So what does "soul" actually mean?

>asking a bunch of souless video game nerds what soul is

That the 'soul' example has some sort of exclusive endeering quality like clear effort inspiration in its production and that the 'soulless' example is similar to the first example but is lacking that quality.

It's what you say when you don't actually have any real arguments for whatever you want to talk about.

soul=i like it
soulless=i dont like it

Pertaining to Yea Forums it means nothing, it's a meaningless buzzword that retards use to defend a particular art style/aesthetic because they lack the mental capability to articulate why they like it. When it's not that, it's just shitposters.

If I wasn't in a blatant shitposting OLD GOOD NEW BAD thread I guess I'd say it's putting in the minute details, stuff that doesn't affect the overall function of the game but adds a human element that lets you know the devs actually gave a shit and weren't just trudging along for a paycheck.

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Aesthetic sincerity vs. sterile design by committee aesthetic sincerity

Or it put it in such a way that brainlet could even understand: DKC Returns uses NSMB color pallets and textures to stay in line with Nintendo's universal 2D platformer commercial line, while the original DKC was about a team of brits trying to do their best to create a highly detailed cartoon world on a 2D screen.

Actual soul comin' through

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*insincerity

No it doesn't. And Retro's DK games are far better than the old ones.

It's the difference between original/not afraid to break the norm and sanitized, standardized, made to appeal to the masses.

This pic is cherrypicked as fuck, there's a sunset level in literally the first world of DKCR that has just as much if not more "soul," if we're taking soul to mean distinctive artistic direction that is inspired and has aged well.

Jeez I love the art style they had back then. I remember when I got this game for the first time still.

Mechanically, yes. Aesthetically, fuck no. DKC looks like an interactive claymation while DKCR looks like one those sterile 3D cartoons that gets put on Nick Jr. It was actually the biggest hump for me to get over when getting around to the new DK games, just how sterile everything looks.

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It's really funny how nostalgia has single handedly been hated by zoomers out of any generation. Every generation has preteen bias (the age at which what you know and what you were knowing about at that point in your age) but never did in my life growing up did I hear so many people younger than the generation before them get triggered about people not likely your era of content over the content they grew up with in their era.

I blame the Internet, since literal 5 year olds are allowed on it now compared to my time where I had to be 18+ just to have parents stop giving a shit. They always say the kids of the parents do the opposite of what they had to put up with growing up, just so their kids " can have it better than them". It's clear some things aren't better just ignoring to prove a point. I generally wish only 18+ year olds were ever allowed to use the Internet. Far too many mentally ill people exist to have justified letting them use it and fuck up society so much as they have today.

Soul means "I played it when I was a kid".
I've seen people on stream chats, probably young, recently saying the Wii had soul. When the Wii came out everyone complained Nintendo had become soulless and was pandering to casuals.

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Soul: Game I played as a child
Soulless: New games

they still use that art style though

That's when it's good to keep people honest and not let every starry eyed nostalgic steal the term. The Wii menu is soulless, it was a direct rip off of the Apple aesthetic which is why people hated it so much. I think the low resolution adds some soul that wouldn't otherwise be there.

The Wii Shop channel music is peak soul though which is where I think people get that idea. It's the ultimate muzak, and wouldn't be out of place in a vapor wave album.

This level has just as much "soul" than any old DKC level

youtube.com/watch?v=RM9ZpFE3fcE

No, see, this wasn't made by digitizing photos of shitty '90s CG models, so it's soulless.

this

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>The Wii menu is soulless
Get the fuck out.

Beautiful

you articulate things well

It was Nintendo using the Apple App store aesthetic before the iphone as a games platform really blew up. Do you think the App shop on your phone is super soulful? Because that's all it is, the App format blown up onto a screen at 480p. Doesn't mean I hate the Wii for saying that though. The Wii gave a life extension to the quirky PS2 era, which gave us more soulful games than there would have been otherwise.

>water
>WATER

People miss the point a lot and have misused it (plus there are plenty who can't understand a slightly abstract concept like it, see: those who don't get the idea of game feel), but it does mean something. The developers making older games tended to be trying their absolute best in a tight knit team and it lead to a lot of small quirks, unnecessary features, etc that added charm. The presentation of a game might be a little clunky but the people doing it genuinely cared and it showed through in the end product. You can still get soulfulness in newer games where the people in charge are keeping a close eye on everything and making sure it all reflects their vision, but it's much harder. It's not that soul exclusively produced a better product either, it's solely related to the charm involved in experiencing the end result.

