I understand this entirely and I agree, but haven't you considered that some people seek the immersion which games designed to be realistic aim to provide because it adds to the escapism aspect?

Hahaha this fuckin guy

Does photorealist graphics, physics etc. make games immersive/escapist? Google street view is pretty good in this regard but I'll rarely lose myself in it.

It's more about games ensuring that suspension of disbelief isn't stretched too far, I think. Inhumanist said something in the previous page about how it's about realism in the games universe- the whole thing can be about albinos on the moon but if they respond in consistent, believeable ways, if the AI is good, if the physics are consistent etc then it's just as immersive as some game that requires the developers to map the streets of Berlin. And it's likely faaaar more entertaining.

They absolutely can add to a game's immersion, don't know what your arguement is there. But there's definitely a bit of confusion if Google Street View is being used as an example. Photorealistic graphics and physics do not make a realistic game; that's down to the actual mechanics of the game. I could consider a game with minimal graphics but a complex set of commands to achieve things which might be accomplished in most games with the tap of a button or two to be quite realistic. And even though that sort of thing sounds pretty tedious and boring to me, I can imagine why someone might find additional immersion in it.

"Realism" is a pretty vague term in this context so there's bound to be confusion, I guess. I wouldn't call a game realistic solely because it is an accurate portrayal of some event in history, for example.

Dwarves and elves can fuck off, if only because they're so boring and unoriginal. That said, games with tentacled cosmic horrors, giant monstrosities, flaming demons, etc. can be quite thrilling.

Dwarves and elves are only so boring because no one bothers to do anything with them beyond ripping off Tolkien. Give me bloodthirsty, amoral elves like the Fair Folk of old or hyper-militaristic, Feudal Japan-style dwarves with actual stone skin and then we'll talk.

This 10000%. It's actually one of the big reasons I find myself always playing JRPGs instead of the Western brand.

What I want is an RPG that truly gets more difficult as you play. Like Zelky said, the very nature of the genre means that you just get stronger and stronger and more overpowered and things just get easier and easier save for a couple bosses. I want a game where you start as an eager young adventurer with an abundance of asskicking power, only to get older and more tired and weaker as the game goes on. By the end of the game you're an 80 year old geriatric who can barely lift a sword.

If you don't bother getting the stat multipliers at level up in Oblivion, that's exactly what will happen. They're an utter pain to get anyway so it'll probably make the game more enjoyable until the whole world inevitably murderizes you.

That's the first 20 minutes of God of War II (kinda)! :V

Tomb Raider II: Why the fuck is this a lot of people's favorite? I see it all over tomb raider forums. It's really, really not good. I don't think you explore a single tomb in it. Everything has been utter shithouse modernity. Contemporary Italy, which is nothing but enemy after enemy after lame puzzle (okay, maybe I enjoy Opera House more in hindsight, but it still was more of a chore than something enjoyable); that awful, insanely long underwater/Wreck of the Maria Doria section that is a fucking eyesore, BORING, loaded with enemies as if the game didn't already have too many-I'll chalk their presence their to TR logic, NO TOMBS, awfully designed environments, and only one redeeming quality (you guessed it: the first two minutes of Forty Fathoms where you are running out of air and their are two sharks loose); Tibet is super fucking overrated and Barkhang Monastery is wasted space (why people worship this level idk) (still no tombs!). I haven't completed China yet, but I am hoping Temple of Xian is as painfully pleasurable as I've been lead to believe. It looks really nice.

