Matt’s Somewhat Serious Bit
As previously mentioned, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Oblivion. It’s a good game, but I don’t think it deserves some of the perfect marks it has been getting around the place – certainly a good game, but not perfect. Oblivion fixes a lot of the things that were wrong with Morrowind, namely graphics and AI – it also adds a massive, beautiful world map, and Havok physics. However, as I mentioned in last fortnight’s Easy Mode, many of the 360’s launch titles lack any sort of new, significant changes to the underlying gameplay – things that we expect to see on new hardware. Sure, Oblivion adds larger scale to the game and all sorts of fancy shit like Radiant AI and Speed Tree, but the underlying structure; the action, quests, NPCs and all of that jazz haven’t really changed that much.
When I thought about how much of the intangible parts of Oblivion had changed compared to Morrowind (procedurally generated trees and such are pretty cool), it got me thinking about a few things in relation to the future of gaming, and how the new generation fits in. If you count the very first set of gaming consoles released (your dedicated Pong systems), this is the seventh generation of home consoles. Think about the progression from the Atari to the NES, and the NES to the SNES. Does this sort of progression apply in the same manner to the 3D consoles, say PlayStation to PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3? Think about the sort of gameplay changes we saw between these generations…now think about the graphical changes. The games certainly felt more solid as the hardware became more powerful, but at the same time, developers were striving to achieve more with each new system. Now it would seem that pretty visuals are the main focus, and everything else is secondary.
Evolution - deja vu?
I tried my best to put myself in the shoes of a game developer – if I were making a game right now with a good team on my side, what could I make that’s either breaking new ground, or hasn’t been done – and it has to be done on a traditional gaming interface, not the Revolution. To make my little challenge harder, the game had to be easily marketable, and not rely on just one gimmick to get it across the line. Needless to say, I failed miserably, but I did have ideas about ground that has only been partly explored that developers could easily capitalise on.
Comedy is an area I feel hasn’t been explored for a long time in videogames (since the decline of the adventure game) – more specifically, the art of parody. You get a few little comedic tidbits in games in a variety of forms (Psychonauts summer camp humour, Conker and MGS2’s post modern style trickery, references to Monty Python in Fallout), but nobody has ever dedicated a videogame to taking the mickey out of other videogames (with the exclusion of one of the Fairly Odd Parents games, which featured a lot of jabs at videogame clichés). You know some developers have a good sense of humour and want to be able to do it (first MGS4 trailer), but why doesn’t someone take it that extra step further. Imagine having a German soldier yell “Haven’t I see you here before?” the next time you run up the beach head at Normandy (which would be the 11th time, by my calculations) – something like that; I suck at comedy, so don’t look at me for ideas. Then again, Sega should just make Shenmue III, and then I’ll shut up about needing new gameplay experiences.
Will comedy ever return to gaming?
You know what really grinds my gears
I try not to do the same sub-sections two weeks in a row, but James did ask me to make a mention (see: I bitched about having no ideas) of the sudden influx of Microsoft based viral marketers into our forums, pumping our humble abode full of messages advertising their attempt to break the world record for a water balloon fight. These messages are so ridiculously easy to spot – when I saw that article on Penny Arcade about marketing companies hiring people to post on forums, I thought that everyone in that business would try to step their game up a little. These messages stick out like a sore thumb – the guys always have piss-small post counts, always mention how great this particular thing is, and most importantly, always have absolutely pathetic grammar and spelling abilities. If anything, posting guerrilla marketing in our forum in this fashion is going to be counteractive to your cause.
Viral marketers - please line up
Note to Microsoft: Why the heck aren’t you doing this in summer? Surely it’d be more successful to have a water fight when it’s, you know, hot.
I can’t believe it’s a video game
Oh no! He broke our freaking wall!
Why don’t they bring back…
It’s Easter this weekend (like you didn’t know), and that got me thinking about videogames. Videogames featuring Jesus. There’s not any, really – is there? Surely some game developer out there wants to be edgy and make Jesus a prime time videogame character – there’s plenty you could do with him, in either present day or 2000 years ago (Passion of the Christ: The Game – you know EA wants it). I’m sure it’d be a legal nightmare with all of the sue-happy American Christians, but it would make for an interesting experiment.
Happy easter, everyone.
The thoughts and opinions expressed in Easy Mode are solely those of the writer, and do not in any way reflect the views of PALGN, it's affiliates, sponsors and advertisers.
Having said that though, I will take the opportunity to fire up about it the viral campaign.
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