Killer7 SINdicate

For me I view Super Metroid as the artistic synergy between arcade game design, and 'art'.
Something like Demon's Souls is probably the modernish version of that game design style.

That Angel dude did talk about Taro's merits as an artist. That's an argument you should have with him.
Me I'm just like, "ok bruh. You like the game. Good for you. It's still shit."
You know that Xed guy (he told me not to say his name, but I think he'd make an exception for this.)
does actually like Taro's games to almost as passionate a level as you do, so it's a shame that you can't have that convo with him. At least not in public around here, since he doesn't seem interested. He doesn't read my fucking posts either, so I have to just deal with his assumptions.

Do you believe that 'synergy' is possible in a game that isn't 'arcade'?

I really think this comes back to the lost gamer taking comfort in the quantifiable (due to autism). Does what you like in any other medium follow rules this clean? And if not, why would you expect such standards to work in video games?

We can criticise films on their adherence to principles of cinematic purity, but that probably wouldn't track very well with what most of us enjoy in film. We could say everyone is doing it wrong, but on what grounds do you say one has to do this?

What is "passive", what does it mean to be a passive audience? Simply not holding a controller? Personally I don't even think I'd draw a line between intellectual and sensory pleasure. You're either getting a high of stimulation, or merely a low novelty suppression of boredom. I might not be able to think as deliberately and produce as many words on Drakengard as I could Full Metal Jacket, but inside I'm firing in response to each.

You talk about games as more like a drug, to reach stimulant sensations.
The older crowd, Icy, Electric guy, me, we view games as a performance + art. I personally couldn't care less about the emotional satisfaction from a game. I'm only interested in solving problems.
It's this key ingredient that separates gaming preferences between older & younger players.
Even Melonie Mac claims that a game is just problem solving, and it's shocking that she's smart enough to figure that out lol but she's fucking 40 yrs old anyway. So it probably just comes with the territory.

I don't need an emotional high from my games. I just want to kill shit. Now how that's done, doesn't really matter to me since I can kill a lot of shit in a Strategy Romance of the Three Kingdoms game, to turnbased like Tactics Ogre, or just pure normie shit like Marvel Rivals. I judge the games by how well they implement the rulesets, the rulesets are how we interact with the game. It's what makes something like Until Dawn a game, even though it's about 97% movie.
With something like Until Dawn, I change the mindset from killing shit, to how long can I survive while suffering all of these morons in the game? With something like Darkest Dungeon it's I just want to kill shit and how long can I survive while suffering these morons in my party?

My directive or goal changes depending on the concept of the game. I don't play games to feel emotions, I play them to temper or refine my decision making skills.
I just view it as another form of exercising.

Now that simply doesn't hold under any kind of scrutiny. We've ironed out something that feels like a theory from the most quantifiable part of video games, which are an art form. And now we're working backwards from there. "exercising", it's not reasonable to become a devotee of Killer7 because it's such effective decision-making exercise. You become a devotee of Killer7 because it is aesthetically and intellectually fascinating.

Pure games I might play as mental exercise. But there are very few pure games, or games that can even be treated as such. Until Dawn isn't a survival exercise, it's an exercise in predicting the reactions put in place by a writer. There's mental work in that, but it's not hardcore calorie-burning mental strain. It's a movie with a cheap gimmick.

Have you ever tried to think out a "ruleset" based critique of Killer7? How do you think that would go?

I am Halo: Combat Evolved's strongest soldier in the world. I believe there's no competition. In trying to finally answer to my satisfaction the question "who wrote Halo?" (several people) I found a lot of interesting comments from the non-Bungie general professional "writers" who Microsoft brought in to support the project. Editors, manual-producers, etc. One of these guys, Eric Nylund, said something what you just wrote reminded me of. He said "Writing is re-writing".

And that's just common sense amongst writers. The more you reread a story, that more that you start to see relationships that you could expand upon or rearrange. Within gaming, you'll be forced to change or rewrite the story around when you realize that the characters don't work as a game squad or party, even though said squad could've had excellent synergy had it been a movie where it's normal for supporting cast to simply support the 1 or 2 leads. Film writing is structured by how much you can limit the budget. Music writing is based around how much story you can tell with as few words as possible.
The only reason I even bothered to concede to Rake and agree with him when he labeled me as an artist is because he told me that a lot of the shit that I say about the gods & ideas & how we're used as vessels, sounds like convos he's had with his art professor.
He also brought up an interview that David Lynch had where Lynch said what I also say that "we live in a dream."
I'm literally saying that, as did Lynch.
When I think of the word artist, I just think of Marxist Hipsters who smear their own shit on the wall, but I can concede to the artist label if artists are actually what he thinks it is, like his professor or David Lynch.
Those who can correspond with the divine.

