Gamers Know Best?

I guess it depends on how you look at things. I wouldn’t say that hardcore gamers are killing gaming since, as you note, they are in a minority and if you take their influence out of the equation then the mainstream are just as much to blame for not buying good, innovative games. Hardcore gamers might be stuck in their ways and like playing clones of, for want of a better term, “benchmark games”, but if they are in a minority then by definition they are unlikely to both influence the mainstream gamer’s choice or the decisions of developers/publishers to make innovative games. I rather suspect that good reviews and a shitload of marketing goes further to making/breaking a game but admit that a degree of “cult appeal” probably helps.

I have to confess that I’ve not bought any of the innovative titles that you listed, although I came close to getting Beyond Good and Evil in Amazon’s Winter Sale one year but then didn’t buy anything. I’ve looked a couple of times at Ico but I don’t really want an emotional experience playing a game. For the most part I know what sort of games I like and am too poor to buy them anyway.

At the end of it I would not even begin to consider myself “hardcore” (anyone with that title might as well admit that their life is over) but almost never discuss games with anyone beyond this web site. For the most part it is because no one I really know actually plays games at all and while we’ll all talk about films, football matches and the like that we’ve experienced, we never talk about games. As such my purchasing decisions are made based on what I have read about the game, how that fits in with my tastes, and whether it looks interesting. The opinion of others only figures into this due to web site reviews.

I couldnt agree with you less on this issue. Your artile sounds more like a tirade against hardcore gamers than anything else.

I did not buy the Sim (or its sequel) and I didnt recommend it to friends. Why? I tried it about a week after it was released (long live the internet) and quite frankly I hadnt really played a more boring game in my life, not to mention that the graphics were less than impressive. So when people ask me about the Sims I tell them my opinion, and I make sure they know its my opinion. Many people like the game, I dont, and I know many gamers dont like it with me (I mean, now they have the Student Life expansion for the sims…. this means college kids are now sitting behind their computer, playing characters that are… college kids! Its retarded.)

I enjoyed Rayman 2 for a little while until as with almost all my games I got bored and moved on. Its an excellent platform game, and this was recognised by most of the gamers. It was however not yet in a time where gaming had become mainstream. This is in fact only since the Xbox, and ‘mainstream’ gaming so far still only applies to consoles.

Prince of Persia and the Sands of time was widely recognised by gamers as an excellent game, and katamari damaci, as weird as it was, was a big hit. And it wasnt the casual players that played this, but the people into the games. Maybe not the FPS-only gamers, but those who kept up with gaming news, those that read E3 reviews and gaming magazines. Those people knew about those games. The ‘mainstream’ audience failed to pick up on it, but thats their loss, its not my job to tell them what to play.

It is true that the people who were really interested in Half Life 2 and Doom 3 were the hardcore gamers. This doesnt mean they will ignore everything else. It does mean however they do focus on games of quality. Say what you want about both of them, innovative or not, they were quality games, and those that follow the reviews and try the demos know this. Now maybe the sims will appeal more to the casual gamer, who asks his gamer friend what to play. However since the gamer doesnt like the Sims, he advises Half Life 2, which the casual gamer in term might find too demanding. This doesnt mean its the gamer’s fault for ‘ill-advising’ his friend. We’ll advise what we think are the best games. The information is out there and available to everyone.

As you state in the beginning of the article, you seem to equate the sims, GTA3 and Halo with innovation. Now the Sims was, as crappy a game as I think it is, innovative. It was so new and untried publishers were hesitant to touch it at first. However, GTA3 was just GTA2 in 3D, a much needed and anticipated evolution. And maybe it is just how I experienced it however I did find very little innovation in both Halo 1 and 2 (zomg dual weapons! UT99 and other games didnt already have this for years :O).

In short, you are blaming hardcore gamers for not showing casual gamers every single game there is, on the remote chance they might just like it. Even though ‘hardcore’ gamers are the ones reading the reviews, with well established demands and preferences. Technological innovations mean more to us than to the casual gamer. We appreciate new and innovative games if they are fun, and we can appreciate better versions of older games. If someone asks us for an opinion on a game we will tell them our opinion, based on these criteria. And we will not recommend what seems to us a sub-par game.

