lobotomy42

Okay, fine, strike Wii Fit - it's still hard for me to see how Street Fighter IV, Halo Wars and Mario Kart are not in the category you're speaking of. I'm not heckling, I just genuinely disagree. Your thesis seemed to be that the industry was funneling all games into this model of 3rd-person-action-adventure, and I don't see it. I agree that there are a lot of 3rd-person-action-adventure games now, but I'm not convinced that it has had a significant impact on other genres. Some genres (puzzle, adventure, strategy) have moved a bit more into indie/niche audiences, but they seem to be thriving there rather than hurting. And others, like rhythm, have actually moved from niche to mainstream. The only major genre decline I can think of is 3D platformers, but even those seem to have stuck around with Mario Galaxy and Prince of Persia. Do we know of potential games/genres that were eliminated in favor of more action-adventure-shooters? (E.g., Did Dragon Age once have a turn-based combat system?) Is there any genre of game which has had fewer or, in your opinion, qualitatively worse releases recently than in the past?

I totally agree with you guys on the Mike Thorton douche problem - it was the most obnoxious part of Alpha Protocol.

Not to *totally* derail this thread... I guess my point is that this is only true if you define "Video game industry" to mean a very-specific-and-narrowly-defined slice of the actual industry. (A self-defined segment by the people that work within it and the press that covers it.) It doesn't seem to be true of games being developed by *any* outlets beyond the handful of hundred-million-dollar studios at the very top. If you're talking about what is affecting people creatively, it seems that the newest and freshest games are coming from the indie scene, which is fairly vibrant right now, having found outlets on XBLA, Steam, handheld devices, iPhone, facebook etc. If you're talking about sales/popularity, then I would point to FarmVille, Wii Sports, Rock Band, etc. I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're cherry-picking which games count as "real" games (i.e., the ones covered heavily by enthusiast press,) then of course you can make the argument that they're all trending towards a certain style, but that doesn't strike me as "broad relevance."

I can't speak to your personal experience, but I disagree pretty starkly with your description of the state of the industry and the "funneling" effect. A couple of points: 1) Development and distribution barriers - especially at the hobbyiest level - have dropped dramatically, meaning that the number of games available to players in any given year, for any given genre is probably higher now than it was ten years ago. An example: Adventure game fans love to complain about the "death" of the genre, but as far as I can tell, the number of adventure game releases per year has been increasing over time, not decreasing. The *change* has been that the industry has also been producing these high-budget third-person action adventure Hollywood style games, and these get the most marketing. But I don't honestly perceive a significant decrease in production of "other" genres. Adventure games are just one example, but you could pick any number of other "niche" genres and find the same thing. 2) I don't think the industry is "funneling" people towards the generic genre you describe. Top selling video games in 2009 (according CNBC) included: 10) Street Fighter IV 9) Halo Wars 4) Mario Kart Wii 3) Pokemon 2) Wii Play 1) Wii Fit So, six of the top ten and four of the top five are NOT that. And these games are all drawn from the "major" platforms. There's no telling what this list would look like if Facebook, iPhone and internet games (Farmville, et al) were included. 3) Anecdotally, while many of the RPGs I've played this year could loosely be described as "third-person action adventure where you kill dudes," I've also been playing lots of adventure games (which wasn't a possibility ten years ago) and miscellaneous rhythm, platforming, strategy and other sundry genres. I'm pretty sure my answer to the question of playing habits would be "I play a heck of a lot more genres now than I used to." Maybe I'm not representative of the typical gamer, but I do have lots of friends that don't read gaming blogs who have played things like Braid, Sam and Max, Boom Blox, etc. I don't think these types of games would have reached them as easily few years ago. However, I hear what you're saying. The funneling that I can see happening is in the press, and on gamer-oriented websites. For whatever reason, this "community" has grown more closed-off over time, covering fewer and fewer genres outside of its chosen few (which, as you say, tend to be variants of the 3rd-person action-adventure bad-ass narrative mold.) Even as the gaming industry and number of gamers has exploded around them, this coverage has grown narrower and narrower and is increasingly unrepresentative of both the variety of games available and the playing habits of casual actual gamers.

