Battlefield 1942. Left 4 Dead. DotA. Oblivion. Wii. GTA3.
That’s all I can do in 5 minutes. Oh, Little Big World.
A lot of bads games are being listed in this thread as good though.
Well, lemme think here. The OP cited these six games:
So there’s an RTS, a dungeon crawler, a stealth game, an FPS, a sandbox game, and RPGs. Six genres? They may be the very top sellers, but you’re overlooking quite a few seriously popular genres. For one thing, you left out Racing. Forza, Burnout, Blur, Grid, Midnight Club, Project Gotham, and even Mario Kart would all like a word with you. And companies that make Rhythm games, such as Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Dance Dance Revolution, are making so much cash that they’re going bankrupt storing all their money, and that doesn’t even make sense!
Other huge genres:
Survival Horror (Silent Hill, Fatal Frame)
Hack and Slash (God of War series, No More Heroes, Bayonetta, Devil May Cry)
Fighting (Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe)
Platformers (Mario games, Mirror’s Edge, Splosion Man)
Puzzle platformers (Braid, Limbo, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom)
Sports (like I really have to name titles here)
If you look around, you can find new games of all varieties, like two-stick shooters, puzzle and trivia games, stuff that’s hard to categorize like Phoenix Wright and Trauma Center…
Basically, it’s kinda like how the most popular ice cream flavor in the world is vanilla. There’s a comforting bland sameness in the top-selling titles that appeals to the masses. But, if you really do want something different, it’s pretty easy to find something original and great.
Another reason why this is a great time to be a gamer: demos. It wasn’t that long ago that buying a game was a totally blind experience; you could read reviews and see some pictures in a magazine, but if you wanted to try it out, you either needed a friend to buy it first, or play a few minutes in a store if you were lucky enough to find a demo booth with the game set up. Now, you can download a demo, with ridiculously minimal effort, and play whole portions of the game fer-real. Demos are what enticed me into Brutal Legend, Ghostbusters, and Left 4 Dead. It’s a great time to be a gamer!
The best I can think of is Mirror’s Edge. Nothing else like it, before or since.
For those that think games are getting worse, imagine, for a moment, that the evolution of games is reversed. 20 years ago we were all playing Call of Duty 4, Portal, Gears of War 2, Civ 5, etc, all of the games that are popular today. Then as the years progress the games come out in reverse, back to COD1, Halo and so on, through the Civ series, approaching today the latest bestest games are called space invaders, Civ 1, frogger, etc. Answer this honestly, do you really think you’ll be lapping up the “latest” games and saying they’re the best thing ever? I think not.
Obscure little game called Guitar Hero.
…is the same as a billion other rhythm games.
…which are all based off Guitar Hero and DDR. Just because they spawned a hundred copycats doesn’t mean they were unoriginal.
Dwarf Fortress is pretty much sui generis.
You have your timelime backwards. Guitar Hero is the modern version of an untold number of 90s arcade games. There is nothing original about it.
Hell, you even mention DDR, which is like 15 years old or something.
And I bet you can’t even name one of that “untold number.”
Simon.
Track & Field. Crash 'n Da Boys. Little Ninja Brothers. Uh… Parappa. Chop chop kick. Beatmania! Probably a bunch of powerpad games too.
Ah, yes, I remember playing that in the video arcades during my youth.
Come on, man. You might as well call Pong derivative because tennis existed first.
ETA: You serious? If you’re actually calling those “rhythm games” then nothing original has been made. Ever.
If you don’t consider games that solely require you to push buttons in a rhythmic fashion rhythm games, I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t believe I need to prove that Guitar Hero is unoriginal. Go look up Guitar Freaks.
Hey, there you go! A game that’s actually remotely like Guitar Hero, even if it doesn’t look like it made it to North America in any numbers.
Goddamnit. I promised myself I wouldn’t argue with WoW players after that RealID thing. You’re right, Guitar Hero is original. I’m out.
What the hell does that have to do with it? Don’t be a bads, bro.
I’m still trying to figure out how Track & Field, Crash 'n Da Boys, and Little Ninja Brothers are anything remotely like rhythm games. The last one is a freaking action RPG.
Indeed. We’ve discussed this a bit over in the big World of Warcraft thread. WoW’s character models continue to look “cartoony” compared to the more realistic-looking models in some other MMORPGs, but it’s actually beneficial. You don’t get that “uncanny valley” feeling when the characters don’t move exactly the way a real person would move.
I recognized back then that quality gameplay was more important than fancy graphics, and I think Nintendo recognized that as well. It’s largely why they became so successful so quickly.
I liked this:
Heh. I played both WarCraft 2 and Diablo II without having played the first versions of either. After “mastering” the “2” versions, I tried to go back and play the “1” versions. Couldn’t do it, because they just felt so doggone clunky.
Never heard of it, but I just looked it up, and it was released in 1992.
I love BGI and BGII, but they do suffer a bit from the dumbing down I spoke of. The perfect example is in BGII: there’s that fortress outside the city that’s been overrun by trolls. Trolls can only be killed by fire or acid, and the game warns you about this on a regular basis. Every box, barrel, chest and crate in the fortress is chock full of fire arrows and acid arrows - how convenient. If this game had been written by the makers of Ultima or Might & Magic, the player would have found out the hard way that trolls can only be killed in this fashion - or perhaps there would have been a clue if you happened to talk to the right person somewhere else, far removed from there. And if the player didn’t have the means to finish off a troll they’d be shit out of luck - time to go back to town and make some purchases or learn some new spells.
The kid will prefer Spongebob because Spongebob is a better cartoon - it is, in fact, one of the best cartoons ever made.
Similarly, even the most jaded gamer would be forced to admit there are SOME good games. I don’t like gaming as much as I used to but, look, WoW is awesome. Civ 4 was awesome and Civ 5 likely will be too. KOTOR was awesome, though I guess it isn’t a new game anymore. Bioshock was awesome. The Grad Theft Auto games are awesome. Innovative? Well, we did’t have music games at all 15 years ago. There weren’t active motion games like the Wii (well, there were some primitive ones.) And there’s always new twists on old ideas - look at LittleBigPlanet.
Going back 15 years, the mix of games was about the same, really. Most games were mediocre, a few were awesome. For every TIE Fighter there were 15 crap games.
WTF are you talking about? All the biggest money game tournaments in the world are console based FPSs. Console gamers aren’t good gamers? That’s a ridiculous contention. Come play Killzone 2 tonight. I’ll headshot you dead twenty times before you even get a shot off in my general direction. And I suck compared to the guys that are really good. PC FPSs are too easy and require far less hand-eye coordination. They’re point and click.
And games keep getting worse and worse because of consoles? Sounds more like you’re bitter because almost all the good games go to consoles and not PC anymore. Sorry.