What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[Dollar Store Sentai]

I don't recall ever seeing much hate for Portal games, not even from the usual contrarians. Only other game like that is probably THPS in the category of games most people seem to like and not have any problems with.

The cake is a lie meme was ran into the ground so hard it hit oil in record time, but other than that I see like 95% praise for both the games.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Indies and blatant woke shit aside, The Last of Us. It's so bad and pretentious, like its fans.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

Last of Us 2 by a long shot simply because of how fucking miserable the whole tone and it’s major deaths being so excessively brutal simply as a way to disguise a cheap nihilistic tone to force drama as brilliantly deep and complex writing. I swear Arthur Morgan’s horse had a more dignified death than the characters in this game.

It's fine if the goal was to show the horrors of people losing their humanity. The thing is it's mixed with dykes scissoring while zombies are around and post-apocalypse version of Toph from that cringy play in The Last Airbender.
My biggest gripe though is that game can't handle it's own message. Yeah, it is barebones and beaten to death "revenge is bad", which is fine by me, it's not a bad message, but let's take a closer look. Abbey didn't give up her revenge and what did she get? Yes, her settlement was killed, but they didn't like her anyway and in the end Allie saved from her a certain death on a cross. Allie gave up her revenge and what did she get? Her friends are dead, cucked father of her child is dead, her settlement knows that she is monster, her favorite walking nose took their child and left, Joel is dead, the person who golfed him to death is still alive and she herself doesn't have enough fingers to play Joel's guitar anymore.
So-o, did Druckman tried to tell us, that revenge is bad or what, because it sure doesn't look like it. All he had to do was to let Ellie to kill Abbey, which would result in "yes, you had your revenge, but what do you have now? Nothing!" And he also could leave that other tranny as a hint, that he/she/they/all of them would try to have revenge on Ellie later and the senseless violence would continue in a world that is already overflowing with it. And not even a hint, that maybe Joel was wrong and killing all those people actually put humanity closer to extinction?
Nope, have this retardation instead, but who am I to question mister "award winning director in the nomination The Best Last of Us 2020"?

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

What seems to be the biggest interest point in Yiik is that it fails in virtually every way imaginable as a game and a story. It's a train wreck of everything not to do in gaming as a medium. The game deconstructs the usual indie creator by showing how he's so up his own ass that he comes up as creepy, stupid, unoriginal and self centered while trying to project those flaws into everyone else.

I guess I'll also mention RDR2. The game tries to play itself as an epic, most infamously the long as shit opening sequence, only to really boil down to "notice when you are in a cult".

It's a pity, because the originality is there.

* The story plays well with the idea of there being only one "soul" per universe and its limitations
* Literal main character syndrome douchebag being the literal center of the universe
* Alex being lied by Essentia to get him to play along
* Alex is accidentally dragged into this whole thing and travels dimensions against his own will
* You can bully a goth kid into suicide

It just fails flat on every level...

 

[The Foxtrot]

Jesus CHRIST this unlocked a memory for me.

Pretty sure I was able to get both the man and the woman to declare their love for my character.

I have too. If you choose to throw the ball at Fink (not that the game lets you...), when you get to the carnival/arcade with Elizabeth and go into the bathrooms for the coloreds, you'll see them in the hallway alive, but shaken up. They'll thank you for saving them (lolwut), and give you a piece of equipment (I forget which one it was).

It's fine if the goal was to show the horrors of people losing their humanity. The thing is it's mixed with dykes scissoring while zombies are around and post-apocalypse version of Toph from that cringy play in The Last Airbender.

This is what I hated about both games. They're supposed to show me a zombie apocalypse, and only the intro of the first game gave me that. The rest of the first game, I never honestly felt like humanity was "TOTALLY ON THE VERGE OF EXTINCTION!", I felt like they'd managed to achieve an uneasy stasis. Martial Law and what amounts to War Communism as an economy might suck, but it's keeping everyone alive isn't it?
Well, until the Fireflies started fucking everything up because reasons.

