Crysis 2

[sporkbox]

I wonder something, Prometheus. You seem to share the traits of real gamers (appreciation for good game series like Mario, Mega Man, et al) and new, good gaming experiences like what the DS and Wii offered (despite the boatloads of shovelware), yet you seem to be in the casuals' corner... Why is this?


There was definitely a boom in gaming when the NES revived the industry, and it continued into the 16-bit generation. However, the 32-bit gen garnered a lot of appeal as well. People who had no intentions of being gamers before had suddenly gotten into it. Mainly for the graphics, but I digress. This coincided with the steady fall of classic genres, which I also lament. It seems like others share my feelings but are part of the problem (the war-game guys who are new to gaming and are in it for the gore, pretentious retro guys who don't actually play old games, graphics > gameplay guys, etc).


I'm not the kind of person who rejects new ideas as long as they're good and serve the chosen genre well. I don't agree with the current "hardcore" trend of bloody shooters, high-end graphics, and potty-mouth. That's just the teenage market that's been in a boom for a while. I feel your pain when it comes to platformers and new experiences. But the overall drop in quality is also partly the casual market. Both the hardcore (I can't decide if they're real gamers or not. It's all about ego for them since they mostly play online FPSes) and the casuals are diluting the variety and quality of games made. Because games are also more expensive to make than ever, devs are less ready to take a chance on a new idea, and I wish they'd take more chances so we could at least get more ideas out there. The DS was well-known for allowing devs to do that in its early years... and then it too diluted. Now, the 3DS has augmented reality and other weird ideas that, while novel, I don't think will have any practical application in a real game. At least they're trying, though, which is more than I can say for the other manufacturers.


I think that the market is sufficiently large as it is. It needs to refine, though, and we need those casuals to become enamored with real games. Ideas like Nintendo's Super Guide are a good idea since they allow the games to maintain difficulty and teach less experienced gamers how to get better. Everyone wins with technology like that, so why aren't more developers coming up with similar ideas?

One possibility is that the even distinction between 'real' gamers and 'casual' gamers is a bit ridiculous. Surely there are only two camps, those who play games and those who do not? I think that this shunning and belittling of people who simply have a preference for easier games is childish and absurd. I think the sooner the phrase 'Hardcore Gamer' dies the better. I refuse to declare myself a 'Gamer' and refuse to have much to do with the so-called 'Gaming' sub culture. It is a cesspit filled with juvenile idiots who use profanity and homophobia to hide their own shortcomings as individuals. Sometimes people just play a game for fun, I know I do. Be it on Wii, PS3 or whatever. Sometimes I don't want a cinematic experience or a hard fought grind fest. Sometimes I just want to throw some bombs at a pile of bricks, or batter like hell on some drums. I feel the ones really leeching the fun out of gaming are the gamers.

It's not solely a matter of taste. It's also a matter of attitudes. Those homophobic, immature gamers mar the reputation of true gamers. They took things too far and think only their taste rules. I have personally witnessed some people getting into games casually, learning more, and graduating to being a real gamer. What divides them is partly taste, sure. "Games" like Chuzzle, Farmville, and other busywork sims are very shallow and mostly mindless. There are games more accepted that share the same traits (Panel de Pon, Puyo Puyo, Tetris, etc) that could also be called non-games, but there's a certain level of depth to them that sets them apart. It's that depth that makes them real games. It doesn't take a whole lot of depth to be considered a real game, but (in my eyes anyway) the difference is readily apparent to anyone who's familiar.


But the attitude is really what ticks me off, on both sides. I make a distinction between three types of gamer: the hardcore that is incredibly into games and judgmental (mostly teenage males that play online FPS only), real gamers (almost everything else, follows good ideas), and casuals (people who play shallow, easy games and don't care to get further into gaming). That last distinction is important. Casual doesn't have to be a derogatory term. I'm a casual TV watcher, doing it very seldomly. I don't care about the cinematography or lenses used, etc. I don't claim that I'm on par with someone that takes film photography seriously, nor do I call myself a TV watcher.


