old school?
 

do you think that gaming has lost its way?

personally i don't like the industries current direction, once great companies like square now sell out on their greatest series to make a quick buck, Nintendo, who brought us so much joy in the past, is now stuck making consoles like the wii, which could, make a LOT of problems, see http://www.8easybits.net/comic/comics/060427.png , http://www.8easybits.net/comic/comics/050904.png , and http://www.8easybits.net/comic/comics/060416.png, ignore the jokes, this is serious, if we don't do anything soon, there may be no going back

I kinda like the way some consoles are going (Wii, Xbox360) while others I don't/didn't like where they were going (Dreamcast/PS3). It gets to the point if you put all your money in on graphics, you aren't going to have good games due to all the money put into making the game look "pretty". While the other extreme is, who wants new games today that look like they coulda been made 10-15 years ago?

I think the industry just has to find its balance between the two. The Wii is advancing, slowly, but it is. It may not have done much in graphics, but the technology thier using for the wii-mote definetly couldn't be made 10-15 years ago. The 360 decided to put a bit more in graphics, but not over the top either. It seems to have found a pretty good balance, it just needs more 3rd party backing. While the PS3 and Dreamcast both tried to advance too fast too far in one jump.

this may be true, i am fine with the wii's graphics, however, the controller is little more than a modified zapper gun, it also, as stated in an above link, tries to destroy the link between gamers and others, these people do not have as much depth, after all as shown in another link, they consider themselves true gamers because, they can kill you in halo, or have a sims character, or beg for gold in WOW, hell even megaman legends 2 has more of a storyline than, most games today, and its MEGAMAN!!! , something must be done before we get another generic game about a kid who saves the world, heres the general script: kid lives normally/ suck ass life, something bad happens, kids family is killed/ taken hostage, next few levels introduce:

the love interest ( if has not already captured , somthing will probably happen to them)

the healer

the traitor

the spoiled kid

the quiet one

and the rival/best friend

add a few extras, references, and a very slight variation in weapons and you have the basic recipe for 99% of most role playing, action, and platformer games.

MegaMan actually has a pretty deep storyline/background nowadays. It's been getting added to by comics and games continually so it's basically ballooned up into this massive orgy of info.


Video Games today are fine. What sucks are the video games that are made for the complete purpose of making a quick buck(Anything based on most kid movies). They're basically duplicates of the previous game of the same origin(kid movie), with you doing the same thing(Running around a crappy 3D platform world collecting things).

The fact that I see these in stores and I don't see something like AMPLITUDE pisses me off.

In that second comic, why is Excitebike being related to BMXXX? Wouldn't Custer's Revenge be the more applicable ancestor?

Also, where can I get one of them fancy soap boxes? For too long my elite gaming pastime has been sullied by the hands of the proletariat (and I suspect, unwashed) masses who consider themselves 'gamers' merely because they play videogames. Back to the time when we were 'ostracized' and nobody realized how fun videogames are! For shame on the developer who attempts to make a game that anybody can access!

I originally posted this back in February.
 

This is a blog I did on 1up.com, where I've been a member for a few months. I hardly ever post things or browse the site, however. I know it's very long, but a little reading won't kill you. I present it here with its original title:

Is the Gamer Demographic Growing -- Or Shrinking?

First off: I am an old-school gamer. I understand that not everyone is, and that not everyone will agree with some of the opinions I present in the article below. Have complaints, questions, whatever-s? Feel free to message me.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Everyone is keenly aware of the growth-rate of the video game medium. How can they not be? The border skirmishes of my youth between Nintendo and Sega are now long forgotten; the titanic struggle between industry juggernauts Microsoft and Sony is the real battle now. Nintendo is still around, of course, and still highly successful -- but they are not a corporate entity on the same scale as their competitors in the video game trade.

I hesitate to speculate who will win the next-gen console war in the long run. And to be honest, I don't care.

The approach Nintendo has taken is the one they often take: innovation. Draw in crowds of non-gamers, and turn them into gamers. Hit them with something they haven't seen before; something like a touch-screen or motion-sensitive controllers. Despite their ever forward-leaning stance, Nintendo's success can also be fairly attributed to their high quality first-party franchises, most of which have been around for a long time (i.e., Mario, Metroid, Super Smash Bros., etc.).

Sony's newest console hasn't really been around long enough for me to make what I feel to be a qualified 'read' on their battleplan, but it seems to be the one that Microsoft attempted, with mixed results, when they released the original Xbox. That approach equates to building a machine that's far more powerful than the competition's, with the hope of drawing people in on the strength of better visuals. The advantage of better graphics, IMO, does not stack up against the PS3's many and varied problems.

I've now been to three stores in my immediate area with a PS3 kiosk suffering a "frozen game" error. Just a little anecdote for you.

The 360 seems to hold the high ground, from where I'm standing. It offers very little innovation to the single-player fan (like me), and I'm fine with that. Cheaper to develop for than the PS3, and possibly more lucrative than developing for the Wii (thanks to simultaneous dual-platform development between the 360 and PC), I predict that the 360 will end up with the widest assortment of games.



