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[alspal]

similarly, nobody plays ico or out of this world for the gameplay; ico's was average and out of this world's was pretty bad

I'm going to have to disagree with both of these assessments. Ico in particular has some pretty remarkable nuances to its game design that contribute to its excellence beyond the atmosphere. You replace the gameplay in Ico with a generic adventure/platformer and you'd lose most of the meaning.

Talking about the meaning of the game has nothing to do with what he was talking about.

Holy shit guys. Can we just enjoy games for what they are?

Yes you can, most casual and non-gamers preffer to have 'mindless fun' in their simple and shallow games.

[Paul Eres]

similarly, nobody plays ico or out of this world for the gameplay; ico's was average and out of this world's was pretty bad

I'm going to have to disagree with both of these assessments. Ico in particular has some pretty remarkable nuances to its game design that contribute to its excellence beyond the atmosphere. You replace the gameplay in Ico with a generic adventure/platformer and you'd lose most of the meaning.

out of curiosity, what specifically do you mean? all i remember about the ico gameplay was thowing bombs and jumping from platform to platform and having to get yorda to magic doors, and fighting shadow things by hitting them repeatedly until they die before they could drag yorda away. and a boss battle at the end where you had to hide behind things periodically while getting closer to something. every puzzle usually had one solution and the challenge was mostly gone after you knew that solution. granted the puzzles were designed better than average for plaformer game puzzles, but they weren't amazing or anything.

that is pretty generic adventure/platformer stuff, most of it is not much different from, say, the gameplay in the lost vikings, right? except for the protecting yorda parts from monsters, but those parts aren't much different than the protecting ashley from zombies parts in resident evil 4 (although admittedly those protection parts were the most interesting parts of the gameplay in both of those two games).

it's possible you're calling things gameplay which i'm not, though. for instance, the 'controls' -- climbing, hanging on to things, and suchlike

still, i'd say something like 90% of the effect of ico on the player comes from the visuals; without the visuals giving you a feeling of vertigo the jumping between plaforms near the end of the game would be pointless for instance. in other words, i'd much rather play ico without its gameplay (or its gameplay replaced by something inferior) than ico without its visuals (or its visuals replaced with something inferior).

and yeah, alastair jack is right, i didn't mean the 'meaning' of the game, i meant the 'value' of the game -- like, the fun the player has with it. i agree that there is some meaning in the gameplay, sure, but that meaning would fall flat and be unexceptional if not for the visuals.

[HyperDuckChris]

Holy shit guys. Can we just enjoy games for what they are? All that matters at the end of the day is how fun the game is. If it's fun, then play it. If not, don't.

QFT. 

[Edmund]

Im very interested in seeing some real gameplay footage of Limbo. The video posted on the site is an animation.. i remember seeing it about 2 years ago.

is there any actual footage of it being played anywere?

[Guillaume]

Holy shit guys. Can we just enjoy games for what they are?

Yes you can, most casual and non-gamers preffer to have 'mindless fun' in their simple and shallow games.

My girlfriend, who is a non-gamer, loved "World of Goo". Does it qualify as a "simple and shallow game" because of that?

I definitely agree that we should play games if we like them, and screw the "yes it's a clone of BLABLA" or "it's following the fad of BLABLA". If it's fun, it's fun, and screw all the pretentious judgements of self-proclaimed "intellectual game analysts".

Seriously, relax a bit and just enjoy the things that are enjoyable.

[ultim8p00]

Yes you can, most casual and non-gamers preffer to have 'mindless fun' in their simple and shallow games.

What is this I don't even

You don't get what I mean. What I'm saying is that at the end of the day, all the "omg it's a clone blah blah blah fad lol" bull doesn't matter. If I'm playing a game and I'm enjoying it (aka having fun), do I really care that it's a clone/fad/whatever? No, I don't.

[havchr]

At the end of the day, good shit is gonna get praise.
Mindless fun is good
Deep shit is good
odd shit is good
as long as it's good, it's all good

Also, let's jump back to IGF stuff.
Who had allnighters during the end deadline?
we didn't, but we worked the weekend through though.

[Alexander Bruce]

I didn't, but now I'm in the middle of trying to get this game converted to the UDK as fast as I can so the judges don't need UT3. It's almost there, but there's just so much little stuff that has to change. Currently removing Physics yay...

[Mike Lee]

I really pushed crunching the last week, but I ended up borking the database I'm using for a large portion of the game. Which means this week I've been trying to fix everything behind the scenes as quickly as possible... I'm hoping to get things finally working completely again tonight.

Yeah, sorry any potential IGF judges who are reviewing my submission.

[jeb]

I noticed that S2 Games' highly polished DotA clone "Heroes of Newerth" is in this year's IGF: http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2010.php?id=40

Out of curiosity, if this game would win the grand prize, how would it make you feel?

[Jason Bakker]

I noticed that S2 Games' highly polished DotA clone "Heroes of Newerth" is in this year's IGF: http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2010.php?id=40

Out of curiosity, if this game would win the grand prize, how would it make you feel?

Surprisingly enough, more "business-like" independent developers (like S2) work just as hard and put just as much effort and love into their games as one man bands do. If they win it'd be because they deserve it.

[Zaphos]

They won in 2004 for one of their older games -- http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entries.php?entry_id=42 ... they do look rather corporate but they're actually a pretty small company I think.

(that being said, personally I'd prefer if something more interesting won ... )

[Alexander Bruce]

I agree with others in that the size of the development team doesn't really matter. An interesting game is an interesting game. I'd probably be more annoyed if something that looked like "more of the same" won, but even then, it's all subjective.

[jeb]

Yeah, I didn't bring it up because of "are they indie?", I'm more curious about how it would make people feel about IGF. A lot of the entries this year feels little like "me too!", but if a game like HoN won, do you think it would affect the next year's list of entries?

(This is highly hypothetical of course, because I don't think HoN will win the grand prize.)

[Mike Lee]

Yeah, I didn't bring it up because of "are they indie?", I'm more curious about how it would make people feel about IGF. A lot of the entries this year feels little like "me too!", but if a game like HoN won, do you think it would affect the next year's list of entries?

(This is highly hypothetical of course, because I don't think HoN will win the grand prize.)

I always like having the original, more "indie" entries win out over entries that tend to be riffs on an existing game. So something like Blueberry Garden winning this year was great in my opinion because it's the kind of game that can really stand to benefit from the exposure as opposed to a Heroes of Newerth.

But this basically comes down to the fundamental question of how you interpret the purpose of the IGF. If you figure the IGF is best used as a tool to push up new and interesting indies then you want to support the quirky experimental stuff. But if you think IGF is way to award the best indie games period then you're going to go in a different direction and hand out prizes to polished "bigger" indie titles.