I think modern 3d games can be considered a work of art to a certain extent. I mean, what about the people that are creating 3d models and animations for use in games? Even the guys in this community that create Freespace total conversion mods and have to create totally new ship models and things of that sort... are they not artists in their own right? Some definitions of Art (from dictionary.com): "skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature," and "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance." Sure, games are meant primarily as a means of entertainment, but I think that there are a lot of games that possess many of these qualities.
People act like you can examine the artistic qualities of a video game the same way that you can a movie, book, or painting. You can't. People can say that the story is artful, or the sound track is artful, or the graphics are artful, but that's all just garbage. That's like saying the font of a book is artful.
But what I find most alarming about this situation is how it speaks to the state of games journalism. I found Heppe's critical analysis refreshing, and even if it's partially just fanboys defending their sacred cow the backlash is worrying. It's a pretty damning example of gaming culture's insularity. Any industry is going to have a hell of a time maturing in an environment where criticism is not just rare but rejected out of hand.
Technical execution is the only valuable metric.
What are you, Vulcan?
Wow. This game must really suck.Or perhaps it's because that component of the review was most egregious to fans of the series in general and this game specifically. Even coming from the perspective of someone who hasn't yet played the game, I certainly consider some of the statements made in there to be dubious at best...there's a lot of the critic's personal preference (or lack thereof) shining through there. I'd also highly advise taking any single review with a massive grain of salt, unless you know that a particular reviewer's tastes often align with your own. Numerous other sources have given Other M high all-around marks, control system included, and I've heard from several people who, while having various quibbles with it, have enjoyed it as a whole.
Films aren't art either if you examine them in the same way as computer games, they are simply rolls of celluloid, the art is in the Story, the acting and the sets which are copied onto the film via a scientific technique.
No-one asked what Mona-Lisa's motivation was...
Or perhaps it's because that component of the review was most egregious to fans of the series in general and this game specifically. Even coming from the perspective of someone who hasn't yet played the game, I certainly consider some of the statements made in there to be dubious at best...there's a lot of the critic's personal preference (or lack thereof) shining through there. I'd also highly advise taking any single review with a massive grain of salt, unless you know that a particular reviewer's tastes often align with your own. Numerous other sources have given Other M high all-around marks, control system included, and I've heard from several people who, while having various quibbles with it, have enjoyed it as a whole.
Eh...the review itself is of minimal interest to me. The reaction of the fanbase is what's interesting, because it is so atypical of it. Fusion was met with annoyance for having an arbitrary plot device limiting them instead of their ability. The review implies that M:OM does the same thing, and is kind of insulting to Samus to boot. If the base is arguing that it's OK because games aren't art, instead of nodding and going "Yeah, this is friggin stupid", something is amiss.See, Fusion was one of my favorite entries in the series precisely because of those plot devices. I sort of have an atypical entry into the Metroid series...my first game was Prime (and its sequel) and then Fusion, and I still haven't made it around to Super Metroid. For me, the thought of having this really rich universe/backstory and a strong character like Samus, and then never really exploring either one, feels like somewhat of a waste of potential. I personally prefer the stronger narrative focus that a few of the newer games have pursued, as opposed to the "wander around and find power-ups" model of the original games.
To be honest though, the lack of major interest in the game is more of a signal though. Walked by the game in Wal-mart the other day, and was surprised it was already out, since no one had mentioned it in any of the places I visit online. This is the first discussion of the game I've encountered - and silence when dealing with a well known property on a platform hurting for hardcore games is a condemnation in and of itself.I've seen a rather massive amount of interest in it myself. I occasionally browse the OverClocked ReMix forums, and there's a 20+-page thread going about it, with plenty of back-and-forth. Just the fact that it's a very different sort of Metroid game has captured a lot of people's attention, for better or worse. Also, from what I understand, Other M has just about the best opening-week sales numbers in Japan of any title in the Metroid series. I haven't seen any details about the US release yet, though.
As a complete outsider to the games (the last Metroid I played was Super Metroid),, all I can say is that I understand the people who do not like this new characterization of Samus Aran, simply because it's a complete departure from her characterization from previous entries.
