Almos

Boredom, or why do I tend to visit game shops less often these days.

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BOX 1:

Title:"Kill'em all"

Genre: FPS

Tagline: "Mayhem, mayhem, mayhem and once again mayhem!"

Description: "You are John Gardener, a simple gardener whose wife gets whisked by sex-starved demons to the planet Inferno. Being the man of hard labour and instant action you grab your kitchen knife and follow your wife's captors down to their native planet! Experience photorealistic realtime 3d graphics, enjoy cinematic cutscenes that have nothing to do with storyline but look good nonetheless, relieve your frustration by blasting your enemies with all kinds of weapons ranging from kitchen knife to nuke launcher, all this while listening to excellent heavy-metal soundtrack!"

BOX 2:

Title: "Maddening foosball 18295 and 1/2"

Genre: Sport

Tagline: "If you thought that Maddening foosball 18295 had extensive set of t-shirts to choose for your players, try Maddening foosball 18295 and 1/2!"

Description: ...

BOX 3:

Title: "A moment of boredom"

Genre: Adventure

Tagline: "It was said that Hawkings himself got stuck while playing this game!"

Description: "You're a female police officer and a fine arts student who's nonetheless plagued by lack of inspiration and bizzare dreams. More than that, during one of your investigations you come upon hints of global conspiracy that has something to do with parallel dimensions. The clues lie hidden in your grandfather's diary..."

BOX 4:

Title: "Realms for the Rich"

Genre: MMORPG

Tagline: "Be a king... if you can afford it!"

Description: ...

...

...

...

:getmecoat

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Title: "G1bb4g3"

Genre: Platform Shooter

Tagline: "Kill or die playing"

Description: "While trying to figure out how the hell to move that little puppet around so you can kill the other little puppet you get killed over and over again. Frustration keeps rising until you pick up your monitor and throw it out of the window. The monitor lands on the head of an innocent pedestrian killing him on impact. You get locked up in prison for manslaughter. After a short while hell breaks lose in the prison and you will have to fight your way out while jumping up against walls, running around, using special moves and power-ups, listening to kick-ass music, shooting the other prisoner and armies of the undead in order to reach level 27."

ps, Bruckheimer, if you want to buy the movies rights contact me.

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... all the more and less intelligent jokes aside, I hope you get where my frustration comes from. Some of the games on the market today are clones. Those who strive for innovation miserably fail (e.g. "Dreamfall"). I happen to hang out at Devmaster forums (for the sole purpose of annoying the regulars) and the most despised thing over there is the idea. Most of the newbies here have idea for a game without having a clue how to make the actual game - and they're an annoying lot. The more annyoing are those, however, who are doing best job in putting them down. But, come to think of it, the idea is what most games today are lacking - hence we get to replay the same games over and over, under different titles, in different settings, and sometimes with improved graphics. That's why from all the new games announced at Gamespot or Gametrailers only a few manage to get my attention. On the other hand, I'm happily enjoying one oldie from times when the gameplay actually mattered - "Elder scrolls: Arena" from Bethesda. Once you come to terms with its ancient low-res graphistry it easily beats the shite out of most things that you need the newest hardware and processor to run. Same applies to "Lords of Midnight". And "Frontier". And few other titles as well. Why? The guys behind them had the idea. Most of designers today seem to be out of them. So they just fabricate clones.

I recently read excellent interview with Alan Moore, and it seems the problem pertains to the world of cinema as well. To quote mister Moore:

"It’s like, ’Let’s make a movie out of a movie from the 1980s that got good reviews at the time. Let’s make it again. Let’s make a foreign film into a dumbed-down American remake. Let’s make good television series from the ‘60s into films, let’s make bad television series from the ‘60s into films.’ Comic books, video games, PIRATES OF THE-F-CKING-CARRIBEAN -- theme park rides!"

Quote comes from www.cinescape.com/0/editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=Comics&action=page&obj_id=51044

Bertalanffy mathemathically proved that systems don't like to change. The word "system" for me is synonymous with "lack of innovation". And that's the situation all over there: there's a movie industry (which is a system), there's a game industry (another example of a system), and both have but one goal - to sustain themselves. To go out of the well-established patterns would be for them to put themselves at risk of failure and - probably - extinction. That's why they do what all the systems do: try to reduce the change for the sake of stability. Nothing wrong with that. But some of us crave for change. And the only change that we see is the progressively increasing poly count. Maybe I'm just complaining - but games not always used to be like that.

