it is definitely objectively terrible, but FMV games scratch a weird nostalgic MST3K itch for me (I'm really excited to play Tender Loving Care with John Hurt which I just picked up in the steam sale). Harvester is the FMV game I'd actually recommend to the masochistic and curious because it is pretty much insane right off the bat.

re: FMV... gabe night 2!!!!

ya I enjoyed it too for the same reason but it's just a very bad game by any standards. I didn't love EVERY second but I really enjoyed a lot of them.

the the room of videogames

did anyone play 'her story' yet? that seemed like a possible reimagining of the category 'fmv game', i didn't get around to playing it because er yeah

otoh i just bought a gaming laptop so xcom 2 is a thing in my life now

Yeah it's okay but not much of a game.

I thought it was great and very much a game, just not a videogamey game.

Not the kind of game that has gameplay

i never finished it because i'd sussed out the central plot "twist" after 3 minutes and lost all interest

That's a pretty circular definition of gameplay.

The gameplay consists of googling keywords and watching the videos that come up

What would you consider a solid lower limit on APM?

It's quality not quantity.

The gameplay consists of googling keywords and watching the videos that come up

Right yep and chess isn't much of a game because the gameplay consists of pushing bits of plastic around on a table.

Gameplay just isn't a useful term here. The game in Her Story is "try to think of search terms that will uncover bits of the story you've not uncovered already". I enjoyed playing it.

And yeah if you've read more than two books in your life you'll guess how the story ends, but that didn't spoil anything for me, it was the process that was enjoyable rather than the plot.

"games" are not easily definable but a simple definition that i think works is "an artificial goal with obstacles to surmount." this includes chess (the goal is winning, the obstacle is checkmating your opponent's king without being checkmated yourself), athletic competition, card games, games of luck (which contain obstacles even tho skill is often not required), and most things we call "video games," including things like interactive fiction that have meaningful choices and/or puzzles to solve. however games that are "walking simulators" are more complicated. is it really a game if there's no gameplay? it resembles a video game in that there are mediated images that you control/traverse to some extent but if there's no goal and there are no obstacles is there really a game? admittedly Her Story has a v minor ludic element in that u do guess keywords to try and find clips you haven't seen yet. but there's no win state, and the obstacle is not particularly interesting or challenging. there are no meaningful choices. i assume everyone here would agree that if it were just the video in one long clip and you didn't interact with it at all - that's surely not a "game." so the game bit is that you google the keywords to see more of the video. it's maybe arguably a game but i don't think anyone should be horrified that there's an opinion out there that it's not much of one.

there's no win state

Well there's no compulsory win state but there's an optional "unlock every single clip" target which I ended up going for. So yeah that might have changed the experience for me to an extent, to be fair.

The walking simulator argument is a different one, the answer there is really just "yeah it's not a game, it's something else, what's the problem with that?"

no problem w/ it at all! that would be like if someone said "hey i really enjoyed playing war and peace" and i was like "hey great novel not really a game." it's lack of gameness doesn't mean it's not a great novel. it just means that if you're looking to /play/ something you might not get fulfillment from reading it.

i think the term 'visual novel', if it didn't come with weird baggage, would be a pretty good way to describe a lot of these things e.g. night in the woods, kentucky route zero, etc - they all have 'gameplay' insofar as you're navigating the game's physical space and making dialog choices that can affect how you experience the story - night in the woods even has platforming segments that put it further into the grey area. but there's not really any way to get 'stuck', no challenges to fail.

i just hate the term 'walking simulator' is what i guess i'm trying to say here - it's a mocking term that doesn't really capture what these games are about

That's fair and I like all sorts of IF games that have barely any gameplay (Photopia, Telltale games). If it didn't so heavily imply text games IF would be serviceable for almost all these.

yeah i like IF even better than visual novel as a term actually

There are more and more VR things which aren't gamey in any way, and those just keep getting referred to as "experiences". I'm pretty much fine with that, it doesn't even imply a narrative, just an environment.

that's part of my problem with 'walking simulator' is it implies environment over narrative when the best ones are more about storytelling

i hope VR will cause a resurgence of in-game characters addressing the player directly a la Sewer Shark.

i love the term "walking simulator" cos it often points me towards things i'd be interested in

we could distinguish between two kinds of ludic objects: games and toys, where games are generally as Mordy describes them upthread and toys lack innate goal-orientation or even challenge. some video games are really toys, and that's fine, and one way of identifying the difference is how we talk about "gameplay".

to be less reductive, it's possible to interact with a lot of games as toys and vice versa - it's not two Platonic forms, it's two kinds of interaction

Perhaps a definition of 'game' is impossible, there's no necessary and sufficient criteria. Perhaps there's just some sort of 'family resemblance' *cough*

HL2

and it's still awesome today

I made an eBay impulse buy of an Oculus Rift DK2, so have finally actually played some Elite: Dangerous, having bought it in the Steam Winter Sale. Not sure what I think of the game yet, but VR is pretty amazing.

I made an eBay impulse buy of an Oculus Rift DK2, so have finally actually played some Elite: Dangerous, having bought it in the Steam Winter Sale. Not sure what I think of the game yet, but VR is pretty amazing.

Oops, Zing Touch double-post

what's elite like in VR? i haven't played it since the first mid-80s version. still waiting for the first truly unmissable VR game, is this it? currently have gear VR but willing to upgrade when price+content level out.

I'm still at the point where I'm just kind of amazed when a ship flies out of 'view' and I can just look over my shoulder and track its movements, etc. So the game is blowing my mind a little, but that's mostly because VR.

I totally couldn't justify full price VR (though the oculus summer sale is intriguing), but I paid £100 for the Dev Kit V2 (which is slightly lower resolution than the consumer version), which felt like an ok entry price.

I used to love Elite back on my Amiga, so as long as I can get away with living a trader lifestyle and fighting the occasional pirate - as it seems possible so far - I think it'll be great. Feels like proper escapism in VR