Shaky Cam Games

Rocketboy13

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Oct 21, 2008
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ecoho said:
Rocketboy13 said:
Also not strictly speaking a Republican policy, just popularized by them.
for the love of god can we all agree not to talk about politics because what ever you say there will be at least one person offened......:(
My bad. I just thought I would clarify for him as he is an Australian.
 

The_ModeRazor

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Jul 29, 2009
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El Gostro said:
Your comments have inspired me to write an article on the rise,fall and abandonment of my gaming life and times...
Cool.
Maybe you get to post it on the wall.
 

w1ndscar

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Jul 22, 2009
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Yahtzee Croshaw said:
The last game that specifically drew attention to the camera was Mario 64, and only because it was relatively new technology. At the beginning they established that the controllable camera was being held on a fishing line by a small cloud monster. But who was filming whenever the cloud monster was on screen, Nintendo? You won't be lasting long if you keep trying to feed us that kind of bullshit.
I Lol'd
 

onelifecrisis

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Mar 1, 2009
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I just read the article. I always read these articles and always end up feeling it was a waste of 60 seconds. But this week... OMG! Yahtzee! You wrote something interesting! Even thought-provoking! Well done, sir. More articles like this please. :)
 

Misho-

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May 20, 2010
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onelifecrisis said:
I just read the article. I always read these articles and always end up feeling it was a waste of 60 seconds. But this week... OMG! Yahtzee! You wrote something interesting! Even thought-provoking! Well done, sir. More articles like this please. :)
Lol This is nothing against you onelifecrisis in particular, but whenever I read the phrase " I feel like I've wasted X amount of time (playing-reading-writing... You get the idea) this" It makes me wonder...

What else would you do in say 60 seconds? I mean I can think in some impossible things like, read a life changing article, lose your virginity (and the respect of your sex partner... remember- 60 seconds only), complete a mario Stage, smoke a cigarrete, go back in time and save the world from Mecha Jesus or something... But realistically it even takes you 60 seconds to fire up some internet pages (depending on Internet velocity) You could just stare into the horizon and lose more than 60 seconds before you realize it... I mean why are people saying things like "you've made me lose 60 seconds I'll never get back... Now I have to get back to my busy schedule of doing nothing and not changing life in the slightest..." If that's the case why not indulge yourself seeing a little article good for a couple of chuckles and maybe some analitical view on games and life?

It makes you sound so snobish when you say "i've lost 60 seconds"... But again, its nothing against the guy who posted. I guess he really is busy saving the world and changing millions of lives 60 seconds at a time.

But agreed, bring some more of this articles Yahtzee!
 

Lunar Templar

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Sep 20, 2009
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Labcoat Samurai said:
Yahtzee Croshaw said:
You have a big angry bloke who seriously needs to get over something, generally a lady friend.
Gabriel Belmont was not particularly angry in the game. I would say more that he was conflicted, and not just for personal reasons, and if you watch the end (before the credits...), he makes peace with everything he's done and forgives himself.

They take it out on non-human creatures with a weapon that incorporates a chain so that it can have a decent reach.
Kratos kills humans too, incidentally. He pretty much kills everyone. Gabriel only kills the monstrous. And every single action game I can think of has that. Even TFU has you killing Rancors.

It has quick light attacks and slow heavy attacks,
Well.... technically Castlevania divides it into single enemy and multiple enemy attacks. Both do have light and heavy attacks, but so does just about every game ever.

as well as combos involving the two, air combos and the ability to grab and instakill the enemy with the circle button if you're just completely bored with tossing the guy around.
Every action game I can think of has air combos. Castlevania does have some grab insta-kills against some enemies, and not *every* action game does. Though a lot do.

You gather souls from enemies and use them to upgrade your combos and magic spells you learn along the way, and collect things that eventually make your health and magic bars bigger.
Just about every single action game has this. (I can't think of an exception off the top of my head, but there are a couple I'm not completely sure of... like I can't remember if you upgrade your health bar in NG2, but you certainly collect 'souls')

Then at the end of it you kill whoever the local equivalent of Satan is.
Hades is God of War's equivalent of Satan. So even God of War doesn't fit this formula. Unless you just generically mean "The game has an end boss". And all action games do.

Many games mix and match some or most of these elements but the three that do every single one of them are God of War, Dante's Inferno and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.
Apart from not *technically* being true, due to Gabriel being a different sort of protagonist, why exactly do you think this is? Might it be because you cherry picked? Bayonetta and Castlevania share a timed block/dodge slowdown mechanic that none of the other games have. God of War shares multiple selectable primary weapons with Ninja Gaiden II, and Castlevania does not have this. Ninja Gaiden II and Heavenly Sword both have chain weapons.