That said departure was in the direction of making her weaker, less self-reliant, is something I cannot accept.
As a complete outsider to the games (the last Metroid I played was Super Metroid),, all I can say is that I understand the people who do not like this new characterization of Samus Aran, simply because it's a complete departure from her characterization from previous entries.
That said departure was in the direction of making her weaker, less self-reliant, is something I cannot accept.
The thing is that this characterization isn't new. She had no real character in the games prior to this, but the Metroid manga (which is canon) portrayed her in a very similar manner: full of insecurities and having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder regarding Ridley.
EDIT: How about we go straight to the dragon's mouth, and see what everyone's talking about?
Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecAYwkwI9Lc
Watch that, and give us your opinions. Spoilers, great and small, abound.
Like this spoiler: Ridley lives and you need to shoot him a lot. AlsoSpoiler:that black guy gets whacked.Also some actual spoiler after the battle is over.
As far as "insulting" Samus goes, I haven't yet played the game myself, so I can't pass judgment on it as a whole. However, I do agree with a point I saw someone make that directly counteracts one of the main complaints of this review. The author took particular offense at Samus's reaction to Ridley, at the flashback to a scared little girl crying as she stood face-to-face with a monster, because Samus has already faced down Ridley a few times before over the Metroid timeline. But the thing is, I feel like it's far more appropriate for Samus to react this way than for Ridley to be treated as just some boss that you have to lob missiles at. According to the backstory, this is the same creature that killed her parents and destroyed her homeworld. Is anyone going to react in business-like fashion when encountering the source of that much personal trauma? Of course not.
As has been mentioned, she already killed his ass like five times. He turned himself into a robot and she still stomped his guts out. But what, now she's going to lock up?Except that, as Dark Hunter pointed out, she didn't even have a real character in those games. She was a sprite attacking another sprite, nothing more. Hell, I just played the original Metroid (via Zero Mission's bonus feature) for the first time, and Ridley's sprite was no bigger than she was, which is hilarious. (Kraid looks even worse.) I'd assume Super Metroid had a similar lack of setup. The closest chance you'd have to portraying the situation like this would be in Metroid Prime, which didn't have Samus exhibiting any real personality either. This is the first real time that Nintendo has chosen to portray Samus as a full character, and as such, this is the first time that we have the chance to see how things probably should have been all along, if the technology/design had allowed for them back then. Remember that, at the end of the day, the series' co-creator was responsible for Other M's story, so one has to assume that this has always been his vision of Samus.
This could make sense if it were the first time she were facing Ridley, if it was the story of her early days. It isn't that.
Yeah, I'm with Spoony on this one. Turning Samus into nothing more than an extension of an unseen(?) operator somewhere, who unlocks weapons based on his whim is bad design.I'll agree that this system isn't really logical in any sense, but to be fair, neither were most of the other solutions to the problem. At the beginning of every other Metroid game, Samus starts out possessing only the most basic of abilities, and she just so happens to come across them in whatever environment she was exploring. That might make sense for the original Metroid, since she might not have possessed the abilities before that (Zero Mission actually had her stripped down to Zero Suit Samus before finding the Gravity Suit), but after that, it's always been essentially a gameplay contrivance. I know the first two Prime games had to jump through some narrative hoops to justify the mechanic: in the first, you randomly have all of your abilities malfunction when you get thrown into a wall by an explosion, and in the second, a bunch of evil shadow aliens happen to steal them from you at the start of the game. I don't know that Other M's solution is all that great of a way to justify the mechanic, but it isn't really any less logical than what came before.
As has been mentioned, she already killed his ass like five times. He turned himself into a robot and she still stomped his guts out. But what, now she's going to lock up?Except that, as Dark Hunter pointed out, she didn't even have a real character in those games. She was a sprite attacking another sprite, nothing more. Hell, I just played the original Metroid (via Zero Mission's bonus feature) for the first time, and Ridley's sprite was no bigger than she was, which is hilarious. (Kraid looks even worse.) I'd assume Super Metroid had a similar lack of setup. The closest chance you'd have to portraying the situation like this would be in Metroid Prime, which didn't have Samus exhibiting any real personality either. This is the first real time that Nintendo has chosen to portray Samus as a full character, and as such, this is the first time that we have the chance to see how things probably should have been all along, if the technology/design had allowed for them back then. Remember that, at the end of the day, the series' co-creator was responsible for Other M's story, so one has to assume that this has always been his vision of Samus.
