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“The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

grumpygamer.com

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Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#171

Post by rurp »

AlbertCory wrote: post #165
belfalas wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there? Replace the word 'bar' with 'school' and this sounds like a write-up of my much of my pre-university…

Indeed, my life began the morning after I graduated high school. The only people from then whom I'm not in touch with but would like to be, have unsearchable common names and don't sign up for those class reunion websites. (I know, I know, I could find them with more effort. But really, why bother?)

I did not enjoy high school. Others have had it worse, but it was mostly something I had to endure.

A teacher in my senior year said something about how some students have the time of their life in high school, while others turn the page after graduating and never look back. Despite being an obvious thought, it kind of blew my mind at the time. The idea that I could choose to have a completely different life as soon as the school year finished filled me with all sorts of positive thoughts. Unsurprisingly I loved college and the newfound freedom I had to make more decisions about my life.

I guess the takeaway I have is that high school sucks more than it needs to for many students, and reminding kids struggling through it that things can get much better afterwards can be emotionally helpful.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#174

Post by barrysteve »

munificent wrote: post #127
chomp wrote: post #14

Gamers are the most entitled consumer group I've ever seen. It's astounding. Someone wants to create something, and there's just so much hate and negativity on something that people didn't even pay for. I've seen it on HN also. Someone creates a thing, and then people pour out of the woodwork to lump horrible criticism. No one is asking for blind praise for what they create, but surely there's a middle ground between…

This is one of the main reasons I was happy to leave the game industry after eight years of doing it. Working incredibly hard to build a product served to a group of people that are often hurtful emotionally stunted man-children is just a deeply demoralizing experience. Obviously, many gamers aren't like that. But a fucking whole lot of them are, and they are extremely vocal, and it doesn't take many of them to suck…

He refers to open world games that don't push back against the player, as feeding a colonialist desire to conquer and complete. He posits that the player never learns that he can't have it all and thus learns to be entitled.

Not sure if entitled is the right word as a lot were power fantasies that focused on rising stats and increasing combat abilities, rather than strictly speaking titles. The pursuit of more flowing rewards naturally drags the player into a position which looks like entitlement.

Morrowind did it better than the later open world games, you had to level up a lot to access dangerous areas that could kill you. The dumbing down and excessive ease in games had been commented on since the original prince of persia.

The games community acts like a bucket of crabs, pulling down anything above it and ripping it apart to feed. The greed for more digital nurturance is exactly why the industry is profitable and getting the drug just right is an art. But the greed is also what drives the crabby trash talk.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#175

Post by adamrezich »

bena wrote: post #168
adamrezich wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the first four words of your attempted paraphrase of my post, or anything like them, do not exist in my post in any form. while reading my post you hallucinated that I was "one of them" and disapproved of the game's art style. to clarify: I don't have any strong opinions about the art style of Return to Monkey Island, and while I have some thoughts about it, that entire line of discussion is uninteresting to me. I se…

So what I did is look up all the Monkey Island games. There are essentially 7. The Secret of, LeChuck's Revenge, The Curse of, Escape from, Tales of, and Special Editions of The Secret of and LeChuck's Revenge. And I went look up screenshots of every game. Consistency does not exist. The Secret of and LeChuck's Revenge are pretty similar, The Curse of looks very Dragon's Lair-esque/Don Bluthy, Escape from looks kind…

I agree with everything you've written here 100%, and this is why I actually think the art style they've chosen for this new game is interesting in a tentatively good way, despite me having basically zero grounds upon which to judge art in general. they eschewed the sort of overwrought cartoon whimsy of the later games and Special Editions, and found an art style that allows much of the same level of expression you'd get from pixel art, while not being pixel art, if that makes sense. it's certainly a bold choice, but it kind of had to be, right?

this is why I never said anything about "consistency" and why I am empathetic to the plight of having to figure out how a Monkey Island game in 2022 should look, because as you discovered it somewhat surprisingly (for someone unfamiliar with the series) doesn't "draw itself" like one would expect for a revival of a retro franchise.

all of this reasoning is exactly why I don't understand why Internet backlash to the art style reveal was so allegedly unforeseen—it was a real "damned if you make it look like any of the old games, damned if you make it look completely different"-type situation.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#176

Post by WorldMaker »

kemayo wrote: post #61
izacus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixel art like which of the originals? Monkey Island 3 and 4 had nothing remotely resembling pixel art and were still beautiful.

