How do you actually describe “souI” to gamers who werent around at the time to experience the same games that you did?
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How do you actually describe souI to gamers who werent around at the time to experience the same games that you did?
Nostalgia
fpbp
>inb4 it's not nostalgia!!
name a single soulless PS1 game. you can't.
>name a soulless ps1 game
slopfest then, slopfest now
>he can't recognize SOVL
zoom zoom
gex 3 really made my ass itch
Croc
more like croc of shit!
you cant its like taking a homeless person to a 5 star restaurant
the only way they get it is by playing a lot of soulful games in a row, then go back to soulless games and feel like somthing s missing but they have a hard time explaining it
It's having attention to details and little extras that make it feel like the person making it had some kind of passion for what they were doing and the freedom to do it how they wanted. Most things these days are carefully designed by committees with each part is made by a different person who probably cares about little more than just getting paid.
This but I would also add that soulful games often have flaws, either due to limited budget/time or technology restraints. They are imperfect precisely because they weren't made as safe and shiny products by wealthy companies but by developers trying to create their dream to the best of their ability, with the limited resources at their disposal. The creative ways that developers get around these limitations fit their games within them is a great example of the kind of honest, unassuming passion that defines a soulful game.
I think you should stop being fricking moronic and learn to articulate your opinions.
It's super easy to explain why the PS1 versions of the Spyro games have better art direction than the remasters despite their technical limitations, if you take the time to be sensible and elaborate. Spouting off buzzwords like SOUL/SOULLESS does nothing but start fights and make you look uneducated. Learn to express yourself in ACTUAL WORDS rather than mindlessly shitflinging; if we all did that, this world would be a better place.
>B-BUT THEY IGNORED MY POST AND CALLED ME GAY
If you make a genuine effortpost and get shitposting in response, you are under no obligation to continue trying. Stop feeding trolls and morons.
forced soul
why are you so mad at the word "soul", are you some super edgy combat atheist?
In the context of trying to explain the value an artistic work holds to you, "soul" carries absolutely no meaning whatsoever. It's completely worthless in any intelligent form of discussion. The quickest way to spot a moron when trying to talk about art is to find someone who cannot express their own like or dislike of something— buzzwords like "soul" are strongly indicative of that.
Again, learn to articulate your opinions and you'll look far less stupid.
It is a more umbrella terms that means many things, but that like saying "transportation" is a meaningless word because it can mean car, plane or boat. It doesn't explain a feeling in particular but it does explain something that generates stronger emotions than usual because the work is more than the sum of its parts. Basically saying something is "really good". Which is mluch easier to say than to pointlessly explain WHY something is good every fricking time when its not point of the conversation at all. you re the moronic one here.
Mario Galaxy 2 was the first time I felt like a game was soulless.
Don't get me wrong, the music and presentation is great (only cos its a copy of Mario Galaxy 1) but everything from the story to the cutscenes to the characters felt so fricking vapid and empty, it made me depressed.
Meme made up by morons on Ganker to have even more thigns to fight over around the time remakes of classic games were being made like the terrible Spyro demake.
Soul is just “it feels like the people who made this really cared about it”
Maybe soul is in the small things like NPC idle animations or little ambient details. Soul can be in artstyle too, making things look pretty with limited time or budget. Soul comes in many forms but the more often you see soul the better you become at recognizing it to the point where if something is soulless it’s blindingly obvious and can ruin the whole thing
not vidya, but I think this gif sums up the concept pretty well
something is soulful if it was made through the effort of a team who is passionate about their work. And even when the work is imperfect, a strong vision shines through and leaves an impression regardless.
something is soulless if it lacks ambition, or is too afraid to try new things.
if it's conceptually shallow and overly polished.
trying to please everybody, in the expense of not being exceptional in anything (Jack of all trades, master of none)
Of course the goal of all games is to make money. But if that's your only goal, you get forgettable trend chasers. The trend setters have always been from people who had a vision and executed it with passion.
forced soul
Why did you reply to me Black person
forced racism
Passion/Skill/Agency
vs
Indifference/Inability/Checklisting
soul is all the things that the creators didn't really have to do to make a functional game but they did them anyway because they cared, or because the workplace was fun and stimulating and prompted that kind of spontaneous "going above and beyond".
