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Top Ten Dying Game Genres
Ant sent us a fun link to an article running over at GameSpy discussing the Top 10 Dying Game Genres. Although I don't think Puzzle games have died - I think they've transformed: Pikmin is just a fancy puzzle game, after all ;) But I still want Dr Mario for my GBA.
Galaga is still one of the greatest games ever!
Posting as directed.
I could have sworn that there were only about 5 or 6 genres total. FPS, strategy (both real time and not), puzzle, sport, RPG (which includes MMORPG), adventure epic, and simulation. If ten genres are dying, then in five years we won't be playing anything.
The graphic adventure game brings back lots of memories... Ahh... King's Quest VI, Quest for Glory I-IV, Full Throttle. Games that actually required thought to play. I really wish they would start (re)making some cool adventure games set in a 3D world (Unreal 2 engine anyone?) I mean, who could say no to 3D Day of the Tentacle?
Beatings will commence if towels continue to be eaten...
Getting first post is certainly not a dying game genre.
Grahpic adventure isn't dying... it's just evolving. DAOC, EverQuest, heck even Ultima Online are all excellent "grahpic adventures" that have either been 3D or are just 2D (ultima).
Maybe single player VGA games are dying, but heck sometimes I still have a craving to play a little Space Quest!
--------
Free your mind.
I love the Sierra strategy games. It always seems that their games come out and within two months the price has dropped to $10-$20. GameSpy claims in this article "...but now their days as a game developer are pretty much over." Is it really that bad? Am I the only one left that loves their new titles? Empire Earth anyone?
Real time strategy games!
No wait, I'm dreaming.
I was a huge RTS fan but the whole genre has been played out.
All of these genres seem like something that a young kid in the 80's grew up to. As the technology has advanced, so have the games. I mean you don't see any text based adventures anymore except with MUDs. The same with educational games. Many are still made but as we get older we tend not to play them anymore and therefore pay little attention to them.
I would have to agree with the puzzle genre dying. No one wants to slap down $50 when you can play the same game online for free. A puzzle game has to be more complex and have more detail than just moving blocks in order for me to buy it. I personally bought Pikmin and I loved it but I don't play it that often anymore.
I don't know why they say that text-based games are dying. Muds are still very popular among the online community. Last I check there are hundreds of text based MUDS out there.
Quality over Quantity.http://www.virusgaming.com/
... would have to go to the whole paddle tennis craze that hit the nation awhile back. What was that game called... ping? ... no that's not it.
They are regular genres confined to limited technical resources. One example that they have is "Text adventure". Well, obviously, people are not interested text games any more but it doesn't mean that the niche is gone, it has just been filled with games with more technical capabilities but which still satisfy the same needs and appeal to the same types of people.
Or another example: They mention that "beat 'em up games" are gone, and say that it was because they were 2D. Again, obviously no one is interested in Street Fighter or something like that but it doesn't mean that the whole idea of beating the shit out virtual monsters has vanished.
In fact, all of these have just evolved, when you look at any modern game, you can always see the features that are borrowed from old games and just enhanced with new tech.
When men used to be men
most good new games don't adhere to any genre whatsoever; instead of giving examples, look at the games that do stick to one genre; they suck. First person shooters are over, what we have instead is max payne. Genres are boring. As soon as enough games are made of a type, a genre is created. Thus any game that falls into this catagory after its creation is tried and old. Now that the tech bubble has burst, companies are forced to release good games, ie genre busting, or else face the concequences. We will see less games, but ones of better quality and of more varied type.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Has anyone ever tried to play one of those adult games? They're probably the least entertaining of all but I imagine they will last quite a bit longer than most others. At least until every computer gamer has a girlfriend/hell freezes over.
chillax137
Graphic Adventures dying? I think not.
How can they say this when Lucas Arts has announced two new games in this "dying" genre?
Full Throttle 2
and
Sam and Max 2
hmmmmm. I think Im going to whip out monkey island and play through that series again...
--Nycto
I don't think so. Monkey Island 4 came out about a year ago, and there will probably be a MI:5. I hope so, for Threepwood's sake. Lucasarts is working on Full Throttle 2, which was, at last count, a graphic adventure. Sam and Max 2 is also in development, which will probably be a graphic adventure. They are partially right, though. I miss the days of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
"Dr Uberman?"
What do you mean dying???
They're dead, bro! Dead, dead, dead. I don't think I've seen a text-based game since Zork.
In fact, even if you included Wizardry and Bard's Tale as text-based (I guess they essentially were except for the pictures of the creatures), that would still make it dead for about 15 years!
I am very surprised to see Tetris on this list. I had thought that Tetris was still very much alive. Perhaps it is just the geek background in which I work at college, but for some of the people I know, Tetris is the only game they play. Tetris still has versions coming out (mainly looks, not playability), but still, if there are new versions out, surely that must mean there is still some demand?
;-).
Duck Hunt is dying out? Perhaps. I have an old Win95 games CD with Gunboat DuckHunt on it. That was fun
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
Naked BMX racing games are alive and well!
The two I'll miss the most are the light gun games, and the beat 'em ups. They are right the bouncer was sorta lame. I think the problem was all the FMV sequences that couldn't be easily skipped through. IMO the last good gun game was virtual cop 2 and the last good beat 'em up was die hard trilogy.
/me dusts off the PS1 and Saturn.
What are your favorite games from the now dead Genres?
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
1) Super Monkey Ball (NGC)
2) Super Bust-a-Move (PS2)
3) Fantavision (PS2) (come on, it was the first friggin game even released on the PS2)
It might not be a prominent genre on consoles these days, but you can't say it's been dead for two years...
P.S. If you want a good puzzler, check out Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo . The name might put you off, but it is probably the best two-player puzzle game I have ever played. It takes a bit from Columns but adds a "fighting game" twist on it with attacking, defending, counter-blocks, and, of course, super combos.
How is Pikmin a puzzle game?
Aside from that, all the great games died with the Commodore 64.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
We used to have this one arcade game that would come to my town as part of the county fair. It cost $.75 (a LOT for back then!!!) and the gimmick was that it was projected into the air so it appeared 3D, the first level had a cowboy shooting crap i think, i think you travelled through time after that, but i never could even really figure out to play. i think it was called timeblasters or timeshifters, or something like that. anyway, it is one of the first "$.75" games it remember in arcades... the next one being Lethal Enforcers.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Games continue to change form and adopt newer forms of graphics. But the best games have a solid foundation and rely on the graphics to tell the story and not to sell the game. Take a look at the list of top games at GameTab. Two Zelda's are in the Top 10 (at least right now). The new gameboy version is hanging onto a top spot while the seemingly controversial Wind Waker has snagged the supreme ranking. Wind Waker is in essence a new tale about Link built upon the foundations of the very first Zelda game for the NES. Nothing has really changed at the fundemental levels.
Notice the lack of PC games on the top 10. A few titles might be missing from the database but it might generally be assumed that a wider variety of titles exists for the consoles that are able to be appreciated by the broader audience. All of the games in the Top 10 are refinements upon a simple formula and many of them are sequels in name if not in spirit of old games.
The videogame industry has not quite run out of ideas like holiday has. It's a pretty darn good idea to be a gamer. If you're burnt out, buy a GameCube which is considered to be for the kiddies. And go make Kimiko happy!
light-gun games are dying? over all the dead bodies I collected from Time Crisis, Time Crisis II, Vampire Night, plus whatever else that I havn't quite bought due to money issues.
On the other hand, the "beat-em-up" - isn't an older version of mortal kombat (which, admittedly, died) had a "keep going" mode that was pretty much like that?
And frogger (3D) is not a fine replacement for pacman/woman/child/mutant-uncle?
Space-shooters have their own incarnations too. in arcades especially. It is amazing how many 194_ variations there are in Japanese arcades. metal slug is available if you want a side-ways-scroll one
I do agree with the graphic adventure, though. Space quest was the bomb. Leisure Suit larry was some crazy stuff too...
However, I would like to remind everyone that in fact I am quite sure that particular genre lives on as adult games. (same thing for full-motion video ones) - so, don't fear - the games are just growing up along with the rest of us. heh.
and no, nobody misses the ghetto edutainment crap.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I don't know why they say maze games are dying. Games such as Doom, Quake, Unreal, etc all utilize the basic maze strategy...albeit you have to frag your way through the maze, but it is still just a maze.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
My favourite game that is rapidly disappearing is "peaceful conflict resolution", followed shortly by "not being a dumbass and setting up westerners for decades of terrorist retaliation attacks". Both started disappearing from store shelves some time in 2002.
That's like... weird, or something.
To round out the list:
- "That's not really dying" posts.
- Nostalgia posts ("I remember those games...").
- Michael Moore's speech was great/terrible posts.
and of courseRyan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Well,that doesn't mean they are dying. There are probably more gamers today playing puzzle games than ever before: you get them free with your computer, you can play them on-line (games.yahoo.com), you can play them on handhelds, etc.
So why are graphic adventures now seemingly a dead genre?
They don't seem to be--games like Myst are basically a graphic adventure game only that the graphics are better. So, for that matter, are many games that at first glance look like FPSs or RPGs (Half Life, Splinter Cell, etc.).
"Who knows. The only thing we know for sure is that -- no matter what -- there will be some dork out there bitching and moaning about how great games used to be, and how they don't make them like they used to. "
Thats ME!!!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I still want Dr. Mario for my GBA
Well, it's going for about five dollars right now, if you can stand it being in 4 shades of gray..
There's also some kind of "nintendo puzzle collection" thing coming out but i think it's gamecube only, and i don't know if it's coming out in america or just japan.
Made in Wario and Metroid Fusion make me wish i had a GBA...
did anyone else have a flood of nostalgia when reading this list? for me the best memories were from River City Ransom and Double Dragon. Willy Beamish was also up there on the list.
I hold a patent on sigs...
