What's wrong with today's games.
James Hague
posting. I'm just including the following text to show where I'm
coming from.
port...@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) writes:
>
>When I was a teenager, I was a video game addict on machines like the
>Atari 2600 and Intellivision. Even though the games on both machines
>were woefully primitive by today's standards, the selection of games
>was pretty varied. You could get shoot-em-ups, maze games, sports
>games, action/strategy games (Intellivision Sea Battle is probably the
>best example of this type), pure strategy games like checkers/chess,
>role-playing games, and original games based on far-out ideas, such as
>Qix. I also owned an Atari 800, which played several games that were
>showcases of creativity and good game design, Archon, M.U.L.E.,
>Pinball Construction Set, Rescue on Fractalus, and Ballblazer are just
>a few of the original, fun games available on that system.
>
>I've noticed that there's now a standard set of terminology to
>describe features of video games. "Power ups" and "bosses". All it
>says to me is that most of the games on the market (at least the
>Genesis) share so many common elements that you can give them names.
>These video games are following a formula. Perhaps this is because
>everybody is in a race to get titles on the market. But why do I want
>to buy the same game all the time, only with different graphics?
YES YES YES YES YES! Finally, somebody can see through all of this
nonsense! Another thank you to Teh Kao Yang for similar comments.
First of all, I am NOT a Genesis hater or a Nintendo hater or a hater
of any video game manufacturer. I would also say that I am not a fan
of any such corporation either. I realize that many readers of
rec.games.video have violent loyalties to certain companies and that
their reaction to my comments will be clouded by such. You can be a
fan of a particular game or of a game designer or group of designers or
maybe a company that writes games. But to be a "fan" of a giant like
Sega or Nintendo? It's like being a fan of Proctor & Gamble or
DuPont. I have better things to do than spray paint "GENESIS RULES" on
a bridge.
It is also tempting to think that I'm just reminiscing about the Good
Ole Days when every game was a classic and everyone lived in harmonious
peace and tranqulity with the universe. But the fact is that there
WERE video games before the current wave of systems and you have a very
limited view of things if you were never exposed to them. There were
games for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Intellivision, ColecoVision,
Astrocade, Vectrex, Vic-20, Odyssey-2, Channel F, AdventureVision,
Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, and TI 99/4A. *LOTS* of
games. THOUSANDS of games. The Atari 2600 alone had several hundred
games for it. Plus, coin-op arcade games have been in production since
the early seventies, and hit a major peak from 1979 to 1982. All of
this before anyone heard the word "boss" or "power-up" or used a
conjugate of the verb "solve" in reference to a game by a company other
than Infocom.
During all of this time, video games never really "settled down."
Games were constanly changing in an effort to find a new audience.
Sure, a big-hit like Pac-Man would come along and spawn a quick splash
of clones, but unless a clone added some new feature, like the doors in
Mousetrap, it was quickly forgotten. After all, Pac-Man is a concept
more than it is graphics. Any other maze game full of things to eat
and energizers basically WAS Pac-Man. So game designers moved on to
different ideas.
From '80 to '82 there was Donkey Kong, Robotron, Xevious, Mr. Do,
Defender, Galaga, Carnival, Reactor, Missile Command, Zaxxon, Tempest,
Centipede, Qix, Crazy Climber, Dragon's Lair, Sinistar, Joust,
Kick-Man, Tron, etc--just look at the variety. Some general themes
would stick around for a few years, "cute games" for instance, and out
of that would come Pengo, Burger Time, Q-Bert, Food Fight, Frogger,
Domino Man, and so on. Being "cute" was about all they had in common.
Out of all of these thousands of games, the great majority of modern
home games are based on FOUR of them: Scramble (1981), Front Line
(1982), Karateka (1983), and Karate Champ (1984)--maybe Kung Fu Master
(1984) as well. This is completely ridiculous. Sure, these games were
great and fun and everything else, but this non-stop cloning is a
complete joke and has been for years. It's getting hard to
differentiate between individual games, the only things that that
change are the shape of the enemies, the bosses, the power-ups, and the
scenery. The game itself is still the same. You can play poker with a
different deck of cards, but it's still poker.
Of course, not ALL games for the Genesis are like this. But after
weeding through the Scramble clones and Front Line clones and Karateka
clones and so on, there's not much left. And what little there is
isn't very original and is usually attacked by the magazines for not
being shooters, so they don't sell as well, giving very little
incentive for future originality. To make things worse, a lot of the
"new ideas" may look completely different, but the underlying concept
is still "get to the end and 'win'."
It is easy to say that "there aren't any original ideas left," but this
is bunk. Atari Games still maintains that early-eighties will to
experiment, and each of their games reflects it. But for the most
part, the big game companies have everyone fooled into thinking that
there isn't anything other than shooters and RPGs so they'll keep
cranking 'em out and everyone will gobble them up so they'll make
more.
Another problem is that there are VERY few good game designers. Lots
of good programmers, but not designers. Just about all of Nintendo's
hits were designed by the same person. Designers used to first come up
with a game concept. Nowadays, they decide to write a shooter and then
concentrate on burning questions like "what power-ups should we have?"
You can put ANYTHING onto a CRT that you can possibly imagine. There
is no restriction saying that it has to be a bunch of junk that scrolls
to the left with a boss at the end. But if that's what you want, that's
what you'll get.
--
James Hague
exu...@exurchn1.ericsson.se