The end-of-the-generation retrospective megathread.

[sclpls]

I think we're just getting into the real auteurs! Kentucky Route Zero is really remarkable as sophisticated storytelling goes. 

 

Yeah, Kentucky Route Zero and Blendo Games are definitely onto some next-level shit.

[Dewar]

 Or just old and cranky?

 

Probably, but it's OK. I'm starting to feel that way about the big releases too, but man the small games scene (indie or not) has really kept me excited for the future.

[Sno]

Allow me to puncture that theory about Nintendo, Lobotomy, because it doesn't explain why they were able to create something like Mario Galaxy during the Wii years and two fantastic, original Zelda games on the DS - which was crazy popular.

I think the DS Zeldas are two of the weakest games in the entire series, but putting that aside, Galaxy is the exception that does not prove the rule.

I feel that Nintendo had put out much more interesting games on the GC, more of them, and in a much shorter console cycle than they got with the Wii. I think the Wii is more than justified by games like Galaxy, Corruption, and Xenoblade, but i think the GC saw a better overall output from Nintendo.

Hey, and since Lobotomy's going to take us down the "let's all feel bad" road, let me get on board with that:

I goddamned hate DRM and service walls. Fuck that shit. I hate it, i want it to go away. I mean, DRM's more or less acceptable by now, i no longer feel like i am being more inconvenienced by it than pirates are. Service walls, however, are only going to get worse. Everybody wants your e-mail and your name, everybody wants to sell you something directly and sell your information to someone else. It's so gross.

 

 

Dartmonkey; 2007, and 2008, were amazing gaming years. That was the high tide of Bioshocks, Assassin's Creeds, Mass Effects, I believe also Mirror's Edge? Truly the year of the passionate triple-A's... followed by a deluge of yearly sequels.

Halo 3 came out in 2007 too, which i think is probably the best straight-FPS of the last cycle.

In my mind, 2007 is as good as that stretch around 1997/1998 was in the 90's.

[SilentBtAmazing]

A lot of this thread comes across as old / cranky / PC-centric, which I largely interpret as "I became a grownup during or just prior to this generation."

As a guy whose first kid's birth interrupted an Ocarina of Time release-year play through I really think you just do not appreciate how incredibly wonderful the mechanics of game distribution and even just "less shitty controllers" really have become.

I think aching for a better age is just total selective memory or else pasting your personal life phases onto the Video game world. Yeah it's true that Quake III Arena LAN in college was some of the best gaming fun I ever personally had but I suspect other people played other video games in that unique college life phase and had similarly unique experiences.

In sum: video games.

[Roderick]

DO NOT get me started on the wonderyear that was 1998.

 

Also, it's plain wrong that there is now less creativity and innovation in video games than whatever earlier year you fancy taking as the magical bar. You need only look into the indie scene to see a staggering volume of games that explode into every weird facet imaginable. Even triple-A titles, though generally less interesting to me personally than before, have their merit. Everything that falls in between is getting better and better too, dipping into all sorts of new styles and genres that came into play only this generation. It's a load of nostalgic crock to lament that creativity has vanished in the industry.

[Sno]

I was simply agreeing with Lobotomy about Nintendo being at their best when their back is against the wall. Very recently, their output on the 3DS has been absolutely marvelous, it might end up being one of my favorite Nintendo handhelds ever, and even the Wii U is starting to look up.

I certainly don't buy into any ideas about this generation being void of artistic achievement. (Hell, even Assassin's Creed started out as a bold creative risk, regardless of the annualized behemoth it's become. I mean, it was an open world stealth game built around innovative crowd mechanics and set in Israel during the crusades, it's pretty wild that it got the huge AAA treatment.)

A lot of what Lobotomy is railing against is just the natural cycle of games development. Somebody has a good idea, and everybody spends the next few years trying to copy it.

I think we're currently in the "everything is a Lords Management now" phase.

 

In the early 90's, everything was Doom. Then everything was Command and Conquer.

[Twig]

A lot of this thread comes across as old / cranky / PC-centric, which I largely interpret as "I became a grownup during or just prior to this generation."

While the latter is true, it has no bearing on the bolded. That's a really weird correlation to make.

[SilentBtAmazing]

While the latter is true, it has no bearing on the bolded. That's a really weird correlation to make.

I see what you mean but I am not sure it is totally unrelated.

