Cleve Blakemore presents: Grimoire (an Indiegogo project)

I'm guessing it means that he's gotten older.

QFMFT.

(Previously).

I think it's more than that, and although I am sure limited technological means and pixel art played a role, there has also been overall a big paradigm shift when it comes to themes.

We have passed from an era where a lot of games looked like this:




Lighthearted, cartoonish, stimulating the imagination

To now this:




I am tired of linear, grimdark games with ultra-realistic graphics, mostly concentrated on realistic violence with cutscenes and protagonists that "smolder in generic rage", which seem to be the theme du jour. It is true that I am not a fratboy eager to go through an ego trip.

However, I prefer something that is more akin to the Pen and paper RPG games I played in college than a Michael Bay movie, and I am sure that it is something that will always have a lot of appeal.

Much like movies, the mainstream tends to look repetitive, but just look at last years crop of indie games, here off of a lazy google search:
http://indiegames.com/2012/12/top_10_indie_games_of_2012_2.html

EDIT: and it's not just indie games either, that was just the easy to counter with, it's really not that hard to find non-grim dark games, hell look at almost the entire lineup on the Wii and Wii-U

Look at her smolder in generic rage!

It's obvious that Japan has not completely veered in the same direction as us. But yes, I do intend to buy Etrian Odyssey 4, it was one of my main reasons for getting a 3DS.

Indie games are not exactly what I am speaking of. And I do not like that too many of them are focused on providing whimsical experiences, gimmicky gameplay, and worst of all, something that attempts to be a "work of art" with little actual gameplay, which to me is just insipid and pretentious. I prefer a rich, deep experience that will not be an insult to my ability and/or intelligence. I also wonder how many people outside of very niche cycles such as ours care about indie games such as these ones.

These days, it seems to be obvious to me that the money is towards games like Call of Duty and Gears of War, as they are the ones who will generate immense revenue and get millions of people to pay full price for. And no, mobile games don't actually make significant money. Gameloft hasn't gotten much revenue at all, and even Rovio makes its money with its plush toys and other derived Angry Birds products, and only very little from 99 cents app sales themselves.

Nintendo has mostly always been focused on kids (and as of a few years a wider casual audience), and I think it is more true today. I think that today's teens want to play Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, not Mario.

The RPG genre has been going strong, you just haven't been looking. You can complain about the money not going where you want it or whatever, but considering how excited you are for the craptastic graphics of Grimoire, the money shouldn't matter to you.

By the way, HHR, don't things like sorcery and necromancy run against scriptural values?

Not when they're innocent, lighthearted, and cartoonish.

As long as they're not whimsical.

There's nothing stimulating to the imagination here, either. Japan is arguably locked even more harshly into an art style it can't get away from.

He says as he points to a picture with a baboon with a 'fro in the background. I get your point, i just think that while the art style of japan is mostly the same, they definitely do not lack for creativity when it comes to art and design.

hmm monkey with an afro.. I sense racism somewhere....

If only there was another game to play besides Gears Of War. Oh, well, I guess the market has spoken.

Good Lord, HHR, you're even more tiresome decrying the nature of modern gaming than you were when you were merely promoting this miserable heap of vaporware.

Graphics didn't cause development to become lazy and theatrical, graphics enabled the appeal of a mainstream that wanted lazy and theatrical games. Yeah, I'm a horrible misanthrope about modern gaming, and I spend more time these days playing old games than new ones. And yes, there's a thriving indie scene, but it's mostly centered around PC gaming which is a rabbit I got tired of chasing a long time ago. It either helps or hurts that PC gaming development will be a dinosaur in a few years with the desktop market stagnating and everyone moving to closed tablet ecosystems; a lot of bad prognostications have been made over the years about the death of PC gaming, but things like cloud computing and marketplace-oriented OSes have made it a little hazy.

But there are modern gaming paradigms that challenge the idea that audiovisuals are paramount for a robust gaming experience (see Dwarf Fortress, which in spite of being made up of CP437 characters will eventually put your computer on its knees). There are also modern gaming paradigms that challenge that idea by rehashing the same ideas we had in the 80s, throwing a "retro" label on it, and calling it a day. There's a huge gaping difference.

