Quick review:
– Spent a good part of last week in bed with a back injury. Suck.
– Went to DisneyQuest over the weekend with Shelly and Kelly. They have an enormous, multistory arcade with an entire wing dedicated to vintage arcade games. Got to play Star Wars, Joust (one of my all-time faves), Battlezone, Tempest, Marble Madness, Zaxxon…many for the first time in years. They even had Space Invaders and Space War machines! Cool.
I don’t know what it is with modern video games, but they all suck. Fifteen varieties of combat games, ten varieties of first-person shooter games, fifteen varieties of racing games, each more formularistic and derivative than the last. Boring. Boring. Modern video game manufacturers wouldn’t know an original concept if it bit them on the collective corporate ass.
– Back in the office: Nothing but disasters. Clients with servers failing, five emergency rush jobs in the last sixteen hours alone, I can’t keep up. Suck.
– Meeting today with a patent consultant for an idea I have. Cool.
– San Francisco is only about three weeks away! Rumor has it Apple is planning something really, really big–much bigger than just new computer announcements. And we’ll get to hang out with altenra. Very, very cool.
– Christmas with my family and somewhat estranged sister. Could be cool, could suck.
And finally, for your moment of Zen:
Found this when we got lost on Disney property. One has visions of a special squad of uniformed, armed guards on Segway scooters to enforce this rule…
Old video games rock. New ones suck. It’s very true, but I don’t know /why…/
I think the fact that new games suck may have something to do with the resources and the budget available to game designers today. Paradoxically, greater computing resources and higher budgets conspire to produce more mediocre games.
Old game platforms were extremely limited in technological resources, and they were often designed on a shoestring budget. As a result, they were very creative, because they had to be. The creativity of the game mechanics was the only factor not limited by trechnology and budget.
Today, the technology exists to make even mediocre game design look really, really good. As a result, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the look and feel ofthe game, but less emphasis is placed on the game mechanics. Worse, monster game-development budgets mean that a game must appeal to a very wide base of players in order to recoup the gargantuan development costs; a game which must make millions or tens of millions of dollars in order to recover the development cost is a game that is not going to go to far into untested territory. New games which are very unusual or differ greatly from games already on the market are too big a gamble; what if they don’t succeed?
Yep.
Artists have for centuries at least – arguably, dozens of millennia – produced their best work alone and struggling against adverse conditions – such as really limited hardware.
Commitees with lots of toys and budget cannot equal this.
Old video games rock. New ones suck. It’s very true, but I don’t know /why…/
New games suck because there’s an emphasis on looks over content, and looks requires huge teams, and lots of preplanning, and not a lot of creative spark. With the huge budgets involved, people get scared to do anything original, they just do “new and improved” on the old things.
New games suck because there’s an emphasis on looks over content, and looks requires huge teams, and lots of preplanning, and not a lot of creative spark. With the huge budgets involved, people get scared to do anything original, they just do “new and improved” on the old things.
I had an Atari 2600 and a 5200. I had a lot more fun with the 2600 than any video game console since.
I had an Atari 2600 and a 5200. I had a lot more fun with the 2600 than any video game console since.
I think the fact that new games suck may have something to do with the resources and the budget available to game designers today. Paradoxically, greater computing resources and higher budgets conspire to produce more mediocre games.
Old game platforms were extremely limited in technological resources, and they were often designed on a shoestring budget. As a result, they were very creative, because they had to be. The creativity of the game mechanics was the only factor not limited by trechnology and budget.
Today, the technology exists to make even mediocre game design look really, really good. As a result, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the look and feel ofthe game, but less emphasis is placed on the game mechanics. Worse, monster game-development budgets mean that a game must appeal to a very wide base of players in order to recoup the gargantuan development costs; a game which must make millions or tens of millions of dollars in order to recover the development cost is a game that is not going to go to far into untested territory. New games which are very unusual or differ greatly from games already on the market are too big a gamble; what if they don’t succeed?
Yep.
Artists have for centuries at least – arguably, dozens of millennia – produced their best work alone and struggling against adverse conditions – such as really limited hardware.
Commitees with lots of toys and budget cannot equal this.