It's the unwillingness or apathy toward the underlying concepts and techniques that sets the casual attitude from the enthusiast and obsessed attitude types. The connotations are up to the reader, but generally it's neutral. I consider casual *games* to be a scourge to quality games, but also realize that some casual games are needed to broaden the market. Oversaturation of the market with these games creates an unbalance, which hurts the market. I feel the same way about the bloody FPSes and "XTREME" games that are continually pushed and hyped to the point that "hardcores" consider them representative of the entire medium. A key part of broadening the market is customer retention, though, and providing a majority of XTREME and casual games doesn't give new gamers an accurate _or_ helpful environment to broaden their skillset or collection. This is what's ostracizing the real gamers who've been playing since the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Those three decades provided a wide variety of games, from arcade to platformer to shooter and more. Casual and hardcore games existed even during those times, and everyone had something to play! Why is it, then, that we have to accept the saturation of casual and hardcore games? They're two extremes on the continuum of gaming attitudes. The market doesn't necessarily need to end casual and hardcore games. It needs to simply focus on good variety. The market will then balance itself out.


I see in today's gaming a repeat of 1983. The market gets so saturated with crappy games and clones (your FPSes, most of which are identical) and rising costs that it implodes on itself. The majority of the consumer base loses interest in the war of extremes and moves onto something else. The way out of this will be another gaming revolution. It'll take more than what the NES or Wii offered, though. It will take a collection of games that are varied and incredibly high quality to revive the industry again. Catering to just one or two of the primary gamer attitudes will result in a decline. If it falls to just one, it'll crash just like it did in 1983. The only benefit we have today over 1983 is that it's much easier to create homebrew.


And that homebrew might be the revolution we need to see.


So to summarize my point, I think that any extreme focus will hurt the market. We've seen what it did with the Wii and iOS games (over saturation of casual games) and the Xbox360, PS3, and PC (oversaturation of very few, demographic-focused genres [FPS, WRPG]). The DS and GBA are the only recent systems that have reasonably offered all gaming attitudes and all genres, with enough variety to gain near-universal appeal. Whatever happened with those two markets needs to happen with "the big boy" consoles.

 

[Batou456]

Also, I urge you to find some proof that the mainstreaming of gaming was steady and progressive instead of coinciding with the release of the PS1[1994], PS2[2003], and Wii[2006] ... Games that, to any real gamer, were extremely easy and gave rise to an industry-wide drop in difficulty and solid game design.

I notice a complete and utter lack of accounting for Atari, the Crash of 1983, Commodore-Amiga, and mainstreaming of computers via the attraction of the internet isn't even mentioned instead of promoting Sony proprietary systems to the ignorance of other platforms and whining about Nintendo's revolutionary new systems which succeed in being both fun and useful in practical terms.

Deus Ex: Invisible War, released in 2003 ala your supposed heyday, is considered by PC gamers to be one of the particularly noteworthy titles that was ravaged by the effects of the console market. Some would argue Crytek has fallen prey to this, but the reality is they've tended towards less sandbox since Far Cry[2004], and the penalty for the stealth is usually that it takes longer not that it's overly difficult. Although I suppose I should emphasize Crysis[2006], FEAR[2005], and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl [2007] weren't exactly easy, unrevolutionary, or without their follow ups. Even Eidos who committed the sin that was Deus Ex: Coffee Wars appears ready to make up for it later this year.

 

[sporkbox]

Also, I urge you to find some proof that the mainstreaming of gaming was steady and progressive instead of coinciding with the release of the PS1[1994], PS2[2003], and Wii[2006] ... Games that, to any real gamer, were extremely easy and gave rise to an industry-wide drop in difficulty and solid game design.

I notice a complete and utter lack of accounting for Atari, the Crash of 1983, Commodore-Amiga, and mainstreaming of computers via the attraction of the internet isn't even mentioned instead of promoting Sony proprietary systems to the ignorance of other platforms and whining about Nintendo's revolutionary new systems which succeed in being both fun and useful in practical terms.

Deus Ex: Invisible War, released in 2003 ala your supposed heyday, is considered by PC gamers to be one of the particularly noteworthy titles that was ravaged by the effects of the console market. Crytek has tended towards less sandbox since Far Cry, so them shifting fully to set piece was not unexpected. At the same time we've had a solid run of various sandbox shooter games from various vendors, who haven't stopped development and Eidos appears ready to make up for the sin that was Deus Ex: Coffee Wars later this year.


Honestly the whole vendetta against "casual gaming" on your part makes no sense to me. This started with Pong being literally programmed in circuitry by Atari, who eventually shifted to FLASH EEPROM technology before there was really what you could call a CPU in modern terms. The Crash of 1983 resulting from the presumption they should be able to simply throw games out there and make money from them, and market otherwise being saturated in a dysfunctional manner. Fun afterall is the key factor, is it not? Why should old genres die completely just because they're unsophisticated by modern standards?

