Xbox Live Arcade: Fez

Phil Fish should be hung. The game is absolute crap and this isn't just my over exaggerated opinion, it focuses too hard on trying to be 'art', took '5' years to make, Phil Fish constantly shits all over Cave Story but his entire style is stolen from it and he has nothing on Pixel, dude won 2 awards for a game that's not out yet by being friends with the judges then went and insulted people on his twitter after wards.

But, again, the guy being a total douche doesn't make the game bad I suppose, but the game has:
1)Boring music, the music is frankly quite boring because it reminds you of how empty the song is, it would normally be a nice tune for a game where there's some action and you however do want some ambiance, think Cave Story, Iji, Underworld, etc.
2)Shitty gameplay - Not even a new concept this guy is bringing to the table and he still manages to do it terribly
3)The puzzles are crap - In a game with no enemies you think, at least good puzzles right? Nope, super easy other than dealing with BUGS. Bugs would be acceptable if it didn't take FIVE Years and he didn't GLOAT about it being great.
4)The game itself wastes a good deal of time on useless cinematics and highlights and very little actual 'content' is in the game

Overall 0/5 will only play when it comes to PC to recall how fucking bad it is and tell future generations of my horrible experience.

Edit:

Oh and if it wasn't enough, the asshole built up hype since day 1 with some 'I've already got this bro' mentality and claiming all this crap about how the game will be X or Y, or on PC, and then it ended up being none of those things. I really reallllllllllly wanted to play Fez so badly because of all that was promised, but after watching a short LP on it and some such I saw how trite it is and am saddened once again.

 

The music is great when not playing :) It just doesn't fit it. It's like if I played Super Mario Bros and Johnny Cash did the background music.

 

Sky Island was finished in less than a year (much less) and actually has enemies, and games.

Oh and Paper Mario, the Wii one I believe it was. So yeah, if Nintendo did it quite some years ago, properly, with fights, and all of that, yeah, no excuses.

Games are centered around gameplay, they aren't movies you move around in, if you try to be 'all art' and no 'game' it isn't a game anymore, it's as much of a game as interior semiotics is art.

I never said I don't like Pixel Art, to the contrary in fact, I prefer 2D art over anything else, Pixel art being the best in my opinion.

Early puzzle gameplay always shows easy stuff but gets harder as you go, if they showed hard stuff it would be retarded as they would leave you everything.

Compare it to Cave Story because that's what you compare indie games that COPY Cave Story to.

 

Flower,flow, journey, etc were actually artistic, like Braid,Fez lacks that, phil fish is not an artist, he's a hack, he steals other people's ideas and shoddily puts them together and attempts to call it art. Look at everything thatgamecompany made and you will notice that it is original, the theme all fits together and everything blends perfectly, this is what makes it 'art' this is what allows this type of game to actually be labeled 'artistic'.

Fez while it attempts to do so is missing something, something that breaks it, it fails to actually set the atmosphere, or mix the gameplay into it in a way where it feels natural.

#1 psn download for april means nothing, number of purchases or downloads has never made something a good game, by that logic MW3 is one of the best games out there, and SW:TOR is actually good!

Showing the harder content is simply counter to the standard, and in doing so all he's done is attempted to say that he has more than he has, if you were to argue that he didn't know the standard is to show easier content and maybe a glimpse at one or two harder puzzles that'd be retarded if he's been developing a game for 5 years, and again showing the challenge would make sense if... it was actually challenging but it isn't! It feels like I'm playing the first 5 puzzles in Layton and am missing the entire rest of the game!

Attempting to say a game cannot be compared is simply saying "This game sucks but my opinions will stand, so I'll say you can't compare it, because I don't want it to look bad", it attempted to replicate Cave Story but just sucked, however if you want to compare it to something without enemies, or anything go ahead and compare it to Sky Island, it still loses.

Oh and as for stripping away all of Cave Story's actual 'content', hahaah, haha, no. Phil Fish had 5 fucking years, a deadline he set himself to make this game, originally said he would add all that stuff and then dropped it for the shallow piece of shit it is, it was his choice not to add all of that 'content' which would have at least had a chance at making it challenging or good.

Game - Not good by itself
The developer - A literal prick, half the shit he says is on the level of "John Romero is about to make you his bitch"

 

Ah, my bad, I didn't mean it had no enemies, I should have revised that, I meant to say something more similar overall.

But if we compare it to no enemies games, I'd play Cooking Mama over Fez. 8-)

 

They have style and theme and aren't pretentious in nature.

Nifflas has made some of my favorite indie games anyway.
Knytt was fun, Knytt Stories I enjoy checking out from time to time.

I actually find Knytt Stories to be very similar to N+ in a way.

 

I'm sorry but you lost any claim to an argument the second you said that MW is a good game, I could not bring myself mentally to read past that point.

@Wonkyth - Phil Fish is the equivalent of Blue from terraria in a PR sense, I'd agree.
Do you mean fruitloop as in homosexual or as in has problems in the head? Sorry, I just don't hear the term often.



Now that I gave it a minute and read over the rest of your post, which was seriously hard to do after what you wrote about MW, here are some thoughts.
Art: He's stated it a few times in the past, not that he needed to, one look at the game tells you he went for art over gameplay even to the point of how the game loads or how he went so painstakingly hard to copy Cave Story's look and make it a different type of light fantasy while at the same time not copying any of the actual gameplay that makes it fun.


The fact that there is no 'standard' is something that you're wrong about, there are preconceived notions that you would only be privy off if you've actually watched many of them in the past and know this, while you may not find some written rule if you ask anyone who's made one or anyone who's watched enough of them to sit down and think of what you would say the unwritten rules are, they could tell you the basics, this is true of most things, and the fact that you didn't know after 5 years of making the game, or actually being a game dev at all which assumes you've actually PLAYED games and enjoyed them is no real excuse, it should be obvious in this sense.

If that was the hardest difficulty he wanted he might as well have come out and said he's trying to make a casual game for 2years to play because he wants that audience.

No, see that's bullshit, he had tons of options from Kickstarter to doing something else temporarily, I'm sorry but you don't work 5 years on a game and then rush it in the end (and still brag about it!) because you were 'strapped for cash'.

The reason isn't something like this and conjecture really isn't worth it, if you've read any of Phil Fish's shit, especially his twitter the reason would be obvious, he's a douche.

Well, again as I've said there were two parts to my argument:
1)Phil Fish is shit
a)He's a douchebag who went back on his original thing
b)He made his game out to be something it completely wasn't and then didn't care about the results
c)Insults his fans left and right, it's project zomboid all over again!

2)The game is shit
a)The actual gameplay is shit, it's boring, slow-paced
b)Anyone can find bugs without even looking, has he even HEARD of testing before release?
c)The world the game is set in is boring, it attempts to be a vibrant and in your face but realistically is the same old shit everyone who's ever picked up an MMO has seen a million times, and the characters aren't much better
d)It's a fucking puzzle game with shitty puzzles holy shit.

Seriously if I set my 8 year old brother to play this I guarantee he can beat every puzzle without three tries.