Tom Waits is an auteur and the greatest living American musician. I think you sound intelligent, but you also sound rather young. More like Justin Timberlake than Tom Waits. I am old. I have forgotten more auteurs than you've probably ever heard of. That is why I asked.

...You

Cannot

Be serious

"You

Cannot

Be serious"

Think what you want to. I'm not here to shape your thoughts. But why can't you just let someone make a statement without feeling a constant need to edge them on to further discussion.

I gave my opinion on this topic in my first post here. There was no need to further discuss the matter. My pick is MGS 4 and I find a list that would ask the question what game had the year's best storylines that leaves off one of the year's finest story driven games simply because there would be lopsided votes in its favor to be biased. At the very least, if it was going to leave off Metal Gear Solid for the reason given, then it should have been titled "What Game other than Metal Gear Solid 4 had the Best Storyline this Year" instead of "What Game had the Best Storyline in 2008?"

Tom Waits isn't an auteur! Musicians cannot be auteurs, it's a phrase that's applied to filmmakers! I'm misusing it when I apply it to Itoi because he doesn't fancy himself a filmmaker, he's an author (which is, coincidentally, related to auteur). The only reason that Kojima is called an auteur is because his approach to game design is more like that of a filmmaker!

It is ass backwards to call most musicians an auteur because, hey-o, serious musicians and composers have complete control over their music 100% of the time! It would be like calling Stephen King or J. K. Rowling an auteur - well duh, they writ every single word in their novels, of course they are! Your usage of it to refer to musicians betrays the fact that you are only pretending to know what the word means!

More than that, Bob Dylan is the greatest living American musician and songwriter, not Tom Waits.

And this topic was made by DTG! How can this possibly be biased against MGS4 when it's being made by the guy who said Kojima was as important a thinker as Kant?

"Tom Waits isn't an auteur! Musicians cannot be auteurs, it's a phrase that's applied to filmmakers!"

But Tom Waits has created films like Big Time and operas like The Black Rider. His work goes far beyond being just a simple musician. Also much in the way that Kojima's games are story driven, almost all of Tom Waits music is as well. Entire albums that are sonic films like Night Hawks at the Diner in the early part of his career, Frank's Wild Years in the nineties, and Alice in this decade as well.




"Your usage of it to refer to musicians betrays the fact that you are only pretending to know what the word means!"

I have a solid enough grasp of what the word means without having to go look it up in a dictionary as you did. Besides is being VG Charts Judge of the Proper Usage of Semantics your job? Why don't you go out to a club if you're old enough? That's what I would do on a Staurday Night if I wasn't in the middle of nowhere and had some money in my pocket.



"More than that, Bob Dylan is the greatest living American musician and songwriter, not Tom Waits."

No Bob Dylan was important in the sixties and in the seventies, but he really hasn't done much since then. Whereas every year Tom Waits seems to top himself. Also Bob Dylan's songs were expressing a political idea of a time and place. Something that Tom Waits' recent albums have done a much better job than Dylan's have in our time. And Tom Waits has lived life whereas Bob Dylan thought that that just consisted of moving to Greenwich Village then back to Minnesota. Tom Waits is classical whereas Bob Dylan is just classic.

"And this topic was made by DTG! How can this possibly be biased against MGS4 when it's being made by the guy who said Kojima was as important a thinker as Kant?"

I don't know, ask him. He was the one that said MGS 4 couldn't be included on a list of games that were competing for the award of best storyline in a game for 2008.

World of Goo, it was so odd, and well told with such whimsy to if
other than that De Blob (things don't need to be dense symbolistic tomes to be great) or Braid
Frankly I don't see why people go so nuts over metal gear's story, I swear Kojima just scimmed copies of Tsar Athustra and the Prince then looked up genetics and conspiracy theories on the web then copied and pasted until he had a story

I loved the Smash Bros story - it was witty and good fun, without a single word in classic Nintendo style

Fire Emblem seems to have a good story, though I'm not that far in so who knows

Not necessarily.  Stories can be told in infinite ways.  There are more ways to tell stories than there are actual stories.  Traditionally, dialogue is for books, poems, and songs.  In visual media, the primary storytelling channel is visual, so the story should be told through visible action, the camera movement, and the editing.  Dialogue is secondary.  In a film you should be showing the viewer the story, not telling the viewer the story.  For good examples of purely visual storytelling, see WALL-E which has almost no dialogue, and the cutscenes in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which tell the story as quickly as possible without slowing me down by explaining everything.

@OT, best story this year is Final Fantasy 4 DS on a handheld, and Wii Fit on a console (it's the only story about Rubang getting abs.)

I take it you haven't actually read any American novels written in the 20th century?

 Even "without" history, those games are AWSOME! ;)