Thursday, April 10, 2008

Zero Punctuation: No More Heroes

Posted by _J_ at 5:42 PM

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6 comments:

_J_ said...

I thought No More Heroes was pretentious and stupid. Given that I spend seven minutes watching Adam play and that is the extent of my experience with the game I find this to be confirmation of how awesome I am at identifying stupid things.

Also, the graphics are shit.

April 10, 2008 at 5:44 PM
_J_ said...

Also I'm not sure when the fuck this idiotic notion entered the gamer zeitgeist but it god damned fucking well is not the case that "unique" and "good" mean the same thing.

Skydive was unique.

Do you fuckers masturbate to Skydive, too? God.

"This does something nothing else does!"

Wow. Great. Is that thing fun?! No? Well then fuck it.

April 10, 2008 at 5:51 PM
MA17 said...

You know that knock knock joke that eventually has the punchline "Orange you glad I didn't say banana?"? I think that to some extent the listener really is kind of glad he didn't say banana. Even though the joke structure is left unchanged (it's still a knock knock joke) from the times when the answer was banana, the time when the answer is orange is memorable because 1) it features a pun, which is ostensibly a joke, and 2) because it's not banana.

I think that mentality works for all sorts of things. Say banana enough times and it's nice to hear orange instead. Stand up for eight hours and it feels good to sit down. Sit down for eight hours and it feels good to stand up. Make enough good 2D Mario games and people will lose their minds over a good 3D one. Keep making fantasy-themed RPGs and the post-apocalyptic one will be named one of the best games ever.

Obviously being different doesn't automatically make that thing good, take the Skydive example. What Skydive understands (I suppose) is that doing something different is a good way to get noticed, but what I don't think they realized is that Mario64 and Fallout are well-executed games that are ALSO unique, and uniqueness can't replace substance. Skydive, in other words, doesn't say Orange, it says Dmanbpazxn, which is an unpronounceable jumble of randomly selected letters that doesn't mean anything. 1 point for being unique, 0 points for having any reason to exist.

I like No More Heroes for a few reasons, but one of them is because I believe that the game is designed to be the way it is as a sort of punishment for our not liking Killer 7. I've written about this here before, but the short version is that K7 was complicated and interesting and nobody bought it so he made the simplest and most brainless game he could out of the pieces of whatever was popular in order to exact his revenge.

That it's a Frankensteinian monster of pop gaming intended to shame us is an odd reason to like a game, I'll not try to defend myself there, but it's a frame though which every "what on earth was he thinking" becomes "this is what we thought we wanted", and that's both unique and substantial enough to justify praise.

April 10, 2008 at 7:11 PM
Unknown said...

I think it is a little bit arrogant to assume that we as a whole do not like Killer 7. The problem with Killer 7 is this little thing called availability. Until it was brought up by you, I had never even heard of this game. Perhaps the designer should have taken his frustration out upon his marketing team as opposed to us pawns who simply buy the games we are told might be good.

April 11, 2008 at 2:18 AM
_J_ said...

Arguably the most important requirements for jokes is that they be intelligible. Intelligible in the sense that they are coherently constructed and exist as self-sufficient entities. Certainly jokes only make sense within contexts such as the popular culture of any given society but within those contexts a joke needs to be constructed in a manner which allows the audience to understand it, to figure it out, on their own.

Said simply: A good joke requires no explanation.

This is the mentality I apply to games as well. Games, to use an idiom, ironically, need to stand on their own two feet. A game needs to be assessed within a vacuum since games are played within a vacuum.

An example of this is my dislike of Final Fantasy 7. The graphics are painfully bad to the point where they make the game unplayable. Since I do not give a shit about the little rhombus boy or octagon girl I do not enjoy playing the game. Contrast this with Lunar, the greatest RPG ever. Lunar's character design is such that I am compelled to learn what happens to these characters and I want to play the game.

Now, many will argue that Final Fantasy 7 needs to be judged within its place in our gaming history. It was designed at a time when 3D graphics were new and, for its time, it was revolutionary and beautiful.

But I don't fucking care.

