http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1784975,00.asp
Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the gaming business soon? Does anyone else think that it is overdue? It has happened before, and I can't see how people will keep shelling out $50 or so for a video game when the games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter.
complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are tweaks and weirder, mostly stupid weapons.
I'm not the only one who thinks there's a problem. When Nintendo president Satoru Iwata spoke at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, he discussed the lack of new game ideas. He saw the same things that I see: There are four or five simple game categories and nothing really new or different.
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations. That's it. Most of today's hottest games are combinations of two or three of these categories, with a storyline added to keep the players from being bored stiff. When my kids show me a game, I usually say that it's nothing but the same old running-jumping-kicking-shooting with a new background. They leave in a huff.
Iwata mentioned that in almost all the big games, the so-called boss characters are all beginning to be pretty much the same: big, creepy monsters. If you want to see exactly how inane this is, go out and rent the brain-dead Paul Verhoeven film, Starship Troopers. The movie stank so bad that nothing came of it after its release. It's essentially a video game turned into a movie?all the elements are there, including an idiotic "boss" that is just some huge flabby bug?and it shows you just how lame these games actually are.
Iwata then showed us a couple of supposedly new (but in fact, rather old) ideas? two concept games that will be released later this year for the incredibly popular Nintendo DS handheld game machine. One is a pet dog that "lives" inside the machine. You can train this dog with voice commands, and you can literally pet the thing on the touch-sensitive screen.
Virtual-pet software has come and gone on the PC over the years, so except for the voice commands, this is nothing new. It's also quite similar to the once-popular Tamagotchi gizmo that was all the rage in Japan.
When two wireless DS machines run this app, the dogs can visit each other in one of the machines. Someone just needs to do a patch to get them to fight and kill each other, or mate and have puppies, for this idea really to catch on: "Only Available on the Nintendo DS-XXX!"
The other idea that Iwata presented is music-making software that creates tunes on the DS. This sort of thing appeared on the Macintosh years ago?and even resulted in a weird toy guitar called the Jaminator?so this is nothing new, either. The game scene is resorting to faddish ideas from years ago to try to appear original. I'm surprised they haven't come out with Pet Rock software yet.
None of this will save a doomed industry. The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
That time is drawing near. We are already getting pre-hype for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 2, as well as the new Nintendo. All this will do is make the visuals more lifelike and the blood and gore more realistic and nauseating. While the kids who are used to this "progress" may not be put off by it, newcomers may be repulsed and skip these new generations of machines altogether.
If that doesn't flatten the market, the never-ending need to satisfy the demanding full-time game-player should do it. Some of today's games are ridiculously hard to play?unless gaming is your so-called life?and so daunting to casual players that they will quickly reject them. Who needs to devote themselves to a game just to play it once in a while? I'll take Spider Solitaire instead.
I really can't imagine this scene continuing as it is for much longer. I suspect that the next generation of machines will be the last?or at least the last in the current boom market. It will be downhill from there.
Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the gaming business soon? Does anyone else think that it is overdue? It has happened before, and I can't see how people will keep shelling out $50 or so for a video game when the games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter.
complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are tweaks and weirder, mostly stupid weapons.
I'm not the only one who thinks there's a problem. When Nintendo president Satoru Iwata spoke at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, he discussed the lack of new game ideas. He saw the same things that I see: There are four or five simple game categories and nothing really new or different.
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations. That's it. Most of today's hottest games are combinations of two or three of these categories, with a storyline added to keep the players from being bored stiff. When my kids show me a game, I usually say that it's nothing but the same old running-jumping-kicking-shooting with a new background. They leave in a huff.
Iwata mentioned that in almost all the big games, the so-called boss characters are all beginning to be pretty much the same: big, creepy monsters. If you want to see exactly how inane this is, go out and rent the brain-dead Paul Verhoeven film, Starship Troopers. The movie stank so bad that nothing came of it after its release. It's essentially a video game turned into a movie?all the elements are there, including an idiotic "boss" that is just some huge flabby bug?and it shows you just how lame these games actually are.
Iwata then showed us a couple of supposedly new (but in fact, rather old) ideas? two concept games that will be released later this year for the incredibly popular Nintendo DS handheld game machine. One is a pet dog that "lives" inside the machine. You can train this dog with voice commands, and you can literally pet the thing on the touch-sensitive screen.
Virtual-pet software has come and gone on the PC over the years, so except for the voice commands, this is nothing new. It's also quite similar to the once-popular Tamagotchi gizmo that was all the rage in Japan.
When two wireless DS machines run this app, the dogs can visit each other in one of the machines. Someone just needs to do a patch to get them to fight and kill each other, or mate and have puppies, for this idea really to catch on: "Only Available on the Nintendo DS-XXX!"
The other idea that Iwata presented is music-making software that creates tunes on the DS. This sort of thing appeared on the Macintosh years ago?and even resulted in a weird toy guitar called the Jaminator?so this is nothing new, either. The game scene is resorting to faddish ideas from years ago to try to appear original. I'm surprised they haven't come out with Pet Rock software yet.
None of this will save a doomed industry. The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?
That time is drawing near. We are already getting pre-hype for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 2, as well as the new Nintendo. All this will do is make the visuals more lifelike and the blood and gore more realistic and nauseating. While the kids who are used to this "progress" may not be put off by it, newcomers may be repulsed and skip these new generations of machines altogether.
If that doesn't flatten the market, the never-ending need to satisfy the demanding full-time game-player should do it. Some of today's games are ridiculously hard to play?unless gaming is your so-called life?and so daunting to casual players that they will quickly reject them. Who needs to devote themselves to a game just to play it once in a while? I'll take Spider Solitaire instead.
I really can't imagine this scene continuing as it is for much longer. I suspect that the next generation of machines will be the last?or at least the last in the current boom market. It will be downhill from there.
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