These hangups over "art" are really out of date, and did a lot of terrible damage to culture and humanity in their own time. They have to be put to rest. We can't let posers claim all activity which isn't autistic engineering brained hard nosed practical boomer no-fun-allowed-ism. Art is expressive craft. It's fucking everything. Commie libtards are notoriously bad at it. Art is for cool people and evil Nazis. If you want we can say real art is when you tap into the Hitler-Force and God starts telling you what to do.

But where are these guys now? As far as I can tell Trautmann's biggest achievement since editing work for Halo (which he hates with a burning passion) is writing the Army of Two tie-in comics. While Eric Nylund, who strikes me as an extremely nice guy, writes more Zelazny-influenced mythology sci-fi but struggles to find commercial success.

Do you see where I'm going? Who are the real writers here? Bungie's internal guys were a bit like Nomura and Toriyama. If it's cool they're doing it. But their work is a mess. Nylund and Trautmann bring it together into a finished AAA product. Who in this equation is God speaking through(you may think God is not speaking through Halo, but you'd be wrong)?

I don't see why it matters what they're doing. What's Amy Hennig doing? Nothing. What's Avellone doing? Also nothing.
That's not indicative of their skill. I'd argue it's because of their skill which is the reason why they don't get work, because Corpos only want to hire Tumblr fan fic writers who are much easier to bully around and also underpay.
Last I checked, writers are always under appreciated in both hollywood & videogames. Music is the only medium outside of books, where writing is somewhat valued to a point.
However writing is the most important part, it's what gives the property life, it's personality. Its soul.
That's why nobody likes modern Star Wars or MCU. The writing is shit.

Avellone has been writing non-stop. Just his work is sterile, boring, garbage for an uncultured niche of retarded faggots whose company he prefers. Check for yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Ave ... ideo_games

And Hennig is only in a bit of a lull. She got to lead a big ambitious flagship recently (which completely crashed and burned).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Hennig#Works

You misunderstand what God is, because we're all emanations of God.
God is just consciousness and Gods are ideas. A god is basically a title or a job, and geometric avatars adopt that title. This is how we have multiple gods of war who are distinct & connected to their local culture. They're the same god or job application, it's just each world culture sees a different shape or interpretation that's based off of the local culture.
All of these gods originate from one god, as that's the source of creation.

Do I think that God is within Halo? Well it's a story filled with plenty of Christian allegory, but no I don't think it's saying a damn thing about God, or what our reality is. It just does what anime does and names various objects after Christian lore.
Matrix 2 & 3 did something similar and only the original Matrix did an ok job of explaining what our conflict is and even much of the dialog between Trinity, Morpheus & Neo were clever allegories of the reality outside of the perimeter. And no, it's not machines that Neo was connected to. It's much closer to how its depicted in the The 13th Floor, simulations within simulation.

Ahahaha. Halo is not a Christian game. It's a work which draws upon the unconscious spiritual bones of what it means to be white, in the same sense that you say Buddhism and 8 million Gods informs the Japanese.

Halo is actually quite on the nose with what it's doing, just it's so audacious, what it's doing is so far beyond the bounds of acceptability in the 21st century, that nobody can really process the idea that they were doing it. People just mindkill and revise what they're looking at on the spot when confronted with the parts of Halo that make this obvious.

This post is long enough, I won't elaborate now. This is just to say that broadly I do agree with and consider plausible your idea of people picking up on divine emanations informed and interpreted through their own culture and heritage. And that, by 2025, the Japanese are the last culture left in this sense, because everything we would interpret this feeling through ourselves is denied to us now.

Of course ideally the skills and the focus and the passion and vision are all flowing through one man, or team or whatever, but we're a sick culture and we've been actively suppressing talent, human quality, sanity, excellence, and brilliance for decades now. Anything good won't be cultivated and what we build is sterile, lacking its appropriate cultural base. Choose your player. Trautmann's grumpy boring pointless professionalism, or the Bungie office frat-house zoo where nobody will EVER finish ANYTHING on time without a gun to their head. And of course, since this time we've also managed to basically kill Bungie with no equivalent replacement emerging. Culture dies a bit more all the time.

