As I see it, games self-censor when they want to get a particular rating from the ESRB. But the same is true of films.
One of the differences is that having a little bit of sex in a video game gets you an almost instant AO rating, thus making the game almost impossible to sell, while movies get away with quite a bit more. So the self censorship isn't limited to toning things down a bit, but for most part game developers completly avoid anything involving sex right from the very beginning.
There are some coming out which you might be interested in - some of them could go either way, though.[...]
Sadly those are for most part all rehashes of games that I could already play last year on the PS2. So there is little need to get them again for the Wii or get a Wii in the first place. Only Forever Blue looks actually interesting.
Super Paper Mario.
That is a jump'n run, not an RPG like its predecessors, so story will most likely be very limited.
BTW, where have you seen in-game movies of Day of Crisis? I haven't seen anything.
Youtube has some, it is however not much, just five seconds, as far as I know that is all that is out there, except maybe some additional screenshots.
### Dunno, I think games like Ico, Beyond Good and Evil or Hotel Dusk actually do deliver what you want - games as a medium for telling a believable story - in spades. I have no idea what they are rated, but games like these will appear on the Wii (as will M rated games).
Could you name a few for the Wii? I know of Sadness, there is also ResidentEvil thing and Day of Crisis comming, but beside that? So far I haven't seen anything that is really interesting or more specifically haven't seen much at all, since beside of a few seconds of Day of Crisis nothing in-game of those games was ever shown and Day of Crisis looked like a pretty generic third-person shooter thing judging from those few sec of gameplay.
### Manhunt 2 is coming to the Wii, and hasn't been announced for the other systems yet.
Its also coming out for the PS2 and PSP, which makes it likely that the Wii is just a port.
### Watching the Nintendo keynotes from the first announcement of the "Revolution", you'll see a huge emphasis by Nintendo on third parties.
Lots of talk with little action followed. If Microsoft cares about a third party they pay them, if that isn't enough they buy them. Microsoft also happens to have the best development tools around and has with XNA something available to let independed developers get started. Nintendo on the other side still hasn't done anything about the independed developers at all, even so it would be trivial for them, they just would need to allow code execution from SD-Card. They also failed to ship the libraries for their online support, so no online gaming until months after the launch. If they really would care they put a bit more effort into it.
### Now please don't tell me you actually inteded to say that there is a "serious lack of games which get the "M" rating." Hopefully, that wasn't your point.
Actually that is the point or at least it is the easiest way to show it. That of course doesn't mean that all M rated games are good and all others are bad. There are tons of M rated games that I couldn't care less about, but on the other side most of what I consider my favorite games don't contain a "E for Everyone" rating.
### I thought what you said was that there is a lack of games suitable for adults, and while this would be a problem were it true, it clearly is not true.
Well, Wii Sports is suited for adults, so is MonkeyBall, but they are not the games I care about. I care about games for most part as a medium for story telling, for presenting a believable environment. I like DeusEx, The Longest Journey, IndigoProphecy/Fahrenheit, AdventRising, Halo2, Shadow of the Collosus, Breakdown and friends for their stories and the way they present it. I however can't get those stories with "E for Everyone"-like content, every now and then there might be blood, murder and there might be use of that evil f*** word, not because to look mature, but because its the realistic thing to do at that point in a story. So far the Wii has absolutely nothing in that area and I have serious doubt that there will ever come much, its just not what the Wii is targeted at.
### Oh, and one more thing about niche markets. This is the exact same tripe I heard when the DS came out. Niche market console, gimmicks, less than stellar graphics, etc. I hope I don't have to tell you want happened.
MetalGear got released for the PSP, so did GTA. The PSP also got a 'real' TombRaider, a real Burnout and a real Need for Speed, while the DS got cheap lackluster conversions of those games. There is very little on the DS that can be considered 'mature' and good, while the PSP is full of those games. I am not saying that the DS doesn't sell, but its game selection is certainly isn't all that great as some people want to make it out, if you don't believe me, just check the ratings on Metacritic or any other side, the PSP got more games and higher rated ones.
And lets not forget that Nintendo dominated the handheld market for decades and that the PSP mostly just gets PS2 ports, which while solid games on their own, aren't very interesting. The XBox360 doesn't have that problem and Nintendo hasn't dominated the console business in quite a while.
### I haven't heard them losing money in many years.
Good for them, as a gamer I however couldn't care less. I want great games and for me Nintendo simply failed to deliver those for almost a decade, the N64 was the last machine where Nintendo had games I cared about.
### hasn't the 360 just had several system-seller games released
Yes, it did and it is continuing to have so for the whole year (Bioshock, Assassins Creed, Halo3, GTA4, Forza2, etc.). This ain't a short term spike, its simply a solid and steady supply of very good games. And lets not forget there is a price cut coming in 2007 and most likely an updated XBox360 with HDMI and bigger drive, which should boost sales as well and is probally keeping them down right now.
On the Wii on the other side I don't think that Mario and Metroid will do that much, the main userbase seems to be interested in Wii Sports and the like, not the 'normal' Nintendo games. Mario, Zelda and Metroid couldn't save the Gamecube, so I doubt that they will boost the Wii much, especially considering that the game just seem to be more of the same and not providing anything really revolutionary.
### You quote the ESRB classifications as being the definition of a "mature game",
Its not THE[tm] definition of 'mature game', its just one and one that gets the point across. Beside yes, a mature game doesn't need to feature realistic graphics, but *by far* most of them do. You don't get a mature rating by having a bunch of monkeys rolling around in spheres.
### Of course, you also _conveniently_ fail to mention that the first retail game to carry an ESRB "mature" rating was Doom 2, which runs quite happily on a GameBoy Advance nowadays...