There's also a huge difference between "graphics" and "art". A lot of folks were perfectly capable of making good art on a 320x200 viewport. Apparently Blakemore isn't, because that shit is kinda nauseating.

Pretty weak troll there.

I hope the baselard is what's in their hand and not what's in their conspicuously unbuttoned pants.

So, I think you guys don't understand where HHR is coming from. To be fair, though, I don't think that HHR understands where he's coming from.

I've decided he's not actually trolling. The thing is, you all are mystified that he thinks Grimoire is going to be better than most modern games even though it's vaporware and will never actually be released. But you've got it backwards. He thinks Grimoire is going to be better than most modern games because it's vaporware and will never actually be released.

I'm not joking. I've written about this in detail elsewhere (I'll spare you the link) but it's what I generally refer to as "the latent object fetish." The idea here is that the game (or camera, or significant other, or meal) that exists in your head is, almost by definition, better than the game (or camera, or significant other, or meal) that you can actually acquire in reality. The latent object of desire is superior to any actual thing you can have. Because Grimoire is unlikely to ever be actually released as a completed playable game, HHR believes it is better than other games. One could, if one were a jerk, like me, point out that this sort of belief system is exactly the same sort of mechanism that the deeply religious use to arrive at the conclusion that the next world is probably better than the one we've actually got.

Now, no theory is any good unless it has predictive value. So I'll give you a prediction for you to use to test mine: if and when Blakemore releases a Grimoire game of some sort (I'd probably give that about 15% odds of a 'full' release, and 75% odds of a longer demo), it is exactly those who are most in love with the idea now who will complain the loudest. The particular complaint you should be looking for in the event of a full release – and I would be willing to wager that these exact words will be used – is that whatever he has released is not "really" Grimoire. That by releasing this poor impostor of a game, Cleve has betrayed the true legacy of Grimore. If Cleve goes the demo path, the particular language the latent object fetish pathology will inspire will be assurances that the demo is only a sneak peak, and that any and all problems or weaknesses one can identify in the demo don't exist in the real game.

And of course that last statement is precisely true: because the real version of Grimore, the one that HHR wants, only exists and can only ever exist in HHR's head.

I get the feeling this is the only way most Grimoire fans are getting any sort of full release.

The No Mutants Allowed theory of game fandom.

Alright, see you guys later on tonight in the drunk thread for beers and tears.

I find this all the more interesting because my significant other is superior in many ways to the theoretical ones I hoped for, and I have had, more than once, a meal far better than I had ever imagined before. Possibly it's my paucity of imagination that's the problem, here.</tangent>

No because it doesn't conflict with my values system, or at least it doesn't replace it. I make the difference between the real world a fantasist presentation. It is also much easier to do this with a game because they're always unrealistic. That's why playing the Walking Dead game was much easier than viewing some of the Walking Dead tv series.

I also do not mind if something has creative or artistic value of some sort. Tolkien was in fact a very fervent Catholic, who inserted Christian allegories into The Lord of the Rings. Perspective with a world unlike ours can also be a useful tool in my opinion.

Even if I do not like something, unless something is truly unbearable, I take the good elements of it, and discard the rest. I don't watch films, but I watch some mini-series, seeing as they leave more time for character development. I just mentally disregard the liberal propaganda and focus on the other individual aspects that make the mini-series enjoyable.

I think that realizing everything you can experience in life has good elements that are worth having or learning from is a good attitude to have.

It's true that in many cases when I remember games I was really expecting, getting hyped over them and thinking of how fun they would be was more fun than actually playing them. This is why for instance, playing a pen and paper game with friends will always me much superior to playing a computer RPG.

In this case though I don't see how it's completely unrealistic. I've played games that followed more or less the same patterns. Grimoire has most of the same gameplay elements as a game like Wizardry VII, they're only more elaborated to a degree. I think it is a winning formula that has a lot of appeal and has been unfairly left aside in these last two decades, and I welcome another step-based, party-based first person RPG.

