Also in pixellated indie-oddity news this week: The Gutter. In it you play a drunken derelict to is vomiting and stumbling his way towards a good night’s coma. There doesn’t seem to be much of an objective to your sodden wandering, but maybe that’s the point. I can’t really say much more than that.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Looking Up At The Stars: The Gutter
Posted by Jim Rossignol on May 27th, 2009 at 11:58 am.
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Wow. The best bit of the game is the credits at the end which list about 100 roles all filled by “JW” or “Jim”. Very funny.
It adds only one feature: death
haha
you get it?
It’s a parody of The Graveyard. Auntie Pixelante recently mentioned it:
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=448
Very similar idea to this from a few years ago, isn’t it?
http://www.wagenschenke.ch/HomeRun.swf
dessgeega is right on the money too. Tale of Tales should play this repeatedly until the lesson hits home that they’re in the wrong business.
The punchline must be in the credits :)
Also, 5$ for the full version that adds “Death”? I’ll take it as a stab at today’s indie games.
Dracko: I don’t quite see how someone remaking their game with a different setting and visual style would have that effect.
@Mihai: I think that is just a reference to The Graveyard.
roBurky: You’re right. I’m probably giving them too much credit when they clearly have their head up their rears.
When I run it with the Windows 7 beta wallpaper, an outline of a man’s head appears in the sky above Stonehedge. I like that (even if it’s entirely unintentional).
I think Tale of Tales should keep making games, but just never make The Graveyard again. I have a number of tedious problems with that game, and The Gutter justified that lost time.
Holy fuck, these people are total arseholes.
I don’t think they’re trying to be assholes. I think they merely misunderstand what it takes to create something meaningful, and that there isn’t only one way (their way?) to do it.
There are lots of Laws and Razors which go a long way to explain it, I’m sure.
No, I’m pretty certain they’re tools who hate the medium they’re working in and think things happening when you control a game is a novelty.
You can tell by their attitudes in the comments:
“Games are more than art. Which probes deeper into the heart of human nature? Whistler’s Mother or The Prisoner’s Dilemma?”
“Ask your own mother.”
I found their Post-Mortem of The Graveyard to be… well, worth reading. Some samples:
I was tempted to add some sort of snarky commentary, but really, these guys are quite capable of speaking for themselves.
I hadn’t read the comments in that post before now, and I may have glossed over them slightly – they haven’t seemed worth listening to since claiming Braid isn’t a game, and I only poked my head in because I got super curious when I saw your (Dracko’s) post :)
And reading them now, it seems more likely they’re fine with the medium but have problems with the culture. Even if they’re not very good with working in the medium, all their complaints and claims stem from the idea that games (of all types, I’d assume) are only really accepted in popular culture when they’re “low brow” works, or pander to businesses. It’s a massive generalisation, and they’re blinded by the big, willy-waving game releases of recent years in the same way Europeans assume Americans are 2-dimensional cardboard cutouts produced with either jock or geek prints (I’m truely sorry to each and every human being that reads that sentence).
Or at least that’s what I’m extrapolating from everything I’m reading here, because the way it comes out in pure word-to-eye form is similar to some slightly immature ArguingOnTheInternets I’ve seen before, which is unfortunate. It always looks just like either incoherent babbling or angry ranting, always focused on the hatred-topic of the moment, and usually bears less resemblance to what someone actually thinks of the subject. And it stems from frustration and confusion, usually – they need an outlet, and the outlet’s usually the “impossible topic” (like games vs. art or whatisagame), or “get off my lawn”. Or both.
What would probably do them good is to sit away from the crowd for a while and think. Ignore the rest of the world and consider what they want to do, and not waste brain cells on what they think everybody else should be doing. Never try to change the world with brute force alone. Take some time out and come back later to present something that’s way more thoughtful than “Braid isn’t a game!” (sorry, but I still find that amusing, it was a pretty silly thing to say)
But actually putting effort in to do something that constructive isn’t an effective marketing strategy.
Dracko, I’d say they’re in the right medium, but working in a genre that doesn’t exist. All the coverage they get is from a focused field that doesn’t include their aims.
That and I don’t think they’ve got good at what they’re doing, but its not like anyone else is joining in these days.
Meaning: heck, you can make things on your computer that control with a mouse and a keyboard and are interactive that aren’t games and potentially do it to great effect. Why not? Why shouldn’t someone be trying?
…You mean like a web browser or text processing software?
MD: You forgot the best part:
“The return on investment through sales was far too low to get even near to breaking even. Technically, this is not a failure because the project was not designed to be commercial […] So not selling well is in fact a bonus.”
Andy: They haven’t played nearly enough games to know that to be true. Hell, they don’t even know what a game is!
Braid – for all its flaws – is a game. In fact, the best parts of it are the playful bits! I didn’t care for the epilogue at all, but man, the mind-bending puzzles! I don’t know how anyone could say those weren’t “fulfilling” or “educational” in their own right. Play is not something to be afraid of because you have bills to think of and have gone through a bankrupt authoritative systems.
@Dracko; Tale of Tales obviously have a deep disrespect for games and people who play them in a way that reminds me of artists disrespecting people who understand mathematics and engineering. The only question for me is why people in the games community seem to crave the legitimacy that comes from their “proper art games”. I wonder how many of the sort of people who go to art galleries appreciate their works as opposed to people who read games blogs.
It also concerns me that people “in the industry” might nod their heads in appreciation to Tale of Tales ranting about the pond life wanting to play games instead of appreciating their master works.
“…You mean like a web browser or text processing software?”
I could have gone on with listing features to make this more clear but I’m sure you get what I mean by pointing out they share a family similarity.
Nobody should be afraid to make a game or to play them, or to look down on it out of some kind of concern for legitimacy. I just think that applies to making other things in the medium too.