My point is more that you can make an excellent game with little to no story at all, or a story that would simply not be workable in a medium like film. Pac-Man, Tetris, Katamari Damacy, even the archetypal FPS multiplayer... these aren't gameplay styles that are compelling because of storytelling. They're compelling because they're fun experiences. Similarly, a lot of fun and compelling new games - Lumines, Meteos, Electroplankton, Nintendogs (arguably) - are fun and compelling precisely because they embody gameplay styles that have nothing to do with storytelling.
The only genre where I can see a concrete argument to be made in favor of enhanced storytelling leading to more sophisticated and fun gameplay is with RPGs, simulations, and other genres that rely on immersion in a particular worldsetting to ground the gameplay experience. Even then, you have to be careful not to hurt gameplay while trying to tell a more complete story. A lot of Japanese RPGs, for example, have become cinematic to the point where interactivity is often limited to saving your progress between cut-scenes. Even if such a game was telling the greatest story in the world (which they never do, but I digress), there is a point at which you must wonder if it's succeeding as a story while failing as a game.
Oh, certainly, there are more trashy books than good ones. The problem video games have as a storytelling medium right now is that a good video game story is more likely to resemble a trashy book, in terms of writing quality, than a good one.
This doesn't reflect on the possibility of telling great stories in video games, more on the likelihood. There's no reason to presume telling a good story in video game form is impossible, but also no reason - yet - to presume that doing so is a necessary or desirable thing.
There are very few video games that aren't full of frightfully hokey writing, if you start judging them by the same standards as movies or novels. Generally, the audience for video games doesn't have very refined taste in writing and doesn't value originality or sophistication very much.
This for the very good reason that the cheesiest, silliest video game stories are often attached to the most fun games. So, most companies put minimal effort into storytelling, or intentionally go for the high school melodrama vibe knowing it'll appeal to their core audience. It usually works, too; I mean, people take Halo's story seriously, gamers seem willing to take any plot seriously if there's a fun game attached to it.
Quite a few years. I think it opened during the Pokemon boom to try and capitalize on the interest kids were having in cute little monsters, and just quietly kept growing from there.
FFIX's problem was not that it was supposedly nostalgic (it did nothing for me on that count). It was a rather ill-advised merger of a quirky, claymation-esque design sense with a deeply unintuitive combat system. While the main characters were appealing, the secondaries were boring and the villains were quite annoying. It just wasn't a game worth playing for long; there was on the fancy CG to separate it from your run-of-the-mill Japanese CRPG. It wasn't a bad game, just... not at all a remarkable one.
Re:Video Game Music Terribly Underrated
on
Video Game Mixlist
·
· Score: 1
Amen. The jazz in Bebop isn't even proper jazz, it's Kanno's pop composition style sequenced through jazzy instruments. I've heard real jazz by other Japanese artists that blows her stuff away, and of course you could... I dunno, listen to jazz by Americans....
Similarly, video game music is fun, but I'm not sure how frequently it's actually good in an artistic or technical sense. It's certainly inspired some cool remixes, probably because the tunes are simple and catchy enough that you can keep them intact while still crafting them into entirely new songs.
To be fair, I don't think any of the next gen consoles are going to use dedicated sound processors. Maybe the Revolution, but I'm pretty sure the 360 isn't.
The GBA is a system whose abilities are consistently underused. It's a true 32bit platform, but so little effort is put into graphics with most GBA titles that they come out looking like late-gen SNES games.
Very early 80's. Basically wiped out the American industry and left the market wide open for Nintendo to invade with the NES. And people even hated the NES at first...
I believe the original poster is referring to the godawful Atari 2600 home console port of Pac-Man. Atari expected it to sell hugely, but people just hated it too much to buy. That plus E.T. did start to fuel the crash of the 80's.
Are you aware of how big Bandai is? Nintendo trying to buy them out would be like Apple trying to buy Disney.
Bandai has huge entertainment assets for animation, live-action, toys, apparel, all kinds of things, as well as a gigantic international distribution chain. Now all that marketing muscle is going to be behind Namco's original video game properties as well as Bandai's licenses.
But you can already do that. If you own a big enough Memory Stick Duo, you can just rip stuff from DVDs you own and convert it into an MP4 file. Go check out some of the PSP video file BitTorrent trackers out there, lots of people are sharing 80 MB TV episodes and 300-400 MB movies. Sony's yet to do anything to try and prevent people from doing this, and there's no hacking required to get a PSP to run video off the Memory Stick.
Yeah, I'm one of the people who paid $75 for Final Fantasy 2 along with a $200 Super Nintendo. Hearing people bitch and moan about $40 PSP games and $50 dollar PS2 games has always floored me, after living through $60 dollar standard cartridge prices for so long.