Almost everything you listed is *extremely* common in action games to the point that nearly every one has it. The only exceptions are chain weapons and grab finishers. These aren't the feature for feature copies you want to make them out to be.
only thing i can hope to add to this is,
Castlevania has been using 'chain based' weapons longer then God of War has even been a thought, since nether of the 'good' games listing in the LoS review you play as a Belmont as the main character
 

Freeze_L

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Feb 17, 2010
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All the movies that did this, successfully, had various reasons to do so. Often the film was a fake documentary and, very often, budget restrictions. The camera guy was always a character, he was part of the film, and it made you feel more linked into the events, even though you are strictly an outsider. You are watching what "really" happened, you get lost in the film. It might even work in games if it were addressed like that, but you would have to be an outsider watching the game and controlling things (like heavy rain) or the cameraman himself.

In fact that is an interesting idea for a survival horror game, you play as the camera-man, and our powerless to help. That would be hard to pull of but a game version of Diary of the Dead would be pretty scary.
 

NapoleonSolo

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Mar 8, 2010
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I think yahtzee may be the only videogame critic that combines social criticism intelligently with his cynical videogaming rants. While I did have fun with God of War 3, the whole time I just couldn't empathize with Kratos cause he is a massive, massive dick (so to all you guys who do love him, you guys are dicks, and if anyone takes this as a literal attack on their personality I'll... well I won't give a shit to be honest). Like the whole game is based around the guilt he feels after killing his family in a wave of mindless violence... so his solution is to kill everything he sees in a wave of mindless violence.

I get this feeling that Kratos is one of those kids who just fucks shit up and says "look what I did daddy!" and then daddy doesn't really care, and after daddy doesn't go to his ball games Kratos acts out and eventually everyone in the family is worried when police discover he has been pepped up on heroin and decapitating neighbourhood cats after impulsively burning down a house. He goes on to become a depraved and savage serial killer, and after murdering his family literally, after delusions of viewing them as these powerful gods that must be brought down (because his first family was I dunno, a lego kit that he destroyed in a tantrum or something) the judge says, "the power was in you all along!" and kratos' wave of self serving destruction somehow manages to stave of a terrorist attack and he is rewarded with a presidential pardon.
 

beema

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Aug 19, 2009
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He can stop using the "like God of War" phrase when they stop making games that are exact carbon copies of it.

Also, shaky cam can go to hell. That's pretty weird that they put it in Castlevania.
 

rddj623

"Breathe Deep, Seek Peace"
Sep 28, 2009
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You conclusion is completely accurate...I shall have to play RE:5 to find out if I'm a racist...
 

GordonFawx

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Mar 19, 2008
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To be fair? I agree with everything you say BUT one thing.

I still like the phrase "Like God of War, but..."; simply because it works so well for these games. I don't like the style of game that's represented by the category (genre at this stage?) but whatever; I like strategy games so I probably have other issues to deal with; including attachment issues since I'm paralyzed with fear at loosing units. Except American ones; because they somehow have ruthlessly stupid AI and give me plenty of reason to hate them enough to want to see them dead.

Also; I'd suggest reviewing Company of Heroes but you've established you're sick of World War 2 games. And don't like strategy games. And it's old.

Keep up the good work!
 

Grygor

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Oct 26, 2010
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unwesen said:
I'm saying Cloverfield wasn't good. That's not an opinion, because a plot is kind of necessary to call it a movie. If I may quote from Wikipedia: "A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a story conveyed with moving images." Story needs plot, or it's no story.
Not quite, no.

Properly speaking, plot is a subset of story. A story is a sequence of events; a plot is a sequence of events that are causally related.

To quote E.M Forster, "'the king died and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died and then the queen died of grief' is a plot."

Atmos Duality said:
You forgot Devil May Cry in that list. God of War is literally identical to it, minus the QTEs (so it's automatically better by default in my book.)
Replace "Magic Spells" with "Guns" or "Techniques", change the Gothic/Tower setting to a Greek setting and you really do have nearly the same game...

Now I'm wondering which game came first...
Let's just say that the first God of War came out a month after Devil May Cry 3.
 

nipsen

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Sep 20, 2008
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AceAngel said:
I wonder if Yahtzee ever get depressed...because you know, half of the people posting are MISSING THE BLOODY POINT in his EP.
..what did you expect? A mass of internet folks going: "maybe my fanboyish group therapy sessions on the internet - along with the religious reverence to conventional wisdom - actually is an expression of a deep-seated desire to be accepted by others!". You know.. won't happen.
 