Now this is our right, because everyone is entitled to an opinion and there isnt really a wrong one. But its not our job to find games for casual gamers. If they prefer certain games, they can search for them themselves, but if they ask me what I think of the Sims, no matter how many people do enjoy it, I will still tell them its a boring game that EA is just milking for all that its worth, because that is how I feel about it.

Kelmon, in response to your response, have you ever tried to get your friends interested in games? alls it seems to take is something a bit sureal, something unusual, and something simple enough to get them hooked…

every time someone new steps into our house ryan hands them an sp with warioware twisted inside and watches them fail time in and time out at the 5 second long games until they realize that pressing the buttons doesn’t actually do anything, that it must be something else. it’s not only hilarious, but it’s also a fantastic way to expose non-gamers to the amazing technology, curiousity, obsertity and fun of games.

i’m not a gamer, i’m a gamer’s wife. but i now have my very own pink ds to go along with my very own pink sp and am currently raising two champion puppies (okay, one’s not a champ yet, but she will be!). all of this (my shabby list of gamer creds) are due to ryan’s consistant and yet pressure-free approach to encouraging gaming.

it’d be worth getting yourself a donkey conga drum kit just to invite your friends over to look like idiots for 30 minutes. our friends from the horror channel still mention how silly and fun and adictive it was to play bingo on donkey conga!

if you can’t afford the drum kit, take them to a lan-laden computer cafe where you can get them into gear as a master chef impersonater or give them a chain saw to cut open bomb-headed screaming weirdos in serious sam, after half an hour they’re fingers won’t hurt from pressing a s d and w so often and you’ll all have something new and exciting to talk about.

there are loads of options to get your chums into gaming, even if they just dabble in it for a day or two, it still opens them up to a brand new world of possibilities and helps them understand where all your free cash runs off to! and all of this, i promise, i’m speaking from recent experiences. ryan and my little brother took me to area 52 (our local, if you can call it local, lan palace!) for new years eve, in which i played serious sam until litterally, i fell asleep in the chair with my finger on the left mouse key.

that’s the key to expanding gaming, getting your mates in a bunch to take turns clapping like apes or cursing each other because he keeps getting all the ruppies and smashing all the pots.

he

and reply to johndoe…
you’re right, it’s not a gamer’s responsibility to help those individuals who are uninterested or unwilling to make an effort, however, education, no matter what the venue or subject, is something that everyone should always share when possible.
and if gaming is a way of life for you, then wouldn’t you want to bring those people you enjoy being with and hanging around along the same, if not a similar path, to yours? at least for one evening.

The gaming community as a whole needs to sit down and figure out proper names for its various subdivisions. Clearly just tossing out the phrase “hardcore gamer” in the context of any controversial discussion is, these days, not much more than an invitation to start flaming.

well, i’ve editted the article so that the first time i use the word hardcore it links to the dictionary definition of the term. i’ll post that here for ease of reference…

hard-core also hard·core (härdkôr, -kr)
adj.
Intensely loyal; die-hard
Stubbornly resistant to improvement or change
Extremely graphic or explicit

In reply to Katy…

I agree, and if someone asks me for gaming advice I will give them some information on a game (as far as I know about it), and if I have one, my opinion. What they do with that is up to them however.

In his article, Plagiarize makes his point that because ‘hardcore’ gamers arent interested in certain games, and therefore not introducing casual gamers into these games (which, again, they dont like, and that is their right), it is the fault of the ‘hardcore’ gamers that ‘casual’ gamers dont hear about this.

Although I dont fall under hardcore gamers as plagiarize’s definition above me, I spend way too much time on games to be called casual. And I resent the idea that I have to go around like a human advertising campaign telling people who dont really care about gaming that much about games that I dont really care about in general. If someone asks me for advice I will give it, but that will be MY opinion and in the end its up to them to find out what they want to get, and why.

You gotta be kiddin’ me! Your are an absolute Moron, who doesn’t even know what B$ your spilling!
People buy games for fun & entertainment be it casual or hardcore their objective is the same!
Casual gamers do have a care-free approach but hardcore gamer’s who the industry address to first. That’s just the way it has been & will be..get it!
Besides there will be plenty of so called” casual games” available as well.
Don’t ever say that PC gaming

Let me slay some sacred cows. Gaming is better today than it’s ever been. My first game systems were the Apple II and the NES so I do have a pretty decent degree of perspective on this whole thing.

