- Cracked.com
- It’s sad because it’s true.
See that?
Funny, right? Clever, maybe? Insightful, at the very least?
NO! It’s fucking REALITY is what it is! It’s MY reality!
Hit the jump so I don’t have to wax depressing out here in public. *sniffle*
That picture represents a reality that says the games industry is going to keep shooting itself in the foot until the wound gets infected and the entire business that keeps me in a steady supply of pre-stressed clothes, pasta covered in tiny shrimpies and white wine sauce, and the finest prescription drugs Rush Limbaugh can buy is about to run into a brickwall that only recently had the smoldering remains of an Atari 7200 scraped off of its stony facade.
I won’t strain myself detailing the myriad ways the games biz seems to be autocannibalizing itself for kicks (mostly because Cracked’s David Wong did it so elegantly in the article linked to the above image) but I will highlight one crucial point I think he missed, owing to his not toiling daily on overthinking gaming itself.
Following what Wikipedia calls the “North American video game crash of 1983,” after Nintendo single-handedly resurrected gaming as a thing, when the overthinkers of the day were attempting to pin said crash on one overwhelmingly evil factor, the answer they nearly unanimously came up with was that Atari simply stopped giving a fuck as to who published games on their consoles. Thus retailers ended up with bargain bins jammed full of licensed pet food tie-ins and games about E.T. so terrible that the publisher was forced to resort to measures usually reserved for the disposal of nuclear waste to contain the game’s innate stench of failure lest it infect the entirety of Reagan-era America.
With that in mind, have any of you seen the Wii shelves at your local gaming retailer lately? Not the items on the shelf, but the actual shelf itself?
No, you haven’t, because they are too busy holding up billions of metric tons of shit like Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum 2009 and whichever Carnival Games sequel hasn’t yet been conned into the cart of a poorly informed, if well meaning grandmother, who is too busy hoping against hope that her spawn’s spawn might enjoy the abortion on a disc she just shelled out a wallet-breaking $7 for.
As famed aphorist George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Oh relax… there are some brilliant games out there that look nothing like Modern Kill of Honor: Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, Alan Wake, Dragon Age, Super Mario Galaxy, BioShock, Drake’s Fortune, Little Big Planet…. Sheesh, take a deep breath
I will agree that the Wii’s games are pretty terrible.
Is it irony that two of the games you mentioned are almost time-swapped clones of each other and LBP is an obvious, ‘net-friendly evolution of the direct forebears of Super Mario Galaxy?
Otherwise, don’t worry about me Frinky, I wasn’t actually crying. It was dramatic license to illustrate a point. I’m too rad to ever be out of a job just because an industry is destroying itself with a depressing dearth of creativity and a marketplace oversaturated with me-too series and blatant idiot-audience-appeasing clones.
Am I the only one who thinks that Half-Life 2 and Fallout 3 are the most interesting games to come out in the last decade or so? Methinks that the gaming industry could learn a thing or two from Valve and Bethesda, no?
Singularity looks like an interesting twist on the FPS. I don’t play too many of them myself, I guess in large part because of the sameness. I haven’t bothered with MW2 because it looked like… just more MW1, which I’ve gotten my fill of.
The Wii certainly is ripe with shovelware and the novelty factor is showing its age. (The iPhone, of course, has a ton of shovelware as well, but nigh-unlimited virtual shelf space, easy-to-find rankings and overall low prices even from big-name titles are, I think, the saving graces there.)
Holy sentence splices batman, break some of this shit up. Those sentences? They’re paragraphs.
FPSs seem to breed a kind of sameness. All of them feature an arsenal of weaponry that fill out specific roles- you have pistols, shotguns, and sniper rifles. You inevitably have a machine gun and something that goes “boom.” That the game industry is eating itself is obvious (someone should tell Nintendo that it’s not 1987 any more) but FPS seem to be the worst of all.
At least with platformers you have to create a memorable character for the players to look at, and with RPGs there has to be an attempt at a story. FPS, though, seem to get by while offering the same arsenal of stuff that we’ve been playing with since Doom. There are good FPSs out there (Half-Life, Bioshock, the Thief series, for instance) but they seem to be an exception. Aside from endless Madden tie-ins, FPSs really do seem to be the laziest, least creative, least inspired, and most hopeless of genres. Of course they, as a genre, would showcase the worst in gaming.
This article shows the same level of inspiration and creativity as the FPS being showcased. We’ve been hearing this same “chicken-little-sky-is-falling” mantra about video games since the initial industry collapse in 1983. And even that collapse had less to do with the quality of the content and more to do with the President of Atari acting like a cocaine-vacuum. Developers have been pumping out knock-off FPSs and sports franchise updates since the early 90’s. This is not news. This isn’t even interesting to people who actually care about games. This is only news to videogame “journalists.”
What is being decried here is a general lack of creativity and risk-taking in the big budget entertainment industry. Remember that summer they released two different movies about meteors crashing into the Earth? That sure destroyed the movie industry. Give me a break.
Graham wins.
I really do like to pew pew pew though.
I still think CounterStrike is the best FPS – but that’s just me, without a console.
Starcraft 2 soon though! Everything else is just fluff.