Video Games Went Down the Wrong Path!

The*Mad*Gamer wrote:

The desire to infuse games with meaningful stories (which, btw, looking at the medium as a generalized whole, is an entirely failed effort) has lead to "less rock, more talk." Personally, I blame Final Fantasy VII for leading designers into thinking they're film directors

Great comment and totally agree! But may have started before Final Fantasy VII

Of course, but it's definitely where it became the standard. People and developers responded to it like never before. It's a crap game to boot.

You want better control and immersion? Get an Occulus Rift, a Virtuix Omni, and a Gun controller. I got to play Alien Isolation this way and it damn near scare the shit out of me.

Pinball will always be better in real life, but I am satisfied with the way Farsight as recreated it. Far better than Virtual or Future Pinball. I just hope they get to bring out Big Bang Bar.

The*Mad*Gamer wrote: I went to a Retro Arcade over the weekend and had a great time, so much so I realized that today's video games are not nearly as fun. I have said many times that modern video games are just "push button movies". Most code monkeys have no idea how to construct an interesting story because they are too wrapped up in graphics. Modern video games went down the path of better and better graphics when they should have concentrated on better CONTROL!

Taste is always subjective, of course, but I'm not certain that "story" is that important in making a quality video game. My opinion, of course. Here are a few examples.

The Last of Us from the beginning, people gushed over this game. To Naughty Dog's credit, they did nail the story and the presentation. And given the subject matter, I wanted to love this game. I really did. But it's the textbook definition of a push-button movie: long cut scenes strung together by play sequences of the most banal kind--bad controls, poor enemy A.I., and linear level design without a single ounce of imagination. Despite the strong story, The Last of Us is perhaps the most dreadfully dull video game I've ever played.

Compare this with Far Cry 4, a game in which the story is all but an aside. You're this fellow who comes back to the country of Kirat to scatter his mother's ashes, and you get caught up in a civil war happening there. Blah blah blah. But what makes Far Cry 4 special is that the controls are intuitive, and it's an open sandbox. You can do as you please. It's up to you, not the game designers, to figure out how to solve problems. When you take down a fortress, for example, do you use stealth and snipe your enemies from the distance, or do you go in all guns blazing? And what happens when a tiger shows up and pounces on you from behind? It's systematic chaos, and it just works. Yet the story is irrelevant.

I keep how important story is in video games, but honestly, I don't think it is. It's all about the minute-to-minute gameplay. I also thing that allowing gamers to be creative is incredibly important.

You want better control and immersion? Get an Occulus Rift, a Virtuix Omni, and a Gun controller. I got to play Alien Isolation this way and it damn near scare the shit out of me.

Probably scare the shit out of me also! I want high control but low to medium immersion... I don't want to get sucked into an entertainment medium I can't get out of!
I also played Space Invaders this weekend, the first video game I ever played and I remember at the pizza parlor there was a line for it! There was a guy there playing pinball shaking his head, saying that Pinball was much better! Little did he know what was coming at the time! HA

They say within 60 years sex with robots will be the norm. Glad I won't be here to see it. If we are honest we all know that video games are going the virtual sex route and its sad. But I can see the other side as well...Feminism is slowly destroying our culture, ask anyone who has been divorced and lost his kids through a court system that strongly favors females, ask a man that has been falsely accused of rape the hell they have been through.....Many men in Japan are giving up women altogether, they are called Herbivore men...go look at Youtube and see the kind of life these guys have, no wonder they immerse themselves in video games.

From the humble beginnings of Space Invaders to Sex Robots.....Now you see why I have gone back to Knizia games! HAHAHA

I'd say family courts are sexist, not feminist, but ok

fastbilly1 wrote: You want better control and immersion? Get an Occulus Rift, a Virtuix Omni, and a Gun controller. I got to play Alien Isolation this way and it damn near scare the shit out of me.

That right there is the "wrong path" Mr. Weeks speaks of. I wouldn't call it the wrong path, I'd call one of the two parallel paths that just doesn't mean much to me -- "prettier is better." A focus on graphics is not a focus on immersion, it's just a focus on prettier paint on the same jalopy.

I want a new jalopy. I want to see new directions, and instead the first demo game for VR is Bullet Train, another First-Person Shooter with the same gameplay as every other First Person Shooter since Wolfenstein. I liked Wolfenstein, but I'm done with Wolfenstein and I'm not interested in the same game with "more realistic" graphics because it's the same damn game!