Doom was originally created for the PC, it also was state of the art in terms of graphics for its time. id Software didn't write it for the Gameboy and neither did they write it for the NES or SNES, because those simply weren't good enough for running it. Only later on, once Doom already was largely successful it got a simplified port to the SNES and much later a port to the GBA.
On the Wii the same is happening, it gets a Farcry, it gets a PrinceOfPersia, some ResidentEvil remake/collection/whatever and other stuff, all of which isn't new, but just remakes, recreations or other ways to cash in on a already successful franchise. The new mature franchises are created elsewhere on other consoles.
### I fully agree that poor Nintendo are likely to be stuck the tiny 99.99% population niche
The problem isn't that Nintendo won't make money, they will, they already do. The problem is that the Wiis selection of games will be hugely limited. Its a problem the gamers will have, not one of Nintendo, which of course might explain Nintendos lack of interest in securing third parties...
### Come on. The Wii is the only console that even my granny plays.
A game that your granny plays is most likely one that is suitable for all ages, not a mature one. Look up how the ESRB defines the term to get the idea.
Yes, I did play completly through the whole game. I however wouldn't call it the best games in years, it is certainly a lengthy game and one that provides good value for the money, but for most part it was a boring rehash of old Zelda topics, it was also by far the easiest and most linear Zelda games ever. The story also happened to be completly crap, it has some good moments, but the way the 'reintroduce' Ganon and Zelda just was totally lame, first they build up some other characters, and then in the end they just through them away and fall back to those old buddies who did have pretty much nothing to do in the game in the last 35h hours. To make a long story short, I was more annoyed by the game then excited, the few great moments it had never lead to anything, the NPC interaction was as bad as ever, technically it was hugely lacking (speech for the NPC, music...) and overall it just was OOT with prettier graphics. What Zelda had was quantity not quality of gamedesign.
How many of those are gamers? How many of the other 17% with HD-TVs are?
### Now HD is a niche (albeit growing) market.
Same could be said about the NextGen console market. By staying low-level they seem to have alienated the normal gamer crowed already quite a bit, future progress in HD-TV ownership will just make matters worse. The problem that Nintendo has is that the technical gap between them and the rest is already quite large, over time it will only get far worse once HD-TVs are widespread and the developers manage to make effective use of the multi processor architectures of the NextGen consoles.
Since Nintendo is targeting the casual gamer I doubt that it will matter to them in the end, but it very well might keep the Wii limited to being a casual-gamer/party console.
Lets see, the ESRB entry on Wikipedia defines it as:
Mature: Contains content that may be suitable for ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.
This of course includes GTA and all those FPS, however mature games don't just stop there, Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, Dreamfall or The Longest Journey got 'Mature' ratings as well, even so they include no senseless violence, mass murder or anything primitive like that, instead they simply deal with stories that a child might not understand.
Anyway, the point is simply that mature games portray realistic graphics and the Wii so far simply doesn't have many of those and neither have there been many of those announced, instead games focus on comical look and topics (MonkeyBall, Rayman, Wii Sports, etc.). I have some doubt that the Wii will ever get out of that casual-gamer niche again.
### I don't see how the poly count matters at all to a game's "maturity".
A game doesn't get more mature due to higher polycounts, a console with good CPU/GPU power will however get more mature games. Games are still striving for more and more realistic graphics and they do that on those hardware platforms that provide the most power. The Wii can't keep up with PS3, XBox360 or PC, which is why most publishers completly give up on the strive for realism and don't even try it, they completly dodge the issue by using stylized comic graphics and a story/setting that fits those graphics.
Just look at AssassinsCreed, Bioshock, DeadRising, GearsOfWar, HeavyRain and stuff, all those might be quite possible on the Wii if you scale down the graphics and maybe the AI, but there simply isn't a publishers out there that would make them for the Wii. The big money goes to those consoles that actually can make use of it while the Wii gets some lack luster ports (Farcry) and a bunch of Minigames (Rayman), which are cheap to produce.
The problem with the Wii is that it has found its niche a little to early and now publishers are flooding it with games to keep it there.
### Except that graphics increase the cost of making the game which usually means something else needs to get cut.
More processing power doesn't increase the cost of making a game, it actually makes it cheaper since there is less need for optimizations. What makes games more expensive are the expectation of the gamers, you however can't solve that problem by just making a low-power console, since at least the normal gamers will then simply avoid the system, since it doesn't ship the games they want.
### Do you find yourself playing Wii games and saying "damn these graphics suck!"
Actually that was my very first reaction after seeing the intro of Zelda. The graphics got better later on, but the low-polycount in the environment was pretty damn ugly in the intro, seeing Epona riding a long a cliff which was literally build out of five polygons really isn't exactly what I call beautiful, not even by last-gen standards.
Currently most Wii games focus on unrealistic and stylized graphics, so the lack of power doesn't show, but then that itself is also the Wii biggest problem, since there is a serious lack of 'mature' games.
### The user interface would be simple. Put CD/DVD in drive, reboot.
Most stupid solution ever. Sorry, but I don't want to reboot to play a game, ever. The whole point of having a proper multitasking operating system is so that we *don't* have to reboot for each an every application. You know, I like to being able to have some chat software running, look-up a walkthrough and whatever while the game is running in the background, I also like to be able to install MODs and stuff and I also like to have games that start up in a few seconds instead of wasting minutes with that whole shutdown, boot, shutdown, boot cycle thing that I need to do.
If there is one thing that sucks with all of the new consoles its that they can't do proper multi-threading, on the PSP I can't watch photos while an MP3 is running, on the PS3 I can't download a thing in the background, on the Wii I can't browse the web while the game is running and the XBox360 also took a year to finally fix the download problem. You don't beat consoles by removing the one thing that makes PCs superior to them while not fixing the rest.
### Problems due to driver variations disappear.
Games would become unusable very shortly after release due to new drivers not being on the live CD. Try to boot a LiveCD from a few years ago on todays bleeding edge hardware, good luck with that...
