What are the most pretentious games ever made?

[A Sentient Cloud]

I was going to name Night in the Woods but I didn't play it long and it seems more "incredibly cringe" than "pretentious". The dev team if I can even technically call them that does suck a lot of dick for cock though.

Accusing a game that you didn't actually play of being...anything at all, seems kinda retarded.

Then again I'll always go to the mat for NitW, it's a fantastically written game.

 

[Polarity]

Accusing a game that you didn't actually play of being...anything at all, seems kinda retarded.

Then again I'll always go to the mat for NitW, it's a fantastically written game.

Night in the Woods was really pretty, had great sound effects, and almost had an interesting story. Then it ends and the true villain is capitalism.

It's Reddit: The Game with a great coat of paint.

 

[Passacaille]

at the middle point of the game the girl creates a portal to a new reality they enter, and it's not AT ALL clear if they could even return to it, which should completely dissolve any motivation he had for this shit

I have to admit I think I never "got" Bioshock Infinite. I remember there was a lot of discussion back in the day if the story was just pretentious pseudo-philosophical drivel, or if there was actually some meaning behind that convoluted ending. I think I just thought "is there really anything to get"? And the reason for that, is within the part of your post I quoted.

You raise the obvious question, why would Booker care about his debts when he's not even in his own reality? What's his motivation? I don't know, and there's no reason to go into a deeper discussion of alternate realities here. I just know that I stopped caring. I'm not in the world I started in. All the things I did in the game up until that point does not matter anymore, not only because it's a linear shooter, but also in the narrative itself. I have no motivation, it's stuck in an alternate reality.

The game's story felt meaningless, but also stupid. Was Elisabeth's idea that instead of getting weapons for the rebels, they'd just travel to a reality where this was already done, so they wouldn't have to? Is that how it's supposed to work out? I first thought we'd bring the weapons back, but clearly that was not the case. Sci-fi shows, like Stargate SG-1 or Star Trek, the deal with alternate realities/dimensions/time-lines, always emphasize the importance of getting back to the original point of origin. Not only does this make internal sense for the characters, but it's important for audience investment.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

The XCOM TPS that suffered development hell and was quietly shat out was a much better time than this shit ever hoped to be.

Still upset that we never got the version of the game that the old pre-release stuff showed. Remember reading about it back in the day I still had a Game Informer subscription, and seeing the teaser trailers, and thinking it was a really interesting direction for an X-COM revival. Then, I guess they saw Firaxis' work and scrambled to change the enemy designs and whatnot, and it ended up being disappointingly safe.

 

[Monuklear]

I have to admit I think I never "got" Bioshock Infinite. I remember there was a lot of discussion back in the day if the story was just pretentious pseudo-philosophical drivel, or if there was actually some meaning behind that convoluted ending. I think I just thought "is there really anything to get"? And the reason for that, is within the part of your post I quoted.

You raise the obvious question, why would Booker care about his debts when he's not even in his own reality? What's his motivation? I don't know, and there's no reason to go into a deeper discussion of alternate realities here. I just know that I stopped caring. I'm not in the world I started in. All the things I did in the game up until that point does not matter anymore, not only because it's a linear shooter, but also in the narrative itself. I have no motivation, it's stuck in an alternate reality.

The game's story felt meaningless, but also stupid. Was Elisabeth's idea that instead of getting weapons for the rebels, they'd just travel to a reality where this was already done, so they wouldn't have to? Is that how it's supposed to work out? I first thought we'd bring the weapons back, but clearly that was not the case. Sci-fi shows, like Stargate SG-1 or Star Trek, the deal with alternate realities/dimensions/time-lines, always emphasize the importance of getting back to the original point of origin. Not only does this make internal sense for the characters, but it's important for audience investment.

I don't remember jack shit about Bioshock Infinite's actual story, but I remember:

1. It completely broke game journos' and Reddit midwits' brains, to the point the internet was flooded with needlessly complicated "BIOSHOCK INFINITE ENDING EXPLAINED" articles and videos.
2. It seemed to be pretty trivial and not hard to understand at all.
3. It was full of fucking nonsense and plotholes.
4. Half of it felt unresolved, to the point I remember getting actually mad at how stupid and pointless the ending was.

