Right. We're all art critics now.

[emeraldrafael]

I'd like to be completely silly in this thread, but everyone's always been an art critic, ever since you could look at something and say "eh, its alright" or "meh, its not that great".

but I dont know, GoW (God, not Gears), has an artistic appeal to it in the way Kratos' body moves, his muscles contracting as he tears a monster apart, or slaughters a civilian, and hte blood splattering can be quite... eye catching. I would certainly frame some of the moments in which Kratos battles in GoW3 as stills and display it in an art of combat sorta way.


...

but hell, any video game cant be as bad as <url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_shit>Artist's Shit

<spoiler=Have you forgotten us so soon X3>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/70/Drake_of_the_99_Dragons.jpg/230px-Drake_of_the_99_Dragons.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/bigboxshots/7/561437_back.jpg

....

I stand corrected.

 

[BreakfastMan]

Whelp, time to take of my socks, dress all in black, and talk in a deep voice, it's snobering time!

What is this Gears of War crap? The principal characters are burly, overly muscled men wearing close to half a tank in armor. No women are ever seen so one must presume that they are all clones. The story is a pile of crap that leads nowhere and, as the you learn in the second game, resolves nothing. There is no character development or themes, it is just a mindless gray/brown gore fest, always looking for new and inventive was to mutilate bodies. Oh, and is that a chainsaw I see on their guns? What the hell! In short, if I want to play a good third person shooting game, I will play Max Payne 2, thank you very much.

That was kind of fun.

 

[Cousin_IT]

Pokemon is a jolly good, spiffing tale of animal cruelty.

But how does one be cruel to that which hasn't the function of reason? Tally ho!

But if the one being cruel has the capacity for reason, & being cruel is said to be an unreasonable thing to do, surely it stands to reason that they shouldn't be cruel even if the cruelty is towards something incapable of reason? Is it only cruel when the recipient recognizes it as such, or the perpetrator? What if an external party to the action recognizes it to be cruel? Is cruelty relative? Am I cruel to make my magikarp fight, knowing it cannot defend or attack, on the basis that doing so may in future lead it to evolve into the much more powerful Gyarados?

However, good sir, recognize that it is a straw-man to apply the concept to pokemon, who are not animals in the worldly sense as they have demonstrated a capacity of reason. Thus, we may not consider it an argument against animal cruelty, rather, a damnation of animal cruelty as an invalid term!

Cruelty towards that which is incapable of reason is impossible!

I don't think you should be allowed near young children.

 

[LordOrin]

Pac-Man tells the heart-wrenching tale of an overweight man haunted by the ghosts of his past mistakes. His only way of coping is through drug abuse and binge eating as he hopelessly tries to escape the maze of his own depression.

The game paints a bleak portrait of the futility of existence, and is reminiscent of classic "drug" movies like Requiem for a Dream or Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke. Some of the game's moments feel gratuitous however, such as when Pac-Man makes a wrong turn and is seemingly torn inside out.

The score is understated, and the final moments are heartrending as the very walls of Pac-Man's drug-induced fantasy world are torn down to reveal a string of characters that will surely appear as nonsense to the uninitiated player, if they even make it to the end that is.

****

 

[Ghengis John]

Been a while since I quoted you, Erana! You are absolutely right about this. A lot of people don't want to give the status of "art" to something they don't like, but they forget that this position means there is no such thing as bad art. And there definitely is. Some art is good, some is bad, and all involves creativity and application of skill.

Don't go making assumptions about me when I'm "standing" right here kiddo. It's not a question of art having to be something you like or approve of. I can recognize Atlas Shrugged as art, even if I hate the philosophy espoused within it completely. The same goes for the film "Thumbsucker", which was an utterly detestable story about a self-centered, conceited brat, but I can acknowledge it as art.

 

[Richardplex]

So, if games are art, and Assassin's creed 2 is undeniably art, and in assassin's creed 2, one is in the renaissance, and in fact buys various portraits, which are themselves not only art, but as they are remade to be implemented into the game, they are art of art, that means assassin's creed 2 is art of art of art.
So, in conclusion, Assassin's creed 2 is a true AAA game.

 

[franconbean]

I personally find tetris a moving tale of the Russian revolution, where the protesters against the Tsar's brutal regime (and piss-poor leadership) group togetger in a show of solidarity but are shot in cold blood by the Tsar's royal guard.
The Communist propaganda is thinly disguised, but I call it a wonderful representation of a turbulent episode in Russian history.

 

[Lord Beautiful]

*monocle*

I find that the exploration-based entries of the Castlevania series act as allegories painting mind-altering narcotics as the salvation of mankind.

In the beginning of these games, you are a man of great strength who intends to save the world from whatever evil figurehead threatens it, an evil figurehead protected by the cruel, convoluted structure of Dracula's castle (no doubt a metaphor for the structure of modern government, or as I call it, "the system"). You may proceed a ways into this labyrinthine fortress and overcome somewhat few obstacles, but you can never reach the top, never reach "the man."

