I work in QA for one of the largest video game publishers in the world. 90% of our own product, including our flagship titles, are crap. And we’re supposed to be one of the better companies out there. And Christ, you should see some of the stuff we pass up! Almost all of which eventually gets published by someone, somewhere.
I don’t doubt it one bit. Course, I haven’t played most of the games on that list, so I don’t know for sure. Have you played them all? I’m not sure what your list is supposed to prove, except that you can name fifty videogames.
Video games are highly entertaining, usually violent spectacles of garish graphics and keenly designed noises that make it fun to sit in one spot for hours and project your personality onto aggressive characters made from pixels and lights who do all sorts of improbable things. But that’s all they do: entertaining you, and passing the time. They largely don’t persuade, inform, challenge your thinking or belief systems. You don’t reflect, assess, or use your higher order thinking skills in MOST games. The most popular games, the ones that take up most of the market sales, don’t educate, don’t teach critical new thinking skills, don’t challenge your expectations or give you new information, aren’t innovative, won’t do anything substantive. You’ll be a better gamer, better able to point/shot/stab/hunt/kill/jump/drive — but unlike books where you might actually learn real skills from, you can’t seriously replicate your experiences in the real world from most video games.
They tell pretty much the same story over and over again, using pretty much the same methodologies and POV as always. You, a young warrior, must find/ seek/rescue/destroy something, often soldiers/aliens/monsters/mutant/zombies/computer warriors and journey/travel/climb/descend/drive/ride go from point A to point B, and must kill/evade/collect these artifacts/weapons/vehicles/power cells/ammunition caches while chasing/hunting/killing/overcoming these horrific obstacles in your way. Yawn. It’s all still Pac-Man, dude! The consoles have improved, the graphics and sounds have gotten insane – the games largely haven’t. Not in twenty five years.
That’s why it’s crap. Diverting crap to be sure, but just like movies studios that can’t seem to do anything but tell the same damn idiotic Hollywood blockbusters over and over again (What? The boy gets the girl? I did not see that coming!) , the more you look for something different, the more you become aware of how rigid and uninteresting the paradigm of current gaming models are.
That’s “crap.”
Well, at least 90% of what’s out there.
Let’s look at your list. Now I don’t know shit about most games these days. So, going by titles alone, I’m going to label them, “Hunt and Destroy”, if they allude to conflict, weapons or suggest barbarian type places or dangerous things and “Other.”
Def Jam: Fight For New York (Xbox) Hunt and Destroy
Wrath Unleashed (PS2) Hunt and Destroy
The Incredibles (Xbox) Hunt and Destroy
Super Monkey Ball Jr. (GBA) Other
WarioWare Touched! (DS) Hunt and Destory
Burnout (Xbox) Hunt and Destroy
Planetside: Core Combat (PC) Hunt and Destory
BeyBlade: Super Tournament Battle (GC) Hunt and Destroy
Blade and Sword (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 (Xbox) Sports
V-Rally 3 (GBA) Hunt and Destroy
Area 51 (Xbox) Hunt and Destroy
Ratchet and Clank (PS2) Other
Halo (PC) Other
CT Special Forces 2 (GBA) Hunt and Destroy
Psi-Ops (PS2) Hunt and Destroy
Star Wars: Battlefront II (PSP) Hunt and Destroy
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (GC) Hunt and Destroy
Aero the Acrobat (GBA) Hunt and Destroy
Project: Snowblind (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Shark Tale (GC) Other
NIBIRU: Age of Secrets (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Medieval: Total War Viking Invasion (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Grand Theft Auto Double Pack (PS2) Hunt and Destroy
Universal Combat (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Peter Jackson’s King Kong (GC) Hunt and Destroy
Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection (Xbox) Other
Outlaw Tennis (PS2) Other
X-Men Legends (Xbox) Hunt and Destroy
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons WWII (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Combat Task Force 121 (Xbox) Hunt and Destroy
Dr. Mario / Puzzle League (GBA) Other
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Xbox) Other
Siren (PS2) Other
Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction (GBA) Hunt and Destroy
Darkwatch (PS2) Hunt and Destroy
Onimusha: Warlords (PS2) Hunt and Destroy
ER (PC) Other
Endless Ages (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Need for Speed Underground 2 (GC) Hunt and Destroy
Rock N’ Roll Racing (GBA) Hunt and Destroy
Thief: Deadly Shadows (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Extreme G3 (GC) Other
Horizons: Empire of Istaria (PC) Other
Fugitive Hunter (PS2) Hunt and Destroy
Tron 2.0 (PC) Hunt and Destroy
Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu (GBA) Hunt and Destroy
Cold Fear (Xbox) Hunt and Destroy
Frogger: Ancient Shadow (PS2) Other
I doubtlessly got some of these wrong – I’m sure more than a few of those games I marked as “Other” are really Hunt and Destroy games – but do you see how limited – how crappy – my choices are if I don’t like “Hunt and Destroy” type games?
