Weekend Confirmed 164 - Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Wolfenstein

So I think you guys have a tendency to conflate story tone and context of a mechanic with mechanic/gameplay design itself. If I walk up to a fire pit and click the right trigger to light the fire in an fps, the visual feedback is different from shooting a guy, but the gameplay mechanic is the same. The content of what you're doing pressing the left stick to navigate to a point, centering the screen over a target with the right stick, and pressing a button to progress.

So the "experience" doesn't change just because it's a fire appears instead of a soldier's brains. And its not like "Oh theres a 3d rendered fire with good particle effects. I think I'm going to sit here and think about life, and even hold a stick in front of my tv with marshmallows jabbed onto the end!" If that's your thought process when you're playing video games, you're doing it wrong. And/or, you might be interested in a new ground breaking new video game called "Electric Fire Place"

So this is what happens when you reduce video game design to these shooter components. Your only recourse is to come up with something extremely insincere, or inane and pretentious. For the former see Gears of War. Its like "In this shooter we're gonna have a single tear rolling down Brah-bro's cheek, and its like you gotta shoot enemies to make work that tear out maann" They wedge in something "emotional" because they can't break out of shooting/gun scenarios.

And then you have the inane "stranded on an island" path of game design. If Cliff Bleszinski represents the above, Ken Levine and Gabe Newell might represent this side (even though they both make violent shooters). Its this idea that "it would be satisfying just to have to survive and stuff! and you'd have to find food and make an S.O.S. sign in the sand" Yes the scenario is different, but a setting and scenario don't elicit a new way of playing. Its just a different and frankly trite skin (just in a different way) to game play we've already seen. In other words, "Portal is different from CoD because everything is white!"

So the solution to breaking out of the CoD formula from people with the inane ie---"holodec" mentality is always to slow down the gameplay and basically rely on the visual feedback of the game world. Its like their answer to making games artistic is to make a 3D post card and play an Enya CD on a loop. Look at the whole attitude and presentation of the upcoming The Witness by Jonathan Blow. Its like "...what if Brookstone just made a game about shopping in their stores... and in that store, there were puzzles? ... woooah man! That would be sooo deep!"

So you know, I remember when Metroid Prime was coming to Gamecube and people wondered if you could do platforming justice in the first person perspective. Now the mentality is like "why the fuck would you ever jump in a video game?" Its a totally parallel concept to people that that type of gameplay should even exist. I have to say it struck me that no one mentioned Halo in the GotY talk. There are way too many Halo games but they're at least more fun to play than Bioshock.

So the fact that you guys only go to these places of like a tree smelling simulator, or something like Heavy Rain---which has god awful localisation, story, and some of the most inane game mechanics out there---suggests to that your ideas reflect Spector's criticisms rather than refuting or solving them. You claim to be old geezers for wanting it, but it sounds like you forgot video games existed before 2005.

Also, PS: Crysis is fucking ugly. Unless its like Gran Turismo and the objective is to recreate something physically in the real world, a game can't be beautiful based solely on technical parameters. That doesn't have to do with being a graphics whore, or a PC elitist, its just having taste for visual aesthetics.