But then you come across an item that allows you to perform a jump even while in midair, a concept in itself which illustrates the idea of thinking outside the box, the box being the laws of physics, the laws of physics being a metaphor for the oppression of the working class at the hands of corporate fatcats. This newfound ability allows the protagonist to access areas of the castle previously unreachable, which allows him to topple the enemies therein, which opens to path to even more powerful items that allow him to jump even higher, perhaps even to fly.

The evil overlord is defeated because the protagonist, an obvious representation of the common man, overcomes oppressive forces and attains special items that allow him to soar in ways otherwise impossible, which is to say, he got high.

 

[Baneat]

Pokemon is a jolly good, spiffing tale of animal cruelty.

But how does one be cruel to that which hasn't the function of reason? Tally ho!

But if the one being cruel has the capacity for reason, & being cruel is said to be an unreasonable thing to do, surely it stands to reason that they shouldn't be cruel even if the cruelty is towards something incapable of reason? Is it only cruel when the recipient recognizes it as such, or the perpetrator? What if an external party to the action recognizes it to be cruel? Is cruelty relative? Am I cruel to make my magikarp fight, knowing it cannot defend or attack, on the basis that doing so may in future lead it to evolve into the much more powerful Gyarados?

However, good sir, recognize that it is a straw-man to apply the concept to pokemon, who are not animals in the worldly sense as they have demonstrated a capacity of reason. Thus, we may not consider it an argument against animal cruelty, rather, a damnation of animal cruelty as an invalid term!

Cruelty towards that which is incapable of reason is impossible!

I don't think you should be allowed near young children.

PETA is wrong, but Team Magma is right!

 

[kidd25]

hey remember when art was simple... yeah neither do i.

 

[William MacKay]

I think Fallout 3 represents what would happen if we had a nuclear war. Oh wait.... it did.
Personally, I think LittleBigPlanet, on a deep level, represents the Holocaust. Somehow.

mmyeah mmyeah. how exactly?

He then asked the class if a rock that just happened to look like a human face was art. Over half of the class said yes.

The point is, when it comes to art people are retarded.

does that logic, that a nonhuman item shaped like part of a human is art, mean that a dildo is art?
OT: this will help our industry be taken seriously, and hopefully we wont get CoD clones and start getting deep, story-centered games. ok, yes it will be a capitalist scheme to take money from the gov't, but its like giving a nymphomaniac sex to save orphans from fire: theyre doing it for themselves, but it helps others.

 

[Twilightlord]

Pokemon is a jolly good, spiffing tale of animal cruelty.

lol
That's kind of what I was thinking and how we should start talking
"Chip Chip Cheerio then"

 

[The Epicosity]

So, if games are art, and Assassin's creed 2 is undeniably art, and in assassin's creed 2, one is in the renaissance, and in fact buys various portraits, which are themselves not only art, but as they are remade to be implemented into the game, they are art of art, that means assassin's creed 2 is art of art of art.
So, in conclusion, Assassin's creed 2 is a true AAA game.

We need to go deeper!

 

[woodaba]

The Tomb Raider series is an examination of the decline of the upper class in the modern age. Lady Lara Croft resides in her ancestral mansion aloof from society, and in her adventures outside those walls her only encounters with the lower classes are bloody gun battles in which soldiers, mercenaries and security guards - in a word, working men - are slaughtered with as much dispassion as she slaughters the wild beasts that, a hundred years ago, her class hunted almost to extinction for sport.

Lara refuses to engage with the modern world except with violence. Her goals are always backward looking, digging into and revelling in the ancient past. It is implied that Lara is only at ease when she is surrounded by the relics of earlier ages, when the peasantry knew their place, amidst the ruins of kings and emperors. Like the once mighty British Empire, Lara spans the world, and yet she leaves nothing in her wake but death and destruction, and like Lord Elgin, robs the world's great historical sites for her own gratification.

Fundamentally then, Tomb Raider is about class struggle, and the violent efforts of a doomed ruling class to assert themselves over the increasingly rebellious proletariat.

Wow...I'm loving this already. Do you have one for say Call of Duty or Dragon Age? OOOOH what about Minecraft?

Call of Duty symbolises the deep momoerotic tension each man has for one another, shooting other men with white blobs from long protruding armaments, while also showing how many people truly feel such deep seated feelings due to its vast selling numbers

The Dragon age series symbolises that all great monuments must soon come crashing down, and the acheivments of yesteryear are undone by the desires of greedy and ammoral men.

Minecraft is a metaphor for the human need to destroy and rebuild, never seeing contentment in the natural world, always needing to build more.

 

[LaughingAtlas]

Alrighty, I'll give it a shot wearing... Two monocles! Glasses, actually. Don't care if it counts because I have a beard, which I remember somehow meaning pretentiousness points for this kind of thing.

