Thursday, June 17, 2010

Doing it Wrong

Last night we were discussing the new Metal Gear trailer shown at E3 this year. Warning it's kind of gross.


I was really stoked because it looks like some awesome ninja sword action, Jaison was less enthused. However we both agreed that it highlights something that's wrong with games today, and maybe has been for a long time.

It's the fact that a lot of developers come up with some new gimmick, then just try to build a game around it. Another example that springs to my mind is Little Big Planet. Here is this really cool set of physics and creation tools that has tons of potential. But somewhere along the line they forgot what actually makes a platformer fun to play.

And of course you can't mention gimmicks without bringing up the Wii. It has some solid titles now, but when it first came out it really seemed like they were thinking "OK, we have this sweet motion control....now what do we actually DO with it?" Most games just consisted of flailing your arms wildly, and in the end a lot of people preferred using the standard controller anyway for games like Zelda. Because it wasn't the gimmick they were there for, it was the gameplay and the story.

Maybe I am actually full of shit (I am), just some food for thought. Mmmm food.

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