with screenshot threads!

Break it down like a typical MAL review and talk about its positive aspects in each section I guess.

Beats me. I can't do it. I try once in a while, but it's just not in me. My latest attempt was Undead Unluck, but it's just hard to write paragraphs to talk about it.

>>72173
Thinking of it like that you'd have to be more feminine in being accepting than the macho idea of trying to sound critical

>>72171
You don't because no one will read it. But if you wanted to do it anyway, you'd just avoid using generic descriptors like "x is good and the y is so great." Be specific and follow lines of thought to clear conclusions.

Part of the issue with this is that it seems that often there is simply less to say about something if it's good than if it's bad.
Yuru Yuri is one of my favourite animes but what can one actually say about Yuru Yuri for example? It's funny and the girls are cute, that's about it.

Here is something I'd like to throw in the ring:
Writing paragraphs of valid criticisms towards a bad anime is also repetitive and dull. Do you enjoy reading those things? I do agree that it's alot easier to do. But in general, it's easier to explain where it hurts as opposed to where it doesn't. And formulating what rubs one the wrong way can feel like a relief, a "vent" so to speak, but a good feeling can contently be ridden out.

Anyway what do you think about this?

>>72194
The long paragraphs are not for yourself.
If you post "X sucks", that's just trolling.
If you anchor your opinion in sound reasoning, then people can still disagree, but you are no longer just randomly offending the topic's fans.

Who are you going to write 5 pages worth of praise for? We are not talking about literary analysis here, but praise. At that point, you come across as highly defensive.
"The soundtrack rocks. I have it running in my car at all times now."
That's succinct and sufficient.

>>72194
There is a lot of truth to this. I think people complain most about things that they care about the most or things that are always brought up and feel forced down their throat(V Tubers for example).

I am highly critical of modern Total War games and I have ranted about the problems I have with them in numerous places, but that's because I likes the older ones so much. If I didn't care about Total war I would not rant about it.

>>72171
Here's an old but short and pleasant review of the hunchback of notre dame I found after watching the movie and googling reviews for it. It's written by a pulitzer prize winner. Maybe it can serve as a reference.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-hunchback-of-notre-dame-1996

>>72200
Oh hey, it's the "videogame aren't art" dude that people get buttdevastated about. But ironically he had some respect for anime/animation. He reviewed quite a bit of anime movies as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9WEyuMq0Yk
https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/japanese-animation-unleashes-the-mind
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-grave-of-the-fireflies-1988
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away-2002
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/princess-mononoke-1999

I wonder what would he think of the more modern ones like Koe no Katachi.

>>72202
I wouldn't really call it ironic for him to have respect for animation over video games. I doubt someone as old as he was ever really delved into games enough to make a fair judgement of them.

>>72203
It's a slap in the face of those normos who hate on anime while being obsessed with videogames at the same time for sure.

There is a point to be made that one should not have skilled in games to be able to enjoy art.

>>72205
One should not need to be able to read in order to enjoy art.
One should not need to be able to hear in order to appreciate art.
One should not need to be able to see in order to appreciate art.

While inclusiveness is nice, forbidding people from creating within environments that are not readily accessible for everybody is not just stifling, it's madness.

>>72205
>>72206
His argument isn't really that though. It's that videogames suffer from too much 'player agency' in that you create your own narrative for the most part instead of the director. Like, I can do tarded shit in SoTC during its gameplay which lower its value as art that can be taken seriously: https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/okay-kids-play-on-my-lawn
>"I think that Roger Ebert's problem is that he thinks you can't have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written 'Romeo and Juliet' as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn't taken the damn poison. If only he'd have gotten there quicker."
It's a good argument in my opinion. I'm not sure how those smug movie-game enjoyers would refute that. Videogames don't need to be art. They are still enjoyable without that. This mentality that they need to be creates boring unenjoyable games. I really don't care if Silent Hill 2, SoTC, ICO, etc are art or not. They are just good games.