For Return in particular it does make sense to compare it to 1 and 2, since Return seems to be picking the series up where Gilbert left it and ignoring what others did since then. (For what it's worth, I remember Curse causing some controversy when it came out, because of that shift to the toon style from the original pixel aesthetic.)

All indications are that while the game picks up threads from MI2 and starts at the end of MI2, the bulk of the game may happen after Curse and even Tales. Ron has said multiple times that "it's all canon" and about the only things that he's acknowledged are kind of ret-conned around are some things that occurred in Escape, which even Tales partly ignored.

We don't have much details yet on how exactly it fits into the canon as the game isn't out yet, but Ron has kept pointing out that Return isn't "MI3a" like he originally grumped an idea about, but a post-Tales Monkey Island game in just about all senses.

Given Murray's involvement in the trailers to date, I think comparing the art style to Curse is more accurate, personally, and I think there's a loving conversation there. I like what I've seen of the art style so far. (But also I like Double Fine's "house style" and this clearly has DNA ties to that, too.)

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#177

Post by zack7linux »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #137
plankers wrote: post #136

I think the game looks fun :) I hope it gets a linux release, unlike every other Monkey Island game.

The Windows version should run just fine under Steam Proton.

All the special editions weren't even updated for Windows 11 WDDM 3.0, one nvidia driver update broke them even on windows. Not sure if they even run nowadays on latest windows versions. They also removed the ios/android versions from the app stores before the special edition releases. Your only option is ScummVM and that doesn't support the special editions. All of them are rated as broken on wine appdb. I would not expect this to get Linux support, its Disney and its obvious by now that Ron doesn't care about his fans so there is that.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#178

Post by BitwiseFool »

acheron wrote: post #78
the_only_law wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's even an exclusively nostalgia thing. Over the past few years I've seen a lot of complaining around art style changes. Notably the Civ V -> Civ VI art style change pissed a lot of people off. Personally I loved the game, but a lot of series veterans didn't even bother to try it.

I don’t think that’s true about Civ 6. A lot of people who only ever played Civ 5 might have been “pissed” and didn’t bother to try it, because they didn’t realize that the Civ games change every time, but any actual “series veteran” was fine with it.

I'm one of those series veterans who was really put off by Civ VI's design choices. I tried to get into it, and just couldn't. I've heard criticism that the aesthetics should not matter and that getting hung up on such a thing was immature. However, I just could not get past the dissonance of the cartoony style and how busy the UI was. Put simply, I found the game to be ugly.

Re: “The joy of sharing has been driven from me“

#179

Post by bombcar »

mikkergp wrote: post #103
bombcar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep down almost everyone is "conservative" - they want what they had yesterday again today, so any change to art style, etc, is already on a back-foot. But in the end, the good things stand out. The reason the CD-i Zelda games are not remembered fondly is not really because of the art style, that's just an easy way to rip on them.

The game developer is basically taking all the hate that people are really directing at a society that doesn't value the same things they do anymore. I thought SNES Zelda and Final Fantasy were the best, but I didn't threaten the developers when they moved to 3d.

It's also a side-effect of being involved in the community as a creator; if you were pissed at the 3D Zelda what were you going to do, fly to Japan and track down Shigeru Miyamoto? Send him a nasty letter?

But here we have someone who posted something on his own site, and not only allowed comments, but cleary was reading them, and people just attacked him.

It's sad.

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