Don't buy any of the new consoles. The video game industry is being destroyed by corporate fat cats. Because all the the new consoles are capable of displaying amazing graphics, publishers are going to expect every game to be nothing short. Witch means that if a game doesn't look to par with what they want they will trash it. All the creativity in games will disappear.
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I believe thats true but not to ALL games. Some are without any creativeity and are destined to suck but the ones with with imagination and gameplay, those are ones that are worth it.
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I think that this is crap. We get several good games each year, and while some gamers who are shallow enough to buy games just because they look good and don't care about anything else will make the "Shiny" games sell, the real gamers who care about truly good games are the final deciding factor. And we still get plenty of innovation. Look at Katamari Damacy, the DS, DDR. The big sellers mentioned - Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo - usually spend the time to make good games - or at the least, competent games. Though many "gamers" may care only about the graphics, looks are not the be-all, end-all for the majority of high-profile games.
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There is a lot in this article that is bang on the money. I'd describe myself as a bit of an indie-gamer. My brother is a 3D designer and animator who is currently out of work. He has gone for interviews at various well known and not so well known software houses and they all seem to be singing a similar tune, they aren't really interested in individual and new ideas. They (and to an extent they apply this to the wider gaming community) want something that is safe, something that is either a) built on an existing franchise or b) borrows ideas heavily from an existing franchise. Creativity does not sell and keep them employed. It's a fact that cannot be ignored.
Look at Sega. Time travel back a few years and examine the games they were releasing, Rez, Samba De Amigo, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Shenmue and more recently Otogi. All bristling with originality and character. Now they are churning out the sequels, another Outrun (which actually was very good), another House of the Dead, another Afterburner, another Altered Beast. They used to be at the forefront of creativity and now they are just treading water.
Perhaps this article and the developers at large are right. People don't want different, just more of what's popular. Keep milking that cash cow until it keels over.
There will always be good games, in fact, I'd say that their are more good games coming out these days then ever before.
People tend to look back on something and give it more credit then necessary. They look back at the super nintendo era and say "man, super nintendo had so many awesome games, way more then their are for the newer consoles". Though, they forget that for the super nintendo, about 80% of the games were stinkers, just as 80% of the games out now are stinkers. No one remembers the shitty games that were coming out, so to many people it seems that the super nintendo era had a higher volume of good games, which isn't true.
The video game industry is fine, it's probably better now then it ever has been since it's no considered a mainstream medium. Game developers are getting bigger budgets, better technology and are able to put that technology too good use. It's actually quite an exciting time to be a gamer, IMO.
There's still plenty of innovation in the gaming industry (Nintendogs, GTA anyone?), it's just harder to think of new genres/ideas because so many have been done. But they're still out their.
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Last edited by BackFire on Sep 5th, 2005 at 01:24 AM
I agree that there are a lot more quality games coming out these days. Infact never since the heyday of the Commodore 64 have I bought more games than in the past couple of years. It is more a fact that the there is an increase in the amount of games coming out that are cast from the same mould as others. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
The article seems to indicate to me that while the film industry has a niche for directors who want to pull something out of the box, the video game industry tends to stifle such development.
Again, I agree with this to a point. As was pointed out Nintendogs is one of those "out of the box" games, however time will tell if that gamble paid off. I'm sure the author of the article would argue that if that game was produced by say Pandemic instead of the big "N" it would fall flat on it's backside. Who knows.
I do however disagree that the majority of old school games are crap. I recently rifled through my vast collection of games for my MegaDrive (Genesis for all you who are stateside) and while there was some stuff that was clearly not as good as I remembered, the majority of it was still very playable and of a high calibre.
Well, did you own all of the hundreds of Genisis games? Doubtful.
Out of the hundreds of Genisis/Super NES games that were released, only a fraction was good. The majority were bad, just as they are today. People simply don't remember the bad ones, so through a flawd perspective the older games carried a greater number of quality games then their are today, but again, this is false.
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Last edited by BackFire on Sep 5th, 2005 at 01:59 AM
[QUOTE=4926790]Originally posted by BackFire
[B] Game developers are getting bigger budgets, better technology and are able to put that technology too good use.
"As recently as 1992, the typical development budget for a PC game was as little as $200,000. Today, if you want a title that will be taken seriously by the retailers - an A-level title - your minimum buy-in is $5m, and $10m for a triple-A title is common. With the next generation of console hardware, the talk is of $20m budgets - not as something that will be unusual, but typical."
That's just wrong. Independent game development teams/companies aren't going to have a great chance of getting their games published on the next gen consoles.
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The consoles are coming out too fast, I think. It takes a few years before companys get the knack of using a console. The games coming out for Xbox now look awesome enough as is, I dont need MORE and MORE awesome graphics to play a good game. I think computing hardware is starting to reach kind of a glass ceiling, where its getting strong enough to handle pretty much anything you want to the point that the games' still good.
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I would believe the argument that says that the drive for graphics is killing games if it wasn't for the fact that people have been saying it since Scooby Doo came out for the Spectrum in 1984.
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No. Theres a game company near me, small development company, and they've published games that have gone straight to the top. Smaller companies grow as they get more and more publicity with the bigger players. This company just scored a deal with Midway, based on a demo they showed at a developer expo. All it takes is effort, not budget.
Look at some of the upcoming games, and recently released games. Its not declining at all, games are getting better.
Playstation I would say is the biggest downfall of all game creators. Only a few of their games were imaginative or creative. All they wanted to do was make the games with the good graphics, stick the storyline together with Blut-tack and hand it in to the gamers. I believe the REAL gaming geneuses come from Nintendo. Think about it, Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong. About 70% of their games were hits. But now the world is going crazy with "Good graphics" fever. Everyone just wants the stuff that looks "real" so they can replace that with their miserable little life.
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Last edited by Jedi-Kaisa on Sep 5th, 2005 at 12:09 PM
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Sep 5th, 2005 12:00 AM
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