The "General Games Chat" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
Mwahaha! What a clever pun for a title! *clears throat* anyways, as you've probably guessed, this is a topic about the alarming amount of fads the gaming industry has gone through as of late. We all remember conkers in school. And Pogz. And Yo-Yos. And Pokemon Cards...well, whenever someone makes a mega-successful video-game these days, it seems there are several thousand clones all bending their knees, ready to leap up and hitch a ride on the Bandwagon of Gaming. Nice bloke that I am, I'll show you some of the trends running amok in SRs across the country, giving examples, pros, cons, and more of my immortal wit. On with the show!
----------------------
1) Extreme Sports
Recently, at the Playstation Experience in the heart of London, as well as top games such as 'Tekken 4', 'The Getaway' and...'Tekken 4', there was a bunch of clowns on bikes and boards, flying around and spinning elaborately as they wore oversized jeans and hooded sweatshirts with 'System Of A Down' all over them. These were extreme sportsmen (or women, I guess. It's hard to tell through the sweatshirts). Now, ever since the very first Virtual Hawk kickflipped onto a PSOne disc all those years ago, we've been bitten by what I call the 'protective headgear bug'. THPS4 will be out before Christmas, not mentioning the fact that Activision have signed up Tony until 2015, Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX 2 has just hit the shelves, Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer is on its way, Shawn Palmer's Pro Snowboarder is...in the trade-ins basket, and there are tonnes of others not really worth mentioning, such as the alarming-in-the-sense-that-somebody-actually-made-that-thing Extreme Scooter and not-real-but-someone-made-a-CD-cover-of-it-anyway Steven Hawking Pro Wheelchair.
There are variations on the genre, such as SSX Tricky's arcade styled snowboarding trickfest and BMX XXX's win-points-unlock-porn system. The point is...who keeps buying all this? Does anyone really need more than one type of extreme game? You get a free demo of the snowboarding one on the skateboarding one (to make things simpler, I'll refer to the games like this from now on) and frankly, the only way I could tell the difference is there was no music in the snowboarding one. Or maybe there was? I was too bored to care. Unfortunately, companies seem to be beating a horse so dead its got maggots crawling inside the dead maggots that USED to crawl inside the dead horse. With a new wave of slightly different games though, there is hope...at least, we keep telling ourselves that because we know we're going to buy them anyway.
2) Cel-Shading
Remember Jet Set Radio? Damn good game, was that. It took a crazy new game that involved both spray painting and skating (bare with me though, this IS in the right paragraph)...and put it with some of the most original graphics ever. It was like being in a world where everything was 2D...but it was 3D. This is the first major instance of cel-shading. Then along came Fur Fighters, which also took cel-shading to make its cartoon-y characters look more cartoon-y. And then there was a load of other games like Cel Damage, that just had cel-shading just for the sake of saying it had cel-shading. Then came Jet Set Radio Future.
See what I mean about worrying trends? Sooner or later I had to scan every prospective purchase just to make sure 'cel-shading' wasn't anywhere on the box. Recently, we've seen uproar as Zelda, every Nintendo fanboy's favourite RPG featuring a little elf, became Celda. People had seen the cool, bad-asss looking 3D Link and then, a couple of months later, they are confronted with something off a third-rate Diggit cartoon. And this is from Nintendo, a company adamant that they are not just a glorified subsiduary of Fisher Price! I mean, come on guys, the first time we saw it was really cool, and every time we see a new way of using it (like in Red Dead Revolver, a FPS or Auto Modellista, a racing sim) it's quite cool but now...it's NOT cool, ok? It's just old, and tired, and stale, and overused.
3) Games Where You Do Naughty Things
OK, for the want of a better genre title, this is the type of game shown brilliantly in GTA3. Soon to be shown in GTA:Vice City. And True Crime: Streets of LA. And The Getaway. And currently seen in Mafia. See already how many games like this there are? Mr Ripper did a very good topic a while back on the world's ever-increasing thirst for blood and gore in games, and this is pretty much your proof. Producers are falling over themselves to recreate a few square miles of Nowheresville and fill it with guns and bad guys...Sony recently snapped up a deal with Rockstar to make sure Grand Theft Auto doesn't go to any other console, which is a testament to how hot this trend has become...I mean, the last one's sold 7million copies, and there's already been 4million pre-orders from suppliers for the next!