I believe you're misunderstanding my viewpoint. I didn't consider computers and the Internet because it only had an effect on the PC market, one that I'm not terribly knowledgeable on and chose not to talk about because of that ignorance. If fun is the key factor in gaming, then how do you explain the broad shift in genre preference? We went from varied tastes that were mostly balanced to a trifecta of casual sim games, FPSes, and western RPGs filling up at least 80% of the console and PC markets. If you're using fun to justify that shift, then you're admitting that the majority of people don't like classic style games.


Personally, I grew up with the NES. When I got older, I went back and played (ports, admittedly) of the older games and read up on the industry's history. Gaming was my first hobby and I took it seriously because I was in love with it. Today I enjoy a lot of different genres, from JRPG to Puzzle, Platformer, a little Sandbox, Strategy, etc. There are only a few genres I dislike. I think those who have contributed to the discussion have wrongly pinned me as one of the bloody gore-porn game players who only plays FPS games and only online. I have just as much wrong with those games and the people who play them as I do the casuals who think games are 2 hour distractions. My taste is broad and I've followed the industry since I was able to pick up a controller.


Unsophisticated doesn't mean bad. Super Mario Bros is not sophisticated at all. By today's standards it's archaic. Yet there's something about it that can capture even new gamers. It's all in its design and the fun garnered from that design. I have watched game design deteriorate over the years and only a few developers are intent on continuing to innovate. The best I can do as a gamer is to buy into what I think is innovative and fun. On the other hand, I hope to one day create homebrew games and make my own contributions to the industry.

 

[Prometheus]

I think those who have contributed to the discussion have wrongly pinned me as one of the bloody gore-porn game players who only plays FPS games and only online. I have just as much wrong with those games and the people who play them as I do the casuals who think games are 2 hour distractions. My taste is broad and I've followed the industry since I was able to pick up a controller.

I most certainly hope you're not referring to me there, because that's not the case at all, and it's not how you came across. (But I still don't think it's right to segregate others who are exactly the same as us, though. )

The best I can do as a gamer is to buy into what I think is innovative and fun.

This.

 

[sporkbox]

That's the thing, though, Prometheus. Casuals and hardcores are not the same as us garden-style gamers with broad tastes. That's fine and all, but both camps presume that they are representative of all gamers. I haven't met an even-minded casual or hardcore gamer, ever. Most interests are marked by the attitudes of their contributors. In this case, gaming. Why do they deserve the same respect that we do when they are partly responsible for the erosion of our medium? Their tastes, buying habits, and opinions continue to influence developer practices and make the problem worse. If we can't diversify the market, it will fall. Maybe we should blame some of the developers, too. After all, a gamer can't buy a game unless a developer makes it.

 

[Prometheus]

That's the thing, though, Prometheus. Casuals and hardcores are not the same as us garden-style gamers with broad tastes. That's fine and all, but both camps presume that they are representative of all gamers. I haven't met an even-minded casual or hardcore gamer, ever.

Just because you haven't met them, doesn't mean they don't exist. I've only ever come across the "uneven" ones (so to speak :lol: ) on the internet, myself.


In real life, all I see are the broad tastes you mention. I know folks who will go for something that doesn't seem like a game at all to my tastes (such as, say, Heavy Rain), but be just as happy playing all sorts of other things, from Super Mario Bros. to Animal Crossing to Rez. These are the real people who really buy games.

Most interests are marked by the attitudes of their contributors. In this case, gaming. Why do they deserve the same respect that we do when they are partly responsible for the erosion of our medium? Their tastes, buying habits, and opinions continue to influence developer practices and make the problem worse.

Again, as above, they are no different to us - they just have different tastes, as do we all.


The issue here, I think, are the "internet echo chamber" types (the "uneven" ones I mentioned above) who seemingly either try to affect the market for games that won't sell in great numbers (such as the fake "grass roots" campaigns that get "organised" for games like Zack & Wiki: The Quest for Barbaros' Treasure - and it's not a bad thing that they won't sell in any great numbers, as they still have an audience), or inadvertently influence developers who make the mistake of thinking that the views seen on the internet represent us all when they do not, instead of doing the hard work of seeing what customers really go for and respond to - lazy market-research, as it were.