The most interesting game I encountered recently was a PC game designed to non-medically use biofeedback techniques to teach young students with how to gradually develop focus using non-aggressive non-violent games without being doped up on stimulants like Ritalin, Adderell, Straterra, Concerta. You’d think there’d be a bigger mainstream or niche market for R&D in a multi-billion dollar industry – but noooooo. There’s too much money to be made doing the same old crap everyone else is…
So I guess my POINT is… (I usually forget my point) that popularity does in fact have a chilling affect on innovation and true diversity. When you find something truly novel and interesting and well-done, it’s pretty rare. The rest of it’s the same old same old.
I gotta agree with the idea that most of everything is crap, even video games.
I think that where video games are concerned, crap means ‘not original; not fun; a clone of an existing game; or more focused on the graphics or sound rather than the gameplay’.
But of course most video games are crap. And I think what I quoted from **Askia **above is totally why. Because in the mainstream game industry, just as in the mainstream music and film industries, the object is to make money. (I know, so obvious)
Yeah, there are a few innovative, truly diverse games here and there, but innovation is such a risk, publishers are clearly much more likely to greenlight a project which is safe (eg. sure to at least recoup costs), which translates into ‘a rehash of last year’s best-selling game’.
It’s annoying, but I’m under the impression that’s just how it goes.
I don’t know that it’s the popularity that’s the problem. Innovation and diversity just aren’t the focus of the mainstream games industry, so that’s why it’s so rare…
If you want innovative though, you should check out some independent games – things are less about the money and more about the art, so there are a lot of great games. However, I think it still holds that 90% of the output from the independents is crap, too. And my explanation for that is that some people just aren’t that good at making games.
I don’t think I’m disagreeing; just chucking in my two cents.
I just can’t agree with you here… I see what you’re saying, but I think classifying a game as crap shouldn’t just mean it’s unplayable. I’d bet that the ‘average’ games you describe fall into my ‘crap’ category because they’re boring, derivative, and/or not very fun.
I, for one, am pretty sure I wasn’t directing my post towards anyone in particular. It was more of a general observation. I’ve always thought that one of the true definitions of “coolness” was a complete indifference to the opinions of others - you just go ahead and enjoy whatever you enjoy.
Of course you’re not as good as the people who heard about your favorite band first. They heard about it first! Duh! It’s just like back in elementary school, and people pushed to be in front of the line whenever the whole class went anywhere. Why? Because people who are first are better! We knew it when we were seven, we still know it now.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with you, Ghanima. I like music - a lot of it, different genres, and I feel like I’ve cultivated my taste pretty well. But I just don’t care about trying to find obscure little groups that no one else has heard of. When it happens to me, it’s purely by chance, because I don’t feel like trying to find stuff that’s incredibly obscure. I don’t even know how people do that - I know there’s some trick, but I just don’t know what it is. It’s fine with me - I place pretty much no value on finding stuff before everyone else. There’s lots of music out there, and there’s plenty of stuff by old and well-established artists that I haven’t listened to yet, because I have a finite amount of time and there’s lots of music in existence. It’s too damn much effort for too little reward to try to find new bands before everyone else. If I find something a few months later when everyone else is talking about it and it shows up on critics’ top ten lists for the year, that’s fine with me. I have enough music to listen to already, and it’s easy enough to find new stuff when I want to. I don’t need to trawl the most distant parts of the internet or read obscure little magazines or hang out in dingy clubs just to find something new, because there’s plenty of old stuff that’s much easier to find.
And if anyone commented on the lumps, you’d have to sneer and explain that lump-free gravy was pedestrian and all the big chefs were serving lumpy gravy nowadays.
