Tired of games that look good...

I started playing computer games on Commodore C=16 and soon C=64; 320x200, 16 colours, 38KB of usable RAM, 8 bits sound. With this kind of ressources a game could only belong to 2 categories: 1) Fun, 2) not fun. Yet this platform was incredibly popular for gaming, and I had countless hours of fun playing many titles.

I am totally ready to accept that these games I have very fond memories of would not entertain me very long nowadays - in fact I tried them with emulators and verified this statement to be true - but there is still one thing I cannot stop admiring looking back at the games of that time: they were totally focused on a fun gameplay. This was of course inevitable, due to the number of categories described above; if you had no fun gameplay, you had nothing, it could not be compensated by stunning graphics, and even much less by great sound.

A fact I have started to become annoyed with in the late 90s, was that more and more games would bet on graphics, but invent little or nothing on the gameplay. We would see an endless list of new FPS or RTS coming out that were mere clones of popular titles, with updated graphics, betting their entire marketing campaign on 3 screenshots, and with very little more to offer.

I thought, well, it will pass, it is new that games can have nice graphics and everyone will come off it someday.

Well, thankfully I do not count on my prophecies for a living. Even if the situation has gotten better, I still get a feeling some big titles have spent a lot more time and given a serious deal more attention to graphics than to the gameplay. In fact it even seems to be a tendency from rather large producers, or at least these are the most succesful in achieving nice graphics.

But, Am I the only one that gets this feeling so many games are clones, and do not add much to the genre they should be contributing to? and that the nicer the graphics the less they contribute?

This lead me to be afraid of very nice graphics, when I see a screenshot that looks great I get this feeling that I won't like the game much.

Maybe someone should work on a game that has ugly graphics, that would catch some attention. I did welcome the graphics of WoW, like them or not, at least they are breaking the mold. I still think it is a kind of nonsense that games producer spend so much effort to make graphics look as real as possible, when on the computer you do not need to be bound to real graphics, and have ample room for creativity, and absolute reality is the one thing that can never be attained.

my thoughts...

I agree.

For most games the main problems are competition and budget. If a producer wants a game to sell he knows it has to make a great first impression, to compete with other games, and the first thing we see are graphics. Now, making a game look good takes a lot of time and each day spent in development costs money, which is detracted by a budget. The remaining time allowed by what's left of that budget is put into creating a good gameplay and trying to fix the inevitable bugs. Since most of the budget was spent on the visual compartment, though, there is little time to improve gameplay, let alone try to innovate.

There was no such problem 20 years ago. Sweet years.

Maybe, maybe not. I am of the same era so know what your on about, but you must consider a few points.

1 - Memorys of early gameing were great because it was all new, and compared to playing marbles with mates in the streets computer games were out of this world. We are used to it now, and its much harder to impress these days.

2 - My childhood was okay, nothing great, but I didn't have bills to pay, or have to get up every morning to do something I hate just for the money. Of course memorys of games will be different when you were a kid, you were a kid!

3 - There have always been good games, and there have always been crap games. The difference now-a-days with the advancement in technology is that even the crap games look good.

I was thinking about this not long ago. I went back and downloaded some old DOS games I played ages ago. Some brought back some great memorys (like Martian Memorandum), and some were a lot of fun. But then when I looked harder, some of those games I have great memory's of are total crap.

A game like Mass Effect or Halo is a game I will never forget, and in another 10-20 years will still have fond memorys of. And in 20 years VR could be a reality for games but there will still be crap games even if they look good, and people will say "back in the day games were fun, not like today when they just look good. I remember when Halo came out, and it blew everyone away"

See my point. I think for the most part its just nostalgia.

2 - My childhood was okay, nothing great, but I didn't have bills to pay, or have to get up every morning to do something I hate just for the money.

axeman87

I remember having to get up every morning to do stuff I hate even when I was a kid. Damned school.

