Hmm, i find difficult to understand your views seeing that you say that console games are trying to "imitate" pc games? Funny you say that, since, nowadays, most if not all big name titles are made first for the consoles and then months later ported to the pc as an afterthought.  So in any case, it's the other way around, PC games struggle to imitate their console counterparts. 

Another thing i didnt understand is, you say you dont like the current gen consoles, yet you praise the original xbox?  What was different from the xbox 1 to the 360?  I thought you were going to mention older consoles to make a contrast, something like the sega saturn or similar. 

just my opinion.

To continue with your Hollywood analogy, the game industry has hit the high concept period. Similar to the mid 70s with the advent of Jaws/Star wars in the movie business.

Innovation and creativity are slowly being replaced with simple, easily accessable games that garner large audiences for little effort (creatively at least) and are supported by heavy advertising, hype and "brand names" (be it titles or actors).

I think its merely a natural progression for any form of entertainment. But as you can see in the movie industry now, tastes are changing. People want more depth and intrigue. Today the pendulum swings one way, tomorrow it will swing back.

zndkwin

He actually said that the Xbox did not give him warm fuzzy feelings.

I would argue that console gaming is getting stronger in many ways. Consoles now have hard disks, internet connections and voice chat systems. If you'd told a Daggerfall player that Morrowind would come out on a console they would probably not have believed you. Games that were really only possible on a PC before can be done on a console.

The other thing that I think consoles are improving on is their various live download online arcade things. As with direct download on the PC, these are opening the door to cheaper, lower budget games. Combined with a general improvement in programming tools and hardware, we're seeing the return of the bedroom games developer.

I am not much of a console fan, to me it's kinda limited considering I am the kind of person who likes to have things that can do 101 things. That is why I am more of a PC gamer. Not only can I play games on my PC, add mods, and avoid getting the cd's messed up and also have my game portable with my laptop, but I can also watch movies, browse the internet, edit photos and videos, listen to music and not to mention I can carry my entire music collection, several movies, every single game I own and every photo I have all in one single device that I can take with me everywhere.

Throw in the choice of keyboard with mouse or joystick, chat programs, cams and the ability to connect to a TV when one wants to and I have the ultimate gadget to meet all my needs in one small portable package.

As per the games themselves, there are 2 things I find annoying about games these days, regardless of the system (console, portable or PC).

1) Games from specific categories all tend to look and play alike. There is not much of a difference between Burnout, Need For Speed and Midnight Club. Sure they each have their own features, looks, styles and races, but in the end, they all look the same to me. Not to mention that the follow up to each of these games (Need For Speed 2, Need For Speed Underground, Burnout 2, Burnout 3) all look the same as the one before but with some minor features. Sometimes I feel like its the same game wih a new can in it and that's it.

2) The advertising of the games. I am not one who buys the game the same day it comes out, but God forbid I find a commercial or ad that shows what the game looks like. All we get or videos that look like movies (coming to a theater near you). I end up browsing youtube.com for videos of the game itself that people post to see what it looks like since I know it will look nothing like the commercials and their movies. I remember when the Nintendo commercials shows what Super Mario, Mario 64 and Zelda looked like, now we get movies that don't show anything of what the game really looks like.

Gaming surely has changed. It's not abut how the game plays anymore, it's about how cool it looks and how cool you are for having them and each of their follow ups. I currently own all of Call Of Duty's PC versions and my so has Call of Duty 3 for the Wii.

That annoys me to no end. Everyone tries to take these cinematic screenshots, make cinematic trailers, and among all of that we rarely see actual gameplay, actual UI (which is really a travesty when an RPG or RTS gets shown off without its UI). You pretty much have to hunt down user videos on Youtube just to get an idea of how the game plays.

I'm glad Gamespot, IGN, and Gametrailers do video reviews now, so even if you don't agree with what they say, at least you can actually see the game, not a marketing gimmick.

What I ment in regards to consoles being more like PC, was the hardware and software involved. They are trying to replace PCs. Web browsers, Hardrives, so on so forth. I wasn't talking about the games, but in a way this generation they are. Look how many console RTSs have come out recently.

And I definitely did not praise the original Xbox. I said I didn't get that "good" feeling with them, because they feel like a piece of greed.

That's the problem though, is that it's all about the "big names". It was never like that til this generation. Yes, there were successful games in the past, that's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about the sterilization of games becoming popularty products rather than pieces of art. It's just not the same anymore.

THe whole point of the blog was the marketing aspects behind it all. It was inevitable, but that still doesn't make me feel any better. Games just feel so sterile nowadays.

Annatar,

I refuse to watch reviews anymore. I think it takes away from the experience of playing a game. Let's say a game you've been looking forward to is about to come out... and well, you log onto your favorite review site one day and it gets a shitty review. You decide to buy the game anyway. But unfortunately, after reading his rant... you're no doubt going to go in to the game EXPECTING it to be bad whether it really is or not. I think reviews are another thing that are gonna bring the gaming industry down.

Reviews are now another marketing tool. Companies no doubt sponsor a review websites, and if they give that game a bad review... guess who losing sponsorship and advertisements (MONEY)...? SO yeah. Since the major review sites are the ones that have a sway on the masses of people out there, THEIR opinions count in the eyes of unsuspecting gamers. Halo gets a 9.6 or whatever, and kids rush to go buy it... while something like the Witcher with it's 8.5 sells nearly as much... it just doesn't have the popularity, greed, and marketing behind it. Eventhough the WItcher, in terms of complexity and craftsmanship is a far superior game to Halo. (this is just an example by the way, yes I realize they are completely different genres )

It's hard not to look at a review. But, remember back in the day when you could walk into a store, filled with video games, with no pre-concieved notions about what that game entails? It was like a treasure trove, it was an experience... like selecting an epic book to suck you away. No marketing, no PR, no corporations, no sterilization, no caring about popularity.

