Hey, you can mail them to me. I'll, um, destroy them in protest for you. That's what I'll do.

im slowly making my way through one of these games, but not as enthusiastically as I thought I would. I mean, it's great and all, but not as good as being first to comment on this, most melancholy of posts.

dammit.

If you hate them for representing the game developing machine devoid of creativity, why did you buy them?  Buying them is worse than not playing them.

The industry does not care if you play or not. You buy. That?s what matters.

You can play safely.

I know how you feel. But I also think that if you believe a game is worth your attention then not only fucking buy it but play it for gods sake. GTA at least, is worth your attention.

It's ironic that the list of ads on the sidebar mentions some of the games you are protesting against.

But I agree with pastaqueen, by all means send them my way, I'll help with the destruction...

Halo 2, GTA and The Sims 2 i can do without.  But I have to come clean, i'm ashamed to say i've been impressed with HL2.  Its not that it's incredibly inventive, and it certainly isn't smile on the face cute.  But it's very well put together, it's not like halo and doom3, which constantly push the same gameplay at you.  You'd be suprised how veried it is, it quickly moves on and encourages you to play differently at different times.

And above all its easy. haha

Do i sound like a salesman today?

You already bought them.  You have already given in.  "The Machine" doesn't care if you play them or not - it only cares if you buy them.  And you already did.  Now play them, so you can forget that you bought them.

Oh... I think there are still imaginative games out there.  After reading your grumpy posts about how dull the gaming industry has become, I have had a discussion with a friend of mine who said that there were still plenty of games out there that were more than just shoot'em up etc...  He was talking about this game were you run around ancient Japan with time travel etc... where you have to figure something.  It sounded somewhat similar to Tomb Raider, as it also had some FPS elements in it.  But it really was about the story line etc...

And then there also a bunch of new Adventure games out there that are supposed to be pretty good.  Myst IV (if you are into this... I personally like Myst a lot) and then there's a new Leisure Suit Larry and finally there's this game called "Sherlock Holmes: Silver Earring" that's supposed to be good.  So plenty of Adventure games out there...

MST

In my humble opinion, the Magna Cum Laude is very much short of being an adventure game, and is more an attempt at taking the last buck out of the Larry franchise. They didnt even get Al Lowe (www.allowe.com) to do it.

I would save your protest for the actual crappy games that rely almost solely on marketing to move them, like Bloodrayne or Driv3r. The games you listed are indeed fanatically hyped, but are all actually quite good.

I felt the same way about Shrek 2, like, I knew I wanted to see it, but I didn't want to because the marketing machine surrounding it was so off-putting. It's like if you're just about to do something, and then someone tells you to do it, and you don't feel like doing it any more, because then it would look like you were doing it because this person told you to.

Anyhow, yeah, you already bought them, so any sort of protest is now pretty void. Maybe you just don't feel like playing them and are projecting your disgust with the state of the game industry now by rationalizing your non-playing as being some sort of statement.

"Each and everyday I walk by the bookshelf that holds my game collection."

This should say something to you. What a radical time we live in, when furniture doesn't even serve it's designed purpose. It used to be at the start of the Twentieth century, you could judge a gentleman's character by the books he kept in his study. Has this changed? I'll admit, I can tell something about a person just by looking at their videogame library. But what happened to that wood pulp stained with ink?

When books, the caravan of all knowledge, have been replaced by electronic entertainment, should we have cause to worry?

I don't own any of those, but I've played Half-Life 2 at a friend's house.  It's funny, the marketing people obviously hype the whole physics angle, but the thing I enjoyed was how the game immediately makes you feel like you're part of a complete world.

So if one's bookcase is filled with porn DVD's (well worn porn DVD's, I might add) what does that say?

the dirty bastards been fucking his DVD's

It's not that I'm bored and/or disgusted with shooters, although I am, but I will take exception with your verbage if I may. :-)

"and chance that we will be more than the toy business."  What's wrong with being in the toy business?

Video games are toys, so are computer games.  What's more noble than a toymaker.  The founder of Lego was a furniture maker when the depression hit.  He switched to making wood toys because he knew people would rather buy their children toys than buy themselves furniture.

Nobody is arguing that games aren't an art, and perhaps a far more relevant art to a citizen of Western culture than poetry, sculpture and painting (though it draws from all those arts...well, maybe not the poetry).  And certainly it needs to grow as an art, new formats, technologies, stories and interactive approaches.   But we can't deny that we make toys, or we miss what makes our art different from the others.

