I'll read the rest of that lter, John, but I never mntioned whatever Journey is. >.>
Oh LP I'm sorry man. The way that my ipad seems to screw up is when I quote people half the time it crashes. So I've been quoting first when I want to multi-quote so I don't lose when I've written something then I go about copy/pasting the other quotes to the bottom. After writing my response to Force I just plum forgot to get around to what I meant to ask you. Which was put succinctly: You don't necessarily feel that escapism and grandiose plot lines are bad things though do you?
Just out of curiosity, what would you consider as 2012's Game of the Year in your opinion?
Honestly, it's hard to say. I played Saint's Row: The Third in July and frankly I don't know that I've enjoyed any games I've played this year as much. I never had any plans to play it, the plot seemed the stupidest part, gangsters run around like celebrities not getting arrested. But after getting it as a gift on steam I decided to give it a chance and couldn't put it down for about 90 hours. (Non consecutively mind you) Technically though it came out in November of last year. And as much as I really really want to give Mass Effect Three that title for the things it did right, I can't ignore the things it did wrong, which were essentially everything on my list. At the moment I can only leave you with, let me ruminate on that one.
For games that cost me $60, I'd say either Mass Effect 3 or Assassin's Creed 3. For overall experience and lasting impression, I'd probably go with the Walking Dead.
I find it strange that two of your candidates are games that upset/disappointed their fanbases so much.
Based off of your synopsis of Journey or TWD, I'd say that you're the type of person that doesn't "feel" something when playing a game or an interactive experience. You reduced Journey to its core elements and thus showed how simplistic it really is from a mechanical perspective.
This is actually a fair assessment, to an extent. One of the things that bothered me so much in mass effect 3 for instance was the conversation wheel. As an example of how much it was crippled between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, when we first meet Jacob in ME2 we get a dialogue tree with seven investigation options. When we first meet James in ME3 we get... ZERO. We have a lot more auto dialog in conversations and used for squad mate interactions, instead of
talking to NPC's to actually
get quests we just eavesdrop, neutral options are largely extinct and many times we aren't allowed to investigate for additional information. Heck the final confrontation in the original release of the game has an unskippable 15 minute conversation sequence with one inconsequential tree that has 2 meaningless options. So why is this a problem? Because this is a
role playing game and the conversation wheel is
HOW we
role play. It's like Maslowe's hierarchy of needs or the way in which a child first learns words to build sentences. If your underlying mechanics are unenjoyable it's difficult to progress to the level of enjoyment. If your underlying mechanics are shoddy it's difficult to progress to the level of emotional attachment. So of course a mechanical perspective is important because games have to be
operated to extract that emotional current. It should be a cornerstone of good design. There's nothing broken about Journey's mechanics, but there's nothing inherently novel or engaging about them either. If there were I might want to stay longer.
That said though I do feel things when I play games. But I need time, I need the right hook and I need to have underlying barriers removed. I felt joy when I played Saint's row the third. I continued playing Mass Effect 3 all the way through simply because I loved those characters. Emotion is definitely a strong component to any game but it can't be the sole component. This is still a game, it has to be enjoyable and to be enjoyable you must occasionally
reward the player. More on that later.
However, do you know why people value and praise Journey? Because it's different, it takes a risk (based on your description of it, I'd say a pretty big risk); it shows what happens when you actually put some creativity behind your game development, it directly communicates the developers passion for their product; it sends the players to a realm that they don't and probably won't experience much if ever in their life, it stimulates the senses, and most importantly, it makes you feel a sense of cathartis for a character that is completely and absolutely different to one self. When the little dude freezes its ass off, you sure as hell feel its pain. If that isn't art, I don't know what is. Yet you call it "pretentious".
Here's the thing, maybe for you the reward
is catharsis. I however get my daily allotment of catharsis in life. I don't really need anymore, henceforth the thing that you value most about the game holds little to no meaning to me. So what rewards are left? I can fly? A million games let me fly. But why should I want to fly when there is nowhere I really care to fly to? If you tell me that my reward for spending days of my life walking towards a virtual reality mountain is that I
get to see the virtual reality mountain I'm going to call you pretentious. If you go on to tell me your game is artistic because you're like braid and limbo and every other game with no story or a fantastically vague story that makes aesthetics ponder how brilliant your inability to write is I'm going to call you pretentious. Then I'm going to point you towards Bastion and smack you in the back of your head.
Same with the TWD, when Lee has to chop off a leg, you can practically feel the agonizing stress that he's going through. I could completely empthasize with Lee when he was searching for Clementine. This is some seriously powerful shit.
I could too, that alone doesn't make it a good as a game. You put a lot of your value assessments on emotion and that's fine. But different strokes for different folks.
If I had to choose between Call of Duty: Blacks Op 2 ($60) and The Walking Dead: Series & Journey: Collector's edition ($30 x2), which game(s) would leave a better lasting impression on me and thus give me a better experience for my $60?
What's the statement here? That's like choosing between eating a bowl of dogshit and a fresh pineapple. I get that you're saying you loved these titles and you'd recommend them, but the amount that you loved them has no bearing on me.