NT
They have that game (Time Traveler) out for the PS2, probably other systems as well... it's a fairly poor port and I think the controls are sometimes unresponsive (though it could well be that I just haven't practiced enough). One cool feature is that you can play it normally or in 3D thanks to included glasses (cheesy red/blue type).
The interesting thing about Time Traveller (at least for the PS2) is that is has a number of bonus video clips interviewing the designer and news clips talking about the games... a great 80's flashback.
I picked up mine for $5 used at EB - marginally worth it, I wouldn't pay a lot more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
how was side scrolling platform games not on this list. haven't seen one of them in a long time.
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
Most of the areas, I couldn't care less. That one could nearly make me cry.
They trot out 'The Longest Journey' as an example of not-dead-yet... and while it *was* a fabulous game, it's not a very good example. The game set up completely for a sequel, which the company then decided wasn't going to happen. It can't have sold very well.
The question, then, is what are all of us adventure gamers to do? I started out as a little kid on the text adventures, then moved up to Sierra's lovely things... I can remember hours and hours on Gold Rush, for example, and it's quite possibly the only reason I actually know Psalm 23.
It's heartbreaking, in no small amount because it's been largely killed by this whole 'everything must be 3d' idea. Some games were just better in 2d. Some games--gasp--didn't *need* to be 3d. The first Gabriel Knight game was terrific, done completely in 2d. The second, done with actual people, was a little weird, but the storyline itself wasn't bad. The graphics on the third looked so terrible that I'm afraid to even borrow it.
So why, really, couldn't they have just kept polishing those 2d graphics? I'm still blaming the people who thought that games like FF7 were the pinnacle of perfection graphically, and never mind that their characters would have looked better built of Lego.
So, in the meantime, I keep hoping that Funcom will change their minds about a sequel to The Longest Journey, and that Sierra will come back and start making good games again, and that it'll be like the good old days.
But I'm not really holding my breath.
They forgot to include BSD...
Oh wait... that was Top Ten Dying Game Genres!
Time Crisis and its sequels and clones were some fun light gun games, but I have a feeling we won't see many more in the future. One reason is the shift from CRT displays to DLP projection and Plasma/LCD/OLED thin panel displays. There simply isn't an easy or cheap way to make a light gun work with a non-scanning display. Light guns and light pens were cheap hacks back in the day, but doing something similar with a more modern display will require much more precise and expensive optics.
here are the genres that are supposedly dying:
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups"
It's not dying: it has been dead for quite a long time.
9. Puzzle
What??? Lot of people still plays solitaire... even minesweeper!
What might be happening is that there are not new types of puzzles...
8. Light Gun
They're not really dead as they weren't really alive... aside of some people playing on nintendos, there were not a really market for they. I always thaught that the problem was that there is only one way to play with this things... aim and shoot.
7. Text Adventure
They didn't die: they evolved! quite long ago they became graphic adventures.
6. Maze
rrright, they died. But that is not a game genre, just a kind of puzzle.
5. Virtual Reality
Again, that's not a genre. I thing much of us would love to play a FPS with a helmet or somthing truly immersive... but most of us can't afford it, and (AFAIK) the real good ones are way too expensive
4. Educational
They would be right only if Educational games had ever been alive. But i still think that they would be a good idea
3. Full Motion Video
And then again... this is not a genre, it's just poor designed video games with a bad transition/gaming ratio...
2. Beat 'Em Up
They are right (at least!). RIP. We'll miss you (i loved double dragon).
1. Graphic Adventure
They are right again. Why did Graphic adventures died? I really really enjoid Maniac MAnsion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island (I II & III)... why aren't new-3d-full-of-eye-candies-graphic-adventures? Perhaps there's a need for a new Roberta.
--krahd
mod me up scottie!
The really sad part of all this is that a few of the genres that are supposedly dying are the ones that were my favorites (text adventure, graphic adventure), and they were my favorites because they combined two things that I craved into one: A challenge to my intellect, and a game set in an engaging story or plot.
This is not to say I can't or won't play other games. It's simply that they do not hold my interest as much as the older genres I mentioned above. The real sad part is the fact that these genres have died or are dying because of the law of supply and demand. No one is demanding these games anymore, so no one is supplying them. That's the real sad part, IMHO.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
What about that 911 arcade game where motion sensors track your body movements without bulky headmouint gear. I thought it was pretty good for a dying genre. And by the way, there is no dying genre, because retrogamers will always go back to dig up game cemetaries.
I would say simulation. You are following a series of prompts to press a given number of buttons in a certain order with your feet. This simulates the actual act of dancing.
The last good gun game I played was called, "Duck Hunt", which came bundled with my Nintendo Entertainment System.
I'm sorry, but gamespy obviously doesn't know about
kaillera.
Kaillera enables mame to play just about any old arcade hit online. Since it's
release 2 years ago, it's developed an entire subculture of dedicated players,
clans, and ladders.
According to statistics built by
kaillera the most popular game genre on kaillera is fighting games (King of
fighters, Street Fighter), followed by a single adventure game that dominates
the charts,
Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara.
I think this game was misclassified as an Adventure game, because it's
gameplay really resembles that of Final Fight, and other Beat em ups
Thats all I have to say about that.
As was pointed out in an exchange highlighted on XYZZY News, you shouldn't confuse "noncommercial" with "dying". Just because game producers aren't putting millions of dollars into a genre, and aren't making millions of dollars, doesn't mean the genre is dying.
This is an important point that seems to be missed by most of the corporate gaming media. In fact, the fact that the gaming media doesn't seem to recognize that there's more to gaming than what corporate game producers are putting out is symptomatic of everything that's wrong with the gaming industry.
Gamespy sort of highlights this when they're talking about puzzle games: why pay $50 for a puzzle game when you can download something for free? Well, that doesn't mean puzzle games are dying--far from it. It means that so many people are coding puzzle games for fun, and people are downloading them, that there's no need for a commercial industry. But plenty of people continue to play them.
The same thing is true of text adventures. It's true that text adventures maybe don't capture the same amount of attention from adolescent males that they once did. But to say that the genre is "dying" is ridiculous and, once again, based on the assumption that "living" means corporate profits. There are tons of text adventure sites, competitions, etc., out there, and plenty of games, both free and independently produced.
I would go so far as to argue that the health of a gaming genre is partially reflected in the extent to which the genre is able to transcend corporate commercial interests. That's not to say what corporations are releasing is all bad, just that in my mind, the gaming community would be better if there was more independent development of games. If that means more of the demand going into open, free, or independently produced games, and less into corporate developed games, and if that, in turn, means a genre is "dying", I'll go for the "dying" genre any day.
The article author called River City Ransom the best co-op fighting game of all time. If anyone disagrees with this, it's because he hasn't played this simple but FUN and addicting game!
Let me put this another way... if you haven't played River City Ransom for the NES... DO SO NOW!!!
Monkey Island is my all-time favorite series of games...I remember thinking about how to beat LeChuck in my dreams and then finding the "second biggest monkey head I'd ever seen" on the island.
The jokes were clean for a 7-10 year old and I had a great time playing them with my dad. Even though the last two were a little bit lacking, the first 3 were incredible and fun for hours and hours on end.
I still hear that theme in my head occasionally...possibly one of the best themes ever written for a game...and we can't forget the groundbreaking SCUMM system!
Oh yeah, I'd be there....
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Duck hunt has been replaced with kill the popups. ;)
Ditto for the "Beat 'em Up". Their description: "Most beat 'em ups were fairly straightforward, you were a guy and your goal was to beat up other guys until they disappeared into thin air." Except now instead of a 2D side scrolling guy, we have a first person shooter, with a 3D environment and a Space Marine or Solid Snake whose job it is to get to the end of the level while beating up (or fraging) all the dudes along the way. My, how things have (not) changed.
Maze games could be argued are incorporated into other genres, like the above mentioned FPS, although the genre as a distinct entity does seem to have gone away. Other genres metioned in the article I do not miss. Text adventure, ugh. These things were just obtuse on purpose and a waste of time. (Although perhaps a connection between EverQuest and it's Diku Mud progenitory would be appropriate.) Educational games, sorry. I have A&E now. And virtual reality games were never really popular enought to say the genre has vanished -- it just never caught on in the first place.
But two I truly do miss. Full motion video: Sierra produced a 9 CD adventure game called Phantasmagoria that was just amazing. It featured live actors against rendered back drops. The range of emotion and expression achieved was far superior to any full CGI you get now. Sorry for all you CGI Spirits Within fans ;), but all of the CGI used in theater and games just has a flat look to it.
The other genre I do miss is the graphical adventure. I don't know why these aren't more popular. Maybe because they were made too difficult of many people to play? I think that must be the reason. Stupid puzzle of ridiculous complexity will turn all but the most hard core off to these types of games.
Games have become much more costly to produce. I believe that that is the main reason we see (or seem to see) fewer genres these days. Producers can no longer take a chance on a game that may sel less than 50 thousand copies, I suppose. I wonder if consumers would accept cheaper games, if it meant that some of the more specialized genres could come back. I wonder if that would ba a good question for an Ask Slashdot.
No one is denying that the first Metroid was immensely enjoyable, but it is a hard case to prove that it is "better" in any category (the classical categories for gaming: visuals, sound, ingenuity, and game ply) then Prime. I mean cmon, Metroid Prime still features platforming gaming, if that is all you are looking for. The newest Zelda game not only gives you all of the options that the originals did, it enters previously unexplored areas of graphics and gameplay.
Try selling a game that looks and plays like the original Legend of Zelda.
There's lots of educational games around...EB has an entire wall dedicated to them here..
Most of the are based on a cartoon / kids show franchise, but they're still pretty good.
The Blues Clues ones are in particular excellent. My daughter loves them, and I can see how well they've been structured to help the child learn, whilst still being a lot of fun.
There's lots of others to choose from too, and more all the time...
Advanced users are users too!
But I still want Dr Mario for my GBA.
