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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: ElPolloDiabl on November 08, 2010, 12:52:31 PM
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As well as many good things I might remember this decade as the decade when everything got dumbed down, especially computer games.
I can probably single out the console as the source of all the me too titles. If people are having a good time playing multiplayer, I guess it is providing entertainment.
There is obviously no risktaking in new releases and I'm sure the marketing department is pulling all the design strings. I heard recently that the creators of farmville are now bigger than Electronic Arts. I hope the industry learn a lesson from that. Not that you should make games for low spec computers... They should learn you have to be competitive and constantly evolve your games, not dumb them down and add more eye candy.
In the (not too) old days someone made a game because they wanted to see their ideas come to life. Nowadays it's all about the money.
Maybe the money just attracts people wanting to make a me too title and I'm ignoring the innovators.
Oh well, back to work on my own game(s), I'll put up or shut up.:)
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As well as many good things I might remember this decade as the decade when everything got dumbed down, especially computer games.
I can probably single out the console as the source of all the me too titles. If people are having a good time playing multiplayer, I guess it is providing entertainment.
There is obviously no risktaking in new releases and I'm sure the marketing department is pulling all the design strings. I heard recently that the creators of farmville are now bigger than Electronic Arts. I hope the industry learn a lesson from that. Not that you should make games for low spec computers... They should learn you have to be competitive and constantly evolve your games, not dumb them down and add more eye candy.
In the (not too) old days someone made a game because they wanted to see their ideas come to life. Nowadays it's all about the money.
I agree with you on major publishers, but I don't agree completly. Type in 'flash games' and you'll find many, many portals, all making money allowing you to play thousands of decent games. Many are Amiga like (personally, I think plants VS zombie and Zuma etc, would make ace Amiga games). Also, mobile app stores are chock full of bedroom coder games, many of a very high standard (well..not all). Same is true of XBLA. I play more XBLA games than £40 blockbusters. Handhelds like the DS also allow for small teams to create games they believe in, with out so much finiancial risk
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Nintendo must be doing something right look at Mario and all those Aunt Bessie's Brain-Training so called 'games' on the DS. Simple concept, maximum interest and sales $$$.
Those Brain-Training 'games' are not too dis-similar to what bedroom programmers were churning it 20-25 years ago.... only it has a stylus and the average consumer is 'ooh wow ace look at this I can use a pen instead of a mouse and wow look it says I have the brain of a 16yr old this DS rocks its knocked 30yrs off my age!'
Sony and the first Playstation pretty much killed gameplay as it was all about the graphics. I've never bought a games console in my adult life and I ain't missing anything.
I've played the odd game from time to time, buts its like omg this game has like 15 buttons and complex keypad combinations just to jump to from one platform to another! Bring back the days when all you had was left, right, up and down and fire!
I've been playing Fifa 09 around at friend's house recently on his *spits* XBOX. Great game I suppose but you are never 100% in control of the player so much 'predictive movement' going on, camera-pans, god damn advertising on the shirts(!), bloody perfect true to life haircuts and other such crap - I remember Sensi Soccer it was just fun for hours at a time, you could win a game 10-0 and it didn't matter. Perhaps am just getting old. =p
Games were meant to be an escape from reality, not to mimic life as much as possible. Why is everyone so fascinated with FPSes and realism?
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...Games were meant to be an escape from reality, not to mimic life as much as possible. Why is everyone so fascinated with FPSes and realism?
+ 1...graohics are nice but gameplay rules for me...I guess that's why I like it retro:afro:
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Having only ever played and enjoyed VIC 20, C64, Amiga & SNES games, I can only say that games & decent gameplay died out long ago with the advent of consoles like the Playstation.
My nephew is one of those who has been into consoles since the first Playstation, I couldn't even name all the different ones he owns, but from what I've seen on them, all of the games on these various consoles he has all look the exact same to me, you now the mind numbing 1st person perspective type of run around and shoot or blow up everything.
Give me stuff like Loco, or The Feary Tale Adventure anyday... :)
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When it comes to published games it's all publisher driven and that makes it a nightmare to get a new/different idea pitched most of the time.
If you're after innovation then the indie markets seem to be a thriving place. You should really be checking out TIGSource (http://www.tigsource.com/) for example and its indeie game database :)
Andy
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The best game I've played in the last 10 years is probably Dofus by french publishers Ankama Software. I played it solidly for 4 years, a turn-based MMORPG that combines great gameplay with graphics.