If we can't diversify the market, it will fall. Maybe we should blame some of the developers, too. After all, a gamer can't buy a game unless a developer makes it.

As I outlined in the previous paragraph, this is absolutely correct - and this is why I agree with what you said about buying into what we find fun. I don't have any interest in programming, myself, so I wouldn't be able to come up with any games or my own, so this is the way forward for me, as it has been throughout my gaming "career". :lol: (I am currently attempting to write a novel based on some games, though, which is another approach to adding value to the products, and another part of the audience which was ignored after the 80s-to-mid-90s boom for these things, which back then as I understand it sold rather decently. But that's a whole other story!)

 

[ZXDunny]

I am assuming that you're either too young to remember, or American, or both, SporkBox


The video game crash of 1983 only really affected the United States - back in 1983 I was enjoying an enormous surge in games being released for the main computer of the UK at the time - the Sinclair Spectrum. The C64 really "arrived" a couple of years later, but the 1982-1986 heyday of the Spectrum was something to behold. Head over to the World Of Spectrum site and review the sheer volume of games and applications released in those years - the consoles of the time may have been dying out, but those of us (and I suspect Prometheus, though I don't know her age, may have been gaming around that time) that had a Sinclair machine in one form or another were really spoilt for choice.


The age of the bedroom coder (or "homebrew" as you call it now) was in full swing, but the important difference was that the major labels of the time were signing these guys up and producing very high-quality titles at what was considered "full price" back then - £8 to &10 a throw, which is like the £40-£50 we pay now. The likes of Matthew Smith, Derek Brewster (who could forget 3D Deathchase?), The Stampers (who now run Rare Ltd), Tony Crowther, and many others were all homebrewers, and produced games that have withstood the test of time and are considered classics.


This trend continued throughout the 80s and into the 90s as many of these coders moved up to the 16bit machines - and there was no let-up. No dearth of new releases throughout the summer months, always something revolutionary on the horizon.


And then the consoles took over, which was sadly inevitable. That was the true death of gaming when viewed by those of that played games back in the day. Summer lulls came around, as strategic holiday sales marketing took hold, and with the notable exceptions of some of the classics (Megaman et al), there were fewer and fewer decent games, games written by small teams with real heart and soul, coming to the fore.


It's never picked up since, I'm afraid.


Until games appeared in other formats. The bedroom coders are at it again, with Flash and iOS as their platforms, and games with heart and soul are being released again. These games are often of the same or similar quality as the old 8bit or Amiga/ST games, and as such get labelled with scorn by many newer, younger gamers as "casual" but they're really anything but - they can hold your attention as well as they always did back when we crowded around an old 14" portable TV with only the humming power pack to keep up warm, gasping in amazement as we ventured into yet another room in Willy's enormous mansion...


I suppose you had to be there, and you probably had to be british.


D.

 

[Prometheus]

The video game crash of 1983 only really affected the United States - back in 1983 I was enjoying an enormous surge in games being released for the main computer of the UK at the time - the Sinclair Spectrum. The C64 really "arrived" a couple of years later, but the 1982-1986 heyday of the Spectrum was something to behold. Head over to the World Of Spectrum site and review the sheer volume of games and applications released in those years - the consoles of the time may have been dying out, but those of us (and I suspect Prometheus, though I don't know her age, may have been gaming around that time) that had a Sinclair machine in one form or another were really spoilt for choice.

You guess correctly, though I had a Commodore 64 rather than a Spectrum. We really were spoiled for choice over here back then, weren't we?


I still have all of my tapes. A huuuuuuuge banana-box full of them, from top to bottom. Almost all gotten from £2 to £5, too. I think I only ever bought one "full price" title, though, and it turned out to be crap. :lol: (It was The Flintstones: Yabba Dabba Doo!, which I highly recommend avoiding. I only bought it because a relative had a Flintstones game that I liked, but it turned out that they had "The Flintstones", not "The Flintstones: Yabba Dabba Doo!". Worst £10 I ever spent.)

 

[Batou456]

If you're using fun to justify that shift, then you're admitting that the majority of people don't like classic style games.

The classic games I remember particularly from Commodore 64 was puzzle platformers, Blue Max, Zork, and Space Sims. Today I can buy half a dozen different new 2D puzzle platformers and various quirky new space combat sims.