:)
Then get Nintendo Puzzle Collection for the GameCube. It's due out sometime later this year, and features Dr. Mario, Yoshi's Cookie, and Panel de Pon. All three games are downloadable to your GBA for play on the go, provided you use Sleep Mode and don't get the urge to save your scores or play any other games.
You could also get the original Dr. Mario, which *was* released for the Game Boy in 1989 (I think). There are at least five copies up on eBay right now.
On a side note, having all these GBA-downloadable games is great, but I wish I could use a ROM cartridge or somesuch to download and *store* the games so that I could switch out titles at will, or (gasp) turn the GBA off.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
As the article itself notes some of these genres aren't dead, they're *free.* This is quite a different statement. I play asteroids and tetris on a regular basis, I simply didn't have to pay fifty bucks for them.
Saying these genres are dead is like saying computer solitaire is dead, even though it takes up more user gaming time than everything else put together, because it *comes with* virtually every graphical enviroment in the universe.
Or like saying the automobile is dead on the day that everyone on the planet is issued one that will last forever.
These genres aren't dead, they're bloody ubiquitous.
It's just that EA and Sierra can't soak us repeatedly for them anymore.
As for "virtual reality" being dead ( a concept inherently ridiculous in light of the sales of The Sims), in the manner they mean, it isn't dead. It's an idea ahead of the technology's ablility to deliver it and thus is merely in stasis until our hardware catches up with our imagination.
Trust me, when they figure out how make a pair glasses and gloves for a hundred bucks that'll give you your own virtual Sarah Michelle Gellar they won't be able to make 'em fast enough.
KFG
Your site is a fucking riot. PLEASE PLEASE finish the tournament of hate.
Sincerely,
One of your many fans
PS. Thank you for introducing me to Wesley Willis. Many an Acid filled night were spent howling with laughter at "I wupped Batmans Ass" and "Rock and Roll McDonalds".
"I love the Sierra strategy games. It always seems that their games come out and within two months the price has dropped to $10-$20. GameSpy claims in this article "...but now their days as a game developer are pretty much over." Is it really that bad? Am I the only one left that loves their new titles? Empire Earth anyone?"
Empire Earth was Created by Stainless Steel Studios, http://www.stainlesssteelstudios.com/
My point was that Sierra primarily publishes other people's games now, like Half-Life. Most of Sierra's Adventure games were developed in-house.
"All of these genres seem like something that a young kid in the 80's grew up to."
Guilty.
"how was side scrolling platform games not on this list. haven't seen one of them in a long time."
I didn't include side-scrolling platformers because platformers are still around, they're just 3D.
Sure, this article isn't perfect and I probably should have included Pinball, but oh well, life's tough!
-Kevin Bowen
I think not.
...only now they call the dots "powerups" and come in 32bit color...
Genres aren't dying, they're just becoming less well-defined. It's getting harder and harder to pigeonhole modern games into exactly one genre, because they aren't sticking to patterns (in basic design, at least). The only "genre" that has really died is text adventure, but that's only an implementation of RPG. Diablo is the same thing with graphics, and that's still going strong.
I don't think that saying the light gun category is failing. Light gun games remain to be one of the biggest sellers in arcade games (I say this because those are the games operators seem to keep around the longest). They say that no current console has an official light gun released. Why would they? It's the Light gun game developer that uses it and designed how it works with the system, ever notice that almost all PS2 light guns say "Guncon/Guncon 2 compatible", and all lightgun games are Guncon Compatible, I'd say theat the guncon is as close to an official lightgun as we'll get, there hasn't been a first party lightgun since the Sega Stunner for the Saturn. I can think of several recent light gun games that came out for the PS2 as well as several new ones in production now:
1) Time Crisis 2
2) Vampire Night
3) Point Blank Collection
4) Ninja Assault
5) Virtua Cop Elite
6) Police 24/7
7) Dino Stalker
8) Resident Evil Survivor 2
9) Resident Evil : Dead Aim
10) Time Crisis 3
11) Starsky & Hutch
I'm not saying that these are all stellar blockbusters, but that's more games that I can name in the puzzle category for Ps2, and puzzle game were judged less dead in the list.
Bork Bork Bork!!
8) Light Gun
7) Text Adventure
5) Virtual Reality
3) Full Motion Video
All of these shouldn't be considered game genres, they're just a description of the technology involved. Any "genre" based on a technology is a fad, and that technology will eventually be replaced.
Text Adventures were "Text" Adventures because they didn't have the graphics horsepower around back then that they have now. If the creators of Zork started out today, they'd make a game with a simliar design with 3d graphics.
You could have a virtual reality shoot'em up, a virtual reality rpg, a virtual reality adventure game, and so on. Again, it's a description of the technology used to implement the game, it's not the genre. It was a fad.
Full Motion Video is the most obvious non-genre here. Again, based on a technological fad. We can put movies in a game, so why not turn the "game" into a movie? There were different kinds of games that had a lot of FMV in them, I wouldn't put them all in the same genre. Though they did all pretty much suck.
And as for puzzle games, if they don't cost $50 anymore, does that mean they're dead??? No! Puzzle games are probably the most alive and kicking genre there is today! They're everywhere, even your Grandma probably plays a couple of them!
I do agree with the article on one point at least: Oregon Trail for the Apple II most certainly did rock.
The number one spot in the article goes to Adventure Games. Truly, this is the saddest loss in recent years. Maybe some new company (or individual!) will come along and breathe new life into the genre. It could be the antidote to all those bloody, boring first-person-shooters. (I mean really, how many ways can you shoot/stab/hack/blow up computerized opponents?)
I have high hopes for Funcom, who put out The Longest Journey three years ago. The article mentions it, and I second their opinion: quite possibly the best adventure game ever. Detailed plot, lovely graphics, superb acting by the voice artists, and an excellent sound track (if you'd like, you'll find legitimate MP3s of that soundtrack available at their official site).
The game's not perfect -- there are some puzzles that are totally counter-intuitive, like the one where you have to use a rubber ducky, a clamp and a hose to fish a key out of an electrified rail in the subway. There are one or two others like that, where the game doesn't provide enough information for you to figure out what to do -- it just depends on you having seen and/or used things that you could miss really, really easily.
Still, there's always the internet for clues or outright solutions if you get stuck. And the games virtues far outstrip its flaws. If you've got some time to kill, get yourself a copy and try it out. It's still available in the US and Europe.
One word of warning: wait till you've got a weekend free. Or maybe a whole week -- "The Longest Journey" is an apt name for it. It took me about 60 hours to play through.
All those (with the exception of text adventure) are 2d games. Any new game is going to be 3d. All the consoles are optimized for 3d, PC graphics cards are made for 3d, and 3d games are a lot more popular. Nobody wants to make 2d games anymore. Those of us who still like to play Tetris and Galaga have to use MAME or play some freeware clone. There's no money left to be made in 2d games anymore. Of course, you do occasionally come across a new 2d game every once in a while. KDE has a whole lot of really good games, some clones of old games, some original.
I guess quoting the blatantly obvious is what "journalists" do best ...
I'd say at least 3 of those genres are still around, sorta. :). Most first person shooters are basically maze games when played single player.
1-Everything I like about text RPGs I found in balders gate 1/2.
2-Xeno Saga is pretty close to a FMV game
3-Games like devil may cry isn't that far from river city ransom,
find enemy -> beat crap out of enemy-> collect money/blood -> buy weapons ->repeat.
Because Pikmin certainly isn't a puzzle game. I don't think anyone would call Command and Conquer a puzzle game, so why call Pikmin that, because Pikmin is nothing more than a modified RTS game. Where are the puzzles with managing resources, attacking the enemy, then collecting at the end of the day? BTW, The Longest Journey has GOT to be the best adventure game ever made. Period.
The author does not specify Virtual Reality GLASSES in his list of "game genres".
When I first saw #5 I thought he meant 3D games were dead and that would be a stupid statement.
"VR games" evolved in to the massive amount of real-time 3D games that are available today. Almost every games is in 3D now and he says "right now VR is a huge unfunny joke". He is wrong, people just got tired of the buzzword VR because 3D is the standard. The head mounted video systems just never got small and cheap enough for everyday use. Don't forget the "splitting headache" factor either. It turnes out that for most uses, using a monitor as a window on a world is more convenient than full immersion.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
"Most beat 'em ups were fairly straightforward, you were a guy and your goal was to beat up other guys until they disappeared into thin air."
... that is untill the next version came out and bodies didnt disappear into thin air.
I always thought of Coutner-Strike as a beat 'em up game
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.
Well, your story got rejected, but at least your grousing didn't!
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
nobody misses the ghetto edutainment crap.
There's always the compelling vision of them breaking out of the ghetto, raising test scores and making teachers obsolete... First thing to do: get rid of the stupid 'edutainment' moniker.
I think games with extremely realistic physics are educational: a good car game can be a laboratory for rigid body physics, principles of friction, momentum, etc. Most people will never fly an airplane, but some games have decent flight models without getting bogged down with control-and-dials trivia, and could teach something about aerodynamics.
Self-consciously 'educational' components in a game is death for the most part, but maybe a good physics teacher could supplement the diagrams and math with the right kind of otherwise pure-entertainment games.
Not exactly. MK and SSF2T and so on are fighting games - one on one, usually a two player "versus" game. Yes, these are pretty much dead :-( Beat-em-ups were different, though, and they're also dead. They were games like Double Dragon and Shinobi where you play a ninja dude (*ahem* Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja!) and went up against hundreds of enemies, punching, kicking and "special moving" them to pieces. A lot of them had two player co-op modes. Some (TMNT, for one) had 4-player co-op modes :-) The only one i've seen recently is Bruce Lee for X-Box, which, while not fantastic, was definitely a good blast-from-the-past. Nowadays they seem to have been superceded by those console "adventure" games where you are Lara Croft or some anime guy with a sword and run round killing people with weapons. It's not really the same.