A dramatic setback is all nice and good in theory, but more often then not it destroys any immersion instead of creating it. Games are after all about interaction and interaction implies having at least a little bit of freedom. If the setback however comes in the form of a challenge that is impossible to overcome it just comes of as fake, since it violates the very basic rule of giving the player a choice. This is especially annoying when it isn't clear that the challenge isn't beatable and you try and try again to beat it without success. Even worse of course if the challenge that is supposed to be unbeatable actually is beatable and the game then just runs into a void where the dialog and cutscenes completely fail to match the in-game action that just happened. Doing the setback in a cutscene of course doesn't help much either, since it again violates the rules of the game, after all why can't I just revive a killed character with a phoenix feather like it worked in all the rest of the game?
I doubt that this problem can be solved by just a few simple additional cues to hint what the game designer intended, I think the core problem runs much deeper. One thing is simply the consistency of the gameworld, if the game has bonus lives or phoenix feathers you simply can't kill an NPC to create a setback, since in a world where death is an easy problem to fix that just wouldn't be a problem to begin with unless the game violates its own rules.
Another problem, maybe the biggest one, is the hero centric nature of games. The player plays the hero, the man that can fix anything, the man that can accomplish anything. That guy simply must not fail, especially not when controlled by the player. But why should the player play the hero to begin with? Or even be fixed to a single character? The games which I find most interesting are those that don't fix the player to a single character, but instead let the player basically play the story itself, jumping from character to character. This little change pretty much completly removes the need to win, since even the characters death won't put a halt to the story. The only reason why the beginning of Half Life 2 worked was because in the beginning one wasn't the hero, one didn't have a gun or any way to defend himself, all one could do was run and due to the level layout there really was only one way to go. Such a situation wouldn't have worked if one would have had the crowbar, since even the tiniest way to defend oneself can be turned into a very powerful weapon with a bit of load and save (aka. save-cheating).
In the end I think games as a whole must have to change a lot to really make larger jumps in terms of how well a setback can work or in a broader sense in how much the player can get emotionally involved in a game. As long as the player plays a hero with a big gun who saves the world all of that just won't ever really work, maybe in a few limited situations here and there, but not more. The problem is simply that todays games are for most part analog to action-movies, no matter if its a strategy game, a FPS or some third person game, its always running, shooting and killing stuff. You don't see all that much emotional drama in the latest hollywood action movie either for basically the same reason, there simply is no time for that when all the focus is already on the action.
### This "decline in PC game quality" is nothing but a selection bias.
I don't think so. A few years ago PC games got ported to consoles, these days console games get ported to PC. Which often means crappy controls, bad menus and other issues, since what was designed for a 640x480 TV simply doesn't look very good at 1280x1024 and controls that work well with a gamepad, just don't match nicely with keyboard and mouse. The PC gaming market seems to be left with a few FPS, MMORPG and RTS games, while those games might be good, there has been quite a lack of good games of other genres, the flightsims are dead, adventure games are dead, turn-based strategy is mostly dead, space-games mostly dead and there simply are *far* to much WWII based games out there, what happened to the cool sci-fi or fantasy settings?
Now I haven't really played much at all on the PC in the last years, so maybe I just miss something, but on the other side I have yet to see a new game on the PC that would be interesting enough for me to actually upgrade my system and bring it back into a game-ready state.
Gothic2 solved the whole class problem pretty nicely by moving the choice into the game. After around 1/3 of the game you had to join one of multiple guilds which in turn would fix you to there class, at that point in the game you however already had a pretty good idea of what to expect so the choice wasn't a hard one. The annoying part with many other games is that they force you to pick a class and skillset at the very beginning of the game, at a point where you have absolutly no idea what to expect from the game, since you simply haven't played it.
Another interesting game in terms of those whole skill stuff is Shadow of the Colossus, since it simply doesn't have any, neither does it have any new weapons to collect or anything that you expect from a traditional RPG or Action-Adventure. It doesn't even have enemies, just 16 collossi. What makes SotC interesting is that its a game stripped down to its core, the whole video-gamey stuff was removed and only a quite realistically core was left, just a sword, a bow and a horse, all those however were very well implemented, especially the horse. I would wish more games would focus on having a few well implemented items instead of tons and tons of rather useless ones.
I think the biggest show-stopper currently is simply that games are not designed to watch. With first person shooters you end up with watching the game out of the perspective of a single player, so you have zero overview of what is actually happening, having the moderator switching camera perspetive to other players increases confusing even more and the simplistic overview map that you got in games like CounterStrike is totally boring to watch. Now if you watch a demo inside the game engine itself this is not that much a problem, since you are the one doing the switching, but for a TV broadcast where somebody else does the switching, it is simply not very well suited at all.
With RTS games the situation doesn't look much better, while the top-down view clears up some confusing, only having a tiny view on the whole map adds enough back into the mix to ruin the fun. That the minimap of the game and the units itself end up being a unwatchable blurry mess on a TV screen doesn't help either.
So while all this isn't an issue for gamer, since they can just watch the demo recordings in the engine itself, it makes games quite unsuitable for broadcast. That games have quite complicated rules makes things only even more complicated.
For video games to become a spectator sport they simply have to be designed to be more watchable. What might also help is if the demo playback would become easier, i.e. say you could download them on XBoxLive without a need to buy the game itself or keep it manually at the right patch level that is able to actually play the demo, just click&watch.
### If the player saves the game and loads it up three calendar days later, will three days have gone by in the game world?
No, but if he leaves the game on for three days the game will be over. To be more exact his character will likely be dead, since in all that real time the player still has to solve a mystery and if he doesn't do that he might meet an unpleasant faith. That said, the game doesn't actually have classic load/save states, instead the game has a build clock which the player can rewind if he wants to go back to a previous point in the game.