Oh, and another update:

It's good that he's using people's private email. Last time I got a super demo, the racist game designer sent it to my public email down at the bus station.

I don't get it, the game is going to be small by today's standard, UrQuan Master HD was only like 500mb that's with VO and everything.. it's currently Wednesday, so it takes him 4 days to put in a URL and pack a small game??

I'm totally shocked by his productivity, it's Beyond human...

It took him 15 years just to get to that stage, idrisz.

You are right, Never mind, I'm pleasantly surprised at how efficient he is now...

must be good work if you can get it...

Tiered demos. Are ... are you serious.

peterb, I'm sorry I ever thought you were just being absurdly satirical. I guess you nailed this one.

The completely unrealistic (I'd use the word 'irrational', but I mean it as a term of art, not as a slam) part of your behavior is that if your goal is "play games that have the same sort of gameplay elements as the Wizardry games" , then choosing Grimoire as your great hope is probably the least efficient of all possible ways to ever play such a game.

There are multiple small indie PC games that have already been released that serve this market. There are multiple Nintendo DS games that serve this market. There are multiple iOS games that serve this market. And in the face of this freaking cornucopia of Wizardry-like games your response is "I think I'll wait for the game that a paranoid schizophrenic racist in Australia has been talking about, and not shipping, for about 20 years, because all the games I can buy today are Call of Duty clones."

The major difference between the games that I referenced above, and Grimoire, is that those games exist and Grimoire does not. If you were coming in here post-release and saying "You know what? I tried those other games, and I tried Grimoire, and man, Grimoire is waaaaay better because of A, B, and C" that would be one thing. But instead you're the guy who is refusing a delicious meal because someday you're going to get pie in the sky when you die.

Editing, and putting an addendum on this: ask yourself how you would feel about Grimoire and Cleve as a product and as a potential vendor if the product in question was something that you didn't feel emotionally attached to. Say he sold, I dunno, snow shovels. Imagine that for 17 years this guy was posting on the internet about how his snow shovel design is nearly finished and is going to be superior to every snow shovel you can buy, because it's going to hearken back to the snow shovels your grandfather used to have, only better. Imagine that after 15 years of this, he solicited donations and then, when his first donation campaign ended, he started another donation campaign for his snow shovels that still hadn't shipped. Would that be a guy that any rational person should want to do business with?

Regardless of what one thinks of this nonexistent game, looked at from a completely abstract point of view, with all of the product details put aside, the guy is acting like someone who is trying to defraud people. Maybe he's not. But it sure smells bad to me. And that's why it gets me somewhat hot under the collar for you (or, really anyone) to walk into a virtual room and say "Hey, let's give this guy the benefit of the doubt." In the past 17 years, thousands of small software developers have shipped software and earned the benefit of the doubt. Cleve has not earned any such thing, and I would argue through his words and actions he has earned the opposite: I won't believe a single thing the guy says until he proves it.

Does anyone have any clue what he does for money these days? It can't be cheap to maintain a fallout shelter and/or a satellite connection to the mothership.

Tolkien hated allegory and adamantly denied its existence in his writings. You're most likely projecting, again.

now i kinda want a snow shovel. anyone else?

Uh, I'm guessing he does Indiegogo campaigns for money. It's not like Kickstarter - even though he didn't meet his goal, he gets that whole 10k. He just got 10k for nothing. And now he's starting another one. I'm not sure 10k of free money really counts as 'eating crow', even if he asked for a million bajillion trillion.

Yep, that is why I posted that screen capture of the final total. Cleve got 10k by just being Cleve, and that is enough to make a sane person fucking sick.

You'll guys will be eating crow when he breezes by $750,000 three months ago in an alternate universe where that totally happened.

BUT SERIOUSLY: He got $10,000 once. What happens when he fails to release a demo and, subsequently, a game? There's no way he gets another ten grand on the next campaign, assuming he's even allowed to have one. (I don't know enough about how Kickstarter works, but I assume people notice stuff like failing to come through on previous promises, right?) Those Codexers seem dumb, but not THAT dumb.