Reigami

I find it odd sometimes how much we've come to expect from our games. So many people out there are out to get the latest, greatest, best looking, bloodiest, most popular thing out there. What ever happened to being able to play something that's just fun and exciting without the extra guff attained through paying an overworked team thousands of extra dollars to make water effects look a little bit better?

I love great visuals as much as the next guy, but sometimes I feel like it gets out of hand. Take games like Modern Warfare and Battlefield 3. Great games to be sure. They've rehashed great gameplay mechanics, given us lots of pretty explosions, awesome sound, memorable moments (mostly) and awesome AI (sometimes). But what have they really added? A couple of gameplay tweaks maybe, rebalanced weapons for better or for worse...but it's still relatively the same game without the reinvention.

Okay, I concede that games don't necessarily need to reinvent themselves. Just look at capcom's formula of street fighter. I love street fighter, I mean I LOVE street fighter, but I'm not going to say the game is completely different than its predecessors. Shooting a fireballs is the same now as it was like 25 years ago. The game looks prettier, the gameplay has been tweaked ad finitem to a point where its much more fun to play. (overall opinion but you know what I mean) but at least Street Fighter is a genre that isn't quite as saturated.

Sometimes I just get frustrated when something truly inventive gets tossed to the side because the potential customer would rather pick up the latest modern warfare 5, or Battlefield 2025 or whatever they might make. But part of this is, I kind of blame younger kiddos. It's the popular thing nowadays to get mommy and daddy to buy you the latest FPS so your friends can come over to your house to play it.

I remember talking about this with my coworker and a customer at the game store. It was like this when we were younger too. Mortal Kombat was the popular thing to have. Gameplay was barely passable back then. I mean come on, we had Street Fighter II, which even by today's standards is fun to play (opinion again....) but Mortal Kombat aged like 2 week old bread left outside in the summer. But why did it cause ripples? why was it so popular? cause it was cool. Blood! OMG Blood in a game, I HAVE to have this game. *runs to mom and dad* "But Timmy has it! Why can't I have it?" It's a tired story...but it still exists today. I think it's a huge contributing factor towards the success of shooting games in general. I feel like it's also not a social stigma to people who would potentially otherwise be labeled as somewhat of a nerd, or a recluse. "I play MW3 ... I'm not nearly as bad as one of those people who play Final Fantasy" or something alone those lines.


I guess we're all still in highschool again ><