I didn’t find this argument convincing the first time I heard it, which was from another twelve-year-old.
Okay, sorry. That was snarky. But do you think many people are really trying to be cool by buying the latest top 40 album? Isn’t it more likely they just heard about it, and like it? Now it may be that the latest top 40 album sucks, and is crappy music that no one will remember in three months. In that case, it’s okay to sneer at people who like it. But if it’s something that’s worthwhile, why would you assume people are only there because they think it’ll make them look cool? No one thinks that listening to the music on the pop station is cool, or seeing the movie that’s tops at the box office. Because being cool by definition means being different from the crowd. Some people may not bother finding other stuff. Lots of people are not fully aware that other stuff exists. But that doesn’t mean they enjoy what they enjoy because they think it makes them cool.
I think the existence of people who only like what they like because they see everyone else liking it is a myth, one I last heard about when I hung out with the disaffected weirdos at my high school. The disaffected weirdos generally had good taste in music, but their sociological analyses were sometimes lacking. People like popular crap because it’s dumbed down to a degree that makes it possible to enjoy without any knowledge or work. That means they enjoy something shallow - and maybe that makes them shallow. It doesn’t mean they only pretend to enjoy it to go along with the crowd.
Did you miss Wendell Wagner’s post about how it’s the most popular novel in all history? You’re a big fan of the single most popular book ever. Wow, that’s some exclusive little club you’re in there. This is the thing that keeps puzzling me throughout this whole thread - way before the movies ever came out, everyone I knew had heard of The Lord of the Rings, even if they hadn’t read it. It’s been decades since it’s been even remotely obscure. Meanwhile, who are these mysterious zombies that just move from crowd to crowd with absolutely no attention to what they actually enjoy? I don’t mean to sound snarky when I say that I have not seen anyone act like that since I was ten. I remember being in grade school, and how one’s social status was the product of one’s awareness of whatever was popular at the time, and possessing whatever toy was big. But after that, it became kind of expected for people to develop their own taste - no one I’ve known since then has labored under any kind of delusion that being cool comes from acting like everyone else.
That’s an incredibly limited and shallow view of the world.
No, not millions. Hundreds of millions. There has never been a more popular novel than that one. If you consider that to be an exclusive little group, well, it’s the single least exclusive group in history (okay, except maybe malaria victims.) If you think that The Lord of the Rings was unpopular before the movies came out, you’re simply laboring under a delusion.
Don’t get me wrong - I share your overall point. It’s just that this is literally the worst example that could possibly be imagined to describe it, because you’re talking about what is just about the single least exclusive media product in history.
Me too. The difference is that I heard of them after they got big.
You are truly the Buddha of pop culture. We must all strive to follow in your footsteps.
You appear not to have recognized that he was joking. I’ll try to explain the clues - first, he was responding to an obvious joke. Second, he described himself as a “hipster”, which is a pejorative description of people who try to cultivate an aura of cool by being interested in either obscure or kitschy things. No one would call themselves a hipster - you’re right - except that in this case, he was jokingly mocking the hipster crowd.
Nope. Because most of us have graduated high school.
Wow. It’s like hearing the voice of God. Specifically, the voice of God stating something incredibly freaking obvious, the sort of thing that hasn’t been explicitly stated in this conversation precisely because it’s so obvious that no one felt the need to point it out. The whole conversation has been based on recognizing this.
God’s such a douche sometimes.
Nope. Because way more than 80% of music sucks, regardless of whether it’s popular or not. Also, many genres are simply very difficult for outsiders, and we all have a limited amount of time with which to cultivate that appreciation. If we start ruling folks out because they haven’t done the work to understand Cecil Taylor or John Cage, then the pool of cool people becomes so small it’s irrelevant. It’s simply inconceivable that someone would like 80% of the music out there, unless they had absolutely no taste and liked anything that wasn’t silence.
You seem to be trying really hard to sound cooler than everyone else, but you’re sadly failing because we’ve already figured stuff out that you’re shouting as though it’s some amazing revelation. Meanwhile, when someone makes a funny, self-deprecating joke, try not to fly off the handle. You see, he was willing to laugh at himself, which makes him far cooler than you, as you’re wasting your time obsessively dividing people into cool and uncool.