Anyways, it all REALLY started with the 2D, top down Grand Theft Auto 1. Newspapers were filled with small articles on how evil videogames are turning non-evil children all evil, and with a game that positively encourages you to steal cars for fun, let alone kill police informers to advance in the story mode, you can sort of see their point...but with so many games of this particular ilk working their way onto each and every format, it's going to do 2 things really. It'll give loads of people some pretty decent games (with the exception of The Getaway, which has been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever), and it will give the gaming industry a really bad reputation. That bad reputation being on top of the 'sad, spotty geek' reputation, of course.
-----------------------
Not that I really should expect anything else. Everything has fads. Books have recently gone wizard mad with all the fuss about Harry Potter. Music has gone nuts for Nu-Metal. TV has gone crazy over reality shows...and with everybody wanting gaming to be accepted as a genuine form of not only entertainment, but art, I guess this is one point in our favour. But then we have the points against us, mainly that the market is saturated with games featuring 2D gangsters shooting skateboarders with Uzis whilst in a full, lush 3D environment...
Then, I guess, if you enjoy your game, then who am I to tell you if it's stupid or not? Heck, some people prefer Fifa to Pro Evolution Soccer...some people even buy Gamecubes...voluntarily! Whether you're playing Tony Hawk's, Jet Set Radio or GTA...have fun! Thanks for reading!
-swander87
----------------------
1) Extreme Sports
Recently, at the Playstation Experience in the heart of London, as well as top games such as 'Tekken 4', 'The Getaway' and...'Tekken 4', there was a bunch of clowns on bikes and boards, flying around and spinning elaborately as they wore oversized jeans and hooded sweatshirts with 'System Of A Down' all over them. These were extreme sportsmen (or women, I guess. It's hard to tell through the sweatshirts). Now, ever since the very first Virtual Hawk kickflipped onto a PSOne disc all those years ago, we've been bitten by what I call the 'protective headgear bug'. THPS4 will be out before Christmas, not mentioning the fact that Activision have signed up Tony until 2015, Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX 2 has just hit the shelves, Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer is on its way, Shawn Palmer's Pro Snowboarder is...in the trade-ins basket, and there are tonnes of others not really worth mentioning, such as the alarming-in-the-sense-that-somebody-actually-made-that-thing Extreme Scooter and not-real-but-someone-made-a-CD-cover-of-it-anyway Steven Hawking Pro Wheelchair.
There are variations on the genre, such as SSX Tricky's arcade styled snowboarding trickfest and BMX XXX's win-points-unlock-porn system. The point is...who keeps buying all this? Does anyone really need more than one type of extreme game? You get a free demo of the snowboarding one on the skateboarding one (to make things simpler, I'll refer to the games like this from now on) and frankly, the only way I could tell the difference is there was no music in the snowboarding one. Or maybe there was? I was too bored to care. Unfortunately, companies seem to be beating a horse so dead its got maggots crawling inside the dead maggots that USED to crawl inside the dead horse. With a new wave of slightly different games though, there is hope...at least, we keep telling ourselves that because we know we're going to buy them anyway.
2) Cel-Shading
Remember Jet Set Radio? Damn good game, was that. It took a crazy new game that involved both spray painting and skating (bare with me though, this IS in the right paragraph)...and put it with some of the most original graphics ever. It was like being in a world where everything was 2D...but it was 3D. This is the first major instance of cel-shading. Then along came Fur Fighters, which also took cel-shading to make its cartoon-y characters look more cartoon-y. And then there was a load of other games like Cel Damage, that just had cel-shading just for the sake of saying it had cel-shading. Then came Jet Set Radio Future.
See what I mean about worrying trends? Sooner or later I had to scan every prospective purchase just to make sure 'cel-shading' wasn't anywhere on the box. Recently, we've seen uproar as Zelda, every Nintendo fanboy's favourite RPG featuring a little elf, became Celda. People had seen the cool, bad-asss looking 3D Link and then, a couple of months later, they are confronted with something off a third-rate Diggit cartoon. And this is from Nintendo, a company adamant that they are not just a glorified subsiduary of Fisher Price! I mean, come on guys, the first time we saw it was really cool, and every time we see a new way of using it (like in Red Dead Revolver, a FPS or Auto Modellista, a racing sim) it's quite cool but now...it's NOT cool, ok? It's just old, and tired, and stale, and overused.