And Beyond Good and Evil was a slightly above average game that’s gotten bigger and bigger as time’s gone on. The Reviews for it were right where they should be, low 8’s at Gamespot slightly higher at IGN. IT was poorly marketed, I had no idea what the game was about months ahead of time like i did other games that I bought that holiday. Frankly of all the underappriciated games that year Beyond good and Evil was the 3rd or 4th best game among the under appriciated games from 2003. Crimson Skies and Freedom Fighters were a lot more interesting and they died comerical deaths despite wide praise from the critics and the hard core gamers alike.

And while i’m at it. Yes I’m a hardcore gamer and yes I think innovation is the most overrated concept out there. I’d far rather have a supremely polished Ninja Gaiden, FFX, Halo 2, KOTOR, World of Warcraft, Baldur’s Gate 2 or Half-Life 2 than an innovative Nintendogs. Novelty will wear off in a heartbeat but excellence is forever. 10 times out of 10 i’ll take the tried and true path over the novel path because most times upon reflection the tried and true is the better path. A lack of novelties will not kill the games industry.

Far more dangerous is getting preoccupied with novelties (you’ll call them innovation but they’re really novelties) and not focusing on polishing things. And casual gamers are more likely to gravate towards a polished game than they are towards a novel game. GTA 3 is often given as an example of the power of innovation, which is nothing short of bullshit or short memory. The GTA series isn’t particuarily different than what i was doing in 1996 in Daggerfall just in an urban environment and since 2001 in 3d. Most games that work have already been done. Nintendogs isn’t terribly different than Tamagotchi it’s just Tamagotchi with a tactile & audio interface. Nothing particuarily innovative here either just highly polished. I think Nintendogs is awesome (but not really my bag) but creidt where credit is due the success of Nintendogs has more to do with extraordinary polish than it does with their being a single new idea in it.

I addressed the sky is falling issues that Nintendo is propegating in my column here The Manufactured Crisis. This is a made up problem that largely can be traced straight back to Kyoto. Their is no crisis, gaming is not only fine, but better than it’s ever been. The decline in Novelty is in fact the sign that gaming is maturing as a medium. Mature mediums don’t reinvent themselves very often, in fact very seldom do they.

it’s not just Nintendo propagating the notion though, it’s also some of the biggest named game designers. as budgets go up, anything but more of the same is a risky bet, espescially if innovation isn’t selling. Nintendogs is vastly different to Tamagotchi. Do you for example, think Ikaruga isn’t vastly different to space invaders? Same idea, move a ship, don’t get shot, shoot the aliens.

the genres you love wouldn’t exist if not for the innovators. maybe you don’t like the games that take chances, but there wouldn’t be polished versions of them if someone wasn’t taking the risks.

beyond good and evil’s strengths were the storyline, and the mixture of well realised gameplay types so wonderfully integrated.

the reason the game is growing in peoples memories compared to Freedom Fighters and Crimson, is because of just that. the emotional attachment with the player that the game managed. those two games were fun, and arcadey, but they don’t have the replayability or the emotional hold on the people that play them. not all games stand the test of time, but the classics often only rear their heads above the rest of the releases when given time. the shining was slated on release but is now rightly recognised at the classic it was.

there’s no reason games can’t be reassed either.

one things seperates innovation from novelties, and that’s longevity. remember that every gametype was novel once. we haven’t discovered all the genres out there yet, and we shouldn’t stop looking.

I don’t really think their are all that many new game types out there that are that will be highly comerically viable. I mean if you look at other forms of entertainment they remain pretty static. I mean the majority of television show types were set by 1970 or so. The Majority of film and theatre are adapting and amalgamating models that date to ancient Greece. How many brand new types of music have you heard in my lifetime? THe last new major genre of musice to be introduced to my knowdledge was hiphop in the late 70’s. Beyond that we have rock which dates to the 1950s, Blues and Jazz that date to the 20’s. I’m really not seeing a new archetype of game coming that’s going to be comerically viable any time soon. And you know that doesn’t mean something is wrong; in fact that means something is good as we’ve come nowhere near making perfect games with the styles of games we have. I’m having a lot of fun now with what we’re working on.

