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Gaming Clown World |OT| Twisted Mental
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Thread: Gaming Clown World |OT| Twisted Mental
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This might explain why so many writing-heavy games (like fantasy and sci-fi RPGs, and cutscene-heavy action games) seem to have plunged so much deeper into the SJW rhetoric than other genres.
macapala
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Who cares? Square has sucked for a long time.
cryptoadam
Needs a Spellchecker
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lmimmfn
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Once again proving why XBox is trash
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Curious how our European D-padders feel about this one.
To me it reads like another tract in the fucking 1619 Project for video game history; this whole trend of downplaying Nintendo and the U.S. video game crash like anybody gives a shit about the Sinclair and BBC Micro besides YouTubers is pure rubbish for the bin.
To me it reads like another tract in the fucking 1619 Project for video game history; this whole trend of downplaying Nintendo and the U.S. video game crash like anybody gives a shit about the Sinclair and BBC Micro besides YouTubers is pure rubbish for the bin.
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It was huge for the hobbyist scene in the UK, I'm not sure how much impact it had beyond the local market here though. The BBC Micro was more of an educational tool moreso than a strictly developmental one.
The ZX Spectrum though, that's a different story and is no doubt an important piece of hardware for early gaming. It's probably the most influential piece of hardware from the 80s. It kickstarted the UK's IT industry and lead to the rise of companies such as Rareware and Shiny Entertainment, the UK gaming industry simply doesn't exist without it.
Saruhashi
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I think that it's kind of like the movie industry.
Sure, people all over the world have been making great movies since the medium existed but if we are talking about mass-market blockbusters using cutting edge tech then you are talking almost exclusively about the US. At least from the 80s through to the present day.
For video-game consoles it's really Japan from the 90s onwards and for the games themselves it would be Japan and the US leading the way most of the time.
Doesnt mean there haven't been great indie and niche games going around and some more obscure tech with excellent games playing on it.
I think you could maybe downplay Nintendo and Japan's importance these days but from the mid 80s through until 2001 they were completely dominant.
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Not knocking the UK microcomputer scene because I think it's really cool and interesting, but the idea that the video game crash didn't happen because it didn't affect the UK tells me that it's because it was irrelevant to the global market, not the other way around like these guys and their YT counterparts keep trying to sell.
They also play this game where they'll champion Japan as an "own", as if the American market wasn't the biggest consumer of Japanese games in the world… trying to conflate and confuse the US industry with the US market. It's driving me nuts lol.
I really think it's an anti-USA "decolonization" gaslighting project (a la 1619) that's only going to get worse. They're also doing the "ya know Saturn was actually successful in Japan… stupid Americans" too. Oh yeah? How many games sold a million copies? Where's all those Saturn born franchises now?
lol no it was actually documented as early as 1993 in this book, but was widely talked about before, sometimes referred to as the Atari Shock.
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Chris Kolher's book "Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life" came out in 2004.
The "anti-crash, gaming history is US-centric" narrative as far as I can tell is only from the last few years, maybe more recently even — since the GG 2.0 "second crash" talk.
lol no it was actually documented as early as 1993 in this book, but was widely talked about before, sometimes referred to as the Atari Shock.
oh wow! I was tapping Kohler's 2004 book. Good pull!!!
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lol no it was actually documented as early as 1993 in this book, but was widely talked about before, sometimes referred to as the Atari Shock.
Cool description.
Liberty4all
Member
The crash was good to me. Christmas of 83 I got sooooooooooooo many Coleco Vision games. It was raining games on 7 year old me that Christmas. Was glorious
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First Law of Modern Gaming: Everything that can be, will be Fortnite.
www.gematsu.com
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves adds Cristiano Ronaldo as playable fighter
Portuguese professional footballer Cristiano Ronaldo will be a playable fighter in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, SNK announced.
www.gematsu.com
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First Law of Modern Gaming: Everything that can be, will be Fortnite.