But after the playing the same game for so long and two of my characters reaching maximum level it does eventually get 'same-y', but an amazing game really that harks back to the days when gameplay counted more than graphics. I highly recommended it to anyone - just beware its highly addictive!
http://www.dofus.com/en
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I half-agree and half-don't. I can see where you're coming from, but I think you're reaching that conclusion by looking mainly at giant corporate software factories like Electronic Arts, who have indeed had a formula of "get marketing to write a spec sheet and then beat the programmers savagely until it's ready for a Christmas release, never mind the quality" pretty much since the Madden series became their bread and butter. There still is innovation and creativity in the gaming world, but it's more concentrated in areas where making a game requires less money and therefore involves less financial risk, so publishers, game companies, and individual creators aren't so afraid to try interesting things.
Portal, for example, started as a concept demo by a newbie team of developers and was upgraded into a small project Valve bundled with a couple of cost-reduced re-releases. A lot of people bought The Orange Box for Half-Life II and Team Fortress II, but everybody remembers it for Portal, which was unique, a hell of a lot of fun, and probably the best example of in-game storytelling yet produced.
To get even smaller and cheaper, La-Mulana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La-Mulana) was made entirely by three Japanese guys in their spare time as a love-letter to the MSX home computer and released as freeware. Yet it's not only a solid Metroidvania-style platformer, it also incorporates an interesting story into the gameplay Portal-style, by dropping hints and bits of narrative in among all the stuff you have to explore and building puzzles around its themes.
So I'd have to disagree. There is new and interesting stuff out there, you're just (understandably) looking in the wrong place.
(P.S. I wouldn't use FarmVille as an example of something to aspire to, even when the alternative is EA-style pablum. FarmVille and the other Zynga titles are big business for the same reason heroin is big business. It's not a game, it's a goddamn Skinner box.)
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I think some of you are missing some gems because of blindness. yes there are a lot of similar games out there but some of them are the best of the genre. Gears 2, MW2, dead space resident evil 4 etc
Also Mario Galazy is so full of ideas and nintendo does do simple games well, but the main idea is usally simple with lots and lots of cool ideas thrown in
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The problem is it costs many millions to produce a game, so you only get something genuinely fresh, when you have someone with a proven track record.
Lots of cool indie games out there though. Check out gems like World of Goo f.x.
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I guess I'm not one of those people who look back at the past with rose-tinted glasses. It's easy to look back and cherry pick 10 or 20 great stand out titles from back then. And conveniently forget about the mountains of crapware that was out back then, too.
I think modern gaming is pretty darn good. Yeah, there are a lot of me-too titles. But it's fairly easy to find the one or two titles that rise to the top. Not really any different from the old days.
And, if you're looking for innovation, check out flash portals like Kongregate. There's a lot new ideas and new takes on old ideas bouncing around in those. Same with the mobile market.
Plus, we have it WAY BETTER in some ways. Take modern simulators. I loved Papyrus Indianapolis 500 for the Amiga. And I COULD go back and play it any time I wanted... But why? Any modern SimBin title features way more cars, way more tracks, and way better driving physics. (And if I really want realism, First Racing League is out there...) Fighter Duel Pro was awesome. I loved it! But seriously... Go back and play it? Heck no! Give me IL-2 Sturmovik. The bar has been moved sky high compared to those days.
I never understood the EA bashing, either. Yeah, EA sells a lot of incremental update sports games. Is that a problem? I fully agree, NHL 11 is basically NHL 10 with a few bugfixes, puck bounces, and new hitting animations added. Is this a bad thing? Is selling an incremental update to the best NHL game I've ever played something to criticize them for? I could go back and play Wayne Gretzky Hockey on my Amiga... But what does it have that hasn't been completely surpassed?
In short, there's still areas in modern gaming where new ideas shine. And we often have the best versions of old ideas readily available. I don't really see the point in blindly picking a few crappy titles and clucking on about innovation and quality being dead. You may have to look for it a bit... But haven't you always?
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Many games have taken a typical Hollywood sci-fi/action route -- sell the eye candy. Marketing to teenagers?
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So many Amigoids idea of good gameplay seems to entail simplistic platformers or shooters; frankly I have no patience for the zillionth 32 color Mario-alike. Games for me either have to have technical depth (flight sims) or a rich story (RPGs, like the SSI gold box games and others), or elements of both; the nightmarish sci-fi background of the Half Life universe is a good example of this.
"Oh," many of you decry, "it is another boring PC FPS." - yes, because it's on the PC. If by some miracle Valve allowed it to be ported to other systems and a build was released for the Amiga, I know the game would be embraced by the same detractors.