>>72207
But all art experiences that. People sing songs with different melodies to change the message, or they change the lyrics.
And even in passive consumption, people will have completely different understandings of songs depending on whether they listened to them after a breakup or on during their honeymoon.
It's not a particular storyline that is the work of art in a game (unless it's a perfect railroad). It's the entire fucking game and its possibilities. It's the lore, the artwork, the GUI and controls, and everything else.
If you accept a game to be art, by playing the game, you are moving through that piece of art.

>>72212
>But all art experiences that. People sing songs with different melodies to change the message, or they change the lyrics.
But you can't really change the song yourself while you CAN change how a videogame plays. The state between winning or losing is what separates it the most from art he argues. I'm sure there are a lot of people who didn't finish SH2, SoTC or ICO because they got stuck in a part without knowing what to do, couldn't defeat a boss, etc. Those people never got to experience the 'art' in its fullest.

Although I rarely make a proper review in full I do like to here and there write about the positive aspects of a work that stuck out to me, like >>>/qa/117597, >>>/qa/114210, or my praise for Eminence while trashing Solo Leveling. The most I've ever written about an individual piece was Disco Elysium in >>>/qa/111976 and >>>/qa/112162 (btw fuck you 112001), which took me around a dozen hours to compose, and I'm finishing some more manga reviews. I know people like to hate on long-ass youtube essays, but here are three I find to be particularly good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxTwYdYzw8c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSLy61I-87s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izb5tv9bfSU

>>72175
Being endlessly negative is for hipsters, not men. True critics, and I mean this without a shred of irony, are able to analyze and talk at length about what makes something excel and its importance. For example, some texts I've recently downloaded and read a bit of:
>Dialect as Didactic Tool - Maria Edgeworth's Use of Hiberno-English (73 pages)
>Hemingway and the Creation of Twentieth-Century Dialogue (29 pages)
>No Place for Home - Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (360 pages)
>Language and Metadrama in Major Barbara and Pygmalion (229 pages)
I doubt organizations like the Institut de France would find these to be feminine.

>>72205
Nah. There's a stupid amount of art whose depth is impossible to appreciate or even comprehend at all without the context and knowledge it demands from you.
Gongora's Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea is utterly unintelligible by design, Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius consists of the academic summary of doubly fictional traditions in metaphysics and linguistics as described by many real-life figures, Blood Meridian has untranslated Spanish dialogue in it and a shitton of very specific geographical terminology alongside archaisms in at least one case taken word by word from Paradise Lost. If you're bad at Dark Souls, then git gud faget. It's the point, it's atmosphere through gameplay.

>>72207
>Ebert: "If you can go through 'every emotional journey available,' doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?"
Here's the problem: he's begging the question. Why would integrated choices devalue a work, when an infinity of stories can be interpreted and felt in a myriad ways? Like the paper Demystifying the Judge, where Dorson argues against multiple prior takes on Holden and gives his own. Isn't the entire point of Undertale's genocide route, which made it so heartfelt, precisely that you were given the freedom to pursue total annhiliation and are judged for it, with consequences that give further depth to other endings? Doesn't Darkest Dungeon's nerve-rackingness hinge entirely on your actions? Disco Elysium too could only exist as a videogame.
His second argument that people can't "learn about another human being that way" or "transcend themselves" is particularly retarded in the face of the insane amount of interaction, cooperative or competitive, that games bring about in a manner far above all other types of art or the insane drive behind speedruns, and when he sets out from the very start to create a definition of art excluding the medium he admits the venture to be a failure.
Ebert's right to point to himself as no expert, authority is domain-dependent. Also what >>72212 said.
>>72214
>Those people never got to experience the 'art' in its fullest.
This is true for any dense piece of art. They've been dropped very many times, believe me.

>>72214
>But you can't really change the song yourself
I do it every day, when I whistle or when I sing under the shower.

>The state between winning or losing is what separates it the most from art he argues.
Oh, and he never argues this.

>>72215
It's weird to see Warlockracy in the same post as academic critiques!
And also, I'd find McCarthy's writing style, particularly his lack of quotation marks, more of an obstacle than anything in the actual work.

>>72188
You just lack critical thinking skills. Cute and Funny aren't objective qualities that everyone experiences the same way, there are reasons you assign those attributes to the show and you should be able to understand why you do.

