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Old 05-23-2008, 02:58 PM   #1
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MGS4 to have 90 minute cutscenes

Link fu

This has to be a joke. Nobody could possibly think that slamming a 90 minute cutscene in the middle of a game would be a good idea.

Right?

Right?

I can't believe there are people defending this shit either. "Metal Gear has always had long cutscenes lol!" Well why not take it to its logical conclusion and make a 29 hour movie then, fucknut?
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Old 05-23-2008, 03:09 PM   #2
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Re: MGS4 to have 90 minute cutscenes

I understand your frustration, but I am one of those gamers who says "I love Shenmue" and "I <3 Xenosaga." You've got to understand that there are those of us, influential those of us, who enjoy what some games have become: interactive storytelling. Interactive cinema, if you will. Where the "gamer" is as much an active crafter of the story as he is a passive observer of the story. Where narrative brilliance can run free, uninhibited by missions and time bars.

I understand that gamers like you say, "Movies belong in the cinema," but you have to understand that gamers like me don't appreciate that B&W answer. We enjoy our half-game half-movie things just dandy -- and we prefer them to either a pure game or a pure movie.

"Why not take it to its logical conclusion?" This shows that you may not understand the point I made above, which is why I make it. We story enthusiast-gamers are happy to see games becoming more and more cinematic, but we wouldn't want it to be a pure movie either. Otherwise it's "just a movie." The easiest way I have of explaining it by analogy is:

- you like vanilla ice cream
- we like vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup on top
- you're asking us to leave your vanilla ice cream alone and to go buy chocolate ice cream if we love chocolate so goddamned much

That's actually a handy comparison, because I really do (irl) prefer vanilla ice cream w/ chocolate syrup to either pure vanilla or pure chocolate.
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Old 05-23-2008, 04:39 PM   #3
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Re: MGS4 to have 90 minute cutscenes

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xuande
I understand your frustration, but I am one of those gamers who says "I love Shenmue" and "I <3 Xenosaga." You've got to understand that there are those of us, influential those of us, who enjoy what some games have become: interactive storytelling. Interactive cinema, if you will. Where the "gamer" is as much an active crafter of the story as he is a passive observer of the story. Where narrative brilliance can run free, uninhibited by missions and time bars.
Given how bad you are at games, I can see why you prefer yours to have as little actual gameplay as possible.

OH BURN

I don't disagree that cutscenes can be good, but a 90 minute cutscene in a game is a terrible misuse of the medium. It's almost like those idiot weeaboo fanfic writers who use manga/anime conventions (pratfalling, sweatdrops, etc.) in their work: you're shoehorning things that work in one medium into another without stopping to consider the reasons they work in their original medium.

For one thing, at a fundamental level I want to be a part of the story: I don't want to watch Solid Snake kick ass, I want to be Solid Snake kicking ass. A 90 minute cutscene is longer than some commercial film releases, which means that it will likely follow narrative conventions: introduction->rising conflict->climax->conclusion. Tell me, what in the rising conflict/climax parts are so important that the player is forbidden for having any real input at all? Is there no possible way the same story/information could be conveyed through interaction in an interactive medium? And if it's 90 minutes of exposition instead, that's just plain bad writing.

Which brings me to my second point: game writing is generally shitty. Part of this is the reality that a game can still stand on its other merits even if its story is unrepentantly terrible: books and film generally don't have this luxury. When people do try and give their games stories, they tend to follow the faulty line of reasoning that goes "if I throw in a bunch of references to Kafka, Randian Objectivism and Nieteszche that will make my story deep."

To steal a phrase from Morbo, "LITERATURE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!" Good literature isn't based on how many dead Greek scholars you can quote verbatim, but people who should fucking know better keep drinking the Kool-Aid regardless. The fact that large numbers of faux intellectuals (a pathetically large number of whom are also games journalists) are more than happy to wank off a game that even superficially references the Kabbalah just makes the problem worse.

You know what's great about stories like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? You can enjoy them for what they are superficially (hick boy and runaway slave have wacky misadventures on the antebellum Mississippi), but below the surface it's much smarter than it lets on. With that said, take all the games that have been acclaimed for their story in the last five years. Make a list of those that had something to say about the nature of human existence and that didn't rub your nose in it like you were a puppy who piddled on the floor. I guarantee you can count the number of titles on one hand.

And by all accounts MGS4 is going to treat you like you had explosive diarrhea on the carpet. Fucking awesome.