soul is the level of quality, attention to detail, innovativeness, etcetera that lives in the space above "just doing my job".
the reason why older games have more soul is because they were made by smaller close-knit teams and were simple enough that a single dev, or a handful of devs, could just say "i think X will be cool" and just code it and throw it in.
basically it's like asking why ulysses has soul but marvel capeshit doesn't. the smaller the team and the greater the passion the higher the likelihood of the artist's vision shining through.
or, in other words, soul is when the hand of the creator touches you through the work. soul is the personal touch.
it's not just that, i hate when people who don't know pretend to know like this
what else is it then?
a game made to be fun has soul
a product made to be profitable does not
back before battlepasses, super whales, and microtransactions, DLC, or even patches, the way for a game to make a lot of money was by being really fun and not full of bugs. Now the best ROI is to design a casino disguised as a game, cut every corner possible, and cater to super-whales who will annually spend six figures each on your p2w f2p mobile game. Modern triple-a games feel like chores to play because they were designed to boost engagement, sell convenience, and have a lot of other priorities than being 'fun', because to both shareholders and Ganker, fun is just a buzzword
>most game development and publishing executives came from industries other than gaming and don't play games themselves
The game feels like it was made by a person, or people that want to make you smile.
Rather than an unintelligent machine trying to rob you of your money and your life by exploiting you.
this is why I mostly only play indie games these days
>Um how do you quantify the spirit
>Use specific words
The opposite of what you're trying to do there.
There is no "spirit". There is nothing mystical about these works. There is only the work, and your feelings on the work. Those human emotions hold far more value than any meaningless buzzword soup you can deliver, and the passion and love you have for a particular work will shine far brighter if you can ACTUALLY FRICKING ARTICULATE YOUR OPINIONS WITH WORDS instead of falling back on meaningless shit like "MUH SOUL".
If anything here resembles the stupid fricking meme stereotype of an "NPC", it's the person with so little sense for introspection that they cannot explain what they like about something in detail without falling back on buzzwords.
It's not a concept NPCs can understand.
You could have also simply answer "I have no argument and concede the point"
You concession is accepted by the way
It's like explaining what internal monologue or mental imagery is to a person who's never experienced them. You either get it or you don't. I'm sorry you were born deficient.
Any attempts to define SOUL are doomed to fail.
If you could quantify it and package it up into a little box to be shipped out to every vidya corpo, then it wouldn't be SOUL. It would just be a successful template, one you would see a million times.
And after you've seen it enough times it would leave no impact on you. It would have no SOUL.
Soul is a feeling. That's why it's so hard to describe.
Soul is not a "feeling". You can explain that X and Y made you feel like true love and care was put into a game because of W and Z without falling into worthless nonsense. For example: I think the bespoke, custom font used on the crates and HUD in the PS1 versions of the original Crash Bandicoot games is great. It's got a nice gradient, the serifs on it give it a nice cartoony feeling, and the remakes throwing that out for a stock comic book sans serif font that I've seen used a million times over dozens of pieces of media is awful. It feels too slick and modern, and knowing that that font used to be something better only worsens that feeling because every time a crate shows up on the UI pulls down from the top of my screen it feels just a little wrong because I know that used to be something unique to the game rather than something stock. Maybe that wouldn't affect someone without experience of those original games, but it affects me, and those feelings are real and I can express them because I'm not a thoughtless fricking homosexual who can't express his own opinions on media.
I wonder if a lot of that is just due to the fact that you had to build everything from scrap back in the old days. So it was built to be unique from the beginning.
These days you can slap something together in a few minutes. And eventually it becomes a if it ain't broke don't fix it thing.
So a lot of little details like this no longer have soul.
For me it's the difference in sound effects. The N Sane ones sound so lifeless across the board
>design a font that fits right in with the tone and make it cool and unique
>vs
>ah whatever just use this one
yep, right on the money
I KNOW YOU GOT SOUL
>You could have had a far more meaningful and insightful discussion if you'd just start talking about what you like/dislike in a particular game and why rather than having to frick about explaining your own nebulous personal definition for a term with no concrete meaning.
my nebulous definition of the term is an insight into what i like in games.
you could have a far more meaningful and insightful discussion if you actually discussed videogames rather than policing use of terms you don't understand the meaning of.