>>72197
>Who are you going to write ... praise for?
One obvious audience is people looking for recommendations/reviews. If you go on Steam and read a bunch of "game is good, I like it" that's worth almost nothing. Useful reviews are several paragraphs and explain the reasons you would want to buy it.
Another audience would be fellow fans, especially those who have less knowledge of the subject than you. The more time you spend with something the better you know it and you can help educate others on all the cool stuff they might have missed or that happened behind-the-scenes so they can appreciate it on a deeper level.

>>72219
The lack of marks specifically I didn't find to be that important when you factor in the linebreaks and differences in spelling. I read some Saramago back in the day and he goes further with his dialogue:
>They should have postponed the elections, said the representative of the party in the middle, or the p. i. t. m., I mean, it's been raining non-stop since yesterday, there are landslips and floods everywhere, the abstention rate this time around will go sky-high. The representative from the party on the right, or the p. o. tx, nodded in agreement, but felt that his contribution to the conversation should be couched in the form of a cautious comment, Obviously, I wouldn't want to underestimate the risk of that, but I do feel that our fellow citizens' high sense of civic duty, which they have demonstrated before on so many occasions, is deserving of our every confidence, they are aware, indeed, acutely so, of the vital importance of these municipal elections for the future of the capital. Having each said their piece, the representative of the p. i. t. m. and the representative of the p. o. tx turned, with a half-sceptical, half-ironic air, to the representative of the party on the left, the p. o. t. l., curious to know what opinion he would come up with.
Cormac's run-on narration is harder to parse but also very enjoyable with how excellently it flows, particularly the apocalyptic Comanche encounter. Half of that page is composed of two sentences.

>>72215
I'm not here to argue any of this myself. I'm just parroting what he said. I don't care either way. It makes no difference to me. Games being art or not doesn't change the way I view them. I do want to make it clear that I think the 'mentality' of being so preoccupied with giving them 'artistic value' can be detrimental to them. I'm definitely not a fan of those Sony movie-games. They are made by hacks who couldn't get into Hollywood and took to videogames instead as a result.

>>72218
He does but in the original post instead. I linked the response: https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/video-games-can-never-be-art He compares it to chess and the fact that not many people view chess as art.

>>72207
>It's that videogames suffer from too much 'player agency' in that you create your own narrative for the most part instead of the director
This is the kind of thing you can only say if you don't play games much. It's a dream that devs like to peddle and that players like to glorify, but it's simply not possible. Every alternate route has to be consciously designed by the developer, and the majority of games don't even offer this level of choice. The Stanley Parable, for example, offers players choices for the purpose of informing them of how they can never break free from the vision of the creator. Spec Ops: The Line does not have any possibility of a happy ending, there is no good way to resolve the situation and the player's choice is a reflection of how they experience and interpret the story by challenging them to assign blame (the first step of which is deciding whether the player actually has agency within the game). A painting that looks different from different viewing angles is still a single painting and seeing how it changes as you move doesn't invalidate it as art.

>>72223
Okay, but you forgot to quote my next statement about this:
>Like, I can do tarded shit in SoTC during its gameplay which lower its value as art that can be taken seriously
You CAN change the director's vision in a game in regards to certain things due to the state of winning and losing.

Just record a gameplay video with the director's designated canon ending. It's "art" now!
Saying adding interactivity changes anything about the director's vision (which is what makes it art) is like saying an artwork is worthless because idiots can't appreciate it.

>>72226
You can make a game look like a retarded clown show and alter people's opinions on it as a result. It's what happened with Starfield really. You can't really do this with a movie, music, painting, etc unless it's through something like satire or parody of it. You can create a mockery of a game yourself with what the director gave you.

>>72224
>Like, I can do tarded shit in SoTC during its gameplay which lower its value as art that can be taken seriously
That's begging the question though.
You stopped taking it seriously (in doing 'tarded shit' and thus reached a point where it was no longer to be taken seriously.
You can do the same to other artworks, by simply mocking them instead of taking them seriously.
In order to appreciate something, you first have to choose to appreciate it.