This could make sense if it were the first time she were facing Ridley, if it was the story of her early days. It isn't that.
Why do people blame Team Ninja for Samus's character? THEY DIDN'T WRITE THE STORY. The same people who wrote the old games' stories wrote Other M's story.
Anyway, I'll point out to those that have not played the game that, this one scene aside, Samus was still the hypercompetent badass she usually is throughout. People are truly blowing this way out of proportion. Ridley's just that much of a badass himself.
Anyway, I'll point out to those that have not played the game that, this one scene aside, Samus was still the hypercompetent badass she usually is throughout. People are truly blowing this way out of proportion. Ridley's just that much of a badass himself.It's not really that one scene aside. It's pretty much every cutscene where Samus is conversing or monologuing. In the gameplay itself, she's definitely hypercompetant; but in the cutscenes the game takes away any control and places arbitrary blocks to what can and should be done, and paints her as insecure and weak.
Excuse me, but I do believe they had the ability to do more characterization even back in the SNES days. They chose not to. As a result, the fans got to "write" her character based on their perceptions of her during gameplay. Derailing that perception, even if it is done by the series creator, is still derailment. It's still perceived as acting out of character. My argument is, if this is how Samus was supposed to be all this time, why didn't they make it clear before? They could have done it during the Gamecube era. They chose not to. They decided to add characterization after more than a decade of games. Can you see why this upsets people?I didn't imply that the SNES didn't have the ability to generate more characterization for Samus; it falls under the "design" side of my argument instead of the "technical" side. Action games of that generation generally didn't conduct more in-depth character studies, and Super Metroid was intended as a solitary exploration game along those lines. As far as the GameCube era goes, Retro Studios completely handled the Prime series development, not the series creator Sakamoto, so they chose to say with a similar exploratory aesthetic.
Proposition: people should only really care about if something is pleasurable to listen to/watch/play/read, discussing whether it is art or not is irrelevant to the objective of these media: entertainment.
Proposition: people should only really care about if something is pleasurable to listen to/watch/play/read, discussing whether it is art or not is irrelevant to the objective of these media: entertainment.
Disagreed.
Proposition: people should only really care about if something is pleasurable to listen to/watch/play/read, discussing whether it is art or not is irrelevant to the objective of these media: entertainment.
Disagreed.
Disagreement with proposition noted and disagreed with.
Proposition: people should only really care about if something is pleasurable to listen to/watch/play/read, discussing whether it is art or not is irrelevant to the objective of these media: entertainment.
Disagreed.
Disagreement with proposition noted and disagreed with.
I simply don't think the utility of an 'art object' can be solely derived from its pleasure value. I feel that I get a great deal out of watching The Godfather even though I find other movies more pleasurable.. Similarly, I extract a lot of utility from pictures of suffering in unfortunate countries, even though I don't find them pleasurable.
In Super Metroid, immediately after encountering Ridley on board the space station and driving him off, she jumps in her spaceship and follow him.
Do they make any attempt to explain her behavior in previous games while making her terrified of Ridley?
Do they make any attempt to explain her behavior in previous games while making her terrified of Ridley?Nope. Not at all.
I think you're attacking the issue from the wrong angle. Quite frankly I believe in the big scheme of things the end user/viewer's opinion is pretty inconsequential to deciding if something is art. For example I think modern art is hack with no business residing in the same museum as say a Renaissance master's oil work. Does that mean its not art? Hardly. Instead I think the intentions, motivations, imagination, skills brought to bear, and creativity of the maker of the product matter much more when it comes to classifying something as art. A little halfpint using crayons to make a stick figure family picture is performing art, they're flexing their creative ability to make something that personally to them is art. Doesn't matter is it looks silly to you. It's no different then some master portrait painter, professional photographer or composer, they are tapping into their ability to create something, they devote a part of themselves into making it. When you, the creator use your imagination, go the extra mile and personally invest in your creation its art.this.