3) Games Where You Do Naughty Things
OK, for the want of a better genre title, this is the type of game shown brilliantly in GTA3. Soon to be shown in GTA:Vice City. And True Crime: Streets of LA. And The Getaway. And currently seen in Mafia. See already how many games like this there are? Mr Ripper did a very good topic a while back on the world's ever-increasing thirst for blood and gore in games, and this is pretty much your proof. Producers are falling over themselves to recreate a few square miles of Nowheresville and fill it with guns and bad guys...Sony recently snapped up a deal with Rockstar to make sure Grand Theft Auto doesn't go to any other console, which is a testament to how hot this trend has become...I mean, the last one's sold 7million copies, and there's already been 4million pre-orders from suppliers for the next!
Anyways, it all REALLY started with the 2D, top down Grand Theft Auto 1. Newspapers were filled with small articles on how evil videogames are turning non-evil children all evil, and with a game that positively encourages you to steal cars for fun, let alone kill police informers to advance in the story mode, you can sort of see their point...but with so many games of this particular ilk working their way onto each and every format, it's going to do 2 things really. It'll give loads of people some pretty decent games (with the exception of The Getaway, which has been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever), and it will give the gaming industry a really bad reputation. That bad reputation being on top of the 'sad, spotty geek' reputation, of course.
-----------------------
Not that I really should expect anything else. Everything has fads. Books have recently gone wizard mad with all the fuss about Harry Potter. Music has gone nuts for Nu-Metal. TV has gone crazy over reality shows...and with everybody wanting gaming to be accepted as a genuine form of not only entertainment, but art, I guess this is one point in our favour. But then we have the points against us, mainly that the market is saturated with games featuring 2D gangsters shooting skateboarders with Uzis whilst in a full, lush 3D environment...
Then, I guess, if you enjoy your game, then who am I to tell you if it's stupid or not? Heck, some people prefer Fifa to Pro Evolution Soccer...some people even buy Gamecubes...voluntarily! Whether you're playing Tony Hawk's, Jet Set Radio or GTA...have fun! Thanks for reading!
-swander87
There have been no replies to this thread yet.
Mwahaha! What a clever pun for a title! *clears throat* anyways, as you've probably guessed, this is a topic about the alarming amount of fads the gaming industry has gone through as of late. We all remember conkers in school. And Pogz. And Yo-Yos. And Pokemon Cards...well, whenever someone makes a mega-successful video-game these days, it seems there are several thousand clones all bending their knees, ready to leap up and hitch a ride on the Bandwagon of Gaming. Nice bloke that I am, I'll show you some of the trends running amok in SRs across the country, giving examples, pros, cons, and more of my immortal wit. On with the show!
----------------------
1) Extreme Sports
Recently, at the Playstation Experience in the heart of London, as well as top games such as 'Tekken 4', 'The Getaway' and...'Tekken 4', there was a bunch of clowns on bikes and boards, flying around and spinning elaborately as they wore oversized jeans and hooded sweatshirts with 'System Of A Down' all over them. These were extreme sportsmen (or women, I guess. It's hard to tell through the sweatshirts). Now, ever since the very first Virtual Hawk kickflipped onto a PSOne disc all those years ago, we've been bitten by what I call the 'protective headgear bug'. THPS4 will be out before Christmas, not mentioning the fact that Activision have signed up Tony until 2015, Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX 2 has just hit the shelves, Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer is on its way, Shawn Palmer's Pro Snowboarder is...in the trade-ins basket, and there are tonnes of others not really worth mentioning, such as the alarming-in-the-sense-that-somebody-actually-made-that-thing Extreme Scooter and not-real-but-someone-made-a-CD-cover-of-it-anyway Steven Hawking Pro Wheelchair.
There are variations on the genre, such as SSX Tricky's arcade styled snowboarding trickfest and BMX XXX's win-points-unlock-porn system. The point is...who keeps buying all this? Does anyone really need more than one type of extreme game? You get a free demo of the snowboarding one on the skateboarding one (to make things simpler, I'll refer to the games like this from now on) and frankly, the only way I could tell the difference is there was no music in the snowboarding one. Or maybe there was? I was too bored to care. Unfortunately, companies seem to be beating a horse so dead its got maggots crawling inside the dead maggots that USED to crawl inside the dead horse. With a new wave of slightly different games though, there is hope...at least, we keep telling ourselves that because we know we're going to buy them anyway.