>>72224
I can draw penises in the margins of The Great Gatsby because I'm bored and don't want to keep reading yet. I can pause a movie to go take a piss. Do these things change the author's vision? Art doesn't need to be experienced in a completely controlled setting to be valid as art.

Failure states aren't an automatic deviation from the intention either. Even if they're not worked into the plot directly (some are), they are still part of the experience and devs expect you to encounter them. Dark Souls wouldn't be the same if you weren't dying a whole bunch.

My Hitman playthrough is pure art, both the 100% stealth missions and the ones where I had to kill a guard or 2, maybe 15.

>>72227
Starfield made a mockery of itself.

>>72231
But I do silly shit unintentionally sometimes as well.

>>72232
>I can draw penises in the margins of The Great Gatsby because I'm bored and don't want to keep reading yet.
You're not altering the content of the book itself by doing that though. It's just something you're doing externally.

>>72222
>I'm not here to argue any of this myself.
I, uh, quads of insistence I suppose. Anyways,
>He compares it to chess and the fact that not many people view chess as art.
Well, the problem with that is twofold: a) chess is at its core a set of rules without any kind of narrative whatsoever, and it cannot be compared to the conscious design of music, sound, writing, or visuals that videogames include, a Gesamtkunstwerk in truth, and b) a good deal of them don't have a failure state or even a win state either and that's not a bad thing. He talks about cave paintings being a form of storytelling and gets pissy at people calling them scribbles, while failing to apply the same logic to videogame design. Chess is on par with Pong, not Shadow of the Colossus. The real failure is in his endlessly irregular arguments, where he also makes clear he believes some fiction to be less artistic than others... because. He never reaches a real conclusion, stating he's unhappy with all the definitions that don't meet his...
>How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.
Le Mao Tse-tung.
>>72223
There are some that go all-in with it and create a truly unique experience, like Dorf Fort or Kenshi I'm told. Those are powerful precisely because of the radical freedom they offer so it ought to be taken into account.
>>72224 >>72227
One of the great parts about games is that the director can design in a way that goes beyond his expectations, such as by leaving glitches in or from the start giving players a toolkit that he isn't certain how they will employ, leaving it up to them.
>You can't really do this
>unless
You can also dick around with Moby Dick by reading dialogue out loud in a tarded accent or making ironic remarks as you go through, discarding an opera because you find it boring and pretentious, or what two of the posts above said. Fundamentally, all art can be experienced in a way different from what the author intended because it's you that is processing it. You're not a machine reading inputs in the strictest manner possible, you're a human being. That games allow for interactivity and thus ridicule within them is not a bug, it's a feature, and you have not justified why this would "lower its value as art," nevermind the subsequent "that can be taken seriously" which goes against things as far back as Aristophanes' plays.

>>72235
>You're not altering the content of the book itself
The book itself now has penises in it. How is that unaltered? If I rip out pages, would you insist the book is still the same? You're arguing that novels exist in an ideal state divorced from the reality experienced by a reader while simultaneously insisting that games are formless because different individuals experience them differently.

>>72236
>radical freedom
All of your options still have to be designed by the devs (barring mechanisms that enable arbitrary code execution). You can't go into a crafting game and create brand new things by bashing stuff together, you can only form what the devs made assets for. What you interpret as freedom is, in actuality, just a very long list of options.

>>72239
Well, yes, that's the reality of freedom in real life too.

>>72240
That's like confusing the number of digits of a number with the digits of a number.

>>72241
More or less, but that doesn't change the fact that DF's freedom is incomparably greater than that of football.

>>72242
You can literally appeal to the board of the international football league to have the rules of the game altered. It's not merely a set of pre-configured unchangeable laws of the universe of football.
The condition of the flooring, the condition of the heating, the permissible footwear (or dress in general), even how the play is moderated and how the rules are enforced... literally everything is up to discussion.
Besides, the rigidity of the game itself (the lack of freedom) is self-inflicted. It's not a sandbox game. It's a test of skill between different teams. The skills that are supposed to be tested are, like everything else, under scrutiny.