I think you're attacking the issue from the wrong angle. Quite frankly I believe in the big scheme of things the end user/viewer's opinion is pretty inconsequential to deciding if something is art. For example I think modern art is hack with no business residing in the same museum as say a Renaissance master's oil work. Does that mean its not art? Hardly. Instead I think the intentions, motivations, imagination, skills brought to bear, and creativity of the maker of the product matter much more when it comes to classifying something as art. A little halfpint using crayons to make a stick figure family picture is performing art, they're flexing their creative ability to make something that personally to them is art. Doesn't matter is it looks silly to you. It's no different then some master portrait painter, professional photographer or composer, they are tapping into their ability to create something, they devote a part of themselves into making it. When you, the creator use your imagination, go the extra mile and personally invest in your creation its art.
Art may always be art to the artist, but I think that, to be near-universally accepted as such, it has to stir for something deeper. You look at something like Michaelangelo's Pieta, and even if you're not religious in the least, you feel something. He managed to bring out pure human emotion from a chunk of marble. And even if you don't have a musical bone in your body, the 1812 Overture is going to give you goosebumps. But random splotches of paint strewn haphazardly across a canvas...well, it may speak to the "artist" and a few emperor's-new-clothes lemmings, but it means ****-all to the rest of us. :p
But see you've pointed out the problem, end user opinion will always vary. There is a group of yuppies that look at paint haphazardly thrown onto a canvas and see art. I'm willing to bet you can find uncultured neobarb who would listen to 1812 and think it was a cacophony of old geezer music. I can look at a well forged sword and appreciate the artistry of the smith, somebody else would only see an instrument of death. The only opinion that isn't an interpretation, that isn't shaped by perceptions is that of the artist. That doesn't mean you need to appreciate all art just because it is art, crap is crap and you're entitled to your opinion. But if the developers of a game look at their creation as art that they've invested their imagination, skill and talent into making it, then what qualifications does a third party to tell them its not?Intent is all well and good, but it's only half of the equation. Good art inspires.
The purpose of art is to create something which speaks to others. Anything less is just intellectual masturbation.Gotta disagree here. While the desire to communicate with others can be a good reason to create, making art for yourself isn't necessarily any less valid a practice, and it certainly isn't automatically a shallow act of self-gratification (which is what I assume you mean by intellectual masturbation). Making art for an audience involves a wide variety of compromises and concessions, and one of those compromises is knowing that your artistic process will be affected by the anticipation of what people are going to think of the art, and by extension what they are going to think of you. You can try to circumvent this by releasing your work anonymously, but the fact remains that you know going in that people are going to be judging your creation. That can be a healthy thing for certain types of art and certain artists--it can encourage you to refine your craft or appropriate parts of other successful works to strengthen yours. It can also sabotage your art by stifling your most honest instincts--history is littered with incredible talents crippled by self-doubt.
That's not quite what I mean. Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm saying that interpretation, not intent, is an artwork's most valuable commodity—obviously that can apply regardless of whether or not the artist was creating for an audience. StarSlayer seemed to be saying that something can be art even if the only person who thinks so is the artist. My point wasn't that the output of an artist creating for himself is automatically worthless, but that art must reach more minds than its creator's if the term is to have any meaning at all.
It's a very good point that works lacking an audience can still have value, and I agree. But I wouldn't consider them capital-A Art. Art is culture; if it's a solitary thing, it's not cultural, it's personal. I don't mean to devalue that. I just don't think it sits in the same category.
Not to re-open a can of worms here, but I stumbled across this (http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2010/09/episode-40-heavens-to-metroid.html) (rather brief) podcast offering a somewhat-different take on the direction Other M took the Metroid franchise. I don't know who this guy is, but he raises some interesting points. I was curious as to what someone who may have actually played the game thinks of his opinion.You're right, he does raise some good points, but it doesn't really sound like he's actuallly played the game either. It does sound like he handily addressed the so called "fan-wangst" though.