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Urban-Themed Video Games 'Basically Dead'?
simoniker writes "Midway CMO Steve Allison has been talking about why he thinks the urban game genre isn't worth entering, suggesting of the cancelled Snoop Dogg/John Singleton collaboration Fear & Respect, which was in development at Midway: 'We killed Fear and Respect... because we have enough data-points to know the hood thing is basically dead. It would be dead before it came out. And you don't want to come out on a dead vibe.' Do people really not care about GTA-style urban shooters any more?"
I think it's more a matter of every game genre can be cloned to death and the GTA-clone genre has reached that point.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Gee, are they saying that they're actually going to try a new game genre? Here's an idea for a new one, WWII shooters!
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Thank fucking god! "Urban Culture" is pathetic bullshit to begin with. Games based on it are just sad beyond belief. They're blatant attempts to cash in on "hip." Let's get back to the proper business of killing orcs and zombies.
It's a BS marketing term that dances around race.
also, FTFA
Quartile maybe?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
How about the notion that they're just out of touch with their demographic? Every time I see an "urban" game (Need for Speed: Most Wanted, I'm looking at yoooooou~) it's always come off as being poser and totally fake. What can you expect? You're getting a bunch of 35 year-old, predominantly-white, middle-class geeks to develop your "hip" urban game!
And NFS:MW wasn't even the worst offender... I can think of many worse...
I'm sure 'Urban' as a sell-any-old-crap gimmick may be nearing its demise, but there is no such thing as a dead genre. A well-made innovative game can be in any genre at all and will sell well. Who'd have thought 'puppies' was a genre that would effectively carry a market launch of a handheld?
The next big theme should be westerns, Red Dead Revolver was a great title, but it needed more horse riding. Gun (playing now) has plenty of horse riding but not enough moseying.
Just look at the 360's array of crappy GTA ripoffs. It's like when your parents start using some word or phrase it quickly loses its cool. When the lamest console of the lot in the Xbox starts flooding the market with a genre it is clear the party's over.
I remember way back when, thinking that when the technology arrived to make games look "real" it would be pretty cool. WRONG. When games look "real" and are modeling real physics, they are limited in what they can do. All we get in the way of innovation is new environments for running around shooting stuff.
Sprite based 2D games could violate physical laws and we didn't care. Better yet, games didn't have to exist in an analog of the known universe at all.
We got what we asked for, and damn it, it's boring.
Also, sorry Snoop, but gamers are savvy these days. Not since "Cool Spot" or "Yo, Noid!" for NES has a catchy license ever been enough to sell a game. In fact, it tends to raise a red flag for most gamers nowadays. "Why do they need to CGI-scan Joe Blow Rapper into the game, or have Billy Bob Actor do a voiceover? What crappy gameplay are they trying to distract us from? Is this another "Bruce Willis in Apocalypse?"
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
You're getting a bunch of 35 year-old, predominantly-white, middle-class geeks to develop your "hip" urban game!
:)
I am a 35 year-old, predominantly-white, middle-class geek, and I like my urban combat set to the preconceived sounds and images pumped out by Hollywood.
Werd.
However, the "urban" genre isn't dead. The problem with a lot of these games is that "urban" is considered a marketing tool, and the games released with the "urban" theme haven't been very good.
I'd argue that there has to be a certain amount of enthusiasm when making any game. I get the impression that the people at Rockstar enjoy what they do and didn't pick GTA just as a marketing tool. I think they might've been down at the pub and said, "Hey mates, I think a game where the player could just grab any car on the street and drive it around would be fun." "Crikey, that's brilliant." "Stone the crows, let's get back to headquarters and start programming this, well after a few more pints."
In fact, another "urban" game, the freeware "drug dealer" game I've played a few times, was probably made under a similar level of enthusiasm though a lower budget.
However, I think a lot of recent games with this theme have been more like, "We need to hit on a new paradigm for video games." "Well, that GTA game is popular and Gangsta Rap is popular, perhaps we can cash in on this trend." "Yes, it hits our key demographic group, lets have a concept meeting about it, after I finish my latte."
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
"Urban theme" doesn't tell me anything meaningful about a game's mechanics or strategy.
So, what we're talking about is superficial stuff -- decoration. And if it's decoration, it's subjection to fashion. And if it's fashion, it's subject to going-out-of-fashion.