While not a 3D remake, some people are remaking classics using the freeware Adventure Game Studio (AGS). King's Quest I and II have been redone (very well I might add) by Tierra Entertainment (and they're working on Quest for Glory II), and there's a fan-made Space Quest 7 in the works as well as a fan-made Quest for Glory 6.
The Adventure Genre LIVES!
But Maaa! Everyone else has a
Surely I'm not the only one who misread your last item as "Britney Spears Hentai..."
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
#2: A couple years ago? Try like 1997, maybe '98.
I don't usually nit-pick, to be honest, but you just can't start off an article with such confusing laziness.
Plot: 8
Characters: 8
Execution: -4
No game was ever better than Liesure Suit Larry: EGA pr0n with a plot! If only I had a 5.25" drive, I think I still have the disks for LSL3.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
A good quest adventure optimized for home compters, rather than a game console will always be a delight. Hard to do, yes. Essentially a D&D for one will always require a good plot, good graphics. Amazing. This is exactly where films screw up. There's a reason why "The Man Who Would Be King" will be watched 100 years from now and "Attack of the Clowns" won't. It's worth watching. All latest transparancies and doo-dads are great, but Quest for Glory V is still worth repeat play because the plot changes. Will you win and still not get the girl? It depends? Better and more complex than the simplified crap one gets on game consoles. Of course, I wouldn't know. I don't play consoles. Mind you, I haven't even owned a TV in years. Gimmie print. Gimmie plot.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Fighting games are dying?
Excuse me???
What do you think all those FPS are?
Wolfenstein was just a game where go around killing things that then disspear. The only difference is you shoot them rather than walking up to them, but that's a technology thing. Side scrollers didn't let you see and fire very far, so moving around worked better. FPS allows you to see far, so it's easier to do that rather than fighting.
Fighter games didn't die, they just evolved into the wolfentein/doom/quake/unreal of today.
No matter what happens, games in all these genres will have devoted fan bases. New games will be made, and old games will be worshipped and cherished, ported and emulated, until the end of time.
Just look at http://www.mame.net/ for examples, all the people you know who worship old hardware and technology and try to revive the old fun they had to be had once again. Some games just never get old. I think my 55 minute completion time of Super Metroid speaks for itself. =]
Star Fleet Battles. X-wing vs. Tie Fighter.
9: Puzzle
Myst, Snood
8: Light Shooter
I can't even count all the shooter games out there. And getting rid of the plastic gun that you plug into your controller port is a good thing.
7: Text Adventure
This is a key element to Quake, Half Life, Tribes, and other 3D shooters in multiplayer. Everyone has seen the sentence "so-and-so rides what's-his-name's rocket."
6: Maze Doom. After 665 levels, I just couldn't stand another maze. Enough already, please make the first twenty levels a little more re-useable.
5: Virtual Reality
Uh, any 3D game. Just without the head-ache inducing head gear or googles.
4: Educational
Who ever wrote this article must not have children. There are tons of educational games out there. The worst of which is not the Barbie series.
3: Full Motion Video
Blizzard, has tons of cut scenes in their games. But they have figured out that game play is more important. Cut scenes should be used sparingly like spice in food.
2: Beat em up
Tekken. Need I say more?
1: Graphic Adventure
Myst, again.
From the article:
a couple years ago when Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider games were generating a lot of buzz, every other new game on store shelves seemed to be some sort of third-person action\adventure that primarily involved staring at the shapely backside of a groaning, attractive young female heroine.
What, are they claiming this wouldn't sell anymore? Yeah, right.
How about a Charlie's Angels game featuring Cameron Diaz's butt? That would sell.
A Star Trek: Enterprise game with T'Pol's butt? Oh yeah. Gel-smearing had better be involved, too.
A Die Another Day game with Jinx's butt? Works for me.
This sort of game has limitless potential!!!
They just go by the name of 'Interactive fiction' now. Check out the-underdogs.org for tons of the stuff. I think there's still some contests running yearly too. If you just getting started out programming games text adventures are a great place to start.
While I'm on the subject educational games aren't dying either. It's just that non-educational stuff (games) are a lot more visible.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That article seems to contain a number of inaccuracies. Puzzle games certainly aren't a dead genre, they've just been taken over by the shareware market (Bejeweled or Crack Attack are amazingly popular games for how boring they are). Gun controllers hardly have disappeared; PlayStation has the GunCon, and PlayStation 2 has the GunCon2. Someone's missing Point Blank or Time Crisis (or their sequels) from their libraries.
Btw, how come that all nerds always fights with that little chinese girl, Ling Xina-whatever... a lot of built-up sexual frustration?
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law
Michael Moore is a Boore Everything he yelled was poore. He's too sickly chicken to act his age so he brought a bunch o' flunkies up on the stage. Mostly all I heard from the crowd was boos He may have won an Oscar, but we watched him lose.
I really think RPGs and graphical adventures sort of merged together. The first RPGs were mostly about combat and the first graphical adventures had no combat. However, RPGs started going beyond "kill this, get gem, bring gem back" to more complicated scenarios requiring you to talk to people and perform tasks. The Ultimas circa 6 and 7 really pushed the limits for RPGs in this regard. In fact Ultima 7 was IMHO more graphical adventure than RPG since the combat model was very simplistic and your stats did not carry very much meaning. It was the story and interactions that made the game.
The Infinity Engine Bioware/Black Isle games had a great deal of Graphical Adventure elements in them---most than most people realize. I still remember in Baldur's Gate I being able to slip past some killers by wearing a "cursed gender-switching belt". They pushed the envelope making RPGs stats as much of a requirement as items in solving the quest, especially in Torment.
At the end the Kings Quest games were going in the opposite direction---putting combat in an graphical adventure.
Brian Ellenberger
Hmm what do we have here?
Dr Mario - Preowned
Thank you, thank you...
The #1 spot blew me away; adventure games really have died off. My favorite games have always been Maniac Mansion, Sam and Max, Kings Quest, and the like. It's been so long since we've had a great title like those. Why didn't anyone else buy the last Monkey Island!? Now I won't be getting any more!
That's odd, but I've been playing a bit of Resident Evil Zero and Eternal Darkness recently, and I was just thinking how much they remind me of old graphical adventures. And even, to a lesser extent, the Infocom text adventures.
...
Eternal Darkness, frankly, makes these old graphical adventures look like "Run, Spot, Run" in terms of depth of plot and overall literacy. It really is awfully close to an Infocom game. Not there, yet, but hopefully Eternal Darkness has been succesful enough to convince publishers that people with an IQ *above* 20 like games, too, and are awfully tired of boring first person shooters.
And as for puzzle games, what about Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2? These people ought to put down Counter-Strike for five minutes I think, and play some *other* games
The sad thing is nearly all the commercial releases nowadays fall into one of three categories, Quake clones, Warcraft clones, and Sports Games. To me the most important dying genres are: 1. 2D platformers 2. Turn Based RPGs And despite the fact that most of the best selling games of all time fit nicely into these categories, there really aren't any companies willing to produce new content for them. What Gamespy really needs is a list of genres that need to die. How about "Mindless Warcraft or Command and Conquer clone", or "Game loosely based on popular movie license"... and surely the world wouldn't miss "Financial simulation that is so random that there is no strategy involved".
FUN and addicting game!
"Addicting" isn't the word you're looking for. That's the gerund form of the verb "addict". What you want is the adjective form, which is "addictive".
Just a small pet peeve of mine that I have no doubt will never be modded up. After all, no one likes to be corrected for simple grammatical errors. But for anyone who actually sees this post, remember: If you're describing something that can easilly cause people to be addicted, use addictive, not addicting.
hmmmmm. I think Im going to whip out monkey island and play through that series again... That was a little too much information about your private life for me.
My blog
Eight of the ten are genres that might be made by independent companies?
Note that none of these genres represent the bloated-budget-orgasm titles which are the favorites of the remaining three or four publishers?
Notice how the game media always sneers with contempt at any game that doesn't spend unnecessary wheelbarrowloads of cash on Hollywood-esque graphics extravaganzas?
Note the whole article was a nice big middle-of-the-freeway slam at the adventure genre, the favorite ad-hoc pissrock of the game media? It's all worthless because Sierra went out of business. Riiiiight.
You know what, stuff it. The adventure genre isn't going anywhere. Neither are any of the others. Two articles ago, it was shareware that was obsolete.
Who knows. The only thing we know for sure is that -- no matter what -- there will be some dork out there bitching and moaning about how great games used to be, and how they don't make them like they used to.
They don't, dumbass. Another thing we know for sure is that -- no matter what -- there will be some smug asshole writing another article about how there are only three kinds of computer games and everything else sux.
Here's a quarter. Buy a fucking clue.
Here's an interesting review of a reality-based game called Live and Learn. Enjoy!
I have a Galaga arcade game in my basement back home and whenever I have people come over, I always get at least 1 person who becomes obsessive in getting an incredibly high score on it. I've only gotten up to level 15 or so (yeah yeah I know others have gotten to #1,493 or whatever) but it's a pretty cool game nonetheless.
Beat em up? Text games?!?!?! Dying? Die! _
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps on console it is, but on the computer, Snood is currently one of the world's most popular games (it's clone of bust-a-move; frozenbubble is a better clone for linux).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Strip Poker & Other Sex Games
lol, anyone remember those... More often than not B/W horrible graphics, but you still felt a sense of achievement when having stripped a girl completely. I wonder what would happen today if such a game was released?
Sports Games
I mean the specific genre like Summer Gammes, Winter Games, etc. Where you have to wiggle your joystick as fast as you can. Talk about hardware destroyer!
What angers me is that graphical adventures are so uncommon these days... Especially Grim Fandango was easily the game of the year to me, better than most movies I've seen lately even! Everything from the character personalities to the unique setting and music. A true masterpiece..
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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so thats not gona be a first person shooter? you dont run around and shoot at stuff randomly? shootem up games dieing?!!? WTF thats all quake 3 was w/o guns it owuld just be another cartoony looking game.