Anywho, let's look at violence as art. We've come a long way from Mortal Kombat, even if we're recycling the fucking game. We have stylish swordplay a la Assassin's Creed series which definitely looked nice when done right, even if some tards couldn't figure it out. (Snobby pricks like to ridicule those with different tastes/opinions, right?) We also have bloody mess indulgences like the Dead Risings and recent Fallouts, turning foes into glistening red chunks with unnecesary force/corpse beating, an absolute joy to behold. It's nice to see more than "swing weapon at guy, laugh at 2D blood splatters, (colored green when they think anyone will be fooled as long as it's not that mysterious red liquid that evidently makes children go in search of it in the real world upon catching sight of it in a game) and move on." I think we're really getting into what we can do with grievous bodily harm, like hurling ragdolls through the air at mach 2, which brings me to The Force Unleashed, a game series with little or no interest besides doing what might look cool.

(Now some actual game criticism, done by literally copy-pasting something I posted before and acting like it's new because it seems like something a lazy egotist might do)

"Force unleashed 2. I stood up for Lucas Arts until I played that fucking waste of a- There is no logic to most anything that happens!

Spoiler: Ho, ho, guess who I'm vaguely mimicking! ...also, there are spoilers here.

Why does the Gorog have natural holes in it's fucking arms? I've heard of creatures warped by the Dark Side, but why the fuck would it result in comparitively scrawny limbs? Why did those people build a city hanging from fucking archways? Were they worried about local wildlife? Did fucking laser guns not work on them? What did that planet have that was worth the massive safety risk of one too many drunken pilots crashing into the thing and bringing it all crashing down as opposed to a fucking space station? Why did any of those bullshit droids the empire sent after you even exist? I thought the Ice Bot was a Kamino-only thing, meant to capture renegade clones alive, freeze them to keep their precious DNA or some shit, but we see them in Arch-city too. The Fire Bots (a fucking palette swap) have absolutely no right to exist, what happened to the fire troopers from the last game? Come to think of it, where did most of the old enemies go? Why the fuck did Kota have his lightsaber handle slung over his back like one might a real sword?! You'd look like a fucking moron, like when a wizard character carries his/her staff on their back, it's a walking stick, you tool! You can carry it as you go and not look hostile as you might if carrying a sword or something. Two Worlds 2 got this right, and as far as I know, it's the only one.

Also, at one point, they say cloning jedi is completely impossible. (they do it just fine in the expanded universe, but here they never go back and explain why "impossible" was wrong.)

Furthermore, was everything that happened in these games just ignored by everyone? Are we honestly to think there were bullshit droids, ridiculous force power, Darth Vader being captured alive like some common fucking cartoon villian, his dialogue equally worthy of a kidney punch to the writer, and the fucking ending(s), I can't even, [sub]motherfucking, sone og a, garfle[/sub]

[sub]Phew. I feel pretty good now.[/sub]...And that no one ever spoke of any of it as they do other things in the series?

My only explanation for that twisted mess was that it was some alternate universe where jedi are ridiculous and everyone's a colossal moron."

-Me, June 12th.
(Was that roughly the goal?)

 

[Richardplex]

We need to go deeper!

well, we also play as desmond, who is using interractive media, which is what games are, therefore, the animus can also be considered art. and within the art of animus there are the glyphs, which are interactive, thus art, and contain portraits, more art. so its art within art within art within art, and the art within art contains art within art. and now art doesn't sound like a real word.

 

[Beardly]

I think Fallout 3 represents what would happen if we had a nuclear war. Oh wait.... it did.
Personally, I think LittleBigPlanet, on a deep level, represents the Holocaust. Somehow.

mmyeah mmyeah. how exactly?

He then asked the class if a rock that just happened to look like a human face was art. Over half of the class said yes.

The point is, when it comes to art people are retarded.

does that logic, that a nonhuman item shaped like part of a human is art, mean that a dildo is art?
OT: this will help our industry be taken seriously, and hopefully we wont get CoD clones and start getting deep, story-centered games. ok, yes it will be a capitalist scheme to take money from the gov't, but its like giving a nymphomaniac sex to save orphans from fire: theyre doing it for themselves, but it helps others.

You ignored the part of my story where the teacher defines art before half the class ignores that definition.

 

[David Hebda]

This is whats considered art nowadays I want no part of it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13660478

[http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/809/1307596479458.png/]

The adults should be shot, the little girl abducted and given to a farmer and his wife, to learn that it means to live and work.

As per the rest of the thread I will do what was asked and not clutter it up with things other than what was requested.


Arcanum of Steamworks and Magic Obscura.
In what can only be described as a intersection of history and Tolkinien mythology Trodica games and created a true masterpiece.
Arcanum a world on the cusp of a technological revolution (steam power, mills, trains and dirigibles) Must choose its path, the New, or the Old. Magic or Technology. into this time you are thrown, the Manifestation of an Old god, or merely one caught in circumstances beyond your control. Be a Human technician, A half Ork warrior, and Elven magician. The possibility are endless as well as the endings, the world is yours to explore and the choices are yours to make, in the world of Acanum

 

[Gralian]

Condemned is quite clearly about the anti-social nature of the common man and the struggle against an oppressive and utilitarian world.

...

*Sips tea*

I'm British. I'm allowed this stereotype.