Xenosaga did something like that, the main character would get e-mails talking about how great Namco's other games were. Only the ads weren't amusing at all and they really broke up the atmosphere of a game that only had atmosphere going for it.
I could tolerate more in-game advertising if it was consistently made in some way entertaining and appropriate to the game. But I imagine it frequently won't be.
If you just want to keep kids happy while traveling, give them a DS. It'll do the job and it's much sturdier.
All the manufacturers of Memory Stick Duos have had an extremely hard time meeting demand for 1 GB sticks. Right now most stores are waiting on second shipments of them.
I think you get 16:9 video to play at fullscreen by cycling through your playback options with the triangle button. I know I've gotten HD TV shows to display properly on my PSP.
I will be entirely amused if both of this generation's handhelds both become marginal systems, still struggling behind the Game Boy Evolution. But saddened, too: if both the DS and PSP fail, then it's really gamers who lose out in the long run.
The DS was a sellout, but mostly because of widespread reports of Nintendo underproducing. So you'd have things like a store with 50 pre-orders, and they actually got 10 units shipped to them. And thanks to the software shortage for the DS, you're starting to see a lot of them sold back to specialty stores, and the value of the system on sellback is falling.
Personally, what makes me worry for the DS's well-being is the rumored release of the Game Boy Evolution by the end of this year. For better or worse, consumers wanted the DS so badly because they perceived it as the next Game Boy. If Nintendo releases a "for real this time!" next Game Boy inside of a year, people aren't going to be happy. People already became unhappy when they realized the DS' backwards compatibility with the Game Boy Advance only worked correctly for one-player games, thereby making it useless as something to play Pokemon with.
As for the PSP... facts are facts: it undersold, which is as close to failure as Sony has gotten in the games industry in the last decade. It's not beating the Game Boy yet, although a lot of people are excited about it. It could very well end up being the Sega Master System of this handheld generation, only holding on to about 20% of the US market.
A little bit of both. The DS also retailed at a far lower price, and most people who bought it thus far are only upset that there aren't more good games for it.
I doubt people would have the probelms with the PSP that they do if it had released at less than $200. I don't think it will get to be really popular system until the price falls to about $150.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is more that you can make an excellent game with little to no story at all, or a story that would simply not be workable in a medium like film. Pac-Man, Tetris, Katamari Damacy, even the archetypal FPS multiplayer... these aren't gameplay styles that are compelling because of storytelling. They're compelling because they're fun experiences. Similarly, a lot of fun and compelling new games - Lumines, Meteos, Electroplankton, Nintendogs (arguably) - are fun and compelling precisely because they embody gameplay styles that have nothing to do with storytelling.
The only genre where I can see a concrete argument to be made in favor of enhanced storytelling leading to more sophisticated and fun gameplay is with RPGs, simulations, and other genres that rely on immersion in a particular worldsetting to ground the gameplay experience. Even then, you have to be careful not to hurt gameplay while trying to tell a more complete story. A lot of Japanese RPGs, for example, have become cinematic to the point where interactivity is often limited to saving your progress between cut-scenes. Even if such a game was telling the greatest story in the world (which they never do, but I digress), there is a point at which you must wonder if it's succeeding as a story while failing as a game.
Oh, certainly, there are more trashy books than good ones. The problem video games have as a storytelling medium right now is that a good video game story is more likely to resemble a trashy book, in terms of writing quality, than a good one.
This doesn't reflect on the possibility of telling great stories in video games, more on the likelihood. There's no reason to presume telling a good story in video game form is impossible, but also no reason - yet - to presume that doing so is a necessary or desirable thing.
There are very few video games that aren't full of frightfully hokey writing, if you start judging them by the same standards as movies or novels. Generally, the audience for video games doesn't have very refined taste in writing and doesn't value originality or sophistication very much.
This for the very good reason that the cheesiest, silliest video game stories are often attached to the most fun games. So, most companies put minimal effort into storytelling, or intentionally go for the high school melodrama vibe knowing it'll appeal to their core audience. It usually works, too; I mean, people take Halo's story seriously, gamers seem willing to take any plot seriously if there's a fun game attached to it.
Quite a few years. I think it opened during the Pokemon boom to try and capitalize on the interest kids were having in cute little monsters, and just quietly kept growing from there.
I vaguely recall the Square rep I talked to at E3 saying it'd be another MMO. If so, then it'll probably be Fantasy Earth.
Not if that support is nothing but a release of Final Fantasy XI. And at E3, that's all Square-Enix announced for the 360.
FFIX's problem was not that it was supposedly nostalgic (it did nothing for me on that count). It was a rather ill-advised merger of a quirky, claymation-esque design sense with a deeply unintuitive combat system. While the main characters were appealing, the secondaries were boring and the villains were quite annoying. It just wasn't a game worth playing for long; there was on the fancy CG to separate it from your run-of-the-mill Japanese CRPG. It wasn't a bad game, just... not at all a remarkable one.