There's a lot of amazingly sophisticated Flash games including one I saw a while ago where they basically let you use a whole variety of classic characters through the classic Mario levels. And obviously there's Super Tux. The main thing that's changed is what's particularly difficult to do involves a higher level of sophistication so games that used to be a big deal are now the province of smaller efforts with archives of text games and similar available.


The use of first person and over the shoulder perspective engines, doesn't intrinsically translate to Shooter. Neither Dark Messiah, Witcher, Assassin's Creed, or numerous other titles involve firearms and are as much about immersive stories as they are about gameplay. Meanwhile with Mass Effect, STALKER, and Deus Ex before them the Shooter genre has emphasized interactivity not only in terms of combat options, but also story options. The limited programming assets and shared memory of existing console systems means they have some very serious limits on how big the universe/how detailed it can be and with no upgrades you're forced to simply trade off if you acquiesce to better graphics.


I won't lie and say I'm not disappointed what The Longest Journey started flashed more then it ignited, but Telltale despite all the criticisms I might level their way continues to make adventure games, as do the Indies. There's even some attempts at mixing Adventure and Puzzle like Big Brain Wolf, although I'm not sure I'd necessary argue for it over the classic Dr. Brains series.


Exactly what genres are you claiming has died out? Recognizing that game development is on a multiyear cycle, of course.

 

[sporkbox]

It sounds like you lucked out pretty well in Britain! I am indeed American and, as I mentioned earlier, I had to read up on the history, since I was born in 1985. I recently read some articles about the history of RARE, and it was pretty interesting. I was well aware of homebrew being very successful, however, especially with the Bitmap Brothers. I wish I had been around for the Amiga since it seemed to be a great platform.


I disagree with you on the iOS et al games, though. I haven't seen any that are imaginative or fun. Older games had a certain charm to them that most of today's games can't match unless the devs go back and figure out how to recreate that charm. With such limited technology back then, it forced devs to be creative. With limitations almost nil today, devs have a truly blank canvas (which is good), but no imperative for creativity. I sincerely think that limitations are what inspire creativity the most. When machines had kilobytes of memory (if that!) and < 100 MHz processors, creating a game was truly a feat. Creating one that was fun was even harder. So even back then, creating and playing games had a sense of accomplishment that came with it.

 

[sporkbox]

If you're using fun to justify that shift, then you're admitting that the majority of people don't like classic style games.

The classic games I remember particularly from Commodore 64 was puzzle platformers, Blue Max, Zork, and Space Sims. Today I can buy half a dozen different new 2D puzzle platformers and various quirky new space combat sims.

There's a lot of amazingly sophisticated Flash games including one I saw a while ago where they basically let you use a whole variety of classic characters through the classic Mario levels. And obviously there's Super Tux. The main thing that's changed is what's particularly difficult to do involves a higher level of sophistication so games that used to be a big deal are now the province of smaller efforts with archives of text games and similar available.


The use of first person and over the shoulder perspective engines, doesn't intrinsically translate to Shooter. Neither Dark Messiah, Witcher, Assassin's Creed, or numerous other titles involve firearms and are as much about immersive stories as they are about gameplay. Meanwhile with Mass Effect, STALKER, and Deus Ex before them the Shooter genre has emphasized interactivity not only in terms of combat options, but also story options. The limited programming assets and shared memory of existing console systems means they have some very serious limits on how big the universe/how detailed it can be and with no upgrades you're forced to simply trade off if you acquiesce to better graphics.


I won't lie and say I'm not disappointed what The Longest Journey started flashed more then it ignited, but Telltale despite all the criticisms I might level their way continues to make adventure games, as do the Indies. There's even some attempts at mixing Adventure and Puzzle like Big Brain Wolf, although I'm not sure I'd necessary argue for it over the classic Dr. Brains series.


Exactly what genres are you claiming has died out? Recognizing that game development is on a multiyear cycle, of course.

I haven't claimed a single genre to have died. I was just challenging your logic since it didn't make sense to me. If fun is the key factor in games being successful and the majority of gamers now focus on those 3 primary genres, that must mean (through your own claim) that most people consider those three genres more fun than all the others. But you just proved that there are markets for other genres, though they are smaller and less prone to hype and marketing, which means the monolithic publishers out there don't give two shits about those of us who don't buy into their blockbusters.


That's why I think that when the gaming industry goes through its inevitable recession and/or crash, it will probably be a return of homebrew that will revive the industry. Not so much for the games (though some are very high quality), but more the idea that people will build their own ideas without the draconian practices of today's console manufacturers. Someone (maybe even the OPT one day!) will release something that's different and set new precedents, just like the NES and the Wii.

