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Comments
Hmm, why isn't there an official Dark Souls thread? Or is this it?
There is one, but nobody wants to bother finding it and people talk about video games in general here anyway.
Here.
.
He won't.
(since we have that link though, you might want to take it to that thread)
Did anyone read the article I posted? I'm curious about people's thoughts on it.
I saw it. My biggest impression was that the title was pretty much a bait-and-switch.
Well, it was. But that's because someone genuinely thought that Chris Sims hated video games because he criticized Braid and Arkham City.
Yeah, pretty much everything he actually said in the article was pretty spot-on, IMO.
This idea bugs me. It comes across as a sort of "all video games should be this particular way, otherwise you might as well just write a book/make a movie/whatever" (I know he's saying he liked Phoenix Wright, but with the implication that it's in spite of everything that makes it different from just... a book). The fact that a game has very little interactivity shouldn't inherently mean that it shouldn't have been released on a video game console in the first place...
Other than that though I didn't really read much of the article, so I don't really have much else to say about it.
But that's not entirely wrong. At least, with the idea Sims is mentioning, which is something so endemic to video games that it seems unlikely to skip it unless you really want to do that.
ETA: I mean, videogames are games and games need to be interactive. They need to let you play. Otherwise, why are they games in the first place?
And no, pressing next is not interaction the same way that flipping a page is not interactive.
Yeah, he wasn't calling it bad, he was just saying that the term "video game" probably doesn't entirely apply to it.
guys how to i beat the maneaters in Demon's Souls?
Incidentally, I actually would call Ace Attorney a videogame series, because there is actually interactivity beyond hitting next. Wouldn't apply that to VNs in general though, even multi-route ones.
Well... it's one thing to say that Phoenix Wright (or any other visual novel, really) isn't very good as a video game because it isn't very interactive, but it seems like the solution to that isn't to say it should just be a book instead, but to... not treat it the same way as you treat video games (or other video games anyway, since for better or worse visual novels are usually classified as games). The thing is, a computer or video game console allows for a much different experience than just reading a book (in particular, voices and music) even if you don't have any interactivity at all, and it seems a little silly to say that something shouldn't take advantage of those particular possibilities if they aren't also going to make use of every other possibility provided by the medium. It's like... I don't say books without illustrations are bad just because a book can potentially have illustrations in it.
tl;dr: Phoenix Wright's lack of interactivity isn't inherently a problem. If anything is a problem, it's the audience's expectations (and therefore probably a problem with adequately marketing it, etc., but still not with the work itself).
^^^ No, he was saying that since it's not really a video game it should have been in a different medium entirely.
So, a bit of a random and slightly fanboyish question.
Does anyone else think PASBR looks, graphically speaking, worse than Brawl? I saw some screenshots and gifs the other day and the characters and animations were plain and lifeless as shit. I really find it hard to believe a game released 4 years ago in an inferior system looks better than it.
But he didn't. He said it's good, but it's not really a game per se.
I wouldn't say that, and I don't think the author of that article said that either. But I would say that it's weird to call something a game because it has pictures and music.
The problem is that you -- and the videogame industry -- are confusing graphics for aesthetics. The devteam behind PASBR spent a lot of money on graphics, then forgot to make the thing not look like shit. As a result, the graphics are entirely useless; hell, Final Fantasy VI looks better.
But interactivity is as essential to games as photography and video work are to film.
That is not to say that Phoenix Wright is bad or anything, it's just that saying VNs are games because of the fact that their presentation is similar to games seems to me like saying Harry Potter is a comic book because they had little illustrations at the top of the page at the beginning of each chapter.
isn't saying that it shouldn't have been called a game, but that it shouldn't even have been published on the DS.
^Ah, okay, I missed that bit. Yeah, that's silly.
Are choose-your-own-adventure books interactive?
Yes.
But even in a digital form (i.e. a VN with multiple routes), I wouldn't call one a videogame any more than I'd call a DVD with deleted scenes or alternate endings one.
@Clockwork, about PASBR
To me it seems like they spent all their effort in the backgrounds and none in the models, because seriously, they look like they are made out of plastic.
Just to chip in and say that Phoenix Wright is more of an Adventure Game than a Visual Novel.
To a degree, they are as in-so-far as that your input and choices affect the story.
But I think that it falls down once you realize that the only interaction in there is basically flipping pages in a way that isn't "Flip to the next page". Yes, your choices change the outcome, but that's not everything that is going on with games. Choices, performance, skill and so on are what makes games games.
But let's be honest here, how much does Phoenix Wright need music and the pressing-of-buttons to be enjoyed? Is it really that much of a substraction from the experience that a comic would feel entirely lacking on the things that make Phoenix Wright what it is?
That's probably just to make them stand out. It will likely work a lot better in action than in a screenshot.
I'd say it's about equal parts, much like MGS is a videogame and also a very long movie.
But see, it actually is interactive. You investigate crime scenes and look for holes in testimony and stuff.
I still never said visual novels are video games (well, not in this conversation anyway). If anything, I was actually saying that they aren't bad video games, because they aren't games at all.
And indeed, despite what I usually say, I don't really think they're necessarily video games (though a lot of them are, BlazBlue's story mode for instance), just that I'm not opposed to people continuing to call them video games since it wouldn't personally affect me either way.
I don't see why this is an argument against it being on a video game console. There's no particular reason you should have to simplify a work of fiction down to its bare essentials. Unless you think the music and whatnot are actually harming the work (aside from when considering it as a video game).
Also I'm saying Phoenix Wright but actually I've never played it, so assume that I'm talking about VNs in general, since ultimately the original article doesn't actually seem to say anything specific to Phoenix Wright in the first place (other than that Chris Sims likes its story).
It's a bad example for VNs in general, since it has actual gameplay.
Anyway, this was the gif that made me think "Holy shit that is bad". I hope this is just because the game is in beta, or it's taken out of context or something.