### But without any form of challenge then what's the point of a game?
The point of the game? How about simply having a good time? The games that I had most fun with in the last month where Tomb Raider: Legends and Dreamfall, neither of them where much difficult at all. If a game isn't difficult it gives me the freedom to actually enjoy the story and the characters instead of getting frustrated in some boss battle. Sure there is a place for games like Ikaruga, which by the way was very nice in terms of difficulty, since even when you suck at it, you sooner or later get unlimited continues, but some games are just hard for no good reason and even worse, don't even provide any way to overcome the hurdles.
One thing I don't understand is why there are still games that allow you do only set the difficulty at the start and not in the game, what good is a difficulty setting when I only find out that 'normal' was to hard when I am at the final boss?
Speaking about RPGs, I avoid to play them pretty much completly, since in the end there are only two ways for me to play them, either the game is easy enough so that I don't have any trouble with any enemy ever in the game, so the whole fighting is annoying and pointless, or there comes a point where fighting actually gets hard enough that it gets impossible to beat the enemy without doing stupid grinding to level up, I normally give up then. No matter how it goes, I never found the gameplay of jRPGs especially appealing.
### There really aren't many graphically violent games.
Depends, most games don't allow you to shoot limbs of, but almost all of them focus on killing things. For me there is little difference if there is blood spilled or not, what matters for me is the options that the player has to interact with the game world and more often then not, those are limited to shooting, slashing or punching things.
### I can't believe you claim the medium is limited.
How many recently released games can you list in which the core gameplay doesn't involve violence? How many of them are not sport games, not party games, not targeted at childrens and not abstract puzzle games? After the adventure genre died out for most part there simply are almost none in that region left. If a game involves more or less realistic looking people instead of cute cartoon figures, there is a good chance that the games focus is on killing them.
### I take your point, but I would argue that 'action' adventure is a natural evolution.
Evolution as in one step forward, and two steps back. Adventure games, the good ones, are about telling a story, characters and dialog. You also have to solve puzzles along the way, but those are there to drive the story forward, not the sole purpose of playing the game. That said, in the last years, well decade, the genre has already made a step back, a lot of classic point&click adventure games today feature extremely weird puzzles (tape cellphone to cat, feat salty pizza to cat, to make cat walk into the house for water to let the player listen to some talk going in there...). But thats for large part because the genre is down to life support, small developers for small budgets are doing these games, taking the low-risk route by recycling classic gameplay. While the resulting games might still be interesting for adventure fans, they are never great and never able to capture the masses.
I don't think that Oblivion or DeusEx are rescuing the genre, they incooperate some adventure like elements, but thats all they do. The very thing that makes adventures games interesting is that they don't are not based around action and what we would call gameplay, this frees the developers from integrate hundreds or thousands of monsters into the story that the player has to slash in the course of the game, instead the story can be written the way it was intended, the world that is presented can stay realistic or comical and most important non-video-gamey.
One thing I hated about Psychonauts was how that game spend a ton of dialog in the beginning to explain all those useless video-gamey elements it had, the items to collect, the monsters you had to destroy and all that stuff that you expect in a video game, all of that however simply didn't fit into the story very well and simply felt extremely forced.
Now I don't disagree that the genre needs to go into an 'action' direction, but action should mean more interactivity and more realistic characters, not fighting and violence. One game that demonstrates where the genre should go is The Last Express, unlike most other adventure games or almost all games for that matter, the game is completly real-time (or at least close), this means the world around one always does something, characters walk around, talk with each other, meat to listen to a concert and whatever. The world in that game simply has a life of its own, it doesn't much care if the player did collect this item to trigger that event, it just continues going no matter what. Another great example for this is Facade, that game is also realtime based, but not only that, it also offers a lot of freedom, there is no 'right way' to play the game, no puzzle to solve, instead its interactive drama where the player simply plays his small part. Its one of the few adventure games that provides plenty of replay value and basically has to be played multiple times.
The sad part is simply that far to few developers ever try to push the genre in a new direction, by far most adventure games these days are just the boring point&click stuff all over again, only every few years comes something like Fahrenheit along that tries something new, something not just improving the point&clicky, but throwing it away doing something completly new.
It doesn't happen often that the difficulty becomes the problem, most often I found that the game starts to get uninteresting first. Those games that I didn't finish, I didn't finish for most part because I simply didn't care about them, when there is no interesting story to be told, no interesting characters to interact with and the gameplay the same for the last ten hours without anything interesting on the horizon there is little reason to continue playing, so once quit I never come back to those.
There are of course also those where the difficulty gets insane at some point for no good reason. Viewtiful Joe was one of those, while the game itself was not very difficult, the bosses where quite hard, at the end of the game then, one was then required to refight all the past bosses directly one after another, that was just insane, I didn't made it on the first try, not on the second and then it was clear that I would never make it without some serious boss-pattern analysis and training, I stopped playing, never came back.
Another case was Advance Wars, basically the same story, the game itself wasn't all that difficult, but the final battle was insane. After reading some FAQs I found out that my team probably wasn't the best, changing it would have required to replay the game. I tried the final battle a few times, but it was just way to annoying, while I managed to not lose for quite a while, I neither won. So it ended up as a half hour battle where I build new units, while the enemy destroys them, rinse and repeat till forever. I gave up, never came back.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance just again the same story, game itself not so hard, last boss impossible. All my characters where powerful enough that no enemy in the game stood a chance against them, yet the final boss killed them without problem over and over again. Look in the FAQ revealed that it might be a good idea to have a healer with me, which I didn't, didn't needed it for the rest of the game. I gave up at this point, since there just wasn't any fun in killing dozens and dozens of enemies just for leveling up purpose, heck, the fast way to level up was by actually attacking your own teammates, then healing them, then attacking them again. That was just to stupid, I gave up, never came back.