The second game, it legitimately felt like they went 65% of the way through development, and then realized "Oh wait, The Last Of Us was a zombie game, wasn't it? Fuck, uh, let's slap a few sections together with zombies!". The zombies were, at best, mobile obstacles. At worst, they were literally just background props.

 

[Battlefield2142EU]

https://youtu.be/Bp2Ab5fXnn4

https://youtu.be/dauGiY2S9bw

Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. It's one of the most politically preachy and dated video games back in 2006. The game blatantly glorify corporate ghettos vandalism like it was going to bring down George W Bush himself. I don't have an issue with video games like Saints Row or Grand Theft Auto killing cops. But getting up treating killing police, civilians and construction workers to spray paint literal clothing product placements as an act of heroism. Not to mention, this game paid actual faggots to tag buildings and spray paint street signs to promote this game. What's even sadder is the game. The original developers wanted to make a light Hearted spiritual successor to Jet Set radio with wall running and matrix slow motion. But that faggot wigger, Marc Ecko, put a stop to it. Even a good review from MrHammers pointed out how unlikable the main character is and how weird that the game is okay with committing terrorism just to spray paint vehicles and private property.

 

[Dave.]

Anything written by Nomura

 

[augment]

Can unsalvageable bad writing be pretentious though? Nomura doesn't even know what the hell he's spewing.

 

[Make America Dumb Again]

View attachment 4762304

But Never forget how big play through YouTubers started their career.

 

[Mexican_Wizard_711]

Everything made by david cage.

David Cage gets shit on a lot. But imo Hideo Kojima is a bigger pretentious hack than cage is, not helped by the fact that a legion of fanboys defend every garbage decision Kojima makes. MGS is possibly responsible for all Cutscene heavy movie games that come out nowadays.

 

[Higgs Bonbon]

I've never played it, and I'm aware that the gameplay is (supposedly) good, but the troonery surrounding Celeste has ensured I'll never touch it, same reason I'll never play Undertale again despite enjoying it on launch. Seems like certain games are autism magnets—the bad kind of autism, I call it Undertalitis.

That, and I've never been a fan of "beat your head against a wall until you win" games. Inversely, I love Pizza Tower, but I fear that because of how speedrunner-friendly it is it's going to catch the stinkplague too.

I wish I lived in a cave sometimes.

 

[SaltyFanta]

I was one of the 12 people on earth who bought the Playstation Vita, I kind of enjoyed it, it was full of indie games, so naturally pretentious schlock was pretty common. One that struck me, and made me instantly uninstall the game was called something like 'Absolute Sunset'. I shit you not, the opening cut-scene was a pixel art man talking about depression.

After that I played a game called 'Woah Dave', a game that actually appears in google searches. It was about throwing eggs into lava. It wasn't pretentious at all, but it made me realize if videogames are going to be taken seriously it'll be because they make the audience happy, instead of licking the balls of critics and substituting fun with 'deep thought provoking themes'.

Barely anyone remembers Depression Quest because they played it, and certainly no one remembers it because they enjoyed it. Videogames are meant to be fun.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I wanted to give a few words on the things mentioned:

I'm surprised no one has mentioned YIIK, the game is straight up just about an author's self insert that can do no wrong, is longwinded, outright mean and very stupid, and he hypes up this "cool meta narrative in a post-modern rpg" that completely falls flat on it's face as a result. The game inserts literary references and uses writing that screams "I'm in college and I just found a thesaurus" writing.

I have feeling that YIIKES was deliberately trying to angle for the game journalist set and not the people who actually play games, then couldn't keep his fucking mouth shut when the criticism came in, then made a bunch of changes to the game post-release anyway including removing the "lemonade alpaca" scene.

Everyone will remember how he cried about how "gamers can't handle complicated issues", instead of "highly flawed but had some interesting ideas". I can fully believe that the major issues with writing and worldbuilding were pointed out in development but got steamrolled.

Nah, they liked it because it ended with "Gamers are really evil rapists rather than princess savers" message. It was when a huge push to promote feminism in gaming happened.

I still contend that there was a bunch of things that happened basically in the 2003-2007 timeframe (toward the end of the "golden age") that set up the situation we have today.

