IcyCalm is making a game..

[GaijinPunch]

Shou has helped the games community immensely, quite often out of his own pocket. People will be enjoying these contributions as long as there are fans who understand games, and what was required to get the industry to wherever it goes. Ironically this is what Icycalm claims to be doing, in his own special way. Or maybe I just don't understand him, as he's been saying to me (and you) for years. Maybe my University (which often ranks in the world wide top 50) just wasn't good enough.

Note: See gamengai thread for his retort as he reads this one regularly and replies there. It's very efficient.

[Skykid]

Edit: on Gamengai

[ACSeraph]

I've been following that gamengai thread out of morbid curiosity and I really legitimately cannot tell whether Icy is actually a crazy person or a God tier troll.

[GaijinPunch]

Fine line. He's only there to try to get me to lose my composure. Believe it or not I've dealt with much worse... In person even. My Zen training was worth it.

[jepjepjep]

Nevermind.

[Skykid]

Fine line. He's only there to try to get me to lose my composure. Believe it or not I've dealt with much worse... In person even. My Zen training was worth it.

You met him in person? There are few stories I'm more interested to hear.

Is he as much of a lunatic in reality?

[ACSeraph]

My connections are all genius, and one has to be a very sad excuse of a lifeform indeed to still fail to get them after I have explained them so thoroughly in my amazing essays and books.

[evil_ash_xero]

I guess IcyCalm is a firm believer in talking a big game. Like if you say "I'm GREAT" long enough, maybe someone will believe it..even if you have absolutely no proof of it.

Kind of like religion I guess.

[Shou]

I don't know who Shou is, but from the sound of it, he's pretty involved with the game industry at a high level .. definitely a perch to look down on poor ol' Icy scurrying around like the blowhard he really is.

I've been on this forum since the beginning with malc and Akira. It's changed hosts and had the database nuked a few times but I still read it from time to time.

[Marc]

Wait, wait, are you seriously telling me that this guy went from writing rambling reviews of CAVE games, to deciding scoring sucks and championing Resi 6? Fuck. I suppose this is all pay to read right?

[Ed Oscuro]

Nice to see you, Shou!

[dcharlie]

is Gamengai down for everyone or is just me?

[Skykid]

is Gamengai down for everyone or is just me?

Oh it's still there. We're just wrapping up now.

[Teufel_in_Blau]

It works just fine for me.

I'd wish Icy would stop insulting people. As a German I feel bad for his use of old misinterpretations and language of our old philosophers.

.... Oh boy.

Every moment I have spent on here has been a sheer pleasure (yes, including the recent moments -- but for a different reason). Some idiot on the Shmups thread called this place "a barren wasteland" -- but only because he is an ADHD monkey who needs 100 new shitposts an hour to keep his brain occupied. There is nothing "barren" about gamengai: it is a treasure trove of love for Japanese videogames, and one can spend entire months reading every single post here and never get bored.

This was a joke because his latest post on the frontage starts like this:

No, nobody has hacked the main site. Just figured I'd sound off here and let the inter webs know that I'm alive and for the most part well.

I'm sure GP has enough sense of humor to understand a little joke.

[Udderdude]

.

[KAI]

Score is shit cause I can't score
Tougeki is shit cause I can't combo

I'm pretty sure the next will be:
Immersive games are shit cause I can't immerse

Seems like he needs to change opinions every time he runs out of arguments.

[moh]

I want to thank you all for keeping me entertained the past few days. This thread is bookmarked now, to cheer me up whenever I'm feeling down. This, and that blackman.txt thing

[dcharlie]

I've been playing the "Make fun of freaks/wierdos" game on the internets long enough to know that eventually you realize the person you're poking at most likely has legitimate untreated mental disorders .. especially if they're paticuarly virulent.

yeah, this was the key moment for me during a series of low key run in with another internet wankpot - where 'friends' of wankpot and my wife stepped in and basically accused me of abusing someone who was obviously mentally either below the usual curve or possibly suffering from untreated mental disorders.

