Soul vs Soulless in video games

[luj1]

These two words are often used when describing video games, we all get what they both mean, and very often we agree with each other on examples of soulful vs soulless, but what do they really mean to you exactly - if it's even possible to describe that, as these might be just vague/indescribable feelings to you?

I ask this because I feel the concept of a game having "soul" is often a synonym of the game simply being very atmospheric, and in many cases they really feel like interchangeable concepts. Like Thief is an extremely atmospheric game, and it's very soulful. But that's really not it, because you also have games like Mario World or Banjo Kazooie, which have a lot of soul but those are two games I'd never apply the word "atmospheric" to describe. Likewise, many sci-fi games and things like Portal have a very (purposely) sterile feel but manage to be pretty soulful.

Maybe this is a dumb thread, and trying to explain what is a soulful thing is like going from "the Force is all around us" to "oh it's a thing produced by your mitochondrias and you happen to produce a lot of it", which ironically enough would make this a soulless thread. We can still salvage it to post examples of SOVL vs SOULLESS anyways, such as:


SOUL:

SOULLESS:

soul means the game has style

 

[luj1]

style = sum of audiovisual experience = coherent emotion

soulless means it doesn't have style, it is sterile or generic

old games also used 2D art a lot, nowadays u see all these mobile UI desing in games like Skyrim, Witcher or Solasta

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

Not on /vr/, but you always see Nintendofags praising their N64 as if Saturn and PS1 didn't even exist.

You get banned on 4chan for next to nothing these days. I'd post on /vr/ if it wasn't clearly modded by seething trannies.

Did the Saturn exist..? Fighters mega mix was great but I can't think of much in that library that really stood out. I did like the boxes though. They were cool.

literally nobody with a Dreamcast.

I had a dreamcast and I still love the way it looks. It's a real shame it's become some faggy shen mue circle jerk. There's some amazing games on that console and it's under explored. It had a lot of those games like Toy commander, weird experimental 3D games that did interesting shit. Pen Pen tri something or other. A simple arcade racing game but so much fun.

Fuck I wish gaming had gone down the Dreamcast direction rather than the playstation one.

 

[Viata]

Saturn is an amazing console. Back then, it was the console to play arcade ports. It sucks now because I can just play the arcade games on Mame, but that was not an option back then.
I had a Dreamcast and I loved to play Quake 3 with friends. It was the shit.

 

[HeatEXTEND]