Laggings

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Mar 10, 2010
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I disagree with this Extra Punctuation to an extend, the first part that is. I like the handheld camera style and think it does have a tendency to give a game a more intense feel, if done right. It doesn't have to be completely over the line like in Kane and Lynch 2, although I liked the idea there too and it would have been the only reason for me to play the game. I think it's never a bad idea to give the camera a feeling of "heaviness" opposed to a hasty guinea pig's astral projection frolicking around the stage.

I see the point of the camera being explained as something that exists within the game rather than being a mere mechanic allowing us view the action breaking the feel of immersion, in a way. But for me, that feeling is even more flawed by a camera that does three full circles around the main character in little more than a second. It makes the meticulously designed models and realistic lighting look like a lego-movie somehow.

I am also sick and tired of people claiming the Blair Witch Project and its copycats would give them "motion sickness" by the way (Yahtzee didn't do that, so no offense), I don't know how anyone would really feel that way if they can handle twitching the camera from left to right pretty much constantly in an fps for a broader field of view. I don't know why the found footage genre is getting so popular now and not directly after the Blair Witch Project came out. I quite like it, but it doesn't automatically make for a good film. Zombie Diaries was awful ...

But back to handheld style in gaming - If you give the player the ability to fully control the camera, he's likely to do stupid things, such as moving it to a position to have constant top-view, which e.g. in a horror game would immensely compromise the feeling of fear. When you are given the choice between letting the camera stick to the floor of a hallway to make a rat look like big foot or letting it float under the ceiling to make monsters look like fourth graders, unless you're really trying to stress yourself or others, you're likely to pick #2 as it almost guarantees a less-stress gaming situation. And makes the people who designed the monsters cry a little inside.

Look at the first Silent Hills and then look at Homecoming (or Hoecummin' as I like to refer to it) - obviously the reasons for the suckiness of the latter are found mostly in the soulless minds of the American developers, but I think the camera plays a role in it too. There are no loading screens between doors, meaning that enemies can follow you around, but still, they seem much less threatening than in the previous games, when we are able to spin the camera around the room until we absolutely definitely get the most practical viewpoint for killing them off. Silent Hill 2 often had these static camera angles which we could sometimes pan around but not move, or the hospital-basement-bit in SH3. Does it make sense a game-camera would be stuck on a slowly turning wheel of a fallen over wheelchair? It doesn't when the camera is a mere mean of granting us insight, but it does when the camera is used for a dramaturgical effect. And even though it may make the game a little more frustrating to play, and the controls a little more whacky, I'm willing to put up with it. So maybe we don't need a camcorder on a stick, but a game-camera that moves a bit less hasty, shakes just that little bit once we're running full speed and has the boldness to set a few limitations for the sake of effect.

I dream of a game-camera not with the moving patterns of Cloverfield but in the style of Children of Men.
 

onelifecrisis

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Mar 1, 2009
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Misho- said:
onelifecrisis said:
I just read the article. I always read these articles and always end up feeling it was a waste of 60 seconds. But this week... OMG! Yahtzee! You wrote something interesting! Even thought-provoking! Well done, sir. More articles like this please. :)
Lol This is nothing against you onelifecrisis in particular, but whenever I read the phrase " I feel like I've wasted X amount of time (playing-reading-writing... You get the idea) this" It makes me wonder...

What else would you do in say 60 seconds? I mean I can think in some impossible things like, read a life changing article, lose your virginity (and the respect of your sex partner... remember- 60 seconds only), complete a mario Stage, smoke a cigarrete, go back in time and save the world from Mecha Jesus or something... But realistically it even takes you 60 seconds to fire up some internet pages (depending on Internet velocity) You could just stare into the horizon and lose more than 60 seconds before you realize it... I mean why are people saying things like "you've made me lose 60 seconds I'll never get back... Now I have to get back to my busy schedule of doing nothing and not changing life in the slightest..." If that's the case why not indulge yourself seeing a little article good for a couple of chuckles and maybe some analitical view on games and life?

It makes you sound so snobish when you say "i've lost 60 seconds"... But again, its nothing against the guy who posted. I guess he really is busy saving the world and changing millions of lives 60 seconds at a time.

But agreed, bring some more of this articles Yahtzee!
:)

I didn't realise that "I've wasted [insert time here]" was so commonly said on the internet! In any case, I was just trying to convey that EP isn't usually very good IMO. I wasn't really suing for my 60 seconds back. ;)