16th December 2005, 12:55 AM
I could have sworn there was a GBA game where you played as the weird helicopter... but on the flip side look at Earthbound. There were 2 Earthbound games on NES and the only reason Nintendo brought the 3rd to the states was because of the booming interest in RPG's (read: Chrono Trigger)
But we're not talking about unusual games with no genre or market, those games you mentioned are part of specific genres with mass appeal and a sellable market. Arena Fighting, 2-D fighters, 3-D platformers, shooters, etc. All games we've played a million times before but these are *gasp* original - and therfore unproven. They might have to take 'risks'! oh noes! but at the same time, Goemon did quite well on N64 and SNES and even the handhelds.
I think what's happening is that because of sony's ideals (and companies like square), the vast majority of people who play video games today do so because of the 'interactive movie' like experience and disregard anything else that's even remotely catagorized as a 'plain' video game. They're even making scripts for side-scrolling shooters now - suddenly people want to have motivation of 'why' they have to shoot the thousands of targets. Fucking idiot people. It's a video game, it exists to test your abilities and allow you to use and gain techniques to win against a series of challenges, as in - A GAME.
I love having video games with stories, dont get me wrong. I wouldn't know what to do if Metroid or Zelda never existed, imagine a Chrono Trigger-less world? hell no. But not all games need to have a director of photography, voice actors, 3 acts and a love interest. There's a reason why old school gaming is so popular right now. Think back to the good old days (I cant believe i said 'good old days') and think about the first time you fired up CT. That game is a work of passion, there were no demographics meetings, they didn't think about 'how to appeal to the inner city youth' or what the game should be rated to generate negative publicity, it was just a group of underpaid Square employees who wanted to make something special
You could have two different directors with the same budget and the same script and you can even use the same cast and crew and one version of that movie is going to suck and the other will be awesome and the only difference is passion and we can see that happening over and over in the games industry, it's business games that appeal to the lowest most common demographic to gaurantee sales that are on all the production schedules of any major publisher while the new and experimental games, the ones made by a group of people who actually have a passion are getting shit on. Fuck, I need an uzi.
But we're not talking about unusual games with no genre or market, those games you mentioned are part of specific genres with mass appeal and a sellable market. Arena Fighting, 2-D fighters, 3-D platformers, shooters, etc. All games we've played a million times before but these are *gasp* original - and therfore unproven. They might have to take 'risks'! oh noes! but at the same time, Goemon did quite well on N64 and SNES and even the handhelds.
I think what's happening is that because of sony's ideals (and companies like square), the vast majority of people who play video games today do so because of the 'interactive movie' like experience and disregard anything else that's even remotely catagorized as a 'plain' video game. They're even making scripts for side-scrolling shooters now - suddenly people want to have motivation of 'why' they have to shoot the thousands of targets. Fucking idiot people. It's a video game, it exists to test your abilities and allow you to use and gain techniques to win against a series of challenges, as in - A GAME.
I love having video games with stories, dont get me wrong. I wouldn't know what to do if Metroid or Zelda never existed, imagine a Chrono Trigger-less world? hell no. But not all games need to have a director of photography, voice actors, 3 acts and a love interest. There's a reason why old school gaming is so popular right now. Think back to the good old days (I cant believe i said 'good old days') and think about the first time you fired up CT. That game is a work of passion, there were no demographics meetings, they didn't think about 'how to appeal to the inner city youth' or what the game should be rated to generate negative publicity, it was just a group of underpaid Square employees who wanted to make something special
You could have two different directors with the same budget and the same script and you can even use the same cast and crew and one version of that movie is going to suck and the other will be awesome and the only difference is passion and we can see that happening over and over in the games industry, it's business games that appeal to the lowest most common demographic to gaurantee sales that are on all the production schedules of any major publisher while the new and experimental games, the ones made by a group of people who actually have a passion are getting shit on. Fuck, I need an uzi.