De-emphasis on content, today

[Kareeser]

I had the inspiration to write this up after reading a quote in another thread by "firsttimebuilder":

Originally Posted by firsttimebuilder haha isnt it ironic how we have our fancy expensive computers with hightech graphics and processing and we still go back to the basic games i'm guilty of it myself...those games are awesome

That got me thinking: I remember myself playing DOS games like Rogue or Prince of Persia far longer than I played games today, like Age of Empires, or Need for Speed, etc.

I personally believe it's due to the lack of fancy graphics technology available at the time. Given a monocrome monitor and no native mouse support, I'm pretty sure game developers would have to spend more time developing an actual story, and actual fleshed-out characters.

You can see similar comparisons in movies from several years ago, compared to today. I may be choosing bad examples, but here is an obvious one:

The magic carpet from Alladin was mute (as carpets are mouthless). Yet it conveyed a full range of emotions, from sadness (when Alladin yelled at it), fear (when Apu saw the big diamond), happiness (countless other times), all done through the magic of hand-drawn animation!

On the other hand, we are presented with rather two-dimensional characters in films such as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", or the latest Bond flick. The story is significantly less captivating, and there is clearly a focus on special effects... bullets, explosions, and the like.

With Will Wright on the verge of releasing Spore, the "next generation" of computer games, I cant help but think that perhaps we haven't quite exhausted our efforts in our current entertainment "rut".

We've tried excessive storylines (with success), and we've tried the excessive "wow" factor (today).

What if we had a lot of both? Or perhaps it's another pipe dream...

[786ARS]

you do get some games with a big storyline, but you are right, its overshdowed by shiny graphics

[Propain]

I have noticed myself over the years a very big emphasis on graphics. Depends on the gamer I guess, I enjoy nice graphics as much as the other guy but if the game sucks I wont be seing thoses graphics much longer. I remember staying up till 4-5 am playing SNES games back in the day or even having a tonnes of laughs playing Intelivision with the buds. Thoses games werent graphicly oriented but hecka fun.

cheers



O

[spartan015]

mario... on SNES and well... goldeneye on n64 and mario kart (not too much on plot but oh well) super mario... it was just fun.

conkers bad fur day was another one

[786ARS]

one of the games that i enjoyed the most was golden sun on the gba, even more so than several pc games.

[DragonNOA1]

Are you talking strickly about games or movies or both? I liked Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Spore looks amazing.

The more we get closer to photo-realistic graphics the closer we see how far off we really are. NES games brought the arcade into the home and were successful on the games that had good content/story, but remember there were many games on the NES that flat out sucked. Same as now, many games have good stories but many just plan suck.

That being said the first PoP was my first PC game and I remember it foundly. I actually bought it again about a year ago and beat it for the first time. Yeah!

NES and SNES and even N64 games were great and loads of fun also and can't be left out of the convo but still, every system has its good and bad games.