It's like cars. In the immediate post WW2 years, there was a melted, "jelly bean" look to car body styles. Shortly thereafter, in the era of the nuclear strategic bomber, cars started to get taller and taller tail fins, culminating in a Caddie my father in law had which I swear must have had tail fins 18 inches (45cm) high. Since this was well beyond the ridiculous, the styles swiftly changed so that the tail fins were cut off, leaving a vestigal ridge about an inch high and several inches wide. The result was angular and gave cars a massive and muscular look. My father in law had one of these too (do a google image search on 1972 Plymouth Fury. Then the energy crisis came, and cars got smaller, and aerodynamics started to chip away a the broad shouldered look, and finally we had the original Ford Taurus, which was back to the "jelly bean" look.
So, maybe "gangsta" is out until we've churned over a couple generations of gamers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Old and busted: "urban" games
New hotness: ping pong games
-- OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.com
Sure, part of the appeal of GTA is being an urban sociopath. The real draw of the GTA series though is its open world. GTA 3 was one of the most open 3D games that had come out in a while. You can get fares in a taxi-cab, drive sick people to the hospital in an ambulance, or totally ignore the missions and just cause mayhem.
Instead of publishers trying to copy GTA by focusing on its gameplay, they instead focused on the hip hop vibe. What they don't seem to realize is that GTA was popular despite its urban flavor, not becaues of it. GTA is more similar to Oblivion than it is to Def Jam: Fight for NY. You want to have a GTA or Oblivion style hit? Create an unquie world and make it open and give the player a lot of different stuff to do. It's a little puzzling that the open world genre is really lacking in quantity right now despite the huge success of the few games that have done it right.
Remember all the side scrollers that came out after Super Mario Bros? What if instead of side scrollers, publishers figured Mario was popular because it featured a fat plumber and all games of the NES era all featured plumbers or fat blue collar workers, but totally ignored the side-scrolling action that made Mario fun. That's exactly what's happening with the companies that tried to ape GTA by putting focusing on MTV style hip hop rather than on open gameplay.
Honestly, when I sit down to play video games, I want to escape reality. However, that does not mean I want to slash up dragons or shoot down space ships with lasers. Sometimes I want to play a game in a GTA or "urban" setting just because it's the closest thing to doing something you couldn't in the real world and getting away with it.
Ignoring the intended meaning of 'urban' as in 'all cities are violent and rap plays in the background 24/7 and people shoot each other', I'd quite like a MMORPG in an urban setting.
By that I mean modern to futuristic, since technically Ironforge in WoW counts as an urban setting. Basically, I'm sick to death of witches and wizards and magic spells. I'm also discounting the Anarchy Online style of city: a bunch of simple blocks of texture rationalising a collection of shops.
What I want is a proper interactive city environment. A properly scaled big city would be easily big enough for a MMORPG, and wouldn't require the player to consciously suspend their disbelief because of the distorted geography like all MMORPGs so far. Graphically, you could have more detail up close where it counts, because you wouldn't need to render miles and miles of landscape.
Example: Midgar would make a good environment for a MMORPG
And no, this doesn't count
With games like
50 cent: Bulletproof
True Crime: Streets of New York (or as it SHOULD of been called, True Crime: Glitches of new york)
True Crime: Streets of LA
Driv3r
Shadow the hedgehog (come on, you can't deny that's what they were going for with this one)
the only ones that were even remotly worth playing in the "urban genre" were Def Jam: Fight for New York, GTA San Andreas that's all I can think of actually.
Maybe if they had gotten people who wanted to make a GOOD game instead of making a Cash grab game the genre wouldn't be a sinking ship with endless clones of two games.
With the recent release of Einstein's private letters indicating that he was a Mack Daddy http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2006/07/11/weins11.xml suggests a new series of gritty urban videogame: the GTR series.
You start as a small time patent clerk named Al working your way up the ladder of Organized Physics. Busting up dice games run by God, setting up a convention for tense-hos, projects that are the Bomb, and so forth.
I think for most, playing video games is a brief escape from everyday life. Why both escaping into an environment that's identical to real life? I'd rather be slaying epic dragons or bugs, etc. (Is there such a thing as an epic hoodie?)
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
... when everyone is into it... well it just isn't cool anymore!
Spoiled white kids don't want to be into "Hip Hop / Gangsta Hood" or even "Goth". It has been way too overdone.
Unfortunately many of them are geting into "Emo/Screamo" bullshit.