Is it possible that folks who started earning money during the last 7 or 8 years are maybe more likely to be PC gamers just because of the rise of the Internet? The last time I owned a gaming-capable PC it was back when you had to call a 1-800 number and take out a $1200 personal loan for something that showed up in a cow box. Finding games that worked on your PC was kind of a crapshoot involving physical boxes and being able to recall your system specs in the middle of Waldenbooks. Personally I found consoles more cost efficient at that time and just never have made my way back over; so I wonder if there is an element of age to the PC bit as well (honestly not sure about that though).

[Twig]

Oh see I misinterpreted what you were saying because you grouped it together with "old / cranky". No, that does make sense.

 

Still not true for me, but at least makes sense.

[syntheticgerbil]

Hmm, I just realized I spent a shitload of time playing "HD" ports of games I missed out on last generation. At least a dozen ports, I'd say. It's certainly convenient for those who missed out the first time, but I found it weird companies were making such a big deal about such rereleases when some companies could only manage to mildly upres the textures and call it a day.

 

As much as I appreciated many HD ports, I'd kind of like this type of rerelease stuff to disappear this time unless it's going to be a major overhaul like Twin Snakes is to Metal Gear Solid.

[Zeusthecat]

DO NOT get me started on the wonderyear that was 1998.

 

Also, it's plain wrong that there is now less creativity and innovation in video games than whatever earlier year you fancy taking as the magical bar. You need only look into the indie scene to see a staggering volume of games that explode into every weird facet imaginable. Even triple-A titles, though generally less interesting to me personally than before, have their merit. Everything that falls in between is getting better and better too, dipping into all sorts of new styles and genres that came into play only this generation. It's a load of nostalgic crock to lament that creativity has vanished in the industry.

 

I'm probably just being shortsighted but as far as non-indie games go, I just don't feel like there was as much innovation as prior generations (which isn't to say there hasn't been an abundance of creativity). I look at the N64/Playstation gen which brought us 3D gaming with Mario 64 and laid the framework for modern fps games on consoles with Goldeneye. Then the previous gen perfected the console fps with Halo's control scheme and introduced modern open world sandbox style gameplay with GTA3. However I struggle to think of any games this generation that provided the same level of innovation that we've seen before. Assassin's Creed is a good example but aside from the whole "automatically climb up walls" thing I don't think it did much that games weren't doing before.

 

I don't necessarily see any of this as a bad thing though. I view this generation as one of iteration and refinement and I feel like the overall quality of games has had a positive trajectory. Of course, my argument goes to shit when you consider indie games which regularly blow my fucking mind. But I kind of see those as independent from a console generation for the most part(and that's just like, my opinion man).

 

Also, on a separate note, would it be accurate to consider motion controls as innovative if they have since been largely abandoned in favor of the control mechanisms that had been used for decades prior to their introduction?

[Ucantalas]

I would argue they are innovative, if for no other reason than everyone sort of collectively went, "Yeah, that's not such a good idea, let's focus on other things instead."

[Twig]

It's disappointing, because I still believe motion controls can be really cool.

 

Just not... when shoehorned into existing games for the fuck of it.

[Sno]

I'd like to throw this thought out there:

I think this earlier half of this last console generation was the generation where PC devs sort of "won" out against Console developers. Companies that built their legacy on the PC successfully transitioned to the consoles and sort of took over the world and obliterated mostly everybody else.

Those efforts began in the X-box/PS2 generation, but when some of the most notable examples include games like Deus Ex: Invisible War, it's probably fair to assert that it was just this last console generation where it really found momentum.

Zeus: A big part of where games like Assassin's Creed innovated was in simulating crowds. Don't forget that it was a big push in the earlier part of this cycle to render large, believable crowds of people that all had their own AI and collision. Look to a game like Hitman: Blood Money's Mardi Gras level to see a slightly earlier example of those efforts, where the NPC's are all clipping through eachother and are obviously being faked.

On top of that, Assassin's Creed had some big aspirations about having the player blend into those crowds as a mechanism for stealth. It's been marginalized as the series went on, but it was one of the big focal points of the original game.

Oh hey, and Dead Rising was, of course, another game that pushed crowds really hard. It's become something that gamers are now taking for granted, but it was definitely something that a lot of games tried really hard to make work earlier on in this generation of games.

[Professor Video Games]

Have motion controls been abandoned though? The Xbox One has a Kinect packed into the box and the PS4 essentially has a Move built into the controller now. I like to think devs know better than to shoehorn motion controls into games at this point, so hopefully we will actually see some interesting implementations of those features in games and not just "shake to swing sword." I'm sure somebody will think of one eventually...