It was *Eleusis who said this toCase Sensitive. I mistyped in the quotebox.
Also, sorry about the really long reply. I didn’t hear about the thread till after it got big. At what point are people going to head off and form a cool new thread that no one knows about?
I’m puzzled by why you’d say that, as you haven’t actually made a case at all. You’ve just made an assertion, which is quite a different thing. You’ve shown no signs of making a case to support it.
If your argument is that “cool” people make no aesthetic judgments whatsoever and enjoy whatever happens to touch their eardrums, that’s bizarre, and you’re gonna have to work pretty hard to come up with any meaningful justification for that. The 80% figure is even weirder and harder to understand. Why 80%? What 20% of what I hear can I dislike?
Seriously, are you drunk-posting again? Because you’re not making any sense.
What you’re not getting is that no one but you is really taking this thread seriously. See, it’s a sort of ironic self-mockery - sure, there’s tinges of seriousness, but we’re mocking those, too. We’re all acknowledging the fact that people do rate others for being cool - and that we do it too, like everyone else - but we’re mocking it at the same time because everyone understands that none of it actually matters.
It’s a meta thing. You might be too old to get it. Irony is very big nowadays. ← (Also a mocking-and-yet-serious comment.) We’re disaffected and ironic and mocking and serious all at once. You don’t seem to have achieved that state. Don’t worry, if you keep working on it, you can do it too. ← (Ha-ha-only-serious again.)
Shit, I was pretty much serious throughout this post - actually explaining things in a rational way and shit. But man, Eleusis, you need to stop going around telling others they’re not cool. Because - by your own standards even - you’re not cool. Nothing’s cooler than not taking yourself and your situation seriously - and man, you’re serious like an oncology ward at a hospital for nuns.
See, you took it seriously right there! If you recognized that we’re all laughing at ourselves for worrying about being cool, you’d recognize that there’s nothing to get riled about. But you’re taking this whole thing too seriously. Maybe you need a bath with some scented candles to help you calm down. Or else some nice pot.
Oh, I get that you were trying to be funny. You were also pretty clearly bothered by the whole thread. Which pretty much by definition means you don’t get it.
Hey, no one here’s arguing with that, except the OP, who’s been thoroughly mocked for it.
Anyway, I’m too cool to bother arguing about this anymore. ← (Once more: a hint of truth, and a thorough helping of self-mockery. It’s a post-modern thing - sentences have multiple meanings, and you have to read them all at once.) ← (The reference to post-modernism is also simultaneously serious - as post-modernism in pop culture have substantially affected the way people interpret what they read, and mocking - as referencing a much-ridiculed school of literary criticism is fishing for laughs in itself, and far more serious that the situation warrants, which means you have to recognize that it’s a joke.)
I’m enjoying doing these close-captions for the irony-impaired. I think it’s going to be my new schtick. People will probably think I’m really cool if I do.
So being surrounded by crap ideas for years has destroyed your good game filter.
I haven’t played them all, but I’ve played enough to know that going by your rules 45 games on that list would have to be crap. I know that’s not true and any game fan should also be able to see that’s not true.
And I have no idea what Askia was rambling about. I wasn’t trying to say that video games are high art that challenge all of our basest perceptions of the world yada yada yada. I was saying that 90% of all games are not crap. No more, no less. Games are entertainment and this thread is about the relative merits of entertainment products is it not?
But I think I’ve finally figured out what everyone else is going on about in this thread. All y’all are snobs. I didn’t want to say it before but everyone that seems to think that everything has got to be crap just wants to hate everything and say that their little corner of the world is the only true corner. That’s just crap.
You want a good game? Re-do Star Control. Not the single player Star Control II (which was great), not the awful Star Control III remake of SC2.
Star Control on the Sega Genesis was great. Re-do THAT game.
2 cents
See, Excalibre, I’m really not implying that I am cool. Even though I am.
But if it’s something that’s worthwhile, why would you assume people are only there because they think it’ll make them look cool? No one thinks that listening to the music on the pop station is cool, or seeing the movie that’s tops at the box office. Because being cool by definition means being different from the crowd. Some people may not bother finding other stuff. Lots of people are not fully aware that other stuff exists. But that doesn’t mean they enjoy what they enjoy because they think it makes them cool.