They forgot the flight simulator genre. It is pretty much on life support at this time. Just five years ago, Microsoft flight simulator was a constant top ten PC game. No flight sim has been popular for years and no new major flight sims are on the horizon. Perhaps one might argue that flight sim is similar to space shooter, which was number 10 on the list.
As they pointed out, text based gaming isn't gone, and it's probably not going to go away. It's just not mainstream anymore.
And I would say that I have failed to find any game that satisfies me the way that a good text adventure does, except for maybe playing a game while reading a book (which is much harder to do). Also, what "technical capabilities" are you talking about? Hardly anything has changed since the infocom days; the same technology is used (albiet SLIGHTLY more advanced with the introduction of a few new engines - TADS, advent, etc). If you're talking about the addition of graphics, then you're not talking about a text adventure.
My imagination kicks the crap out of a graphics engine any day, and so I'll continue to prefer a good text adventure, and that's *exactly* what I've got. Incidently, I keep some of them here.
Still...it would be nice if there where more epic text adventures - ones that take a year or so to play. But that's probably way more than I can expect.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
10-In SOVIET RUSSIA jokes
9-Cowboy Neal jokes
8-First Post jokes
7-Stephen King dead at 55 jokes
6-Linux is teh sux0rz jokes
5-...a Beowulf cluster of these jokes
4-Sex with a mare jokes
3-Hot Grits in the pants jokes
2-Natalie Portman naked and patrified jokes
1-And in the number one position... (drum roll please) BSD is Dying jokes!!!
On behalf of the beleaguered Slashdoubt community, I bid thee all a fond good evening (USA EDT 2:49AM).
Maybe they will predict that NetHack will die as well.
These games are just being published by smaller developers. The ones that can't afford the extraordinate fees to buy a chip so that there programs work on the consoles. These games are usually more affordable as well.
Check out some of these sites:
Game House
Pop Cap Games
Llamasoft
Shockwave Games
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
I don't know about anyone else, but I thought that the Monkey Island series was just great because it was absolutly hilarious.
Also, the first monkey island game came with that crazy pirate face decoder, which anoyed the living daylights out of me because I constantly misplaced it and couldn't play (although it too added to the general hilarity of the game).
Finally, I wonder if anyone else has fond memories of prince of persia, because for the longest time that was the best game available to us poor mac users.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
I love the Sierra strategy games... GameSpy claims in this article "...but now their days as a game developer are pretty much over." Is it really that bad? Am I the only one left that loves their new titles? Empire Earth anyone?
Empire Earth was Created by Stainless Steel Studios
My point was that Sierra primarily publishes other people's games now, like Half-Life. Most of Sierra's Adventure games were developed in-house.
Genres aren't dying, they're just becoming less well-defined. It's getting harder and harder to pigeonhole modern games into exactly one genre, because they aren't sticking to patterns (in basic design, at least). The only "genre" that has really died is text adventure, but that's only an implementation of RPG. Diablo is the same thing with graphics, and that's still going strong.
This is somewhat true. One could argue Grand Theft Auto is just a free-roaming beat 'em up \ racer.
One game I wanted to somehow mention in this article was 1989's David Wolf: Secret Agent, which tried to combine hang-gliding, flight simulation, driving, diving, and bad acting into one poorly digitized adventure-like package. Try categorizing that one.
Strip Poker & Other Sex Games - lol, anyone remember those... More often than not B/W horrible graphics, but you still felt a sense of achievement when having stripped a girl completely. I wonder what would happen today if such a game was released?
That's true, they probably should have been included in this article since they peaked in the 2600 days and Custer's Revenge... well... jeez
how was side scrolling platform games not on this list. haven't seen one of them in a long time.
I didn't include side-scrolling platformers because platformers are still around, they're just 3D.
All of these genres seem like something that a young kid in the 80's grew up to.
Guilty.
Sure, this article has some flaws and I probably should have included pinball, but oh well, life's tough!
. . . haven't seen Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates.
http://www.puzzlepirates.com
(My favorite was Jawbreaker!)
Hell, look at all the "official" Pac -Man variants that they released.
And who can forget the Pac Man cereal? It was basically just a Lucky Charms ripoff!
I guess there will always be people that set up the holodeck to simulate a 1996 PC to play Masters of Magic.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
Tetris Worlds for both GC and PS2 (and maybe XBOX?) Is absolutely fantastic, and has an up to 4-player competitive mode.
... but remember the 2 things that make these games great in the day was that they were fun for the sake of fun and they ran on very little resources.
So while thay might be redundant on PC's they make great games for PDAs. Just look at Pop-Cap Games. Diamond Mind, Dynomite and many other great fun games.
And there are the PC classics that are still fun on a PDA, like Astroids, Space Invaders and tetris...
So i feel that theses games make great PDA games, letting you kill time quickly on that long daily commute.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
The Journey Continues
Funcom Announces Strong Production Line-Up
No hints as to when it will be done, though.
Oh.
C|N>K
The "Not getting laid tonight" catagory.
Have you not walked down the RPG isle?
How about the "Action/Adventure" isle (the likes of GTA3 / batman forever / MDK) - granted, GTA3 should probably be in the "criminal training" isle
And then we have the hillbillies isle (sorry but it's true. Go look at Walmart sometimes - a walmart in the middle of nowhere, especially)
Last but not least, we got the always-popular-but-nobody-admits-it adult isle. They are big in japan anyway; the states have their share too.
New and good games comes out all the time. Might want to broaden your horizen a little - and they don't always fall into the three categories you describe...
Example: Max Payne might seem like Quake - but is fundamentally differet
Homeworld / Catalysm might seem like Warcraft - but again very different (much better IMHO)
DoA beach volley ball might seem like a sports game - but really borderlines on "kinky foreplay." Badly executed one, but an attempt nontheless.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
... is the interactive fiction equivalent of Cage's 4'33", and is still the subject of controversy in the community. It's worth trying, and it will only take five minutes out of your day (but stimulate a lifetime of contemplation) (well, maybe not).
Here's the link in case you missed it.
For another similar game which is quite recent, weak story, but amazing details... Syberia. Also Syberia 2 is coming.
DOTT is still the best there has been though, alas.
Games used to be great.. and they dont make them like the used to be.
(reads article to end).. DOH!!
Dilbert said it best... "When virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, the human race is doomed."
;)
Girl at door: "Is Dilbert home?"
Dogbert: "He's been in the holodeck since March".
Ahhhh well... you know it's true!
it's just kinda comatose. Really, I shiver with nostalgia just thinking about all the Infocom games I played. As long as we have fond memories of the text adventures of old, they can't possibly be called dead.
Darn, I'm getting old. Anyone want to get together and chat about the great global wonders of MUD playing?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
to the bubble gum chewing hour =)
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
I know Microsoft is still churning out updates to Flight Sim, but I used to spend hours and hours flying around, doing imaginary missions and such, and I haven't seen any new simulators come out for years.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
If one game can keep a genre alive then Advance Wars proves that on the appropriate platform such games can be a killer apps. The fit is perfect -- it doesn't rely on fast reactions so if the ride is bumpy it doesn't affect the games. It can be saved mid game so if your stop turns up you don't lose progress. If you like this style of game and haven't tried it you are missing out.
I hear there's even a sequel on the way in time for Christmas.
The death of gun games? What is that guy smoking. Time Crisis 3 came out, one of the more popular games now. Also a game called "Wolrd Combat" with 4 player action (4 machineguns in arade!) Also the helicopter game (air assault) where you fly in helicopters and shoot mechanized robots. Area 51 is classic and I still see people playing it.
Death of Puzzle games? Bust a Move, Puzzle Fighter, are still very popular. I would even consider Dance Dance Revolution a type of puzzle game but one has to use the whole body to achieve a goal.
Biggest Crap is the death of side scrolling beat them up games. One of the most popular games in Taiwan/Singapore/Malaysia is this side scrolling game based on Romance of 3 Kingdoms. 4 player action which gave rise to 4 generations of the same game. I think it is called "Knights of Valor"
Over all the article is writen poorly and without much research. Dont know why is there a debate the article hold no water if parts of it are not true.
Available in all good shops now for PS2/GC/Xbox/GBA.
Dear Slahsdot.org,
Could you please STOP STEALING FARK.COM's links?
(Or at least steal quicker? You are always one day late... and you don't add any value) I don't know if I am a little slow to notice or if slashdot just started doing that but that's annoying...
How come Space War is the only game to impliment gravity in relation to shots fired? It was a great game. Have to get around to building my MAME console one day.
I drank what? -- Socrates
For some reason, women of all ages where I work love this stuff. I'm waiting for the inevitable "can we block this" call.
And it is addictive. I went there to check it out and ended up being stuck there for over an hour. I downloaded alchemy as part of my .Mac subscription and hence now can't get my wife off of the family iMac.
Around 1995, most of the "war" related games are turn-based, ie those with hexagon grids. Not very different from the board games but with computer opponents. The Panzer General series and many other WW2 games released by SSI are the examples...
But, after RTS taken off, good turn-based game seems to disappear. I really miss these turn based ones...
www.hitechcreations.com
It seems GameSpy thinks that a genre is dead just because it isn't flooded with copycat crap anymore. I prefer that "dead" genres produce artworks like Ikaruga and Viruta Fighter 4 than the sewage drenching "alive" genres like RTS and FPS.
All I can say is... They don't make games like they used to be!!! ;-)
I think the meaning of genre has been lost over the years, it is independant of any presentation aspects of the game , including graphics and audio. It just defines the principle game mechanics, just as movies and books have the same genre, a text-based adventure game has the same genre as Baldurs Gate
-Shrapnel
ye holy crap! what a bizarre troll!
i must have missed that movie. which one was it?
http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2003/03/8596_com ment.php#8778
http://cryptome.org/iraq-booty.htm
Jagged Alliance II --- Strategy? Simulation? You have management (limited cash, generate more cash by liberating mines, manage weapons and ammo, supply train, your mercenaries, etc). You have some strategy (which area to attack next?). You have puzzles (how to build a barrel attachment?) But in the main part you have round based tactical combat.