First off, Plagiarize, you are smoking crack. I would bet dollars to doughnuts that ONLY the hardcore gamer bought Beyond Good & Evil. I am a fairly hardcore gamer, and I am the only person I know amongst many gamers who have played it. A female lead and a Pig sidekick do not a financial blockbuster make.

You are also talking, essentially, about the hardcore FPS PC gamer. The only games you mention as having a locked in hardcore fanbase are games like Doom, Quake, and Half-Life. I don’t know where I’m going with that…

Vermouth. I cannot stand how you take Nintendo’s comments and actions out of context. Yes, Nintendo has made some bone-stupid decisions before. However, in the Japanese market there is a serious problem with gaming. Lots of new games aren’t being bought for a variety of reasons, two of which are the prevalence of cell-phone based games and the size of the used game market. You may think games have only gotten better, the Japanese still think the 16-bit era was the golden age. Don’t think cell-phone games are big? How about the Final Fantasy games that are being released for them, but I digress.

…Anyway. The games you list as being mass-market innovative hits aren’t there because they are god’s gift to gaming. The Sims is an easy game to play. Kids play it. I know kids play Halo and Halo 2, but kids who aren’t into games can play it. GTA III? Easy game to play. Walk into traffic, press the triangle button, drive around, mow down people, fuck a hooker, get killed wake up at the hospital, repeat. Halo? Try the only launch game worth 50 bucks on the XBox. I was working at Babbage’s during its release cycle, the only game I could recommend and still sleep at night was Halo. The rest sucked. Millions of people had Halo to look forward to Halo 2.

Oh, and GoldenEye 64 pretty much did everything Halo did. First. On much less powerful hardware.

I think what you’ve done is merely highlighted the fact there are more than one type of ‘hardcore gamer’.

The first, of which I believe you are referring, plays only a few games, and refuses to accept other alternatives.

The second, looks for quality, originality and vibrancy in the games they buy. This is the gamer who buys the obscure games like Ico, like Katamari Damacy, like Gitaroo Man, like Electrplankton.

The latter is a true gamer, wheras the former is a ‘counterstrike gamer’. Substitiute ‘counterstrike’ for any of the following: Madden, Need For Speed, Tony Hawk, GTA.

I believe there are two definitions of ‘hardcore gamer’, and you have selected the one which the passionate, variety-craving gamers object to. The gamers who DID buy BG&E, and Ful Throttle. The ones who want those games to continue in some form.

The mainstream gamer buys movie tie ins, Need For Speed Underground and Madden or whatever sport game is popular. The fact GTA, Halo, and the Sims are popular isn’t an indication that the mainstream makes those games popular, it’s because they are an exception to the rule: most big sellers are not great games. They are cash-ins.

A well intentioned article, but some definitions are not as universal as you believe them to be.

Pat I think you’re full of shit I’m sorry to say. I hated Ico, it’s actually one of the worst games i’ve ever played, it made me want to go to sleep. I’m as hard core you get hardcore, i love video games, i’ve been playing them since I was 4 years old and no I don’t crave the games that supposedly mark you as a “gamer”. I don’t like the offbeat games because they sacrifice quality to become offbeat.

I’m not a mainstream gamer, but i like Halo, Vice City and madden because those games are really really good. I take a good deal of offense that I’m somehow less of a real gamer because i prefer a extraordinarily polished experience to a unique experience. You want proof i’m not a mainstream gamer? How about I beat Baldur’s Gate 2:SOA & throne of Bhaal 4 times in a row in about 3.5 weeks? Just because I don’t want to play Ico and BG&E doesn’t make me any less hardcore because I love Madden.

