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No Blockbuster Titles in 2005?
The NYT is reporting that, unlike last year with likes of Half-Life 2 and Halo 2, 2005 has been curiously devoid of gaming hits. "With the introduction of a brand-new console, the Xbox 360, millions of players are supposed to be raving about the new machine and buying tons of new games to play on it. None of those things are happening. Sales are down relative to the holiday season last year, and major publishers are getting hammered on Wall Street. And so there is a lot of angst out there in the video game industry."
I hear Nintendogs was a hit.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
No original ideas... sequal after sequal, rehash of the same game ten different ways. How many ways can you fight WWII or demons on mars?
No matter how much EA spends on promoting it's latest FPS - it's just like the original with extra antialiasing. Woopittie doo. My money is spent much better elsewhere.
Though i'm not sure that there weren't ANY blockbuster games but it sure feels like it. This is what happens when large gaming companies discourage original ideas and only go with the bigger guns + more polygon count game design route.
Original ideas are risky but now it seems that lack of original ideas is riskier.
Just not for BLOCKBUSTERS.
:-)
Great games I can think of offhand:
Guitar Hero
Darwinia
Civ 4
Space Rangers 2 (starforced, sadly)
We Love Katamari
Very good games:
The Movies
Warhammer 40k: Winter Assault (this is a sequel, so maybe it doesn't count, but I really like this game)
T2X (amateur mod for Thief 2, surprisingly good, although a bit uneven)
Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney (DS title)
I'm sure there are more, but my memory fails me right now. I was just thinking yesterday that there have been an awful lot of great games this year, but usually from unexpected directions... all of the big publisher games have been pretty mediocre. The EA method (Let's Ship Yet Another Sequel To Something That Sold Big Last Year) is failing... nobody is generating new game ideas.... new property, as it were. They're all focused on exploiting what they have instead of making things that are genuinely different or fun.
Because they haven't been investing in new gameplay ideas, they're running low, and people aren't buying as many games. This isn't really rocket science.
EA would have been far better off, instead of coughing up huge money for that exclusive NFL license, in investing that money in about fifty small game developers. 45 of them would have failed spectacularly, 4 would have done well, and 1 would have been a megahit for the next generation of sequel exploitation. Instead, they paid way too much for a license that will ensure that their football team sits around collecting paychecks without actually having to work very hard, since they have no competition.
It's interesting that of all the big players, only Nintendo seems genuinely committed to doing new stuff. I just recently picked up a DS and Phoenix Wright, and I've been very pleased with it... I didn't realize a touch screen would be fun, but in fact it's very natural and a great gaming idea. That's why, I suspect, they're professionals, and I'm not.
Each *5 year for the past three decades of gaming has been known for being relatively slow and stale. Also, each *6 year has been big stuff; coincidentally, Nintendo has had a hand in the last two *6 years. It wasn't until '86 that Super Mario Brothers revitalized gaming in the USA; in '96, Super Mario 64 set the 3D gaming generation on fire. Both of those games changed the way people played games for the next decade--d-pad in the '80s, analog control in the '90s.
Interestingly enough, 2006 is the launch year for the Revolution...