You mean when it was a gamble about whether you'd like it or not? Boxes are bigger and worse marketing "tools" than reviews.

It's easy to make a box that catches the eye and put an easy spin on the cool stuf you can do.

How a person interprets a review largely depends on what he thinks about reviews. If he's expecting reviews to be Word of Law, then yes, he'd just come away thinking the worst. If he thinks of reviews as more of an opinionated overview with the game, then he's able to strip the openionated part of it, and keep the overview.

A review is just an opinion. No matter who writes it where, that fact never changes. Some reviews are obviously better than others because the writer spent more time learning the game first, rather than just glancing at it. But they are inherently not evil if you take them for what they are, and just use them to learn how the game plays.

I have plenty of games that received mediocre scores (6-7s) and I greatly enjoy them. At the same time, I skipped many games that got 9s and 10s because the gameplay just doesn't appeal to me, even though these were hailed as the epitome of coolness. So, treat a review right and it's just a useful tool, as it should be.

That is true, and I understand that. I have quite a few games that recieve lower scores but that, to me, I find to be better games than those that scored higher.

And what I ment by walking into a store and buying a random game, yes there's a chance you might come across a dud, but you'd atleast be able to go home and play the game through without any outside influence subconciously telling you what to play or not. It's easier to form your own opinion about the game, and chances are since you were looking for a particular type of game, your imagination would've filled in the blanks thus you probably would like the game anyway. (I'm talking about back then, when semi-realistic graphics didn't really exist). I never ran into a game I didn't like back then, strangely. Probably becuase at that point in time I didn't realize games were just pieces of code put together. So in a sense I guess you could say I've become jaded.

I absolutely agree with this.  Reading a bad review about a game that you have been so excited about seems to almost take the wind out of your sails, in a way.  Suddenly it doesn't seem as adventerous.

This can be said about any negative review though, whether for game, movie, or even books.  It seems to take away some of the novelty.

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We're living in a world of mass market, that Gaming has recently become a part of it, like books, movies etc... IMO the problem isn’t that much about gaming and what it has become, but about the way “people” get influenced by advertisements and why they prefer shiny graphics to elaborate game play that require them to actually think more than 2 sec.

I mean, if point and click games would have been far more popular there’ll be still a lot of these game being made today instead of 2-4 each year. Think about want happens in the head of the “casual customer”, does he always have time or mind-likeness to do complicated thing after his workday? Probably not all the time and the gaming industry just adapt to it, even if we could think, that sometimes that they push people to behave in that way…

After all there’s also a kind of social recognition to posses one or the other game? Try to say that Diablo/Starcraft/Halo… are bad games and you’ll see how people react; they immediately ask you how you can defy what the majority/mass is thinking. The same case is also applied to movies and books or course, say that Harry Potter (the book) or Gladiator sucks you’ll get the same kind of reactions.

Well, you have to take account that since the ps2 shipped it was the first console to include a DVD player. It kinda brought together the gaming market and the more casual, DVD-viewing one.  You could say gaming has matured, meaning that now any celebrity that doesnt know a thing about games now has their own game where they star on it.  It's been opened to the big publics.  Kinda like windows 95 was the first widely used windows system.  Before that, only enthusiasts fiddled with config.sys and autoexec.bat entries to free up enough RAM to play their favorite DOS games.  That has a result some simplification (namely consolities), but it can bring new opportunities to try different things too, for this new wide market.  The only thing that that takes is the drive and decision to do so.

Man I remember those times. I had a few disk with different setups so I could play certain games. I would just hate it when I got a message that I could not play because of inssuficient memory. +1 Karma

I'm 35 I started playing consoles when I was 8 years old with the Atari 2600, pacman and combat. God I loved those games. Then I got the Nintendo, genesis, Turbo graph 16, Surper nintendo and then I got a PS1. Then I stiopped buying them because it was ridicoulous. To many games and not enough good games. I remember playing Dragon warrior the first time and getting mad because I always got killed. it never occured to me to buy a weapon for my hero I'd never heard of a RPG before that game. Then try adn find a game that is better then Final fantasy. We can't get back what we had back then. ORIGINALITY. Now it's always a remake or something cheap with a nice view. I'm generalising but it,s true. I'm on the Elemental side of this blog and people here are all crying to get a not Master of Magic game, the reason is simple it's because that game when it came out was Original. Now it's alot more about money than it is about being any good. This goes for PC too. Spore is the perfect exemple. Everybody expected so much from the game, when it came out it flopped because money was more important than the game.

I wouold say that out of 100 games that come out only 2 attracts my attention. When I was 12 I would buy about 20 games a year. So it's quite a difference.

The only thing that makes this gaming industry still viable for me is that there is so many creator of games out there a few of them actually makes a good game once in a while either by accident or by design.

Stardock is one of the rare game developpers that I follow around because tghey have shown me that money is not so important. I remember a post from Frogboy where he said something like I have a contry house and a fancy car and all the trimmings what I want to do now is the game I want to make and not a game to make money since I already have that. (at least it was something similar). There is nothing wrong in making money it's just I wish people would worry less about having so much of it and just try and have enough of it instead. We would probably have better games then.

It's only my opinion

What I think really stinks, is that they don't say what the game is about on the box, just stuff like "a thrilling squeal to (whatever came before it)". I DO NOT BUY GAMES UNLESS I KNOW WHAT THEY ARE.

If all else fails read the instruction manual