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Oh it is absolutely not a criticism. Especially when the game is massively influenced by The Return which is probably my favourite show in years and is 18 hours of David Lynch smelling his own balls
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Oct 30, 2023 14:15
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A LOT of True Detective season 1 in there too
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Oct 30, 2023 14:17
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I think even a big Remedy fan probably has to admit that the game where live action Sam Lake mugs the Max Payne face to the camera is probably a little masturbatory Yeah it is, and that's not entirely a bad thing, but a story about writing is like a horror movie about struggling with depression, if it isn't subtle then it's so trite that it starts to pull you out of the story. I think that the idea is readily there if you want to grab at it, but it's also good enough in other ways that it's fine to let it just be inspiration rather than central theme.
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Oct 30, 2023 14:19
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CuddleCryptid posted:Yeah it is, and that's not entirely a bad thing, but a story about writing is like a horror movie about struggling with depression, if it isn't subtle then it's so trite that it starts to pull you out of the story. I think that the idea is readily there if you want to grab at it, but it's also good enough in other ways that it's fine to let it just be inspiration rather than central theme. Yeah that's entirely fair!
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Oct 30, 2023 14:27
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Well I'd be enjoying Dead Space Remake more if it wasn't straight-up broken. There's a loading bug that can cause enemies to disappear and items to fall through the floor. Reloading a save usually fixes it, unless you're in Chapter 10 where it triggers regularly, and reloading saves in certain places gets you a black screen. Oh man, I'm on Chapter 7 right now. Finger crossed it doesn't break, because I'm having a blast
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Oct 30, 2023 14:42
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CharlestonJew posted:yeah. it's hosed up that that guy wants to discuss games in the games forum The kind of people who take video games that seriously are also the kind of people who threaten developers or rage out on stream or something. It's a spooky game where a live action man makes funny faces at you, that's about as deep as it gets (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 30, 2023 15:16
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I think it's a fair post and dumping on a guy for writing an effortpost on something he cares about kinda sucks
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Oct 30, 2023 15:20
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Panderfringe posted:The kind of people who take video games that seriously are also the kind of people who threaten developers or rage out on stream or something. were you born this much of a loser or did you have to practice at it
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Oct 30, 2023 15:20
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No Dignity posted:I think it's a fair post and dumping on a guy for writing an effortpost on something he cares about kinda sucks
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Oct 30, 2023 15:21
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Panderfringe posted:The kind of people who take video games that seriously are also the kind of people who threaten developers or rage out on stream or something. It's a piece of writing that someone clearly put thought and effort into, it has obvious themes and is clearly trying to communicate something. Just because it's a videogame doesn't mean that it's somehow exempt from common elements of storytelling. This is a really boring rear end way to engage with videogames.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:21
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Panderfringe posted:The kind of people who take video games that seriously are also the kind of people who threaten developers or rage out on stream or something. What the gently caress dude
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Oct 30, 2023 15:35
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Panderfringe posted:The kind of people who take video games that seriously are also the kind of people who threaten developers or rage out on stream or something. Does your brain just leak out of your ears if you watch something more profound than a Marvel flick lol.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:41
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drat this thread got it all lately
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Oct 30, 2023 15:43
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CuddleCryptid posted:This may be true but I honestly prefer it as not. There's a *lot* of media that is self-referential in that way and it comes off as very masturbatory, and I think that if AW is intended that way then it doesn't escape that trap. I think it works more as a meta thing for a character in a story rather than a personal story about fulfillment as a writer. I agree with what you're saying pretty much 100%, but I contend that it's both, and the games are heavily about the messiness of the process, both the highs and low. There's a manuscript page in Alan Wake that kind of illustrates my point - quote:Page 12: Wake and Night Springs A lot of artists who manage to make a living off of it, often need to have this kind of reckoning with themselves. You may be working for money, but ultimately you are putting yourself into whatever you make, and as an artist, even the things you initially look back on derisively could have been a very valuable learning experience. It's not also until you have some sense of hindsight that you can realize that even if something was an entirely workmanlike process, it's ultimately impossible to not infuse some part of yourself into what you're making, as cynical as the product itself may be. You can make "real" art without even necessarily feeling like you're doing it. It's that unintentionality in creation that makes the Dark Place so dangerous to navigate. It picks up on that. It also ties Wake into being a bit of a hacky writer and him being heavily conflicted about that. In American Nightmare and the Alan Wake DLCs, he's largely concerned about internal consistency and eventually begins paring his writing down massively so that their "implications" are less of a