I’m not going to apologize for buying sequels more than original brands. When an original brand is really heavily polished like Brothers in Arms or Jade Empire I won’t delay in spending my money there but I did buy the GTA Double Pack and Crimson Skies 2 over Beyond Good and Evil and I don’t feel guilty about that. Those were better games. I eventually did get around to trying BG&E and it’s a decent game but not much better than the low 8 gamespot gave it at the time. I’m not going to apologize for it and I’m not any less of a hardcore, gamer for preferring a better game versus a more unique game.

the Hardcore console gamer. I do not have anyone of those games you are mentioning but I would like too. If I would like to why don’t I? I guess my case is slightly unique. Until a few weeks ago I lived in Nigeria which lies on the inside corner of Africa (you could slot south america right into that corner). As you can see, I am not exactly in the most conducive place for gaming. Until now, my main way of getting games was when my mom travelled. I would basically just give her a long list of games I wanted and she would just go out there and the few she could find and thats that. My point is i think you being very unfair. I am a hardcore gamer, I play games, I talk games and basically games are my main thing. Despite my unsuitable means of getting them I still manage to play some of the best most innovative games around(gameplay wise) like my love kotor, halo, soul calibur, Ninja gaiden. I am the one who looks out for the quirky innovative titles like psychonauts and Fable(before it became the hype monster). I am the one who takes the slack, the condescending attitudes and down right rudeness from people who don’t understand. I am the one affected by the insanity of Jack Thompson. I am the one who spend weeks hyping up game ‘A’ or game ‘B’ to a bunch of guys trying to get that spark of gaming love. I am the one who takes time out to answer this thread. And if gaming was gone, I am the only one who would truly feel loss not the the bleeming mainstreamer.

And don’t knock on RTS’s, FPS and especially RPG’s as there has been a lot of amazing work this gen like NWN, dues ex, Halo, kotor etc.

Vermouth, you fail to understand the concept of ‘examples’.

Denied.

And Ico is hardly crap, Vermouth or whatever. Just because you can’t appreciate doesn’t mean its crap… and the last really good Madden was 04. The last 2 have been incremental rehashes. While I don’t agree with the author I certainly don’t want to be playing the same games I am playing now for the next 10 or even 5 years. I know alot of those games that claim to be innovative are just innovative in appearance but some are truly innovative and give you an experience you have never had before while being utterly a blast.

Anyone who thinks the game industry isn’t broken is being a little bit Niave. Dev costs keep going higher and higher, and developers are no longer allowed to own thier own IP’s because they are tied to money grubbing publishers. And big monster publishers like EA are just eating up any competition and crushing innovation beneath thier heel. And each day gaming becomes more mainstream, the unwashed masses who listen to the killers and think that MTV is ‘good’ close in like mindless zombies, zombies driving the sales of attrocities like Driv3r(lol) and enter the matrix skyward while breathtaking truly innovative titles like Ico (which I finally played) languish. The author is right about one thing though, if anything is going kill this industry, it is going to be the single-minded mentality of some of these supposed ‘Hardcore’ gamers.

Controversial points are fun.

What’s not fun is when they are misunderstood, and people start arguing about complete non-issues. lumzi23 - Plagiarize was not knocking RPGs, RTSs, or any genre. And you are not a hardcore gamer by the authors definition. You are a gaming enthusiast. A hardcore gamer for the purpose of this article is the kind of gamer who plays the same game over and over, and deviates very little from their preferred game type. Whether or not this is bad is completely a matter of opinion, but I’m tired of reading arguments (which then ricochet and start more arguments) which have nothing to do with the point at hand.

The comments here are going to start getting very polite very quickly or they’re going to get axed. Same goes for comments about incorrect definitions - it’s been covered enough and it’s not worthy of further discussion.

sorry most of my examples were FPS, they’re the examples i know best. RPGs and RTS games are guilty of this too though. an RTS comes along that does away with resources and oh look, resource managing is back in the sequel (Ground Control, *i think* like i said i’m less confidant with these examples). I’m not saying you don’t have your Jade Empires or your Deus Ex’s that blur or bend what should and shouldn’t be done in these genres, just that most people don’t try and a big part of that is that the gamers don’t try.

Goldeneye didn’t change the face of PC gaming. Goldeneye was the first FPS on console that really worked well. Halo was the first FPS on console that made PC developers take notice. I still feel Halo was innovative, but not so much in one big way as in a handful of small ways. The shield, the way they implemented vehicles, the way the weapons system worked, that type of thing. goldeneye didn’t buck any trends apart from FPS on console sucking up to that point, and it still deserves credit for it, but it’s certainly no Halo in terms of pretty much changing the face of entire genre.

