Pretentious Games

[INF1NIT3 D00M]

Crysis 2's single player campaign plot is pretentious. It tries to be edgy and cool, but ends up leaving a really bad taste in the mouth. I'd rather have a generic military theme in Crysis 1.

Agreed. There's a fun drinking game in there if you take a swig every time someone says something that includes the prefix "nano".
IIRC, most conversations are silence from your end, and everyone else babbling something along the lines of "Nanotrites are destroying all of earth's nanoparticles! You're going to have to use your nanovision to see the aliens, only then can you use the nanosuit to destroy all the evil alien nanotrites and save the earth's precious nanoparticles!"

Be warned though, hardy men with powerful livers have DIED playing that drinking game.

 

[Kimarous]

*runs in* KOTOR 2! *runs out*

Okay, now that we've riled up the Obsidian fanboys... yeah, yeah, pushed out incomplete, there's some interesting conversations, yada yada.

But OH LORD DARTH NIHILUS! No! He is NOT a good villain! Being vaguely implied to be your shadow archetype does not make him any less of a flat character! He comes out of nowhere, he does nothing, he says nothing (coherent), and pretty much serves as a plot device for Visas Marr and returning to Taris!

To say nothing about party member conversations. Yes, even Kreia. Heck, ESPECIALLY Kreia! Good points or no, she is one of the most pretentious characters in all of gaming. I'm sorry, but when 90% of your dialogue is blabbing your world view, you ARE pretentious!

 

[Vault101]

eeeehhhhh.....Its almost like the word "overated" just another way of saying "I dont liek this"

Journey somtiems comes across as "oooohhh loook how arty and beautiful this is!"

...except..well...it kind of works..and sand has never been so damn gorgeous

 

[loc978]

I really think most pretension in gaming stems from fanbases rather than studios or advertising. Unless it's a huge-budget AAA game, then the advertisement often tends toward pretension.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Bastion was pretentious as fuck. But

For instance, I don't think Dear Esther is pretentious because it doesn't assume anything important. It's quite literally just a messed up dude on an island trying to deal with his pain, and anything else you bring to that is your own fault.

Pretty sure it's a chick, dude.

And yes, it is pretentious. It assumes I want to hear the 2 dollar words about nothing that guy is saying. You know what has a good narrator that says things worth listening to?

MOTHERFUCKING BASTION

Bastion was pretentious as fuck. There's nothing more pretentious than a narrator who thinks he's saying important but doesn't have anything to say in the first place, and not only that, puts on a fake attitude taken from every american western film to try and impress on the audience how unpretentious and gritty the game is, compared with all those games that, like, aren't.

I see you trollin', brah. Logan Cunningham could read Twilight and make it sound good. He's that fuckin' good.

Oh, you were talking about the acting. Okay. Any reason why?

 

[Busard]

What was said above. I really don't think that originally the devs are trying to hide behind any pretense. In the case of Dear Esther, it was already KNOWN beforehand what the whole thing was about. The original mod was out for some time now, it was just remade, because they wanted to have their experimental piece with a new coat of paint. The fact that it had a big publicity (good for them though) and that it somehow riled up a whole bunch of people who thought maybe too much of it suddenly labeled it as hipster and pretentious, when I think it's rather more of a label confusion like said above (that it's not really a game in itself, more of an interactive painting/narrative in it's most basic form).

I would rather call games like SW:TOR (or the last mass effect) as pretentious, as they are trying to sell themselves on whole complex storylines while they're not that well written in themselves (specially when the older iterations like Mass Effect 2 and 1 had some better metaphorical approach with certain choices)

 

[Mr Pantomime]

One Chance. The game shows a lot of tradgedy, but it doesn't set it up, so it falls very flat. Sure, your wife dies, your kid dies, your coworkers commit suicide, and the entire human race is doomed, but theres no reason to care. If I showed you a short film with clips of people randomly commiting suicide and dying from some disease, you might be bothered by the graphic nature, but you wouldnt care about the characters. I dont find that in itself pretentious, but the fact that the game expects me to care does bother me.

The books in Braid.

Gonna have to disagree with you on that one. The books in Braid were a very novel way of introducing the new game mechanics and advancing the story. The things mentioned in the books were used as elements in the gameplay. For example, Tim mentions how whenever he wore his ring on his hand people's perceptions of him changed drastically, so he tended to put it away. In that particular level, the ring changes the perception of time for everything around it until it is removed by the player. I could go on and list some more examples, but I think that they compliment the game very nicely.

What was inside the book was interesting, but the mechanic itself was terrible. Instead of actually presenting the story through gameplay, or at least while you were playing, it made you stand in front of a bunch of books, reading random blurbs in each one.

 

[KarlMonster]

I liked Dear Esther. The prose was fantastic, the metaphors quite clever, and certain images were very well thought out. Linking it all together as a so-called adventure/exploration game resulted in an incoherent presentation, which left the player bored - and even lost - during the long transitions.

Pretentious is a game review that says a murder mystery adventure game has replay value. Actually, just throw all game reviews into the big pretentious hole. I've been using my Junior Woodchuck Decoder Ring to interpret what they really mean to say about the game, anyway.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

But unusual for mainstream games does mean it's experimental for the medium. Simple and experimental aren't really antithetical, as it's hard to deny it was certainly an atypical experience. Whether or not it was a successful one is something else entirely.

