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[kane_magus]

"The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games"

And it's pretty much all true, every (NSFW) word of it. :( It might possibly be a very tiny bit on the exaggerated side maybe, but not by more than the tiniest of margins.

Thank goodness for indie game creators... well, when they aren't busily ripping off blatantly copying cloning um... being inspired by(?) Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress or Angry Birds or whatever, that is.

For the record and for what it's worth, I have not personally played a game that required looking down a gun-sight for around three and a half years or so, not since finishing Half-Life 2 Ep 2 (which is the second episodic sequel to the sequel of Half-Life *ahem*), and I feel pretty good about that.

...wait, does Portal 2 count? The Portal Gun isn't technically a gun, even though "Gun" is right there in the name (though the official name is the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device"), and it doesn't have sights, as such. Yeah, I think I'm still in the clear. No... wait, I did play Red Dead Redemption, which had sniper rifles in it, even if I hardly ever used them. Bah. Oh yeah, and I tried playing Halo not too long ago, forgot about that as well (though I didn't get very far before getting incredibly bored with it). Oh, and as awesome as they were, Bioshock and Bioshock 2 had guns in them. Yeah, okay, I've played games that required looking down a gun-sight fairly recently.

Well, what I'm getting at here is that I haven't played any of the Call of Duty games or any of their multitude of spin-offs and knock-offs, and I feel pretty good about that.

Comments

[david-grana.livejournal.com]

Eh. If Portal counts, then all FPS games have you "staring down the barrel of a gun", and I don't think it's fair to lump them all together as something bad or "undesirable".

I couldn't get past the first point (#6). I didn't agree that it was an "ominous" sign, but merely a way for game and console developers to try and explore new modes of interacting with games, and therefore not inherently bad. Maybe I missed the true point of it, but from what I gleamed the rant sounded like yet another cranky, "old-school" gamer who despises anything that isn't a boxy controller with a D-pad and two/four action buttons.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I think in his point #6, at least as far as the Wii is concerned, he was complaining that while he felt that the motion control technology was used in an interesting and innovative manner for Wii Sports, since then it's mostly just been used for what a lot of cynical "hardcore" gamers would call mere "waggle" (though I rather hate that term myself, along with those who consistently use it as a throwaway insult against the Wii, I feel that it may be appropriate in this case). A lot of games do just use the flick of the controller to replace what would otherwise have been a simple button tap, which is pretty lazy. The games that genuinely use the motion controls in an interesting and unique way are few and far between. And some games just ignore it altogether, e.g. the bit about "turn[ing] the controller sideways like a very uncomfortable control pad from 1991." (Not that all games have to make use of the motion controls, of course. I'd honestly prefer that they not use it at all, than to take on some half-assed implementation just for the hell of it.) He wasn't saying that it was inherently bad or that the old stuff was innately better, just that the new stuff isn't being utilized properly (or at all) in most cases, at least as far as the Wii goes.

I agree with him that the apparent on-rails aspect of that Star Wars Kinect game looks pretty crappy (if indeed it actually is on-rails, given that the new Fable game turned out not to be (http://kane-magus.livejournal.com/483936.html)). If that is actually a limitation of the Kinect itself somehow, rather than merely a (questionable) design choice by the game devs, then yeah the technology is rather poor. But with that said, I don't see why the Kinect itself would have such a limitation. You could just walk in place or something in order to simulate forward movement or turn to the side to simulate turning the character in game. Granted, I haven't had any first hand experience with the Kinect to know if that's the case or not, or if there are any games that do such a thing, but it seems to me like it's just a lazy and boring design decision on the part of whoever is making the Star Wars game to have it be on-rails. The whole thing also seems like less a critique on the Kinect in general, though, and more a critique on what was shown of that one particular game.

Don't know anything about the Vita or how it compares to iPhone games, as I haven't played either, but if it really is just "touch the screen and then sit back and let the character do the rest of the work" then yeah that does seem like a step backward in many ways, compared to older games. On the other hand, that may conveniently do away with a lot of the problems with finicky or imprecise controls that a lot of older games had. I dunno.