minefield that the Dark Presence can abuse - which he outright states in the text. That kind of paring down and self-editing is IRL a pretty good strategy for finding your own voice, even if your final products don't end up being that pared down. Lake did eventually take screenwriting classes after Max Payne, and that's not an uncommon way of self-editing to improve yourself in the long run. Sam Lake also stated in interviews that the Wake series was meant to be a larger commentary on the typical Hero's Journey narrative, hence why Wake's books that alter reality are pretty blatantly titled, Departure, Initiation, and Return, those are the literal three acts of the monomyth, not even subtle with it; it's within that framework where Wake has to not just grow as a writer and a person (with his drinking, control, and anger issues), but as someone who more intimately understands his craft and is less at odds with it, because he can't be at odds with it to survive in the Dark Place, and you can't be a control freak there either. I wasn't even thinking about it before, but that also ties neatly into Control, which is another game where the central theme is just blatantly stated lol, but I love Remedy for that. I think what makes this great is that it still feeds into the meta narrative about creator and a creator's work, but it's still Wake's story and he himself is a creator with those problems. The game itself points out that anything is as real as anything else. It's very Lynchian in that sense where the answer to "Is it a dream?" is basically "Yeah maybe, but the dream is just as real as the reality." Lil Swamp Booger Baby fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 15:45
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As an addendum, the games are overall focused on the idea of how memetic art can be, and how much a creator can be influenced by his art just as much as his audience. That's why Mr. Scratch exists, because Wake's art and his public persona themselves created an expectation of what kind of person he is. Wake influenced the world with his writing, but in a very Control style fashion, the universal subconscious of man created a living OOP as a response.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:55
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I just got through the AW2 boss fight with Nightingale and the first time around it bugged out on me. I made it through a couple of stages and then he teleported away and I could hear him and it was playing the "oh no this is intense" music but I couldn't get to him. It's amazing how fast the tension drained from it when I was just walking in circles hoping the next stage would trigger.
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Oct 30, 2023 16:11
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Panderfringe posted:The kind of people who take video games that seriously are also the kind of people who threaten developers or rage out on stream or something. This take says more about you than the people you're talking about.
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Oct 30, 2023 16:54
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:I agree with what you're saying pretty much 100%, but I contend that it's both, and the games are heavily about the messiness of the process, both the highs and low. Yeah Alan being kind of a bad writer in many ways plays into it like you said. He's pretty high on the concept of being "a writer", as most people are when they feel largely defined by their job, and while he has some pretty good conceptual ideas when he actually sits down to write out a story it comes across as very point by point. When events are happening in the flow of the game it's fine, but in AW we also see them physically written down and the manuscript pages tend to be conceptually interesting but poorly written. The same applies to a lot of Control's documents. It's overwrought, and as a result it doesn't really work that well in book form. Thankfully Sam Lake makes video games and doesn't write books, but the effect is the same in some parts. What I think we can agree on is that the main thesis of Alan Wake is that if you are a writer then people will find plot holes in your story and use them to make your life hell, and if you find one of those people in the middle of the woods then it's fine to shoot them with a gun. Fil5000 posted:I just got through the AW2 boss fight with Nightingale and the first time around it bugged out on me. I made it through a couple of stages and then he teleported away and I could hear him and it was playing the "oh no this is intense" music but I couldn't get to him. It's amazing how fast the tension drained from it when I was just walking in circles hoping the next stage would trigger. Yeah I had a similar issue where I got to the point where Saga went "oh poo poo gotta run" so I turned around and bolted, expecting an advancing wall of death to be following on my heels. No, I just ran out into the previous area until I realized no one was pursuing me, then went back to finish the fight.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:00
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I've never played Alan Wake before so I grabbed the Remastered edition this morning (EGS has it on sale for under $10), figured I'd play through it before getting AW2 sometime down the road. Glad to see it still inspires much discussion 
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Oct 30, 2023 17:21
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Panderfringe posted:The kind of people who take video games that seriously are also the kind of people who threaten developers or rage out on stream or something. Precisely the opposite in my experience, it's people who want "politics" out of their games that see as just toys that are the ones raging out and threatening devs.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:29
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*seeing a polite and well reasoned discussion about the themes of a work* you seem like the kind of sick gently caress who makes death threats to the creators
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Oct 30, 2023 17:31
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AnEdgelord posted:Precisely the opposite in my experience, it's people who want "politics" out of their games that see as just toys that are the ones raging out and threatening devs.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:34
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As a side note: Do not buy Quantum Error. It's probably the least fun I've had with a game in a long time. The concept is cool but the execution is genuinely 'lovely indie shovelware' game tier except they want you to pay $70 for it.
