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Oilers99

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#1 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts
Just a bit of clarification, I am not stopping videogames altogether. It's just I have reached the point where following them more than casually, playing them more than infrequently, thinking of myself as a gamer or investing a lot of energy into finding games that genuinely appeal to me in the indie scene, no longer make sense for me. Could that change? I suppose. But I think a big portion of the industry would have to make a an important shift to reinvigorate my interest. And man, lots of names I remember from here. Starts to dawn on one how much time this place used to take up. If anyone wants to contact me, I will probably come around GameSpot every so often, so I will likely get back to you on a PM eventually. God be with you all. And for those not religious, may fortune favour you.
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#2 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts
The vast majority of you don't probably know me. As recently as five or six years ago, that would not have been the case. Let me tell you something about myself--I signed up for GameSpot's forums about a decade ago. In fact, my ten year anniversary on these forums will be on November 28th. I was considering doing something to commemorate this, but I have realized... almost nobody is around who would still care. ssfreitas is gone, Minda_Cubed gone, SupremeAC, str1... my gosh, does anyone even KNOW about The Virtual Underground, and its several year run as the GGD country club? Primary Games Discussion, I suppose, is a fitting name change--it really has nothing to do with who was really posting here prior to the name change. A few things you should know about where I was a decade ago. I had been taken out of public schooling due to some social issues, that both my parents and I feared would get worse in middle school, and I was relatively isolated for several years. Videogames had, since my childhood, served as my escape, but, and remember, I was a console gamer and I played primarily NIntendo games, so there was no social aspect to it. And, in addition, I was an intelligent kid struggling with school work (due to a number of issues), with a particular gift for writing. The prior year, I had bought, for the first time, a current-generation console. Up to that point, I had received a NES and SNES while their successors were in the midst of their heyday, and bought the N64 quite late into its life-cycle. Owning a Gamecube, within the first years of its launch, was a new, new thing for me. Can you imagine how... liberating it was to suddenly have an outlet for my desire to write, a place to socialize, and with videogames, one of the few topics to which I could speak knowledgeably, as a persistent topic? It was a perfect storm, and after spending some time primarily on the GameCube forum, I began to make the transition to General Games Discussion, as I became more interested in videogames in general. There, I learned you could do things like... add people onto your AIM list and chat with them online (I knew you COULD do this, but had no reason up until that point to WANT to do this) outside of the forums, develop a repoire with some users, identify people who were more like-minded (SupremeAC and Systems_Id tended to be more sympathetic to Nintendo's approach that generation) and those less like-minded (Pedro might have been the least-impressed person by Nintendo's design philosophy that I have ever met). It was a great amount of fun. Then I was asked to be a moderator. Let me tell you, at sixteen, that's a heady amount of trust and responsibility. I was actually being trusted to run things, and make good judgments, and was, you know, actually considered a leader? Me, the socially awkward teenager who was desperately lonely in real life, and was socializing online with other gamers... for lack of anything else going on in his life? That might have been my proudest moment to that date. It also gave me very periphreal contact with the GameSpot staff--these guys were my heroes. I knew that their lives weren't glamorous, but I had very humble ambitions for my life: I wanted to work with videogames for a living. I knew I could do it! I knew I could write, that I could be analytical, and maybe... games journalism wasn't that far off the mark. The other major positive memory was participating in the contests run by Adam_B, who ran Developer for a Day, which let forumites compete for minor prizes by writing game design documents. I LOVED those. It was halfway through the second one, where I was trying to put together a slightly more cogent design than the vague one I had submitted the first time, that I somehow decided... yes, this is what I want to do for a living. I want to be a game designer! I worked hard with each installment on trying to develop innovative designs that developed interactive storytelling, rather than traditional gameplay. Looking back, they probably didn't work. But I truly believe there were some intriguing ideas buried in there. And then... over time, I just started posting less and less frequently. I resigned moderation somewhere along the way. And eventually, my posting dropped off to very random bursts. You see, if you've stuck with me this far, I think I owe it to you to make this not just about me anymore. I think we're doomed to choose between perpetual adolescence, and outgrowing videogames. At least, that's the case today. You see, I do have a very child-like personality in some ways. I enjoy behaving as if I am really just a mischievous five year old, and I can look at the world with the same wildness and wide-eyed wonder, I think, that I did when I was very young. But in other ways, I have grown a lot. I went to several years of university, and discovered a lot about myself. I re-invented myself, becoming a musician. I deepened my faith a lot, and developed intense desires to help heal the world in various ways. Along the way, I met a girl I really liked, and asked her to marry me. The wedding is in May. And when I look at videogames, I see a bunch of titles that are about shooting people in the face, stabbing them in the back, retreading familiar game design ground, and generally appealing to me on a level of either visceral, violent pleasure or long-established design tropes that I am already quite familiar with. There is part of me that can just appreciate good design. I played Gears a while back, and I thought it was a terribly well put-together thing. But I didn't like the people. I felt alienated by