The thing is, that doesn't seem to be happening at all. Are there a lot of 360 games? Well, relatively speaking; each of these games take a long time to develop, and the console wasn't launched until late 2005. The thing is, the assortment isn't as wide or as varied as it should be.

Let's be honest. You saw a hell of a lot more originality during the run of the "pre-gen" consoles. It seems like the majority of the 360's success is based solely on FPS games -- and let's face it, all of these FPS games are just mild deviations from the successful recipe of Halo.

To be fair, there have been some pretty original games for the 360. Condemned was great, and I'd never played anything quite like it -- though it bore some similarities to the Xbox's Breakdown and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, and a distant resemblance to RE4. Viva Pinata is supposedly very good.

But beyond those two titles, I see very litle effort on the part of developers to push the envelope and really expand on their games' respective genres. Just a bunch of FPS games that are advertised for wildly and touted as "Halo-killers".

Nintendo seems willing to do nothing but expand upon the ways you can play video games. To me, this is both good and bad; it's good because it draws more people into the video game demographic, but it's bad because it just doesn't compare to the "classic" school of video gaming.

That's ambiguous, I know. Think of it this way: The 360's most popular titles have absolutely nothing in common with the Wii's. The 360's most popular titles as I write this are probably Gears of War and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion -- note that GoW is basically another Halo-style FPS game, and Oblivion is the fourth game (not counting expansion packs to PC versions) in the Elder Scrolls series. In short: they've been done before, just not on the same scale.

Likewise, the PS3's most discussed titles seem to be Metal Gear Solid 4 (note: another sequel), and Resistance: Fall of Man (another Halo deviation!). I see a pattern, and that pattern is refusal to budge from proven formulas. The majority of these next-gen games have nothing to do with art or story-telling; they do have a lot to do with making money.

The Wii's emphasis on innovation and doing things we haven't done before basically back Nintendo out of competition with Microsoft and Sony. As a result, both of the bigger competitors are not encouraged to expand or innovate by anything but market trends.



And who makes market trends?

Here's the sad part.

We do. The gamers decide what sells and what does not. And the majority of us, sadly, are content to blow their money on shitty products and play what amounts to the same game over and over.

Here is my answer to the titular question; it comes in two parts: The gamer demographic is growing; the age group of the average gamer is expanding, and more and more females have joined the ranks of the gamer population. Nintendo even marketed Brain Age towards middle-aged housewives!

At the same time, however, the video game demographic is shrinking intellectually. Why is Tomonobu Itagaki one of the most popular faces in the gaming world? Why isn't Jordan Mechner -- a man who has actually contributed more than the program lines for bouncing breasts -- known to anyone I talk to?

When did it ever become okay to forgo creativity and instead focus on making money? Everyone knows that that's how you end up making an inferior product: it's true in literature, it's true in music, it's true in cinema, and god damn it, it's true in video games too.

Anyway, I've written enough, and in the process I've set my mind down a path that's bound to leave me in a foul mood. I doubt anyone will actually bother to read this gigantic, wall-of-text rant, but I had to get it off my mind.

Just give us something new. Is that too much to ask for?

i agree
 

amen to that, we don't need another remake of final fantasy I, halo killer, or sequel, we can have those too but we also need more originality and innovation, the problem here however ts that this creates too many "casual gamers", who want this done over and over again until it becomes stale, like another remake or port of final fantasy 1, oh and in case you're wondering, there are 10 of them, including wonderswan and translations, I weep for our favorite pastimes vicious cycle :(

I just miss the days when Square made non-crap games. That said, this is the era that has given me everything Nippon Ichi. As for crappy movie licenses, they were around well before the modern era. The trick is to not play them. It's not like the old school didn't produce a metric assload of crap too. It was just a lot easier to ignore back then.

And I look at FF12 and see despite Square-Enix's money whoring they are quite capable of innovation and willing to do it, they just make a lot more crap than they used to. Personally I'm not worried that causal gaming wil destroy real gaming. Even the Wii, the bastion of casual gaming has a number of hardcore games coming, and the other two systems have almost no capacity for it, there's simply too much money in hardcore for it to be abandoned. And really there isn't more shit now than there was for any previous generation.

Yeah. My philosophy where games are concerned is that you should build upon the classics, not rehash them. There are some games where this philosophy doesn't apply, simply because they're driven by an intrinsically good idea (and I'm talking about Mega Man). Or they're sports games, maybe.

The 360 and the PS3 are sticking to solid foundations, which is good, but they're not building upon them fast enough. I'm awfully sick of FPS games where you fight aliens. Having ONE that I don't play is enough.

The Wii is building too fast on a still-shaky foundation, in my opinion. It's difficult for a gamer like myself to approach the Wiimote; it's fun and intuitive to play simple games like Wario Ware and Wii Sports, but when I tried Twilight Princess all I could think about was how I would be a lot more comfortable with a 'Cube controller. And I hate the 'Cube controller.