Here let me make an analogy for geeks and nerds: Having a Linux desktop today is not as cool as having one say 10 years ago. Too many people have one, hell almost anyone can burn a knoppix cd and boot one. If you want to be cool in the geekdom now you have to run exosteric shit like Hurd on an UltraSparc under an emulated virtual environment or some crazy shit like that. Oh, is that GNU/Hurd, *wink* my bad.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It's not the genre that's dead, if it can even be classified as a genre, it's the lame knock-offs that are very dead dead dead. Thus far, frankly, every time I've heard a game industry insider declare a genre "dead" it's because they can't figure out how to release a game that isn't completely ripped off from a more popular version. True Crime: New York City was a great example of this. A wonderfully rendered New York, like, stellar. But... bad cars, a fake CJ is the protagonist, "big star" voice acting that is uninspired, and some of the degrading hoops you have to jump through to get through the story give me a headache just thinking about them. Contrast this with San Andreas, which is BIG, but by no means an amazing rendering of any city (although it's still very cool). The storyline is all over the place, but that adds to the charm. The voice acting is really fun, even CJ is a blast to listen to, the missions are batass crazy and the replay value is endless. By all technical merits, True Crime New York City is the better game, but it's really not at all, because the "play" part of the game isn't all there.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
After "San Andreas" is there a purpose of building a competing title? That game is a be-all-end-all for the genre solely for the fact that it is one of the greatest user experiences ever created.
Don't predict the decline of a genre because somebody got it all exactly right and nobody has caught up just yet.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
As long as we're wishing, I want Morrowind re-released under the Oblivion engine (with a blend of gameplay mechanics for a best-of-both-worlds melange). And a non-shitty sequel to Deus Ex. For that matter, a Deus Ex re-make that's exactly the same but with better graphics/physics would be GREAT.
:(
How about another Fallout game? Maybe some company could revive the System Shock series. That would be TRULY kick-ass. Or, as with Deus Ex, just release the same game as SS2 but with new graphics/physics. Hell, it'd be the best game on the shelf at Best Buy. I'd shell out 40-50 bucks for it. For that matter, a Starcraft sequel would almost certainly be the best RTS on the shelves, barring any serious fuck-ups on Blizzard's part.
And someone should really do something good with the FarCry engine.
And Lucasarts should start making adventure games again. Or maybe they could come up with another original-trilogy-based storyline for a game series, in the tradition of Dark Forces.
And I'd like a pony.
Imagine yours
You could have four totally different play experiences. Set up the quests so that some that are trivial for one group are impossible for others since the tactics simply don't transfer between them. Forget the fake "Alliance v. Horde" setup where you make the races fight: ninjas and robots simply can't team up since a stealthy assassin isn't going to be any more effective teamed with something out of an anime nightmare. It would be hell to balance, but could be done.
Frankly, after looking over a bunch of MMORPGs (WoW, CoV, Planetside, AO, EVE, Auto Assault) I'm not impressed. The only truly different one is EVE and I don't have the time to have a second career which seems to be about the only way to really get into that game.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I work in games and he is absolutely correct. The "ghetto hood" thing is up. Its done, its over.
Thats not to say that rap isnt done, but the old NWA gansta shit we grew up with... is.
Its become a farce. Its now a cartoon of what was always stupid and ridiculous no matter how cool we thought it was to rebel along side with it.
GTA games are exhausting. Thats not to say that a new GTA wont be a big hit because GTA is far more than just "ghetto hood style" Its only recently they've taken it deeper into that bullshit genre and have cartooned it in many respects.
GTA San Andreas, was of no interest to me, and as my friends play it... we mock it. "We got Respect!" Yeah... great... now what.
GTA San Andreas has some great environment modelling and the idea of a virtual city and free reign will never get old as long as your ability to "live" in that city becomes more real. In other words, the goal is a virtual city without much scripted behavior. More of a do as you please, close to life experience as possible... Thats the goal of the GTA virtual city phenomenon.
The ghetto aspects of it is a farce. Its a marketing tool. The run around and kill things wont get old... well it does, but it has to be changed and given new life through new game play ideas within the virtual city.
The ghetto games are pathetic. Infact i was working on a game concept for a major hip hop persona. The game to this date has not gone through. They were just interested in the marketing aspects... not the game. They didnt care much about the game as long as they could use their hip hop image to sell it.... as if thats all it took to make a game popular.
The ghetto hood thing is dead. We're adults now and the kids are different. Sure theres still good hip hop music, and the teens enjoy it, but its not the same as it was. The whole gangsta thing is a joke now and i'm thankful for that. There are much better things in life to promote... even if i was a fan of much of a lot of the music.... It's nice to see people growing up, including myself.