The game's not out, so maybe I will be surprised by Kojima doing something interesting with cutscenes (apparently you can control the drone that follows Snake around during cutscenes: whether this will result in anything of consequence is up in the air). I'm not counting on it though, and so the promise of 9 hours worth of cutscenes (supposedly a full third of the game's length) fills me with dread rather than optimism.
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Old 05-23-2008, 04:46 PM   #4
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Re: MGS4 to have 90 minute cutscenes

You're just being completely contrary. What the fuck, man. Did you make the thread to have a discussion or just to be a giant prick? Insulting my gaming skills was something I would have laughed off if it had been the only turd you shoved down my throat, but no: your entire post was one greasy diarrhea dump down my esophagus. With all due respect, I'mma puke it back up on your face and encourage others to steer the fuck clear from this thread unless you can act your age.

Nobody asked what you wanted to do, and I think you egoistically missed that point. As I said in the first post, and I'm going to repeat here again, games like MGS4 make you rage but people like me happy. If your misery means my happiness, I guess this is one of those times I'm going to be happy to kick you out of the escape hatch into the freezing hell of outer space. You're being a real tool saying that our community's arguments are invalid -- the arguments that we enjoy half-game half-novels more than pure games or pure novels, and that we think the half-and-half format not only can work but superiorly works. I'm not saying you have to agree with us, but you're being completely impolite about us having this contrary opinion to yours and you're calling us morons for not agreeing with you.

What.

The.

Fuck.

And to think I nodded my head in agreement when ************* scolded ************** for banning you for bad behavior. Go back to 4ch@n if this is how you want to behave.
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Old 05-23-2008, 05:08 PM   #5
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Re: MGS4 to have 90 minute cutscenes

KING OF EMOS, DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH BUTTHURT

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xuande
You're just being completely contrary. What the fuck, man. Did you make the thread to have a discussion or just to be a giant prick? Insulting my gaming skills was something I would have laughed off if it had been the only turd you shoved down my throat, but no: your entire post was one greasy diarrhea dump down my esophagus. With all due respect, I'mma puke it back up on your face and encourage others to steer the fuck clear from this thread unless you can act your age.
Funny, I always joked that damicatz had to be your sockpuppet troll alt. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think it could be true, but damn you're coming close to convincing me. Funny how you're accusing me of an egotistical knee-jerk reaction when your first response to what I posted is to clench your asscheeks so hard you could bend steel girders.

Quote:
Nobody asked what you wanted to do, and I think you egoistically missed that point. As I said in the first post, and I'm going to repeat here again, games like MGS4 make you rage but people like me happy.
And I'm perfectly entitled to my opinion that such games are emblematic of the ridiculous excesses that "story-based" gaming has fallen to. How do you justify movie length cutscenes in the middle of a fucking video game? Answer me that simple question please.

You can say "it's like vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup lolz!" The problem is is that as time goes on it's getting to the point where there's a tablespoon of ice cream with an entire bottle of chocolate syrup poured on top. At that point you might as well just be making a movie: that's clearly what Hideo Kojima wants to be fucking doing anyway.

Quote:
If your misery means my happiness, I guess this is one of those times I'm going to be happy to kick you out of the escape hatch into the freezing hell of outer space. You're being a real tool saying that our community's arguments are invalid -- the arguments that we enjoy half-game half-novels more than pure games or pure novels, and that we think the half-and-half format not only can work but superiorly works. I'm not saying you have to agree with us, but you're being completely impolite about us having this contrary opinion to yours and you're calling us morons for not agreeing with you.
You cite Xenosaga as an example of the genre, but guess what a common complaint is on the lower half of the Metacritic game rankings?

The story and cutscenes interrupting the gameplay. It's very much a love it or hate it kind of game, by my reckoning.

And more importantly, Shenmue (3D adventure game with periodic "press X to not die" quick time events) and Xenosaga's (JRPG) gameplay are to Metal Gear Solid's as Ted Kennedy is to sobriety. You can get away with four and a half hours of cutscenes in Xenosaga because it's a JRPG and that's largely expected as the nature of the genre. Nine hours of cutscenes wedged into a stealth action game doesn't really sound like a peanut butter and jelly matchup, especially if most of those nine hours is going to be ruminating on ridiculously overwrought and melodramatic bullshit. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm not betting the farm on it.
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Old 05-23-2008, 05:35 PM   #6
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Re: MGS4 to have 90 minute cutscenes

I can't "prove" you wrong on your opinions. You're just being a jerk and insisting that this is "a tablespoon of ice cream with a gallon of chocolate syrup" when to me and the others it isn't. We see it as the right and welcome proportion.

