What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[Muad'Dick]

10 pages and I see no mention of one of the worst offenders; the entire Borderlands franchise.

You don't have to have a sexually ambiguous main character with an undercut , babby's first political discourse, depression, midwit philosophical talking points and blatant contempt for your audience to be pretentious. One of the greatest crimes of pretentious games is their breaking the fourth wall with the narrative equivalent of the fucking Killdozer. Thats where Randy "Magic USB" Pitchford comes in.

If Reddit: The Animated Series wasn't bad enough already, its incapable of going for give minutes without telling you how self-aware it is.

 

[Coolio55]

"Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" (trailer)

The documentary film "Playing Columbine" is online now, telling the whole story of what happened after this game was released. http://playingcolumbine.com/T...

youtu.be

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A little surprised no one has brought up super Columbine Massacre RPG yet. This is an shitty edgy RPG maker game that's up it's own ass with it’s heavy handed political messages and anti-religious themes that paints Eric and Dylan as the true victims. Because they had no friends and were made fun of at school. The writing accurately predicted YouTube skeptics and r/atheism at the same time. The game comedy feels the worse, writing by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland . The game creator was even friends with lulzcow Matt Jarbo and even had a now deleted interview on the old Mundanematt YouTube channel.

Oh man. I really wish I could see that mundanematt interview ...although I may regret saying that
Anyway, afterwards (after it inevitably caused trouble for his professional career) the creator had to make a documentary about how it was actually a social experiment and he was really smart and intelligent. I can't remember if this was before or after the us govt decided to deploy smiggles (A.K.A Adam Lanza) on his forum.

 

[ShitlordroltihS]

*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.

I'm going to keep calling them roguelikes.

 

[OtherLastTrainHome]

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.

the seventh generation of vidya consoles was the beginning of the end for my interest in gaming as a primary hobby, and GTA4 was one of the titles that really cemented what a mistake it was for me, as a kid, to have expected so much better from the industry. i remember being first in line at gamestop during the midnight release of GTA: San Andreas on ps2 and playing that all day and all night. my parents thought those games were hilarious and my mother loved a lot of the music in Vice City.

then GTA4 happened, and it's the most anti-GTA game ever - it's GTA in name only. i have never understood where the appeal comes from. Rockstar is just one of those few companies that apparently can do no wrong and suffer no backlash despite scores of evidence to the contrary. they're a lot like Nintendo, Acti-Blizz, etc in that regard, propped up by legions of drones.

there are no side activities in GTA4. money is worthless. there are no customization options for vehicles. there's basically no clothing to wear and the game forces you to wear a suit for many missions anyway. the shooting and gunplay is about all the positive there is to it but that's also the critical downside to GTA4 and every game after that Rockstar developed: the autistic focus on hyper-realistic movements, and the complete death of the power fantasy in what was the ultimate power fantasy game. to this day it fucks with me that people think the game is a groundbreaking masterpiece when there's nothing of value to be found as a video game. except for the "world interaction", or whatever the robotic shills on boards like /v/ continue to extol it for. it's an open world game that absolutely did not need to be open world because there is nothing to do. GTA5 was even worse in this regard; GTA4 took the franchise behind the shed, and GTA5 pulled the trigger.

GTA5 is the most pretentious shit on the planet and even more wildly popular than GTA4, a distinction i cannot fathom. the open world was even worse, the wanted system completely broken, and even more uniquely GTA things were excised from the final product. the vast majority of missions don't award money (not that it's useful anyway) and i sincerely believe that the Rockstar team thought they were being funny, endearing and clever in how much of the player's time they waste on the sheer amount of mundane, tedious faggotry in the game for absolutely no meaningful payoff whatsoever (yoga, collectibles, etc) while marketing the game on a big lie about masterminding criminal heists. i'd sperg out about GTA: Online, which has always been a massively insecure and dangerous platform that Rockstar still hasn't suffered severe consequences for, but that ship has sailed, and i don't want to be reminded of how much money they rake in year over year.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Related, calling a game immersive sim is just pretentious cope. It's a fucking FPS.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Related, calling a game immersive sim is just pretentious cope. It's a fucking FPS.