It kind of sucks to quit a game at the last boss, but when the difficulty jumps from easy to impossible, its often the only reasonable thing to do. I have more interesting things to do than to fight impossible boss battles.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the differences is that having a little bit of sex in a video game gets you an almost instant AO rating, thus making the game almost impossible to sell, while movies get away with quite a bit more. So the self censorship isn't limited to toning things down a bit, but for most part game developers completly avoid anything involving sex right from the very beginning.
Sadly those are for most part all rehashes of games that I could already play last year on the PS2. So there is little need to get them again for the Wii or get a Wii in the first place. Only Forever Blue looks actually interesting.
That is a jump'n run, not an RPG like its predecessors, so story will most likely be very limited.
Youtube has some, it is however not much, just five seconds, as far as I know that is all that is out there, except maybe some additional screenshots.
### Dunno, I think games like Ico, Beyond Good and Evil or Hotel Dusk actually do deliver what you want - games as a medium for telling a believable story - in spades. I have no idea what they are rated, but games like these will appear on the Wii (as will M rated games).
Could you name a few for the Wii? I know of Sadness, there is also ResidentEvil thing and Day of Crisis comming, but beside that? So far I haven't seen anything that is really interesting or more specifically haven't seen much at all, since beside of a few seconds of Day of Crisis nothing in-game of those games was ever shown and Day of Crisis looked like a pretty generic third-person shooter thing judging from those few sec of gameplay.
### Manhunt 2 is coming to the Wii, and hasn't been announced for the other systems yet.
Its also coming out for the PS2 and PSP, which makes it likely that the Wii is just a port.
### Watching the Nintendo keynotes from the first announcement of the "Revolution", you'll see a huge emphasis by Nintendo on third parties.
Lots of talk with little action followed. If Microsoft cares about a third party they pay them, if that isn't enough they buy them. Microsoft also happens to have the best development tools around and has with XNA something available to let independed developers get started. Nintendo on the other side still hasn't done anything about the independed developers at all, even so it would be trivial for them, they just would need to allow code execution from SD-Card. They also failed to ship the libraries for their online support, so no online gaming until months after the launch. If they really would care they put a bit more effort into it.
### Now please don't tell me you actually inteded to say that there is a "serious lack of games which get the "M" rating." Hopefully, that wasn't your point.
Actually that is the point or at least it is the easiest way to show it. That of course doesn't mean that all M rated games are good and all others are bad. There are tons of M rated games that I couldn't care less about, but on the other side most of what I consider my favorite games don't contain a "E for Everyone" rating.
### I thought what you said was that there is a lack of games suitable for adults, and while this would be a problem were it true, it clearly is not true.
Well, Wii Sports is suited for adults, so is MonkeyBall, but they are not the games I care about. I care about games for most part as a medium for story telling, for presenting a believable environment. I like DeusEx, The Longest Journey, IndigoProphecy/Fahrenheit, AdventRising, Halo2, Shadow of the Collosus, Breakdown and friends for their stories and the way they present it. I however can't get those stories with "E for Everyone"-like content, every now and then there might be blood, murder and there might be use of that evil f*** word, not because to look mature, but because its the realistic thing to do at that point in a story. So far the Wii has absolutely nothing in that area and I have serious doubt that there will ever come much, its just not what the Wii is targeted at.
### Oh, and one more thing about niche markets. This is the exact same tripe I heard when the DS came out. Niche market console, gimmicks, less than stellar graphics, etc. I hope I don't have to tell you want happened.
MetalGear got released for the PSP, so did GTA. The PSP also got a 'real' TombRaider, a real Burnout and a real Need for Speed, while the DS got cheap lackluster conversions of those games. There is very little on the DS that can be considered 'mature' and good, while the PSP is full of those games. I am not saying that the DS doesn't sell, but its game selection is certainly isn't all that great as some people want to make it out, if you don't believe me, just check the ratings on Metacritic or any other side, the PSP got more games and higher rated ones.
And lets not forget that Nintendo dominated the handheld market for decades and that the PSP mostly just gets PS2 ports, which while solid games on their own, aren't very interesting. The XBox360 doesn't have that problem and Nintendo hasn't dominated the console business in quite a while.
### I haven't heard them losing money in many years.
Good for them, as a gamer I however couldn't care less. I want great games and for me Nintendo simply failed to deliver those for almost a decade, the N64 was the last machine where Nintendo had games I cared about.
### hasn't the 360 just had several system-seller games released
Yes, it did and it is continuing to have so for the whole year (Bioshock, Assassins Creed, Halo3, GTA4, Forza2, etc.). This ain't a short term spike, its simply a solid and steady supply of very good games. And lets not forget there is a price cut coming in 2007 and most likely an updated XBox360 with HDMI and bigger drive, which should boost sales as well and is probally keeping them down right now.
On the Wii on the other side I don't think that Mario and Metroid will do that much, the main userbase seems to be interested in Wii Sports and the like, not the 'normal' Nintendo games. Mario, Zelda and Metroid couldn't save the Gamecube, so I doubt that they will boost the Wii much, especially considering that the game just seem to be more of the same and not providing anything really revolutionary.
### You quote the ESRB classifications as being the definition of a "mature game",
Its not THE[tm] definition of 'mature game', its just one and one that gets the point across. Beside yes, a mature game doesn't need to feature realistic graphics, but *by far* most of them do. You don't get a mature rating by having a bunch of monkeys rolling around in spheres.
### Of course, you also _conveniently_ fail to mention that the first retail game to carry an ESRB "mature" rating was Doom 2, which runs quite happily on a GameBoy Advance nowadays...
Doom was originally created for the PC, it also was state of the art in terms of graphics for its time. id Software didn't write it for the Gameboy and neither did they write it for the NES or SNES, because those simply weren't good enough for running it. Only later on, once Doom already was largely successful it got a simplified port to the SNES and much later a port to the GBA.