Or what about breakout & co? Tron? Snake? Space Invaders? Loderunner, Pitfall Harry, ... (Jump and Run)?
Or how about Uplink?
I have grown up with these games. I still remember snake (QBasic), King's Quest I, Pong and others. I tried to play these games a few weeks ago, and I brought back memories.
Am I the only one to remember Fantavision as a kind of animation creation software? I used to play with it on my Tandy 1000 TL and created vertice (vertex?) animations with it. I remember that Luxo lamp animation. I was so amazed back then...
I loved the metal guillotine gates you had to jump through.
Man you would NOT want to have to get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom in that palace...
Take of every zig!
for great justice!
we will never surrender...
All your base are ermmmm nevermind....
Where's my coffee?
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
Gyro mouses work fairly well and with some work could be accurate enough for gaming. A feasible gun game that uses an LCD seems possible to me. It just wouldn't be a light gun. Just stick a gyro in a gun body and calibrate it now and again.
Like ZZT! and The Incredible Machine
Just because I said so.
Educational games are NOT dying. In fact, there are more now than there have ever been at any one time. How many sites on the Internet exist soley for the entertainment of children? 100's? Each of these sites has tons of games to play. Also, if you haven't gone to a computer store recently, you should. The last time I stopped in CompUSA to pick up an ink cartridge, there were more rows dedicated for educational games than for common games. I haven't played these games myself, but my neices and nephews seem to have no trouble finding about a million things to do on the computer oriented for children.
As correct as the author is regarding some of these game genres, he is really off on some others.
BTW - What a great speech by Adrian Brody.
Are these any side-scrolling shooter engines out there that idiots(Graphics Designers, VB programmers and Scripters) could program in?
I would love to make my own R-Type game.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Aside from complaints that these games are not a genre (e.g. virtual reality is a technology). I believe that emulation has a role in killing these games. Why develop and expand upon R-Type when you can emulate the original game? Many of the great games started as arcade imitations that were expanded to offer something unique. No one wants to play Super Tetris 2002 when they can play the original Gameboy Tetris.
The great games of the current market mix different genres to create a unique experience.
I had forgotten all about good ol' Kings Quest. And Quest for Glory, all that good primitive crap I used to love. [Sigh]
Ah well, back to Neverwinter Nights...
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. --Edmund Burke
The truth is, games where yo run around in a maze aren't dead, just now they are known as Doom instead of Pac-Man.
> Am I the only one to remember Fantavision as a kind of animation creation software?
;(
No, but most have forgotten
> I used to play with it on my Tandy 1000 TL and created vertice (vertex?) animations with it.
I had it on the Apple ][+. Never knew it came out on other platforms.
Yes, it was vertex animation, with tweening (lerping)
> I remember that Luxo lamp animation. I was so amazed back then...
The 2nd disc (back side of the floppy) had some cool animations. I brought the cell reproduction into science class one day. The teacher loved it, since it showed the principles better then any verbose description could.
--
I am not a number -- I am a free man!
They forgot that bsdgames are dying.
"Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule." -- Nietzsche
I actually find myself playing RPGs now, which I never had any desire to play before.... Thank goodness Neverwinter Nights is a good enough mix of the two to keep me busy for months (at least) to come!
Visit us at http://www.iblist.com!
Damn this article... I just replayed RCR about a year ago, now I'm having urges to pull my Nintendo out of the basement again.
:)
River City Ransom - One of the best games EVER.
Yes, I agree with the article's author, we need a River City Ransom 2.
I can't live without my Acro Circus... That was one kickass skill.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Being scared of new things and ideas shows an unwillingness to take risk and thus is evidence of the wrong investment strategy.
Puzzle games aren't dead, they are HUGE on lesser platforms - palms, phones, etc. Are they dying on desktop computers? Yeah, because you don't need to fire up the 500W desktop and sit in your desk chair to play them anymore.
Maze games - please, tell me how Quake 3 and other FPS games are intrinsically different than maze games where you fight others? I mean truly, in terms of GAMEPLAY, Quake3, Counterstrike, America's Army are all just evolutions of TANK.
Educational: no, just the crappy educational graphics & simplistic models are gone. Simulations such as SimCity are still rolling, and there are a number of other entertaining titles that are terrificly educational, look at Europa Universalis or just about any wargame.
And "Graphic Adventures" are dying? Um, Icewind Dale, Fallout, Arcanum, etc (to point out only 2d ones) - Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, etc.
How the HECK can one say the graphic adventure is dying?
Methinks this author confused 'crappy 4-bit graphics' with the game play beneath them, because I simply don't see these genres dying at all. I DO see them evolving.
-Styopa
I think light gun games are fading is because of the Columbine backlash. Too many groups were looking at light guns as the cause of all evil. I remember when I got my Dreamcast I wanted a light gun something awful for Silent Scope (never got it) but because of the recent isolated tragedies in Columbine no one wanted a kid playing with a gun for a while.
Which is unfortunate, because at least at most of the Dave & Busters I've been to recently most people play with the light gun type games the most. Mainly while waiting for the 8-way linked NASCAR games, but still, they're playin the light gun ones.
Even a firefighter type game.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Good grief, go over to shockwave.com or popcap.com dexterinty.com or any of dozens of other places. What do you see? 90% puzzle games. Admittedly these games are all pretty stale and have been feeding off of each other for a long time now, but it's a thriving market.
No! I don't have a problem! I don't need your 12 steps I can quit mudding anytime I want to! (Gonnna go mud now)
Little Brother, watching the watchers
The article's problem is that it has a very strong bias for console games. They say that the puzzle genre is dying, but in the same breath say the reason is that no one wants to pay $49.95 when the same game can be played for free online. Well, duh. But you know, people are still playing the games. Maybe not on the consoles, but that's hardly any reason to call the genre dead.
And as for "edutainment"... Far from dead! Jeez, walk through Best Buy sometime and look in the kids section! There are as many "educational" games out there as there are shooters, RPGs, and RTSs. Most are probably crap, but (speaking as the father of two boys, 10yo and 5yo) some are really good. The 10yo loves the Clue Finders nth Grade Adventures series. The 5yo is working his way through one of the Reader Rabbit titles. (In fact, when the 10yo was 5 he blew through RR and taught himself to read in less than a week! His little brother isn't making such amazing progress, but the game is definitely helping.) And don't forget the Pajama Sam and Putt-Putt games. Kind of like Myst for the preschool crowd. They're not overtly educational, but they do a fair job of reinforcing problem-solving skills.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is coming out for the Gameboy Advance on March 31st (note: I don't make any money off that link... feel free to buy it elsewhere). One of my favorite games coming out on one of my favorite systems! (I picked up my platinum GBA:SP on Friday) If you've never played the game before and like puzzle games *at all*, you should definitely try it out.
With the space shooters, I would say they are still alive, just implemented in 3D. The example of this that remains most true to the genre would be the first Starfox games. Even the latest preserved it in the sort of 'mini game' of flying. If you want to relax the definition to allow free-flight as opposed to force progress along a path, a great number of 'space-flight' sims could fit the description (A lot of them are dumming down the micromanagement and physics). If you'll make that same allowance for 'side-scrollers' (how many 3d games force a path?), then I would say the space shooter is quite alive.
Puzzle I think he make the argument himself for. They are widely available online for free and don't require high-end hardware to play, so they are popular. Are they huge at the software stores? No, but they are used to draw in advertising revenue and the like, so they continue to be a commercial success.
The light gun has always been a rather small, niche thing for frequent use. How many games were released that supported the 'zapper'? The 'super scope'? How many platforms ever had 'official' light guns that were that popular? Has Sony ever released a non-controller 'official' method of control? Time Crisis series and its kind are pretty much as numerous and popular as Duck Hunt would have been if it was not bundled. Same with the dance pads, maraccas, etc, they are still quite popular in their niche, *especially* DDR.
Text adventures I've always thought were ways of representing a rich world not possible through the power of the computers of the time. Now worlds can be acceptably created in 3D graphics and that has worked well. Could be compared to books vs. movies, except books require no power, and are ultimate in portability and convenience, and with text adventures, whatever is in front of you could just as well play the fancy, 3D graphics world that you are free to explore on your own terms.
With maze games, I really haven't cared much. It is probably safe to say that those games, if they have nothing other than a maze, are dead. A lot of games have mazes in them, but by itself it gets boring now.
VR, well, I agree with the article, except it is not technically 'dying' but rather 'stillborn'.
Edutainment is still alive and kicking. The author may have grown up and doesn't really find anything big happening, but my young nephew loves new games coming out that are edutainment. Far from dead, but the audience of the 80s edutainment has grown out of it.
'Pure' FMV games were a really passing hype when they realized they had the tech to play movies on computers and consoles. They are still quite promiment in other games as a story-telling mechanism, just really really toned down. Those games listed as examples always sucked and never were popular enough to say that genre was ever really 'alive'.
Beat-Em-Up is another one of those things were the definition gets tricky. Does Devil May Cry count? Does Shenmue? Does Tenchu? All these games have a number of characteristics similar to the examples given. Some add a bit more depth and sophistication, but retain the basic principles at their core.
Again, I would say the 'Graphical Adventure' type game is a sticky definition. It is hard to draw the line between those and some RPGs. I'll leave this one alone.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Puzzle games aren't dead. Since no one's buying them, they just inserted them into RPGS (Remember Final Fantasy X?).
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Chess is not going to die any time soon, but it seems like if it were judged by the same criteria as the games in this list it would be percieved as one of the doomed.
I think there is just a perception that some genres are fading away because of how much marketing we see. Nobody wants to market and push puzzle games like tetris because they no longer are great money makers. That does not mean that their genre is dying. It is too hard to guarantee financial return for the simpler games. If someone puts a marketing push behind such a game and it becomes popular, it is too easy for a competitor to quickly develop a rip-off to steal some of that market share.
http://www.zak2project.de/
zak mckracken is my favorite adventure game of all time (and you could lose the game!)
