Different Perspectives

Different Perspectives: A look at the ideas of Gaming today.
Posted by: Marcus

Before I get started, I just want to say thank you to anyone who has read this blog up to this point. If you've enjoyed yourself, good for you.

Anyway, this week I've got my spur of what I want to rant about from a different source than usual. To give you a little background, I've been a subscriber to a dude who calls himself Moviebob. Moviebob is also known as the Game Overthinker, recent winner of the "My Vids Don't Suck" contest over at Screwattack.com, which is a great website, and he's very deserving of that honor. With that said, this post is a quasi-response to some of his videos on Youtube, particularly the idea of gaming today lacking the goofy, yet creative spark of the retro days.

Before I get started, I'd like to give a message to Bob specifically. Bob, if you read this, I do want you to know that I'm also a gamer who remembers, and loved the old days of getting frustrated at Castlevania and nearly throwing my controller through a wall, and beating Mario Brothers for the first time. I miss those days, and still enjoy the sounds of E1M1 as much as I did the first time I heard it.

With that said, I have to say that I disagree that gaming has lost its creative spark when it comes to "out-there" ideas. However, I do think that too much emphasis has been put on the "serious business" side, and I partially blame the Spaz gamers that I outlined in my previous entry, and the MLG fad. When it comes to "serious games" and "serious gamers" they enjoy games that take themselves far too seriously. The first two games that come to mind are Halo 3 and Call of Duty: World at War.

Halo 3 is supposed to be a game about the Earth fighting a war against an interstellar cult, but it doesn't feel like it, and World at War just sucks. I'm not even going to go into detail. Neither have anything inside of them that are inspired, and neither of them are fun without friends to play with, making them damn near worthless. However, the "serious" gamer has decided that these games are the cream of the crop, and they've become much more popular than they would have, say, ten years ago, or from my prediction, ten years from now.

Anyway, I can't say that the crazy concepts of the old days are completely gone. Let's take a look at a few games from the here and now, and break down their core concepts.

Gears of War is a third person shooter where your main enemies are oversized lizards with asthma. You're playing as a group of soldiers with armor that looks like it was inspired by Soundwave the Decepticon, and using crazy weapons like grenades with a bolo attachment, a futuristic take on the Tek Bow from Turok 2, and an assault rifle with a CHAINSAW attached to it! Those are all neat ideas, and they're tied together with a solid storyline that is dark and engrossing, but never takes itself too seriously, with the Carmine of the game setting in for what seems to be their "Kenny."

Madworld is an attempt to return to the old beat-em-up stylings of a Final Fight or a Streets of Rage with a crazy storyline that could only come from the fucked up mind of the man who created Devil May Cry. It's Frank Miller meets Hideo Yamamoto, and it's downright awesome.

The list goes on, and I don't really want to spend too much time on naming games, and more on the ideas. I think the big problem is that the games that want to be taken "seriously" in this day and age still don't want to get rid of the crazy ideas, and I don't really understand why these developers keep trying to make games that will be taken seriously. Call of Duty 4, while a really solid game, had a storyline that really sat on the fence of whether it was trying to be a war story, or a Hollywood style action flick turned video game. Same goes with Bionic Commando. GRIN evidently didn't realize that the elements they were trying to put together with that level of downward feel only works for Metal Gear Solid, namely because Hideo Kojima is a goddamn genius.

What I do think is that different people should work on different titles. I enjoyed Bionic Commando for what it was, but the entire time it felt like they were trying too hard to blur the lines between military shooter and science-fiction based action game. If they had a different writer for that game, and didn't try and make it seem so serious, it could have been much more enjoyable, and a lot more fun. Let's face it. The one thing that game did incredibly well was the feeling of swinging through that city, and (for me anyway) it got the adrenaline pumping.

Then again, maybe part of the problem for some of these games is the immersion factor. Games like Gears of War, Metal Gear Solid, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and their ilk do an excellent job of getting the player to care about their respective universes, and don't try to tie themselves that hard to the modern day, unlike your atypical FPS game nowadays.

To conclude, I do have to say that the fun absurdity of the retro gaming era isn't gone, but it certainly isn't getting the spotlight that it truly deserves, because it's what set Video Gaming apart from other forms of media in the first place. Now, we just have to wait and see if the games that are still in those old series can still live up to the name. Mario is pulling it off, but I'm really hoping to see Castlevania: Lords of Shadow get that series back to the grandeur it once had.