[Rant] What's Wrong with Video Games These Days?

Games are dumb because gamers are dumb. HTH

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There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Tails

The genre is also greatly varied. For every Halo there's crazy shit like Serious Sam or Duke Nukem, which is far too silly to be considered grim and bleak. Most of them play differently as well, but then I'm just being asinine in that regard since in the end you are at it's most basic, shooting guns at other things.

Games like Serious Sam and Pain are exceptions to the rule. Most FPSes these days are new Halo clones, WW2 shooters, or a different variant on Tom Clancy's shambling corpse of a tactical franchise.

I can't even think of a recent game that went balls to the wall rockin with your cock out endless stream of bloody gibbing enemies to annihilate heavy metal riff festival.

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I really fucking hate WW2 shooters by the way. It wasn't even a "good war" but that doesn't stop you idiots from buying Call of Duty: World at War and playing through the same scenarios that were in the first Call of Duty.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

All gamers are equally culpable for the crimes against good taste.

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Originally Posted by Encephalon

:words:

Services like Steam re-releasing old games are a godsend in terms of PC Gaming because the stuff we used to love to play we can't have a go at anymore because Vista or XP won't have anything to do with it.

They just recently released an X-Com bundle, and everybody loved X-Com.

I'm seriously hoping they'll someday release Crusader or Syndicate.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Tebian it's you.

You are part of the problem.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I'm not sure where I knocked on genres, exactly. Ragging on a genre game for being another FPS is not the same as ragging on an FPS for being another WW2 game or another variation on Halo, a franchise that outstayed its welcome with the first sequel.

What's "wrong" with games are gamers, and the market is going to cater to their demographics. So if you're a white male aged 15-25 who possibly smokes pot and loves Family Guy then there's nothing wrong with the games these days.

There's nothing wrong with playing an FPS for competitive reasons, but the end result of gaming solely for the competitive (achievement unlocking) aspect has led to a rabid case of sequel-itis. It makes less and less sense for companies to try and compete for that marketshare and innovate the genre when it all gets soaked up by the next Bungie or Tom Clancy game.

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Originally Posted by Rotorblade

You, like most of us, probably don't know shit about what you're criticizing other than something that amounts to "I'm not interested" and "These people eat this shit up."

Don't project your personal experience onto me. I actually have followed these trends and don't exclusively play Street Fighter 4. I have no comments on the fighting game genre because I don't actually play fighting games to feel like I can make a comment.

I play FPSes a lot, though, and I know the kind of people who play them. A friend of mine used to be so hardcore he spent all the time at college playing Diablo 3 just so he could come in third at Quakecon. He wasted his life. He's also not really a friend anymore but that's another story.

I've played Gears of War and Gears of War 2 and they're pretty much clunkier Halos with more grit and personality that unfortunately got driven into the ground as internet memes by posters like Tails. The Tom Clancy games are also stuck in a rut following the same rail shooter formula with the only thing that significantly distinguishes each title being the locale.

Call of Duty 4 on the other hand was a great game. The single player stunk and was dumb as shit, but the change in setting and weapons design really gave something new to build upon the basic multiplayer formula from the first two Call of Duties.

But it's all just sequels. Sequels sequels sequels. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about gamers not being the problem with video games. My point is that video games are a problem if you're not like the average gamer. Gamers don't care what they're playing as long as they can play it. It's cheap escapism that lets them forget about the financial dead end that is their retail job or their soulless materialistic lifestyle fueled by their engineering degree. I can go on with these backgrounds because I'm intimately familiar with all of them.

No opiate has ever been greater than gaming, and those people use it as a void to fill the space where normal people place social fulfillment or awareness.

Putting the onus on me to change things is an unrealistic demand because producers don't respond to the people who don't buy their video games, and I have better things to do than design video games. Modding and design is a luxury for people who are rich enough to sperg out in front of a computer for hours at a time hunched over lines of code they may never profit from. Maybe I'm just getting too old and my prior experiences make it all seem like the same old bullshit, but it should be readily apparent to even the casual observer that in terms of quality the industry is broken. There's no feedback for the consumer aside from his purchase, no meaningful consumer advocacy (94% for fucking Far Cry 2?), and very little room for hobbyists to affect the industry at large.

There are plenty of independent and innovative games and game designers out there, but that's not what people talk about when they mention "games these days." If you want to find out why gaming isn't seriously considered as a medium of art, look in the mirror.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by OmagnusPrime

Sorry Brady, but you destroy pretty much any pretense that you know what you're talking about buy saying shit like that. Let's skip past the fact that Gears isn't an FPS and Halo is (something of an inherent difference), but pretty much the only things they really share are aliens and guns.

Ok, so Gears is a third person shooter. I've still played the game and god forbid I lump it into the same genre that has everything else except a cover system. You'd go into a conniption if I called Dead Space an FPS, even though I'm playing it right now. I really don't give a fuck.

Saying that Gears and Halo only share aliens and guns ignores all the other themes they share. Badass space marines killing waves of aliens in exotic locales. What differentiates Gears from Halo is the cover system and an environment caked over in 36 flavors of mud and grit. The game was designed to appeal to the Halo crowd, and the fact that there's such a huge overlap speaks to that. Being a shooter in the spirit of Halo isn't a knock on the game. My main complaint was that everything compelling about the game is ruined by the people that play it.

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Again, I'm calling bullshit. Of the top 20 games of 2008 we voted for here at GFF six are entirely new IP. And that ignores some of the year's bigger new IP entries such as Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, indie IP such as World of Goo, Braid, Castle Crashers and the Pixel Junk games. And how about non-sequels like Patapon, The Club, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Sega Superstar Tennis, No More Heroes, Race Driver: GRID, Lost Odyssey, Dissidia, Frontlines: Fuel of War, End War, Haze, de Blob, Boom Blox, Audiosurf, The Last Guy, LostWinds, Too Human, Army of Two, Spore, The Bourne Conspiracy or even Wii Fit. So yeah, what was that about it being all sequels?

You just listed off a lot of derivative games and movie tie-ins. Too Human, a God of War clone, Star Wars: Force Unleashed, an extreme version of the Jedi series, Haze, a Halo clone. Not many of the games you even listed are very good, which is kind of why this thread exists in the first place. And a lot of the ones that are good are 10 bux on Steam or Xbox Live. But if you were paying attention you'd notice that I'm not talking about Indie titles, I'm talking about AAA releases.

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Then there's the pure fact that sharing an base IP doesn't make a game a generic sequel. If you need proof of that just take a look at Burnout Paradise, which plays to the base values of the series but is actually pretty far removed from any of its forebears. And what about Far Cry 2 that you mention, which is only a sequel in as much as it has the name (seeing as how it was a new team, new engine, new gameplay mechanics, etc, etc). I could name more, but I think you get the idea.

Far Cry 2 is a piece of shit.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Enough to know that not all of them are very good. You don't have to play Big Mutha Truckers to know it's not that great either from things like gameplay videos and word of mouth.

I certainly know a lot of them aren't worth paying 60 bucks.

Gears probably would not exist if it weren't for Halo. I don't need to go through all the differences in Frontline: Fuel of War to explain why it wouldn't exist without Battlefield.

There's nowhere I can't reach.