 

[Prometheus]

If fun is the key factor in games being successful and the majority of gamers now focus on those 3 primary genres, that must mean (through your own claim) that most people consider those three genres more fun than all the others.

Remember the decline that I mentioned before? That's the key thing here - it's not "most people", it's more like "most of the people who are left".

 

[sporkbox]

I'm not sure that the gaming industry lost that many people as a result of the PS1/N64 and PS2/GCN/XBX era. Definitely some due to lacking variety, but how then do we account for the return of some gamers (and acquiring new players) from the DS and Wii? I imagine Kinect and Move have attracted some as well, though not nearly as many as Nintendo due to how similar the tech is.


If I understand you correctly, you're saying that despite the overall expansion of the market that they've forgotten about a specific demographic due to the focus on those 3 genres? That makes sense.

 

[Prometheus]

I'm saying there hasn't been an overall expansion (at least until the Wii and DS started bringing a number of old customers back and many new customers in). This has been hidden by good economic times, population growth, and multiple-console-ownership, as I mentioned earlier.


LOTS of people were lost as a result of the eras you mention, unfortunately. The problem is not what you probably think it is - it's not certain genres getting precedence (after all, we had that with platformers in the 90s - the same thing happening with war shooters now is only natural, really), it's not certain types of people playing, it's not "demographics" (judging things on the basis of "demographics" is actually a problem related to the industryite labelling that I spoke out against earlier), it's actually very very simple and related entirely to not making what people want to buy: It's disinterest. As I said earlier, if you make something that we don't find fun, or worthwhile, or worth the money, we just silently go elsewhere.

 

[Batou456]

the majority of gamers now focus on those 3 primary genres

I still note zero attempt to justify this claim or the break in logic you fly off with on it. Indeed you don't even use real game classes instead of a nebulous grouping of the utterly meaningless "simulation" class, broad brush FPS-class, and the virtually meaningless "Western RPG" class.

None of those categories really holds the best selling Console games of the latest year to have such statistics. Those were dominated by Exercise made Fun programs, the newest Mario, etc. Of the three you list only First Person Shooters with massive marketing campaigns and rapid turn over show up in the top 10 in terms of gross sale from what I've seen, despite having a vastly higher per unit price.


Digital Distribution statistics aren't that open, but the last one I remember seeing had a rather ridiculous number of Half Life 1 units being sold, and of course Valve thinks Portal 2, a first person puzzle game, will do so well they have literal billboards out and about.


From my perspective you're running off on a wild tangent here. Electronic Arts and Activision-Blizzard not being publishing companies that you really want to continue to exist is legitimate enough, but not what you're talking about.

 

[sporkbox]

the majority of gamers now focus on those 3 primary genres

I still note zero attempt to justify this claim or the break in logic you fly off with on it. Indeed you don't even use real game classes instead of a nebulous grouping of the utterly meaningless "simulation" class, broad brush FPS-class, and the virtually meaningless "Western RPG" class.

None of those categories really holds the best selling Console games of the latest year to have such statistics. Those were dominated by Exercise made Fun programs, the newest Mario, etc. Of the three you list only First Person Shooters with massive marketing campaigns and rapid turn over show up in the top 10 in terms of gross sale from what I've seen, despite having a vastly higher per unit price.


Digital Distribution statistics aren't that open, but the last one I remember seeing had a rather ridiculous number of Half Life 1 units being sold, and of course Valve thinks Portal 2, a first person puzzle game, will do so well they have literal billboards out and about.


From my perspective you're running off on a wild tangent here. Electronic Arts and Activision-Blizzard not being publishing companies that you really want to continue to exist is legitimate enough, but not what you're talking about.

The sim games I'm referring to are games like The Sims, Farmville, Frontierville, practically every Zynga game, etc. And you'd be a fool to say those games haven't been insanely popular.


FPSes are just that. First Person Shooters. Every CoD, Medal of Honor, Killzone, Halo. All of those have also enjoyed massive popularity and success.


Lastly, Western RPGs. This genre doesn't do as well as the other two, but (in the States anyway) it does much better than Japanese RPGs. Games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Borderlands (which also combines FPS), the upcoming Skyrim, and others. They still do very well (mostly among PC gamers) and stand out among the other genres.