 

[Monuklear]

People like to make fun of Gone Home, Fez and depression quest. But I think the granddaughter of all hipster pretentious art game crap is Braid. It's an alright puzzle platformer with super Mario bros references. But game journalists and homosexuals in the video games are art crowd circle jerk over braid being deep because the ending is a text screen references the Manhattan project. Braid is such hipster trash. Even college humor made fun of braid for sniffing its own farts back in the day. Yes, that college humor.

Nobody remembers Braid.

 

[augment]

Aren't castle crashers, super meatboy and vvvvv incredibly popular with zoomers.

 

[Monuklear]

Aren't castle crashers, super meatboy and vvvvv incredibly popular with zoomers.

Speedrunners, maybe. But by that logic so is Super Mario 64, and somehow I don't see that as "core zoomer culture".

 

[whatever I feel like]

"indie game" (actually published by Sony)

 

[Gamepads]

Nobody remembers Braid.
<...>

Oh man... Seeing SMB there hurts. Seeing troons for some reason compare Celeste with Pizza Tower made me think of SMB. Trying to latch to the popular stuff, they wind up ignoring SMB which pretty much laid the groundworks for that kind of platforming. Then again, little meat guy is probably too fuckin' hard for them.

 

[Toolbox]

Typical SS13 round.



The sequel "remastered edition" is such a lazy copout.

It's the same endings, except there's a bucket in it.

You don't even have to look for new content. It's literally behind a door labeled "new content".

The narrator's speech about video games is so up it's own ass. It's 20 mins of him moaning.

The remasters content is far worse than the original game, made obvious by just how much they apparently hate their audience. Any commentary in Remastered especially when they directly bring up things that people have said like when Steam reviews for the first game are shown just grates the experience. The worst part is them trying to say "no you're just nostalgic, stanley was never that great" like what? You're berating the player for liking your content?

 

[SouthernBitchBob]

I remember a flash game years ago that made fun of shit like this.
Passage in 10 seconds

 

[Sparkletor 2.0]

Life is Strange where every choice you make determines the outcome of the game!

The last choice you get is either to go back in time to save your friend but you have to sacrifice the town or save the town and let your friend die. So either everyone in town is dead and everything you did to solve the mysteries and help people was meaningless, or you let your friend die in the first scene of the game so you never learn about your powers or solve the mystery or stop the creepy teacher's rape dungeon. So basically none of your choices mattered other than would you sacrifice an entire town to save your best friend's life.

 

[Leftists=Pedophiles]

Bioshock infinite lets you slaughter proto-antifa and has a negress antagonist. It also doesn't admonish you for taking the "racist" option in the opening raffle, even if the choice is meaningless. Did the original bioshock even have a message aside from "Libertarian extremism is kinda maybe bad and destructive but also badass"? I'll take it over TLOU2 or a fart-huffing walking sim easily.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Life is Strange where every choice you make determines the outcome of the game!

The last choice you get is either to go back in time to save your friend but you have to sacrifice the town or save the town and let your friend die. So either everyone in town is dead and everything you did to solve the mysteries and help people was meaningless, or you let your friend die in the first scene of the game so you never learn about your powers or solve the mystery or stop the creepy teacher's rape dungeon. So basically none of your choices mattered other than would you sacrifice an entire town to save your best friend's life.

How much more (or less?) pretentious would the game be, if you'd have to sacrifice all of the other people in the world, and not just the town, to save the said friend? If LiS was like that, and came out today, would people celebrate for killing all of the Republicans, homophobes, bigots, transphobes, Russians, CEOs, bankers, etc, as a result? Or would they seethe about all of the innocent Ukrainians, Democrats, the rest of the entire LGBTQIAOZOMGWTFBBQ population dying, instead?

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Nobody remembers Braid.
View attachment 4756354

I'd say Castle Crashers is legitimately good.

And might as well add Plants vs Zombies to that list.

 

[retard strength]

Accusing a game that you didn't actually play of being...anything at all, seems kinda retarded.

Then again I'll always go to the mat for NitW, it's a fantastically written game.

Man maybe it did stop sucking after an hour (X), but I was not gonna waste more time to find out. It felt like a game written for teens that got overhyped, and that's fine. I'm not the target demographic. The dev team still sucks dick for cock.

 

[Pissmaster]

Any of the David Cage games. The guy wants to make movies but is trapped making games "Where your choices matter". Spoilers, they usually don't since there is only one right path/ending for you to choose. The topics that he tries to bring up are so badly written and ham-fisted too. His games want to be something greater, games that have heavy and complex topics but they struggle to even be coherent.