On the Wii the same is happening, it gets a Farcry, it gets a PrinceOfPersia, some ResidentEvil remake/collection/whatever and other stuff, all of which isn't new, but just remakes, recreations or other ways to cash in on a already successful franchise. The new mature franchises are created elsewhere on other consoles.
### I fully agree that poor Nintendo are likely to be stuck the tiny 99.99% population niche
The problem isn't that Nintendo won't make money, they will, they already do. The problem is that the Wiis selection of games will be hugely limited. Its a problem the gamers will have, not one of Nintendo, which of course might explain Nintendos lack of interest in securing third parties...
### Come on. The Wii is the only console that even my granny plays.
A game that your granny plays is most likely one that is suitable for all ages, not a mature one. Look up how the ESRB defines the term to get the idea.
Yes, I did play completly through the whole game. I however wouldn't call it the best games in years, it is certainly a lengthy game and one that provides good value for the money, but for most part it was a boring rehash of old Zelda topics, it was also by far the easiest and most linear Zelda games ever. The story also happened to be completly crap, it has some good moments, but the way the 'reintroduce' Ganon and Zelda just was totally lame, first they build up some other characters, and then in the end they just through them away and fall back to those old buddies who did have pretty much nothing to do in the game in the last 35h hours. To make a long story short, I was more annoyed by the game then excited, the few great moments it had never lead to anything, the NPC interaction was as bad as ever, technically it was hugely lacking (speech for the NPC, music...) and overall it just was OOT with prettier graphics. What Zelda had was quantity not quality of gamedesign.
### That means 83% don't
How many of those are gamers? How many of the other 17% with HD-TVs are?
### Now HD is a niche (albeit growing) market.
Same could be said about the NextGen console market. By staying low-level they seem to have alienated the normal gamer crowed already quite a bit, future progress in HD-TV ownership will just make matters worse. The problem that Nintendo has is that the technical gap between them and the rest is already quite large, over time it will only get far worse once HD-TVs are widespread and the developers manage to make effective use of the multi processor architectures of the NextGen consoles.
Since Nintendo is targeting the casual gamer I doubt that it will matter to them in the end, but it very well might keep the Wii limited to being a casual-gamer/party console.
Lets see, the ESRB entry on Wikipedia defines it as:
Mature: Contains content that may be suitable for ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.
This of course includes GTA and all those FPS, however mature games don't just stop there, Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, Dreamfall or The Longest Journey got 'Mature' ratings as well, even so they include no senseless violence, mass murder or anything primitive like that, instead they simply deal with stories that a child might not understand.
Anyway, the point is simply that mature games portray realistic graphics and the Wii so far simply doesn't have many of those and neither have there been many of those announced, instead games focus on comical look and topics (MonkeyBall, Rayman, Wii Sports, etc.). I have some doubt that the Wii will ever get out of that casual-gamer niche again.
### I don't see how the poly count matters at all to a game's "maturity".
A game doesn't get more mature due to higher polycounts, a console with good CPU/GPU power will however get more mature games. Games are still striving for more and more realistic graphics and they do that on those hardware platforms that provide the most power. The Wii can't keep up with PS3, XBox360 or PC, which is why most publishers completly give up on the strive for realism and don't even try it, they completly dodge the issue by using stylized comic graphics and a story/setting that fits those graphics.
Just look at AssassinsCreed, Bioshock, DeadRising, GearsOfWar, HeavyRain and stuff, all those might be quite possible on the Wii if you scale down the graphics and maybe the AI, but there simply isn't a publishers out there that would make them for the Wii. The big money goes to those consoles that actually can make use of it while the Wii gets some lack luster ports (Farcry) and a bunch of Minigames (Rayman), which are cheap to produce.
The problem with the Wii is that it has found its niche a little to early and now publishers are flooding it with games to keep it there.
### Except that graphics increase the cost of making the game which usually means something else needs to get cut.
More processing power doesn't increase the cost of making a game, it actually makes it cheaper since there is less need for optimizations. What makes games more expensive are the expectation of the gamers, you however can't solve that problem by just making a low-power console, since at least the normal gamers will then simply avoid the system, since it doesn't ship the games they want.
### Do you find yourself playing Wii games and saying "damn these graphics suck!"
Actually that was my very first reaction after seeing the intro of Zelda. The graphics got better later on, but the low-polycount in the environment was pretty damn ugly in the intro, seeing Epona riding a long a cliff which was literally build out of five polygons really isn't exactly what I call beautiful, not even by last-gen standards.
Currently most Wii games focus on unrealistic and stylized graphics, so the lack of power doesn't show, but then that itself is also the Wii biggest problem, since there is a serious lack of 'mature' games.
### The user interface would be simple. Put CD/DVD in drive, reboot.
Most stupid solution ever. Sorry, but I don't want to reboot to play a game, ever. The whole point of having a proper multitasking operating system is so that we *don't* have to reboot for each an every application. You know, I like to being able to have some chat software running, look-up a walkthrough and whatever while the game is running in the background, I also like to be able to install MODs and stuff and I also like to have games that start up in a few seconds instead of wasting minutes with that whole shutdown, boot, shutdown, boot cycle thing that I need to do.
If there is one thing that sucks with all of the new consoles its that they can't do proper multi-threading, on the PSP I can't watch photos while an MP3 is running, on the PS3 I can't download a thing in the background, on the Wii I can't browse the web while the game is running and the XBox360 also took a year to finally fix the download problem. You don't beat consoles by removing the one thing that makes PCs superior to them while not fixing the rest.
### Problems due to driver variations disappear.
Games would become unusable very shortly after release due to new drivers not being on the live CD. Try to boot a LiveCD from a few years ago on todays bleeding edge hardware, good luck with that...
