nonakani

Fffffff I remember finding this on the internet and it BLEW MIND MIND.  Best PMD-based thing ever.

thepsientist:

Are you kidding I live for this kind of insight lol. I agree with you! What I mean is it’s just such a shame that in this day in age I see so many weird “lazy” things happening in games. I don’t want to point fingers because I really don’t want to offend someone’s favorite game, but I’m really not joking when I say “Were games in the 80’s lazy? Yeah some of them were”. But what I’m noticing is it’s a lot harder back then to notice it because it was known as that, weird period of “trial and error”. There was no real guide to making a game perfect or amazing, there were just guidelines.

Today there’s still guidelines but because of the technology I think it’s much easier to see laziness.

@_@ now we’re both overthinking, haha.

And that’s why I tagged it that way XD

But yeah, it’s sort of a vicious cycle: say, Game A is released (year and era and pixel count doesn’t matter).  It’s a huge hit, everybody loves it, the studio decides to make a sequel.  In this sequel, the accentuate the parts of Game A that people liked, and advertise it as such.  Game B is released and is again a hit because it contains much of what made Game A a hit.  They then distill this further in to Game C, then in to Game D, etc.

There’s a huge amount of “much of the same” mentality in marketing, and not just in games.  After all, don’t fix what isn’t broken, right?  Game A sold for a reason, after all!

And it works, too.  I’m not saying that a sequel keeping with the spirit of the original is bad, or that keeping elements is poor design, or that changing things up is the only way anything can ever be good (there are always exceptions to everything in cases like these, no exceptions), but hey, Game B sells because it’s a sequel to Game A.

This does, however, create two interesting effects: one being that no matter how good a game actually is people will perceive it as being exactly the same/a rehash based entirely on its advertising.  (I’m so amazingly guilty of this.  See my line about war shooters in my previous post - I’m sure there’s great war shooters out there somewhere.)

The other is, in some cases, a dislike of change, regardless of the result of the change.  For example, there’s plenty of people that dislike Mother 3 because it deviates from Earthbound in tone and the tightness of plot.  That’s fine, and people can like whatever they want, and it doesn’t make anybody else’s opinion more or less valid.  It’s just a different game.  Though, to be fair, that’s not as much an advertizing or demographic thing.

thepsientist:

I think that’s the ultimate. Classics had fewer things to work with so they (the creators) put…

Now, I’m by no means gonna say that all modern games are bad or all classic games are, uh, classics, but it seems to me that the paradigm of what a “good” video game is in the general market now is definitely different from before, a good deal of which being because of graphical advancements, I think.  (And maybe changes in marketing strategies and perceived demographics.  Stuff like that.)  Don’t get me wrong, I know how much thought and effort goes in to a single video game (read: a crap-ton), but it does sometimes seem like modern games (or, at least, mass-marketed modern games) lack…depth?  This is, of course, my personal opinion, and there are many, many exceptions to this, again, in my opinion.

What it basically comes down to is that I like a certain kind of video game (made of several specifications which I myself am not even sure of, which somehow mash together to make something I consider “good”).  We all like a certain kind of video game.  Sadly, not all video games will be that certain kind of video game.

My certain kind of video game just doesn’t mesh with what a lot of general culture thinks are video games, I guess?  (Not nerd culture, they’re all up with the retro and stuff, yo.)  What I mean to say is that I’m biased against war shooters.

(Though the perception that a game cannot be deeply engaging on a personal, psychological, narrative, or what-have-you level and also have “good” graphics by modern standards frustrates me a lot - these are not mutually exclusive, world!  Then again, now we’re getting in to what people and gamers consider as beautiful - to one person, beautiful graphics are 256-color, high-detail polygons, to another it’s the sleek simplicity of 8-bit.  And then there’s how far on the narrative sliding scale any given game should be, in a single person’s opinion.  Should puzzle games have plots?  Should games have stories of novel-like depth?)

Wow, words just flew out of my mouth (keyboard), there.  I think I jumped between three different arguments, too.  …I should get back to studying now XD