[Sno]

MOTION CONTROL. ACK.

As consistently horrible as motion control has proven itself to be, there's clearly a strong draw there for casual gamers. It's baffling and i don't understand it. Mapping vague, arbitrary gestures with unreliable detection to would-be simple binary actions is not more fun or more playable than giving you a button and telling you to push that button. Motion control is horrible, none of those games have ever worked right.

The grisly specter of motion control will haunt us for years to come.

Edit: Hey, touch controls also really came about this generation, right? Really started with the DS, didn't it? I feel alright about touch control for the most part. I don't like touch-only interfaces like the smartphones, but i think touch has proven itself as an acceptable thing for the most part.

[lobotomy42]

MOTION CONTROL. ACK.

As consistently horrible as motion control has proven itself to be, there's clearly a strong draw there for casual gamers. It's baffling and i don't understand it. Mapping vague, arbitrary gestures with unreliable detection to would-be simple binary actions is not more fun or more playable than giving you a button and telling you to push that button. Motion control is horrible, none of those games have ever worked right.

The grisly specter of motion control will haunt us for years to come.

Edit: Hey, touch controls also really came about this generation, right? Really started with the DS, didn't it? I feel alright about touch control for the most part. I don't like touch-only interfaces like the smartphones, but i think touch has proven itself as an acceptable thing for the most part.

 

At the risk of alienating the one person on this thread who once kinda-sorta agreed with me: I actually like motion controls.  I get that they aren't as good, will never be as precise, responsive, flexible and everything else and there are some (ok, most) games where they never belong and waggle sucks, etc.

 

But hear me out: there is something to be said for the action you're taking to be representative of the action happening in the game.  No More Heroes let you swing the Wiimote in a certain direction at a certain time as a way of punctuating a series of action moves.  While that game could never be said to, you know, control well, it did *feel* neat when everything aligned. I also just tried out the Wii U Sports Club package* and played around with tennis for awhile only to remember how *easy* the whole thing is to fall into.  The stakes in Wii tennis are just so goddamn low, the learning curve is very simple, and it just viscerally feels right, dammit.  I haven't honestly used the PS Move or Kinect because my apartment is so tiny but I have no trouble imagining that they have similar strengths and weaknesses: low intimidation, easy learning curve, kinetic symmetry...and really crappy precision and timing.

 

(*Tangent: Wii U Sports Club is actually a significant re-engineering of the controls from the original Wii Sports titles and not just an HD re-release! I did not know that going into it.)

 

 

DO NOT get me started on the wonderyear that was 1998.

 

Also, it's plain wrong that there is now less creativity and innovation in video games than whatever earlier year you fancy taking as the magical bar. You need only look into the indie scene to see a staggering volume of games that explode into every weird facet imaginable. Even triple-A titles, though generally less interesting to me personally than before, have their merit. Everything that falls in between is getting better and better too, dipping into all sorts of new styles and genres that came into play only this generation. It's a load of nostalgic crock to lament that creativity has vanished in the industry.

 

Intellectually, I understand that you are correct because the quantity of games available is just so staggeringly higher than in the past that the spread simply has to be wider.  And as I admitted before, I'm mostly oblivious when it comes to indie titles so I assume everyone is correct when they say that the land of indies is a magical paradise of mind-blowing shit that redefines what it means to be human and eat cheeseburgers.  But even so, I think it's fair to say that some major categories of games have narrowed in terms of what they offer even as the larger category of video games has expanded.

[Roderick]

When I wrote that rant yesterday it was late and I was a little more abrasive than usual. Apologies if it didn't fall well. I do stand by my opinion that there has been a lot of innovation in the last few years, and earlier pointed out that crowd dynamics are a huge part of our games nowadays and totally new. Another big new thing: sophisticated, mature storytelling. Remember the «mature» games in the 90s and early 00s? They look like childish screaming at this point, compared to the subtle machinations of Braid, Thomas Was Alone, Dear Esther, Journey, Gone Home, Thirty Flights of Loving, etc, etc. Playing through I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream this month taught me that, by Odin, things were mostly infantile back then.

 

Sno; your comment on AC's stealth mechanics made me realize how I loved that you could blend into the crowd, but never quite knew if you were safe or not. Later sequels totally gamified that with small groups that would turn monochrome as you entered them. I'd make a strong case for having some unknowable aspect in this, a mystery. It makes it so much more exciting - though possibly also frustrating if the game demands perfection. I'd make that trade-off though. 