A dramatic setback is all nice and good in theory, but more often then not it destroys any immersion instead of creating it. Games are after all about interaction and interaction implies having at least a little bit of freedom. If the setback however comes in the form of a challenge that is impossible to overcome it just comes of as fake, since it violates the very basic rule of giving the player a choice. This is especially annoying when it isn't clear that the challenge isn't beatable and you try and try again to beat it without success. Even worse of course if the challenge that is supposed to be unbeatable actually is beatable and the game then just runs into a void where the dialog and cutscenes completely fail to match the in-game action that just happened. Doing the setback in a cutscene of course doesn't help much either, since it again violates the rules of the game, after all why can't I just revive a killed character with a phoenix feather like it worked in all the rest of the game?
I doubt that this problem can be solved by just a few simple additional cues to hint what the game designer intended, I think the core problem runs much deeper. One thing is simply the consistency of the gameworld, if the game has bonus lives or phoenix feathers you simply can't kill an NPC to create a setback, since in a world where death is an easy problem to fix that just wouldn't be a problem to begin with unless the game violates its own rules.
Another problem, maybe the biggest one, is the hero centric nature of games. The player plays the hero, the man that can fix anything, the man that can accomplish anything. That guy simply must not fail, especially not when controlled by the player. But why should the player play the hero to begin with? Or even be fixed to a single character? The games which I find most interesting are those that don't fix the player to a single character, but instead let the player basically play the story itself, jumping from character to character. This little change pretty much completly removes the need to win, since even the characters death won't put a halt to the story. The only reason why the beginning of Half Life 2 worked was because in the beginning one wasn't the hero, one didn't have a gun or any way to defend himself, all one could do was run and due to the level layout there really was only one way to go. Such a situation wouldn't have worked if one would have had the crowbar, since even the tiniest way to defend oneself can be turned into a very powerful weapon with a bit of load and save (aka. save-cheating).
In the end I think games as a whole must have to change a lot to really make larger jumps in terms of how well a setback can work or in a broader sense in how much the player can get emotionally involved in a game. As long as the player plays a hero with a big gun who saves the world all of that just won't ever really work, maybe in a few limited situations here and there, but not more. The problem is simply that todays games are for most part analog to action-movies, no matter if its a strategy game, a FPS or some third person game, its always running, shooting and killing stuff. You don't see all that much emotional drama in the latest hollywood action movie either for basically the same reason, there simply is no time for that when all the focus is already on the action.
### This "decline in PC game quality" is nothing but a selection bias.
I don't think so. A few years ago PC games got ported to consoles, these days console games get ported to PC. Which often means crappy controls, bad menus and other issues, since what was designed for a 640x480 TV simply doesn't look very good at 1280x1024 and controls that work well with a gamepad, just don't match nicely with keyboard and mouse. The PC gaming market seems to be left with a few FPS, MMORPG and RTS games, while those games might be good, there has been quite a lack of good games of other genres, the flightsims are dead, adventure games are dead, turn-based strategy is mostly dead, space-games mostly dead and there simply are *far* to much WWII based games out there, what happened to the cool sci-fi or fantasy settings?
Now I haven't really played much at all on the PC in the last years, so maybe I just miss something, but on the other side I have yet to see a new game on the PC that would be interesting enough for me to actually upgrade my system and bring it back into a game-ready state.
Gothic2 solved the whole class problem pretty nicely by moving the choice into the game. After around 1/3 of the game you had to join one of multiple guilds which in turn would fix you to there class, at that point in the game you however already had a pretty good idea of what to expect so the choice wasn't a hard one. The annoying part with many other games is that they force you to pick a class and skillset at the very beginning of the game, at a point where you have absolutly no idea what to expect from the game, since you simply haven't played it.
Another interesting game in terms of those whole skill stuff is Shadow of the Colossus, since it simply doesn't have any, neither does it have any new weapons to collect or anything that you expect from a traditional RPG or Action-Adventure. It doesn't even have enemies, just 16 collossi. What makes SotC interesting is that its a game stripped down to its core, the whole video-gamey stuff was removed and only a quite realistically core was left, just a sword, a bow and a horse, all those however were very well implemented, especially the horse. I would wish more games would focus on having a few well implemented items instead of tons and tons of rather useless ones.
I think the biggest show-stopper currently is simply that games are not designed to watch. With first person shooters you end up with watching the game out of the perspective of a single player, so you have zero overview of what is actually happening, having the moderator switching camera perspetive to other players increases confusing even more and the simplistic overview map that you got in games like CounterStrike is totally boring to watch. Now if you watch a demo inside the game engine itself this is not that much a problem, since you are the one doing the switching, but for a TV broadcast where somebody else does the switching, it is simply not very well suited at all.
With RTS games the situation doesn't look much better, while the top-down view clears up some confusing, only having a tiny view on the whole map adds enough back into the mix to ruin the fun. That the minimap of the game and the units itself end up being a unwatchable blurry mess on a TV screen doesn't help either.
So while all this isn't an issue for gamer, since they can just watch the demo recordings in the engine itself, it makes games quite unsuitable for broadcast. That games have quite complicated rules makes things only even more complicated.
For video games to become a spectator sport they simply have to be designed to be more watchable. What might also help is if the demo playback would become easier, i.e. say you could download them on XBoxLive without a need to buy the game itself or keep it manually at the right patch level that is able to actually play the demo, just click&watch.
### If the player saves the game and loads it up three calendar days later, will three days have gone by in the game world?
No, but if he leaves the game on for three days the game will be over. To be more exact his character will likely be dead, since in all that real time the player still has to solve a mystery and if he doesn't do that he might meet an unpleasant faith. That said, the game doesn't actually have classic load/save states, instead the game has a build clock which the player can rewind if he wants to go back to a previous point in the game.