As for the Wii U, the only reason he calls that "half-baked" is because they're apparently only allowing one tablet per console unit, which does seem a bit of a strange and unnecessarily limiting decision to me. But then, I hardly ever play multiplayer games at all, so I doubt it would be an issue for me personally. >_>

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

"As for the Wii U, the only reason he calls that "half-baked" is because they're apparently only allowing one tablet per console unit, which does seem a bit of a strange and unnecessarily limiting decision to me. "

You realize that when it came to multiplayer games on the Gamecube, you were generally required (especially for the 4-player types) to use Gameboy Advances as controllers instead of the normal controller.

That kind excessive interactivity might be what they plan on doing with the Wii U - and 3DSes. (Just pondering this of course, but I can easily see them do it after the kinds of things they did with the GC.)

So it's only a needless and unnecessary limitation unless their goal is to make you buy more hardware. Hardware they're making a profit on from Day 1.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

(Somehow missed this comment when it was originally posted. I don't think I ever saw the email notification.)

I don't remember all that many Gamecube games that required the GBA for multiplayer. Then again, I didn't play many multiplayer games on the Gamecube, outside of maybe Super Smash Bros Melee (which did not require a GBA). The only games that I recall playing that had (optional) connectivity with the GBA were Wind Waker and Metroid Prime, and those weren't multiplayer. I'm pretty sure the 4-player Zelda game used GBAs, but beyond that, I'd have to look up a list on Wikipedia or something.

Not saying it's not the case, just that I don't have personal experience with it.

I certainly hope it isn't the case with the Wii U and the 3DS, though. Or, at least, I hope it doesn't become a requirement, anyway. That would just be retarded. About as retarded as only allowing one tablet per console.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

The only one I don't agree with is #3. Games have been repetitive and derivative ever since the Atari 2600 days (and probably before) and I don't think it's any worse now than it was then. I just finished watching a series on nicovideo that was a short 15-20 second clip of every single Super Famicom game ever released; a lot of them were definitely derivative and unoriginal games. People are always going to want more of the same, whether it's books, TV, music, video games, or whatever.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I guess the only thing I don't agree with #3 about is that it's being listed as an "ominous new trend." The fact that it has been going on forever doesn't make it a good thing, though. The derivative and unoriginal games were just as crappy on the SNES and Atari 2600 (and, in fact, were a primary catalyst for the big video game crash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983) in the 80s) as they are now, and just as they will be 20 years from now.

For games, it seems to have been getting increasingly worse lately, proportional to how increasingly costly games become to create. The huge AAA games, anyway. The big publishers (EA, Activision, etc.) would rather just go with what they know will sell, and what sells are apparently sequels to and lazy rip-offs of previously successful games. Risks on new ideas are very rarely taken and just as rarely repeated. These days, you mostly have to look to the indie devs for that (when, that is, they're not trying to blatantly copy Infiniminer (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01/20/proto-minecraft-abandoned-due-to-epic-error/)Minecraft or whatever).

"And yes, we gamers are ultimately to blame."

Pubs/devs make sequels and blatant knock-offs because that's what people buy. People buy sequels and blatant knock-offs because that's what pubs/devs make. Pub/devs make... and so on and so forth. I guess you can just chalk it up to simple human nature. People sell shit because people buy shit, and people buy shit because people sell shit. There will always be someone willing to buy your crappy knock-off. And there will always be someone willing to sell you a crappy knock-off. <insert however many other ways to restate the exact same thing over and over here>

But, as you pointed out, the whole thing can be applied to movies and music and such as well.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

Well, I also think it's completely understandable that people buy the same type of game -- when you have to spend $40-50 (or more) on something, it's a much safer purchase if it's close to a game you already know you like.