Kiwifarms, 5+ hour youtube analysis videos and Reddit were the only times I ever heard the term "immersive sim", and it was only in the past 3-5 years I want to say.

When I was a kid, people just called Deus Ex a first person RPG.

 

[cybertoaster]

Well, until the Fireflies started fucking everything up because reasons.

I give them credit for not showcasing the fireflies as "muh brave rebels against fascism" but as a bunch of violent terrorists, specially at the end when they tell joel to basically fuck off after crossing the entire country on foot.

Similar shit with infinite and the vox populi, tho levine cucked out at the lefty criticism and retconned that faction in the dlc.

I was one of the 12 people on earth who bought the Playstation Vita

Why are used vitas so expensive? did sony only made like 20 or what?

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

How the fuck is trump and the same time a russian puppet and a warmonger that will nuke russia?

This quote from a leftist review of the handmaid's tale bullshit setting of fundies taking over applies to this:

No one who knows anything about the way America works would ever really think that its rulers would want to let silly gender prejudices keep them from creating new consumers, much less let religion get in the way of productivity. The Baptist loonies are suckers to be wooed in election years, no more. They are useful as janitors in peacetime, cannon-fodder in war. Making them into the rulers of a nightmare vision of America is, by a charitable estimation, very naive.​

​

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).

It really shows you the abysmal low self-esteem of game developers when they let the commentary of a dying boomer only famous because of a normie tv show about movies define their entire lives and careers moving forward.

Compare that with how animators in the 90's shot back at said boomer's opinions, constantly ridiculing him for his dumb takes. And really who cares about some guy who thought absolute abortions like 'the happening' and 'ghosts of mars' were good movies?

 

[Dysnomia]

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.

I liked Wheatley. "Nobody's going to space, mate!"

My lovably moronic robot buddy became an insane super computer and tried to kill me. I though the dialog in the game was really entertaining.

The first game didn't have as much story aside from the hidden areas full of bean cans, overheated Xboxes used as camp stoves and graffiti. After I beat a puzzle I liked to make my own entertainment by tossing all the dead turrets into a pile or destroying everything I could pick up by dropping it in toxic goo or putting it through the barrier. Portal 2 had less of that. You couldn't pick much stuff up. But I got a laugh out of splattering that white gel everywhere.

 

[Shamino]

Nah, the first Biocock really takes the cake in pretentiousness. It really feels like something made by a leftoid majored in Humanities, and not only because of the take on Ayn Rand phylosophies, no wonder journos and gamedevs in general jerked off praising this game.
Is the game that popularized the retarded abuse of audiologs. Unlike its predecessor System Shock, biocock's recordings are generally invasive in gameplay, too lengthly and the placement really didnt make sense oftentimes, It really raises the question if the Rapture citizens were either extremely autistic or mentally ill to end up mainly using recordings to communicate on a daily basis.
SS implementation of audiologs to convey storytelling was years light more coherent and succint than this crap. What happened Ken Levine?.
Also the whole fuss about "choices & consequences" by merely deciding either harvest or save the Little Sisters, which basically translated into a different ending.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

everyone's gone to the rapture

want a game where you can look at the pretty lights and graphics with a boring story and like nothing else? well do we have the game for you.

 

[SaltyFanta]

Why are used vitas so expensive? did sony only made like 20 or what?

