“God mend thine every flaw, / Confirm thy soul in self-control, / Thy liberty in law!”

[larryhammer]

Realization of the week, video games edition: I’ve long known that I don’t particularly care about realistic controls or physics in racing games, but apparently I absolutely do for pinball games.

Self-knowledge is good.

---L.

Subject quote from Pikes Peak, aka America, aka America the Beautiful, 1904 version, Katharine Lee Bates.

Comments

[rebeccmeister]

Hahahaha, this is so funny, but makes sense to me, too.

[larryhammer]

The ball needs to react "heavy" -- well, unless it's Kirby, since float-iness is an essential attribute for him. But if it's pretending to be metal, it needs to feel metal.

[cmcmck]

With pinball it has to be a real machine for me.

The Bally 'Apollo' in my all time favourite.

[larryhammer]

I had thought so too, but I'm pleased to learn that a "good enough" virtual version works well for me.

More startling to me is that the virtual games I'm loving the most are both from 35 years ago.

[thistleingrey]

from 35 years ago

People can keep learning things into and beyond middle age, but I think (by observation) aesthetics often have something of a sweet spot, time-wise. When it falls can vary, sometimes as early as 8-12yo and sometimes into a person's mid twenties. Fueled partly by nostalgia, perhaps, too. One need not have experienced the exact thing previously for it to carry echoes of things one did experience, if that makes sense--color choices, shapes and proportions, sounds.

[larryhammer]

Interesting point. One of the two, though, is for the Game Boy, which I never played with -- and indeed I've gotten used to GB aesthetics only in the past couple months. (The other, for Sega Genesis, does share a visual language with the arcade games of my teens, many of them having been Sega consoles.)

[thistleingrey]

Fair! Having played computer games almost without interruption since the early-mid 1980s, though, I'd suggest that game design also has an aesthetics--sort of like dialects?--that has shifted over time, in terms of what a game encourages/discourages for a player. (Most mainstream games from ten years ago are way, way easier to start than most games from the 1990s, never mind the '80s or '70s--so much hinting and pathfinding. The whole "millennials are delicate snowflakes" stereotype is only a type, but ... it isn't wrong, either.) So, like, perhaps something about zeitgeist is speaking to you.