digibutter.nerr

[Zelnor]

The video game industry has left me in despair !

Okay, so after a long time I walk along the aisles of Karstadt today, and what do I see ? Crap. Just… crap. There were over possibly two hundred video games there, and just about all of them were utter crap. Third party zombies. Digitalized Vomit. Stupid simulations. Ripoffs.

CRAP !

Why is it that today, where advanced technology enables us to create breathtaking worlds of fantasy, complete environments with people, plants, animals, artefacts – the water rippling like real, the sun shining, realistic shadows, even the glow of magic – and yet all we shell out are the same tired low- no, no-quality renditions of shit ?

98 % of all games today fit in one (or rather one of these and the “franchise or fad” category) of these categories:
- a war game of some sort with hyper-realistic (speak: brown-greyish) graphics but only the same stereotypical characters – either historical or high-tech futuristic faceless voiceless nameless idiots with muscles bigger then their faces and brains that would make a tyrannosaur look like Aristoteles – and just about no plot next to shooting things because somebody says so.
- An adventure game with the same tired plot devices and twists as its predecessors; this, however, largely owes to the fact that most adventure games today are the same Final Fantasy title re-re-re-re-[…]-re-released and some other stupid point-and-click game released to. Androgynous main characters are optional, but often seen.
-A game that was already on an older console, re-released in best Final Fantasy tradition with maybe better graphics but otherwise the same stupid gameplay –either too simply or overcrowded to the point of *crag* – and the exactly same horrible style we already hated two years earlier
-(Korean) cash MMOs which show you hoe awesome the top classes are and then send you on a grind-tarded journey and try to always sell you EXP upgrades and other crap in-between; most of it only for looks. (If I find myself ever paying for a facelift or something similar for my digital, fictional character with anything but virtual, in-game currency – PAY REAL MONEY FOR DATA ! – I swear I’ll beat myself to death with my own keyboard.)
-Stupid simulators, about as close to reality as Uwe Boll is to good movies, which take a concept and then discard it and just make shit up. These are frequently the first to be beoguht by little children who are subsequently traumatized, especially if their bloody stupid parents see these as a sort of test and are subsequently surprised that Whiskers dies in a week because their spawn managed to keep his VirtuaPet9000 alive over three weeks, but didn’t find the cheat console on his cat and was surprised that it stuck its head in the toaster – because the virtual pets from Uncanny Valley are as lifelike as Micheal Jackson.
-Franchise and fad games. Full stop. The sheer numbers of these little…abominations sickens me. All fun and ZeroPunctuation-ripoffing aside – seriously, WTF. These little things are released more and more, crowding valuable data- and shelf space in the supermarkets and at home, and are simply about as fun as having your uretha torn out through your eyeballs with a red-hot snowshovel which has been tied to a corcorde and is filled with lava. They have horribly graphics, butcher their own source material – whatever innocent book, movie, TV show or other thing fell into the clutches of the responsible company, more often then not likely to be EA – to the point that even the Anime dubs of 4kids are less massacred and then fill it up with gameplay that would make Shigeru Miyamoto commit suicide 354 times. Simultaneously. These little – things are thrown out by mass to whore themselves on the streets for money for their pimp daddies EA and Co. They have no soul, no sparkle, no nothing. They’re ridiculously easy, badly written, abhorrently flawed and just… Evil. Even the Devil would make a better game, if he wanted to go for widespread despair and suffering.
And that these little soulless bastards are allowed on the market and on consoles such as the Wii, and use it’s potential NOT AT ALL – it makes me loose my faith in mankind. Just to get money, we shell out and out and out. Consum and Greed seem to have taken the place of creativity and doing things right. And I pray that this won’t stay like this. I mean, when you have people devoting time and creativity – wait, no, forget about creativity – time and resources to shelling out “The sweet little polar bear cub” (Actual translation of a real game title) games after the Knut fad, you wonder how far people are willing to go out of the boundaries of good taste just to get money.

Where’s the creativity ? Chrono Trigger, a game made in an era where polygons were confined to math class and the Gigabyte seemed to be akin to the Monolith from 2001 had me hanging to the screen, made me laugh cry, hope, yearn, fight, rage…
Majoras Mask, with graphics so cheerily colourful and yet so edgy you could cut yourself to ribbons had me glued to the screen, outrunning the moon, time, and fight an enigmatic enemy seemingly almighty.

They both, compared to today, are what a blunt stick is to an AK-47. And yet they are infinitely better in value, because they reach something in people. They [i]have[/h] soul. Spirit. They are… indescribable. Or, rather… They’re beautiful. They’re art.