Game "play", anyway, is a vague and indistinct concept. Yes, you might (wrongly) think that there's no difference between, say, Doom and the System Shock games (to go all retro on you) but utterly depthless sprite-hoppers like the SotB series, The Killing Gameshow, etc. etc. - those are the same games with different sprites, fact.
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Something done well with all that Ghz today that couldn't be done before is fine with me. You can't compare 64 player Battlefield 2 on PC with Green Beret/Commando/Beach Head on an old 8 bit and I'd rather be playing Colin McRae Dirt 2/WRC 2010 than RAC Lombard Rally on ST/Amiga too. But I would rather play Ruff n Tumble over gay mario shit on any Nintendo crap with their crayola colours and baby graphics hmmm
I also see people complaining about Playstation but isn't Wipeout 2097 on Amiga one of the greatest achievements we've seen in the community? Thing is both PS and Saturn had 2D gaming abilities that no PC or Amiga could ever touch and many shmups exist for both.
A good game is a good game, and what is good about consoles is their games use every last ounce of mhz left in the system, witness Killzone 2 on a 12 foot screen and then go back to playing Bruce Lee on C64? I think not ;)
What has been lost though is your ability to write such games on locked down hardware. With the exception of Blitz 3D on PC it is pretty much a dead end. Bedroom coding is dead...good games are just as rare as they were in the days of Amiga, 90% of which were badly programmed or ST ports when it came to arcade/action games. There are probably only 10 games on Amiga which wouldn't look out of place in a MAME cabinet to be honest. Ditto C64.
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I also don't agree with the OP. Gaming is different today, I miss some things, true, but on the other hand games have advanced soooo much. It's really difficult to compare e.g. last Metal Gear Solid game to the original Metal Gear. The presentation of the story is so dramatic, touching and plain awesome - it's more than a game and it's great.
A gamer is a gamer - I can play UFO for hours on my Amiga and then go and play God of War and enjoy both. And graphics quality matters, it really does. The aforementioned GoW is really a pretty standard game, nothing truly innovative or addictive, but the graphics are simply so beautiful that I just like playing it, I like seeing what comes next.
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@ B00tDisk
"Oh," many of you decry, "it is another boring PC FPS." - yes, because it's on the PC. If by some miracle Valve allowed it to be ported to other systems and a build was released for the Amiga, I know the game would be embraced by the same detractors.
Never was a big fan of platform games and even more so shoot-em-ups. RPGs were my favorites, The Speris Legacy, The Faery Tale Adventure and the few others that were made for the Amiga. Hate to say it but the best RPGs ever made were for the SNES Terranigma, Chrono Trigger and a whole lot more.
Having watched and even tried some of the games my nephew plays on his various consoles and PCs, it's all about the graphics and this obsession with 3D/ first person perspective and not about the gameplay or thinking element. Hell even the adverts for them on the telly all look the same.
If by some miracle these became available on the Amiga, to say you know the game would be embraced by the detractors is 99.9% wrong, cos here's one detractor that wouldn't give them the time of day... :)
@ Amiga_Nut
A good game is a good game, and what is good about consoles is their games use every last ounce of mhz left in the system, witness Killzone 2 on a 12 foot screen and then go back to playing Bruce Lee on C64? I think not
True, A good game is a good game, but gimme Bruce Lee or better still Forbidden Forest on an old 14inch monitor over the mind numbing likes of Killzone anyday... (the old games may seem equally mind numbing, but there's something about them that's fun...) :)
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I must say gaming has become much better nowadays, better that is, better than in 1996, when you couldn't seperate one doom-clone from the other, or if you liked adventures more, there were those horrendous 'interactive movies'.
But also in the 80s not everything was good. There have been plenty of atrocities released on the Amiga and Commodore 64 as well. Though we are eager to forget that.
Thing is, 2D is not accepted as a full game since Doom came out (not saying Doom or all of its clones are bad), whether it should be.
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True, A good game is a good game, but gimme Bruce Lee or better still Forbidden Forest on an old 14inch monitor over the mind numbing likes of Killzone anyday... (the old games may seem equally mind numbing, but there's something about them that's fun...) :)
I love to play modern games side by side by the old classics B-)
And still think some old classics look very good.
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I must say gaming has become much better nowadays, better that is, better than in 1996, when you couldn't seperate one doom-clone from the other, or if you liked adventures more, there were those horrendous 'interactive movies'.
But also in the 80s not everything was good. There have been plenty of atrocities released on the Amiga and Commodore 64 as well. Though we are eager to forget that.
Thing is, 2D is not accepted as a full game since Doom came out (not saying Doom or all of its clones are bad), whether it should be.