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Oct 30, 2023 20:33
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Yeah gently caress paying $70 for games when pretty much all of them ship in an extremely broken state these days.
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Oct 30, 2023 20:44
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Basic Chunnel posted:Bloober games are pure hackwork, but Remedy games are very much an aging product of the late 90’s — not just in their combat mechanics, but in the way that, like most every other nerd of that time, their takeaway from the commercial and critical success of Tarantino movies was that a deep knowledge of your genre referents was not just necessary to make something good out of them, but sufficient. Tarantino made elevated genre pulp look so easy that everybody who came after him fell headlong into reverent pastiche. Alan Wake is a great example. I dont agree with all of this post, but its a good post. I think it speaks well of AW2 that it provokes these kinds of thoughts and the posts, particularly from cuddlecryptid and booger baby, that I've enjoyed reading and could absolutely not articulate myself. That said I'll kramer in briefly to say I'm really loving loving the game and was grinning like an idiot during the talk show segment. Fighting Nightingale, however, was a loving chore and I hated every minute of THAT
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Oct 30, 2023 22:58
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I actually adore the concept of external Remedy fan reception and reaction influencing Remedy and being explicitly called out as such in the game (this is obviously true for any franchise or sequel, but it's notably funny in the context of a writer writing a writer) Unfortunately I also absolutely hate multiverse/shared universe poo poo at this point, it was a huge downer in Control for me, and that applies here It doesn't just not add, it actively detracts, however well it is handled
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Oct 31, 2023 00:55
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I'm the exact opposite, at least at the level they're doing it now. I didn't play anything from them after Max Payne 2 until I picked up Control, and suddenly running into mentions of Max and all the stuff I was tangentially aware of in Alan Wake was like  , one of my favorite little things I've experienced in a game. I've felt the same way since, I'd probably get sick of it if they were a bigger/more prolific studio, but I love it for now.
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Oct 31, 2023 01:07
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Eh, I think shared universe stuff can be fun, and I think Alan Wake in particular is a good fit for it. poo poo is heavily inspired by Stephen King and that dude was doing a giant interconnected shared universe long before Marvel was, and I think the shared DNA between various stories can be nice.
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Oct 31, 2023 01:19
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:Also part of the reason Alan Wake and its sequel specifically aren't just thoughtless homages is because they're explicitly about the creative process, the search for the "perfect" story when you have self-doubt about even being able to make anything decent, and how art itself is ultimately just a confluence of influences where you struggle to find your own identity within a sea of subconscious impulses born from all the stuff that made the biggest impression on you as a budding artist. The Dark Place is a very direct metaphor in that regard, and the games are definitely about just taking joy in the creative process and learning to accept your love for art and what you want to make as it is, without loathing yourself for failing to be a paragon of originality. CONTROL was a nadir in that respect. Gameplay was kind of simple, possibly because of a limited budget, but aesthetically I think they did exactly what they intended, which was pure “hey, remember SCP?” pastiche leading into a cinematic universe. Lake says he’d never heard of SCP, and I don’t believe him. AW1 makes a big deal out of its King influence (lest we forget, its very first words are “Stephen King once wrote,”), and you can grant that it came around at a time when King’s popularity was in the low tide of its cycle and popular horror lit was still recovering from its late 90s collapse, but it is very much a King homage, and its concerns were King’s concerns. King is all about writerly anxiety. The strangest thing about it is that in gestalt it most closely resembles the master’s proggy, mystical doorstoppers of the 90s, which most people don’t love all that much. Tommyknockers, Insomnia, etc. Really, if you cut out the metafiction element it’s a pretty clear kludge of Desperation and Bag of Bones. The metafictional “artist as magician” element, for its part, is a popular quirk of later Dark Tower novels, but it was a minor quirk. Its prominence in AW seems more derived from other contemporary media, particularly Peter Straub’s 2004 novel In The Night Room and M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady In The Water film, from ‘08. And of course there’s Duma Key, also from ‘08, in which an artist’s creative power is hijacked by a dark, water-bound entity and turned into reality-altering magic. Frankly I think AW succeeds and falters in the same way those gonzo King novels do, but it’s too derivative to be as weird as they are. You just don’t see much media that celebrates that corner