Amen. The jazz in Bebop isn't even proper jazz, it's Kanno's pop composition style sequenced through jazzy instruments. I've heard real jazz by other Japanese artists that blows her stuff away, and of course you could... I dunno, listen to jazz by Americans....
Similarly, video game music is fun, but I'm not sure how frequently it's actually good in an artistic or technical sense. It's certainly inspired some cool remixes, probably because the tunes are simple and catchy enough that you can keep them intact while still crafting them into entirely new songs.
To be fair, I don't think any of the next gen consoles are going to use dedicated sound processors. Maybe the Revolution, but I'm pretty sure the 360 isn't.
Which is why E3 has a media-only day that retailers can't attend?
The GBA is a system whose abilities are consistently underused. It's a true 32bit platform, but so little effort is put into graphics with most GBA titles that they come out looking like late-gen SNES games.
Yes. Remember, Slashdot is where old jokes go to die.
Very early 80's. Basically wiped out the American industry and left the market wide open for Nintendo to invade with the NES. And people even hated the NES at first...
I believe the original poster is referring to the godawful Atari 2600 home console port of Pac-Man. Atari expected it to sell hugely, but people just hated it too much to buy. That plus E.T. did start to fuel the crash of the 80's.
Are you aware of how big Bandai is? Nintendo trying to buy them out would be like Apple trying to buy Disney.
Bandai has huge entertainment assets for animation, live-action, toys, apparel, all kinds of things, as well as a gigantic international distribution chain. Now all that marketing muscle is going to be behind Namco's original video game properties as well as Bandai's licenses.
But you can already do that. If you own a big enough Memory Stick Duo, you can just rip stuff from DVDs you own and convert it into an MP4 file. Go check out some of the PSP video file BitTorrent trackers out there, lots of people are sharing 80 MB TV episodes and 300-400 MB movies. Sony's yet to do anything to try and prevent people from doing this, and there's no hacking required to get a PSP to run video off the Memory Stick.
Not one of those URLs work, and that makes me sad.
Yeah, I'm one of the people who paid $75 for Final Fantasy 2 along with a $200 Super Nintendo. Hearing people bitch and moan about $40 PSP games and $50 dollar PS2 games has always floored me, after living through $60 dollar standard cartridge prices for so long.
Xenosaga did something like that, the main character would get e-mails talking about how great Namco's other games were. Only the ads weren't amusing at all and they really broke up the atmosphere of a game that only had atmosphere going for it.
I could tolerate more in-game advertising if it was consistently made in some way entertaining and appropriate to the game. But I imagine it frequently won't be.
If you just want to keep kids happy while traveling, give them a DS. It'll do the job and it's much sturdier.
All the manufacturers of Memory Stick Duos have had an extremely hard time meeting demand for 1 GB sticks. Right now most stores are waiting on second shipments of them.
I think you get 16:9 video to play at fullscreen by cycling through your playback options with the triangle button. I know I've gotten HD TV shows to display properly on my PSP.
Please. Most of the ideas in the Matrix got stolen from a much older anime called Megazone 23. :P
(Right down to the idea of the last two chapters being crap!)
I will be entirely amused if both of this generation's handhelds both become marginal systems, still struggling behind the Game Boy Evolution. But saddened, too: if both the DS and PSP fail, then it's really gamers who lose out in the long run.
The DS was a sellout, but mostly because of widespread reports of Nintendo underproducing. So you'd have things like a store with 50 pre-orders, and they actually got 10 units shipped to them. And thanks to the software shortage for the DS, you're starting to see a lot of them sold back to specialty stores, and the value of the system on sellback is falling.
Personally, what makes me worry for the DS's well-being is the rumored release of the Game Boy Evolution by the end of this year. For better or worse, consumers wanted the DS so badly because they perceived it as the next Game Boy. If Nintendo releases a "for real this time!" next Game Boy inside of a year, people aren't going to be happy. People already became unhappy when they realized the DS' backwards compatibility with the Game Boy Advance only worked correctly for one-player games, thereby making it useless as something to play Pokemon with.
As for the PSP... facts are facts: it undersold, which is as close to failure as Sony has gotten in the games industry in the last decade. It's not beating the Game Boy yet, although a lot of people are excited about it. It could very well end up being the Sega Master System of this handheld generation, only holding on to about 20% of the US market.
A little bit of both. The DS also retailed at a far lower price, and most people who bought it thus far are only upset that there aren't more good games for it.
I doubt people would have the probelms with the PSP that they do if it had released at less than $200. I don't think it will get to be really popular system until the price falls to about $150.