>>72243
Then what about mods, or being able to edit RAWs even without them?

>>72245
Won't change that DF is ultimately a sandbox game and specifically designed for you to freely express yourself, while football is not.

>>72246
Then I don't understand what the disagreement is. Yeah, that's the point of sandboxes, freedom to fuck around and stuff while lacking a win state. Minecraft, too. And, well, going back to a previous statement,
>You can't go into a crafting game and create brand new things by bashing stuff together, you can only form what the devs made assets for.
That's where modding comes in, a whole-ass new dimension of stuff you can achieve.

>>72247
I failed to address the proper point actually. I noticed after posting my wall of text but then felt that every "fix" would look like a moving of the goalposts, so I shied away from that.
I apologize for my mistake.
What >>72239 speaks of is a different kind of freedom.
In theory, you can think up completely new maneuvers in the middle of a football game that no one has executed before to move the ball into the goal. There is literally no limit to the variation.
In DF, you can only affect the world in ways that it was designed to be affected. In other words, the maneuvers that are available to you are those that the game developers already added to the game. Even if you chain them in bizarre combinations, the individual interactions are all pre-configured.
And if you think of a new thing to do that you can mod the game to permit you to do, you will have to save the game, exit it, mod the game and re-enter just so you can do a thing that you should have been able to do from the beginning. It quite literally takes you out of the game.

>>72248
>the maneuvers that are available to you are those that the game developers already added to the game
Well, that hinges on how free you consider the act of pushing a ball around. Is Rocket League as free as a match of football because you possess an absolutely open range of motion, open movement, and therefore maneuvers too? It's even got the dimension of height that football lacks. And if mods are disqualified due to taking place outside of the game in action then so is any change to the rules of football, meaning we're stuck with a single standard modality, single objective, single set of limited rulings, single timetable, all things where DF has qualitatively more to offer with its many more dimensions and systems whose interactions are often unplanned and unexpected as the game's changelist attests to. Its combinatoriality is greater than that of football.

>>72248
Yeah, this was the original point. If you really want to, you can go out on the pitch and start biting the other players because you're only bound by physics. You can't do actions in a game that aren't programmed in.

You can mod them, but mods are works by a different person and not part of the original art. They're the equivalent of fanfiction. They can occasionally be art themselves, but still distinct things. Just because you can write Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead doesn't mean you have freedom in Hamlet.

>>72249
>that hinges on how free you consider the act of pushing a ball around
There have been scientific papers written after particular shots explaining what the fuck happened. Because football is not just straightforward maneuver execution.
>And if mods are disqualified
That was not my point, but rather that if you add a mod to your installation because you ran into a situation in-game where your current set-up failed to offer you the maneuver you would like to perform (to deal with that situation), then THAT takes you out of the game.
>all things where DF has qualitatively more to offer with its many more dimensions
And that's where you confuse the sandboxing aspect of an open world game with the actual freedom of movement in a reality where you are loosely bound by game rules.

>>72215
Your elysium review finally pushed me to give the game a shot, good stuff anon.

>>72171
A lot of what I consider my favorite media doesn't lend itself to long-form review. Simple messages, simple themes executed beyond what my words can convey. I just want other people to experience it.

So, sometimes, I take a different approach. Make it inviting. A stupid joke and a few good screencaps can do more to pique interest than a structured review.

>>72250
>They're the equivalent of fanfiction.
Fanfic and mods differ greatly in that the latter is integrated into the original work, while fanfic remains separate. It's a genuine modification that runs inside of the game, one that can greatly affect how the public interacts with it, as it happens most prominently with games like Skyrim or Minecraft that purposefully support it as a central aspect, or by setting standards in group play like this video here covers at length:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU
Its bibliography is nothing to scoff at. It gets to the level of altering how designers will shape the game going forward in order to work alongside modders. That's a serious level of mutuality right there.
>>72251
>Because football is not just straightforward maneuver execution.
Oh, I know, I'm not trying to diminish its complexity. That'd be stupid.
Frankly, this might due to me endeavoring in the double fool's errand of a) trying to measure freedom and b) comparing real life with non-real life. That's on me.
>>72252
Thanks, that was my goal.