The other path is the creative aspect, and that can't be conquered with sheer mass. It can't be conquered by putting more and more programmers and processing power on the job. It's the part of the package that defies project management.

Tempest was an interesting game because it did something new, and did it well. I can still recall my buddy Brian Reedy describing it to me the day after he found it in the arcade at Colonial Park Mall in Harrisburg. It made no sense to me. I couldn't picture it from his description, because its concept was fundamentally different from anything else I had ever played. To this day I have two memories of the game, the one that matches reality and the one that I painted in my mind based on Brian's description.

To some extent I think the more limited graphics and processing forced publishers to take more risks, because they couldn't use paint to rerelease the same game. Back then creativity may have been the easier commodity to acquire on short notice.

S.

That reminds me, they really screwed up that board game version of Wallenstein, didn't they. It had nothing to do with shooting Nazis at all.

Something that really gets forgotten is that those early arcade days were a pioneer time. You had these games being made by sometimes one guy in a garage somewhere...not teams of "devs" on a payroll for a third-party contractor working on the arm hair animation for a game with a $25 million budget and anticipated sales of $400 million. It was a naïve and sometimes borderline amateur industry back then. So you got these really maverick, out there concepts like Tempest. Or Q-Bert, Centipede or Berzerk for that matter.

To Sag's point, I remember reading in game magazines at the time or in books such as the fabled "How to Win at Video Games" (which had ILLUSTRATIONS instead of screenshots!) about games and yeah, your imagination would set it up a certain way...and you'd see the game in an arcade and play it, and suddenly all of those tips went out the window because you had no idea what the hell you were doing. Until you got better out it.

Also, I like women.

Steve, Sag, and Michael-
If you haven't seen it yet, there's a pretty good documentary on Netflix called Atari: Game Over. It kind of points out some of the stuff Michael was talking about what with those early Atari games being made by one person, there was no big budget. They also hit on stuff like how experimental it was back then, that stuff we take for granted like "3 lives" had to be figured out by someone. It spends quite a bit of time on the fabled E.T. cartridge landfill, but I liked how they don't shame the guy who designed it (who also did the terrific Yar's Revenge, btw). Pretty interesting stuff. Having been born in '84 and having the NES be my first in-home video game system, I'd never played a 2600. After watching that doc, I was so fascinated by it and the game design employed, I went down to my local retro gaming store and picked one up (with that awesome wood-grain paneling) and about 5 games for less than $60. No nostalgia attached, I love that damned machine.

Josh Look wrote: Steve, Sag, and Michael-
If you haven't seen it yet, there's a pretty good documentary on Netflix called Atari: Game Over. It kind of points out some of the stuff Michael was talking about what with those early Atari games being made by one person, there was no big budget. They also hit on stuff like how experimental it was back then, that stuff we take for granted like "3 lives" had to be figured out by someone.

Yep, this stuff was absolutely garage-band efforts.

What I find curious is how many of the original core concepts essentially dead-ended. The karate-fighting concept lives on and at one point even had dinosaurs fighting each other. First Person Shooter is likely 80% of gaming revenue currently. The Defender concept -- cruising along the landscape -- is gone. Robotron's and Berserk's top-down combat is largely gone.

In college I remember thinking to myself that games were changing in order to generate more revenue, not to make for better gaming. Games in arcades weren't convincing people to put fifty cents in instead of a quarter, so there was a need to keep people pumping quarters mid-game in order to continue play. The idea of having wizards set high scores was interesting to end-users, but could take a machine financially offline for an entire evening while one guy ran up a million points on Missile Command for twenty-five cents. So it wasn't a positive direction for the companies making the machine nor the arcade owners maintaining them. I think that had more of an effect on the evolution of the industry than the home consoles did, as I think much of the transition had already occurred when the bigger home consoles hit the streets.

I think Sag has it right-- it was all about getting people to pump in more quarters. With fighting games, you had two people playing (and paying) simultaneously. With racing games, it was as many as you could string together. With shooters, the added story element kept people paying to see the outcome.

I was fortunate to have grown up during the hey-day of classic arcades. I mourn for the amazing diversity of ideas we saw back then. Side-scrollers like Defender and Moon Patrol; shooters like Galaga, Tempest, and Missile Command; puzzle-mazes like Pac-Man, Q*Bert, and Burger Time; and then the just weird ones like Crazy Climber, Jungle Time, Tapper, Marble Madness, Bubble Time, Paperboy, Tetris, Punch Out, etc.