of his oeuvre when they could just do IT or Salem’s Lot instead. What I see AW2 doing is leaning hard into survival horror for its gameplay, which is a good choice, and very very hard into David Lynch for its story, which is a bad one. Twin Peaks is a clear referent in AW1 but not central — AW1 wears its influence the same way every forward-thinking genre mystery TV show has, since it aired. But AW2 is serious about aping Lynch. Specifically I don’t think you get anything like AW2 without Twin Peaks: The Return. The laid-over faded image technique (itself lifted by Lynch from very old films like Cat People) used a handful of times in TPTR is everywhere here. Alan Wake is the good Coop on just over half of his 25-year timescale (idk how much of American Nightmare actually ends up in AW2, but Mr. Scratch as a concept is Mr. C). The feds being totally unfazed by the supernatural, etc. I don’t think it works nearly as well as AW1, maybe because they don’t know how to hit Lynch beats the way they hit King’s — hell, the problem might be that they think of Lynch as having beats. In my playthrough I’ve hit a few narrative moments that very clearly aim for the distinctly unsettling confusion of the phone bit from Lost Highway (the drowned daughter bit, Mr. Door “he’s writing this right now,” etc.) but again I think Remedy / Sam Lake, unlike Lynch, are too anxious to let the player languish in surrealism, too anxious for you to see and appreciate what they just did, and the tension dissipates. Idk.
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Oct 31, 2023 01:28
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As for Alan Wake being an intentionally hacky writer… if they’re going for that I don’t think it works, a writer trying to perform bad writing is like an actor trying to perform drunkenness — you actually have to be really good to make it convincing. Speaking of good writers pulling off bad writing, I’m as bewildered as everyone else at how Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace seems to have flown under AW2’s reference radar. The bit of Alan Wake narrating clipped, short sentences that just end up restating their point over and over again (“It was dark. Black. Like night. She couldn’t see through it, the absence of light,”) was done fantastically in one particular section of Terrortome.
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Oct 31, 2023 01:43
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Is it even shared universe? I thought that was used when multiple writers collaborate to add nods to each other in their own art? All Remedy games are written and produced by one dude: Sam Lake. Weirdest addition to the game is the inclusion of the Yötön Yö horror movie. It is literally a 20 minute made-for-game movie that you can watch inside game in a particular theater. Somebody even uploaded it to youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S478Ni0wWI (spoilers for the game)
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Oct 31, 2023 01:51
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Does this weird hate for “shared universes” also apply to like… sequels in general? What makes Alan Wake less good in someone’s mind just because now it shares a setting with another, related franchise written by the same person and made by the same game studio? Is the presence of the Bureau in AW2 that damaging? It’s a real weird holdup to me that I can’t wrap my head around.
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Oct 31, 2023 02:01
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Bussamove posted:Does this weird hate for “shared universes” also apply to like… sequels in general? What makes Alan Wake less good in someone’s mind just because now it shares a setting with another, related franchise written by the same person and made by the same game studio? Is the presence of the Bureau in AW2 that damaging? Basically the Marvel Cinematic Universe ran the idea into the ground to the point it tainted the very concept in some people's eyes, it shouldn't have because it's not like pieces of fiction being connected is an inherently bad idea or something but that's the reason.
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Oct 31, 2023 02:06
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Bussamove posted:Does this weird hate for “shared universes” also apply to like… sequels in general? What makes Alan Wake less good in someone’s mind just because now it shares a setting with another, related franchise written by the same person and made by the same game studio? Is the presence of the Bureau in AW2 that damaging? For me the connection is bizarre because Alan Wake made a point of repeatedly pushing back on explaining the mystery entirely. There's a quote from the first game that pops up all over the environmental graffiti in the second: quote:In a horror story the victim keeps asking why, but there can be no explanation and there shouldn't be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest and is what we'll remember in the end. Then they take it and make a whole big connection to a game that is entirely about the complete opposite of that. It's a strange thing to do even if it doesn't have an actual impact on the story because it turns the monster from a force of nature into something that could put in a box. Does it fundamentally change the story? No, but it's weird. CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 02:22
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Isn't Control partially about the futility of trying to nail everything down with specific explanations?
