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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?
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.
I'm still amazed there's not a Pirates v Ninjas v Zombies v Robots MMOG.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
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?"
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"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.
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.
I would so totally buy that if it were
Pirates v Ninjas v Zombies v Robots v Monkeys
and I'd pre-order it if it were
Pirates v Ninjas v Zombies v Robots v Monkeys v Pimps, since that would be proof of the vibrant "Urban Theme"
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
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.
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!"
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.