Best [and Worst] of the Past Decade

[etoven]

It just wasn't there, it didn't have what it takes. Japan and to a lesser extent Europe, got it though. And gave us characters to FEEL, stories to get in to and explore, even raise discussion.[quote]

Europe has indeed done a good job of this in the past decade, with the rise of the European adventure game. Of course almost all of those are on PC, aside from Quantic Dream's stuff, but there are a lot of them now, and adventure games as a genre have generally had more focus on story and characters than any other genre. They better, given that story, characters, and puzzles are the entire game; there is no running around shooting people scenes in most of them to distract people away from the lame plot and characters.

America used to do good adventure games too, though, back in the '80s and '90s... it's just this last decade where the genre pretty much entirely died here.

[quote]The art of the PC game design is to use the virtually limitless resources, the art of designing a console game is to engage the player. It took western developers a long time to understand that and with the competition streaming out of Japan they had to evolve or die.

... Sorry, I can't think of anything serious to say to such an absurd statement that I haven't said already severla times...

No games will be successful if they don't engage the player. That is just as true for PC games as console. And they did that.

So they hired writers, they commissioned artists. They started getting really fancy, paying a Lockheed/Martin aircraft designer to design their robot enemies or getting a Nasa scientist to come up with realistic weapons that could plausibly exist, but dont. They hired composers and arrangers, they sat down with designers who have schooling in art to understand color coordination and contrasts, texturing and etc not just 'what looks cool'. And suddenly, within the last decade, we have American games that outperform Japanese games by a large margin.

Here's what confuses me though, above everything else really: Here you are saying that last decade, Western games on consoles got better. Okay, we all agree on that point. I am saying that at the same time, Western PC games, and American PC games in particular, almost entirely vanished, replaced with multiplatform titles also on consoles. That the reason for that improvement in their console games was because of the move over from the PC. IT explains everything you're describing here pretty much perfectly... and yet you deny it with crazy claims about PC games that have not even the slightest connection to the reality of how computer gaems were in the '80s and '90s, which is the period I'm actually talking about! It's kind of bizarre really... we both agree on the end result, pretty much. Why do you deny the cause?

Look at Metroid Prime on Gamecube, its arguably better looking than Twilight Princess, Final Fantasy 13 or MGS3 and 50% of that is because of design, not graphics.

As I said before, the key people behind Metroid Prime had also made the Turok games on the N64 -- games I would definitely say had amazingly well designed worlds. Of course Metroid Prime went even beyond that, thanks to the greater capabilities of the system they were now on and Nintendo's influence which seems to improve the work of any developer they work with (versus games made by those same people without Nintendo's help), but the core of it was already there in their older works.

We improved our craft and that was a direct result of the software created for consoles to push the envelope of entertainment, to bring the emotional tonalities of film in to the interactive stage. PC games STILL dont deliver in that arena.

Interesting point here, but a lot of that is just because technology now made it possible, not because of anything else. Games by everyone changed, not just American ones.

Do you understand it now?

Not when you're still so deep in denial, no. :)

I...wow. Seriously? Okay, yeah, I think you could make that point for a few high profile games from Epic and even id, but that simply is not the case for most exclusive PC games then or now. It's patently absurd to argue otherwise!

Ow, shit nigga we got quotes within quotes!