TRIII: Anyone who has played this on the PS1 knows that this shit is dark as fuck. Flares barely help. India and the South Pacific were rad enough, the closest we get to the first game, but largely outdoors and thus lacking that creeping death and total isolation atmosphere that made the first the unmatchable game that it is. I play these games for a simulacram of the ancient. Nevada Desert was pretty sick, really dusty and dead, minus the water which makes life rear its head amongst all of the bleakness (that is to come with the next two levels). HSC and Area 51 are easily my least favorite non-London levels. I remember playing these on a playstation magazine demo disc in '98: reminded me of MG as much then as they do now. That shit's the total opposite of the soul of TR (but, hehe, how far that series strayed from its roots!). I haven't hit Antarctica yet, but Tinnos better be astounding. That's really all that's left. And fuck whoever digs Madubu Gorge. What a bore and truly not indicative of TR (as one prolific poster on the trforums claims-of course, he plays the Dynamics games ). PALACE MIDAS EVERY DAY
Gotta give em credit though, Jungle is a kick ass opener, and Crash Site is super fun (Lost Valley gone whole level). Quicksand traps and those Caves of Khaliya are great. Coastal Village's first part is very pretty. I wish there were more crocodiles in this series (TRIV fixes that, fucks up most everything else).

TRIV: I haven't gotten to the Tomb of Semerkhet yet. I get confused and bored with all the backtracking, absolutely forgettable environments (okay, minus one part of Sacred Lake, but that's like 1/10 of the play time I've put in), too much story, and it's just soulless. Again, how some people can think this is the finest TR is fucking daft. It's like they took the signifiers from the TR's Egypt levels, then built a Disneyworld out of it. It's as fake and bullshit. No sense of "holy fuck, there's no one here and this place is O L D". Feels like you're on a backlot for the whole duration so far. The Indiana Jones moments exacerbate this. When are the Nazis gonna show up?

Tomb Raider Chronicles: What a three quarter assed entry into the series. The Rome levels, while modern, are actually fun to play through. The plazas and piazzas, sewers, three bosses(!) in one level, Desert Eagle sniping, Pierre and that asshole, all make it worthwhile. The engine runs nice. But that is where the fun ends. The Rig/Sub levels are skippable and offer nothing of interest, which also goes for the buggy VCI levels. Ireland's opener is passable and the Labyrinth is okay, but I couldn't be bothered to continue. Underwhelming.

Approximate ratings so far
TRC 1/5
TRIV .5/5 (I've never been so bored with a TR game)
TRIII 3/5
TRII 2/5
TR 10/5

I'd play UB, GM, LA, but I have no way to run them. I'll be skipping AoD unless I get desperate for a fix. It's so far removed from what I desire.

Whoa, I think that's the most anyone's written about Tomb Raider. Like, ever.

I just got Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, which was released for PC today. Should be a good weekend.

[/spoiler]

I have played a lot of the Tomb Raiders and none of them compared to the first one. Later all it seemed to be was going into a room and trying to solve some extremely complex puzzle.

Tomb Raider Anniversary is a lot of fun. It's the original game without tank controls! :'D

TR had precision controls! I can't imagine whatever goofy schema they devised. From what I gather (I've no way to play it to verify), Anniversary is a total butchering of the original. Cistern? Gone (or turned into part of Tomb of Tihocan). St. Francis Folly: made mythologically accurate (BOO!), rooms totally changed (from the footage I've seen, for the worse by a longshot). The Lost Valley puzzle looks cool, but fuck they screwed up the actual valley itself, what with the combat, the dinos, layout. I love PS1's limited draw distance. NOTHIN BUT DARKNESS
I don't think I've seen what they turned Caves, Vilcambaba, Qualopec, the first two Egypt levels, or the first two Atlantis levels into. Sanctuary of the Scion they fucked up. So clean (currently playing through the original level ). I heard they destroyed Great Pyramid AND Palace Midas. Like, kicked out everything that made them so mysterious, forgotten, lost to time, and massive. To go back a bit, combat looks shot to hell. Stupid. Absolutely unnecessary. Gotta appeal to those casuals tho!

Dunno about complexity in the other TR's-seems more like bad design: sometimes it's a bit pixel hunty, othertimes yer just clueless as to where to go/what to do because shit's overwhelming. That said, I have quite a bit to complete, especially since I'm about to take on the nastiest levels of II and III.

I've never been so afraid of anything in a game as the fucking crocodiles in TR. The addition of the harpoon gun in II takes away much of the terror.