Vermouth, I love your outspoken opinions, I love how well you defend them, and I hope you realise it. I’m not one who likes his opinions to go unchallenged, and challenging them well helps me reconsider and refine them, so keep it up.

You’re of course allowed to like things the way they are, and say so. If you don’t greatly like innovation and aren’t looking for anything beyond more polished and better looking versions of the games we have, keep speaking out about it. If I enjoyed the same kinds of games as you, I think I’d agree with pretty much all your points.

The gaming industry really isn’t floundering at all. If people want more innovative titles, they need only look for them. If people want more blood and gore and Counter-Strike clones, that’s not hard to find, either.

Making gaming more mainstream only makes the market wider and wider, allows for more games to be made, and more types of games to be made.

If you really can’t find anything new that tickles you, there are more than 20 years of history in gaming to dig through. ROMs and EBay should be more than enough to carry you for a couple years.

Basically the whole article is flawed because it is based on an imagined problem.

Plagiarize, you are going to have to explain to me how Halo got PC developers to take notice of console games.

I’ve thought about it, and I don’t get it. Halo was originally developed as a PC game, and was a successful port to the PC about a year later. Though I don’t know what that has to do with anything. Consoles -> PC and PC -> Consoles ports are nothing new.

As for innovative, I don’t know the only aspect of that game I would consider innovative was only being able to hold a limited number of weapons, one of each class, was it? Which makes sense because Power Suit or no, Gordon Freeman wasn’t walking around with all that gear and still able to swing a crowbar at the end of the day. (different game, I know, the first one I thought of by comparison.)

Pat, how did you mean that then because the sense i got from your post was serious gamers who are really passionate about the medium play quirky games X,y and Z and sheep who just follow what they’re told to play play X, Y and Z.

To me, I don’t know that Gameplay has all that much left in it. I mean to say that really thrilling me simply by what’s going on ont the screen has gotten really hard to the point it’s like 5 games per year manage it to the top level. But their are worlds upon worlds that most games should be working on in terms of story and until i start seeing stories that match high quality films and novels in even action games, I think we’ve got a long ways to go before we really ought be looking to reinvent the gameplay concepts.

Hardcore gamer as described in my article = this guy

He’s complaining that games are too easy these days and describes four swords as ‘mundane’. he wants games to go back to the time where game over meant game over, and he wants end bosses to require perfection to beat.

He thinks Mario and Sonic weren’t marketed towards children and uses ‘The Adventures of Cookies and Cream’ aka ‘Kuri Kuri Mix’ an example of how much modern platformers are aimed at children, when he quite blatantly can’t have played it.

Vermouth: my point was that genuine enthusiasts try something different from the big sellers lists, and the games I listed are most certainly in that category. It doesnt mean that you will enjoy them, and it doesnt have to be THOSE games.

The point is to try something different rather than sticking with the one or two defined genres.

You know Plagirize, while I don’t entirely agree with what that guy was saying because he wants us to turn back the clock quite a bit but his general message that games have gotten too easy is something that really ought be talked about. I wrote a column about this too, I think games have gotten both short and easy all at once. I mean seriously games described as hard is a pretty short list amongst AAA titles. I don’t nessacarily think we need to go back to Sonice 2 or Metroid on the NES or somesuch but I think the pendulum has swung way too far the other direction that I get a AAA game on Friday and can easily finish it before i go to work on Monday morning without spending every waking moment over the weekend playing that game. Given some freetime i can plow through games 2 or 3 AAA games in a given week if I’d want to. I don’t know that that seems so healthy for the industry. I know i played Sonic 1-3 for weeks to beat them because they were pretty damned hard towards the ends. The notion that Sonic or Mario weren’t designed towards kids is partially true. Today’s games are designed towards kids–they’re designed so people who are kinda okay with games and give up pretty easily are going to play through them to the end. Sonic and Mario were marketed towards kids but they were designed for anyone and pick up Sonic 2 today and even with all your years of gaming behind you tell me the last 1/3rd isn’t a pretty brutal grind. That wasn’t a game designed for kids–it was marketed to kids of course.

