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If you like Earthbound and / or WarioWare you should check out Undertale!
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11/04/15, 07:15 Edited: 11/04/15, 07:05
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It's really meant to be done last, and I can't imagine anyone accidentally starting it without already knowing about it--you really have to go out of your way to play the game that way, and they make it abundantly clear to you what you're doing. Like I always say, the game is always a step ahead of you when it comes to this stuff, and it's fully aware that you're only doing it because you want to see what happens. It's playing off of people's completionist tendencies. That's the whole point!
The most brilliant moment in the whole thing is when one character tells you that at least you have the guts to do it yourself, unlike people who just watch someone else do it. "There's probably someone like that watching right now!"
And the "punishment" isn't even bad. It changes one minor detail in the game's "The End" screen, and that's it. Granted, you're not supposed to know that there's a punishment going in...
...I like it when developers get overly clever though. It's like when I got mad about having to replay the whole thing because I killed one frog at the very beginning to get the "true" ending. On the one hand, yeah, that sucks, but on the other hand, it makes perfect sense within the context of the game, and expecting anything less would feel a little fake. Having played like 500 different games in my life, it's really easy to see where games tend to cheese things a little bit to make their experience more "player friendly," and it takes a lot out of the game for me when I can pick up on that.
It's like how none of your choices in the Mass Effect games actually change anything in regards to which missions you do, which party members you recruit, and what the overall story is. "Oh, your Salarian doctor died in Mass Effect 2? Conveniently, here's an identical Salarian doctor in Mass Effect 3!"
Having a game with actual consequences is a breath of fresh air to me. It ups the stakes by a lot. |
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I don't mean overly clever to mean making choices matter, I mean overly clever like in "ha ha you did this one thing now you can't ever do this huge chunk of the game." But it seems everyone was over-exaggerating what doing the genocide first does anyway. I was under the impression that if you do that first you can never do the other paths.
As for the whole cleverness of something like SOME PEOPLE DON'T EVEN HAVE THE GUTS TO DO THIS THEMSELVES AND THEY'RE WATCHING RIGHT NOW... my brother was telling me all about it and I was like... "meh". I don't find that particularly clever because I don't find it a particularly interesting statement. Guts is irrelevant, people are watching because that is modern gaming culture. Even though I don't personally get it AT ALL, these let's plays and stuff are huge. I highly doubt there is much of anyone out there who chose to watch instead of play because they just felt too bad about killing digital creatures themselves. Most people are watching because that's the easy way to experience a game without having to put in the work nowadays. Or whatever. Hell, I have no idea why let's plays are so huge.
I'm already so over the whole ha ha you're actually a bad person for doing the violence the game asked you to "cleverness" anyway, it's getting pretty overdone and it was never particularly interesting to me. Maybe because I never drew much of a line between smoking waves of enemies in say... Uncharted... versus doing it in these games anyway. So at the end of Hotline Miami when the whole twists turns out to be THERE WAS NO POINT TO ANY OF THIS AND YOU MURDERED TONS OF PEOPLE FOR NOTHING?!!? my first thought was... is there ever really a point to most video game violence besides "violence is fun"? Sure a lot of games try to build some story to obfuscate that fact, but they usually start with "violence is fun" and go from there.
And of course this is where Jack Thompson was wrong... more or less I'd say video game violence is a pretty innocent act precisely because it is a video game and not real life. That's not to say I think there is NO connection between media violence and real life violence, but it's certainly tough to find a clear one. I'm not saying it can't make us FEEL bad, but there is no real moral weight behind that. I don't want to kill all of these enemies in Undertale because the ending I had made me feel nice and that was a good place to stop, not because I actually think it would be ethically wrong of me to do so. So it's hard to make a game that can actually make me feel like they "got" me with their clever tricking me into partaking in violence, because I've partaken in violence in games for years and I never deluded myself to think that it wasn't because, on some level, violence in games is fun and that's (probably?) ok. It's not some hard fact I'm going to be shocked to find out about myself. I mean, the only reason I ever gave a shit about Mortal Kombat is the gratuitous violence that went beyond anything I'd played to that point. Ripping out spines and stuff well... that was fun.
For awhile, anyway. Got kind of old fast.
With that said I do tend to be more interested in non-violent games nowadays because I think they can tell more interesting stories and, hopefully, give more interesting gameplay than the stuff I've been playing for years (because you know, violence IS fun and thus it is one of the quickest go tos in gaming), and that is why I thought Undertale was brilliant... it turned non-violence (and making friends, etc.) into a serious gameplay mechanic in a genre that we rarely see non-violence in. |
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Zero said:I'm already so over the whole ha ha you're actually a bad person for doing the violence the game asked you to "cleverness" anyway, it's getting pretty overdone and it was never particularly interesting to me. Maybe because I never drew much of a line between smoking waves of enemies in say... Uncharted... versus doing it in these games anyway. So at the end of Hotline Miami when the whole twists turns out to be THERE WAS NO POINT TO ANY OF THIS AND YOU MURDERED TONS OF PEOPLE FOR NOTHING?!!? my first thought was... is there ever really a point to most video game violence besides "violence is fun"? Sure a lot of games try to build some story to obfuscate that fact, but they usually start with "violence is fun" and go from there. I'm with you there. Well, I liked it in Hotline Miami because that was one of the first games to be all subversive and do it, but now it feels like you can't do the same "twist" again without covering the same territory. Undertale understands this though, the characters in the Genocide run who are more aware of what's really going on are basically coming at you from the perspective of, "You're not good or evil, you just want to see what's going to happen, but either way, we can't let you do that." I think regular Undertale does a good job with the opposing violence theme because it straight-up tells you not to do it, and you have the option not to. Stuff like Spec Ops: The Line is cool, but there's a little bit of suspension of disbelief there since it's a totally linear game and unless you want to just stop playing entirely, you don't have any other choice but to press forward. Granted, there's suspension of disbelief either way because the games aren't actually real, but I think certain games do it better than others. |
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