Muds were an early form of most things we take for granted on the internet today. Chat rooms, Instant message, ... fear even cybersex where you actually have a "body" to use if you wish. The community is from the feeling that you are living and dying together with your friends.
I still frequent one of the old muds I used to play. The main thing I am interested in is that many muds are good places to sharpen coding skills. LP muds for instance are beautiful examples of object oriented programming, and a simple way to "experience" what you are coding. The mixture of pre-compiled and interpreted code sections will make it interesting for many years to come, if only in an *ack* educational sense.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I'm using UK release dates, as its what I have to hand:
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups"
Ikaruga. And It Fecking Rocks.
9. Puzzle
Super Bust A Move 2. Admittedly just another version of Puzzle Bobble, but there you go.
8. Light Gun
House Of The Dead 3. Not bad, though its no Time Crisis 2.
7. Text Adventure
ok, here we'd have to cheat and see what is happening in Palm land. Its a bit difficult to sell Text Adventures when consoles don't have keyboards.
6. Maze
Super Monkey Ball 2 (particularly on the complex levels) is a maze game in all but name, really
5. Virtual Reality
OK, I'm stuck again, but doesn't something like Steel Battalion, with its massive controller, do effectively the same job? Silly headsets seem to have moved on to providing a real-world component to the game instead; things like Dance Mats and Maracas, and particularly the upcoming Sony Eye-Toy are doing the same thing.
4. Educational
Given that Amazon.co.uk feel the need to have a whole seperate section of the shop to them, they can't be that dead. Lets choose version 15.0 (!!!) of Mavis Beacon as an example.
Also, don't underestimate the amount of history that people learn from playing something like Medieval: Total War, or a WW2 flight sim.
3. Full Motion Video
Would I get hit if I mentioned that Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance came out last week?
2. Beat 'Em Up
Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers is practically a Golden Axe sequel it sticks so rigidly to the formula. Kung Fu Chaos is pretty similiar as well.
1. Graphic Adventure
I've never really understood just what exactly it is that makes a Graphic Adventure different from the new Resident Evil 0, other than the odd Zombie to shoot. Can anyone explain?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
What I mean is that games like Mario RPG were 3d but used in a 2d manner. It worked really well. I wish other developers would experiment with this route.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I have dr mario on gba as well as a hundred other classic NES games. just get yourself a flash cart for the gba. the writable cart and writer itself will set you back more than the cost of the gba itself, but playing mario 1 on a handheld is priceless
There's also the iFiction site, too, to play his and other text adventure games online.
Enjoy!
Is this thing on? Hello?
Hrm. My elementary school math skills are a little rusty:
In five years, we will be playing solitaire. With physical cards. And there'll be some missing from the deck. (And it'll still be more fun than watching "cut scenes" in most FPShooters.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
you mean theres something else besides FPS??
I find it strange that there just happens to be 10 dying game genres out there. In fact, a close read demonstrates that there aren't 10 dying genre but just an article that fleshes its number out to ten for unknown reasons. Why 10? Does the number of dying genres have to equal the number of fingers (or toes) on the human body?
I didn't know that Space Shooter was a genre. If you think about it, a lot of these games are just side scrollers with different graphics and those certainly are not dead. Defender just was re-released for the Gameboy Advance... admittedly it is a very poor game but it would fall into this category.
Puzzle Games are definitely not dead or even sick. What about Worms? What about the game pictured (Bejewelled). Take a look at Yahoo and note how many people play the puzzle games. What about Mahjong? These games don't even have a cold.
Gun games are definitely few and far between but they always have been. Saying they are dying is not accurate. I'd say they are just a little anemic. New games and guns are still being produced at about the same clip they always have been.
Text Adventure... are you kidding me? TEXT adventure? I played my first one of these on a Decwriter. I haven't seen one of these in about 10 years. Dead, buried, "The worms crawled in, the worms crawled out, turned to dust and forgotten is more like it. Even my memories of the memories have faded...
Maze games are an entire genre? What is there besides Packman and Packman Wannbe? Is Bard's Tale a maze game?
Virtual reality has never really caught on... it is even more sproadic in release than gun games. Home implementation hasn't ever been common and there has never been a killer app in this category. These games couldn't die because they were never even a twinkle in their developer's eyes.
Education games are alive and well and though you could argue that there is nothing new under the sun in this genre, that doesn't mean it is dying. My local Bestbuy has one whole section devoted to these. I'd like to have had the SAT/ACT ones in my High School days. I practiced for my ACT by watching Gilligan's Island for 400 consecutive weekdays before the test.
Full Motion Video - Here, finally, is gold. A crappy genre that I always hated. RIP... on second thought, rot in hell.
Isn't Diablo just a differently themed Beat 'em Up? How about Neverwinter Nights? Certainly there are dozens of 3D fighting games out there. If you narrowly define this (which IMHO makes it not a genre) you still can't make this one look dead.
The graphic adventure has been pronounced dead several times. It now can be called "undead" mainly to the efforts of one company, Lucasarts. Sierra abandoned this genre a long time ago. Why? They made several extremely crappy adventures (remember Phantasmagoria? ) and no one bought them. If they would return to their Space Quest/Kings Quest roots they could maybe repeat their successes of the past... don't count on it though.
One thing that gets me about this list it that a lot of the so-called "dead" genres are showing up on the Gameboy. Hmmmmm.....
grimzap
grimzap
These genres may revive, as movie genres do. In movies, Star Wars in 1977 revived the 20-years-comatose space shoot-em-up genre, and Chicago may currently be reviving the decades-dead musical genre. Similarly, in video games Enter the Matrix may revive the beat-em-up genre this May. Currently, the Japanese RPG genre is splitting into variations of Zelda, Larry, Dragon's Lair and turn based strategy. Pikmin is a unique hybrid of action and RTS. So genres can change and revive.
IF Archive has something to say about that.
Write your own in TADS, Inform, or Hugo.
You are in front of a green tinted monitor, it is 1983...
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
There was Urban Chaos, Drakan, Space Bunnies Must Die (as you pointed out), Heavy Metal FAKK2, um...Oni. Actually I guess a lot of those came out long after Tomb Raider. That's hardly "every other game" though, so you're right.
I think it's more appropriate to attribute all of those games to an older one: Prince of Persia. Many many games today are just Prince of Persia in 3 dimensions. Interestingly, the actual Prince of Persia 3D was not as impressive as many clones of the original's gameplay.
OK, maybe it's not that "interesting."
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Wow, there's one of my dead genres! :-D
I knew it would pop up somewhere, hehe
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
OK, so this is perilously close to an OT troll, but: :-) and try a few games. Some of the advantages over vids: You can actually win free games, it's real hardware, you can trap the ball and catch your breath every now and then, and... when you whack the cabinet it actually affects the pinball's motion (try knocking down an ogre by hitting the vid box).
If you haven't played pinball in a while, get out of the house
And BTW there are LOTS of great pinball sims available, many for free.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
wow, i never would have guessed that, since there's about 10 new fighting games a month. There may not be your classic Double Dragon style side scrolling level based adventures, but what are FPS games if not updates of that concept? Not to mention GTA, which is a golrified boxing game with cars involved. I also think the 'puzzle' category is still very much alive, but it has been combined with action. See: Metroid, Zelda, Resident Evil, etc. I think the article should have been written as "top ten game styles that have been co-opted by good graphics and easier gameplay".
Oh c'mon... has no one here played Mystic Heroes for GameCube? The whole point of that game is to beat the crap out of the hordes of badguys on the screen. I think it's a fairly well done 3D version typical of the genre.
And Gauntlet being dead? Has anybody played Gauntlet: Dark Legacy? That's like the second or third game I bought for the GameCube, and it captures the spirit of the older versions quite well.
Maybe I'm a bit skewed in my perceptions, since I went straight from SNES to GameCube, but I don't see either of those genres as 'dying'.
Not only is Pikmin a puzzle game, but so are some of these squad-based tactics games. I'm thinking mostly of The Incredible Machine as the prototype for these games, or Lemmings. Take Fallout Tactics (from a couple of years ago.) That was basically The Incredible Machine with rifles and grenades instead of hamster wheels and conveyor belts. The same is true for Star Trek: Away Team (but no one played that so I don't know if it counts), Commandos (the first one, not sure about number 2), and to a certain extent Hitman 1. Any game that requires the player to find the right spot and put the correct piece there is fundamentally a puzzle game, no?
Until people stop putting these elements into their games, I don't think we can count the genre out.
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
I miss my Dark Castle... (and Beyond Dark Castle)
nya nya nya nya nyah (Thwack!!)
In essence, the problem with this article is that it misses the point of most modern game designs. Let's take some top selling games from the last year or two:
Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City
WarCraft III
NeverWinter Nights
Each of these games has a role-playing component (develop your individual war leaders' skills).
Each of these games has a puzzle-solving component (open the ancient seal by following clues).
Each of these games has a maze component (learn you way around Vice City).
Each of these games has a "dot-eating" component (pick up the gold, hidden item, etc.). Each of these games uses 3D graphics, canned video.
Each of these games has a "twitch" component (although in single-player mode, WC III and NWN allow you to pause to get your bearings or grab a snack).
In essence, all that the article shows is that the "one trick wonder" game is dead; you need to have more going for you than a single concept or a technology demo. Indeed, if you look at the graphic adventure -- it simply integrated the text adventure, the canned slide show, and a few mini-games.
There are a few minor things that have disappeared. E.g. being able to type text into a game has been replaced by selecting from canned responses? Why? Probably because most people find the process of figuring out that you have to SCRATCH your name into the rock and not WRITE, CARVE, or SCRAWL it to be too damn annoying.
You've obviously never microwaved the pool water then.
CmdrTaco wants Dr. Mario for GBA.