Compared to other consoles and the PSP, I recall Sony made very few of them. It wasn't the immediate success they expected I guess. You're really not missing much, unless you're into weeb games, PS Vita was mostly indies and weeb games, a lot of the games were cross playable too.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Bioshock Infinite wasn't that bad... At launch. I think that the game's flaws ended up being made a lot worse by the DLCs and the attempts by it to sort of "retcon" the Vox into being better and badly implemented connection to the first two games that could have been done in a much better way. The main game had a pretty good point of how just fighting for freedom and equality can quickly lead you down a path of unspeakable shit, mirroring how Comstock made Columbia into a epitome of American Exceptionalism but went too hard on the whole WASP superiority thing with it. All extremism is bad. Same deal as with 1 and 2 in a way, keeping the theme that ideology isn't everything and you can't reduce life to it.

Overall it feels like the game we got was just a small shard of what could have been. The fascinating glimpses at time travel stuff were reduced to a small section where you talk with old Elizabeth when they could have done so much more like exploring the different timelines and the consequences of it. The famous Crowbcat video of the Infinite we never got is a good glimpse a the sort of things we could have had, or that one mockumentary about Columbia from a alternate 1980's talking about it. But instead... We got what we got.

Then came the DLCs. And all the cocksucking Levine got from the base game obviously went to his head and to the rest of the team as well and they just went full retard. The DLCs take place on Rapture for some reason, it comes off as a badly shoved in and simply being there to capitulate on the popularity of the first 2 games for no real reason other than reuse assets and try and tie it. They make the black girl Vox leader into a dindu nuffin who was only killing children because quantum twins told her to do it because Elizabeth needs to get her innocence under control by metaphorically menstruating/getting her hymen popped.

Ironic how she would become a massive porn star, guess the gamers agreed with the writers she needed her cherry popped ! In a way Infinite's influence on the world of adult machinima has far outdone it's influence on gaming.

Also another game that was really pretentious and super tryhard about being intelectual and smart was Black Ops 3. No one has mentioned it, probably because no one here played the campaign and even the few who did don't remember it but it got almost universally panned for being a very weird nonsensical plot and 2deep4u. My brother in Christ it's fucking CoD people are looking for some popcorn stuff not this. Black Ops 1 had a pretty good balance of action and serious, you didn't need this shit. There is a reason Treyarch just gave up and the next game was multiplayer only, though that didn't help either since the whole franchise had over stayed it's welcome and saturated the market.

 

[mensch]

Horizon series. Just the first few bars of the main theme tune is enough to make me feel physically nauseous at how fart-huffingly faux emotional it all is.

There are no lyrics - just some German broad whimsically moaning different notes.

The game itself feels like it was designed by committee to be as inoffensive as humanly possible. It's a giga-budget movie game that's desperate to tug at your heart strings and create some sort of feeling inside you, like an Avatar on steroids. It even goes for all the same hooks - women are strong, tribal people are noble, and we must protect Gaia at all costs.

I think i'd rather slit my own scrotum than endure an hour more of this series.

 

[Peru oso donas]

Horizon series. Just the first few bars of the main theme tune is enough to make me feel physically nauseous at how fart-huffingly faux emotional it all is.

There are no lyrics - just some German broad whimsically moaning different notes.

The game itself feels like it was designed by committee to be as inoffensive as humanly possible. It's a giga-budget movie game that's desperate to tug at your heart strings and create some sort of feeling inside you, like an Avatar on steroids. It even goes for all the same hooks - women are strong, tribal people are noble, and we must protect Gaia at all costs.

I think i'd rather slit my own scrotum than endure an hour more of this series.

HZD surprised me because i never thought someone could take a concept like robot dinosaurs and make it boring as shit.

 

[Coolio55]

Horizon series. Just the first few bars of the main theme tune is enough to make me feel physically nauseous at how fart-huffingly faux emotional it all is.

There are no lyrics - just some German broad whimsically moaning different notes.

The game itself feels like it was designed by committee to be as inoffensive as humanly possible. It's a giga-budget movie game that's desperate to tug at your heart strings and create some sort of feeling inside you, like an Avatar on steroids. It even goes for all the same hooks - women are strong, tribal people are noble, and we must protect Gaia at all costs.

I think i'd rather slit my own scrotum than endure an hour more of this series.

