Giant Bombcast 02/02/2016

I totally agree on both these counts - as a printmaker I find myself continually referencing the limited palettes of Mario 3. And it was a bummer, Jeff doesn't need to like the game of course but I didn't really get the point of the segment.

@roomrunner: The original manual for Metal Gear 2 came with a chart of some sort to decipher morse code; so it didn't expect you to know it. Still crazy though.

"Have you gotten to the part where you have to do the thing with the doodad and the other thing?" Giantbomb talking about The Witness

Tip drill with a bar of soap confirmed as useful technique, continue...

This is a long post coming, but hell, i think it's worth explaining.

If you didn't see pretension in the way Braid delivers it's message (and that's not to call it a bad game, I enjoyed it a lot, but the story elements felt really ham-fisted), then maybe you'll never be convinced, but the best way that I can explain it is... There's a subtle difference between a creator acknowledging that what they do and make is art, and a creator who is trying to make art. The difference between somebody making art because they have something they want to make, and somebody making art because they want to be an artist and/or enjoy having the image of an artist. The former is pretty standard for anybody who makes creative stuff and thinks about their work, while the latter is what typically comes across as pretension. Blow's games (Braid especially) feel like the latter, basically a game version of Oscar-baiting films, like somebody went out of the way to dress them up in extra artsy-ness for the sake of appearances.

Again, it's a subtle difference, which is why it's almost impossible to explain outside of a case-by-case basis. But when looking at what's presented within a work itself, it's a sense that the work is trying to speak in a profound way without earning the ability to do that - to speak about a topic of philosophical or social importance and seem genuine, it needs to present some kind of foundations that both make you respect what it has to say about the subject and give it grounding/context. Stanley Parable is one of the best examples of doing that well: It has really complex and important things to say about choice in game design and choice in general, and as it does so, it's coming at it in ways that demonstrate that the creator thought through the matter on basically every level (while throwing in humor and variety). The Beginner's Guide is similarly well-done for the subjects it speaks about, but even more directly and with fewer jokes. Both come across as thoughts which the creator was fascinated/troubled by and wanted to put out into the world, rather than thoughts that came about because the creator wanted to make a game talking about [big concept].

Blow's message-delivery, at least from almost everything I've seen of it, tends to try to jump relatively suddenly to those upper levels of importance without demonstrating the same foundational understanding and thought, and that's why it's so off-putting (even though the games, as games, are good). To be fair, I think part of it is just the way that Blow tries to do subtlety or to avoid over-loading with story, like at some point a lot of messaging was cut out and what was left over was only the most blunt top-level stuff, but at some point that's going to come across as un-earned and pretentious regardless of how genuine it really is. In an effort to be subtle or surprising or whatever other description, they lose the sense of complexity and context.

I don't think that Blow is particularly mean or abrasive in his online personality either, nor do I follow him much in the first place, but that's kind of beside the point. A lot of people probably do blow whatever stuff he says on twitter out of proportion to support the pretension narrative or w/e, but personally I think it because of the way his ideas are presented in-game.

Donut Create Push has become something I can FULLY get behind.

I love Dan as much as the next guy (take that how you will) but man I hate when he takes his own opinions and seemingly unknowingly tries to make them seem like they are the understood idea on certain things. He suggested that most people didn't like Resident Evil 3, which is totally not the case. He just never played it, so because he never did he again seemingly subconsciously, tries to portray that game as being one that nobody liked.

NOBODY DISLIKES LORD JILL.

@newhuman: The main point of Jeff's argument seemed to be that he didn't own the cartridge of it way back when, which is a great way to decide what video games you don't like

One of the main distinctions between 3 and World is Yoshi. I'm thinkin' Jeff just secretly likes Yoshi, and all these years of Yoshi-bashing have been him covering it up

Or he likes secret exits THAT much

I have tons of nostalgia for SMB3, and I only played SMW afterwards, so years ago if you asked me I probably would have said that SMB3 was the best. That being said I recently re-bought the GBA remake to play on my Micro, and man, those levels are short and straight-forward compared to World.