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Oct 31, 2023 02:27
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SirSamVimes posted:Isn't Control partially about the futility of trying to nail everything down with specific explanations? Like the SCP it was born from partially yes, but also there's a lot of "we put it in a box and studied it and now we have the ability to use it as a weapon" around it. I mean in SCP they have regularly used memory wiping drugs that they harvest from a continent-sized leviathan living in the Hadal zone.
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Oct 31, 2023 02:31
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Bussamove posted:Does this weird hate for “shared universes” also apply to like… sequels in general? What makes Alan Wake less good in someone’s mind just because now it shares a setting with another, related franchise written by the same person and made by the same game studio? Is the presence of the Bureau in AW2 that damaging? Put it this way: sometimes you’re a kid who loves the perfect film that is Alien, and you’re like “more of this please,” but then you get more and the returns diminish. Then you get a crossover with another “universe” that’s decent on its own merits. Maybe the idea is appealing on its face. Maybe you buy into the bombast, the “dream match” quality of two great tastes coming together. What could go wrong? But things don’t always add to the sum of their parts. The crossover becomes its own thing, and you get one good FPS out of it, but pretty much everything else to come out of it sucks. It sucks really, really badly, such that Alien becomes defined by hacky, derivative bullshit. So from then on the idea of a hyped-up crossover does not, in your mind, foretell good things in and of itself. Another, more germane example: M. Night Shyamalan (who again, prefigured Alan Wake 2 with his own metafictional indulgence, Lady In the Water), after wrecking his name brand with a string of flops, toils through a couple of unpretentious, lean and mean genre indies such that within a few years, people start to wonder if maybe his earlier failures were a fluke. Then he has a real comeback with Split. The thing with Split is (spoilers for a 2016 movie) that it’s a lean mean genre picture that just so happens to reveal itself, at the very end, as a secret prologue to a sequel following MNS’s second movie, Unbreakable. Much the same way CONTROL reveals itself to be, on some level, a prologue to AW2! Some people were thrilled we were in for more Unbreakable. A lot more people didn’t didn’t much care one way or another. There were also people who actually liked Split more as its own thing, its own weird little one-off playing by its own rules. There were people who were deflated by the implication that Split only happened because MNS couldn’t make what he really wanted, which was Unbreakable 2, and the further implication that Split, by dint of not being the creator’s darling, was a minor work in service to the other, more important thing. Not to mention that if the return of the other thing didn’t pan out, the thing you showed up for would probably die too. And if the other thing did really well? Who knows if they’d bother to return to the secondary franchise. Maybe CONTROL becomes something like the Hulk in the MCU — the FBC showing up in everything as a feature but never getting another crack at their own starring vehicle. That would be a shame. What if you liked CONTROL way more than AW, or thought its greatest future potential lay in going deeper into itself rather than deeper into whatever AW was doing? If you’re not as enchanted by the grand universal plan as the creators are, that can end up being a problem, because now, there’s no reason to expect that future CONTROL games, if any, will exist at the same distance from AW. It may end up a “sidequel”, or worse, whatever Book of Boba Fett was while everyone was waiting for the Mandalorian to show up. Speaking of Disney is really staring this dilemma down as their firehose of networked properties generates less and less enthusiasm, the grand overarching plots and the individual pieces both becoming more and more listless… But more to the point, investors and entertainment conglomerates are betting big on imperial IP franchises across all forms of media. Anything that’s anything must be a flagship, a sequel, or a tie-in. Anyway, and apropos of nothing, one of the issues with Split specifically was that a fairly common feeling about MNS getting his mojo back by explicitly easing the throttle on the grand schemes, on “lore” and bluster. The end of Split indicated he was raring to leverage his comeback into a return to the bloated conceptual mythology that had ended his first run at the top. Sure enough, nobody cared about Glass, and he went back to smaller genre pics. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 03:03
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Alan Wake always lended itself to this since even in the first game his famous book series is basically just Max Payne (Alex Casey) E: also I want to say, I'm also someone increasingly sceptical of how every movie is a shared universe and think Scorsese is entirely right about Marvel movies That SAID, despite the shared elements, Alan Wake 2 absolutely feels like an auteurist work of art and less of a corporate product than 99% of video games
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Oct 31, 2023 03:08
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Basic Chunnel posted:The crossover becomes its own thing, and you get one good FPS out of it, but pretty much everything else to come out of it sucks.
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Oct 31, 2023 03:14
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I hate to break it to you but AVP, beyond the one FPS with truly random Alien spawning points, all of it is really bad. Even before they threw in the Terminator or Robocop
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Oct 31, 2023 03:19
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