I'm "guilty" of this myself; most of the games I've played probably for the past 5 years are more are in a pretty narrow subset of games, and often I just play sequels to stuff I already played (what I'm playing now, Atelier Rorona, is codenamed "A11" because it's the 11th Atelier game)

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

It's not so much that people are making (and buying) the same types of games as previous games that is the problem. After all, without that iterative process, without people making increasingly sophisticated games similar to Doom and such, we wouldn't have the likes of Half-Life or Bioshock today. I'm not sure where the blatant, shameless clones fit into that process, though...

As for Minecraft, which I keep bringing up, I eagerly await the future game that will be the Half-Life 2 to Minecraft's Doom. What I don't care so much for, however, are the incredibly sucky, inferior copies (http://kane-magus.livejournal.com/463123.html) of Minecraft. And yet, FortressCrap apparently sold quite well, regardless of its nature as an horrendously sucky knock-off.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

"The derivative and unoriginal games were just as crappy on the SNES and Atari 2600 (and, in fact, were a primary catalyst for the big video game crash in the 80s) as they are now, and just as they will be 20 years from now."

Regarding that, derivative/unoriginal games weren't the main cause of the crash back then. The business side of it played a big part of it. You had a lot of 3rd party developers making 2600 games with no oversight, no Quality Control (Such as that is.), and most importantly - no customer service on the business side. Lots of department stores would buy games from these tiny Me Too operations without knowing how crappy the games were - seriously, the types of games that flooded the market right before the crash weren't even playable. Literally. Things as simple as joystick controls were barely responsive.

So there they were with full stocks of games nobody was going to buy - because the gamers found out pretty quickly the games were crap. And the stores couldn't force the company to take back the games - either because the company would not do any refunds, or the company -couldn't- do any refunds and was already liquidated into bankrupsy. As a result of this, they couldn't buy new games from better companies, which meant those Quality companies couldn't sell their games to the department stores who would refuse to buy anything more simply because they had no space. Nobody buying games made the stores decide "the fad had ended" and they refused to stock any more video games after liquidating whatever they had for pennies. (I remember buying Asteroids for a buck - and that was one of the Good Games!)

It stayed that way until Nintendo came along and, after failing to sell the Nintendo to the stores itself because of the above, offered the stores a full money back garrantee on all unsold product. That took all the risk away from the stores so they finally accepted - which ended north america's video game crash. It's important to note that the crash only occurred in north america. Gaming continued on normally everywhere else in the world.




Oh, and even the likes of Pac Man and ET on the 2600 had very little to do with the overall crash. Although Atari's insane business decisions blew those things way out of proportion. The games didn't live up to the hype, yet for some reason Atari felt it was sane to have more copies of each game made than there were consoles sold. Consider that, and figure out how that could -not- end badly.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

It's a good thing that the similarly shitty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_Tree) unplayable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_52) crap (http://www.nesplayer.com/misc/unlicensed.txt) that got released for the NES was never numerous enough to sink everything all over again. For the most part, Nintendo seemed to be on top of that sort of thing and kept it from happening.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Yeah that was one of the differences between the Nintendo era and the Atari era before it. Nintendo actually had control over 3rd party releases on their console. Atari had absolutely no way to prevent someone from releasing a game for the 2600 since there was no DRM on the console (no encryption, no lockout chips, etc) and the entire console was made from off the shelf parts. It wasn't the lack of desire to stop 3rd parties from releasing shit on the 2600, it was the lack of legal means.

[rabbitucker.livejournal.com]

For the record, I am willing to pay as much as FIVE dollars for "Monkey Shit Tower Defense."

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Well...

...there's always Duke Nukem Forever (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItORBMmdUJw)...

>_>;

Yeah... yeah, it's not the same thing, I know. (At this point, I don't even think I'd pay as much as a measly five dollars for DNF, honestly.)

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Hell, for that matter, I don't think I'd play DNF even if I had access to it for free. From what all I've heard about it, the whole thing is kind of a turd, in and of itself.