There are better things out there.
That does not mean for a second that the genre wont still be around in some small form. Did mafia films die out completely? No. But the mass marketing appeal, the sure hit, the bullshit used by marketers... can no longer work using the ghetto slant... Because its become a joke.
And on a side note.. Hayao Miyazaki rules.
Do people really not care about GTA-style urban shooters any more?
You know, I've asked myself the same question, many times... about war games, space strategy games, adventure games, just about anything single-player. The market has changed so much. Even Star Wars Galaxies, itself an MMORPG, was reinvented so that Sony could attract a more casual (or, if you like, dumber) fan base. The last time I set foot in a game store, it was all MMORPG, MMORPG, World War II sim, MMORPG... oh, and Sims 2.
A decade or so ago, a lot of games were still crap, but there was at least more variety of crap. It does seem like the games market now is becoming ever more monolithic -- especially since most PC games seem to be console ports anymore. It's kind of depressing. I'm barely out of my 20s, and already I feel like some wheezy old man when it comes to video games -- "Whatever happened to Descent, Wing Commander, Sim City? Get the hell out of my bushes..." etc.
because I just read that old games' graphics will never age!
What all the wannabes apparently failed to spot was that the GTA series mocked first the mobster, and then the gangsta genres. Anyone who listened to the radio stations (never mind playing some of the missions) in Vice City and thought the game was in any way taking itself seriously needed their head examining. The same applied to San Andreas once CJ escaped from the oddly humourless Los Santos missions in the first part of the game. As soon as he met up with The Truth, all bets were off.
Part of the fun of the GTA series is seeing how a bunch of weirdoes in Scotland will take the piss out of American pop-trash culture in the next mission - but the (US-developed) imitators all missed the point and played the whole thing straight. No wonder people got bored very quickly - if you're not taking the piss, there's literally nothing to hold your attention.
You must think in Russian.
GTA never had celeb endorsement, it was just a good game. Fun, with lots of humor, and a not-so-subtle parody of the world we live in. Fear and Respect, for all apperences, has endorsement from two people the average person could care less about. Snoop Dog (aka P. Diddy) is a laughingstock when he's not making halfway decent music. GTA was never about the "hood vibe" and it likely never will be. You don't go around as a black youth by default, you don't go around tagging, you don't sit on a stretcorner singing in monotone. You don't even threaten to "bust a cap". Besides, what has Midway been behind in the past 10 years that was a thundering success?
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
I am sadly selling my old copy of System Shock 2 as I don't really have a PC to play it on anymore, but I would love to play through the same SS2 again with just updated graphics and perhaps a little new content...
I'm surprized we don't see more re-skinning of older games like that. There have to be a lot of gamers now that have never seen System Shock (one or two) and would love it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You want to play a game to escape your every day hum drum. To forget about being stuck in traffic for hours on your way home. Who want's to go to a world of alley ways and city streets. You want to go any place else but an Urban world. Dungeons and Dragons, Outer Space, the Wild West, Knights in Armor evan World War II. Who needs SUVs and street punks you see them every day.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
You are on a beach, there are palm trees and a bottle of rum.
Drink Rum
You are on a beach in the shade of palm trees, slightly tipsy. A steel band is playing Soca. You are hoding a bottle of rum
Shoot students.
ok
Assault college
ok
Shout badass things
return to base
Game over
Hell you could play it on a phone with Java capability!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Highlights of this period include *17* Mortal Kombat games, a half dozen NBA Jam games, roughly the same number of NFL Blitz (NBA Jam on a football field) games, a couple of light gun games and racers that actually weren't that bad and curious attempts to bring just a little originality (Primal Rage) and absurdity (War Gods) to the gore gimmick that the company had been living off since the original Mortal Kombat.
As Allison clearly states in the article, which is reproduced in the Slashdot blurb...
"We killed Fear and Respect," Allison explains, "because we have enough data-points to know the hood thing is basically dead. It would be dead before it came out. And you don't want to come out on a dead vibe."
Those aren't the words of company focused on making original properties or great games, they just want to catch and ride trends for easy sales.
They had a crap games on their hands that they intended to sell with a fad-appeal and a big name license. The fad died so they killed the game.
It's really that simple. That's how it works, when you sell games based on trends, not the quality of individual titles or your brand as a developer.
One day, people will finally stop buying whatever the latest Mortal Kombat rehash is and Midway will die just like spiritual sister Acclaim.