CmdrTaco gets open-source Dr. Mario for GBA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Isn't Parappa largely a clone of that old "Simon" game?
Will I retire or break 10K?
WHAT!!!!!! Beat 'EM Ups are dying... how could this be.... What about the classics.... Double Dragon, Streets of Rage and let us not forget Golden Axe. Waht is the world coming to ???
Yes. Programmers all over are trying to prove various systems Tetris complete.
However, they can't use the name "Tetris".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Five dollars? Try free and Free. Milestone 1 of Vitamins, a clone of Dr. Mario on the GBA platform, is released under the GPL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course 2-D and text-based games are dying out in the face of 3-D console titles.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
They didn't even mention the one genre that actually is dying: the FPS. I think that's now the exclusive domain of the mod community and has gone the way of puzzle games and shooters: free.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
Underrated game. 3D beat 'em up. With weapons.
I'd say that though gun games aren't dead, they're certainly dying. You mentioned Time Crisis 3 and World Combat. I'd probably add Police 911 to that (The one where it tracks your real movements). That makes a total of 3 games over the past few years, which isn't exactly booming.
Nope.
Not all of these made it to the states, but in the last couple of years on PS2 there was Gun Survivor 3 and 4, Ninja Assault, GunBarl Collection (the first Time Crisis game and Point Blank 1, 2 & 3) Virtua Cop Rebirth, Time Crisis 2, Vampire Night and Endgame.
Sure there's no Sony lightgun, but the GunCon is fairly 'official' at this point (and damn hard to improve on!)
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
The fact is, if you add graphics to a text adventure, it's no longer a text adventure.
Some text adventures had graphics in the top 2/3 of the screen and text in the bottom 1/3. Does that make them "text adventures with graphics" or "graphic adventures with a command line"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Turn based would be a nightmare in multiplayer
Turn-based Pokemon for the Game Boy is 2-player.
Play selection in Madden for set-top consoles is turn-based and 2-player.
The trick is to have all players take their turns simultaneously and then the game animates the result of the round. You wouldn't even need broadband. Sony has implemented a set of such games for PCs on its Game Show Network web site.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Where you have to wiggle your joystick as fast as you can.
That's called "Max 300" in Dance Dance Revolution, and I still can't pass it on heavy.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sweet Jesus, how could you name these games, but not mention the Heretic/Hexen family!? I haven't seen a more involved version of 'Hit the button here, something happens -way- the hell back there and heaven help you remember where' since the Hexen days. I still cringe when I hear the sound of Dark Bishops swishing around...
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
know for a fact that none of the big RPG studios (Black Isle, Origin, Bethesda) are working on anything turn based anymore.
What about Squaresoft, who's working on Final Fantasy X Part II for PS2? Or is the Final Fantasy series not big enough for you?
Will I retire or break 10K?
...on Gamecube!
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
I have dr mario on gba as well as a hundred other classic NES games.
How could you afford to purchase genuine copies of "a hundred other classic NES games" without being independently wealthy?
And how did you build your NES cartridge dumper?
but playing mario 1 on a handheld is priceless
You don't need PocketNES to do that because all Super Mario Bros. games except SMB 3 have been ported natively to a Game Boy platform (SMB 1 and The Lost Levels to GBC; SMB2, SMW, and Yoshi's Island to GBA).
In fact, here's a GPL'd homebrew port of Dr. Mario to GBA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you believe the makers, the Monkey Island series is still around. In 4 they hinted at a fifth, but I doubt it... four sucked.
I liked 1-3 a lot. They were really, really funny. But in 4, the controls were just too backwards. Instead of clicking on that rubber chicken you want to pull, you have to hold down an arrow key and wait for him to slowly rotate around to facing the chicken, then hold down the forward key until he is in range. When he comes in range, the option to pull the chicken pops up on the bottom of the screen and you click on it. Hooray for 3D! I quit after 20 minutes.
Maybe that's why it's a dying genre.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
"Graphic adventures place emphasis on puzzle-solving and a good storyline. Because of the latter, they also tend to be linear.
RPGs are more like the games that you described. The motivation is more on leveling your character up and becoming more powerful rather than a storyline-driven game."
You've got that backwards.
There is no way to win a roleplaying game. So,
then, what's the point?
The story. The telling of it, the experiencing
of it.
And thus the reason that there hasn't yet been
an RPG released on any computer or console.
How the hell could they say puzzle games are dead. When I go to work that's all my co-workers do, mindlessly click little web-based puzzle games like Bejeweled. More people probably play these games than any other type. A) they're free B)there's no learning curve for non-gamers
STOP ROCK VIDEO
Sure saved me some time raving on about Powermonger and Dungeon Master, not wanting to be a dork and all. Doesn't mean it's not true.
This is not a minor thing at all. The semantics problem you mentioned were pretty much worked out by the end of the text-command era. If you look at the parser in an Infocom game and compare it to Space Quest III or Quest for Glory ii (which in particular had command-line completion if i do recall correctly) -- very different experiences. I recall few, if any, vocabulary "puzzles" in those later games.
Once the graphic adventures switched over to mouse-commands, challenge and immersion went right out the window. Most puzzles could be solved by clicking (or dragging an icon and then clicking) on the screen. Of course, simulated dialog became possible with mouse commands, but that never did make up for the loss of gameplay.
Also, some of the most entertaining moments in many old games of that nature were the smart-ass responses you would get for an incorrect command.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
VR was released too early for its time, when most games were 32 bit. PS1 quality games were the first-wave of VR, whereas Dreamcast quality games should have been the first wave of VR. If SEGA made VR versions of ANY of their first person shooters from Dreamcast, they would be immediate hits! Dreamcast graphics are potentially four times as good as PS1 graphics...maybe more, yet they released PS1 quality VR games at a time when it WAS possible to make Dreamcast quality VR games. 32 bit games were far more economical to make for VR at a time when VR was widely experimental, but now 128 bit VR games which come with a helmet should be part of every new wave console's library; they'll be hits I tell 'ya. All ya gotta do is tweak existing first person shooters. Just thinking about a VR-helmet version of MGS2 gives me multiple orgasms :)
2. Beat 'Em Up
What about Oni?
BASE Conflict for Quake 3
Here: http://tinyurl.com/82xt
Note how the genres that are dying are ones not making MONEY!
It's not about how much people are playing, its about how mcuh people are selling.
Which is quite sad because the word "dying" is a misnomer here, if we rate how much something is dying by how much people are forking out for it. I fork out exactly $0s for playing games on iWon.
This is what happens when you attempt to present an article as having ever so slight the amount of authority to it, but then not have enough people realize its so completely full of crap. I don't just want to comment on badly written articles like this, I want to be able to write to the author and publisher and say "your article sucks, it meets no minimum level of journalism and should be pulled, deleted, and eaten." Just once I want someone to write back "you are absolutely right, we'll do that right now!"
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
One word: Kazaa.
Most of the game formats mentioned in the article are popular for arcade games. Most of them support short play times, which is good for operator income. In the US the entire arcade category is not doing well due to the availability of cheap high quality home consoles and PC games. Most home video games have longer play times. I think it is because a long game is perceived to have greater value which helps people justify spending $50. This means that all game genres that are mostly represented in the arcade are living on borrowed time.
Being a female born in the 80s who grew up around boys who were more interested in sports and riding bicycles, i was never subjected to a lot of computer games. My foray into computer games came when my father bought home a Tandy computer (around 1987), which ran games off a cassette. One of these games was called Rupert Rythum. I can not remember what this game was about, but from there, we purchased a 286 and i tried my luck at games like solitare and tetris. They kept me occupied for hours.
After giving up on the 286, we were sold on a P500 and windows 95. Here was when i got my first real game. Zork. Now i had to wonder, were all games like this? Why was so much effort required to finish the game. I did not care about lighting lanterns, giant onions or grues. To this day i never did finish the game.I wanted graphics and not a giant paper map i had to have next to me at all times to work out where i was going. After giving up on this i discovered a variety of platform games ranging from Commander Keen (1-6), Duke Nukem, Cosmos Cosmic Adventure (1&2. Were there anymore?). I had a go at Space Quest once, but it didn't hold my interest.
Now i am dating a Software Engineer (yes some of them do have girlfriends), and I am subjected to having many computer geeks (i use the term in a nice way) in my lounge room playing Counterstrike, Need For Speed, and a variety of others until the sun comes up. As for the demise of some computer genres, it means that my lounge room will be free of sweat and spilled coke stains.
nt
You know, I've heard that BSD game is dying.
It was cool up untill the showdown with the bulldoser. I kept getting runover. :(
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
You still need to dump it on a cartridge so you can play on your GBA, right?
Yes. You can play the game in an emulator, or you can use the MBV2 cable to copy the game from your PC to your GBA's internal RAM. I'm still working on putting the GBA into sleep mode so that you can keep the game in the GBA's RAM between plays.
Will I retire or break 10K?
you actuall have a fannypack with you, that the author doesn't tell you at the outset, but you can tell by typing "i". in it is a screwdriver to unscrew the plaque from the base of the howitzer to the north. you can pull off the plaque (and get 5 points) to reveal a hole, with a spray paint can and a howitzer shell inside. you can go spray paint the booth for another 5 points, at which point it tells you you have done everything the demo allows.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Getting your 3.5" to 5.25" is the first puzzle in a Leisure Suit Larry game...
i have to agree to that :)
filthy quotes and sleezy humour all the way!
You're right, some games handled text puzzles much better than others and made failing a positive part of the gameplay experience (although dying every time you failed added nothing to the experience).
On the whole, I think LucasArts managed to capture most of the positive aspects of text adventures (e.g. with their rather insane object combinations) while avoiding the simple nastiness (e.g. if you didn't feed a sandwich to the small dog you needed to start your game over).
Oh, OK, that's alright then.
> grin
ChristTrekker grins.
> noogie Little Brother
ChristTrekker seizes Little Brother under one arm and gives him a ferocious noogie as Little Brother squirms.
Constitutionally Correct