>my nebulous definition of the term is an insight into what i like in games.
And you would have far more success in discussion if you explained what you liked about a game to begin with instead of lazily slapping a worthless buzzword like SOUL onto it.
did you not read my lengthy description of what i mean by "soul"?
you'd be correct if i just said "soul" and didn't elaborate further, but i did so you're not.
you're having an argument against someone who isn't here.
Even if someone was to provide you an explanation in the way you've explicitly requested you wouldn't accept it as valid. You're arguing from a position where you've made up your mind that 'soul' isn't a thing.
It's similar to 'love' in that everyone understands the feeling to a general extent. You understand it when it happens and there's clearly something wrong with you if you need an exact definition of it. There's evidently developers who 'get it'. They understand videogames on a fundamental level and it's extremely apparent to anyone with a discerning eye and love for the medium.
Each of the posts you replied to encapsulate the concept pretty much perfectly.
Buzzword spamming trog.
I didn't even use a single buzzword even by warped Ganker standards. You're actually insane
Sincerity
I'm not reading all of this but if soul is a word so many anons here can understand, it's your problem you don't understand it. You're the one who looks like an autistic for crying about it.
Passion against reason
>who werent around at the time to experience the same games that you did?
That's called nostalgia, not soul.
First you need to know what soul is. This may take some time as you are currently near NPC levels of awareness, but if you're asking questions like this there is hope. Keep at it!
Secondly, you need to develop your vocabulary so you can actually express your feelings in a meaningful way. Soul is rooted in passion for making a great game and going beyond the spec sheet because it's fun and it makes the player smile. That's the generic term, but for any given game you can articulate what makes a game soulful. Is it the strong art direction that shines through the games low budget? Is it the unnecessary idle animations that add life and personality to the characters? If this doesn't make sense you may still too NPC brained. As an exercise I'd recommend playing a lot of remasters/remakes and the original games back to back and writing down how they make you feel, since remasters/remakes are often soulless. Think about which one you prefer, and why. Does one have better pacing? Why? Are the soundtracks different? Is one better or are they just different? Why? Are there incidental details missing in the remake(there almost always are)? Why were they removed? If they are still there, what does that say about the developers working on the remake? Why might they think/feel that way?
The final step is realising that soul is a clumsy and inadequate term that doesn't do justice to the games it describes and not using it. This is a sign you have achieved a full internal dialogue and are no longer an NPC. Good luck!
>Verification not required
Hello R*ddit
You can't
>You could have had a far more meaningful and insightful discussion
Anon, where do you think you are?
PS1 is the most soulful console of all time and it's not even close
>you could have
>you could have
>you would have
you could/would have been less of a homosexual if you didn't communicate in such a moronic way.
Creative integrity, passion, and attention to detail.
Also most games with that moniker are in the 16-bit and 64-bit eras. But they still pop up here and there, especially in the indie scene.
One of my biggest problems with the Remaster was no option to toggle the graphics/sound files back to the originals.
I wonder if a graphics toggle would work for a game like Spyro, or if it'd be easier to just have the old versions of the games available as an option.
A toggle for sound and voices would probably be trivial.
>Made in 1999
>Almost every NPC in the game will respond differently to Ryo depending on what his current objective is, regardless of whether it relates to them or not. Every line is voice acted.
>Ryo's house is packed with one-off hand crafted 3D models that can be picked up and rotated, purely for the sake of immersion.
>Actually have to manually remember and dial phone numbers using a rotary phone and Ryo's diary.
>Every single NPC is uniquely modeled and has a routine that suits their life.
>A wonky combat system that still has an absurd amount of depth and options despite being sparingly used.
>Game forces you to drive forklifts for a week for no real reason other than to make you feel like a teenager working a shitty job.
>Store items are fairly useless but still detailed and lovingly crafted with appealing designs.
>No reason to visit Nozomi every day in front of the flower shop or call her after work other than to hear her voice and figure out more of the relationship between her and Ryo.
That is soul.
>muh nostalgia!
I played this for the first time last year on PS4.