The experiment was modest but the use of terms like experimental definitely risk coming across as pretentious since it offers more than they can deliver in terms of the expectation the word delivers. Use of the word medium also risks coming across as pretentious as do half the posts of the escapist and almost 100% of the comments on gamasutra. If you look close enough then all games are different in some subtle way that is atypical but what we love is when there is a marketing message about why this particular game is different and worth special attention. If that message tends to allude to there being some sort of high brow, intellectual rigour going into it's production and the end result is just something you have seen before but in a slightly different context then some people are always going to call bs and others are always going to want to believe.

 

[Cranky]

I found Gears of War a bit pretentious, but at least it was a visceral shooter and allowed me to shoot shit with friends.

 

[endtherapture]

Crysis 2's single player campaign plot is pretentious. It tries to be edgy and cool, but ends up leaving a really bad taste in the mouth. I'd rather have a generic military theme in Crysis 1.

I appreciate the effort on Crytek's part to have an "actual" story instead of "You good American fight evil Koreans and aliens" but the whole suit not shutting the fuck up, downloading and rebooting constantly, morons screaming at your ear, taking control away from the player to show a crappy cinematic or a QTE, the complete murder of any sense of player agency was simply not worth it.

I preferred Crysis 1 generic-fest as opposed to the mess we ended up with in Crysis 2. Still a good game though.

Crysis 2 was bullshit. Everyone was more enamoured with this bloody suit than the fact that THERE WERE ALIENS LIVING UNDER MANHATTEN. The suit was just confusing and ridiculous and it should've been a subplot not the entire main story.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Dragon Age 2's "mature" stories, particularly the ones that deal with mages vs. templars.

Please elaborate.

I get someone not liking some of the more mature stories. They tried way too hard to present a grey-on-grey choice, and the entire story just kind of collapsed at the end due to that pressure, but I honestly don't see how they could be labeled pretentious.

It's essentially that the execution of the idea wasn't as complex, developed, or multilayered as it needed to be. The writers desperately want you to take it seriously (to the point where they start throwing around terms like "tranquil solution") but when they can barely write a consistent character, it just doesn't work.

The end result is something that attempts to evoke us-vs-them and grey-vs-grey, while making it abundantly clear that serious IRL issues are way above the writers' pay grade.

 

[Kahunaburger]

The books in Braid.

Gonna have to disagree with you on that one. The books in Braid were a very novel way of introducing the new game mechanics and advancing the story. The things mentioned in the books were used as elements in the gameplay. For example, Tim mentions how whenever he wore his ring on his hand people's perceptions of him changed drastically, so he tended to put it away. In that particular level, the ring changes the perception of time for everything around it until it is removed by the player. I could go on and list some more examples, but I think that they compliment the game very nicely.

I actually saw the perfect graph to describe Braid (or Dear Esther, or The Path, or...) yesterday.

 

[mental_looney]

Fahrenheit, the story is awful in the first one and loses the plot so fast and the gameplay is not that great either simon says stick wiggling.
Heavy rain, it's ok but the plot not the cinematic gaming and plot god send it's creator makes it out to be, and it has zero replay value so there is no so many different experiences from it just the one

 

[Brandon Logan]

I feel like everyone is gonna respond with indie games. And then there will be some cod haters, Dragon Age 2 haters, and then some of the old mass effect 3 ending ragers.

 

[Arina Love]

Pretty much whole ME3 story is one pretentious pos.

 

[Xenowolf]

Suprised no-one has mentioned Passage, a freeware game where all you do is walk left or right, while a timer goes down until your character dies. So all lives eventually end, I thought that was common knowledge, funnily enough.

 

[Stemer]

While most games that are marketed as having 'deep' storylines fall flat (largely due to their stories being out classed by other media), the one that really stands out head and shoulders (and torso and legs for that matter), above all others is Heavy Rain.

I really can't think of any other game that failed to deliver on hype as spectacularly as Heavy Rain. I think the one time the devs told the truth in interviews was when they said it had a 'film quality plot' although they negated to mention that the particular film it equaled in quality was SAW 3.

 

[Kahunaburger]

A lot of indie games do sadly fall into this trap. The combination of struggling artists with limited resources can give you gold, but it can also give you a lot of stuff that's just way too vague or so heavily drenched in weird symbolism and unconventional narrative. I think a lot of people forget that a big reason why people like Franz Kafka and Phillip K. Dick wrote the crazy shit they did is because they were crazy as shit.

Yeah, I'm pretty psyched about the decreasing barrier to entry in game design, because it opens the door to more games of the "shine on, you crazy diamond" variety. It's also a big part of the reason I'm enjoying roguelikes so much. It's a genre where the barrier to entry is so low that if someone things "you know what would rock? If Doom was a turn-based RPG. [http://doom.chaosforge.org/]" they can make that game.

Also, Kickstarter is interesting to me for that reason. It might open the door to really interesting pet projects. For instance, this one:


...at least after it is developed enough that the guy making it feels ready to actually put it on Kickstarter.

 

[Busard]

Suprised no-one has mentioned Passage, a freeware game where all you do is walk left or right, while a timer goes down until your character dies. So all lives eventually end, I thought that was common knowledge, funnily enough.

Oh yeah, I tried this one. It was surprisingly at an expo in switzerland about video games in general, and passage was on the show (as long as other games, thankfully, like Ico, GTA IV, Original Pac Man and even Journey, to my pleasure). Passage is REALLY blatantly pretentious though, because it not only rides on the exact same principle as other games like the Path, but the message is so blatantly obvious and flat that, in any other media, it would kinda be smiled upon (in a condescending way) by the general public.