Your right about the atrocities even back then, out of over 5000+ Amiga games I have I reckon there must only be a few hundred that I still play to this day.
If 2D is not accepted as a full game anymore, it just helps to re-inforce my view about todays games being mind numbing. If you can't accept a game unless it is 3D then it only goes to show it worked, your mind has been totally numbed... :)
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RPGs were my favorites, The Speris Legacy, The Faery Tale Adventure and the few others that were made for the Amiga. Hate to say it but the best RPGs ever made were for the SNES Terranigma, Chrono Trigger and a whole lot more.
Well, I'll agree, it's rather a crappy time for old-school single player RPGs. I don't think that has anything to do with dumbing down for consoles, though. It has to do with everyone chasing after the profits of WoW, I think. MMORPG is the buzz. Anything with a semi-expansive world has to be a WoW clone to get published. I hoping this trend should be wrapping up fairly soon, and we get a few good single player story RPGs. Also, someone should get with Wizards of the Coast and do some real D&D games, like the old SSI Gold Box games were.
If 2D is not accepted as a full game anymore, it just helps to re-inforce my view about todays games being mind numbing. If you can't accept a game unless it is 3D then it only goes to show it worked, your mind has been totally numbed...
I don't really think so. I just think the bar has been raised. Except in rare circumstances where 2D actually IMPROVES gameplay (Worms?), you really need to be in 3D to meet expectations. With the power of today's machines, this really isn't an out of line mark.
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Your right about the atrocities even back then, out of over 5000+ Amiga games I have I reckon there must only be a few hundred that I still play to this day.
If 2D is not accepted as a full game anymore, it just helps to re-inforce my view about todays games being mind numbing. If you can't accept a game unless it is 3D then it only goes to show it worked, your mind has been totally numbed... :)
True. But to name one single game which really utilizes 3D is Thief, where you had to use the shadows, and also take care where you set your steps. Ergo, using 3D aspects for puzzling purposes. (plus it had a tremendous atmosphere)
Then again, one might well be able to achieve approximately the same gameplay in 2D, using an isometric pov. But one of the main charms of Thief was the feeling of being that character, being very vulnerable and alone in an environment you should not be.
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I like playing Lotus II AND Need for Speed:Most Wanted. A game can still be great regardless of age or hardware it runs on I agree. Super Stardust is probably the rare exception, as a shoot-em up package it still hasn't been beaten really. Awesome sound, awesome blasting/flying gameplay, awesome graphics. I do actually prefer it to PS3 Super Stardust HD. Then again I wouldn't bother loading up Gauntlet 2 on Amiga but it's there on 360 in perfect detail for a few quid too.
You have to admit, design skills aside, there is nothing you can't do on today's hardware that you could do on an Amiga or C64. Vice versa is not true and I happen to like playing Battlefield 2 with 63 other people in a photo-realistic environment with sand-box gameplay (ie playing silly buggers!) :)
Now if you are saying wacky surreal design skills like those of Manic Miner/Gribbly's Day Out etc are not common now as they were in the 8bit days then I totally agree Franko.
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Thanks for the responses. Sorry for depressing you, but the sameness of game releases was starting to get to me and I was thinking we may see people do like they did in the 80s and abandon video games for a period of time. Doubtful considering the price of consoles to the average salary.
You put it in perspective that although there is a load of uninteresting stuff there are still some quality titles that pop up or can be found with a bit of searching.
The golden era of of pc gaming is gone and finished. I hope I can look forward to many cross-platform/cross system titles from dedicated developers.
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I mostly play old games and updates to old games, but I've noticed the trend of newer games being dumbed down and less interactive. I like to actually play games, not watch them, so it's hard for me to find good single player games. Downloadable games seem more innovative than what's on store shelves these days, though, and I've played a lot of really fun XBLA games.
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Assassins creed II is an amazing updateish to thief.
I think most people are missing the point. yes there are a lot of games out there that are more or less the same. And yes it was the same in the 8 bit and 16 bit days.
As to mario having child like graphics., so what really does not make it any less of a game.
There are still a lot of fresh ideas out there especially on abox arcade. Things like limbo and rreally good updates like shadow complex and trails HD.
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Games These days are too boring. play them for a few hours and that's it. ( i know i have dozens and dozens of STEAM games along with countless "backup" games :D).
Everyone puts so much time into graphics they forget game play.
The games of the past didn't have great graphics they had to rely on game play to hook you in.
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Games These days are too boring. play them for a few hours and that's it.
It's the ones I can play in a few hours that I like! The enourmous sprawling games, I just don't have time for these days ;(