I'm not going to play a game if the only way to make the experience tolerable is to constantly remind myself of the justifications for why the gameplay experience, which sucks, is justified. I'm not going to play Final Fantasy 7 if doing so requires that I constantly remind myself that the graphics are shitty because it is old.

"I believe that the game is designed to be the way it is as a sort of punishment for our not liking Killer 7."

That's the sort of thing I won't do for a game. I judge games based upon their own merits, within the vacuum of the gameplay experience itself. I'm not going to navigate through the convoluted extrapolation required to arrive at the "it's a Frankensteinian monster of pop gaming intended to shame us" conclusion; I refuse to put on my gaming beret and wax intellectual about the hidden depths of a shitty game with ass graphics in an attempt to justify its existence.

I think it is sensible to judge games as entities unto themselves rather than praise or condemn a game based upon other games. Fallout gains no bonus points for not containing elves. Psychonauts is not wonderful and awesome simply because people stopped making games like Grim Fandango and Monkey Island. The quality of a game is found within the gameplay experience itself not an academic exploration of the game within the history of gaming.

Now, I heart satire. And certainly satire only functions when one has knowledge of the thing being satirized. But I will happily maintain the position that gaming is not the place for satire. Certainly a game can contain a few jokes here and there. But if the totality of the game is a satire of pop culture gaming and the only justification for a games existence is that commentary on gaming? Then the game missed the point of gaming. We play games for many reasons, but deep social commentary portrayed through shitty graphics and rehashed bullshit from digital crapfests is not one of them.

April 11, 2008 at 10:23 AM
MA17 said...

Perhaps the designer should have taken his frustration out upon his marketing team as opposed to us pawns who simply buy the games we are told might be good.

I agree, but I think Suda did just that when he didn't release No More Heroes through Capcom the way he did Killer 7. As an informative aside: Killer 7 was one of the "Capcom Five" Gamecube exclusives that were supposed to come out in 2003 (Dead Phoenix, Killer 7, PN03, Resident Evil 4, and Viewtiful Joe). Phoenix was canceled, Killer 7 and Resident Evil were delayed for years, and only PN03 didn't wind up getting a PS2 port.

And when I say that he's getting his revenge on us with NMH, I don't mean that he's torturing us with awful shit, but rather he's making fun of us through the game which is pretty good anyway.

I think it is sensible to judge games as entities unto themselves rather than praise or condemn a game based upon other games.

I'm split on that, and I think it's because I subscribe to the notion of what we might call personal taste and critical taste. Critical taste considers as much of the medium (or world) as possible and starts making comparisons. It looks at Okami and says "wolf zelda" and docks some sort of point for it being so easily pigeonholed. Critical taste also says things like "graphics don't look next-gen" or "definitely not a Halo-killer". Its role is to place each game in its proper place in relation to everything else, so it HAS to compare it to other things.

Personal taste can do whatever it wants. I can personally play and love every Zelda game and still wet my pants in glee at the thought of playing a wolf Zelda, and there is nobody in the world who will convince me that I'm wrong and there is nobody in the world I can convince that I'm right because it's personal. Personal taste doesn't need to consider anything but the game itself because all it needs to do is decide whether or not I like it, and not how it compares to everything that has come before it.

I'd like to interject here that critical taste is not "objective" and personal taste isn't "subjective" because frankly they're both subjective.

When people praise NMH for being unique, it's because they like having their critical taste excited. When I say that Suda made the game to criticize us for our reception of Killer 7, that's another critical taste issue. If you choose to ignore critical taste and listen only to personal, then that's fine, but I hope I've at least shed some light on why it is other people disagree with you.

We play games for many reasons, but deep social commentary portrayed through shitty graphics and rehashed bullshit from digital crapfests is not one of them.

This argument is almost a perfect anti-South Park comment. If you don't "get" South Park because cartoons are supposed to look nice and be about coyotes who fail comically at trying to catch a roadrunner in delightfully unrealistic ways then you're obviously dealing with a very limited view of what a cartoon can possibly do and haven't figured out why people watch them or make them.

You don't have to like South Park, South Park isn't perfect, but are the people who like it wrong because they're enjoying something that fails to meet the cartoon criteria you've decided on?

April 11, 2008 at 4:41 PM

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