So I *finally* finished this game, after six months. (Origins, not Awakening) A few weeks ago I decided to pour myself into this game nearly full-time just to get through it. Christ, this game is LONG. I'm still not sure it's a particularly good game, though. The game's design opts for quantity over quality - bombarding the player with hours and hours of dialogue, dozens more hours of quests, hundreds of lore entries, items, skills, etc. With so much material to draw from, almost any player is bound to find *something* to draw them in, but I can't help but wonder if slogging through all those levels of all those dungeons was really necessary for me to enjoy the bits that were truly memorable. Must every game completely consume the player's life for weeks or months in order to be considered "epic?" My relationship with the game was rather love-hate. I would get addicted to it for several consecutive days, staying up as late as possible to play it -- until I stumbled into an insane difficulty spike because I'd wandered into an area designed for higher-level players than me, had my ass handed to me several times in a row, and then I'd shut off the Xbox in frustration and abandon the game for a month. (This happened at least twice.) The game's message to me seemed to alternate between "Come and get lost in our overly-detailed and fleshed out fantasy world!" and "Haha you're addicted to our emotionally manipulative digital drug! Go suffer from withdrawal!" The latter is not a particularly pleasant feeling to get from a game.

Can I get in on round 4? I'm sucking in the free games, but I want to try with Thumbers anyway

On average, I've been 50/50, but this has had several major swing periods. As Chris said, back in the 90s you get a lot of games to run on run-of-the-mill family/work PCs. So adventure games and other miscellaneous software became a staple for me. At the same time, I was a mindless Nintendo fanboy for much of that time, for no real reason. My brother and I convinced our parents to buy us a Super Nintendo, but we never even had that many games for it. By the time the N64 came out, we owned maybe 8 games for the SNES. But renting was much bigger back then - we definitely used the console more for rentals than anything else. During high school, I got really into PC hardware and programming, and so PC games became much more pre-dominant - mostly strategy games. So for about four years, I was spending money on PC parts and cobbling together "better and better" gaming machines. (In retrospect, not that much money, but probably more than a high schooler should have been spending.) Then college came, and I realized I had better things to do with my time and money than build computers and curse loudly when they didn't work. PC gaming in the 2000s seemed to be increasingly obsessive about graphics hardware and upgrade cycles, and I just couldn't deal with. So, I largely gave up on that rat race and settled for playing old adventure games again on whatever hardware I had at the time. I also bought a GameCube and that was my main gaming platform for most of that decade. (Although I also had a GBA during my semester abroad.) Later, I also got an Xbox 360 for the more "hardcore" games I was missing by not having a PC. The last year or so, I've become receptive to the PC again, as it seems the "rat race" aspect has calmed down and adventure games have picked up again. Also online flash-style games (Dragon Age Journeys!) that run on even my Linux work computer are appealing, so that helps.

I hope the company is doing well. From the outside looking in, it seems like it's been a rough time for them. Also, the way Schafer talks in both the Eurogamer interview and the Joystiq post makes it sound like the business end of things is eating up all his time these days. As if he's full-time company president, part-time game writer, which is sad.

Both screenshots are really angular and not particularly interesting. This is supposed to be their "new style."

If nothing else works, there's always the "Options->Difficulty->Easy" tactic. For some reason, I never had as much difficulty in Alpha Protocol as I did in Dragon Age. Most of the difficulty criticisms that are held against AP seem, IMHO, to apply equally as well to DA. But I guess people's mileage varies.

Anyone used OnLive? The coolest feature of that service is the ability to jump in and watch literally anyone currently playing any game on the service and, well, watch. Since the player may not even know that anyone is watching, it becomes a weirdly voyeuristic experience.

It was also a very, very different game. Much of the main story thrust in Torment was discovering your forgotten past, determining which parts of it were true, and how learning these truths would affect your development as a character in the present. The journey was as much about self-discovery as it was about affecting the world around you. Dragon Age had a much more traditional cRPG story structure - your character is expressed mainly through your interactions with the world, and siding with one faction or another in various conflicts. The origin stories complemented this nicely, as it gave you some additional insight into how one or two of those factions worked, and potentially a bias one way or another. ("Here's what it's REALLY LIKE to be a city elf in the ghetto; aren't those humans bastards?") From what little we know about the game, it sounds like DA2 is going to follow much more in the footsteps of DA:O than Torment (as it should.) Removing the origin stories means that the scope of the game is in some way reduced.