the muscle-bound fantasies, the game that conveniently made the targets of maiming machines to be inhuman monsters. We have never had a war like that. Every last person we have blugeoned, stabbed, shot and blown up has had a face, a name, a history and a personality. The monstrous thing is pretending that they do not have human dignity. When I look at a game like Halo or Gears, part of me is bothered by the fact that a big part of the design is to create guilt-free slaughter. Even if I exclude games that are outside of the realm of visceral pleasure that is too simple, and a tad disturbing for my tastes, the rest, even games that tend to rely on pure design, seem to be simply retreading familiar ground. How many times can one play the same game of Mario Kart or Mario platformer? How about Metal Gear Solid? Even Final Fantasy, long a paragon of consistent change, seemed to be predictable in its latest installment in a lot of ways. When everything is a numbered sequel, spin-off, reboot or licensed title, you can't help but feel you've played everything on the market before. Largely because you already have. It's gotten to the point where I can even predict the marketing--GTA V's images will include an attractive girl in a bikini, men with guns, and lots of vaguely satirically looking American urban images, all in a visual style that is more saturated and stylized than the final engine will be. The last thing I had going that really interested me was Nintendo's games. I grew up on them, and their design quality, in addition to a child-like playfulness that I simply cannot grow out of, has always had me more forgiving of their retreads than other gaming companies. That isn't to say they are less guilty--I can just stomach it much better from them. A particular favourite of mine has been the Paper Mario games. The first game, despite my consistently high expectations for Nintendo games, outdid my expectations significantly. I've always felt the simple surface belied a very deep, strategic, and elegant gameplay system. The second game was simply more gorgeous, more polished, funnier, deeper, and significantly, a much better story. In short, it was one of my all-time favourite games. Super Paper Mario, was not something that truly fell inside that style I fell in love with, and liked it quite a bit, though not near as much as the other games, on its own merits. But given how long it had been, I was very much anticipating Paper Mario: Sticker Star as a return to the gameplay system I had loved so much. Then it turns out they completely junked the badge system and the leveling system in favour of a bunch of stickers that don't work as well. Apparently. At this point, I'm not sure I could be bothered to play the game to find out. It's just enough to know... nobody is doing anything that is that interesting to me anymore. There are relatively few developers doing genuinely interesting work (Irrational's work on BioShock comes to mind, though), and the one company who has been doing retreads that I have enjoyed is now doing my pet favourite series as a retread BADLY! In other words, videogames now simply have failed to engage me emotionally anymore. Seem videogames are an emotional medium. We engage with them because we feel entertainment, we feel a power fantasy. But I'm feeling much different things these days. The emotion I wish to dominate my other emotions is compassion. Is there really a single videogame one could say captures compassion, and in an intrinsically interaction fashion? What about my emotions of anxiety and anticipation as I consider a future of marriage and children, and a future which I hope will be filled with music? What about all these much more complex, nuanced emotions I find myself having as I go about the messy, complicated business of being an adult? I know there are a few games that attempt to deal with these things. But why does it seem that whenever you ask for games that deal with mature, adult themes, rather than a mature rating due to presence of digital boobs, you seem to get the same dozen or so over and over? Yeah, I'll probably check out To The Moon, and yes, I know there are many games out there... but on the whole? Videogames are still about shooting things dead. Or experiencing something that is about as emotionally complex as a roller-coaster ride. I'm... just past that. The sad thing is I KNOW that videogames could genuinely be for adults. We could have daring game developers who wrote and designed games that explored complex issues, and asked players to make choices that involved more than hand-eye co-ordination or detached management of statistics and resources, and forced them to think emotionally as well as intellectually. They could push the envelope in technology to improve communication between the player and the story, rather than pushing technology to produce better physics of a person being flung through the air by an explosion. But you know what sells? Guys in their twenties and thirties buying, in droves, games that are about what they wanted when they were teenagers--shooting things in the face. Or failing that, at least pure, uncomplicated pleasures like a Mario or a complex role-playing game. I think we have, in our society, extended adolescence incredibly long, and the result is that adult adolescents are driving a marketplace that no longer has a place for me. So, I'm done. Not with playing videogames altogether, but simply trying to be a gamer. I have a few games that I will try to find time for, and I might even pop by to say something on here once every blue moon, but the simple fact is that I have outgrown games, and I think, as your world becomes more nuanced, as you begin to think through the concept of what it means to be in a long-term relationship, what your answers to questions of the meaning of life and faith and religion and such are, and what kind of mark you really want to leave in the world, you'll end up attracted more to sophisticated films and books that deal with such things with the nuance that videogames, as a whole, simply do not. I do believe that day will come someday for videogames. But in the meantime, they've lost me. And so too, then, has a community in which I might otherwise participate. There's really nothing left for me to talk about. I believe that will be true of many of you someday as well. I'll hang around this thread a little bit if anyone actually remembers me, and wants to bid farewell. So, goodbye, GameSpot, staff and forums. You meant a lot to me. And goodbye videogames. I just outgrew you.
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#3 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts

[QUOTE="Oilers99"] Dude, one of them showed a brief clip of Paper Mario, which is basically packaged transcendence. I just pity the poor, unenlightened souls that do not realize that. :Dc_rake

Which conference was that? I must see it!

Well, there were those thirty glorious seconds on the Nintendo press conference, but they showed a more extended look on Nintendo's 3DS showcase.
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#4 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts

[QUOTE="Oilers99"]I'm starting to wonder if, collectively, the standard is far too high for these press conferences. There are only so many games you can show in an hour, and not everything they show is going to appeal to any given person. I consider it a plus if I can find three or four games out of a given conference that generate interest, and another one or two I would like to keep an eye on.Pedro

A good press conference is one that has the most hype and thats about it. It doesn't matter if any of the items shown would come to fruition once it gets folks excited. So with that said these conferences were bad because there wasn't much content to get unecessarily hyped about.

Dude, one of them showed a brief clip of Paper Mario, which is basically packaged transcendence. I just pity the poor, unenlightened souls that do not realize that. :D
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#5 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts

[QUOTE="c_rake"]

So... good press conferences?

Metamania

The only good press conference that we had was with Ubisoft. Everything else was pretty much hit and miss.

I'm starting to wonder if, collectively, the standard is far too high for these press conferences. There are only so many games you can show in an hour, and not everything they show is going to appeal to any given person. I consider it a plus if I can find three or four games out of a given conference that generate interest, and another one or two I would like to keep an eye on.
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#6 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts

[QUOTE="Oilers99"]We're never going to recapture our childhoods. What Nintendo showed to me today is that they are what they've been for the past several years--very much affected by the industry's trend towards inbreeding, but responding differently. Sony says, "look, we've got this brand new game called The Last of Us!" and really, it looks very much like other videogames. It looks like Uncharted. It looks like the industry's trend towards the more mature (which is to say, the more deeply adolescent predisposition with violence and profanity), it looks like many other shooters, it looks like many other post-apocolyptic games. Nintendo comes out, and says, "hey, we have this idea for having a rock-based Pikmin, and this idea of basically completely reversing Pac-Man's design, and for this ninja game, and for having one person work out while the other person watches TV, and we want to have you guys talk to each other through Mario games, and... we're doing this all within previously established franchises". Nintendo actually threw out a lot of ideas that were new, but they were all within familiar confines that they know they can market to more or less the same crowd as before. I think this dillutes the original ideas, frankly. Everyone else? They're just trying to change the superficials, play a smoke and mirror game that tries to trick us into thinking The Last of Us, a supposedly new franchise, isn't the game we've been playing before. Or that we haven't played Halo 4 five times before. Or that Call of Duty: Black Ops II isn't going to be terribly familiar. I'm not trying to defend Nintendo particularly. I guess I prefer how they've responded to the market rewarding rehashes and remakes, sequels numbered dishonestly (how many times have companies started adding numbers to subtitles, so as to make the franchise appear less redundant than it actually is?), and a handful of gameplay archetypes and themes that seem to sell without any abating, than how western developers have. Is their way better? No, but when I go play a Nintendo game, I get to jump over ridiculous enemies, or play in a haunted house that's sillier than scary, or attack things with plant/ant hybrids. That seed of imagination and innovation is there. But the effect of the pressures of the modern market for gaming are there, and if you don't like it, really, the only place you can go is the indie gaming scene.Systems_Id

