Editorial

It seems to me that lately game designers are running out of ideas for new games. Pretty much every game out there is a sequel, based on the same engine as or just have a familiar feel to them overall. Sure, in the past few years we have had a few groundbreakers, but I'd have to say as a whole that the gaming industry is in a drought of sorts.

Think back with me, if you will, to the days when you were running that old 486x66 with only 8 MB of RAM. Back in those days games were ingenious. You had games that really set the standards, like my favorite installment of the WarCraft series, WarCraft 2. Then you had quite possible the best FPS ever with Doom, as well as many, many others. Back then it didn't take fancy graphics and overly complicated gameplay to make games fun. Hell, some of the best games out there are on the SNES, and we all know that system wasn't a real graphic buster. Most of the roms for it still place under 2 or 3 MB (but we aren't supposed to have those unless we own the original cartridge, right?). This was a golden era of video gaming.

That was the mid and early 90's, and everything was still so fresh and new. Then we come to the late 90's. By this time the familiarity was starting to set in. Sony's PlayStation came out in 1995, but the PSX craze didn't really set in until about 1997 or 1998. Graphics seemed to become key at about this time and the PlayStation delivered many big-name titles, such as two of the best Final Fantasy games (7 and 8). Computer gaming did relatively well in this span of a few years as well. Genre-busters such as Diablo were selling like hotcakes, as were some of the familiars, such as Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. Now I'm not a huge fan of FPS games, but you'd be a damned liar if you didn't say that Quake and Duke Nukem 3D both had an all-to-familiar feel about them. Another game, although a great game in itself, StarCraft was released. While I love RTS games StarCraft didn't really deliver a whole lot of new ideas or concepts in the RTS genre. Now before you start flaming me, StarCraft is one of my favorite games of all time. I still play it from time to time with friends on battle.net.

Now this brings us to the 2000's. In my eyes there have been a lot of flubs in the past couple years and very few games with staying power. Even those with some staying power have a very familiar feel about them. Baldur's Gate 2 and Diablo 2 come to mind. While console gaming boasts better than ever graphics now, have there really been any games that you think five or more years down the line you'll still want to play? To me it seems like originality has taken a back seat to pop-culture. Video game designers not really wanting to try anything groundbreaking, sacrificing for what sells. Don't get me wrong, some video game designers have still been busting their asses to come out with new and fresh ideas (kudos to Lionhead for B&W, Blizz for WC3, and Rockstar for GTA3). Granted I haven't had a whole lot of experience with the next gen consoles (I'm more of a PC gamer), I really haven't seen many games that make me say "Hey, I think I want to go buy a GameCube, or an Xbox, because this game just looks too damned awesome." Maybe it's just me getting old and wanting to stick old school…who knows? Anyway, that's my humble opinion, so if ya don't like it, stick it up your ass!

Dec 4, 2002 - 12:00 am | 0 comments
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