Q&A: August 14th, 2024

Holy Shift Asks
The world seems to have moved on from QTEs as a test of reaction with a single button press in favor of button mashing to demonstrate exerting effort. Can we read something into this and have there been any QTE sequences that moved you? We know you like WET's death animations, but this is more on the funny side, what about the feels of timed button presses?

Perhaps this doesn't count, but MGS3's conclusion always stuck with me, forcing you the player to be the one that pulls the trigger. Modern Warfare 2's conclusion always stuck with me too, though that's also 95% because of the presentation, the music, sound-effects, cinematography, even the post-processing effects.

Though... that's really in my mind the only way a QTE can be sold, because by their very nature, you're only doing one thing as a player.

Fuji274 Asks
If there was any game you could forget and experience it anew, which would it be and why?

My answer is normally Spec Ops The Line, but because I've been rewatching it quite a bit, I think it might be Black Ops 1... that way I could better evaluate the quality of the game's story, and did its twist and turns effect me so much just because I was a Teenager who hadn't seen enough movies?

Kizza Lee Asks
Favourite Fast and Furious Movie. (Hint: there is a correct answer).

There's two Fast and Furious franchises. Fast and Furious the car movie, and Fast and Furious the action movie.

Of the former, the best is Tokyo Drift, of the latter, it's seven.

Tokyo has easily the best in-camera driving sequences of the franchise, and certainly a big improvement from the pure bullshit that was 2 Fast 2 Furious. Of the action films, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all very close, but I think 7 has the ultimate best collection of setpieces.

Also Nathalie Emmanuel...

Duncan Gohl Asks
What is modern gaming missing that made the golden era of gaming so beloved? Is there a nostalgia bias for having experienced that at a time where I was too young to critically think about the gaming landscape at the time. For reference, I would list the timeline from Halo CE (2001) to roughly when the Xbox One launched (2013), as that is when I personally started to notice negative discourse in the gaming industry.

Absolutely there's a nostalgia bias.

Back when I was growing up in the 2000s, the cynics of that era were droning on and on about the 90s being the golden era of video-games, and via Tim Cain talking about this, as ridiculous as it sounds, there were people in the 90s saying the 80s were the golden era of games and it's become too corporate and lifeless.

Make no mistake, these complaints have always existed, and will continue to exist.

What makes these conversations frustrating is that it's not all or nothing. There's plenty of things about the gaming's current environment that's a definite step-backwards from the 2000s, the most obvious being the upper industry's priority on the attention economy at the expense of quality, and the homogenization of genres and audiences.

Thing is, what industries aren't effected by the attention economy right now? Games are merely a part of that, and like anything else, it's going to ebb and flow and change and evolve and degrade and revolutionize and generalize, at all times to varying degrees.

Personally, with the successful push of open-source software like Blender, landmark successes of games like Baldurs Gate 3, and multiple big-budget flops in a row, I'm actually generally optimistic about video-games long-term. There's more great games in my library than I have time to playthrough in my life-time, and that's an amazing problem to have.

What I'm not sure about is how relevant the AAA will be to people who are interested in games for more than killing time, or being a proxy for career progression, though quite frankly... I don't see a reason to care.

If AAA wants to stop making interesting games, cool.

Somebody else will make them instead.

RupertLitterbin Asks
Can you make me a cake?

Nah.

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