These little trampled husks today, all cloned of the same tired old thing, however, make me want to take a blunt object to the skull of whoever ordered them produced.
Ten thousand clones of Age of Empires, Tomb Raider, FF….
The same principle, over and over, ad infinitum.

Horrible.

[BAMFing ARCHER]

Sadly, I agree. Everything nowadays is not-so creative. TWEWY was something fairly creative, but other than that, I haven't really seen anything as creative in this year. I think the pinnacle of the gaming industry was the SNES to N64/PS1 era, which I refer to as the Golden Age of Gaming. And good job there on sounding a lot like Zero Punctuation. Because it's true.

[Francis]

The problem is that the gaming can easily make a negative impact on the story, and vice versa.

You may have great gameplay (like Tetris), but adding a lame story that no one cares about only makes it frustrating.
You may have a great story (Final Fantasy), but the gameplay is monotonous.

The gaming industry is very young, and is still going through growing-pains and self-discovery. It is getting better, even though it is a slow process. One big problem is that it takes a huge budget to make a detailed 3D game. Compare that to the fact that anyone can get a video camera and make a decent movie for cheap. So, people can only make games that make money, and to make money, you have to stick with what works and not take any chances. That is why we see the same crap over and over again.

Another problem with story-driven games is that they are too long. Games are expected to provide 20 hours of gameplay. Thats like a whole a whole TV series with multiple seasons. Except they dont have the writing talent of a TV show. So you end up with a crappy story that is drawn out to last for 20 hours.

[Drive-Thru Whale]

What I really hate is when they take good games and bump them up to atrocities like that.

Read: Bomberman Act Zero and Bionic Commando,

GACK ACK ACK ACK!

[Tails Doll]

[Small Sammer Guy]

Games nowadays are aimed towards...family. Games nowadays are made family friendly...at least in my point of view. The Wii is a great example.
Don't worry, we still have hopes for 2009.

[Almaz]

Uhhhhh...I'm pretty sure Nintendo's the only one who's really big on the whole "family" thing. We're still at the point of Not-so Final Fantasies, Enter Halloween-related menace here killing games, alien slayers, WWII/Middle Eastern shooters, and a couple of other stuff. Still, the mean ESRB rating for a game these days is between T and M...

and, unfortunately, console makers don't want what their fans want. What they want is what makes them money, and if their fans want that, well, that's just the icing on the cake.

[Yoshi]

Yoshi's theorie is this:

The NES could have been good, but it was the beginning of gaming, and there were no saves, so you couldn't make a game very long.

Then there's the SNES, known as the best age by many. There was saving, so you could have some games that aren't five hours long. The graphics didn't take too long to make, and all was good.

The N64 was 3d. The revolution was good enough to bring nice new gameplay. Yoshi will skip this part.

The gamecube was getting a bit rusty. It was still good, however.

Then we have the wii. Now think about the GRAPHICS. If they have to photoshop a 3d character's sprites, and you can turn them every degree out of 120 or so degrees, then the jumping sprites for each degree, and attacking sprites, then sprites for every item in the game you can lift being lifted, etc. That would take a long time, and developers get lazy.

To be honest, it would happen to yoshi too.

[Lord Krump]

Where to begin, where to begin...

[carfilledwithfish]

It's not completely the developer's fault that games based on TV shows/movies suck.
One of my art instructors used to work in the game industry, and had to make a few. (I can't remember which ones, unfortunately) They had to time the game's release with the release of the movie/TV show/whatever, and were given about six months to make the games. And, well... making a decent game in six months isn't really possible.

[Zelnor]

Okay, your Lordship...

I personally own no PS3 or XBOX 360 because I don't have Scrooge McDuck chained up in my cellar, so I can't say much about that. Maybe they do have what the Wii lacks, probably they don't.

Also, Nintendo and the third parties shoveling crap on aren't the two-headyd hydra of evil. Well, Nintendo allows the crap on their Wii, but we don't sue McDonalds for letting their people put crappy ketchup and fat in their burgers, do we ? In this case, as in so many (I'm looking at YOU, american oil lobbies !), good things are suppressed by large bags of money.

I don't think my statements have EVER been close to Mr. Thompsons. I merely stated my dislike of the shooter genre and felt that many of them were unsophisticated and on the lines of simple shooting; also - Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is a highly respected member of my video game gallery and not a shooter at all. It's a first person adventure. I may have made some statements about senseless killing in the past, but Metroid Prime 3 is only my second Metroid title ever; so I wasn't quite in the series. It did turn out to be very good, though.