Nah, Anniversary's better than the original, if only because it's not fucking obnoxious to actually play.

Translation:

Here's me being completely unsurprised by DD's snobism.

Xlxlx is no casual, he actually plays the Souls games. Also, old school Tomb Raider and its shitty tank controls is borderline unplayable nowadays. Just sayin'.

Well, I'm proud of myself. After many, many years of trying to beat Super Mario Bros 1 on the NES, I finally beat it. World 8-3 is really what was stopping me. Maybe I'll beat the game with no warp pipes someday...but I'm not touching this game again for a while!

I like em both but to be quite honest, every one of those things are "unoriginal" in the sense they've been done a billion times over.

Finally got the Mega Man collection (1-6) on Steam! Already unlocking some repressed memories, why didn't I do this sooner?

I don't "enjoy" oppressed elves, bearded, gruff-voiced dwarves, dragons draped over literal mountains treasure etc, I tolerate them to get to the things I do like. It's like metal and lyrics; it's nice to find good metal with good lyrics, but even if the lyrics are complete shit it can still be good metal.

But yeah, rexxz is right too. I'm trying to recall a fantasy or semi-fantasy video game I've played that didn't have a flaming demon.


Basically what I'm saying is that Gene Wolfe needs to fucking design a game already!

Flaming demons can have all sorts of variety to them though, it's a really vague descriptor. Elves are always still just elves and they're boring 99% of the time. But of course you picked that out of all the examples, huh.

Are drow considered elves? They were kind of interesting. But anyway, elves are only uninteresting because they've been around forever and been used in every possible way. The same will go for any kind of fantasy race eventually, be it tentacled monster, gelatinous octahedron or transgender faerie-folk.

They are?

Buuuuut I can't really disagree with that. I did like how The Witcher 2, while stuck with the awful boring generic elves from the Sapkowski novels, still tried its best to make them interesting and unique. For example, when you're first introduced to Iorverth, the elven freedom fighter, he's literally playing a joyful folkish ditty on a piccolo while sitting atop a mossy fallen tree trunk in a clearing. So when he opens his mouth you expect a quaint, soft-spoken simpleton with a Welsh lilt... yet instead you're met with one of the gnarliest, gravelliest and most tortured voices you'll hear as well as a wit so sharp it even Oscar Wilde could cut his teeth on it.

The only elves in games I've really liked were the elves in Dwarf Fortress. Tree hugging, cannibalistic, slave driving hordes that are fit only for the magma pits.

^Dwarf Fortress is awesome.

Speaking of ambitious games, I still can't figure out if No Man's Sky is going to actually be fun to play or if it will quickly just become a boring monotonous chore. Regardless, it definitely seems intriguing.

As the resident open-world junkie here I feel similarly. Interesting in concept but sounds like it could get boring, even by my standards.

Elves can be done well, I really like the elves in the Elder Scrolls games, with the high elves being this quasi-nazi master race fascists, and the dark elves having their own really unique culture. Honestly though they hardly count as elves, sharing only a few general characteristics like pointy ears and long lives. The games more often call them Altmer, Dunmer, etc. than "elf".

You're right that 99% of games don't make anywhere close to that kind of effort, though. I think the difference between elves and demons is that a generic elf is boring, while a generic demon is still pretty cool, and demons tend to come in a lot more variety anyway.

Mirror's Edge was pretty good, except the combat was pretty annoying a lot of the time. I was playing on Normal and dudes would just kill me left and right and whenever I had to do combat stuff it was like, "well don't run at dudes with machine guns with nothing but your bare fists you dummy" but when I tried dropping the difficulty to normal it was just stupid easy and boring. Also, basically every part of the platforming itself felt really natural and second-nature to me, except I had a lot of trouble with parts that required you to wall-run then jump. I must've died like fifty times on some of those parts and it was really frustrating.

Still a good game though.