If you want to accuse somebody of being butthurt, though, you'll have to look in the mirror fundamentally. I know that sounds like a childish "I know what you are but what am I?", so I'm asking you to shut up and seriously consider why I would say this:

1. You're ranting and raving as though what MGS4 stands for threatens the fabric of the space-time continuum. That if we continue to go down the slippery slope which Kojima wants us to we're going to lose our way and our gaming. That's nonsense.

2. Why nonsense? Because these arguments, fundamentally, are over a decade old and nothing has changed in that time. Back when Final Fantasy VII first came out, there was a fear-mongering crowd that pretty much said the same thing about 2 hours of FMVs that you're saying now about a 2-hour solitary "scene". (I agree that it's retarded to call it a scene when it's a motion picture-length video file.) Fast forward to 1999 (seems recent, but it's 9 fucking years ago) when Shenmue came out on the DreamCast. OHHHHHHHHH the haters! Everywhere. "This game is boring." "This is like playing one long fucking movie." "Yu Suzuki should go write books and leave video games to the rest of us." Yadda yadda yadda. And again, Shenmue didn't have a single cut scene longer than 30 minutes.

Fast forward by nine years, and you can see why the question shouldn't be "Oh woe is me? Why has it come to this? Why has it happened that we now have 90-minute cut scenes in video games?" but rather "Holy shit on a sandwich! o_o I can't believe it took 9 years for this to happen! I was certain that we were going to have the first 2-hour FMV by 2003! Where did my predictions go wrong?"

All this anger, all this fear, all this "butthurt" of yours is completely misplaced and blown out of proportion. MGS4 is one game in a sea of 6-hour Professor Layton's, 10-hour Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2's, and 20-hour Mario Galaxy's, each of which had cutscenes beneath 10 minutes in length. (Hell, Layton's the most cinematic of them all: and yet all of its cutscenes except for the OP and the ED are generally under 2 minutes in length!)

What you don't seem to realize, though, is Kojima doesn't want to be a film maker. He also doesn't want to be a video game maker. What he wants to be, like Yu Suzuki who came before him, is somebody who can take the best elements from both jobs and craft it into something new, something better. Better to us, anyway, if not to you and your crew. Every time you say things like "He should just go make movies" or "This is like a gallon of sauce on a tablespoon of food," it proves that you don't respect our differences and/or you don't get the picture. To us, what Kojima offers is our ideal amount of sauce on food. What you're proposing is the blandest, driest food the market has to offer, even if for you the amount of sauce is just right.
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Old 05-23-2008, 06:28 PM   #7
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Re: MGS4 to have 90 minute cutscenes

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xuande
I can't "prove" you wrong on your opinions. You're just being a jerk and insisting that this is "a tablespoon of ice cream with a gallon of chocolate syrup" when to me and the others it isn't. We see it as the right and welcome proportion.
And there are people who shove parrots up their ass and feel there's nothing wrong with that. Your point?

Congratulations on having an opinion. That and a dollar can get you a cup of coffee.

Quote:
1. You're ranting and raving as though what MGS4 stands for threatens the fabric of the space-time continuum. That if we continue to go down the slippery slope which Kojima wants us to we're going to lose our way and our gaming. That's nonsense.
It's simply a dead end as far as storytelling in games is concerned. When hideously large chunks of your games are non-interactive cutscenes, you wind up trying to take on movies on their own turf and--here's a shocker--the movies are always going to win in that arena because they have the benefit of focus (and typically also writers who haven't had the benefit of being able to hide behind game mechanics and/or JRPG poopsock grinding). Many games wind up taking a plot that would be 2 hours in a theater and by necessity wind up stretching it to three times its length or more: is it any wonder the story suffers as a result?

Quote:
2. Why nonsense? Because these arguments, fundamentally, are over a decade old and nothing has changed in that time. Back when Final Fantasy VII first came out, there was a fear-mongering crowd that pretty much said the same thing about 2 hours of FMVs that you're saying now about a 2-hour solitary "scene". (I agree that it's retarded to call it a scene when it's a motion picture-length video file.)
Hey, guess how good the quality of FFVII's story was?