2) Cel-Shading
Remember Jet Set Radio? Damn good game, was that. It took a crazy new game that involved both spray painting and skating (bare with me though, this IS in the right paragraph)...and put it with some of the most original graphics ever. It was like being in a world where everything was 2D...but it was 3D. This is the first major instance of cel-shading. Then along came Fur Fighters, which also took cel-shading to make its cartoon-y characters look more cartoon-y. And then there was a load of other games like Cel Damage, that just had cel-shading just for the sake of saying it had cel-shading. Then came Jet Set Radio Future.
See what I mean about worrying trends? Sooner or later I had to scan every prospective purchase just to make sure 'cel-shading' wasn't anywhere on the box. Recently, we've seen uproar as Zelda, every Nintendo fanboy's favourite RPG featuring a little elf, became Celda. People had seen the cool, bad-asss looking 3D Link and then, a couple of months later, they are confronted with something off a third-rate Diggit cartoon. And this is from Nintendo, a company adamant that they are not just a glorified subsiduary of Fisher Price! I mean, come on guys, the first time we saw it was really cool, and every time we see a new way of using it (like in Red Dead Revolver, a FPS or Auto Modellista, a racing sim) it's quite cool but now...it's NOT cool, ok? It's just old, and tired, and stale, and overused.
3) Games Where You Do Naughty Things
OK, for the want of a better genre title, this is the type of game shown brilliantly in GTA3. Soon to be shown in GTA:Vice City. And True Crime: Streets of LA. And The Getaway. And currently seen in Mafia. See already how many games like this there are? Mr Ripper did a very good topic a while back on the world's ever-increasing thirst for blood and gore in games, and this is pretty much your proof. Producers are falling over themselves to recreate a few square miles of Nowheresville and fill it with guns and bad guys...Sony recently snapped up a deal with Rockstar to make sure Grand Theft Auto doesn't go to any other console, which is a testament to how hot this trend has become...I mean, the last one's sold 7million copies, and there's already been 4million pre-orders from suppliers for the next!
Anyways, it all REALLY started with the 2D, top down Grand Theft Auto 1. Newspapers were filled with small articles on how evil videogames are turning non-evil children all evil, and with a game that positively encourages you to steal cars for fun, let alone kill police informers to advance in the story mode, you can sort of see their point...but with so many games of this particular ilk working their way onto each and every format, it's going to do 2 things really. It'll give loads of people some pretty decent games (with the exception of The Getaway, which has been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever), and it will give the gaming industry a really bad reputation. That bad reputation being on top of the 'sad, spotty geek' reputation, of course.
-----------------------
Not that I really should expect anything else. Everything has fads. Books have recently gone wizard mad with all the fuss about Harry Potter. Music has gone nuts for Nu-Metal. TV has gone crazy over reality shows...and with everybody wanting gaming to be accepted as a genuine form of not only entertainment, but art, I guess this is one point in our favour. But then we have the points against us, mainly that the market is saturated with games featuring 2D gangsters shooting skateboarders with Uzis whilst in a full, lush 3D environment...
Then, I guess, if you enjoy your game, then who am I to tell you if it's stupid or not? Heck, some people prefer Fifa to Pro Evolution Soccer...some people even buy Gamecubes...voluntarily! Whether you're playing Tony Hawk's, Jet Set Radio or GTA...have fun! Thanks for reading!
-swander87
----------------------
1) Extreme Sports
Recently, at the Playstation Experience in the heart of London, as well as top games such as 'Tekken 4', 'The Getaway' and...'Tekken 4', there was a bunch of clowns on bikes and boards, flying around and spinning elaborately as they wore oversized jeans and hooded sweatshirts with 'System Of A Down' all over them. These were extreme sportsmen (or women, I guess. It's hard to tell through the sweatshirts). Now, ever since the very first Virtual Hawk kickflipped onto a PSOne disc all those years ago, we've been bitten by what I call the 'protective headgear bug'. THPS4 will be out before Christmas, not mentioning the fact that Activision have signed up Tony until 2015, Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX 2 has just hit the shelves, Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer is on its way, Shawn Palmer's Pro Snowboarder is...in the trade-ins basket, and there are tonnes of others not really worth mentioning, such as the alarming-in-the-sense-that-somebody-actually-made-that-thing Extreme Scooter and not-real-but-someone-made-a-CD-cover-of-it-anyway Steven Hawking Pro Wheelchair.