It's not about recapturing childhoods, it's about bringing some ambition back to a once great company.

You say the rest of the industry is playing a smoke and mirrors game but that's pretty much what Nintendo is doing only under the guise of "innovation". Both New Super Mario Bros. games look like carbon copies of what we've been playing. Pikmin 3 didn't look signficantly different at all from Pikmin 2. NintendoLand is full of mini games that I haven't given a sh*t about since their inception. Where the hell are the "A Link To The Past" like masterpieces? Where's the f*cking ambition from this once great company? Watch_Dogs is the singuarly most ambitious title I've seen out of the industry in years and its made by Ubisoft of all people.

Edit: Now all we need is ssfreitas, Randolph, Minda_Cube, and some of others I'm missing, and it'll be a real party!

No, and I think the smoke and mirrors is there in Nintendo too... I just think that their underlying creativity pokes its head out in the little things. And I never understood tha disinterest in mini-games. Most collections of them are not fun. I think Nintendo has generally been better than average at releasing fun collections of mini-games. Nintendo Land looks like the heir apparent to the Wii Sports games, and as an early tech demo/multiplayer game for the Wii U, I think it serves just fine.

Where I think the problem comes is that we want Nintendo to take all these little ideas, and put them together in a single big adventure with high production values. I don't think the current landscape that they have decided to work in allows them to do that. The proof is that the last time they did it... was shortly after the GameCube's launch with Pikmin. They keep rolling with new ideas, but they're scattered, and put in familiar boxes. Like I said, it's dillution, but I don't think it's much different than what's happened with the rest of the industry.

See, when you say "what's happened to Nintendo", I think it ignores that the question is probably best asked of all the major publishers. Nintendo sticks out, likely because, rightly or not, seen as the standard bearer for innovation. I think the pressure to continue to rely on existing IPs has affected every company deeply, including Nintendo. It's a fair point, but I think the discussion, if you're going to have it, has to be much, much larger than simply what Nintendo is doing. It has to be about our willingness to continually plunk down cash for mostly the same experiences.

I wouldn't be absolutely shocked if Randolph came about, or even Minda_Cubed, but I think it's more likely that I eat my left sock than ssfreitas showing up, though I'd love to hear from him. Often wondered what happened to that guy.

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#7 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts

ZombiU has some cool new ideas. Every time you die you become a new character and then you have to reach where your previous character was where he will be a zombie, kill him and take his back of goodies so you can get your inventory back. Looks really neat.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2012-zombiu/731244

But for me who loves motion aiming this is a step back. We are back to sticks.