There is perhaps another perspective to look at when it comes to game difficulty these days and it starts with a confession:

I really suck at video games

I’m not proud of this but it is a fact. The number of games that I have completed over the years can be counted on one hand (Turrican 1 & 2, Secret of Mana, Quake 2 and Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance) whereas the number that I haven’t is pretty much uncountable. Perhaps, and this is only a hypothesis, I’m not the only one and therefore the difficulty of games is being tailored to the less adept who might form the majority. There are quite a lot of games that I’d like to have seen the end of but even with a cheat couldn’t see quite how I was ever likely to (Doom 2 springs immediately to mind).

If you can plough your way through 3 games in a week then I am both in awe and horror. However, I know for certain that I have neither the talent or, more importantly, the time to achieve this. Perhaps with games being targeted more towards older games the developers have realised that we don’t have unlimited time to spend playing their games and so they need to be both more accessible and quicker in order to fit into busy lives.

Just a thought.

Difficulty is a different issue. There are still crazy hard games coming out, and the examples he picks, Four Swords on the Cube and The Adventures of Peaches and Cream may not be crazy hard, but they are both hard games. If his biggest beef is with the fact game over doesn’t mean game over any more, that’s easily fixed. I know that I’ve played through 3 games without dying, restarting or saving. AvP PC on Directors Cut, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and Time Crisis in the arcades. I’ve attempted it with RE: Remake, RE:Zero and RE:4 and failed every time. Difficulty is still there if you approach games the old way, and even then you have your Ikarugas and Ninja Gaiden Blacks to dish out pain pain and more pain.

Are the majority of games easier than they used to be? Very definately. But does that mean that you can’t challenge yourself with speed runs, single credit attempts and so on? Absolutely not. That only leaves the elitist badge of honour type of thing. ‘I *beat* Metroid’ used to be an impressive thing to say, but there are still such boasts. Halo 2 on legendary for example. I think I’ll probably try and write a more balanced, middle of the road look at the idea middle of the week.

I havent played it for a while, but if I remember correctly Sonic 2 had no save points, or indeed passwords (im not 100% sure on this one). This meant that you had to play the whole game in one go, which is always going to make a game harder.

IRT topic

Woah…minefield. Im staying out of this one. But I have to say that I do agree with many of plagiarize’s points.

I’ll just chime in to highlight a couple points. An “innovative” game does not sell to the mainstream until it is polished. Hardcore, enthusiast, fanatic or whatever you wish to call more dedicated gamers really do not have a massive effect. I feel it is far more on the development side. A developer sees the promise in a past game’s success and/or failure. Halo, for example, took a lot from it’s PC roots. Everything in Halo has been done previously in some game at sometime. Halo polished up those ideas, made them work together and put out a pretty solid product. Halo also had the force of “every other Xbox game is terrible” behind it. Xbox pretty much was Halo for a year. Halo is bad example of ‘mainstream’ love.

GTA3. Blends the 3d of any good console platformer. The freedom of GTA1&2. Then it adds violence and a healthy dash of controversy to get the public arroused. If you are going to tell me GTA3 would have sold if it was about Princess Strawberry in her magical free-roaming Lollypop Kingdom you are mad. GTA3 sold on violence and carnage, it stuck around because there was a damned good game underneath it all.

A truly popular game, on all fronts, needs a couple things going for it. It needs to be fundamentally solid. This means all the basic game structures are solid. Movement, progress, pace, goals etc. It needs a hook. The hook in conjunction of a solid base is really the prime elements of a great seller. The hook can be anything. The Sims hook was “I am play a game about life?” GTA3’s hook was violence and carnage. Halo’s hook was, honestly, what else are you going to get for xbox? Myst’s hook was its gorgeous graphics. See what I am getting at? The hook MAY be innovation, but it is often not.

Beyond Good & Evil did not sell because it had no hook. You cannot advertise a great story. You cannot really advertise charming characters. And they didn’t anyways.

Psychonauts sort of had a hook. But it was not strong enough.

Prince of Persia: TSoT should have really pushed free demos. The game is too hard to have any marketable hook without actually playing it. The game is too tame to attract people on its action.