One thing I'll say that a David Cage game did really well was how in Heavy Rain, you can make decisions to a point where all of the protagonists die, and the villain gets away with it. It's cumbersome to pull off, and you more or less need to follow a guide to do everything just right, but I remember that ending being satisfyingly dark.

 

[cybertoaster]

I could swear we already had this thread, anyway.

For example portal 2 seems pretentious but it isn't, its a well put together game something most indies will never be, and at every point where the lore seems to be getting too serious it gets shot down, not with the braindead lolrandum humor you see in complete shitstains like borderlands but with old school nonsense like cave johnson going full boomer with his corporate speak, it never comes out looking smug or condescending.

Metal Gear is a good (not great) game series with a mediocre story with a pretentious delivery of said story, see what I mean? Kojima pushed it to the breaking point with dead stranding which was without a doubt a pretentious shit game from beginning to end, even the first teaser its incredibly pretentious in hindsight.

Bioshock infinite is not as pretentious as it seems, but the DLCs were incredibly pretentious for AAA gaming att and woke before woke was a thing. The problem with that game is that the plot tries to be smart but its dumb, its what dumb people think smart storytelling is.

And to top it off the twist-ending means you can only play it once and be impressed, its not a twist like the end of Dead Space 2, its a dumb 180° twist of the game that's there as a big "fuck you" to bioshock fans, with the DLCs just twisting the knife.

But the worst part of infinite is the game we didn't get, which makes the pretentiousness of the watered down version we did get even more obvious

David cage has sucked since indigo prophecy, I truly don't understand who keeps buying his shitty games or why he keeps getting paid by sony to make more of this interactive movie shit that has barely more gameplay than those FMV "games" for the SegaCD did.

I played Gone Home because I, like many other early players, were duped into thinking it was a horror game. Because it had some very misleading marketing. When you get to that seance stuff you start thinking that the whole family is dead and then nope. Red herring. Turns out your lesbo teen sis ran off with her AWOL from the military girlfriend. A foolish relationship that will never last and will land people in prison. There's something kind of fun about going through items in a house. You can look at a lot of useless stuff. It's just that the devs were not creative enough to do anything with it. It's a mystery but it's not a good one. Putting lesbians in it only ups the woke factor. It doesn't make it a good game. It doesn't deserve the praise it gets. Sadly, that praise opened the floodgates for more games just like it. Point & clicks/walking simulators need a good story to carry them. You are playing a story with interactive environments. It's ok if the gameplay is a little off sometimes. But the story has to be at least halfway decent.

Gone Homo was not the first pretentious POS indie game I played but it was the first time ever when not sucking up to a game and its mediocre developers got people actually hating you.

I could and did call braid a pretentious piece of shit and blowhard a hack when that game came out. Some people agreed with me, others didn't and played the game anyway, same with other shitty indies.

But with gone homo you couldn't say shit, you had to be silent else a wave of proto-woke fedora tippers and unbearable 20something cunts would crash thru your window and say you were literally hitler. It was the first time this happened in vidya and it worked, you just couldn't say anything negative about this boring mediocre crap game without being ostracized from game communities and its no surprise this marketing scheme of "wokeshit as a shield" has been copied and re-deployed ever since.

BTW that game came out just a year before gamergate happened, what a coincidence...

I love Fez. I hate Phil Fish. It's such a shame such a cute, fun game was made by this pretentious hipster fuck who can't handle people saying mean things on the internet.

Here's the thing: that fucker? he's a rich kid who never have to work for anything in his life, its the same with everybody in the indie game scene. That's why all their games about muhdepression come out looking so fake because for them depression is having a bad day, and a bad day for them is the barista getting their coffee wrong. They never had to deal with the real shit like poverty, illness, a broken home, let alone terrible things like being born in a third world country or going thru a war. Shitheads like fish from fez didn't even made the game, he literally paid a guy to actually make the game and then paid critics to get the awards he needed by giving them stock in his company.

They all do this shit, the entire games-are-art scene its full of rich kids looking for fame and of course more money.

Spec ops the line might be my favorite example of an accidental comedic game. It's writing about what it would look like if Micheal Bay got to direct a movie based on Stanley Kubrick, a Holocaust movie that never got to be made.

That game lost any credibility it had after the mortar mission, its literally impossible to get past that part without burning all the civvies. They could've made it incredibly difficult to point out that "doing the right thing is hard" or something, but that means writing an alternative ending that isn't some ME3-grade bullshit where you die fighting, win say fight or get arrested, which is the kind of hacky shit these mediocre writers prefer to do.