I'll give you a hint, it wasn't very good. And guess what, those predictions you're mocking? They came true:

Quote:
Of course, the CG movies are the real culprit here. FFVII arrived right as Pixar-quality animation started to become available for the humble masses, and the PlayStation provided a large enough medium to allow them to dole it out in massive doses for eager eyeballs. Seamlessly, too -- once players saw that opening movie as the camera zoomed in on Midgar, further and further until it met up with the interspliced train engine and the player's party hopped out without a hint of load time, that was all it took. Never mind that the load times throughout the rest of the game were atrocious, that moving from screen to screen was met with a lengthy pause. Or that the frequent random battles took longer to load than most random battles in Final Fantasy VI had taken to complete. Or that the bulk of the "play time" was empty padding. That was the FFVII revolution: half the game, spread across twice as much time.

Worse, the filler-heavy 60-hour clock time quickly became the new standard for console RPGs -- who cares that Chrono Trigger was 25 hours of unmitigated awesome? After FFVII, anything less than 50 hours suddenly became a rip-off; developers responded, tragically, by giving gamers exactly what they wanted. Parasite Eve was soundly rejected for its shocking!! 10-hour story; its spiritual successor Vagrant Story (which would have made a powerful 20-hour game) was stretched to 30 via tons of copy-and-paste corridor design.

Sadly, the follow-the-leader nature of Japanese RPG devs meant that they trod lemming-like into wretchedness, following FFVII's lead into tedium and excess. Gamers, they discovered, would suffer through any amount of boring combat as long as there were flashy cinematic special effects (which had the net effect of dragging things out even more). They'd traipse along in pursuit of the dangling carrot provided by 30-second nuggets of slick FMV, regardless of how boring or illogical the story in between turned out to be.
That's part of the problem that you keep blissfully attempting to sidestep: the more cutscenes and FMV, the more story matters. Storywriting in games is, bar a few rare cases, total ass. Not that it matters, as FFVII taught Square that people will eat any amount of bullshit for a "story" that wouldn't pass muster at an indie film festival.

Quote:
Fast forward to 1999 (seems recent, but it's 9 fucking years ago) when Shenmue came out on the DreamCast. OHHHHHHHHH the haters! Everywhere. "This game is boring." "This is like playing one long fucking movie." "Yu Suzuki should go write books and leave video games to the rest of us." Yadda yadda yadda. And again, Shenmue didn't have a single cut scene longer than 30 minutes.
How sad that "your input has no meaning for only half an hour" is your metric that cut scenes have not become/were not excessive. Tell me, did all of those cutscenes really require that you have no input, and why? Not that it really matters, because as I pointed out Shenmue is a slower paced game and there's more room to be forgiven for lengthy cutscenes because of that.

Quote:
Fast forward by nine years, and you can see why the question shouldn't be "Oh woe is me? Why has it come to this? Why has it happened that we now have 90-minute cut scenes in video games?" but rather "Holy shit on a sandwich! o_o I can't believe it took 9 years for this to happen! I was certain that we were going to have the first 2-hour FMV by 2003! Where did my predictions go wrong?"
GEE IT SURE IS STRAWMEN AROUND HERE

You don't have to cross the two hour mark for it to be totally fucking ridiculous, dude. You should hopefully realize that 10 minute death soliloquies are generally way over the top even without having to fill another 110 minutes.

Quote:
All this anger, all this fear, all this "butthurt" of yours is completely misplaced and blown out of proportion. MGS4 is one game in a sea of 6-hour Professor Layton's, 10-hour Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2's, and 20-hour Mario Galaxy's, each of which had cutscenes beneath 10 minutes in length. (Hell, Layton's the most cinematic of them all: and yet all of its cutscenes except for the OP and the ED are generally under 2 minutes in length!)
If Layton can tell you the story in 2 minute snippets and stay out of the main game's way, maybe the future is in the Layton's of the gaming world and not the Metal Gear Solids. Hell, Goichi Suda can can tell a deceptively clever story without relying on overwrought half hour literary wankfests and with a shoestring budget to boot. How come Kojima can have a ridiculously large budget and the best we can get is 45 minutes full of heavy handed allusions to the military industrial complex?

Quote:
What you don't seem to realize, though, is Kojima doesn't want to be a film maker. He also doesn't want to be a video game maker. What he wants to be, like Yu Suzuki who came before him, is somebody who can take the best elements from both jobs and craft it into something new, something better.
Five minutes of gameplay broken up by thirty minutes of cutscenes is not "the best of both worlds," but you are permitted to indulge in the fantasy regardless.

Quote:
What you're proposing is the blandest, driest food the market has to offer, even if for you the amount of sauce is just right.
No, what I'm proposing is that games take advantage of their unique advantages over a static medium like film rather than trying to beat them at their own game with writing and plots that are decades behind the curve.
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