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If you look back through the history of the industry you will at EVERY point be able to see a few gems that stand out and a whole lotta crap... it's just the way it is, it's not new, it's not even proportionately getting worse really.

In years to come some people will look back and say "where is the innovation the likes of Katamari and Shadow of the Colossus" while fully ignoring the brilliance that exists around them....

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... all the more and less intelligent jokes aside, I hope you get where my frustration comes from. Some of the games on the market today are clones. Those who strive for innovation miserably fail (e.g. "Dreamfall"). I happen to hang out at Devmaster forums (for the sole purpose of annoying the regulars) and the most despised thing over there is the idea. Most of the newbies here have idea for a game without having a clue how to make the actual game - and they're an annoying lot. The more annyoing are those, however, who are doing best job in putting them down. But, come to think of it, the idea is what most games today are lacking - hence we get to replay the same games over and over, under different titles, in different settings, and sometimes with improved graphics. That's why from all the new games announced at Gamespot or Gametrailers only a few manage to get my attention. On the other hand, I'm happily enjoying one oldie from times when the gameplay actually mattered - "Elder scrolls: Arena" from Bethesda. Once you come to terms with its ancient low-res graphistry it easily beats the shite out of most things that you need the newest hardware and processor to run. Same applies to "Lords of Midnight". And "Frontier". And few other titles as well. Why? The guys behind them had the idea. Most of designers today seem to be out of them. So they just fabricate clones.

Ugh, no.

Here is why "I've got this great idea" is frowned up on: 99% of the work in making something good is in the execution, not in the idea. This is only something you learn once you actually try and turn an idea into a reality.

Developers don't frown upon the "I've got a great idea" newbies because they think ideas are bad. They are just the same - they have dozens of their own ideas.

Why don't you see more of those ideas filtering through to finished products? Because not every "good idea" turns into a "good reality". Because it's expensive to spend time sorting through the list of ideas to find the good ones.

Every bad idea you develop to reality and then have to throw away, because it isn't as fun as it sounded when you put it down on paper, is money and time wasted. Back in the day when David Braben was writing Frontier, the costs of finding out whether an idea was good or bad was a couple of days of one programmer's time. These days, it's more a matter of a team of 5 people working for 3 months to build a good prototype.

That's really expensive. It's a lot cheaper to load up the "genre defining/leading title", play it for half an hour and then decide that you're going to do your game the same way.

I'd love as much as the next guy to see more fresh ideas filtering through to the retail shelf, but you have to work within economic realities (ask questions like "how can I figure out the quality of an idea more cheaply") rather than just insulting any and all game developers working in the industry today, by suggesting they are creatively bankrupt.

I recently read excellent interview with Alan Moore, and it seems the problem pertains to the world of cinema as well. To quote mister Moore:

"It’s like, ’Let’s make a movie out of a movie from the 1980s that got good reviews at the time. Let’s make it again. Let’s make a foreign film into a dumbed-down American remake. Let’s make good television series from the ‘60s into films, let’s make bad television series from the ‘60s into films.’ Comic books, video games, PIRATES OF THE-F-CKING-CARRIBEAN -- theme park rides!"

Quote comes from http://www.cinescape.com/0/editorial... &obj_id=51044

This again is economic reality. There is viable money to be made by exploiting existing markets (e.g. people who like action movies) and there is viable money to be made by expanding markets. Some companies will do the former, others will do the latter. This will never stop being true and isn't specific to any one industry.

Within any given industry, a balance needs to be maintained, because there is only so much "more of the same" that consumers will tolerate. There are self-correcting failsafes that ensure this happens: when the consumers stop buying because there is too much "more of the same", that "more of the same" will cease to become as profitable and so more companies will switch to a "new markets" approach. Witness that in the past two years, both Nintendo and EA have noticeably shifted in this direction.

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Putting aside the market forces for a minute, you might also consider that a development studio for the average title these days is pushing well above the 50-person count.

