Cliff Bakehorn

I sure think games are becoming repititious. I have several examples. Role-playing games seem to have the same story with different characters and environments. Action games are becoming shallow with nothing but 'insane' gunfights. Action Sports games are the most repititious, with almost all of them just molding from the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, just with a different board or item under the character's feet.

I think innovation is going to keep getting more and more rare with the way most gamers are acting. It isn't anyone's fault but the gamers. I really hate it when people insult and rag on Nintendo, who is trying very hard to put innovation into their oldest and best series. I think I'm right when I say this: people whined and cried about Mario's water pack in Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime's first-person perspective, and Starfox Adventures' land-oriented gameplay, but all three of those games lead the system in sales and were huge steps towards success for the Gamecube. Also, Zelda: Wind Waker has gotten the worst treatment, but so far, it has critical acclaim from the people who have actually played it.

Joseph Asphahani
Sure they are, but just like any other multi-billion dollar industry like Hollywood or Pop music, it comes with the territory. This is gonna sound a lot like a history lesson… There was a period of gaming, a surprisingly-not-so-long time ago, when games were all side-scrolling platformers or sprite-based RPG’s. Yet, even during that time there was enough fun and fanbase coming out of each game cartridge to keep the designers and publishers interested in making them, clichéd or not. Of course, I’m talking about the coming-of-age of gaming: the Nintendo/Sega years. Back then, for every new killer app that Nintendo could design and release, Sega had its own game to answer it, and vice versa. Even the release of their hardware coincided with one another. It kept the business fair, and the games fresh, and as a result it technically grouped gamers [of my generation] into two categories. The Sega camp, and the Nintendo camp. There weren’t many in-between.

But times have changed. After the jump to CD and 32-bit machines from cartridges, there was a definite inflation of hardware and quality designers. There were Neo-Geos, TurboGrafxes, Jaguars, 3Dos, and of course Sega and Nintendo machines to design games for. And that’s when it all started going down hill. With the increase in hardware options, game quality plummeted. Thankfully, everything righted itself in time (mostly with the introduction of Sony into the biz) and all these trashy machines were thrown away where they belonged. Only a fraction of their games were fun for everyone, but because of the huge splits they caused among gamers, you could no longer pick up any old game and enjoy it for what it’s worth. Welcome to the birth of the [well-defined] game genre.

Everyone wanted a piece of Sony’s new action, and of course the veterans (Sega/Nintendo) were still around. There were several ground-breakers, even after games had been set into genres. With the jump to 3D, we got polygonal fighters instead of new generations of street fighters. 3D also introduced a spin on what used to be side-scrolling: expansive worlds that stretched across the player’s vision. And Resident Evil, kinda self-explanatory. The level of innovation since then has been like a roller coaster since then. Sometimes designers make the same game with a new story and levels just so they can have their own “exclusive” crap (i.e. Dead to Rights / Max Payne, Driver / GTA / Yakuza Missions, among others). If designers and publishers really want to keep the innovation alive and fresh for the consumer/gamer with every title they release, they’ll stop thinking in terms of business, in terms of what will compete with other games, and they’ll start thinking outside of the box. Just like they did when they made Resident Evil or Deus Ex (honestly, no other really good examples stand out in my mind). They tried to hard to meet this challenge a short while ago, and made several remakes of old franchises that had that old magic. Shinobi, Rygar, Metroid, Contra, etc. While all of these were great games, it acted like more of an excuse for their loss of their age-old ingenuity. C’mon, guys, we all know you can do better than that…

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