I'll give an example.  For a time, I worked for a company called Rocket Science Games.  It was peopled with grown-ups who were going to 'correct' the games industry.  After all, games grew out of hackers making toys in their garages.  Certainly high-powered Apple engineers and ILM artists and producers would make a higher quality product.  In fact, they were going to blow the other game companies out of the water.  (Rocket Science got the cover of wired even before they hired any real development teams).  They would be making GAMES, not games, the toys that the kids made.  GAMES.  The next leap forward in storytelling.  The results were/are predictable.  Utter failure.

Meanwhile, one Mr. Miyamoto kept cranking out products that were as much toys as they were games.  "Hey, if I jump on that it makes a funny sound!  Cool!"

Toys are under-rated, and if I may say so, "If it aint broke, don't fix it."

You know, Ron, being my childhood hero in many ways, if you told me to take a long walk off a short pier, I probably would. But if you asked me, knowing what I now know, not to play Half-Life 2, I would probably have laughed. A lot. At you.

I was like you, except worse. I was prepared to boycott buying the game full stop. The mere thought that millions of other gamers were going to go out and buy the game, authenticate the game and play the game at roughly the same time frightened me.

But all that is in the past and I'm slowly working by way through Half-Life 2. I'm savoring every nook and cranny. Sometimes I just paddle in the water. What it is to be young.

(I love Monkey Island!!!!!)

Wow, you're way farther up the evolutionary ladder than Ron. I'm vexed by your very presence ;)

Anyway; ,,Calm down Garth! Take a ritalin, man."

You've already given in to the machine by buying the game. o_O

You should of at least stolen them. :P

This is a great post.

Please don't unwrap them.  Continue your civil disobedience -- it sends an important message.  It says, I will not wait gleefully every year for the 10 or so AAA hit titles to enjoy.  I am waiting for choice.  I am waiting for alternative, smaller, diverse games that intrigue and surprise me, make me laugh.  Games that are not blockbuster spectacles designed to overwhelm and immerse me; instead something where I can better hear the voices of the game's creators, and can play within their little gardens, and absorb some new sensibilities and ideas.

For Gods sake don't buy them!  Once you've handed your money to the pubs, you've signaled your love for their offerings, and they will continue.  The damage to the industry has been done.

I personally refuse to buy the creatively bankrupt hot games.  If I need to test them for research, I'll borrow them from a co-worker, but I refuse to vote Yes to the pubs if the game doesn't deserve it.

Yeah, I agree with Scott.

Playing them would signal my giving in to the machine.

As far as the machine is concerned, I don't think they care if you play them or not, they just want you to buy.

As Scott so finely put, don't vote yes. Our capitalism is a democracy of dollar signs.

I caved and bought HL2. This is an account of what happened:

a) Arrived home, ready to install the thing. 5CDs. Needs 4GB of HD, hefty system requirements. OK, no problem. Let's just do it.

b) 45 minutes later and the game is still being installed...

c) Installation ends (?) OK, now I have to go to this steam thing. I just want to play the single player mode, but NO... I am presumed to be a criminal probably, so I have to give personal information and register with a service I will never use. But let's do it...

d) Another 15 minutes or so and my steam account is created. Now it is starting to "decrypt game files"... ????

e) 45 minutes later and the decryption was complete. Gladly this is a 3GHz system, imagine if I was installing on a slower system. Surely I can play now? Oh wait, it wants to verify the CD. Put it in again.

f) Wow. now I need to somehow BIND my cdkey to my account... To play a single player game. Sure, let's do it, why not?

g) 10 minutes later (probably the server was slow) and I can finally play! The first time the game launches it takes like 5 minutes to load. Switched graphics resolution, another 5 minutes. I started this "experiment" at 8PM, and it is now past 10. I am STILL WAITING to play the game I bought...

h) Game finally launches. After 20 minutes of gameplay or so I realize it is just another average fps game with average graphics, no humour and a post-apocalyptic (is this right?) world. WOW! I can kick bottles around! Amazing!!! AND GUESS WHAT... the first puzzle involves moving a CRATE closer to a WINDOW, so I can jump out of it! Yes, moving crates around AND jumping, now THAT's original!

When I exit I now have a very important STEAM icon in my system tray. Yes, I can now receive HL updates and instant messages at any time. And it loads (by default) every time my Win XP system starts, until I disabled this option (something that 99% of the users will NOT do.)

Things are really out of control in the game industry if you ask me...

Sorry for the english and spelling errors, I am brazilian. HL2 costs here as much as 20 days of work at minimum wages (totally unrelated factoid)

Excellent comments. Thanks. I thought I was the only one who thought that way.

Yes, i must say that i've been dissapointed with  all the games i've played in recent years, in one way or another.