View attachment 4753009
Bioshock Infinite's popularity, like Overwatch, is only kept alive by all the pornography. When people talk about bioshock they are talking about the first two bioshock games. When people talk about Infinite. It's all the porn of Elizabeth.

You weren't lying, its been 10 years and coomers still make porn of this.

And there's a LOT of dog porn...

At the time this wasn't that bad and maybe some considered it funny, but now all games have an annoying characters like Wheatley with annoying quips and the part where Glados turns into a potato has devolved into "lol, so random" humor, everytime I mention this I just remember this video

Millennial Writing

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ShreddedNerdJoin the Discord: https://discord.gg/mn4E8CPsgXHave you noticed this trend? Cringeworthy writing i...

www.youtube.com

Man, that guy is a huge halofag, practically his entire channel its him going full assburgers about halo.

Also a consolefag, in this day and age...

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

Surprised nobody mentioned Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Aside from being incredibly boring, having riveting fights of LMB-LMB-RMB-SPACE and the absolute fucking joke of permadeath(yes, it had it, but the game is so easy, that you will never get to that point) it's so far up it's arse that it turns into spiral. The main feature of the game is that protagonist is a schizo. How was it portrayed? Well, she hears voices, that NEVER say anything useless, in fact they inform you if someone wants to hit you from behind and never lie to you. Ok, what about hallucinations? Eh, in the game you are literally descending into Hel, so who the fuck knows. Delusions? Well, this fucking game ends with "What was that? I don't fucking know! I am crazy, remember? Let's go for another round!" which to me is more like bad writing and not exploring the themes of mental illness. And speaking of, do you think the whole game revolves around the protagonist having mental illness in a pre-medieval society, where it would be blamed on demons and spirits? Yeah, for about 20%, the other 80% is, I shit you not, daddy issues. The protagonist keeps bitching that her father is a monster, who locked her in a dark room, killed her boyfriend(your sole mission is to take his head to Hel and fight her, so she would let him go to Valhalla) and eventually killed her mother, who was insane too. And in a bonus cutscene turns out that he betrayed his settlement, which again adds confusion if it was real or just schizo trips. Yeah-yeah, "does it even matter if the story is good", but guess what? It's not. And all of this is shown to you not in some naturalistic manner, oh no, it is so artsy and pretentious, like all the scenes with her boyfriend are not just "oh, I loved him", it's so desperate like she was ready to inhale his farts instead of fresh air. And yes, the fact that it has female protagonist is just another reason why journos praised this garbage, nevermind that fact that it deals with a theme of mental health like this studio dealt with Devil May Cry reboot several years earlier. I'll just add that at some point of the game, she just says "I don't need you anymore" and the voices go away, you know, like in the real life. It's like Depression quest, only a game, not a Powerpoint presentation.

As for Spec Ops: The line. You know, it's overrated, but it's not bad, let alone pretentious. It just deconstructed the pestered cliche of yankee army bringing democracy through carpet bombings. Yeah, maybe you came here with good intentions, but do I need to remind you where the road made of good intentions is built towards? Yep, here you go.

Bioshock Infinite, eh, it was fine until they decided to connect it to the first game. Why? Just why? Not only it's retarded, Levine also used it to wash-out Fitzroy(pun intended cuz she iz black), who now didn't want to kill a boy, oh no, she merely pretended to and was infomed that she will die, but in the end it will be for a good cause. I mean, I loved portrayal of the riot in Infinite, it showed how really blind in its rage it was, that maybe those people had a good reason to rebel, but in the end they didn't care who to kill as long it serves their revenge. And they fucking destroyed it with one short cutscene.

As for something I didn't actually play, but am familiar with - games by Kojima. The writing is one big "tell don't show and then tell something else", the depth of this "tell don't show" is so great, that it's above sea level, it sounds almost like fanfiction. And when you think "God, this must be a parody of spy fiction", you put MGS games one after the other and then look at Death Stranding only to realise that yep, this is what Kojima thinks a good writing is. And he is so desperate with shoving messages into those games, that he himself doesn't understand. God, I am glad that Konami dumped his ass before he would put his dirty hands on Silent Hill. Can you imagine the dialogues in that trash? "I don't know why we can't leave this town. We probably did something bad, although I am sure as hell didn't. My wife died two years ago and I didn't have anything to do with it. Because killing people is bad"