What makes a game pretentious?
Everything this game did.
>>729298083Picrel.
>>729298325>"Fine">Does itReally telling on yourself
>>729298325>Wow Anon that looks like a cool game, can I play?Yeah sure I'll let you play if you suck my dick>Okay lol!Dude I can't believe you just sucked a dick to play a video game>WHAT DO YOU MEAN? I WAS FORCED TO DO IT. THIS DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING Forced? Bro, you chose to do it, with great enthusiasm, so why are you upset?>I'M NOT UPSET AND I'M GOING TO TELL EVERYONE HOW NOT UPSET I AM BECAUSE I SUCKED A DICK BECAUSE I DIDN'T WANT TO ANYWAY
>>729298083that game filters 99% of /v/
>>729298083Pretentious means something that wants to appear deeper than it actually is. Most of the time you do that with ambiguity for the sake of it.
>>729299667>"I AM SILLY" false equivalenceYour faggot fantasy of sucking a dick has no relation to the game. I paid for the game, I'm going to play the game. I'm not morally reprehensible for the actions I perform to progress in a fictional, digital space, and implying I am is as retarded as claiming video games make people violent. Killing a dog in a video game has no real-world impact and only requires you to click a mouse.
>>729300086>I paid for the game, I'm going to play the game.Okay. So why are you so defensive?The game literally says, directly to you, the player, "this isn't real so why should you care?". And, on top of that, you get to explicitly put all the responsibility on Kurtz and, by extension, the game/devs, if you so choose. They don't disagree with you at all.
>>729299820yeahi liked it. its a servicable (if clunky) TPS with cool visuals, an interesting environment, and a decent story. the soundtrack is fucking peak, too, and Walker's voice acting and lines are extremely well donebut one of the devs says something cringey (like most of those liberal faggots do) and all of a sudden that means the game is shitside note, i've read the heart of darkness and there are hardly any fucking similarities
>>729298083A "pretentious" game is one that claims one thing (YOU CAN DO ANYTHIIIING/YOUR CHOICES MATTER!) and then not living up to it's claims.Inafune wanted to create Mighty No. 9, and leveraged his "pedigree" of being the brainchild of the Megaman series into telling the people who would eventually support his vision as "bringing back the core of the Megaman series' gameplay without the oversight of big corps and shareholders". Then the whole Community Manager debacle happened and showed everyone that Inafunes' own words were nothing but hollow bullshit. Lip-service to keep patrons coming through his door and handing him money. What we got was a hyper-generic "modern" side-scroller that was anything but what was promised, devoid of any passion, and filled with most-common-denominator shoehorns that led to abysmal sales and the whole team just quitting.Pretentious is claiming your game is a "thought-provoking storytelling masterpiece" when the only thing it touches upon are skin-deep problems with cookie-cutter solutions and having the player hold the bag for their actions.Pretentious is having a game whose main selling point is a story, then ostensibly leaving out the hook to keep players from finding it out a la walking sims like Life is Strange where no "mechanics" are involved except for walking to different places and learning tiny fragments of in-game lore that are hamfisted to try and force the player to feel a certain way instead of trying to organically let the player be consumed by the story itself.Pretentious is making a thread about pretentious games and not being able to suss it out for ones' self because they are a cocksucking faggot.
>>729301796Feel like most your examples are a bit of a stretch and also I think OP wanted to discuss SOtL
>>729301190>side note, i've read the heart of darkness and there are hardly any fucking similaritiesRead it again
>>729302084well name them then. aside from the captain being a charismatic leader, dead at the end, and going crazy, there are hardly any of note
>>729298083YIIK is the only game that is actually pretentious.
>>729301796this applies perfectly to Dispatch
>>729298325You can tell the person who made this comic has a 2 digit IQ
>>729302251You're sent on a rescue mission deep into a "backwards" non-Western country to extract the leader of the previous (arguably imperialist) expedition who had been sent to impose some sort of order, only to find that he had been mercilessly and senselessly oppressing the native population. The mission is a failure but the protagonist and his outlook on humanity and civilisation are forever changed. Of course there are some tweests but this is the setup anyway
>>729303151i guess that's of correct, save for the fact you're the guy who ends up oppressing the natives lol (and walker is rescued if you so choose at the end)i prefer welcoming my rescuers to dubai though
>>729298083this game was fun
>>729298083Those patronizing loading screens and having no alternative but to do some obviously bad decisions. Compare white phosphorus and two hanged men. One is so obviously on the nose "you are le bad" moments and the other is genuine kino schizo moment once you look back at it. It has some genuinely good moments and storytelling but the fuckups are so transparent and obvious at what they are trying to do.
>>729305336>One is so obviously on the nose "you are le bad" momentsEasy to say with the benefit of hindsight. Yeah, they were never pretending it was heroic (hence why your teammates protest) but that's not the twist. The twist is the presence of non-combatants.
>>729298325
>>729298083Forcing the player to do something and then berating them for doing so.
>>729305553>your teammates protestOnly the sniper guy does, the nigger was on board from the start
>>729298083In this case, I think it's the fanbase
>>729307051Playing a game is a voluntary activity
A pretentious piece of media is a work of media that believes itself to be deeper than it actually is. I wouldn’t say Spec Ops is pretentious because it’s exactly what it claims to be. An actual pretentious game is Bioshock Infinite, since Ken Levine didn’t understand the concept of parallel universes and quantum mechanics, yet wrote his story as if he did.
>>729303151This. Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now and Spec Ops are literally all the same story at their core. They’re all about a doomed journey into war torn shit-hole to find a higher ranking officer who went insane and decided to rule over the natives. If anything, Spec Ops is the most unique of the 3 since it adds the schizophrenia/protagonist going insane too angle.
>Self Inserters cant into narrative or character development Imagine my shock
>>729298083The game isn't pretentious, the devs were
>>729307669So is living.
>>729298325That's TLOU2 and Shit33
>>729308564Yes.
>want to use game to make a message>Make the message hard to pick up unless you are on the spectrum>Use methods that really feel insincere and hypocritical when wanting to develop the message inside the medium, and might rely on meta knowledge to even work, thus ending in a situation where you give a lesson by saying "do as i say, not as i do".Besides Spec Ops The Line, others i can think of might be several instances of Fallout with the "War Never Changes" by trying to find any excuse under the sun for people to not develop civilization in 200 years, the nuke any large civilization that finally develops over time. In fact, i suspect that later they might just nuke the Minutemen again because why not.
The devs
>>729298083Tbf making any sort of full adaptation of Heart Of Darkness with little twists beyond "military evil" is extremely pretentious and overdone. I don't think anyone needed another "war makes you crazy and leads to evil shit" story, duh we knowThen again not sure a boring generic brown-filter 2000s FPS where you just play as a generic buff military dude taking down terrorists would have been any better. It'd have been unremarkable slop rather than pretentious trite
