Or the last time you saw a decent god game (like Populous, Dungeon Keeper etc)? Or point and click adventure? Or text adventure?
Telltale games make excellent point and click adventures.
From Dust is a great new god game
Text adventures? hmm, can't really see the point nowadays. It was a mechanic to allow adventures to be played on very simple hardware. New machines use graphics instead.
Welcome news (shame its console only tho). It's one title in a god-game desert though. The genre seems to be largely abandoned, which is a great shame. How else are we supposed to exercise our inner god complex? :D
Text adventures? hmm, can't really see the point nowadays. It was a mechanic to allow adventures to be played on very simple hardware. New machines use graphics instead.
I disagree. Part of a text adventures appeal was that the world was rendered by your own imagination - something that should never be under estimated. How many people watch a film and then moan that it wasn't as good as the book? Same thing applies to well written text adventures.
And a good text adventure need not be completely devoid of visual appeal. Take a look at Wonderland (Magnetic Scrolls, 1990) which had a good parser, auto mapping, small location graphics, a windowed environment etc. All very appealing. 20 years on parsers could be astonishingly good. Dialogue could optionally pass through TTS systems like Ivona. The problems could be more sophisticated and involved.
Sure, there were plenty of platform games in the 80s. But that doesn't detract from the amount of innovation that occurred at the time. Many coders were independent of the primordial commercial games industry, creating games as part of their hobby rather than as their day job. With little financial risk, and no chalk nosed business men dictating what the market wanted, developers were largely free to experiment. If you look back at any issue of Crash, YS or SU you are almost guaranteed of spotting some novel new concept. Not every novelty was a hit, but many were: Lords of Midnight, Fat Worm Blows A Sparky, Bounder, Elite, Wizball, Sophistry, The Sentinel, E-motion etc etc
The converse is true these days. Most games are created in-house by large (50+) teams of developers, with multi-million investments at stake. Publishers have so much riding on a game that, by and large, they stay away from anything that might not hit broad market appeal. Hence, we get yet-another-FPS, yet-another-racing-game, yet-another-dune2-clone etc.
Worse still, the less profitable genres are virtually abandoned these days. When was the last time you saw a really compelling commercial combat flight simulator? Or the last time you saw a decent god game (like Populous, Dungeon Keeper etc)? Or point and click adventure? Or text adventure?
I'm not saying that there isn't some innovation these day, just that it's very rare, and mostly limited to the indie developers out there.
I know what you mean man and yeah I guess it was certainly easier to get a game to market back then so in theory there was more scope for innovation.... but lots n lots of those games were copies of something they'd seen before - while you're right about the current swathe of FPS etc my point was that we used to have swathes of, scrolling shooters, isometric 3d games etc etc
I'm just stunned he finally got a Pandora delivered ;)
Seriously though thats what i love about iOS gaming, tons of bedroom coders making some classic and original games (And also some great remakes). Yep you have the big corporations making a LOT of money with some big name franchises but often you find a 99p bargain
I know what you mean man and yeah I guess it was certainly easier to get a game to market back then so in theory there was more scope for innovation.... but lots n lots of those games were copies of something they'd seen before - while you're right about the current swathe of FPS etc my point was that we used to have swathes of, scrolling shooters, isometric 3d games etc etc
True :)
Mind you, I never had a problem with isometric 3D games. It was just another way of presenting a game. Compare Kirel with Knight Lore for instance. Very different games that share similar presentation. The same is true when comparing Fairlight with Head Over Heels. Mind you, I'm have a strong bias. I love isometric 3D. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator would've rocked in isometric 3D :D
Mind you, I never had a problem with isometric 3D games. It was just another way of presenting a game. Compare Kirel with Knight Lore for instance. Very different games that share similar presentation. The same is true when comparing Fairlight with Head Over Heels. Mind you, I'm have a strong bias. I love isometric 3D. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator would've rocked in isometric 3D :D
Nowt wrong with isometiric.....well aside from the barrels that killed you in Head over Heels....I swear they were drawn wrong and you'd die without touching em
Comments
Telltale games make excellent point and click adventures.
From Dust is a great new god game
Text adventures? hmm, can't really see the point nowadays. It was a mechanic to allow adventures to be played on very simple hardware. New machines use graphics instead.
Oops, I'd forgetten about them (although I prefer to buy a complete game rather than a series of short chapters). I also forgot about Machinarium too.
Welcome news (shame its console only tho). It's one title in a god-game desert though. The genre seems to be largely abandoned, which is a great shame. How else are we supposed to exercise our inner god complex? :D
I disagree. Part of a text adventures appeal was that the world was rendered by your own imagination - something that should never be under estimated. How many people watch a film and then moan that it wasn't as good as the book? Same thing applies to well written text adventures.
And a good text adventure need not be completely devoid of visual appeal. Take a look at Wonderland (Magnetic Scrolls, 1990) which had a good parser, auto mapping, small location graphics, a windowed environment etc. All very appealing. 20 years on parsers could be astonishingly good. Dialogue could optionally pass through TTS systems like Ivona. The problems could be more sophisticated and involved.
I know what you mean man and yeah I guess it was certainly easier to get a game to market back then so in theory there was more scope for innovation.... but lots n lots of those games were copies of something they'd seen before - while you're right about the current swathe of FPS etc my point was that we used to have swathes of, scrolling shooters, isometric 3d games etc etc
Seriously though thats what i love about iOS gaming, tons of bedroom coders making some classic and original games (And also some great remakes). Yep you have the big corporations making a LOT of money with some big name franchises but often you find a 99p bargain
True :)
Mind you, I never had a problem with isometric 3D games. It was just another way of presenting a game. Compare Kirel with Knight Lore for instance. Very different games that share similar presentation. The same is true when comparing Fairlight with Head Over Heels. Mind you, I'm have a strong bias. I love isometric 3D. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator would've rocked in isometric 3D :D
Nowt wrong with isometiric.....well aside from the barrels that killed you in Head over Heels....I swear they were drawn wrong and you'd die without touching em