Re: Humble Choice for August 2024

On Wed, 7 Aug 2024 08:58:15 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 06/08/2024 20:51, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 
* High On Life
   https://store.steampowered.com/app/1583230/High_On_Life/
  The one with the talking gun. Coarse and sophomoric,
  its style belies its solid gameplay, but damn you'd
  better be able to stomach the stupid jokes and visuals.
  It's not half as funny as it thinks it is (well, unless
  you play it while high, in which case you'll probably
  have a blast). But the shootie-shoot-shoot bits are
  well done.

Actual humour in games is pretty rare in my opinion. What is far more
common is attempted humour that only appeals to the type of person that
thinks knob gags are the way to go. Some games that I found at least
amusing though are Tales From The Borderlands and Portal I/II. Not laugh
out loud funny but more raise a smile funny and possibly a titter.

Humor is hard because it very, very often depends on precise pacing
for its gags. And controlling the pacing is one of the biggest
difficulty in computer games, because -unless you completely railroad
the players- it's the gamer who determines what happens and when.

It can be done, of course; it can even be done well sometimes. There
are a variety of methods you can use too (for instance, just keep the
jokes to the cutscenes, when the player has no control except to
watch). "High on Life" seems to rely on the 'constant stream'
methodology; just keep nattering about with endless cracks and japes.
Some of them will inevitably hit. But the disadvantage to this is that
a) the nonstop noise can get annoying really quickly, and b) it's hard
to maintain a stream of quality jokes, so as often you're hearing
b-list material.

Plus, humor is so incredibly subjective... not only amongst people,
but to the same person at different times. What's funny to somebody
today might not be tomorrow, depending on their mood and things going
on in their life.

There are some games which do it well, but a lot of developers just
don't have the talent. So they go with "haha, isn't this weird and
offbeat!" and hope for cheap laughs. Which works in the short-term,
because laughter is essentially just an expression of surprise, but it
doesn't have any lasting impact. "High on Life" seems to fall into
this latter category.

I'll admit it; these choices are challenging my 'favorite-day-
of-the-month' theory. It hasn't overturned it entirely, though;
although not generally my style, "Sifu" is too good to not grab, and
"High on Life" and "Blacktail" are worth grabbing even if they aren't
/great/ games. As I've said, one of the things I /like/ about
HumbleChoice is how it exposes me to games I normally wouldn't
purchase because I'd rather put my money to games more suited to my
tastes. These curated selections make me expand my horizons, and
that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's definitely worth the pittance
I spend each month.

It the same type of reason I like Amazon Prime. The games I'm mainly
interested in are ones that I just haven't heard of but look like my
type of game and ones they I wasn't sure if they'd be my type of game.
The ones that generally hold no interest are the bigger hitters where
it's a case of if I wanted to play it I would own it already.

Except, IMHO, the general quality of Amazon offerings are inferior to
those on Humble (and generally are older too; by the time I get them
on Amazon, I usually already have them elsewhere. But given my
fascination with feeding The Number, that might be a 'me' problem ;-)