Yes ... we could guess it was going to be brought by square space ... you should do a bait and switch where the opening commercial is from someone else and it is this big surprise...

@davidh219I think part of the argument about the witness is a stylistic argument. Some artists consider simply bringing up ideas and getting people to think about them as what they should do. Not really to bring answers but simply to get the apathetic populace to think about deep questions since most people do not. Dan "just let me do puzzles" is a good example. Many fine artists do actually believe John Blow's comment that what is important is the person looking at the artworks response to the artwork is what is important. As well, as we have talked about before, for many of us the emotion around HOW you tell something is part of telling something. This is why saying slavery was evil is not nearly as effective as a movie like twelve years a slave. This is why people worry about the amount of homosexual characters in media. For me even if there isn't a unifying theme here simply making people aware of these quotes and thinking about them and thinking about something hiring than their own enjoyment/job is good and needed. But then I read philosophy and philosophy quotes for fun and enjoy things like EVA and Ghost in the Shell. A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down. For many people the sugar is the puzzles and allow Blow to get them to think about philosophy and see quotes (the medicine) they wouldn't normally see. Given the intellectual level of many people that play games, that is enough.

I feel like it's pretty commonly accepted that Resident Evil 3 is one of the weaker old-style games in the series, but I don't think there's any sort of widespread dislike the same way there is for Code Veronica and Zero. If you want to say Dan pulled that assertion out of thin air though, I'm right with you.

Also the Mario 3 talk was depressing, since it basically boiled down to "I didn't own this game when it came out and that's why it's never personally resonated with me", which I feel like is a thing I've heard Jeff say about a few things over the years.

There was certainly a dip in the show but picked itself up quick and it has been great indeed. It's basically just Metal Gear in show form, we even have some sort of Patriots and FOXDIE.

When people ask me about colorblindness, I just tell them to go to photoshop and turn on the filter. It's so complicated. I wonder if my love of purple is due to my color deficiency

I agree with Jeffs opinion on SMB3. I liked the game when I was a kid, but it doesn't hold any appeal to me anymore. SMW, on the other hand, I could play from start to finish at almost anytime.

@moonwalksa: I think the problem here is that the distinction between "a creator acknowledging that what they do and make is art, and a creator who is trying to make art" is almost entirely a matter of perception on the viewer of the art, instead of a fundamental difference in the creator themselves. Almost any piece of evidence you could use to paint good ole Jon Blow as a pretentious blowhard can just as easily be used as evidence of the loftiness of his ambitions and his unwillingness to compromise the quality of the thing he is creating. Labeling him as either an up-his-own-ass blowhard or a dedicated singular visionary says more, I think, about the critic than the creator. (Fwiw I'm entirely in the "Jon blow is the smartest man in videogames" camp, so, I dunno what that says about me.)

I've never fully understood the hate for Resident Evil 6. I played all of it with a friend well after it was released, so I went in knowing about all the hate. But I found it to be an amazing co-op game. Lots and lots of fun. I don't like horror and have never played any of the other RE games to completion, so I suppose that is where most of the hate comes from: people disliking how different it is from the older games. I don't have that basis to compare to, so I just enjoyed the game for what it was. I wish more games had co-op similar to it.

I don't agree with Jeff's prodigious hate of food all the time, but I can always count on him to go against the tide. Hummus is so gross. I don't like guacamole either, but I'm indifferent towards it rather than hate.

I thought I was going to hate re6 because of the direction change but as an action game I loved it. Still I feel 5 and 6 aren't true re games.

I actually liked RE6 my first time through.

Second time I played it, I was left baffled as to how I ever enjoyed it. Woof. Mercenaries mode was still fun, though.

Also: How Jeff feels about Mario 3 is how I feel about Mario period. I appreciate its existence, I recognize its quality, but I have no love for it.

Well, I guess Blacklist is going on the list of things to watch.