GBA - A Wasteland For Creativity?

jvm writes "Having been intrigued by heated discussions over licensed games and stagnant creativity in the videogame market, I did some investigation into just how many original titles can be found in the library of games for Nintendo's GameBoy Advance. Depressingly, out of the hundreds of games catalogued, only 9% are not licensed, not sequels, and not remakes of older games. That's fewer than three dozen games, and most of those fall into well-known categories. Graphs and downloadable data are provided for interested readers to do their own examination."

Comments

Reasons why the lack of creativity

[Alpha27]

• Sometimes new things do not get a good chance when they first come out so it becomes more of a cult following. Therefore it's less of a chance of a good sell, and return on investment.
• People like franchises/sequels.
• Some new games are just reinventions of old ideas.
• How new can you get? Many games are similar to each other. We have FPS, RTS, Platformers, RPGs, fighting, sports, card, 2d scrollers, etc. Each genre has their style, and everyone sticks to the style that works.

I'm curious to see a report on other platforms, including SNES, and alot of the older systems. I wouldn't be suprised to see the percentage of new games shrink overtime.

Re:Reasons why the lack of creativity

[PainKilleR-CE]

I noticed the article also forgot to mention something else that was blatantly obvious:
The top two original titles (Golden Sun and Advanced Wars) both have sequels now.

Of course, he also ignored franchise titles with original gameplay, such as Wario Ware, Inc. which could be viewed as a commentary on the game industry very much in line with the article, if you follow the storyline. It's much easier to simply examine the titles and figure out which are sequels or franchise games than to figure out what titles actually have original gameplay.

Re:Reasons why the lack of creativity

[jvmatthe]

The definition of original for this article was chosen because it was unambiguous.

Does a title use a license from a movie, cartoon, etc.? Is it a direct sequel? Does it use properties developed in previous games (i.e. is it a franchise game)? Is it a remake of an earlier game? Is it a retrofit of a game from another platform?

As far as I know, each of those questions can be answered definitively "yes" or "no", without debate. Had I chosen to try to find a definition by which Wario Ware, Inc. was considered original, it would have necessarily included defining original gameplay.

The definition of original gameplay is not something I'm even going to attempt at this point. I admit up front (and even at the end) that there is a weakness with the definition. But to push it further makes it an issue of opinion, and probably an intractable problem (for a single person or even a small group of people). Intractable because one would need to play each game considered in its entirety and make a decision, a subjective one, on whether it had enough original gameplay to be considered original.

Hope that makes the choice of definition a bit more clear. It wasn't that Wario Ware, Inc. was ignored. Quite the opposite: it was considered and then binned appropriately under the working definition.

error in original games

[hiroshi912681]

Motocross Maniacs Advance is actually a sequel/remake of an old B&W gameboy game, a great one, mind you. I believe there was a sequel on GBC, also.

Advance Wars is a derivative of (Nectaris) Military Madness... but he fails to realise that Hudson at the time also was making the (X) Wars series, too... like Famicom Wars, Super Famicom Wars, GB Wars, (64 Wars got canceled)... as great as Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2 are, they still are just sequels/remakes.

originality is dead =( oh well, I like retrofits.

We've Got to Support Originality!

[Gothic_Walrus]

One note - Advance Wars is actually a continuation of a previously Japan-only series of Game Boy games.

Unfortunately, originality on all consoles has been vanishing as of late. Publishers make the easy decision and decide to go with what's guaranteed to sell. No one really needs four different NFL games for each season or a tie-in piece of shovelware for every blockbuster movie, but that's what we're getting.

As was noted in the article, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of us, the gamers. As long as we're content with retreads of old franchises and sequel after sequel to an unexpected hit, that's what we'll receive. It would be nice to see console manufacturers award originality (maybe a price break on the media or the license fees?), but that probably won't happen. Therefore, we, the gamers, need to support originality. We need to buy the games that are different, the ones that take chances. Praising them isn't enough. More often than not, even a mediocre original game is far better than a licensed one. The problem is that we don't do that. We buy the franchises, the crappy licenses (Enter the Matrix, anyone?). We don't support originality, making it an unneeded risk for publishers.

Until we reform our buying habits, nothing is going to change.

The bright side of it

[edwdig]

On the bright side, the GBA is by far the most friendly console/portable ever released for homebrew development. I'm going to ignore the special limited edition PlayStations you could program that were only released in Japan, as you could only run programs that fit in RAM, which made it extremely limited.

For under $100, you can get a flash ROM cartridge and the cable necessary to program it. The GBA is high powered enough that development is usually done in C using GCC rather than in assembly like on most 2d systems. The hardware is very well documented. The system is simple enough that it can be emulated at full speed on any Pentium 3 based system. It's hard to top that for homebrew development.