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Was Videogaming Better Back in the Day?
An anonymous reader writes "Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs looks back at the dawn of videogaming, when we were all kids just typing in our games, one line of BASIC at a time. And he finds the present lacking: 'The dreamers became assets instead of leaders, and the rockstar designers became, well, Rockstar ... or Blizzard, or Valve. Publishers with cash-rich money to spend bought the creative process, and the minds of marketing professionals replaced four guys hopped up on sugar doughnuts and generic cola. So, how dare I be surprised that the price of today's gaming blitz is a little piece of last generation's soul?' Do you agree? Was simple gaming better, or are you a story in games fan?"
Things change. I don't think games today necessarily have less soul than games before.
On average, maybe, but that's not because indy developers can't make small and fun games; it's because games that they couldn't make are dominating the visible industry, with huge budgets and little soul. There's still indy developers writing neat stuff, they just don't get as much of a share of the market... But the market's bigger. Fine by me.
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There's more choices today, tons of games coming out, and a huge backlog of old games to entertain yourself with if you feel so inclined. Big budget publishers allow for the creation of games way bigger and more complex than ever before, and we also get lots of neat things like shiny graphics, more realistic physics, and hopefully some better AI in the future.
Meanwhile, if you and your buddy want to lock yourselves in a basement for a week and hammer out a crazy game idea that you have, you can certainly do that. And there's this neat little invention called "The Internet", which you can use to distribute and even sell your game, without even needing to get a publisher involved. There are many people who have done very well this way.
The rise of big gaming companies has not killed the small group or individual game developers. It's just that now they're only a part of a much bigger ocean of games. If anything, new things like the Xbox Live marketplace could make that method of game development even more lucrative, by opening it up to the huge world of living room consoles.
I guess that maybe back in the atari days, small developer teams were making games for the home consoles, but that was such a small industry back then, the opportunities now are much more interesting.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
There are quite a few turn based strategy games: Advance wars (GBA, DS), fire emblem(GBA, GC and Wii), field commander(PSP), Disagea(PS2), final fantasy tactics 2 is on the way
If you like turn based games you've probably already heard of it, but in case you haven't check out: Battle of Wesnoth Lots of fun, and it's free.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
You got M.U.L.E for Linux !
T /Arcade/M-U-L-E-7431.shtml/
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/GAMES-ENTERTAINMEN