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves adds Cristiano Ronaldo as playable fighter
Portuguese professional footballer Cristiano Ronaldo will be a playable fighter in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, SNK announced.
Video games are wild
I've been in gaming since the late 80's and it wasn't until I got online in the late 90's that I even heard of the 'videogame crash' America had. In the same way you don't care about our gaming market, we didn't give a shit about yours either. Your crash was a local event, that barely registered in the rest of the world.
The globalised 'gaming industry' as we know it today really only manifested in the 2000's, and America only became a major driving force with the 360 and Steam.
Prior to that Japan was usually the only truly international force in gaming.
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I think the fact that the UK and Europe didn't notice the crash has more to do with it's relevance at the time than the US' impact. It had the microcomputer backwater. Eventually, the "crash" shaped world reached the UK and we're all here now and you're playing all the same shit as the rest of us.
I think it's great that there's a pride and resurgent interest in the history of UK and Europe's early gaming scenes, but it's really going too far when people are trying to swap Alpha Waves in for Super Mario 64 Indiana Jones style, or say the Saturn was "umm… actually" successful in Japan to try and make the US gaming audience look like myopic chauvinists.
Europe has their own market and favor their own genres, like strategy games, adventure games, RPGs and simulators. Games with a bit more depth. PC was always the biggest system in there.
Japan obsession is primarily a US thing. I don't have exact data but I think Nintendo never been too big in Europe. It's a Sony land (where they found success as an extension of their TV business). In eastern Europe Nintendo barely exists.
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Yep. PC is the main platform. Playstation is the most popular console. Because of FIFA and stuff.
This was accurate in the 90s but over the years, the differences are way less significant now. Comparing the German vs Global Steam best sellers for example, it's basically the same outside of like one Train Simulation game. There are slight variations and Farming Simulator is more popular in Europe, but the markets are very similar nowadays.
The big games sell everywhere. There's a tendency towards a bit different games in Europe, nothing too dramatic though.
What I'd really like to do at some point is really dig into the history of the South American gaming market.
It was as different a landscape as N America, Europe and Japan, but really diverted with its obsession with Sega and extreme poverty making retro gaming 'current' even to this day.
It's a bizarre offshoot of our hobby that I'd love to know more about.
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Super interesting. I got a couple of buddies down there in Brazil and Argentina and yeah it's like a parallel universe. MSX also penetrated there as well as Sega via TecToy, and the way it shaped their taste and trajectory is fascinating. And the have a ton of talent in "retro" development (JoyMasher, Seba Games, Banana Bytes). Gaming is still very expense (legally) and there's regulations that make it very difficult to develop games in Brazil.
If I can find them I have cool videos from an Argentina dev talk that touches on their place in the gaming world from their POV. Huge shmup scene there… like if that genre ever became popular again, we'd be talking about South American countries like we talk about Pakistan in Tekken and Mexico in KOF.
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Gamers: AAA is ruining gaming! Budgets are out of control! Design by committee is awful!
Also gamers: Small devs using AI tools are ruining gaming!
Game doesn't even have 50 reviews and is getting "bombed" for AI assets. Anyone remember when electronic music wasn't "real music" because it was made by computers?
The anti-AI movement is Lars Ulrich crying about MP3s and Napster. Change My Mind.
Also gamers: Small devs using AI tools are ruining gaming!
Game doesn't even have 50 reviews and is getting "bombed" for AI assets. Anyone remember when electronic music wasn't "real music" because it was made by computers?
The anti-AI movement is Lars Ulrich crying about MP3s and Napster. Change My Mind.
I'm mixed on the AI thing. There will still be a "look" that will be hard to shake (no different than the typical Unity or Unreal Engine look). And big corporations will use it too. It won't necessarily "level the playing field".
And gamers are craving genuine content they can connect with instead of the mega corporation slop. That's a big reason why indie is rising in popularity in the first place: plenty of gamers want that hand-crafted personal touch instead of a made-by-committee 500+ person studio handling the game. AI will not make games look more creative or less corporate in the same way that Unity's diverse toolset didn't prevent the flood of cheap pastel china-mill game assets.
