"Five Nights at Freddy’s"

[kane_magus]

Hmm.

You know, as much as I've enjoyed Mr. Lowell's work in the past, I think that he might just be a bit too jaded and cynical, in this particular case. And, yes, for those of you who have endured my own pissy rants about the evils of the video game industry, that is indeed coming from me of all people, believe it or not. Don't get me wrong, as it's not even that I necessarily disagree with what he says about Five Nights at Freddy's here. Not really. Taken on its own merits, ignoring the context of it being made by a single dude working (initially) with an infinitesimal budget, then yeah, everything said about it in the above linked article is indeed true. Still, I just think that this probably should have been a case of "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." Y'know, just this once.

Mainly, it's just that, unlike games like Dota or LoL or whatever, or games like Diablo III, or games like SimCity, or just about any other given EA or Ubisoft or Square Enix or Capcom or whatever game from the past decade or two[1], I don't think that Five Nights at Freddy's is a game that actively harms video gaming as a whole, and thus doesn't really deserve such vitriol. It really is a cheap, incredibly simple, made-by-one-guy game. If it had been made by a Triple-A team of hundreds of people, then sure, it'd be pure shit, but... well, for being a game made by a single guy, at least it's not one of the multitudes of shitty, half-baked <insert whatever dumb thing here> simulators you see being shat out lately. It does have that much going for it.

And then there was the bizarre bit where he dumped mentions of Gone Home, Journey, and The Stanley Parable into the article, claiming those games to be "too simple and basic to ever be worth your time" as well. All I can say in response to that is "What the fuck, Mr. Lowell? ಠ_ಠ"

(As an aside, not all of those old Sega CD FMV games were as terrible as he makes them out to be, either. Well, most of them were, true enough, but some of them were still... uh... okay, at least, I guess? I liked a few of them, anyway. *shrug* Or, at least, I remember thinking that I liked them at the time, even while acknowledging even then that they were more or less pure shit, even so. Hmm, I'm not really helping my case here, am I?)

[1] - Though, to be fair, my wrath is admittedly directed more toward the asinine layers of shit being piled atop the games made by those guys, rather than the games themselves.

Comments

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Reading the article it sounds more like he bought it expecting it to be more than what it was since a lot of people were raving about how much fun it was or something.

I've seen a little of it since there's family that own it. I don't really get the interest in it, but I'll agree with you that the guy is being a bit jaded. It's like he's pissy because the game -could- have been something more than it is, all this while acknowledging that the game was made on a non-existent team and non-existent budget.

The game isn't meant for everyone, and it's likely designed to be simple to play as part of it's lure to non-hardcore gamers just as much as it was for limited budget/time/manpower. If people are enjoying it, then I wouldn't call it a failure or fit for the garbage.

The old Sega CD games he's comparing it to really didn't have as much to offer regardless of their budget, and were likely aimed at dedicated gamers who were simply uninterested in full-motion video type things back then. I know I wasn't, probably because there were several lightgun based games back in the day that weren't tied to any console at all - just a vhs tape to play and the lightgun to register/score hits on the screen.

So it's a wonder that Dragon's Lair was a relative success, except that it went with full-screen animation instead of pre-recorded video.

What I'm trying to say here, of course, is that you should drop by the irc channel more often. *nod self*

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I guess I should do one of those disclaimer/full disclosure things here: I have not actually played Five Nights at Freddy's myself. I bought it on sale on Steam after watching Matt and Pat play it for one of their Shitstorm videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHsNt6Yyc2g) back in October, but I just haven't played it myself yet. For what it's worth, though, in that Shitstorm video, they mention some of the same things as the article does (e.g. that it looks like a Sega CD game and that it relies on jump scares), except that they don't necessarily see those things as faults.

For me, the difference between those old Sega CD games and Freddy's is that Freddy's is supposed to look like shitty security camera footage because, well, that's what it's meant to be. The old Sega CD games, on the other hand, looked like shitty security camera footage (if even that good) because that's just the best they could do back then with FMV. Freddy's isn't one of those games where they play a clip and you click on something with a crosshair and then another clip plays depending on how well or not you clicked on the thing on the screen, as most of those Sega CD games were. The gameplay in Freddy's is pretty different from that.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I'm trying to think back to the old games I played on Sega CD... Sewer Shark, Top Gun, Ground Zero Texas, Jurassic Park... honestly, with the exception of maybe Supreme Warrior, all of those were indeed crap (and even Supreme Warrior is crap by today's standards, for sure). That said, I have played a few FMV games that were actually good and still hold up today (in my opinion anyway, of course), though they weren't on Sega CD as far as I know. Gabriel Knight 2, Phantasmagoria, and Star Trek: Borg, among others. And to bring it back, Lowell just seems to be one of the vast majority who apparently believes that "FMV game == bad game," period, full stop, end-of-line (even if it just looks like FMV without actually being FMV, since I'm pretty sure Freddy's isn't actual FMV and is instead just 3D graphics intended to look like FMV).

He also seems to think that if a game isn't "complex," or if it doesn't have some huge, engrossing story, or whatever, then that means it's a bad game as well. He faults Freddy's for only allowing you to close doors and turn on lights and not be able to fight back and whatnot, and for the story being no more elaborate than "work the night-shift at a Chuck E. Cheese," which seems rather close-minded to me. Freddy's doesn't really need to have all of that. I wonder if he also faults Tetris for not having a huge story or because it only lets you rotate and drop the blocks and nothing more. (Looking back on it, not being "complex" was one of his several complaints about the MOBA games, as well. Hmm. Then again, to be fair, he was more attacking the game designers and players for claiming those games to be complex and indeed praising them as such, when they're actually not, rather than for the lack of complexity itself, which is fair enough, in my opinion.)

The main thing I can agree with him about is that the game's reliance on nothing but jump scares is kind of lame, but even so...

But then, as I mentioned above, he also lumps Freddy's in with Gone Home, Journey, and Stanley Parable, as if those games are also similarly "trash heap" games, and that's the point where I think his article really shits the bed.