I don't know if I could pinpoint any one factor that caused the shift in design strategies. Home consoles certainly did ding the arcade market for a number of years. And when fighting games like Mortal Kombat hit big, suddenly there seemed to be only one type of game around.

I guess I don't really have anything meaningful to add to this conversation, but it's a subject that's dear to my heart. Thanks for letting me reminisce!

Tapper and Marble Madness! Two of my faves

R.P.Kraul wrote: The Last of Us from the beginning, people gushed over this game. To Naughty Dog's credit, they did nail the story and the presentation. And given the subject matter, I wanted to love this game. I really did. But it's the textbook definition of a push-button movie: long cut scenes strung together by play sequences of the most banal kind--bad controls, poor enemy A.I., and linear level design without a single ounce of imagination. Despite the strong story, The Last of Us is perhaps the most dreadfully dull video game I've ever played.

I don't disagree that The Last of Us is ultimately a player-assisted linear narrative, but it seems an odd one to pick on, as there are so many other games out there more amenable to the critique. Relative to a lot of games, TLoU does a good job of blending cutscene and action. I don't think I put my controller down while playing it, in contrast to the more disruptive "let's watch a movie now" aspect of many current and recent games.

I was an Arcade Manager back in my college days. The arcades were so packed you could barely walk through them. I remember the regulars and the guy that was king of the hill on the Star Wars machine I spoke of earlier in my post. The funniest story about him was that he would come in on Friday nights and I would walk over and say hello checking on how his game was going, he would say its going great and soon a crowd would begin to gather to watch his mastery of the game.

One day the arcade was being cleaned and the machine was unplugged erasing his high score, he was pissed!!! LMAO!

Even my high school teacher would come in to play MS Pac Man...almost everybody was hooked back then! In the teachers class you would get a naysayer saying arcades were a waste of money and he would defend his Pac Man playing by saying, no its not a waste of money because you enjoy the time while playing!

I also got into my one and only fight at that arcade. A guy refused to leave after we were closed and it ended in fists flying, I was pushed into the girls bathroom at which point I said screw this and called the police! HAHAHA!

The original Gauntlet machine was a complete hit! 4 people at once playing that was a great thing to watch. Along with the fighting games...Track and Field was a big hit at my arcade also....and Pole Position was always busy. I was the guy walking around opening the machine when the quarter got stuck and giving change.

I sat in a booth like a king overlooking the arcade, inside my booth I had three clipboards of reports. The clipboards hung on the wall and behind each clipboard was a Playboy centerfold, hahaha...only I could see these so I got away with it!

I was lucky to be there at the start of the video arcade games too. These days, my reflexes aren't what they used to be, so I'm just easy meat for Defender/Stargate, Robotron, etc. Even Xevious beats my old, slow ass these days.

Today, video arcade machines are mostly dedicated hardware. Jet-ski machines, sit-down racing machines, shotguns on steel-jacketed cables, etc. There might be a beat 'em up machine or two with them in the arcade, or maybe a retro Ms. Pac Man or Galaga. If your argument is, "Game controls ain't what they used to be," game controls today are much better now than what they were then.

Sagrilarius wrote:

In college I remember thinking to myself that games were changing in order to generate more revenue, not to make for better gaming. Games in arcades weren't convincing people to put fifty cents in instead of a quarter, so there was a need to keep people pumping quarters mid-game in order to continue play. The idea of having wizards set high scores was interesting to end-users, but could take a machine financially offline for an entire evening while one guy ran up a million points on Missile Command for twenty-five cents. So it wasn't a positive direction for the companies making the machine nor the arcade owners maintaining them. I think that had more of an effect on the evolution of the industry than the home consoles did, as I think much of the transition had already occurred when the bigger home consoles hit the streets.

Sag's absolutely right. In the mid-80's there were games that a good player could play for as long as the player could stay upright. My brother could play Robotron until he got bored or got enough points to win the monthly high-score contest. Heck, I could get 20-30 minutes off of Galaga or Xevious. That wasn't good business, and beat 'em ups fixed that problem. Twitch gaming and platforming went to home consoles, along with games that had storylines and plot.