Good game play is highly subjective, and there can't really be a clear winrar (unless of course, you look at sales figures!). If you look at alot of the more highly acclaimed games, they often innovate in some way (Which at first might lead us to think that innovation is the key to success but that's not necesarilly true, just look at Clover studios). But by the same token, games that are generic and don't innovate -can- be high sellers or even still be acclaimed, or just plain loved by indiviuals.

Graphics on the other hand may actually be measured. They often improve with each new game. i.e. higher resolution, higher poly-count, etc. There's probably a lot more other things to list other than those two, but I'm no graphics monkey.

To anyone who complains about newer games lacking innovation, go check out some of the original downloadable games for xbl arcade and the ps3 network. I know that on the xbl arcade, microsoft has specifically said it intentionally keeps the memory constraints low so that developers will concentrate more on what makes a game fun rather than making it look pretty.

There are tons of quality, innovative titles out there but unfortunately, some people would rather proclaim doom and gloom than actually go out, hunt these games down, and play them.

Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, No More Heroes, God Hand, N+, Odin Sphere, Blast Works, Red Star, The Club, Endless Ocean, and Bloom Box, just to name a few.

Not to mention numerous, cheap anthology collections of older games that contain an endless supply of forgotten gems.

There are tons of quality, innovative titles out there but unfortunately, some people would rather proclaim doom and gloom than actually go out, hunt these games down, and play them.

Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, No More Heroes, God Hand, N+, Odin Sphere, Blast Works, Red Star, The Club, Endless Ocean, and Bloom Box, just to name a few.

Not to mention numerous, cheap anthology collections of older games that contain an endless supply of forgotten gems.

Grammaton-Cleric

The Red Star is sold at Best Buy for $15. They have tons of them. But sadly, nobody buys them.

This really is a great game. Too bad nobody cares or wants it.

[QUOTE="Grammaton-Cleric"]

There are tons of quality, innovative titles out there but unfortunately, some people would rather proclaim doom and gloom than actually go out, hunt these games down, and play them.

Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, No More Heroes, God Hand, N+, Odin Sphere, Blast Works, Red Star, The Club, Endless Ocean, and Bloom Box, just to name a few.

Not to mention numerous, cheap anthology collections of older games that contain an endless supply of forgotten gems.

ASK_Story

The Red Star is sold at Best Buy for $15. They have tons of them. But sadly, nobody buys them.

This really is a great game. Too bad nobody cares or wants it.

It even scored well here at GS and still barely anybody seemed to pay attention.

That's what annoys me about these threads: people rant and rave about the lack of innovation even while they personally let quality titles slip through their fingers.

Consider a game like Beyond Good and Evil: That game is constantly praised in these forums but how many of the gamers doing the praising probably nabbed the game in the bargain bin? I picked it up day one.

The same can be said of POP: Sands of Time, which is continually hailed as a masterpiece around here despite the fact that most gamers, including the hardcore set, didn't contribute to its sales.

And don't even get me started on the weak sales for No More Heroes, which is easily one of the better Wii games available.

And of course there's the Dreamcast, which everybody now claims to love. I remember waiting in line all night for a PS2 during the 2000 launch and I was genuinely amazed by the fact that not a single one of the people I spoke to in line that evening owned a Dreamcast or were even aware of the quality and **** of games available for the console.

The problem isn't graphics, the problem isn't mainstreaming of the medium, and the problem isn't franchises and sequels.

The problem is that gamers are often unwilling to go beyond their established parameters for software and would rather invest in a safe bet. The innovative games are out there, if people want them.

Your whole point revolves around the notion that there are no games which look excellent and have awesome gameplay which is preposterous.

You're looking at those Commodore 64 games with nothing but loads of nostalgia. You even managed to shoot down your whole point by saying that those old games aren't great today. You look at those games fondly because they remind you of your childhood days. But realistically, 99% of those games are complete crap today.

Maybe someone should work on a game that has ugly graphics, that would catch some attention.

Bolka02