There are variations on the genre, such as SSX Tricky's arcade styled snowboarding trickfest and BMX XXX's win-points-unlock-porn system. The point is...who keeps buying all this? Does anyone really need more than one type of extreme game? You get a free demo of the snowboarding one on the skateboarding one (to make things simpler, I'll refer to the games like this from now on) and frankly, the only way I could tell the difference is there was no music in the snowboarding one. Or maybe there was? I was too bored to care. Unfortunately, companies seem to be beating a horse so dead its got maggots crawling inside the dead maggots that USED to crawl inside the dead horse. With a new wave of slightly different games though, there is hope...at least, we keep telling ourselves that because we know we're going to buy them anyway.
2) Cel-Shading
Remember Jet Set Radio? Damn good game, was that. It took a crazy new game that involved both spray painting and skating (bare with me though, this IS in the right paragraph)...and put it with some of the most original graphics ever. It was like being in a world where everything was 2D...but it was 3D. This is the first major instance of cel-shading. Then along came Fur Fighters, which also took cel-shading to make its cartoon-y characters look more cartoon-y. And then there was a load of other games like Cel Damage, that just had cel-shading just for the sake of saying it had cel-shading. Then came Jet Set Radio Future.
See what I mean about worrying trends? Sooner or later I had to scan every prospective purchase just to make sure 'cel-shading' wasn't anywhere on the box. Recently, we've seen uproar as Zelda, every Nintendo fanboy's favourite RPG featuring a little elf, became Celda. People had seen the cool, bad-asss looking 3D Link and then, a couple of months later, they are confronted with something off a third-rate Diggit cartoon. And this is from Nintendo, a company adamant that they are not just a glorified subsiduary of Fisher Price! I mean, come on guys, the first time we saw it was really cool, and every time we see a new way of using it (like in Red Dead Revolver, a FPS or Auto Modellista, a racing sim) it's quite cool but now...it's NOT cool, ok? It's just old, and tired, and stale, and overused.
3) Games Where You Do Naughty Things
OK, for the want of a better genre title, this is the type of game shown brilliantly in GTA3. Soon to be shown in GTA:Vice City. And True Crime: Streets of LA. And The Getaway. And currently seen in Mafia. See already how many games like this there are? Mr Ripper did a very good topic a while back on the world's ever-increasing thirst for blood and gore in games, and this is pretty much your proof. Producers are falling over themselves to recreate a few square miles of Nowheresville and fill it with guns and bad guys...Sony recently snapped up a deal with Rockstar to make sure Grand Theft Auto doesn't go to any other console, which is a testament to how hot this trend has become...I mean, the last one's sold 7million copies, and there's already been 4million pre-orders from suppliers for the next!
Anyways, it all REALLY started with the 2D, top down Grand Theft Auto 1. Newspapers were filled with small articles on how evil videogames are turning non-evil children all evil, and with a game that positively encourages you to steal cars for fun, let alone kill police informers to advance in the story mode, you can sort of see their point...but with so many games of this particular ilk working their way onto each and every format, it's going to do 2 things really. It'll give loads of people some pretty decent games (with the exception of The Getaway, which has been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever), and it will give the gaming industry a really bad reputation. That bad reputation being on top of the 'sad, spotty geek' reputation, of course.
-----------------------
Not that I really should expect anything else. Everything has fads. Books have recently gone wizard mad with all the fuss about Harry Potter. Music has gone nuts for Nu-Metal. TV has gone crazy over reality shows...and with everybody wanting gaming to be accepted as a genuine form of not only entertainment, but art, I guess this is one point in our favour. But then we have the points against us, mainly that the market is saturated with games featuring 2D gangsters shooting skateboarders with Uzis whilst in a full, lush 3D environment...
Then, I guess, if you enjoy your game, then who am I to tell you if it's stupid or not? Heck, some people prefer Fifa to Pro Evolution Soccer...some people even buy Gamecubes...voluntarily! Whether you're playing Tony Hawk's, Jet Set Radio or GTA...have fun! Thanks for reading!
-swander87