This is what the real flood is. A flood of Indians lol. (That's a joke, but it's much closer than Halo's flood which seems to combine the locust showers from China to symbolize an end of the world.)
This is basically the conflict of MGS, ramplant decline but with nobody of merit to replace it, because we live in a bioleninist society where only those who spout correct opinions are allowed to fail upward.

Nobody with merit allowed to replace it. Important distinction to make there. The world of full of people of merit still. More than enough to revive culture and industry. Just they're all exiled to obscure corners of the internet because The Woke run everything and won't tolerate anybody not in the faggot coalition having anything.

All pretty true, and again, I won't really defend Taro's work on the execution of its writing. Instead I would say it's a game where the divine touch reached parts of it, but definitely not the finish of its storytelling. But listen to them and tell me they're not touched. I feel this way about many works. It's very hard to land a complete production.

Yes you love the music. Good for you, but I process that as art asset. Just because a piece of music came from a game, doesn't make it the game. Most composers are freelance and don't even work for the company that made the game. Why would I consider the art asset as the game when it's just a supplement? The game is the whole, not the sum of its parts.
Now I know what movie critics must feel like when ever they try to explain to gamers what art is, because from what I'm seeing, it seems to be a much too liberal definition of what defines a game as art.

We need to draw a clear line between "video game" (the whole work) and "game" (the contrived interactive challenge part of it).

Yes, the game is the whole, not the sum of its parts or the arcadeness of the "game" multiplied by the quality of the "art assets". The experience of the whole transforms each part into a piece of something new which we can't quantify alone anymore. The quality of the game by arcade reverse-engineering logic doesn't matter. When we talk about a "video game" we're talking about the final thing, which the "game" is another part of.

You like an art asset, but that's not the soul of the game.

I like the art assets in isolation, and the complete experience.

It can and does help the game, but the soul is the ruleset.

Which is just passable. Without the ruleset, there is no game. It's just a series of images & music, which yes can be interpreted as stand alone pieces of art, but I'm not making a statement about the art assets. I'm talking about the actual game. Which is shit, and I'm not sure why I need to change my mind about it being shit when I already thought it was shit over 20 years ago.
Your argument is look at this piece of art, give it chance. You're not convincing of the merits of the game. You're just pointing out that it has art assets that you appreciate. You're not actually talking about the game, in fact you seem to be ignoring the game.
It's similar to how mathematics basically is reality without the supplemental art assets (all of the imagery that we're seeing right now. We're simply the assets obscuring the mathematics.), the golden ratio is the formula that builds this reality. These are the building blocks, a game's rule set is the skeleton of the game.

I'm not talking about a "game", I'm talking about the video game "Drakengard". And I'm not asking you to take a chance on it. This is how I see things. I'm not suggesting there's quality in the thing stripped down to a hypothetical abstract wireframe form that you've missed. I'm saying we should take the fact it doesn't exist that way as meaningful. I'm saying take it as it is, not how you've deconstructed it in your head. There is no pure game.

And if you want to talk about true underlying structure, Drakengard is bigger than its game sections. The true organising structure underlying everything is, perhaps, the JRPG or action game form. The convention runs back to the start menu, the screens you go through to get to the game, and everything in between.

I'm old, I don't have time to play every shit game. I'm not going to waste my time to play a game, because it has a piece of art. Especially since it's mostly just the music, story and gfx that everyone loves. I could just longplay that on youtube.
This is why it's important for a game to be equal parts arcade & art like Super Metroid, Strider or Demon's Souls. Sure you can enjoy separate aspects of its art assets outside of the game, but it's only when you play those games that you truly experience what they are, and it's an experience that can't be found outside the domain of gaming.

Yes that's what I'm saying. The experience of every part of Drakengard is fundamentally transformed into one new experience distinct to every part as its own piece if you play it. And I like that whole new experience.

This feels completely contradictory to everything you wrote up to this point. If the transformed "true" experience is the whole thing taken together, then how can we talk about the value of abstract games?

Now for this whole section of you responding I'll just have to say it's hard to accurately carry over someone else's entire worldview as a third person so I won't tell you I have him perfectly captured and can't answer for him. You're taking an awful lot from not much.