I'm not sure how to feel about the Retro DK games to this day. I'm not personally a fan of the new presentation style at all and it does feel more washed out and by the numbers (a lot of personality was lost in the change off of the kremlings and going for a bunch of silly theming for everything including the levels because hey, it was the kremlings, they're goofy) but at the same time a lot of work was put in and there are a ton of small details you wouldn't normally see from something made by committee.

>using Donkey Kong Country for this without a shred of irony

You know, Cranky Kong and his ramblings were a direct parody of this. He kept ranting about how sterile and soulless Country was in comparison to the original NES DK games.

like handcrafted stuff vs chink shit.

Pretty much all modern 3D games feel generic and soulless to some extent, simply because the hardware and CG techniques used are more or less consistent across pretty much every game, and have been for over a decade. I mean, they can't entirely help it--they're just using technology as it exists today. DKC would look exactly like DKCR if the technology to do so had existed back then.

What gives these old games "soul" (in a graphical sense) is that they were running on very limited hardware, and developers had to come up with all sorts of different ways to represent what they were attempting to portray. The end result was there was a lot of graphical variety between games (especially games running on different sets of hardware). When you look at DKC vs. SMW, they look like entirely different games, despite being on the same machine. Whereas, if you look at NSMB Wii & DKCR, even though they clearly have vastly different visual themes, at their core, they look far more alike than their SNES ancestors. As another example, compare SMB1 & SMB3 vs. NSMB1/2/Wii/U. SMB1 and 3 looked totally different despite being on the same machine, whereas the NSMB games have looked identical for over a decade, and across a ton of different machines.

Furthermore, with old games, a lot of times where you had to use your imagination to interpret what was being presented. When you look at a modern game, you pretty much know immediately what you're looking at (especially true for modern games that go for a photorealistic style).

TL;DR with how powerful and consistent hardware is these days, there's less (apparent) diversity in graphical styles.

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>a lot of times where you had to use your imagination to interpret what was being presented
I see this as a failure on the devs' part desu, shit should always be easy to read and interpret, and simplified if you can't make it work. It's like how the visions of filmmakers had to be simplified and toned down before the advent of CGI let them plaster whatever bullshit they wanted up on the screen. Granted, the "What I saw/What it is" threads here have shown me that somebody is always going to misinterpret your work, especially when they have the IQ of a fucking pinecone.

Inspired vs uninspired. Soul is when you can feel the artist’s true honest desire manifested through game form.

Best post ITT.
Soul has nothing to do with passion or budget or team size. What is 'Soulful' is simply the manifestation of human expression in lieu of technological advancement. In this sense, the term really intends to describe what ISN'T there more than what is. The imperfections have become the art. A computer is perfect by design, and you will never have a vertex or a ray of light out of place. I believe this leads to the perceived sterility of modern games, as we have come closer to functional rendering perfection.

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Man, I love this image so much. It's so dream like and surreal.

>Comparing the most revolutionary SNES game of that time that was literally written in assembler from top to bottom with some shitty remake a NEET could do in his spare time using a free version of unity.

"I waa 12 when I played it"

Seething

I did a poor job of explaining my point. I will probably do a poor job again, but I'll try to clarify a bit better.

I was speaking more to the fact that, in an older game, when you see a crude (by modern standards), pixelated (or low poly) representation of a jungle, there's a little more thought and imagination that goes into interpreting it all as an actual jungle. Whereas, with a modern game with a photorealistic style, you look at a tree and your brain instantly interprets it as a tree, because it looks just like a real life tree. Maybe here's a better example: say you're scaling a mountain in an old Final Fantasy game. It takes a lot more imagination to envision yourself as "going up a mountain" than a modern game like RDR where you're going up a literal, realistic mountain.

SEETHING COPE COPE SEETHING BASED CRINGE

Originally "soul" just meant the game had its own unique look/style that oozed with instantly recognizable style. Unfortunately most people turned it into OLD GOOD NEW BAD

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old good
new bad

>Pretty much all modern 3D games feel generic and soulless to some extent
*AHEM*

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Computer animation becoming mainstream and pushed way further in movies rather than video games making up the majority of that front and with its own separate focus.