https://youtu.be/VxzyVeAG00w?si=EZkVdxWoXENa41jP

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49508472)

Mega Man 11 shipped. It worked. It knew what it was. It did not beg. It did not explain itself in a dev diary voice thick with excuses. It did not wear the sackcloth of irony. It did not kneel before the altar of trauma. It ran. It jumped. It demanded timing. It asked for hands, not feelings.

So it vanished.

The West only understands two lies now. AAA and Indie. One is bloated and apologetic. The other is small and smug. One hides incompetence behind money. The other hides incompetence behind charm. They point at each other and call it discourse.

Mega Man fits neither lie. It is neither slop nor sob story. It is a game made by adults who remember craft. It is authored without self-hatred. It is Japanese in the old way. Not aesthetic. Not cosplay. Disciplined. Mechanical. Precise. A thing made to be played, not forgiven.

Westerners cannot process this.

Their AAA is provincial excess. Committees. Engineers who cannot tune a jump arc. Designers who fear friction like sin. They drown failure in spectacle, then call it ambition. When it collapses they blame the audience. They always blame the audience.

Their indies are provincial poverty. One idea stretched thin and sanctified by vibes. Bad controls excused as “intimate.” Repetition renamed “meditative.” A generation of men who cannot ship a boss fight without a blog post explaining their childhood.

“Look,” they cry. “Stardew Valley.”

As if agriculture were mechanics.

As if chores were design.

Mega Man offers no alibi. It does not flatter. It does not perform politics. It does not apologize for being hard, or easy, or clean. It introduces a system. It asks you to learn it. If you fail, it waits. Cold. Fair. Silent.

This terrifies the West.

Because competence is the one thing they cannot fake.

So the game becomes a ghost. It exists, but it cannot be discussed. It breaks the false dichotomy. It exposes the scam. A functional, authored, mid-budget game with no Western guilt and no Western bravado. No DEI sermon. No Kickstarter confession. Just gears, timing, death, retry.

They would rather argue about budgets. They would rather argue about representation. They would rather argue about anything that keeps them from admitting the truth.

Mega Man is what gaming looks like when adults do the work.

That is why the provincial purveyors of Bad Games pretend it never happened.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49508861)

In the state of gaming there is a hegelian dialectic which manifests. False dichotomies stabilize an era. They give everyone a place to stand. Cartridge versus CD. AAA versus indie. Craft versus spectacle. These oppositions feel permanent only because nothing has yet arrived to exploit them. Then a game appears that feeds on the contradiction itself. This is the dialectic in action. Not synthesis as compromise, but synthesis as annihilation of the frame.

FF7 did not argue for CDs over cartridges. It used the excess of the CD to expose the limits of restraint. Cinematic scale became memory, memory became expectation, and the industry reoriented around it. Nintendo did not lose a technical debate. It was bypassed by history.

AAA and indie define themselves against each other. One justifies bloat through budget. The other sanctifies austerity as virtue. The argument sustains both. Then games like Expedition 33 to tear through it. The Absolute State of Game Prices torn asunder. $50 GOTY, arriving at just the right time. Marketed as indie, because it technically is. You need to understand imho that the state of gaming lives in contrived dichotomies. Sega vs Nintendon't. Cartridges vs CDs. Badass western games vs passe JRPGs. Nintendo vs. all. When something comes along that breaks these false dichotomies, the state of gaming is torn asunder and redefined. And the moment exists only contemporaneously. Zoomers dgaf about FF7. Future Gens won't care about expedition 33. These are not Games. They are Syntheses imho.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49508954)

imo some of the problem is graphics. no one really wants to see 3d graphics on a 2d plane. But you can't draw OG mega man in anime and have it resonate with people. But they could do a 2D mega man X9 with PS1 graphics and decent production value and imo it'd resonate with the 2 Million Losers worldwide who'd buy that sort of thing. And they could have it appeal to westerners by having Fatalities you can do whenever you beat a boss.

edit: especially if they improve the movement like they did with Metroid Dread. idk what Engineering aspects allow that game to have better control than like any 2D game I can think of iirc.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49508960)

And then you think about the 90s and how FF7 came out in 1997 and then FF8 came out just two years later. LJL

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49508993)

As gaming grew and became more mainstream (early-to-mid 2000s), it started to attract less talented people. This coincided with the proliferation of tools that make it easier to make a game (not necessarily a good game), which in turn opened the door to talentless women in gaming. And since they are women, they care more about surface level solipsisms instead of creating a work with any depth. (If they are even. capable of depth to begin with.)

Finally, the ability to monetize games beyond the initial sale allowed publishers to grow revenue and margins for a time, driven by MBA types who joined these companies after gaming became mainstream. This added revenue and margin from subscription fees and in-game purchases and what-not allowed for staffs to balloon in size, thus further diluting the talent involved in making games. Obviously this was a cash grab that has killed the proverbial Golden Goose of gaming.

As you have pointed out previously, some see indie games as the answer. But even most indie games are drek because tools make it too easy to make The Same Game. We are really only saved by Japanese game companies at this point.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49509037)

The other element here is that employment law in the US makes it very, very difficult to just hire white nerds who want to make a great game with depth of character and story. It's basically illegal unless you have a company with fewer than 30 people.

As it becomes easier to make indie games that rival AAA games in "quality" (graphics and production values), this may change. But we'll be digging through piles of shit in the interim.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49509270)

Would probably help if any of the really big AAA companies were led by founders with the requisite willpower needed for this.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49509306)

I played MM3 this weekend for a bit. Just meh

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810138&forum_id=2#49509046)