Discovery Channel's Games Documentary Impresses

Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes the kickoff of a new Discovery channel series called Rise of the Videogame. Blogger John Walker discusses the show, which just began last week, with an eye towards its research rigor and friendliness to the subject matter. He comes away fairly impressed, both by the topics covered and the casting. Along with games industry luminaries like Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn, they chat with folks like Steve Russell (of Spacewar! fame) and Smartbomb author Heather Chaplin. "A little visually overwrought with its montage footage of real-world conflict, it's otherwise a solid, informative and supremely well 'cast' documentary. If you've read around the subject, it won't tell you anything new. But it's fantastic to hear the stories from the people themselves. Episode 2 is very sensibly about the rise of Mario, next Wednesday."

Comments

Re:My humble 2 cents...

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

The problem the parent eludes to is that many developers think graphics are more important than the game. Graphics are nice, but if the game sucks, a polished turd is still a turd. I'd rather play a great game with decent graphics than a mediocre game that awes me with shiny for the 30 minutes I play until I decide that it sucks.

Re:My humble 2 cents...

[king-manic]

Good times when the hardware was limited and the focus was in the game itself, not only in the graphics as we see in lots of games nowadays. I find the trend towards minimalist nostalgia a bit too rampant on games.slashdot. The old games were sometimes fun but were more frequently exercises in repetitive game play. Pac man was interesting for it's time but boring as all hell now. Super Mario brothers was fun for it's time but highly repetitive. Back then the focus was on making a buck and you've neatly forgotten the 80% of the games in the bad old days that were just pure unadultered dreck. These days it's still 80% dreck but the EA factory produced dreck still has better basic playability then some of the gems of yore. It's sort of like music, so many older people remember fondly how great music was back in 1960 and gee how bad and crappy music is now. But really there was dreck and one hit pop wonders back int he 60's too and it was also 80% dreck. You've just forgotten all the dreck, summed up a decades worth of music in 40 good songs and compared it to whats on the top 40 now which represents only the preceding month. Similarly the "gameplay" folk take all the games they liked in their youth (10-20 years) and compared it to the last month of releases. No wonder it compares poorly, because you are comparing all the gems from 10-20 years to whats just got released and your nostalgic memory taints the whole endevour.

Go back and play galaga then play another shooter like Raiden 3, play X-men:the arcade game and compare it to X-men legends II, play Hogans Alley and compare it to Time crisis 4, play pitfall and compare it to Ratchet and Clank future:TOD, or play donkey kong and compare it to Mario Galaxy.

You'll find the "Good times" weren't so great and we are likely in the midst of a gaming renaissances but you're too caught up in nostalgia to notice.