And anyways. I bought all 3 of those games and many more.

Hell I am playing The Journey to Wild Divine right now. Bring me all the games! I’ll play anything!

Oh by the way. Check out God of War. God of War was a brand new franchise. It borrowed some mildly innovative game mechanics from DDR style rhythm games. It polished all that up to the max. Then it added over-the-top violence as the hook. God of War became a successful game.

I am not saying violence makes people take notice. A game just needs something that a mainstream/casual gamer would mention in a conversation. A mainstream gamer is not going to say to his friends in the lunch room “Wow, I got this God of War game the other day. It has an innovative control scheme which lets you play out brutally cinematic moments with ease. The combination between the smooth animations and timing based responses really creates a solid and refreshing action/adventure experience.” He will say something more like:
“I got God of War the other day. That game is insane. My guy can rip people in half. After you beat down some bad guys you can do crazy finishing moves like ripping their heads off or impaling them on a spike. You jump on a minotaur and stab your sword right into his mouth!” The gamer is talking about the parts of the game where the ‘innovative’ aspects are in full swing. However, they are described through the rose glasses of the hook.

GTA3 is the same thing. Talk to a casual gamer about GTA3 and they will tell you about all the violent things they can do. All the cars they can steal, get painted, bang hookers etc. Essentially they are describing the more innovative parts of the game (all the freedom and stuff you can do). Again though, its the hook of violence and carnage that is the vehicle.

Doc what was so innovative about GTA–Freedom? Umm hello Elder Scrolls Series Arena in like 1993,Daggerfall in 1996. I was killing people back then and getting away with it; it didn’t do anything for me by 2001.

I meant to put innovative in quotes. I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. I agree that GTA3 was not really innovative, just effective at implementing past innovation in a new universe.

On a side note. Isn’t Jade sexy? I am not talking like “homg game boobies rawr!”. Jade is just one of the most stylistically attractive gaming characters. Although most of Jade’s attractiveness is in her whole character. Not until after play BG&E did I consider Jade a sexy lass.

I refuse to be defined as a casual or a hardcore gamer.

The terms are just too wishy washy and massively generalise gaming habits.

A quick glance at the amount I play games would scream CASUAL GAMER, at the most I’ll squeeze in about 10 hours in a week.

Then there’s the number of games, I just don’t have that many. Only about 40 or 50 games, which pales in comparison to the numbers of CDs and books I have lying about the house.

But actually looking at the titles reveals something else:

They are not the kind of titles associated with the stereotypical casual gamer. There’s no FIFA, no rubbish liscenced titles.

Instead there are games that may be associated with the so called HARDCORE FPS player; Serious Sam, Half Life, Deus Ex, Raven Shield, Unreal Tournament, Halo.

Then there’s some third person games like MAx Payne, Jedi Knight games (mainly third person so I’m calling them such) Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell.

But then there is my favourite part of my games collection - where I believe the best of the quality lies. Old Lucas Arts adventures. Little Big Adventure 2. The Broken Sword series. The criminally overlooked Outcast.

Then there’s more recent gems; Psychonauts, and the criminally overlooked Darwinia (a superb strategy action game with retro graphics, new ideas and a great story lovingly crafted by Introversion software - check it out - it beat of tough competition to win the peoples choice award at the Edinburhg festival - somewhat amazing considering how few people have heard of it).

Casual and hardcore and other such terms are utterly pointless - what matters is quality, inovation and above all fun.

I totally agree that gamers should do more to praise undervalued games, word of mouth has power, shown by the fact that as soon as I know my adress at Uni I’m going to buy Beyond Good and Evil.

As gamers we should save our plaudits for the truly great games and spread the word to everyone.

Then there’s the number of games, I just don’t have that many. Only about 40 or 50 games

Bloody hell. What are we calling “a lot of games?” I think the number of games that I own can be counted on one hand. Does Solitaire and OS X’s Chess game count?

Well compared to most people who comment here I got the impression my collection was rather stingy.

Say it’s an average of around 5 games for every year I’ve been gaming (and most of them bought on budget).

I suppose it’s more in comparison to what is generally considered a casual gamer but judging by “how big is your game collection” threads on various forums it seems rather small compared to other gamers.