Compare this to the other entertainment/culture fields where innovation and experimentation are much more common (literature, visual art, music etc) and we notice that, for the most part, groups or teams range between one and fiveish (with exceptions).

This drives much of the stagnation we are critical of in the games industry today and it does it in a few ways. A couple:

-Technology advances greatly increase the amount of work that goes into content generation (modelling, art, mapping etc). This is the market's own fault for pushing 3d rendering technology so much in the past 10 years (and is still happening with Microsoft and Sony's new consoles).

Having more and more people working on increasingly (comparatively) small parts of a project has the consequence of the team members making compromises in design etc. in order to get everyone working together in a halfway productive manner. There is less room for flair or innovation when it "breaks" the work the rest of the team has produced hitherto for a title.

-Games are expensive these days, and take a long time to produce (technology again). It's not practical to try out an idea over a 6-month development period to see if it's viable when you need to write paychecks for 50 people for that time and end up scrapping the work.

A lot of people like to make comparisons between Hollywood and the games industry (I don't like to, but I am about to do so anyway) and there's definitely more of a commonality than with literature/music/etc.

Hollywood movies are made with extremely large production teams. Time and costs are enormous and the output is generally stale, boring and formulaic because they can't afford for it not to be. There are examples of movies that are critical successes but perform poorly at the box-office; studios can't afford to make too many of that sort of movie. The same goes for big studio games. I'm sure every one of those Police Academy movies made a profit (just as the 3 or 4 EA Madden games we get each year do)

Contrast that to the independent (or pseudo-indie) film scene where smaller teams take bigger risks because the budget is much smaller. Nowadays it's possible to produce higher quality films on smaller budgets thanks to advances in technology which make it easier (cheaper) to perform digital manipulations or save on photofilm costs. This is the opposite to what happens in games; costs go up as the technology demands harder work in order to match up to the hardware. This makes small-team games very difficult to produce to big-studio standards as the cost:time ratio is a pain.

The DS or PSP are nice places to look for innovative games because the nature of the hardware means that content creation isn't anywhere near as steep an obstacle as it is for the average PC or living-room console game these days.

rant-esque

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Despite this all indies can still bite back, and they do: consider "Infinity". The engine was done by one person, the other one did models, the other - music... I think that their team's size does not reach that of a pro team, but what they have done so far kicks ass: www.fl-tw.com/Infinity

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The kind of indie games that work out are those that don't deal with a whole lot of 3D graphics (it's hard to compete with the big studios on that front) or are mods for games where most of the engine work is already done.

The indie games that do well generally do so because of great gameplay, often innovative or original ideas that are possible because the risk is much lower due to the smaller content overhead.

Infinity is off to a pretty bad start when it comes to being a success or not as it's entering (or it will do in 4 of 5 years time if it's ever done) a saturated market with an Eve-style game. It has a heavy focus on graphics and mmo elements; both of which are already well-handled by big studios with big content generation teams. In that sense, it's more useful as a technical demo the programmer might use to get a job somewhere else.

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But some of us crave for change. And the only change that we see is the progressively increasing poly count. Maybe I'm just complaining - but games not always used to be like that.

Vote with your wallet. Buy innovative games that interest you. If you can't find anything these days, you're either already down on all games, everywhere from the start, or you're not looking hard enough.

Buy a DS. Plenty there: Electroplankton, Nintendogs, Brain Age, Kirby Canvas Curse, etc. Admitedly not my cup of tea for the most part, but plenty of innovation there if you're into that sort of thing. Later this year, buy a Wii. Should be lots there.

Or don't. Buy a PS2. Lots of innovation there. Guitar Hero, Shadow of the Colossus, ICO.

Or skip straight to PC, and stick with quirky independent PC games like Darwinia or Rag Doll Kung Fu.

This is a big, huge industry with new games released on a weekly basis. If you love games, you'll find them. If you don't...why even bother?

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Try Nintendo. Most recently, try Animal Crossing, Brain Age or Chibi-Robo. Get a Wii when it comes out. That's all you need.

...

Oh, and Gibbage (which I can't play, sorry Dan, but my computer really doesn't like it).

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