There’s a series of videos posted onto YouTube called “Game OverThinker”, where a guy discusses matters of the games industry to various images. A few days ago he put out “Can it Happen to Us?“, where he compares the games industry to the comics industry. The idea is that comics originally focused on a young audience, though at some point their original readers had grown up. Around this time, Alan Moore and Frank Miller brought in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, comics that were aimed towards the adult reader. They were violent, contained sexuality and possessed more complex stories than what you typically got out of a comic.
Since then, he states that the comics industry has taken the violence and the sexuality and pushed them into comics, aiming towards an older audience while abandoning the youth (as well as completely ignoring the complex stories aspect of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns). He looks at the comics industry as being in trouble, which it technically has been for a while. Or at the very least it hasn’t been selling as well. In the end, kids aren’t interested in comic books, and he blames it on the fact that they are primarily targeted towards an older audience.
He then ties this to the current video games industry. The most critically acclaimed games, as well as best sellers, of this day and age are most often M-rated titles made for adults and not children. The Game OverThinker states that games are, ultimately, toys and that the games industry could soon be seeing a similar end as comics have, where only the hardcore audience supports it.
In a lot of ways, the Game OverThinker is right in his comparison to the comics industry, but there is one vital area that he is wrong. Video games are not toys. I’m not going to say all of them are art, either, but they are very much an entertainment medium akin to books or film. They are certainly not toys, or at least not anymore.
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Interestingly enough, most of the time I find other gamers to be some of the most frustrating people to discuss video games with. It’s one of those areas where people are so closed-minded it becomes frustrating.
One of the most tiresome comments I hear is how the game industry is in trouble, and we’re basically experiencing a trend of mediocrity. I find this amusing, because ever since I got an Xbox 360 I’ve enjoyed playing video games more than I have in the past several years. In fact, the last time I enjoyed gaming this much was when the Super Nintendo was the latest and greatest thing.
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I’m a fatty. Plain and simple. I’ve come to terms with this fact long ago, and do what I can to try and fix it. I don’t feel extra sympathy for other fat people, however. If I see someone relentlessly insulting a person for being overweight, well, I think they’re an asshole. I think they’re an asshole because they are blatantly being an asshole about it. Yet when someone sues McDonald’s for making them fat, no. That’s a result of personal stupidity and lack of responsibility. It isn’t the fault of McDonald’s that you ate their food too much.
As such, I think this reaction to Sony’s new Playstation Network game Fat Princess is retarded.
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Now, while the three main companies completely failed at this year’s E3, and a couple of other companies followed suit, it wasn’t all bad. It was pretty irritating that Capcom’s was nothing but a panel about how “great the Lost Planet movie will be…..when it comes out in 2011″, and half of Ubisoft’s conference was all about how they’ve managed to get tween girls to start playing games (with some of the most horrible IP imaginable). However, Activision managed to deliver quite a bit, and even more so, EA is beginning to show that they can be a quality company after all.
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I honestly don’t update this blog often enough, and I really should. However, sometimes work and the comic get in the way, so that leaves large gaps where nothing is posted.
However, I wanted to make sure I posted this week. Maybe it’s more for myself since I’m technically repeating what has already been said by more eloquent people. Still, the press conferences at this year’s E3 were a disgrace. I need to make that clear.
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So typically I’m used to hitting up The Escapist and finding something to rant or bitch about on their forums. So imagine my surprise when I read a headline that, without seeing the article, makes me want to complain about it. After all, blogs are for complaining, right? In any case, GSC Game World has chosen to make it vocal that, apparently, us Americans have trouble understanding Eastern European gameplay. That’s how they explain their game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl selling poorly in the states.
Now, I remember back when I was a senior in high school and finding out about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for the first time. I thought it looked fantastically awesome. It was like Morrowind with guns. I was excited about it, particularly because at the time I felt like my computer could actually handle such a game. After all, it played Aliens vs. Predator 2 and Planetside well enough! Pretty much every friend I had in high school that played video games, even if the only game was Counter-Strike, was looking forward to this. When I left for College, I had a few friends that were also excited about it.
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I know, Starcraft: Ghost was a long, long time ago, and to talk about it now is just absolutely silly. However, I got to thinking about it when pondering a different blog topic, and figured instead of digressing there I’d just dedicate an entry to Ghost.
Now, I’m not a Starcraft fanatic. Fact is I’ve never played it. Everyone I know has played it, but I have lived a life of having computers that are poor gaming machines, and even when it could play games I was too busy spending money on console games. So my attachement to Starcraft: Ghost is not some crazy fanboyism. Well, it is, but not to the franchise. See, I liked the original gameplay clips, but then I found out Blizzard picked up Swingin’ Ape Studios to finish the game after the original team gave them the finger. Swingin’ Ape previously had made Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, the studio’s premier game. I loved it. A perfect combination of humor, gameplay and multiplayer. So I find out Blizzard grabs these guys to do the game and I’m psyched. I see the new gameplay and I’m further psyched (primarily because I tend to suck at stealth, so being able to just shoot everything pleased me greatly).
Then the Xbox 360 came out and Blizzard said “yeah, we’ve swallowed Swingin’ Ape up to be our console division, but we are cancelling Ghost because we want to focus on the next-gen consoles”. Well damn. Naturally, three years or more have passed since the cancellation and no word on what Swingin’ Ape, or “Blizzards console division”, is up to.
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Last year I wrote a three part series of articles covering my major problem with games journalism. Interestingly enough, this is pretty much also when I started to put a major hand into Wii60.com’s news and reviews. While there are some aspects I have personally adjusted to today (mostly as a result of compromises in Wii60’s review system), for the most part I feel the same. So I shall post the three parts once again, one at a time.
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Last year I wrote a three part series of articles covering my major problem with games journalism. Interestingly enough, this is pretty much also when I started to put a major hand into Wii60.com’s news and reviews. While there are some aspects I have personally adjusted to today (mostly as a result of compromises in Wii60’s review system), for the most part I feel the same. So I shall post the three parts once again, one at a time.
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Last year I wrote a three part series of articles covering my major problem with games journalism. Interestingly enough, this is pretty much also when I started to put a major hand into Wii60.com’s news and reviews. While there are some aspects I have personally adjusted to today (mostly as a result of compromises in Wii60’s review system), for the most part I feel the same. So I shall post the three parts once again, one at a time.
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