I’m aware of the problems IPlay had securing the rights.
That said, the gameplay in the Fallouts is absolutely nothing like the gameplay in Wasteland. They are entirely different games in everything but setting.
At least the Zeldas had roughly the same gaming paradigm. And though I’ve only played a few, from what I understand the games take place at different points in time of the same universe and/or use the same archetypical hero. The same cannot be said of Wasteland/Fallout.
I suppose I think that one of the problem would have to be the media in general’s response to new games. I went to MetaCritic and MobyGames and Half-Life 2 is listed up there as the best game ever. I think this is probably the root of my problem. So here’s what inspired this post. Occasionally I get the gaming urge. I don’t feel like replaying anything I had before and I want something new. So I go and look online to see what’s hot lately. And I am invariably not interested in most of the games around. The reason I played Half-Life 2 was because I was living in a hostel in Europe at one point, and the internet cafe was a good way to waste time during the day. So I played HL 2. It was okay, but nothing I’d particularly care much about. Same thing with Portal. I thought it was cool, but I really am not interested in linear gameplay.
Yes Deus Ex was linear in a fashion, but at least there were options that you could choose. I you had your augs to choose from and different ways to complete a level. It was a crying shame that DX2 was worse. They could have really made that genre into something special for sure.
Now as for MMORPGs, that’s a different story. I have liked them a lot from time to time. I really liked the Star Wars MMORPG but then they really fucked it up, so I gave up on it. I didn’t quit as a result, but I didn’t return to the game as a result of their game play “enhancements”
But no, I wouldn’t say that Mario 3 is better than SMG. In fact, I never really liked the Mario games all that much. Mine would either be Super Mario World, or Mario 64. The N64 really had some solid launch titles, btw.
But I guess the main problem for me is that a lot of gamers, these days, are really wowed by the stories in games. I am too if I am able to influence it to some degree, but what I don’t like is something like Half-Life where you simply kill x, y and z for it to progress. Yeah the super gravity gun was cool at the end, but that’s about it.
But yeah, you guys have helped me get some new games on my radar. Mass Effect seems like it’s worth a look, and I did want to try Mirror’s Edge before writing this thread. That 2D game you were talking about looked cool too.
But I think a large part of the problem is also that games didn’t go where I wanted them to. My dream was to play Sim City and have it be even more detailed yet they have gone in the opposite direction. I’d like there to be more storyline involvement rather than less. I think Fallout 3 is going to be right up my alley, and I’m certainly not one of those die-hard F3 fans that refuses to accept anything but a carbon copy of F2. Although, I am a bit bummed that Van Buren didn’t get finished. It would have been cool to have another Fallout game.
From what you’re saying, it definitely sounds like Mass Effect and Fallout 3 are right up your alley. In both games you have some influence over the storyline, but much more so in Fallout 3 than in Mass Effect. Mass Effect is shorter, but engrossing and fun to replay.
Part of the problem I have with games now is that I find myself more “rushed” in life than when I was a kid. A few hours in front of a TV when I was a kid was a long, long time. A few hours in front of a TV now seems a lot shorter, and I find myself less willing to spend that time just trying a game to see if it’s good. I went through a mountain of crappy Super Nintendo cartridges for the few gems like Legend of the Mystical Ninja or Super Metroid or Super Mario RPG. I just don’t have the time to sift through a mountain of crappy stuff anymore.
I think you misunderstand what I mnean. In the days of yore, when the game staff was 6 dudes in a basement after dropping out of college, OK, you gots yer bugs. These days, when they are willing to hire 200 dudes with advanced degrees to program their super mega-graphics of doom, they coudl at least iron out the bugs. But they frickin don’t. And while bugs from the past were accidental foul-ups, today’s bugs are the result of much more systematic errors.
Merk - I haven’t played any of the games you mentioned except a couple of Grand Theft Autos (3 and Vice City), but I can attest to video games changing a lot in just a few years. In particular, they’re a helluva lot more complicated. Compare the SNES Royal Rumble to any of the WWE titles for PS2, After Burner to Ace Combat, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing to Facebreaker, etc.
I also know all too well that once your reflexes start flagging, it makes a lot of tasks MUCH more complicated. I’ve recently started going back to games like Contra, and I find myself strugging horribly with sections or even entire levels that used to be only somewhat difficult.
The simple truth is that the little kids who grew up on frogs hopping across freeways and spies navigating weird elevator systems have grown up and need something deeper and more challenging. It’s possible for a game to be engrossing, or imaginative, or breathtakingly beautiful, but still far too easy for the new regulars (Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil is the perfect example).
You might want to look into computer games. From you OP, that sounds like more your thing.
Getting rid of bugs is much, much harder than you seem to think it is, especialyl with PC games.
Oh, you mean to tell me that if you have an ATI XXYZ card, AND an Asus Motherboard while running ABC brand antivirus software, the game makes a bleeping noise during a cutscene? My God, it’s clearly this line of code right here, we’ll take care of that right away!