Yeah I was gonna bring up the Elder Scrolls elves as something different. There are like what, five different races that apart from generally being tall, narrow faced people with pointy ears, all look and act drastically different and have different customs and cultures. I don't know how it is in the other games since I've only really gotten into Skyrim (I never owned anything from the beginning through Morrowind, and Oblivion didn't appeal to me at all for whatever reason), but the Falmer (snow elves) are feral, cannibalistic monsters who exist only in ruins and deep underground, and the Dwemer (which, now that I think about it, are one of the few times I've ever seen Dwarves described simply as another race of elf, instead of a completely different thing altogether) are long extinct and you only ever see depictions of them in their ruins, which are laden with traps and clearly far more advanced than anything else that exists in Tamriel. I like that a lot.



I could be wrong because I never really delved into the lore of the series or anything, but since all of the English speaking people refer to them as Elves, I've always taken those to just be Elvish translations of what the humans call them. Like, "mer" = "elf" so "Dun-mer" = "Dark-elf", "Bos-mer" = "Wood-elf", etc.

Overall though yeah I agree with everybody, elves are generally just ripped off from the Tolkien version and never expanded upon.


In other news, I finally started up FFT after years of saying I was going to. Strategy games intimidate me, especially ones with permanent death (which I don't know for sure if this game has but it certainly seems like it does), so I'll probably alternate between suicidally arrogant and cautiously cowardly. Here's my first experience after nearly an hour of the tutorials:

>BH finally starts game
>Agrias is introduced
>"Oh hey, that's the character I've seen Morri reference a few times along with Chris Lightfellow as an example of how easy it is to design a badass female knight to explain how fucking insulting the skimpy boob plate shit is, and she certainly seems like an unfuckwithable enigma, I can tell I'm going to like her."
>Ramza is primed and in position for the final kill
>Agrias uses Paralyze on the last, completely useless and inconsequential archer
>Ramza gets caught in the crossfire and is also paralyzed
>Ramza misses his turn due to paralyzation
>Nameless flunkie strides in for the final kill, robbing Ramza of the XP
>"Fuck this bitch"

Well, sort of. "Mer" is their generalized word for themselves, and people will say "Mer or Man" to mean "anyone normal" as in "this tomb has been sealed for hundreds of years, untouched by Mer or Man." "Elf" I guess is an English translation for that, with like you said the prefixes meaning the different races.

Obviously merely calling your elves and dwarves something other than elves and dwarves doesn't automatically make them unique. I brought it up to demonstrate how the Elder Scrolls writers were taking conscious efforts to distance their creations from normal elves and dwarves - they're not "elves with a twist" or whatever, they're something completely distinct that share only general traits with the established cliches. For example the Dunmer are absolutely nothing like dark elves are normally portrayed in anything other than (very) general appearance.

I just wish people invented their own goddamn fantasy races... And yes of course calling them the "Fae" and having them be exactly like Tolkien elves doesn't count.

It's as if everyone ripped off Star Wars for their alien races.

Didn't Tolkien rip off Wagner and Norse mythology and stuff? Everyone's a plagiarist...

He took the names, yeah, but conceptually, his stuff was pretty original. The "elves as humans who never fell into sin" idea was fairly cool, and actually justified their idealization. You can't say the same about most modern interpretations of them as a race, who are great and awesome and perfect and better than you because they're elves and the author clearly wanks to pictures of the bloody things.

Sad thing is, apart from the aforementioned Elder Scrolls giving us the Khajiit and Argonian, the very next thing I thought of was:



EDIT: Well now that I think about it, FFXII also introduced the Viera didn't they? You could also argue that Moogles are a sentient race and not just beasts, like with Chocobos or Moombas, as far back as several games previous.

Really it's kind of unfair since it's the western fantasy genres that just ape off elves and orcs and trolls and whatnot a million times over, but it's sorta funny to me that one of the most blatantly diverse (I mean everybody except the Viera are fully integrated into society the world over and live in harmony with one another) blends of original fantasy races just also happens to be one of the shittiest games in the series/genre.

What are those gorgeous, perfect creatures?

#AllSeeqAreBeautiful