Runner-up would be MMORPGs, which have exploded in the past decade. My perspective here is beyond just the past year. The entire current generation has seen the rise of these genres. They were building steam (or establishing themselves) in the past two generations. Today, they are the most-played genres.

 

[ZXDunny]

The video game crash of 1983 only really affected the United States - back in 1983 I was enjoying an enormous surge in games being released for the main computer of the UK at the time - the Sinclair Spectrum. The C64 really "arrived" a couple of years later, but the 1982-1986 heyday of the Spectrum was something to behold. Head over to the World Of Spectrum site and review the sheer volume of games and applications released in those years - the consoles of the time may have been dying out, but those of us (and I suspect Prometheus, though I don't know her age, may have been gaming around that time) that had a Sinclair machine in one form or another were really spoilt for choice.

You guess correctly, though I had a Commodore 64 rather than a Spectrum. We really were spoiled for choice over here back then, weren't we?


I still have all of my tapes. A huuuuuuuge banana-box full of them, from top to bottom. Almost all gotten from £2 to £5, too.

Well, that's your fault for going for the non-patriotic C64


I remember fondly my first "big box" game, The Hobbit, and its ground breaking new adventure AI system. And of course, Sabre Wulf was the first main-stream "arcade" style game I grabbed - and I didn't finish that one until 20 years later... I can remember very well heading into town on my pushbike with a couple of quid's worth of pocket money burning a hole in my pocket and browsing the Mastertronic and Codemasters budget range. God, there were some awful games (Ninja Scooter Simulator, anyone?) but for £1.99 there were some stunning times to be had. It's a crying shame that the only way that games these days can get a challenge together is to make the enemies more resistant to gunfire rather than upping the difficulty level of the gameplay. Likewise, the only way that some major FPS releases can get some longevity is by adding Multiplayer modes to add to the thin veneer of their single player campaigns... Sad indeed that gaming has almost irretrievably lost that certain something that had me coming back again and again, despite the 5 minute (or 10 minutes with the 128k games) tape loading times.


That fact alone made them anything but "casual" as when you put that amount of time into waiting for your gaming fix you almost certainly put the hours in after the load has finished. Now I can load those games instantly, but although they're the same quality as what many consider to be "casual" games, they are anything but and are just as hard now as they were then. I challenge any of today's gamers to finish Pyjamarama or complete Cybernoid on one life (I can still do that now), get through all 20 caverns in manic miner, or manage to get past day 5 in Deathchase - those games take a skill that today's gamers just don't seem to have.


I suppose that our young american friend is right in one respect - with little in the way of processing power or graphical capability the focus was on stunning gameplay (anyone remember pixel-perfect jumps in platformers?) and now that graphics and sound are of almost movie quality, that focus has shifted. I play Dynamite Dan and don't see the surroundings as something to be gawped at; it's something to either be avoided or used to further my progress. Bioshock was one game I got into in a big way, but I found myself slowing down the pace so I could go look out of the windows in an underwater city - the gameplay was generic and uninspired, but the scenery was gorgeous. The game became less of a challenge and more of a scenic tour. That's not to belittle the game in any way other than to say that it lacks what those 8bit games had in spades.


I need to discuss with you at some point what the gems were in the C64 line-up - I was rabidly anti-C64 in my youth (you had to be one or the other!) and as such missed out on a lot of really excellent titles that I'm just starting to find now via Vice64 on the Pandora. I've tried many of the C64-equivalent of the Speccy games I loved and found them wanting in many ways; I assume that the C64 had other strengths and I'm wondering which games should be getting my attention. As this is off-topic here, I'll PM you later on about it


D.

 

[ZXDunny]

Valve thinks Portal 2, a first person puzzle game, will do so well they have literal billboards out and about.

And well they might. Portal was a lovely game, and one that demanded the "easy" setting so you could enjoy it's real strength - the dark, twisted humour. The puzzles were hardly taxing, but that game was so compelling to play that many gamers finished it in one sitting. If Portal 2 has narrative even close to Portal, it will be a must-have game. In this case, it's definitely not about the gameplay or puzzles - they're just there to provide pacing for the fantastic storyline.


D.

 

[sporkbox]

I'm saying there hasn't been an overall expansion (at least until the Wii and DS started bringing a number of old customers back and many new customers in). This has been hidden by good economic times, population growth, and multiple-console-ownership, as I mentioned earlier.