Because I'm telling you common Japanese belief systems which I believe make it impossible for Japs to be classified as Atheists. Who's ever heard of an Atheist monarchy? That goes against the entire concept of monarchs. Even a constitutional ceremonious one.

I don't want to speak in detail for someone else's position so I won't.

It's not like I ever expected anything out of Hellsing, which has some occult elements but is obviously just about random cool shit because that's all it is.
What a lot of Japanese produce does do is retain callbacks to ancient history from Ghibli to One Piece.
These callbacks exist not due to esotericism, but due to their national character.

Cultural psyche, sure. Whether or not this could be called "religious" in the sense my friend met I won't take any further.

And second, if the stock life goes on we look at the horizon ending is just the extent of things, is that really a problem? You sound like you're suggesting there's potentially some great disillusionment to be had here, but frankly I don't see what it is you want that you're losing. What do you think they're channeling when they make all of these things you love? Do you think one has to be an esotericist to be a great artist? Honestly having read a lot of your posts I think you may believe that, and you may even be onto something.

I believe that Japanese evolved separately from White people but were also able to obtain a higher civilized culture. Hearing that they're Atheist makes me laugh because it indicates to me that Japs are just dogs imitating gods.

I'm not saying that Huwites are gods, but I am saying that much of the arts that they are responsible for attributed to them is due to the favoritism of the gods which granted them glory. Since the 15th or 16th century, Japan was the one other country who also seemed to be children of the sun. It seems authentic, but they're actually just pretending. How does life & society progress if you only know how to imitate?

At this point I want to ask what you think atheism means.

The problem with the Obama movie game, was simply that they were bad movies. We removed the game, but once that was gone there was nothing else to do. Gamedev carried on making genuinely pointless, irredeemable works. It is simply impossible to give a reason why one should bother playing American games from this era. Just look at them. They look like jokes now. Conflict: Denied Ops. Battle: Los Angeles.

I still need to respond to your other post. What I wanted to remark upon in that other thread was how Obama era culture was characterized by Anti-Terrorism which was also reflected within the pop culture. It's funny, because you don't hear any of that shit any more.
Now it's either Antifa or Maga terrorists which is weird to me because those Middle Eastern terrorists were real, but they got replaced with fakeness.

America never did anything interesting or compelling on Terrorism or War on Terror aesthetics. Japan gave us Dead Rising and Vampire Rain, off the top of my head, which are both awesome. And both are also very heavy works because they actually deal with the substance of terrorism and extreme ideologies in a way that would be radioactive in America. They're about depopulation and worthless eaters, and racewar, respectively.

Multiplayer games can be an enthralling experience when played at a high level and that's not reducing the game. That's what a game is, its soul is the play mechanics. They're the closest things to arcades that we have left, where you're rewarded with your skill. Not many games these days reward skill. I used to be in top 100 in several hero shooters and even used to have psn fan communities. What's shocking is a lot of hot girls took part in that and made me realize that several bitches in my team, including the captain are girls. I would even get hit on by some bitches from the opposing team and they'd made orgasm sounds, just because they love the sound of my voice.

Modern era is nothing like that anymore since everything is extremely moderated. All I hear are gay sounding Zoomers cussing me out, they basically sound like Riley from Boondocks.

I like some multiplayer games played seriously as games. Age of Empires 2 is probably the purest thing I play and am capable of enjoying. But my favourite online multiplayer "games" were ones I could fuck around in and have a weird hybrid experience with. I greatly enjoyed 'Rising Storm 2', which you could play as a "game" and try to win, but it was more about the breadth of crazy chaotic things which would happen over the course of a round playing out.

This post turned out way too long but revising it sounds painful. Feel free to disregard as much of it as you please if you want to reply to bits or pieces of it.

I found something that "might" have potential. Its called Elderfield https://welcome-to-elderfield.itch.io/w ... elderfield There is a demo for it on steam.



The assets are all original. The mechanics and content are sort of... I say that because its using an SH/Yamaoka inspired soundtract just like Termina(please don't let this become another cookie cutter trope). It also has a farming sim element using the RPG maker engine...in an environment that is overrun with farming sims, though.

The game, at least as far as the demo is concerned, doesn't really seem to have any strong narrative. The horror and monsters seem to be there just to be creepy with no real depth or theme behind them. The horror elements are more horror tropes than a solid narrative tied to the world. Maybe it will be more fleshed out as progress on the game continues.

Thematically, its shallow, but the demo is worth playing.