I have read much positive about Mass Effect. And since this too leads to Mr. Thompson - have I ever stated that I thought games were "dangerous", "murder simulators", "training you to be killers" or attacked your pasttime in any other way ? I don't think so. I may not like the genre, but there are people who do and I respect that as long as they have the maturity and sanity to keep it separated from reality. I'd be willing to give Mass Effect a shot, but I wouldn't buy it, not that I could actually use it anyway. I am offended at your notion that I am a stereotyping person. And on the theme of Bioshock - I am compeltely aware of its complex bioethic-, socialcritic- and psychological undertones. I haven't played it, but read through text dumps, watched videos and read the plot analysis. I may not play shooters, but I am not ignorant to their possibility as a medium of a moral or lesson. It's just not my kind of medium, it'd be like having PSAs on my toilet paper.

I do not wish to offend, but I think that the genre of FF isn't vital to the discussion. I admit I made an error, though I think the two genres are closely related. Point-and-Click Adventures are also less scarce then you think -they don't need much work, so the third party thrashers love to make them cheaply. Also, I wasn't focused on consoles in this rant-essay but on the industry as a whole and the fact that there seemed to be, on the surface - even I have better things to do then spend my time reading plot summaries on Wikipedia - not much difference; sure the plots are different but "at the end of the day you're still the same bloody guy rescueing the same bloody princess with the same bloody boomerang." And I can count myself as a fan of the Zelda series. Maybe I am expecting too much, but how about a few new core-gameplay elements ? Majora's Mask's Mask system was a fresh new wind in the musty cellar of Nintendo's Frankenstein Lab. MP3's Hypermode was a wakeup-call with a Power Bomb from the usual collect-powerups-then-scan-and-shoot. Plot is important, but it gets kind of tiresome and easily ignored if it's the same thing all around it. And once again, I'm the sort of gamer who gets all the lore scans in a Metroid game.

And whilst Nintendo does release games from the same franchise every now and then, that's exactly the same what is done with FF as well. It's a franchise. Of course they all have the same name.

Yes, androgynous main characters was aimed at JRPGs.

Okay, first of all, I am NOT attacking turn-based gameplay. Therefore, I can safely ignore the paragraph after that. I meant to say that I wonder how FF goes in when it's mostly one or two titles being constantly re-released.

An Example:

Final Fantasy VII (You know, the one where Aeris dies.) came out in 1998. Now, a mere ten years later, we have:

#

* Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII
* Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII
* Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode: Final Fantasy VII
* Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII

# Films

* Final Fantasy VII Advent Children
* Last Order: Final Fantasy VII

I know no other game which has been re-made or expanded so oftern. And the same thing happens all over -people make a rotten game, then later get an even worse sequel, a bad re-release, and generally a sucky succession.

Nintendo does not seem to have many ports; the only port I've seen is a cheap third-party remake of a Harvest Moon game which actually was on the GC and I regret buying it.

And I am not looking for an excuse to bash FF, I have a great respect for the series. I am merely using it as a stand-in for a large game series.

I will never play WoW - I'd rather bundle my money and drop it off at the Animal Shelter.

You're not reading it right. I am raging against the large number of badly-made simulation games that are squeezed out onto the market and are so horrifically bad that an Uwe Boll movie almost looks tame in comparison.


If you think Miyamoto's a moron, I feel we will not get onto one ground. I have great respect for Mr. Miyamoto; not for nothing he's called "the Walt Disney of electronic gaming" and "the father of modern games".

And there are clones of Final Fantasy. As it is said, every RPG wants to be Final Fantasy. And many of them use very similiar battle systems. Also, the plots of many of them are somewhat generic and therefore close to FFVII. Your opinion seems to be that I want to rip on FF, my opinion when reading this is that you seem to react harshly to protect your dearly beloved Final Fantasy-series and therefore react slightly above need.

In the end, I do not know why the Nintendo bureaucrats let so many thrid party crap on, but I can't blame the creative minds in it for that. Therefore, I do not see Nintendo as the culprit, but those in the industry who have decision power and take mass produce and money over creativity and innovation.

[Lord Krump]

[Zelnor]

Lord Crump, I fear we are still not being able to discuss coherently.

I am NOT bashing FF or FFVII or any FF game at all. But as long as you see any of my points as nothing but a relentless assault and refuse to consider any of my points for more then two seconds, let alone respect my opinion as tantamount to yours, I fear we have reaches, as we say, "das Ende der Fahnenstange."

[Lord Krump]

[Zelnor]

Okay, now we've gotten back on track. I think I might have taken your arguments a little bit too personal - I hope that I am not a stereotyping person; I as student of an international school really shouldn't be.

Anyway, I wonder how the industry would be if the guys with the good ideas also got to make the company decisions. Would they allow the crap on board or would they be content with the money they get from their mainstream stuff ?