Tempy wrote:

There will always be different games but the breadth of titles this gen has diminished from the PS2 era even, let alone the PS1 where you could have a game like Bushido Blade on your shelf next to Colony Wars, Klonoa, Music 2000, Parappa the Rapper, Gran Turismo, FFVII, G-Police, Kula World, Team Buddies, Alundra, Wipeout and Ape Escape. Money and graphical standards means the safe route is preferable and understandable but that doesn't mean I have to be ok with it.

I know I'm fast become the sole defender of this generation of gaming on the forum, but Tempy, you are being far too dour.  A token five minutes with Google plus a bit of thinking about games I'd played, and I came up with this: 

Colony Wars, a space-based shooter with branching outcomes.  Go play Project Sylpheed!

Klonoa, a 2.5D platformer I never got on with.  You can play Rocket Knight Adventures on XBL, or for a new take on that sort of style, how about Trine?  Or Super Mario 3D Land or SMG, if you want to see where the platformer's got to?  What about Fez?

Music 2000; weird music creation thing.  How about Rock Band 3?  A rhythm action game that crosses into semi-proper teaching, allowing you to play with the pro instruments and actually learn how to play? 

Parappa the Rapper; a rhythm action game that I refuse to believe is more or less bizarre than Ouendan.  Ouendan helpfully is 1000 times better at being a game, too.

Gran Turismo.  Sure, it was the progenitor, but you'd be mad to say you'd rather have that around than Forza, with NFS:HP, Burnout Paradise and TDU2 providing totally unique and driving experiences.

FFVII can be replaced by any one of a hundred FF/Tales/Secrets/Zelda/WoW games, including MMO options.

G-Police is the hardest to provide a direct comparator for, but that's probably because the basic mechanics, while fun, are so simple you wouldn't get them in a game today without a lot more added to it.  So for the sake of using downloadable stuff as an example, I'll point out that G-Police is on the PSN store so you can still play niche titles like this without digging out an old console.

I haven't played some of the other ones you mention so it's not easy to compare them, but add those to original ideas like Left 4 Dead, Deadly Premonition, Minecraft, From Dust, Plants vs Zombies, Darwinia, Dead Rising....

My point being that you're suffering severely from rose-tinted glasses syndrome here, and while the diversification and mainstreaming of the hobby may have led to huge sales for the annual CoD/FIFA/Maddens, there's still more than enough variation out there!  Each of the examples I gave is a demonstration of how the ideas spawned in the PS1 era have grown and developed, and that's before we look into the more esoteric stuff available now.  Each of those PS1 era games was a development of stuff that came before so I don't think this generation has that much to prove.  Haven't even looked at the more esoteric stuff that'll come along as Kinect and Move mature; Johann Sebastian Joust?  The next iteration of something like Child of Eden?

Every generation has its overused genre.  We do indeed have a lot of 1st/3rd person shooters, but the way you dismiss them all makes me think you haven't really given them much time!  There's still a lot of variation inherent in the different games, and for every identikit CoD clone you'll have something like Tribes, or an RPG angle like Deus Ex, or a survival horror like Siren, MMO-alike co-op Borderlands, free-running open world stuff in Assassin's Creed, action survival horror like Dead Space, plus different styles like Condemned, Second Sight, Mirror's Edge, MGS, Prey, Prototype, Portal, Dark Souls.... Sure, all "men with guns 1st/3rd person games," but they're all so stylistically and thematically different that you simply can't complain.  The PS1 was equally as clogged for 3rd person survival horror Resident Evil/Parasite Eve clones, and shit 3D platformers like Crash Bandicoot.

I think originality is alive and well in this generation and I'd rather have access to these games than still be jammed in a jaggie-strewn pre-online pre-downloads PS1 world, playing Parasite Eve 2 and wondering if it'd get any better.  I can ignore a million teenagers playing CoD together as long as I can still play Deus Ex, Minecraft and Assassin's Creed.

I think you're just sitting in the same trap as a lot of us.  Like you, I can remember replaying the demos of the original GTA on a mate's PC, and Syphon Filter on a coverdisc for hours and hours and hours before excitedly getting the games in question.  I remember being blown away when Homeworld came out, but I think all these experiences are "treasured" above some because they happened at a carefree end-of-school time in life where I had lots of time to enjoy videogames.

I can't see how you can look at some of the titles mentioned though and say "there's no creativity now, it's all just 'man with floating gun' games."  Even the aforementioned shooters have more variation in them now than they ever did during the PS1 era.  

Sure, some big-budget games have some inbuilt "safeness" to ensure they don't bankrupt their publishers, but for every game like that you have about 10 like Fez, or Deadly Premonition.  There's more diversity now than I know what to do with.

No, you don't.  But your argument can't be "there's no creativity this gen" when there is.

These fucks aren't making enough stuff I like. What a bunch of dicks.

Exactly

That is probably the case, yes. I suspect Elm keeps up his enthusiasm as flying jets for a living has probably caused some kind of arrested development to kick in.

Half-Life is the story of a man who never realises that he's been fired.

It's about getting old to some degree, and there's always been plenty of cloning and cashing-in in games, but it's also pretty logical that budgets going up leads to less risk. On the upper end of things (excluding XBLA, PSN etc), publishers don't produce games they produce franchises, and they're focus tested to all buggery. To not appreciate that you have to be seeing the present through rose tinted spectacles.

Okami HD with Move.

Okami, YESSSS!!! One of my favourite games!

hylian_elf wrote:

Okami, YESSSS!!! One of my favourite games!

I owned it on PS2 and Wii, but never got around to playing it on either. Looking forward to playing this.

Capcom vs SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium 2001

Just add an online mode with SFxTs netcode and search parameters that breaks Europe up into regions and lets you choose multiple regions. Sick of being limited to Ireland for same region and having to wade through everyone in the world for any.

Sell it to me for a good price!

I.e. cheap.