I can't just boycott games, cause what if a great one came along one day? It would've slipped through my fingers.

I played a very generic adventure game a year or so ago called "runaway" or somethin' like that...
Gave-up half way through, or towards the end...

Ron, could you please collaborate with those other guys one more time, and give us a game we can be proud to have on our shelves?

Hate the blockbuster mentality of the machine all you want, but if you fail to play the games of today then you also fail to learn from their mistakes and their rare successes.  Evey new innovation builds on all of the failures and successes that come before it.

Or maybe hype doesn't mean that the game is hot?

Like that Katamari [whatever] game? Paper Mario? Metroid Prime 2 Echoes? Pikmin 2? Animal Crossing? Harvest Moon?

You'll find good games if you look for them.

Hey Ron (and everybody else),
I've quoted your post in my own blog (And linked to it accordingly - and according to your linking policy).
I also wrote my opinion on a few games i've been playing recently.

Happy Hannukah !!

Oded

I agree with your comments, but Half Life 2 is still really fun to play.

I bet those developers are sitting in their holes, pulling out their hair and thinking of ways to trick Ron into opening the shrink wrapping of those games. After all, they can only take his money once the box has been opened. Amazingly, I've developed this insane new way to 'wait for choice' without spending my money on games I'm not going to play. Guess how?

pirating?

Actually, I've played almost all those games and the only one I've enjoyed as much as I thought I would was HL2, go figure.

man that brazilian guy had some good points.  Anyway Grand Theft Auto is just a game made by some crazy Scots who want to invade american culture and pulverize it.  They are using the machine to rage against it.  I say let them.  Belle & Sebastian, Irvine Welsh, Grant Morrison, Mogwai, Boards of Canada, respected/decriminalized public graffitti, Angry Young Men, and even Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone btw.  All scottish.  Rockstar makes america cool.

yeah but have you noticed that hardly anyone has heard of gta : london

Gregory - well, dunno about you, but I keep my videogames on my bloody huge bookshelves right below my collection of 200 or so collectible hardcover novels, which are right next door to my 650 CDs. The pulp-and-ink is alive and well in the home of the discerning geek. :)

jeremy - Grant Morrisson? good call. I've got his signature. he looks exactly like King Mob, btw.

Grumpie, you already gave in to the machine by getting those games you didn't steal. Just do what I do: Get some hardcore gaming buddy, and borrow the games from him. He can only play one game at a time, so just get whatever he/she's not playing.

You know what I don't like about video game marketing? Is that most games, except for like nintendo games and The Sims, are marketed in their own little world, just like failing industries like comic books. It's like, for example, if Fox had chosen to advertise The Simpsons in animated cartoon  fanatic magazines and animation websites. They really need to say "LOOK! This game is here... it's not only for the elite crowds; it's for you, too!". After all, they're really expensive to make, yet they don't advertise them as well as dvds or anything.

To save Ron, or anyone else, the time:

Halo 2: Halo was overrated and Halo 2 is...well, just don't bother.  Fight to save Earth!  Only, just for the first couple of levels.  Most of the rest of the game you get to play as an alien, hopping around from one boring and disjointed location to another.

Half-life 2: If you liked Half-Life, you'll like HL2.  If not, you won't.  It's the same thing, only now with space age polymers, physics, and Benson!

GTA: What-ever: Pleasent surprise.  The very touchy 90's era gangbanger schtick only lasts about an hour or so into the game, then it mainly fizzles away into just being fun.  I didn't expect to like it much, based on GTA3 and VC.  The game is at its best when its not shoving "DO CRIME" down your throat.  Go figure.

WoW: Not bad, as long as you realize you're buying a single player game disguised as a massively multiplayer game and you'll have seen and done about all there is within a month.  Hey, at least that first month is free!

The Sims 2: It's The Sims, only this time with SimWants and SimFears - complete with initial wow followed by loads of tedious boredom...and it still takes half an hour to pee.

but...if you unwrap them at night and put them again in their beautiful boxes before sunrise?
who would ever know?
let me tempt you muahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

Ok I can agree about all the games (I can't play HL2 anyway because of my problems with 3d graphics...) but WoW
I could NEVER NEVER NEVER believe it to be unworthy of all the adoration I already granted to it in these long months!

Oh man, everybody here is so incredibly indie.  Like, you guys remember back before Valve and Rockstar sold out?  Back when it was all about the games, man?  Remember back when Bungie used to be cool?

