What *is* soul, Yas Forums?

It's the associations your brain creates between otherwise unrelated things. For example, you might have played a game a lot when you were on summer vacation as a child, so your brain created an association between the game and the sense of freedom you had at the time. Or you might have played a game with a friend you enjoyed spending time with and your brain created an association between the game and that friendship.

In other words it's nostalgia. Pokemon Emerald and Pokemon Platinum are pretty much the same fucking game but I enjoy Emerald vastly more, because I played that game as a child.

The explanation that people try to give that it's about the developers expressing themselves vs corporate design really bothers me because most "soul" games are made by Nintendo who has always taken a very designed by committee approach to games. They have ALWAYS focused heavily on what the consumers want, which is why Zelda moved to open world games and Animal Crossing added crafting for example. A game can be designed based on trends and be great while a game can buck all trends and be a labor of love and expression and be shit.

FPBP

>no dlc
>no season pass
>microtransactions
>no esports relations
>not pop culture
>not made by EA
>just the original with the exception of one good sequel
My take on it

Soul is the result of passion and effort.

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>most "soul" games are made by Nintendo

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Great art direction and gameplay.
Modern games are trying to imitate life so much that it has no charm or originality.

>not shitposting
Impressive attention to aesthetic detail

>shitposting
Thing I like

You just posted it

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>Nintendo who has always taken a very designed by committee approach to games
there is no way a game like Earthbound with all the crazy shit happening in it was "designed by committee"

Soul is when developers put passion and effort into their game and don't just try to cram it full of artificial experiences.

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Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes

Something that was done poorly

For me, soul is when you can feel a human texture in something (e.g a video game). It's present in some form of error or struggle, where can you see the human creator's creativity scraping against the medium they've chosen - early games with low-res textures are an example of this; these low-res textures have to blur and distort the designer's intended design in order to comply with the medium (the game engine, the hardware) however, instead of merely being a limit on the designer's creativity, we find low-res textures and low-res models charming and aesthetically appealing in an unexpected way, and they even carry their own unique style to them. Here, the human creator's will prevails in these harsh circumstances and in the end the limits don't mean anything and even *become* a part of the art, it is now soulful.

With greater technology and high-fidelity graphics, I think these situations are harder to come by, and it is harder to make something stylized when it is more suited for realism. Realism is also impressive in marketing as well.

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Badspot got everything he deserved
fucking kike lmao

Rundown?

comfy aesthetics

Threw it all away because Minecraft stole his thunder. He let Roblox win the contest.

tl;dr
All of his developers for blockland left and killed the game.
Then his wife divorced him and ended up getting 90% royalties from blockland
Now he's living in a motel somewhere drawing porn on a tablet.

So he only gets ~10% of Blockland sales and he's a NEET drawing horse dicks now? Fuck, I can't help but feel sad

just

Holy shit so is that why they killed it and Notch making billions was just a coincidence in timing?

>can't help but feel sad
Don't, apparently dude was a notorious cunt on the forums and only was abusive to most of the people trying to help him lmao