[Twig]

Motion control is horrible, none of those games have ever worked right.

Except for when they do, of course!

[Sno]

Another big new thing: sophisticated, mature storytelling. Remember the «mature» games in the 90s and early 00s? They look like childish screaming at this point, compared to the subtle machinations of Braid, Thomas Was Alone, Dear Esther, JOurney, Gone Home, Thirty Flights of Loving, etc, etc. Playing through I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream this month taught me that, by Odin, things were mostly infantile back then.

This comment bothers me.

In part because of the implicit assertion that no mature story-telling existed in games prior, and in part the assertion that story-telling in games is mature now.

At the very least, i find Braid incredibly pretentious.

We're venturing into incredibly subjective territory though, so i'll tread carefully.

[Roderick]

Hmm, come to think of it, it doesn't explain Grim Fandango or any of the Lucasarts branch of games. I think then what I'm getting at is that there seem to be a lot more titles that allow themselves to explore small but interesting ideas than before. And I would argue that in terms of storytelling there are more 'daring' ideas being done now than then. I've had more feels in the last few years of gaming than ever.

 

But, yes, highly subjective.

[JonCole]

While motion controls may have been crap this/last generation, it looks like the legacy of motion controls is improved UI design which I can't complain too much about:
 

The good news? Issues aside, it really works. In fact, the fastest way to navigate the Xbox One's user interface is via the incredibly robust suite of voice commands. The friction that limited voice commands on the Xbox 360 with Kinect is all but gone. Now you can order the system to go from one app to another from anywhere — whether it's to watch TV, start Netflix or boot up a game. There's little perceptible lag from finishing a command and the results on screen.

Kinect is also used for lots of little things throughout the Xbox One's user experience. Profiles support fast facial recognition for sign-in. Once a profile has a face associated with it, the console will sign that person in whenever they sit in front of the console — it even says hello. Controllers sync automatically based on who's holding them. There was a frequent sense of "holy crap" among Polygon editors regarding the Xbox One. We were constantly surprised by what the system could distinguish, by all the small but smart usability enhancements provided by Kinect. It feels futuristic and cool in a way that little else about the new consoles does.

 

- Polygon

[JonCole]

Retrospective megathread new topic proposition: favorite not very popular/well-known games

 

I absolutely loved Resistance 3. Really good pacing, a great break from the earlier Resistance games, some sections really invoked some of my favorite moments from Half-Life 2, and Insomniac was at the top of their game as far as interesting weapons on the more believable side of things (as opposed to R&C, that is).

 

Halo ODST was my favorite Halo of the generation. Yeah, this was the "not very popular" game I had in mind, at least in comparison to the other Halo games on 360.

 

Alpha Protocol was an awesome RPG that almost delivered on Obsidian's incredible potential. Almost happened to be close enough for me and I fell in love with this game.

 

Blur was a super solid arcade racer that got swept under the rug as Activision dismantled Bizarre Creations and SplitSecond split the gaming community's attention in this relatively niche space. It was kinda the Call of Duty of arcade racers, which I loved but the multiplayer community was just never really there.

[Sno]

I found Alpha Protocol to be a pretty deeply flawed game, but i'm happy that its cleverest idea - its conversation system - has bled out into many other titles. (Notably, the newer Telltale games.)

ODST is, however, i think the best Halo campaign Bungie's ever done. I like Halo 3 more overall for its mechanics and its multiplayer, but ODST's atmospheric presentation and open-ended environments are just absolutely marvelous. The fact that it's also such a stand-alone story makes it an easy recommendation even for non-fans.

Going by your picks, i guess you're not expecting people to dig deep for obscure oddities, so how about we reframe this as simply picking a few games from the whole of the last cycle that you feel like you particularly need to champion?

...

I think i need to ponder this one a bit.

[Ucantalas]

This last generation saw a remake/reimagining/sequel to one of my all time favorite NES games, but got little to no recognition at all: "A Boy and His Blob" for the Wii.

It was such a fun little puzzle-platformer thing with a style I liked and based on one of my favorite NES games. I really, really wish it had done better.

Actually, apparently, score-wise it did really well, but I cant find any sales numbers, so I don't know if it actually did poorly. It's just that no one I know ever bought it or even heard of it, so it feels to me like it failed...