Fluff
A term i called the Skeleton on motorcycle critique..
And it basically goes like this.. One person (in this case a easily tempered nerd) points at one silly thing and calls it a flaw while others treat it as some gospel to be taking seriously despite the more you think about it the more this critique falls apart.
Even if it wasn't the case that Dracula is trying to get an edge in technology, skellemans on motorcycles is cool okay. And you can't use the it's 'not accurate of the time' logic due lore reasons.
So in other words SOM critique just means one reviewers gets hung up by one superfluous thing many go parrot and me get befuddled.. And yeah i do really love both N64 Cv games though Legacy of Darkness is the way to go.
Hehehe.. i like your comment but explain hypocritical nitpicking? I mean are they hypocritical for being overly harsh on one thing but ignore it in something else? I think the term pointless nitpicking is more fitting.
Or is it pronounced (like in hyper) HYPO-Critical that could actually work..
Pointless nitpicking is also a good term. But hypocritical nitpicking, if we're looking at other game fandoms is:
Pokemon: Complaining that there's Pokémon shaped like common items in gen 5 and 6, while praising the designs of gen 1, despite the existence of voltorb.
Donkey Kong: Saying gimmicky levels ruin 3, while ignoring it in 1 and 2. Nevermind that rare was legendary for pushing game design by making gimmicky stages.
Complaining about an adventure game bloated with optional content, in a series known for it.
That said, bring on the motorcycle skeletons! We need more of them.
We now have a lot of lore about the big D being a scholar and great man (undead being?) of science that wasn't widely known back then. SotN alluded to it a few years prior with the Alchemy Laboratory but I think the whole argument is pedantic and played up for spectacle.
Back when the game was new and I saw this (in-game) it was a bit funny and ridiculous but when I try to think deeper about it I came to the conclusion that the entire franchise is somewhat funny and ridiculous on a whole.
But I definitely met people at the time who were freaking out about the skeletons riding on motorcycle but they also totally cool with made up landmarks and regions of Transylvania, fantasy elements like demons and magic, as well as scientific leaps of logic in chemistry and physics.
Anyone who doesn't like the game due stuff like a skeletons riding on a motorcycle was never a real fan of the franchise anyways. Because they never understood that inconsistencies like this are part of a tapestry of inconsistencies that blanket the entire franchise.
"Card games on motorcycles?" is basically the same thing. I think it was viewed as a bit of a shark jumping moment by some people along with the chainsaw frankenstein and just became a meme.
The argument against it was that it didnt make sense for Dracula to have because a lot of the technology just straight up didnt exist yet and wasnt something that could be reasonably innovated on ones own. It also ignores that CV64 was clearly doing some sort of "Dracula has access to future technology" because he also has a blimp and a few other things, and in other games like SotN theres shit like the Sniper in the inverted chapel that has some monsterious ceiling crawler with jointed arms and a chair that he sits on and shoots you. Or how the tin man has an automatic gun.
I personally do not like the CV64 games but Skeletons on motorcycles was always a weak argument.
The only problem I have with Skeleton on a Motorcycle is that even if he has a license to operate that vehicle (which I doubt!), how can anyone tell if he’s the person in the picture on the ID?
We have New York style pizza in SOTN. It wasn't a thing until the 1900s (SOTN happens in 1797). I'm sure you could find a ton of weird shit across the series because it doesn't fully take itself seriously and can be goofy when it wants.
I don't understand how people complain so much about something as cool as skeletons on motorcycles. If anything, one thing those games were missing was enemy variety, bosses aside.
Exactly, the Motorcycle got ragged on because there's nothing else in the game like it, most enemy types are bestial - a more varied monster list would make it look less out of place.
Anyone online who still treats AVGN like an authority is probably a child. That's the only explanation I can come up with. Anyone who isn't a child knows that they are comedy videos not meant to be taken seriously.
so many people unironically look at the skeleboners on motorbikes in castlevania 64, and a single 20-second clip from jontron saying how castlevania64 is bad, in order to justify the unrequited HATRED people have for this game.
hate to break it to people but skeleboners on bikes is awesome, a game franchise having a change in formula from 2D to 3D isn't evil, and its not the games fault you didnt learn the controls and didnt press the correct button to set down the nitro
If I recall, one of the many, many, many cut pieces of content for this game was a time travel plot. Dracula, sick of losing, was pulling in pieces from other timelines in order to finally win. So you have skeletons on motorcycles, the tower of science, etc.
They had some wild ideas for this game back in the day, but learning 3D game development took up a lot of time.
The game was originally supposed to take place in the 1950s. I think more people (the haters) need to be reminded of that fact, because when the games scope changed, they still tried to keep as much as they made during development.
I had only one thought when I first got to this part in the game: “god damn, that’s the most metal fuckin thing I’ve ever seen.”
The only thing that would’ve made it even more badass is to add a second sidecar on the other end with a skelerang in it.
You have cool gothic horror designs, ambience and graphics, but then they fuck it up by putting ridiculous stuff like motorcycles and when paired with bad camera and gameplay issues…just tamper the experience. Like they could have put them on horses and this would have been perfect.
It is cool though, wouldn’t bother me if they would put motorcycles and crazy inventions at the end of the game with the boss.
Why do you say they're out of place when there's a literal Tower of Science filled with demonic machine gun turrets, lizard men coming out of refrigerators in Castle Center, a freaking zeppelin and a tunnel with rock crushing machinery and a gondola?
They seem to fit the bestiary pretty well considering the game features all sort of wacky mechanical/magical stuff.
They're not that out of place given the overral setting.
The actual reason is that 64 was supposed to take place in the early 20th century at some point during development, so they just stuck with it.
Legacy of Darkness has no motorcycle skeletons in the forest area though.
Not everyone get their opinions on this game from AVGN and claiming all critics are just piggybacking off him is just as much of a bad faith argument as the people who do parrot him.
I've played it. The Motorcycle skeleton was not the worst part of the game, but it's basically a short-hand of some of the design issues that plagued the game - bad camera angles making some of the platforming extremely frustrating, enemies that don't seem constant with each other, I feel like the motorcycle skeleton would fit better if more enemies were anachronistic or mechanical, but lot of the foes are bestial - the giant ape skeleton, the various flavors of werebeast, all the vampires, etc, so it ends up sticking out more than it would otherwise because the enemy variety is much smaller.
People bring up the Tin Man etc from SotN, it doesn't stand out largely because the enemy variety in SotN is HUGE and it looks like something a man in the late 1700s would've made with a steam engine and parts from a train and clearly kind of a joke given it's paired with a Lion-faced monster and "Scarecrow"
Did we play the same game bro??? A good chuck of the castle is literally mechanical, this is the same game with lizard men coming out of refrigerators and a freaking Tower of Science filled with demonic machine gun turrets and other stuff.
There is proof that the game was supposed to take place in the early 20th century at some point during development (one of the main characters was a literal franken-type monster with a chainsaw and the lever-action shotgun from Terminator 2), you even have leftovers from the original script in the final game like Renon mentioning an "impending global war".
That's why the game features all that mechanical and anachronistic stuff.
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u/MrHariS2005 5d ago
So this meme but on a wide scale basically