I stumbled onto this really great piece on Video Games Live and an interview with Tommy Tallarico. Gotta admire anybody that follows a vision that way.
Talking with Tommy Tallarico, Part 3 – Games – News – IFC.com
via Talking with Tommy Tallarico, Part 3 – Games – News – IFC.com.
Well E3 has come and gone and while I tried to spend as little time as possible at the venue, I was drawn in for a day to see what the industry has put together to assuage our gaming jones. It has been a concern of mine and many others that the interactive entertainment business is starting to feel a little stale. With development costs reaching as high as $40 million and more, it is easy to understand why a publisher takes the safe route and releases annualized sequels. It has gotten so one year pretty much looks like another. Much like the “new fall line-up” on television, the schedule is full of familiar names. No year has been more demonstrative of this than 2010. I am hard pressed to find a single title that had anything resembling originality in it. With the possible exception of Kirby (for which a case could be made that it is a sequel); Star Wars: Old Republic, which while being new, feels familiar and “done” and some smaller, esoteric games such as Journey and Child of Eden, just about every game that garnered media enthusiasm ended with a number. Just look at the list of sequels and annualized brands:
Even the new DS hardware has a name that makes it feel like a sequel, the 3DS. So what was the big news, I mean the industry spends millions of dollars to show off the latest and greatest and this list of “been there done that” is the best we can come up with. YAAAAWWWWWWN. Every dollar that is spent at this show is one less dollar you have to develop games or market them to the appropriate audience. I am amazed at how underwhelmed I am.
Please do not mistake my attitude for a belief that these games will be turkeys. I would be surprised if anything on this list ranks lower than an 7 out of 10 and I would be shocked if most if not all didn’t feature some “innovative” new mechanic or game feature. But I could remove the numbers and subtitles from these and show them to any of a dozen industry professionals who would probably have trouble telling what year this collection of game brand releases represent. The game industry has entered “Generica”, the familiar feeling you have when you go to a new city and it looks exactly like every other city. So comforting, so reassuring, so f*#$*ing boring.
Then I found my saving grace, the thing that would save this year of gaming. Kinetic and 3d gaming. Huh? Looking at the uses and functionality of these, they feel like a gimmick. Just something to make the same old game play feel new because instead of sitting comfortably in front of your tv with a controller you are jumping around like a hyperactive 13 year old after eating a box of nerds or you are looking like Stevie Wonder wearing goofy 3-d glasses and twitching and swaying to avoid phantom projectiles. (My apologies to Mr. Wonder, he is a genius and I mean no disrespect). So this is the year we trade in our dignity to enjoy our hobby. I imagine that some will take to these styles of play but I find 3d to be intrusive to watching movies and I can only imagine what the tech does to video games. As for kinetic gaming, when I want to excersize, I’ll go to the gym or the beach, not to my PS3 or Xbox360.
I thought that the connectivity of this generation would bring about some true innovation in gameplay. Perhaps that was naive, the addition of multiplay on a large scale has been thoroughly explored by PC gaming and console game publisher merely look to those games to decide what to publish. Oh boy, MMOs, first person shooters, and third person action games with multi player and team functionality. What a stretch. I guess all of the innovation is going to happen on the portable platforms like Iphone and I pad. Or maybe I missed the double top secret room where q and his boys have been cooking up some new tech. Frankly, I think its going to be a long year for consumer and publiisher if something doesnt change to shake things up. Maybe I’ll go back to school, it looks like I’ll have a lot of free time on my hands.
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Jim Atkiss 