### But without any form of challenge then what's the point of a game?
The point of the game? How about simply having a good time? The games that I had most fun with in the last month where Tomb Raider: Legends and Dreamfall, neither of them where much difficult at all. If a game isn't difficult it gives me the freedom to actually enjoy the story and the characters instead of getting frustrated in some boss battle. Sure there is a place for games like Ikaruga, which by the way was very nice in terms of difficulty, since even when you suck at it, you sooner or later get unlimited continues, but some games are just hard for no good reason and even worse, don't even provide any way to overcome the hurdles.
One thing I don't understand is why there are still games that allow you do only set the difficulty at the start and not in the game, what good is a difficulty setting when I only find out that 'normal' was to hard when I am at the final boss?
Speaking about RPGs, I avoid to play them pretty much completly, since in the end there are only two ways for me to play them, either the game is easy enough so that I don't have any trouble with any enemy ever in the game, so the whole fighting is annoying and pointless, or there comes a point where fighting actually gets hard enough that it gets impossible to beat the enemy without doing stupid grinding to level up, I normally give up then. No matter how it goes, I never found the gameplay of jRPGs especially appealing.
### There really aren't many graphically violent games.
Depends, most games don't allow you to shoot limbs of, but almost all of them focus on killing things. For me there is little difference if there is blood spilled or not, what matters for me is the options that the player has to interact with the game world and more often then not, those are limited to shooting, slashing or punching things.
### I can't believe you claim the medium is limited.
How many recently released games can you list in which the core gameplay doesn't involve violence? How many of them are not sport games, not party games, not targeted at childrens and not abstract puzzle games? After the adventure genre died out for most part there simply are almost none in that region left. If a game involves more or less realistic looking people instead of cute cartoon figures, there is a good chance that the games focus is on killing them.
### I take your point, but I would argue that 'action' adventure is a natural evolution.
Evolution as in one step forward, and two steps back. Adventure games, the good ones, are about telling a story, characters and dialog. You also have to solve puzzles along the way, but those are there to drive the story forward, not the sole purpose of playing the game. That said, in the last years, well decade, the genre has already made a step back, a lot of classic point&click adventure games today feature extremely weird puzzles (tape cellphone to cat, feat salty pizza to cat, to make cat walk into the house for water to let the player listen to some talk going in there...). But thats for large part because the genre is down to life support, small developers for small budgets are doing these games, taking the low-risk route by recycling classic gameplay. While the resulting games might still be interesting for adventure fans, they are never great and never able to capture the masses.
I don't think that Oblivion or DeusEx are rescuing the genre, they incooperate some adventure like elements, but thats all they do. The very thing that makes adventures games interesting is that they don't are not based around action and what we would call gameplay, this frees the developers from integrate hundreds or thousands of monsters into the story that the player has to slash in the course of the game, instead the story can be written the way it was intended, the world that is presented can stay realistic or comical and most important non-video-gamey.
One thing I hated about Psychonauts was how that game spend a ton of dialog in the beginning to explain all those useless video-gamey elements it had, the items to collect, the monsters you had to destroy and all that stuff that you expect in a video game, all of that however simply didn't fit into the story very well and simply felt extremely forced.
Now I don't disagree that the genre needs to go into an 'action' direction, but action should mean more interactivity and more realistic characters, not fighting and violence. One game that demonstrates where the genre should go is The Last Express, unlike most other adventure games or almost all games for that matter, the game is completly real-time (or at least close), this means the world around one always does something, characters walk around, talk with each other, meat to listen to a concert and whatever. The world in that game simply has a life of its own, it doesn't much care if the player did collect this item to trigger that event, it just continues going no matter what. Another great example for this is Facade, that game is also realtime based, but not only that, it also offers a lot of freedom, there is no 'right way' to play the game, no puzzle to solve, instead its interactive drama where the player simply plays his small part. Its one of the few adventure games that provides plenty of replay value and basically has to be played multiple times.
The sad part is simply that far to few developers ever try to push the genre in a new direction, by far most adventure games these days are just the boring point&click stuff all over again, only every few years comes something like Fahrenheit along that tries something new, something not just improving the point&clicky, but throwing it away doing something completly new.
It doesn't happen often that the difficulty becomes the problem, most often I found that the game starts to get uninteresting first. Those games that I didn't finish, I didn't finish for most part because I simply didn't care about them, when there is no interesting story to be told, no interesting characters to interact with and the gameplay the same for the last ten hours without anything interesting on the horizon there is little reason to continue playing, so once quit I never come back to those.
There are of course also those where the difficulty gets insane at some point for no good reason. Viewtiful Joe was one of those, while the game itself was not very difficult, the bosses where quite hard, at the end of the game then, one was then required to refight all the past bosses directly one after another, that was just insane, I didn't made it on the first try, not on the second and then it was clear that I would never make it without some serious boss-pattern analysis and training, I stopped playing, never came back.
Another case was Advance Wars, basically the same story, the game itself wasn't all that difficult, but the final battle was insane. After reading some FAQs I found out that my team probably wasn't the best, changing it would have required to replay the game. I tried the final battle a few times, but it was just way to annoying, while I managed to not lose for quite a while, I neither won. So it ended up as a half hour battle where I build new units, while the enemy destroys them, rinse and repeat till forever. I gave up, never came back.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance just again the same story, game itself not so hard, last boss impossible. All my characters where powerful enough that no enemy in the game stood a chance against them, yet the final boss killed them without problem over and over again. Look in the FAQ revealed that it might be a good idea to have a healer with me, which I didn't, didn't needed it for the rest of the game. I gave up at this point, since there just wasn't any fun in killing dozens and dozens of enemies just for leveling up purpose, heck, the fast way to level up was by actually attacking your own teammates, then healing them, then attacking them again. That was just to stupid, I gave up, never came back.
It kind of sucks to quit a game at the last boss, but when the difficulty jumps from easy to impossible, its often the only reasonable thing to do. I have more interesting things to do than to fight impossible boss battles.