dvader654
That's a really neat idea, but I also find it kind of depressing. Seems very nihilistic.
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#8 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts
And for the record, I quite liked the conference. But everything I've seen about the videogame industry continues to justify my trend towards greater disinterest in it. It continues to refuse to grow up, and seems to grow more... adolescent by the day. You know what would be a sign of maturity? A videogame that was engaging, and mostly about talking. Not killing things. Not about exposing the breasts of some impossibly proportioned woman. But about ideas, and about exploring life on a more meaningful level. As I get older, that's more of what I'm interested in. And the videogame industry, for the most part, I'm simply outgrowing. What I have strategically refused to outgrow, because I indeed think it's a sign of immaturity to label it as something to outgrow, is my sense of childlike wonder and play. Nintendo strikes a chord with me there, even if I'm frustrated with them for not stepping outside the borders of their established IPs very often. And that's why they're probably my last major link of interest to the industry.
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#9 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts
[QUOTE="SciFiCat"]How sad is it that the only thing about that conference that got me excited was Pikmin 3 (a sequel) and after that everything just went downhill. Not a single new IP, WTF Nintendo?!, seriously what does it take for your creatives to make a new game that is not dependent on a previous franchises? Where is StarFox? (remember that series Nintendo?) or the next Retro game? I'm afraid this console is going to be a repeat of the Wii regarding third parties, some will make games for it, these will sell poorly when compared to Nintendo's own offerings, then the PS4, NextBOX will roll out next year and 3rd parties will jump ship looking for greener pasture where their games will actually sell. E3 2012 was a flop for me, sorry if I'm being a downer. Only the third party games caught my attention like FarCry3, Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider and Dishonored. (all games that I'll will probably end up playing on PC) My Biggest highlight of E3: The Last of Us - Runner up: Pikmin 3 My Biggest letdown of E3: The Last Guardian completely gone M.I.A. - Runner up: No new 1st Party Nintendo IPs

Well, you can do a new IP... as long as it looks exactly like another extremely successful IP currently on the market, or alternatively, some amalgamation of them.
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#10 Oilers99
Member since 2002 • 28844 Posts

[QUOTE="dvader654"][QUOTE="Systems_Id"]

Damn even Pedro is still here, fighting the good fight.

Really does feel like old times.

Edit: Holy crap I just scrolled through the last couple of pages of this thread and it feels like I've been transported to 2003-2005.

Systems_Id

Every new gen brings out the same old fights. Which means nothing has changed from any company...

Haha true but this time I side with Pedro whereas the me of yesterday would of sided with the Nintendo fans. I thought that Nintendo was just being held back by the Wii and that the Wii U would unleash their true creativity but...no. It really does feel like Nintendo, as a company, has run out of ideas and now they're just throwing stuff out there. This isn't the same company that brought us Super Mario World, Metroid, Star Fox, Super Mario 64 and other legendary titles. This is a company content to rest on nostalgia, fanboys, and the fickle casual market until the day comes when that won't be enough.

We're never going to recapture our childhoods. What Nintendo showed to me today is that they are what they've been for the past several years--very much affected by the industry's trend towards inbreeding, but responding differently. Sony says, "look, we've got this brand new game called The Last of Us!" and really, it looks very much like other videogames. It looks like Uncharted. It looks like the industry's trend towards the more mature (which is to say, the more deeply adolescent predisposition with violence and profanity), it looks like many other shooters, it looks like many other post-apocolyptic games. Nintendo comes out, and says, "hey, we have this idea for having a rock-based Pikmin, and this idea of basically completely reversing Pac-Man's design, and for this ninja game, and for having one person work out while the other person watches TV, and we want to have you guys talk to each other through Mario games, and... we're doing this all within previously established franchises". Nintendo actually threw out a lot of ideas that were new, but they were all within familiar confines that they know they can market to more or less the same crowd as before. I think this dillutes the original ideas, frankly. Everyone else? They're just trying to change the superficials, play a smoke and mirror game that tries to trick us into thinking The Last of Us, a supposedly new franchise, isn't the game we've been playing before. Or that we haven't played Halo 4 five times before. Or that Call of Duty: Black Ops II isn't going to be terribly familiar. I'm not trying to defend Nintendo particularly. I guess I prefer how they've responded to the market rewarding rehashes and remakes, sequels numbered dishonestly (how many times have companies started adding numbers to subtitles, so as to make the franchise appear less redundant than it actually is?), and a handful of gameplay archetypes and themes that seem to sell without any abating, than how western developers have. Is their way better? No, but when I go play a Nintendo game, I get to jump over ridiculous enemies, or play in a haunted house that's sillier than scary, or attack things with plant/ant hybrids. That seed of imagination and innovation is there. But the effect of the pressures of the modern market for gaming are there, and if you don't like it, really, the only place you can go is the indie gaming scene.