LOTS of people were lost as a result of the eras you mention, unfortunately. The problem is not what you probably think it is - it's not certain genres getting precedence (after all, we had that with platformers in the 90s - the same thing happening with war shooters now is only natural, really), it's not certain types of people playing, it's not "demographics" (judging things on the basis of "demographics" is actually a problem related to the industryite labelling that I spoke out against earlier), it's actually very very simple and related entirely to not making what people want to buy: It's disinterest. As I said earlier, if you make something that we don't find fun, or worthwhile, or worth the money, we just silently go elsewhere.

What I find funny is that the genre focus and the disinterest of buyers is related. How else do you explain how people became disinterested? There _was_ a price jump during that time, which could have turned consumers away. But if the economy was doing so well, then that couldn't have been the problem. I'm more likely to believe that the fall of platformers and arcade style games contributed to the loss of gamers. Developers stopped making those kinds of games, so people either found a platform that _did_ provide that (the GameBoy/GameGear/Wonderswan, etc) or they stopped gaming altogether.


Demographics may have been a factor, as it always is. As gamers get older, their tastes change, and some of them stop playing altogether; that disinterest thing you mentioned. In that case it's likely other parts of their life taking precedence over gaming. It's nowhere near the dominating cause, but it's a little naive to just dismiss demographics. Sure, marketers eat it like candy and try to push that, but it's somewhere between the end-all-be-all and irrelevant.

 

[Prometheus]

Well, that's your fault for going for the non-patriotic C64

Hahaha, how did I know you'd say that? That brings back some memories in and of itself. :lol:

(Ninja Scooter Simulator, anyone?)

Sounds like a candidate for Dr. Ashen's "Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of"!

Sad indeed that gaming has almost irretrievably lost that certain something that had me coming back again and again, despite the 5 minute (or 10 minutes with the 128k games) tape loading times.

Only five or ten minutes? Blimey. Some C64 stuff had you waiting up to an hour... Actually I vaguely recall a formerly-commercial game that was given away as a cover-tape on a magazine, that honest-to-god took about two hours to load. And it wasn't really very fun. I honestly can't even remember the name of it, but it put me off so much that after that two hour wait, a short play was all that was needed to tell me never to load it again. And I never did.

(anyone remember pixel-perfect jumps in platformers?)

There's something that some of my fellow Mega Man fans call "toe-grabbing" (you can guess what that refers to - and it's still around, too), so yes, I absolutely do. :lol:

I need to discuss with you at some point what the gems were in the C64 line-up - I was rabidly anti-C64 in my youth (you had to be one or the other!) and as such missed out on a lot of really excellent titles that I'm just starting to find now via Vice64 on the Pandora. I've tried many of the C64-equivalent of the Speccy games I loved and found them wanting in many ways; I assume that the C64 had other strengths and I'm wondering which games should be getting my attention. As this is off-topic here, I'll PM you later on about it

I'll look forward to that. I'm still learning of many gems myself, I must admit - obviously, as time's gone on, I've become aware of a lot of stuff that I missed that is as much to my tastes as what I had at the time. I might have to pick your brains about some Spectrum stuff as well, as I have relatively little experience with it (and only a small collection of games). Obviously, though, going on what I've seen you say in various threads before now (and in this one), I know I'm going to have to track down Sabre Wulf - that's a given.

What I find funny is that the genre focus and the disinterest of buyers is related. How else do you explain how people became disinterested? There _was_ a price jump during that time, which could have turned consumers away. But if the economy was doing so well, then that couldn't have been the problem. I'm more likely to believe that the fall of platformers and arcade style games contributed to the loss of gamers. Developers stopped making those kinds of games, so people either found a platform that _did_ provide that (the GameBoy/GameGear/Wonderswan, etc) or they stopped gaming altogether.

We're on the same page here. This is exactly what I mean. Many of us did migrate to handhelds (although personally I was always quite handheld-centric to begin with ).


(Some folks underestimate how important arcade-style game design is, but if you look at a great many of the games that are getting praise in this thread, you can see it. Obviously, it's not the be-all-and-end-all, and in no way am I saying that absolutely all games should be that way because that wouldn't work, but my understanding is that it is one key to selling lots.)

Sure, marketers eat it like candy and try to push that, but it's somewhere between the end-all-be-all and irrelevant.

I agree with this. I was just referring to "demographics" in the too-commonly-used "be all and end all" sense that you see out there. My apologies for misunderstanding your usage of the term.