>>72325
>integrated into the original work
I fail to see how this is relevant. I can glue my fanfic into the middle of a book and call it chapter 5.5, that doesn't make it part of the original work or an element of the author's creative vision. The potential for fanworks isn't exclusive to games either, lots of mangaka encourage doujinshi and there are TV shows that take Reddit memes and put them in the show proper as a shout-out, which is an even higher level of mutuality.

>>72343
That's being obtuse. Fanfic is written outside of the work, mods inherently and obligatorily exist inside of it. It's comparable to homebrewed tabletop rules, not regular fanworks.

>>72344
Again, you're holding the two mediums to different standards. You're saying a book can only exist as the author made it and additions made by third-parties don't count, but with games suddenly anything that anyone puts in it is inherently a part of the work. By your logic, total conversion mods that use completely different assets and alter/replace even core mechanics are part of the original work because they're built on the original codebase while something like OpenXCom is a separate work because it was built from scratch.

>>72371
>You're saying a book can only exist as the author made it and additions made by third-parties don't count, but with games suddenly anything that anyone puts in it is inherently a part of the work.
Oh, no, I'm not saying that. You can totally go and alter this or that work, and you can also associate it with some other fanwork, but mods only exist as, well, modifications. That's what they are.
I can go and read a Blue Archive doujin without having ever played the game and it's even impossible for me to make that doujin part of Blue Archive, either physical or digital in both versions it's wholly separate from the game. The original and the fanwork are divorced from each other, physically. It is equally impossible for me to play Tinker's Construct without Minecraft. That's why I made the comparison to tabletop, there you can't introduce a statted red yeti either without a game to put it in. I'm not arguing this on idealist grounds of the author's vision, it's purely practical.
>By your logic, total conversion mods that use completely different assets and alter/replace even core mechanics are part of the original work because they're built on the original codebase while something like OpenXCom is a separate work because it was built from scratch.
"Codebase" brings in extra implications, but besides that yeah, exactly. Same for Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Forgotten City, yeah. Like it says at the top of this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_derived_from_mods
>A game is considered standalone when it does not require the purchase or installation of any other game (including separate engine software such as the Source SDK) in order to run.
Where's the contradiction? Are there any people that argue mods aren't part of what they're modifying? If I'm holding them to different standards it's because they work differently, because the game acts as a platform not incidentally. Nobody talks about book modding when someone makes an annotation.

>>72383
>I'm not arguing this on idealist grounds of the author's vision, it's purely practical.
Then you're not talking about what the rest of us are. We were discussing whether player agency and the illusion of choice make games less artistically valid than other mediums. Whether to view mods as part of the work or separate works in this sense cannot be judged by functional considerations.

>>72386
Why not? Especially if it's fostered on purpose. About 64% of HoI IV players use mods, it's a matter of customization. There's no book that has 64% of its readers also reading fanfic about it.

>>72388
I wouldn't exactly consider the ever-changing jumble of mechanics and spaghetti code in Paradox titles to be art, but regardless you're confusing a toolset for a piece of art. Anbennar may be built on EU4, but it is not EU4. Even if every person who plays EU4 also plays Anbennar, that does not make them the same thing. They're distributed separately by separate entities who did not collaborate in its creation, one merely uses tools offered by the other, treating mechanics in the same way a fanfic would use characters from another story. Maybe you could argue that non-substantive changes like bug fix mods or UI improvements (which I'm pretty sure make up the majority of those HoI mods) are more like printing a book in a different font or fixing typos, but graphics in a game are generally more fundamental to a visual medium than the presentation of something purely text-based.

You can use ACE to add Tetris to Pokemon Blue, but considering that part of the game's artistic vision would be insane.

>>72390
Does the codebase for a game really need to be neat and clean as well for it to be considered art? That feels like a sort of unnecessary requirement for something the audience for the most part will never see...

You know I bet paying more attention to english classes rather than sitting boredly awaiting the more exciting science/math ones would have helped...

Feel like I've seen this very same post in the past as well...

You now realize that March 23 is almost a month ago.