Insomnia | Forum

PS. The UK magazine Retro Gamer must surely be the stupidest-titled videogame magazine ever. Because the games it covers are in no way, shape or form "retro" -- they are simply old for fuck's sake! -- for a game to qualify as retro it must be contemporary! I mean, for the love of Christ, there's absolutely nothing retro about stuff like Gradius!

The Future of Gaming

I'll now take the time to give you my personal outlook on the future of the videogame industry. Many people are saying that Sony will have a monopoly and we'll all be damned to play shitty games by 989 Studios, but I don't see that happening. If you'll look around, there's been a sudden wave of "nostalgic", for lack of a better word, games coming out. Just look for the Gameboy Color, we have an updated Bionic Commando, and Blaster Master and Crystalis games coming out. On Playstation and N64 we have Namco Museum games, along with a few knockoffs like Konami Arcade Classics, and these games are doing quite well. I don't think this trend will end anytime soon. Just when big budget polygonal games have almost taken complete hold, it's with a sigh of relief that I welcome this new trend, even if it isn't quite as good as playing the games on the NES. People are finally waking up and realizing that most of the games today suck, and so the market calls for games they know are good.

Getting back to the subject at hand, we all saw how the Dreamcast was accepted: with mediocre excitement in the beginning which has slowed down to a trickle. Before it came out, the gaming media was ecstatic, then... they saw what it was, just a means for more sub-par 3D platformers and a few good sports and fighting games. When this gets old, people begin to look around for better games, so either the 3D games will get better, or the companies will remake classic games, and since making a top-quality 3D platformer is a tough task which takes years of programming, gobbling up as many classic game liscenses as it possibly can will more likely be the option that the game companies go for.

In a couple years when the Nintendo Dolphin is launched, officially marking the complete mainstream takeover of the next generation systems, I don't think much will have changed. What can you possibly do for a game that hasn't already been done? Nothing much, better graphics, that's about it. It's all been done, there is no other demension to conquer. When creativity amongst games reaches it's brim, things will stagnate. The industry will no longer progress but rather regress. Some people are yapping about the next generation consoles may possibly have enemies with no set patterns but they control themselves, and that will be the next big breakthrough - bullshit. That will accomplish nothing except having smarter enemies, nothing special. The only thing that may save gaming is the online frontier. Playing games over the net may never get old.

That's about all the time I have now for this brain dropping, but I may add onto it later.

Regardless of that, the best way of trying to understand how games have developed is by playing them. All the good ones, all the bad ones, all of them. And this should interest everbody, since it increases your understanding for games in general.