The delusions of grandeur are definitely a theme with these people though. It is amusing though that the top several internet gobshites all, ultimately, share the same traits - it's just variations on a theme : recap , icy, etc - it's the same up-their-own-arse self-stroking whilst EVERYONE ELSE IS A MORANS gobshitery that doesn't fly outside their own bubble of importance.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Is that what you dream about at night? Vindication through dead philosophers? You've taken the work of some very perceptive and insightful men, and twisted it into "Videogames where you can pretend to be a thug gangsta are the highest artform ever created by man". They'd laugh at you.

We desperately need necromancy here; can you imagine what it'd be like for Nietzsche's resurrected corpse to show up at icy's door and give him a well-deserved bitchslap?

If I were dead I'd be pissed if some asshole went around misinterpreting my life's work and claiming that if were alive we'd be <3 <3 <3 bestest friends ever <3 <3 <3.

[moh]

nothing gets a girl's pussy wet like video game theorists.

[nasty_wolverine]

nothing gets a girl's pussy wet like video game theorists.

this is getting sigged...

[Mischief Maker]

Is that what you dream about at night? Vindication through dead philosophers? You've taken the work of some very perceptive and insightful men, and twisted it into "Videogames where you can pretend to be a thug gangsta are the highest artform ever created by man". They'd laugh at you.

We desperately need necromancy here; can you imagine what it'd be like for Nietzsche's resurrected corpse to show up at icy's door and give him a well-deserved bitchslap?

If I were dead I'd be pissed if some asshole went around misinterpreting my life's work and claiming that if were alive we'd be <3 <3 <3 bestest friends ever <3 <3 <3.

Holy shit, Icycalm is just like the protagonist in that (fucking) chick flick "Julie and Julia!"

A nobody who writes a blog riding on the coattails of a much more interesting and intelligent person (Julia Childs). Her blog's unexpected popularity gives her delusions of grandeur and she starts fantasizing about how she's bestest friends with Julia Childs and gives interviews with the media about how she's going to make Julia Childs one of the bridesmaids in her wedding. Then at the end she finds out that the real Julia Childs hates her blog. The strange moral of the story is for her to forget the real life person Julia Childs, just focus on the imaginary Julia Childs she made up in her head giving her a thumbs up every step of the way!

Just like Julie/Julia ended with the chick visiting the Smithsonian, looking at Julia Child's kitchen, then paying tribute by leaving an entire box of butter on the exhibit to melt under the hot lights, Icycalm will punctuate his game development career by visiting the grave of Nietzsche and paying tribute by putting an undelivered laptop on the headstone.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

ust like Julie/Julia ended with the chick visiting the Smithsonian, looking at Julia Child's kitchen, then paying tribute by leaving an entire box of butter on the exhibit to melt under the hot lights,

Because nothing says admiration like leaving a disgusting mess for a hapless janitor to clean up...? Is that actually presented as a good thing? That sounds like a terrible movie.

[DMC]

I've been playing the "Make fun of freaks/wierdos" game on the internets long enough to know that eventually you realize the person you're poking at most likely has legitimate untreated mental disorders .. especially if they're paticuarly virulent.

Good point, actually.

[Moniker]

Icy actually began to make a modicum of sense in the last few posts on the gamengai thread. I mean, while I don't really believe that immersion is the defining quality of art (and I imagine his theorizing must be a bit more nuanced than that), I can at least sympathize with the idea. The immersive arts are what gets me going - literature, film, and theater, e.g. - and, despite at least a feeble attempt to understand them, the non-immersive arts (painting, sculpture, etc) don't really do much for me. Although I do view that as a personal limitation, rather than a shortcoming of said media.

Loss of individuation (more or less equivalent to immersion, as I understand it) is a highly-valued Nietzchean quality. However, breaking immersion in art can be valuable simply because immersion is such an expected and valued quality.

I think that I'd agree that shmup-styled scoring breaks immersion, and that shmups, for that reason, in part, don't really qualify as art. Artistic and compelling, certainly, but not art proper. However this assumes that games must approximate art to be successful. The two are separate notions that occasionally collide.