I was less enamored of Episode 3 than I was of 1 & 2, mostly because it got my hopes up with that awesome Noir sequence, before abruptly changing pace. That opening sequence was fantastic! It combined the best of Phoenix Wright with solid TellTale parody writing in a noir setting. If only the rest of the episode had been that good!

This bugged me, too. Although, for many video game news bloggers, it's debatable whether either term "professional" or "journalist" applies.

And thus, my career as a professional comics reviewer began and ended.

Today, I beat No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, which I thought was generally inferior to the original -- except for its soundtrack, which was way, way better. The crazy concept doesn't pack as much punch the second time around, and the ending, in particular, was way more traditional video-gamey and way less meta. I also recently finished Alpha Protocol. I talked a lot about it in the Alpha Protocol thread, so I won't say any more.

My favorite Al Lowe story was inadvertently revealed by an interview with Scott Murphy (one of the Space Quest designers) several years ago: Weird! Unrelated - I could never stand the LSL games, but I did like Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist which he co-wrote with Josh Mandel.

Dude, did you miss the 100-odd suspiciously-attractive women that trotted out the Nintendo 3DSes during the Nintendo conference? AWKWARD MOMENT.

The Wii is only 640x480 (or 640x240 for games that don't support progressive scan, or if you're using analog cables) For a screen a few inches wide, 400x240 seems fine. Plus, on a lower resolution screen, you can put more hardware power into effects and get a little more bang for your buck, so to speak. I'm pretty sure the main limiting factor of the DS (graphics-wise) has been more horsepower/performance related than a screen that's too low-res. Surely the low poly-count and pixelated textures in Spirit Tracks are more noticeable than the resolution?

If they *work*, I think the motion controls will be fantastic. The live demo they tried during the keynote didn't inspire confidence, though, obviously. Ditto the lukewarm feelings on the art style - I didn't think they could make Zelda look *more* generic than Twilight Princess, but apparently they can. Geeze, I wish they'd kept the Wind Waker style.

For this type of thing, talking points and groupthink are more effective than any script.

Well that was pretty great! Shame about the Zelda demo not working - I feel bad for Miyamoto; giving a demo with technical glitches is never fun, I can't imagine doing it during a conference keynote! (Also, weird to have watched a Nintendo keynote where Zelda was *not* the most exciting part!) But the new Kirby is :tup: for me, and I was pleased with the generally solid lineup. I doubt the new Donkey Kong will be as good as the bongo-drum Jungle Beat for GameCube, but I like Retro, so we'll see. And Mickey and Kid Icarus have potential, too. In comparison to the MS keynote yesterday, Nintendo definitely gave the impression of driving forward while everyone else plays catch-up to their ideas. On the other hand, it would be nice to see Nintendo *ever* showcase something that isn't derived from an existing franchise. (Did the Kirby sewing platformer really need to be a Kirby game?)

It changed developer AND publisher, on separate occasions. I'm pretty sure Jensen has been the only constant on the project. As for it getting buried during the holidays - do adventure games really compete with "big" titles anymore? It seems like they exist in a separate market these days.

I don't have a problem with "casual shit," I just wish they would do some original "casual shit." Wii Sports was cool because, for all its faults, it was still a mostly new idea in 2006. Four years later, collections of sports-related minigames just don't have the same sway. Microsoft's casual line-up (and, for that matter, their core lineup as well) seems so blatantly focus-grouped and derivative that it's hard to have any enthusiasm for it. It's really disappointing after last year's presentation about the possibilities of then-Natal.

Geeze, a surprising amount of Scott Pilgrim hate on this thread. I would not have expected that. Scott Pilgrim is basically about a loser/hipster who meets a girl, and then it turns all video-gamey with fights and explosions and super-powered vegans. The "target audience" is, um, loser hipsters and vegans who get Video game references. (It's very similar in tone to "Spaced," which is why it makes sense that Edgar Wright is doing the movie.) This game looks pretty faithful to the comics, and the movie looks about as faithful as it can be given the strange casting choice of Michael Cera. (Scott Pilgrim the character was never "awkward" so much as oblivious and selfish, in the way that nerds are.)