[off-topic] Sony releases PS Vita SDK

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Sean Kelly" <sean at invisibleduck.org> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1942.1334874732.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>On Apr 19, 2012, at 3:20 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message
>> news:mailman.1939.1334865913.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>
>>> But IMAO, indie gaming is where it's at these days. True creativity has
>>> left commercial games since id's DOOM days.
>>>
>>
>> Yea, pretty much. With a few exceptions (Splinter Cell 1 though...3 or 4,
>> and some Japanese stuff), I see the mainstream industry as mostly a
>> "Pixar-wannabe high-def-animation factory" these days. They don't care 
>> about
>> gameplay anymore, just storytelling, animation and emulating Hollywood.
>
>I've switched from calling those games to calling them interactive 
>cinematic
>experiences.  Some are actually enjoyable from a story perspective, but
>overall I think they're an evolutionary dead end for the game industry.=

The funny thing is, such things are *exactly* what sunk the Sega/Mega CD. 
There were good games on it, but the ones Sega really pushed were the 
Digital Pictures ones that put cinematics/etc ahead of gameplay. As a 
result, it sunk the system.

But now, the whole damn industry has gotten it into their heads to do *the 
same thing*. They *think* they're not repeating it just because now they're 
using realtime CG instead of FMV. But the FMV is a red herring - Yea, the 
production values made B-movies look like blockbusters (which I actually 
kinda liked), but the *core* problem was reducing gameplay to "backseat" 
status behind movie-mimicry - *exactly* what the game studios are obsessed 
with doing now.

It worked for Dragon's Lair, because that was so novel at the time. Nobody 
had played a game like that before, nobody had *seen* a game that looked 
anything like that before, so it worked primarily due to its uniqueness. But 
it *can't* be reproduced because we've *already* had Dragon's Lair - it's no 
longer novel, and can't be novel again. And Zelda Wind Waker proved that 
real-time graphics have already exceeded Dragon's Lair on *last* 
generation's hardware. So that's it, the "Dragon's Lair" approach to games 
is dead, dead, dead.

I'll take another game with a "Save the princess" backstory, or even *no* 
story at all, over a game driven start-to-finish by a less-than-spectacular 
story any day. Hell, it's much better replay value like that anyway: 
Listening to the same story over and over really kills replayability.

Does anyone care why MegaMan's trying to defeat Wily? Or his "emotional 
growth and struggle" while doing it? Hell no, they just enjoy doing it.