The fact is is that there are so many lines of code that they write, and they cannot plan for every configuration of every system the game runs on. Yes, certain bugs and errors are inexcusable and you have to wonder if anyone did ANY playtesting at all with them (something like the most recent Pool of Radiences uninstall bug that deleted your entire harddrive springs to mind,) but a lot of the smaller ones are hard to pin down and honestly, unless they cause the entire game to crash, or mess up saved data, it’s not considered that important to fix.
I’ve felt the same way for some time, with the exceptions of Super Mario Galaxy, and before that Resident Evil 4. Both reinvigorated my love for games. I also play a lot of my DS.
No, I’ve done bug testing. It’s a right royal pain, it is. That doesn’t make the current lack of bug testing or the “ship it, we’ll just patch it later” attitude any less obnoxious, idiotic, or unacceptable.
hear, hear! I have done debugging also and it is a pita. But, it’s part of what has to be done.
I would also like to reccomend Braid. It most certainly does not have linear gameplay.
Imagine a 2D platformer where you control time. There’s one rule on each level… and it changes.
There’s a pretty big difference between something minor and obscure like this, and the fact that, for example, in Saints Row 2 (no obscure hardware on an Xbox), if you drive from one side of town to the other in a fast car, you’re pretty much guaranteed slam into invisible walls (invisible cars?) in the middle of the road and come to a dead stop at least two or three times.
Oh, and then there’s the bug that’s happened to me at least ten times where a loud-ass machine gun sound starts up out of nowhere and continues until I finish the level! I have to mute the TV every time it happens.
The severity of bugs that are deemed acceptable to ship, even in just console games these days, is disgusting.
I will have to try this Braid. The last 2D game I liked also happens to be my favorite 2D game ever, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Flawlessly executed, IMO.
I kind of agree with the OP. I’m damn tired of most games and I feel like the move to 3D has done absolutely nothing for gaming in general. Specific games are awesome, yes, I don’t deny it, and I think it is crazy to think there isn’t going to be another gaming heyday, but right now most of the stuff is really crap. TF2 is amazing and dragged me into online play which I thought I would never enjoy. (Deathmatching irritates me to no end.) A wonderfully executed but way-too-short rails game was Beyond Good and Evil that showed just how seamlessly a dedicated team can mix up niche gaming to bring together a wonderful experience. The first Silent Hill brought genuine terror to me in a way I thought was possible only in nightmares, while the sequels have continually failed to accomplish anything close.
I agree with the other poster who mentioned the time issue. I’m not averse to spending a lot of time on a game, but there’s this window where it has to hook me and I don’t come back to it if it fails. I wasted good money on the Morrowind expansions which I never sat down to play. Well, ok, I did sit down to play, the point is that I wasn’t about to get invested in the game again. Unlike the OP, I was amazed at how they captured the feel of the 2D Zelda and Metroid in the move to 3D, though the second Metroid for GC didn’t hold me for more than a few hours. My disappointments with the first Fable are almost surely going to prevent me from even bothering with the sequel which, given previews, looks to have improved nothing but the look of the game. Civilization’s incremental improvements aren’t worth the money.
I mean, improving the graphics is cool for a few days and then the game has to live or die on its own. By the time Morrowind’s graphics became the background, the world had gained a depth. By the time TF2’s graphics ceased to wow me, tactical complications kept me insanely intrigued. Zelda’s continuous innovation in playing has kept me pleased, though I don’t own a Wii and didn’t grab Twilight Princess.
A game has to have something besides graphics and progressive generations are wasting way too many resources on friggin’ graphics. At the end of the day the graphics cannot make a bad game better. I remember playing Turok and at one point realizing that I was relying so much on my HUD that I practically was playing a really crappy 2D game instead of an interesting 3D one. The underlying mechanic simply isn’t there.
Last perfect single-player game was Portal, IMO. It took one lovely concept, made a short game with a cute story behind it, and left it at that. It didn’t beat it into the ground. It didn’t try to make a 2 hour game into a 10 hour one. It was just what it was, and that’s perfect.
There’s 50 times more staff developing today’s games, and 100,000,000 times more code involved. If bugs were ever unacceptable, it was THEN, not now.
I don’t think video games today suck. I do think we’re harder to impress.
When I got my NES system, every game was new and interesting. When Wolfenstien 3-d came out, it was revolutionary. Something completely different.
Fast forward through the last 5-10 years. We’ve taken those genres and expanded them dramatically. Your ‘first person shooter on rails’ sounds very bland and boring. But when you truly examine those games like Call of Duty 4, FEAR, and Dead Space they’re simply amazing. They may be on rails, but they’re telling a story. Like a movie where you get to walk through the main character’s footsteps instead of just watch them.
There are more open ended games out there too. Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and GTA come to mind. There are underlying stories, but you’re under no obligation to follow a script, or even to follow it at all. Or games like Team Fortress 2, Unreal Tournament 3 or Left 4 Dead where the plot is a joke used as a shell to encase a multi-player game.