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To expand on this: when is the last time you played a AAA game that genuinely felt like a passion project? Solo devs or very small teams are way more likely to be invested in making a game they want to play rather than a cynical product designed to extract dollars. It's a breath of fresh air to see games like Valheim, Brotato, Halls of Torment, Balatro, Mullet MadJack and more thrive when corporate gaming is becoming increasingly detached from what the customers actually want.
Saruhashi
Member
I agree in some aspects but I also disagree in others.
For people like us I think there will always be a place for human-crafted videogame experiences. Even if it only goes as far as "this guy painstakingly made this game all by himself so I will give him the $25 and see how it plays".
For the larger gaming landscape there's only so much money to go around and only so much available for developing games. So if you have AI generated slop also generating the larger share of revenue it takes money away from non-slop projects.
I think if you look at social media platforms and platforms like YouTube and Spotify the overall trend is towards massively popular brian-rot content and away from genuine content made by people with real passion. However, on a more granular level there are still the odd nuggets of gold that can be found where real people are making real good content because they have passion and talent.
I would bet that a lot of the content people already consume is heavily AI generated but the creators just won't admit it.
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100%. It doesn't change anything in and of itself.
I think it's embedded in my thinking that we are, for all intents and purposes already in an AI-generated content era. Pixar/Fortnite, political fuchsia and danger hair, sterile photo realism… it's just a wetware C-suite instead of an LLM. I think actual AI is just exposing that all "art" is only as good as its prompts. GIGO.
I think the reactionary allergy to AI is only going to result in a "purity test" which only serves publishers and devs who can afford "acceptable" art… the joke being every digital art tool chain is incorporating AI.
To stretch the music comparison, we didn't have this chicken little concern when music recording went digital; everyone was happy to think their favorite artists were sitting in an dim amber lit studio just feeling the vibes, and not all isolated, not even always there at same time, with an engineer copy-pasting a perfectly quantized "fixed" sample in ProTools and repeating it over and over, exactly how dance music is made… never mind the cost of professional mastering locking small artists out of all major distribution channels before cheap DAWs changed the indie game.
I'm pretty mixed too honestly, just think the Luddite reaction is completely misguided.
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That's kind of my point though; how stupid is it that one dev using AI for asset creation is soulless, and a game like Assassin's Creed with a 2 hour credit scroll is "human crafted"?
1997
Very true. Same time, how many dorks don't play indies because of their graphics and presentation?
If/when the AI asset generation catches up that it's indistinguishable, it will be very ironic that only giant publishers that afford to employ human artists and virtue signal the narrative they are the pro-human solution.
Saruhashi
Member
I agree that it's very stupid.
I wouldn't be surprised if games like AC Shadows were already extensively using AI on top of all the people listed in the credits.
We'll see how it goes in the future anyway but I think AI will become a bigger and bigger factor in gaming whether we like it or not. Normies will eat that shit up.
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Agree with the principle but disagree about Spotify in particular …. I think the negative effect of Spotify is individuation, siloing, and ultimately mediating an experience we used to have with each other from recording mixtapes to P2P file sharing. The algorithm is myself though: from 80s bubble-era Japanese pop to psychedelic rock from Zambia, I'm not (or at least don't feel) herded towards a conclusion like YouTube, or TikTok — which is really the "radio" broadcast in the analogy vs. Spotify's "mixtape discovery".
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That's fair, but on a personal level you're also denying yourself the opportunity to get better at making art assets. I don't mind people doing it for a game with a scope and scale that makes it unrealistic to make on their own, but people taking a shortcut at every opportunity is trading a skill for convenience (something that happens tragically often throughout human history).
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Might as well be though, right? Remember all the details they got wrong about Japanese culture in the first trailer? AI can't draw hands, Ubisoft's wetware artist network can't draw cultures.