It's amazing how you can make a game about giant robot dinosaurs and have everyone's attention stolen by the fugly character designs.

E: Semi-sniped

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The game itself feels like it was designed by committee to be as inoffensive as humanly possible. It's a giga-budget movie game that's desperate to tug at your heart strings and create some sort of feeling inside you, like an Avatar on steroids. It even goes for all the same hooks - women are strong, tribal people are noble, and we must protect Gaia at all costs.

I remember the game having moments were there could have been unique ideas like educating the next generation of humans who'll be artificially created in a millenia, what parts of culture to keep. only to have it become a joke where the sole white male in the scientist group wanted to put BDSM porn.

It really shows you the abysmal low self-esteem of game developers when they let the commentary of a dying boomer only famous because of a normie tv show about movies define their entire lives and careers moving forward.

Compare that with how animators in the 90's shot back at said boomer's opinions, constantly ridiculing him for his dumb takes. And really who cares about some guy who thought absolute abortions like 'the happening' and 'ghosts of mars' were good movies?

Game devs have progressively (pun unintended) been replaced by art school rejects who try to make up for their "inadequacy" of making games by trying to make games into the films they couldn't make. It doesn't help the entire media as a whole has been infected with extreme politics and virtually zero ability to related to anything that is not living in California. The end result is that almost every thing created post 2013 will be thrown to the garbage.

 

[Kharash]

recordings are generally invasive in gameplay

I recently played through it again and when you enter the Medical area there are like 5 recordings within reach of each other and when you take a few steps while listening to the first one Atlas calls you on the radio and interrupts it. It's absurd.

Also another game that was really pretentious and super tryhard about being intelectual and smart was Black Ops 3. No one has mentioned it, probably because no one here played the campaign and even the few who did don't remember it but it got almost universally panned for being a very weird nonsensical plot and 2deep4u. My brother in Christ it's fucking CoD people are looking for some popcorn stuff not this. Black Ops 1 had a pretty good balance of action and serious, you didn't need this shit. There is a reason Treyarch just gave up and the next game was multiplayer only, though that didn't help either since the whole franchise had over stayed it's welcome and saturated the market.

I can't blame Treyarch for actually trying to do more than your average CoD. It's not completely out of left field either since the other Black Ops games were far more interesting visually and storywise than the Infinity Ward games. Essentially going for the "It was all a dream" thing probably wasn't the best call though. Still, once you actually put all the pieces of the plot together it's pretty interesting.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

The fact they did it on a CoD campaign kinda sabotaged them, as those games are not really suited for it.

Zero Dawn was so forgettable and inoffensive and bland it skipped my mind entirely when trying to think about a game to mention. It really is kind of insane how bland they made it. I have actually read about the game while wasting time and parts of it do sound interesting but it always comes off so bland and like they quickly waste the opportunities given.

Also I don't think it has been mentioned, but The Witness. From the same guy who made Braid. It's a pretty good puzzle, a cool mechanic and all. But fuck me is it pretentious. It deserves mention if only because of the one puzzle where you need to literally wait a whole ass hour for a entire lecture to play in full to complete. Even if it is a "optional" puzzle it comes off as very pretentious. And the creator was salty some dude made a shitpost parody called The Looker so he deserves to get clowned on.

 

[Toolbox]

I don't recall ever seeing much hate for Portal games, not even from the usual contrarians.

The contrarians have sprung up in the last few years since its been so long since portal 2's release that late gen zoomers have begun to sperg. Not that all of them are, but I suspect it. Like a lot of this type of retardation in the gaming community I think this sprung from /v/. Little of the hate is directed at Portal 1.

 

[Hummingbird]

Nina Freeman's Cibele which is just another of her self-absorbed games where you learn how she lost her virginity to an online stranger with barely any gameplay. Then again, I have a feeling Nina wants us to see her games as deep, but in reality its just her obsessing over her dysfunctional past.