And that is the just the fps genre. C&C may seem a superficially like it’s decedents, but there is a wide variety of RTS games out there. Games have since added true air units. Artillery and morale have also been added to number of games. The genre has moved into 3 dimensional combat in space. Supreme Commander moved into a scope and scale that was unprecedented. The Total War games brought combat down to much smaller and personal scales.
If you look at those games without peering from the point of view of it’s ancestors, I think you could be amazed by the modern generation of games. But it’s hard to do that. Games have grown slowly, and many of us have grown up with them. That make it hard to appreciate exactly how far they have come.
I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of crappy games out there. But to say that all games suck is a little myopic, IMO. There are a wide range of games, and generally, there is something out there for most people. But what is really important is that you enjoy what you’re doing. If you’re not, nothing I say can change your mind. But I do hope you find another game that strikes you like Deus Ex did.
I have been thinking about this and I try to imagine what it would be like to come up under modern gaming. I’d imagine people would feel like everything is amazing. I feel like gaming hasn’t made significant progress. The required increases in budgets for most modern games is hurting the industry, not improving it, IMO.
I mean, let’s be clear, I’m still a gamer. Games don’t suck. But the progress has been questionable, overall, IMO.
Probably a good assessment. A lot of folks are wondering where the open-endedness is, where the human-like AI is. Realistic destructible environments, that kind of thing. We’re hitting the limits of what we can do computationally, though, and unless there’s a serious breakthrough in hardware or programming we’re not going to see any major vertical innovation (Commander Keen → Wolfenstein 3D → Doom → Quake, for example) for a while. Any innovation is going to need to be lateral (Braid is not much more complex than Super Mario World computationally, but gameplay-wise, hoo boy…), and that IMO is harder to achieve on a regular basis.
I’ve been playing games since the ZX Spectrum. I cut my teeth on the likes of Jet Set Willy, Knight Lore etc.
I was also big into arcades and close enough lived in one for a few years. Played everything e.g. Star Wars, Dig-Dug, Wonderboy, Joust, Space-Ace and on and on.
Today I have a PC and a 360 having moved away from Sony when my last beloved PS2 broke.
I think there are games today that are way better than anything before. Some are just good old fashion puzzlers like Braid but others like COD4 or Halo3 are modern FPS. The multiplayer elements of these games are what make it for me. No longer do I have to go to a LAN party or set up a network game in work to get my fix of online carnage. Games like Halo etc. are way better than their forerunners like Doom or Quake on nearly every level.
I installed a emulator on my PC last year and installed all the old Spectrum games I used to love. Not one held me for more than a few minutes. I spent a lot of time just looking at the screen trying to reconcile the shitness I was looking at to the great game of my memories.
When you are a kid things are special in a way that you just don’t have the capacity for once you get older. I’ve got great love of the Star Wars movies but now have to admit that they are pretty roughly made to my eyes nowadays.
Some games suck because we’re getting older. I had to get a controller with a slo-mo setting just to play MK3 on my SNES.
What I hate about new games, especially first person type games, is the difficulty of accuracy of my character or vehicle. GTAIV is classic of this problem. I suppose it could be operator error, but the drivability of the cars in that game does not reflect the movements I actually want to make. I slow down in corners with sufficient braking and the car still wants to veer into a building or object. The aiming of weapons is just as difficult. It just about spraying bullets and hope you hit something. Although the graphics are top notch and smooth, the play itself is not fluid and is sloppy.
Where as Left 4 Dead, the shooting experience is dead on what I intended to do with it, and is fun to play. However, the problem with that game, and most games is the multiplayer options of play. Granted L4D is zombie’s vs. the four, but why can’t 16 players just get the option of playing in a map and just shoot each other?
Halo PC is IMO legendary for the types of games available to play in multiplayer. Albeit outdated, that game was responsive to my controls. The play was very fluid. The slayer, team slayer type of games is what is lacking in new games today. Todays games are all about finding or arming a bomb while you hold a button while you avoid getting shot. That shit is retarded. That’s why I hate new games, the multiplayer options are lacking bigtime. And don’t get me started on forced multiplayer matching (no option to join a server).
I am reasonably convinced, as I exclaimed 8 years ago…that online games are the future. There will be a place for single player games but the major potential is online
The problem is, however, that the vast majority of online games are the same. You have WOW and it’s clones…which are level grinders. You have ones like COD where online is just a twitch fest.
There are a few games out there with potential. The 2 that stand out for me are Eve and World War 2 Online. Each still has it’s issues (again my opinion) but it feels like it is onto something.
WW2online is completely different from anything out there. No level grind, no hit points, realistic physics and equipment. THIS, I hope, is a twinkling of the future. Not all games will be like WW2Online but the IDEA behind it is refreshingly different. I wish them well.
I wish more companies would take a chance on innovative games like these and that people would give them a chance.
But, like someone says, I may be a big band 1940’s music lover dissatisfied at the way things are going and that the future will be nothing other than twitch fests and WOW clones.