15th May 2010, 6:26 PM
Quote:Old PC game magazines in particular churned out so many reviews chastising any game that wasn't gory and violent like Doom.
I bought PC gaming magazines through most of 1996 and subscribed to PC Gamer from early 1997 to early 2001, and that just is not true. PC Gamer did drop its educational games column in 1997, but all the way until the mid '00s, they had a dedicated wargaming column, despite the niche nature of that genre, various columns for sim games, etc. Or how about their Game of the Year awards... in 1996, for instance, Civilization II won (runner-up: Tomb Raider).
Yes, technology has always mattered in PC gaming, but if you go back and actually read the magazines, they didn't say that all games with older graphics were bad, or only FPSes mattered, or any of that stuff. In genres like strategy games, 3d did not become common until the early '00s; for wargames, it has never become common. Adventure games also have remained mixed. Also, the FPS focus thing in particular really was not true back then I would say, it's only in the past few years that the entire industry focused so much on that one genre.
Quote:That is, they critized King's Quest 7, not for having somewhat easier puzzles due to the new interface as the fans were doing, but for the art style looking cartoonish (sound familiar? Same thing happened with Wind Waker, and just like Wind Waker years later they pretend like they loved it's style all along).
I actually liked KQ7 quite a bit, but it was a big change of tone, I think that's what the reviews were referring to... it was aimed at a younger audience tonewise I think.
Quote:Sierra, who's game designers were starting to feel the effects of their own internal decay in the form of the marketing department making demands, "responded" with the really "dark gritty" Mask of Eternity, adding violence and blood and an art style all "realistic" when none of the fans asked for it.
And the game received scathing reviews, as it deserved. It got no benefit reviewwise from being 3d.
Quote:And in the end, the reviewers gave a short pithy review of it that also called it bad, but then again, they DID more or less ASK for it.
Some did, some didn't, but either way none asked for it to be done so poorly... and lots of people were quite angry that the tone changed so much! That hurt the game more than it helped it, really.
I think that Sierra did that not because of criticism against KQ7, but because adventure games seemed to be dying, and they thought that they couldn't just keep making them as they had been. That was the cause. And indeed, at that time adventure games were in serious decline, one that they really wouldn't recover from until perhaps a year or two ago.
(Might say more later too)