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Topic: The Perfect Game

Posts 41 to 49 of 49

Noire

LuWiiGi wrote:

No game is perfect. No game can ever be perfect, because every game can be improved infinitely.

ummm

PhoenixAran wrote:

Super High-Kicking Upskirt Japanese Schoolgirl Space Ninjas Deluxe Edition

Lieutenant Commander of the Lesbian Love Brigade
There can only be one, like in that foreign movie where there could only be one, and in the end there is only one dude left, because that was the point.

Kid_A

LuWiiGi wrote:

No game is perfect. No game can ever be perfect, because every game can be improved infinitely.

Well that's sort of a ridiculous thing to say. There are very few games that I consider to be near the realm of perfection that have an infinite amount of ways to be improved. Most games are really only one or two "things" away from being perfect. A bad camera system in Mario 64, for example, or frame-rate issues in Super Metroid. Now, if you're talking about everybody's individual opinions, then I guess I see your point. But I think the real issue is that "perfection" is all in the eye of the beholder. For me, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a perfect platformer. To someone else, it might be the worst. It's only perfect because it checks off all the right boxes in my personal column of what qualifies as a perfect platformer. Since everybody has different columns, "perfection" is a pretty difficult thing to reach on an individual level.

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Philip_J_Reed

I had a professor who described Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" as the perfect modern novel.

I read it, and enjoyed it, and, in fact, I thought (and continue to think) that it was utterly brilliant. But I found what I thought was a fairly obvious continuity error and pointed it out to her, thinking she'd need to reassess her use of the word "perfect."

Instead, she very politely told me that I might need to reassess mine instead.

Philip_J_Reed

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Axoloth

The perfect game is already out. It was released on September 10, 2010. The 7th if you live in NA.

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Adam

No game can be improved infinitely. At a certain point you would be making "improvements" solely for the sake of proving a theory. From that point on, the game would only become more complex, not better.

Imagine a perfect poem. There are only so many words in a language. At a certain point, you would have to agree that there are no more words to fill a slot and that one is the ideal word to suit that particular form, that particular context. After that, all you could do would be to add words, which would either break the meter or make it unnecessarily longer in a genre that is often at its best with brevity.

I'm simplifying, I know, but you get the idea.

I'm not necessarily arguing that there is a perfect game, though I find it very hard to find fault with my candidate, Cosmic Encounter, but I would say it's at at least possible as long as you aren't taking "perfect" to indicate some divine gift to man.

Edited on by Adam

Come on, friends,
To the bear arcades again.

Adam

Thank you for pointing out that games aren't poems, haha. Graphics don't make a game better. I wouldn't say a novel would be better if you added pretty pictures to it. Sometimes a game looks just right the way it is. And even if it doesn't, I am only talking about the game as a game, nothing to do with what graphical overlay happens to be applied. I could rerelease a poem with a prettier font, and that might make the experience more pleasant to read, but the poem itself is not suddenly better.

Edited on by Adam

Come on, friends,
To the bear arcades again.

Philip_J_Reed

I think you're missing Adam's point. (To say nothing of the fact that sculptures, paintings, novels and so on have all gone through "technological revolutions" of their own and, arguably, are still doing so.) The point you're making is that graphics/sound/etc. in general all have room for advancement. And while that may be true in a strictly technological sense, those advancements don't necessarily enhance the quality of the work within.

For example, if your favorite game is A Link to the Past, and Nintendo updates it for modern consoles with up-to-date graphics and music, did that automatically make it better? From the perspective you're arguing, the answer would have to be yes. From Adam's perspective, the answer is not necessarily. People may prefer the graphics and sound of that bygone age, and no technological advancement is going to change anybody's personal preference on things.

In summary: cutting edge technology does not necessarily equal higher quality material. Unless you genuinely think the remakes of King Kong, Godzilla or Planet of the Apes were actually better than the originals. Or that the Star Wars prequels were in any way at all superior to the original trilogy.

Philip_J_Reed

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Adam

Not necessarily. You assume better technology = better games, but there's absolutely no reason to believe this. Better technology means you can make more kinds of games, but it does not mean that existing games can automatically be made better. At a certain point, you would simply be making artificial changes (like graphics) or needless complexities just to prove that you have better technology.

We could change up the game of chess (in video game form, of course) a million superficial ways, but strip it down to an ASCII representation and I'll have just as much fun with it, personally. Or Advance Wars, if you prefer a strictly video game format. Unless you think we're on the cusp of a major breakthrough in random number generators, I don't think advancements in modern technology are going to do much for this game other than make it prettier and improve the online. The core game -- that is, the thing that is played, its rules and systems, etc. -- is not being improved by technology, just the way we see and access it.

I'm not trying to downplay graphics or sound. Bit Trip is my favorite game series, so obviously I can't say I don't care about it. But we apparently are defining the word "game" slightly differently.

Edit: Leave it to Chicken to completely steal my thunder. That's basically what I'm getting at, but not only is the point about nostalgia / personal preference applicable, I also meant to say that the graphics are (in most cases) not a core concept to the game but just an overlay. To use chess as an example again, the game has been virtually unchanged for a very long time. We have made better looking sets and pretty video game versions, and these may be more enjoyable to play for some, but the game itself is the same. (And for the record it's an analogy. I know it is a board game, though there are countless programs that make this comparison accurate enough.)

Edited on by Adam

Come on, friends,
To the bear arcades again.

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