..Nearly broke my head there. Off to play some Mega Man.

[Squire Grooktook]

Personally I feel shmups are very immersive. I can't think of any other genre that makes me flinch or reel back in my chair when I get hit as if it had actually happened. And than you got games like Rayforce that have really beautiful atmosphere and aesthetics as well.

[Skykid]

Personally I feel scoring adds immersion: it completely reconfigures your approach to playing the game and adds an additional layer of 'zone', if that means anything. Playing well is one thing, scoring well is another. Both in tandem and you're completely dialled in.

[ACSeraph]

Score is shit cause I can't score
Tougeki is shit cause I can't combo

This is exactly what I thought as I was reading his argument against Shou. It explains exactly why he would go from a heavy interest in Cave shooters to a hand-holding interactive movie like RE6.

He is just simply a scrub whose confidence and mind was literally broken by the games he was interested in. And so, he turned to philosophy to argue about why throwing is cheap and blocking is for pussies.

There's really nothing more to him than that, and any fighting game player knows that there is no reason to argue with a lifelong scrub. We should simply shun him, our only reply to anything he says being a .gif of a fapping monkey. He doesn't deserve any more of our attention than that.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Personally I feel scoring adds immersion: it completely reconfigures your approach to playing the game and adds an additional layer of 'zone', if that means anything. Playing well is one thing, scoring well is another. Both in tandem and you're completely dialled in.

I think it depends on the kind of immersion you're after - for shmups, I agree that having a good scoring really makes you want to work that much harder, and can really help turn a good game into a fantastic game. If the scoring's just kinda tacked on, I think it actually takes away from it (the original Mega Man for instance, it was a good idea to do away with it in later installments). Mushihimesama Futari is great fun to score in, but when you're looking at it from the horrific stance of a game about trying to stop a war your crazy mother started for completely insane reasons and killing the people of your own kingdom you don't want to have to fight (Palm seriously has a fucked up childhood), the scoring I think draws attention away from that. If you look at the plot for a lot of Cave's shmups, many of them are anti-war or present their battles in negative light (we'd rather not fight but we must, and even then there's not always a happy ending).

For me, a game qualifies as art if you can get a genuinely strong emotional response from playing it, if it connects with you in a way that makes you reflect on the experience. Something like Shadow of the Colossus isn't art to me just because it's pretty, or because the world is big, or because the story is presented in a lonely, minimalistic way. It's art because the game world sucks you in - the time you spend journeying from one colossus to another, or merely exploring the huge world you're in, you're forced to experience a kind of sad loneliness at being in such an empty, yet beautiful landscape. All of the ruins that suggest a once-flourishing civilization only add to that, and there's the more obvious reflection that the colossi you're killing generally aren't hostile towards you, you're usually the direct attacker and any danger you're in is a direct result of you going to kill them.

Katamari Damacy is another game that for me qualifies. It's clearly absurd, but in a way that's pure joy to play. It's a game that clearly only cares about a silly, fun experience, and it doesn't give a damn whether or not it makes sense. It's a surprisingly 'innocent' experience, without any real violence when a lot of video games reward you for violence, and there's always something refreshing about sitting down to play it and just enjoying the sheer absurdity of the game.

In this case I suppose it's more a matter of opinion from game to game what would qualify as art and what wouldn't though. Icy on the other hand seems to treat his opinions as though they were absolutes...

[Skykid]

^ Oh I understand and agree with this. Colossus is a good alternate example of a game where basic scoring would detract from its cinematic and absorbing qualities.

But the plot in shmups... Honestly, it wouldn't mean much if Futari had no scoring, I still wouldn't care about insect kingdoms and fat ladies turning into dragons - I just want things to blow up in an engaging way.

There are a few shmup exceptions where I don't care for scoring and think the aesthetic qualities would be more powerful on their own, several by Treasure: Silvergun and Gradius V - but generally speaking I think scoring done well in a game is immersive. I spent my childhood trying to top the day's HS tables by throwing 10p's into all sorts of stuff, and it made every experience that bit more interesting and challenging.