A lot of the "damage" to vidya had already been done by whenever Braid was released (2008?) and the whole "games are art" thing was still a few years away with everyone desperately trying to prove Ebert wrong with his "games can't be art" claim. As far as "feminism in gaming" went, games journalism wasn't nearly as infested in 2008 with diversity hires back then as it got in 2014 (Kotaku was still very readable back in 2008).

I think Wheatley being unbearable was kind of the point of the character, but yeah in retrospect the writing wasn't good. A whole bunch of quips and very tryhard humor like "the part where he kills you" where everything tells you that including the achievement, GLaDOS doing the "I'm a potato" quip.

Portal 1 wasn't even that big on actual storywriting, but Portal 2 tried to do a whole bit of world building and indeed, the writing was off in that. Half-Life didn't seem to suffer from that since it had a different writer, or rather one writer, Marc Laidlaw. Portal 1 had two writers and Portal 2 had three writers.

The problem with Portal 2 was that it was a sequel to a game that didn't need a sequel. There was the mysterious mute player character, a sardonic AI, and an innovative game mechanic, and that didn't need a whole lot of explanation. The sequel basically dragged that out with gimmick mechanics, a backstory that explains too much yet not enough, and the dumb twist of "actually GlaDOS was the dude's human secretary". I'll give the humor a pass since that sort of thing wasn't nearly as played out as it is now.

 

[ShitlordroltihS]

Copy paste 2D indie side scroll platformers about depression, and roguelikes about how much it sucks being a tranny

 

[Higgs Bonbon]

Copy paste 2D indie side scroll platformers about depression, and roguelikes about how much it sucks being a tranny

*roguelites. With pixel graphics and bullet hell mechanics to make sure streamers play it for several weeks. Don't forget the obscure mechanics that the chat will scream about while the streamer keeps making the same mistakes on purpose.

 

[OtherLastTrainHome]

I'd say Far Cry has a tendency to suffocate itself on its own farts, particularly the 5th entry which has such a retarded message that I'm left wondering what the fuck the hack retards at Ubisoft are thinking when they write these scripts.

i'm replying quite late but since i binged the thread i figure i could reply to this at least.
far cry 5's lead writer was an unironic anti-Trump doomer who sincerely believed that the bad orange man was going to lead the human race into a world-ending nuclear apocalypse with Russia. the peggies were meant to be ludicrous caricatures of Republicans (specifically, Christian right-wingers) at the time despite the fact they were possessed of the simmering, monomaniacal rage of Antifa - the Left. in case you need any more indication of this, one of the most retarded side quests in the game involves you securing the vaunted "piss tape" from the peggies and delivering it to a crackpot agent who walked off the set of South Park. i gave a link at the start of this paragraph but that's not the article i remember reading back in the day. it should still give you an idea of where ubishit's priorities were.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

"games can't be art"

It really all flows back to this idea. Once this idea started to propagate in gaming, writers and producers tried to shoehorn games as art by making them pretty much every medium besides games: Films (Uncharted), tv shows (The Last of Us), Indie films (most of the thread) and literature (Disco Elysium).

The only result was games becoming less fun and devoid of artistic merit, since none of the mediums is intrinsically artistic.

The most artistic game I played in the last half decade is probably Cruelty Squad because it's 99.9% gameplay and has ideas that can be interpreted by the player rather than strictly being about whatever globohomo approved message of the week is.

 

[Strangolapreti]

Gris and Season after fall are pretty games with gorgeous art but lacking gameplay.
I think there is effort put on them, but also a lot of pretentiousness as well, since they are oretty shallow outside of the pretty graphics.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

People get mad when I say it, but I honestly think Grand Theft Auto IV is Rockstars most pretentious title.

Dan Houser and Leslie Benzies literally stripped all the fun out of Grand Theft Auto in order to make the movie they always wanted to make.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is pretty high up there, but I can't recall them flat out removing features from the first game because their protagonist "wouldn't do that".

 

[Stoicism Is For Losers]

Disco Elysium, The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, boring games for boring people but they pretend they get something out of being bored to tears.