Is Mixtape Even a Game?
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A new “game” came out called Mix Tape. It has received unanimous extreme praise from the gaming press.
However, independent journalists and real consumers are not impressed.
Mix Tape is a piece of media that questions what a game is, as it more approximates a semi-interactive movie. The player can sometimes move through space, can sometimes perform various actions, but those actions ultimately have no impact on the player’s outcomes. Even plot proceeds through its predetermined steps at a predetermined pace.
You can check out this brief review to see what I’m talking about:
While I haven’t played the game (and I could, if you want to sit through it on stream), I’ve seen a good deal of it as it’s only about a three-hour experience. I personally find the low-framerate character animations, particularly when combined with the higher frame-rate backgrounds, to be nauseating. I hate seeing it in modern animated movies (like the last Puss’n’boots movie), and I hate it much more in a game.
The soundtrack, which is the “vibe” focus of the game, is also full of music that I find unappealing, boring, or annoying. I was a teenager in the 1990s, and I wasn’t a fan of the music of that decade already, but they really picked a boring set list of B-tier songs. Maybe that’s the point, as I remember making mix-tapes for friends of deep cuts of various artists. Your mileage may vary.
So why is a mediocre interactive movie experience getting such universal acclaim? IGN gave it a 10/10, which means Mix Tape is better than Skyrim, which they gave a 9.5/10 to. Is this experience really so good, so revolutionary, that it deserves a score that places it alongside the real classics? I think we’re dealing with another gaming journo astroturf scenario.
The studio is owned by Larry Elison’s daughter. Gaming journalism is notoriously corrupt and willing to trade on favors (some sexual – just look into the real story of Gamergate 1.0). They are also packed with millennials with 90s nostalgia who hold a dislike (or open disdain) of the broader demographics that make up the bulk of gaming consumers. Mix Tape was given a 10/10 by Dean Takahashi, infamous for not being able to get through the Cuphead tutorial.
Giving Mixtape a 10/10 is possibly more about owning the chuds and scoring an invite to a swanky party than it is about some perfect presentation of an idea.
The thing is, the “gameplay lite” problem was literally solved decades ago with Visual Novels, a medium that western game journos never seem to discuss. You want a story-based experience with few fail states? Well, that’s existed for a long time already. Of course, they usually require a bit of reading, and that might be ableist in a different direction. And Visual Novels often do at least have fail states in the form of branching stories or good/bad endings. Mix Tape does not.
There doesn’t appear to be anything special about Mix Tape, which is part of the backlash. It’s overrated to the extreme, so it must be hated to an equal extreme to even things out. It doesn’t look profoundly bad; it just looks uninteresting. What standard does one compare it to? Even rating it as a game is going to provoke comparisons to real games, making the gassing-up of the game all the more intolerable.
But what do you think? Should I stream a playthrough of it?
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I hate it as someone who live through the decade, someone who likes music, someone who likes video games, and as a writer. It's really the perfect storm of everything I dislike about Current Year and people my age sneering and grifting instead of earnestly making anything. It's the perfect nadir of this era.
You could easily play it on stream because there are entire sections of it you can beat without even touching the controller. You'd probably spend most of the time talking about how inaccurate it is, because it's incredibly inaccurate.
This is a clear case of shilling.
The reviewers were given rather generous gift packs before they wrote anything.
There's no way that this game deserves a 10. It's a 3 hour nostalgia bait animation that requires virtually no input from the observer. Calling it a game implies actually having to play it which in this case, you barely have to touch the controller.
I would say Mix Tape is the distillation of Aemoia - making an experience that a majority of the people who have interacted with the product that they never had themselves.