The funny thing is that the games listed in the original post owe their core of popularity to the players more than some monstrous advertising machine.  It was the players who decided that they enjoyed The Sims and GTA3 and World of Warcraft and (probably) Halflife.  They didn't need television or magazine advertisements to tell them how they felt.  Even the HALO games, which I feel are definitely overrated, have succeeded, in my opinion, largely because the players really picked up on the multiplayer.  These games have become successful for reasons of substance rather than some cleverly employed trickery or smoke and mirrors, as loathe as many of you may be to admit it.  

Don't get me wrong though.  Most AAA titles do leave a lot to be desired and don't count myself as a fanboy, even of my beloved Zelda series.  I merely feel that your disdain is misplaced.  I'm with the fella above who said to save your protest for derivative, insulting rubbish like Driv3r and Bloodrayne, or, how about those games which rely entirely on licensing, like Enter the Matrix and that new Goldeneye game?  The yearly Tony Hawk iteration and the countless generic military shooters?  It's these games, so astoundingly mediocre, that're truly illustrative of creative bankruptcy in the game industry.  Iffen ye axe me.

Oi! you can say what you want about all those titles but The tony hawk series are genuinly good, each and everyone of them! Every new title in the Tony Hawk series added something new to the game and made it a bit more fun to play. Seriously, go play a demo of one of the games and enjoy the insane stunts you can make and the rocking soundtrack :)

its good to see someone thinks like i do.

this industry is just about dead creativity wise.

none of the games he listed were made in japan.  that might be part of the problem.  getting the creativity to come to america.

schazzwozzer - I agree entirely. I think Ron picked bad examples. They're not the most original of games and I think Halo 2 is overrated in particular (I think Halo and Halo 2 are so ridiculously admired because they were the second and third decent FPS games ever released on consoles, following Goldeneye...no PC gamer gets the fuss because we all played Quake), but they're all perfectly solid titles that succeeded - as you say - through quality not hype. People love Half-Life (it still regularly turns up in Best Game Ever lists), and Half-Life 2 is by all accounts an excellent game. People loved GTA3 and Vice City (interestingly, despite the fact that the first two GTA games were massively hyped through the old get-the-mainstream-media-hysterical-about-the-morals trick, both were only moderate successes, probably because they were basically just fun little arcade games), and San Andreas is again by all accounts an extremely good game. I know nothing about MMORPGs or The Sims so I can't comment on those, but the first Sims wasn't particularly massively hyped either, it succeeded through quality and appealing to people who don't usually play video games (an enduring trait of all the Sim... games). I also think yours and the previous posters' list of games that truly should win disdain are bang on.

I'd say a game like Half-Life 2 is the Pirates of the Caribbean of gaming - it's mainstream, not massively adventurous, well-publicised, but very very good and very very successful, and there's not a whole lot wrong with that.

Why didn't you buy the new Sid Meier's remake of Pirates! ?

Have you check out Darwinia(in devlopment) or Uplink Ron by Introversion software.  T think you may like their games.  They lack graphics and yet are successful.  Anyway here's a link I really think people should check out.  http://www.introversion.co.uk/  Boy i sound like a salesman.

"The funny thing is that the games listed in the original post owe their core of popularity to the players more than some monstrous advertising machine."

In the gaming press, both print and online, all of these games were very heavily hyped before release.  The mainstream media rarely hypes games of any sort, and if it does it's only for very high level console titles.  The only media we can judge a game's hype by, then, is the gaming press.  Still, if the games in question turned out to be bad no one would have cared - so I'm not arguing your point.  What I'm saying is, it doesn't matter.

It's not so much about hype that's the problem.  Let's look at the titles again: The Sims 2, GTA: SA (GTA 5), Half Life 2, Halo 2 - each of these games, while still enjoyable in varying amounts, make little to no effort to improve the formula of its previous incarnation.  GTA3 was a great example of innovation in a sequel, but as much fun as Vice City and San Andreas may be, they are still more of the same.  Half Life 2, as great as it is, is still more of the same.  The same can be said for the rest of the titles, as well.

I'm not knocking the games for being sequels to popular titles - that doesn't matter to me.  What I would like to see, however, is more innovation in each game.  Give me a new experience, not just new content for the game I played years ago.  Some of the games try to bring something new, at least, but the additions and changes are minor at best, and cosmetic in general.  HL2 added physics into the gameplay - but exploited it very little.  If more of the environments had been modelled with physics, the ways in which players could play the game would have grown by a great deal.  Imagine Deus Ex style gameplay with Half Life 2's physics models, only applied to as much of the world as possible.  As it stands, HL2 may have gone through the trouble to physically model a wooden bridge in the game - only to put explosive barrels at its base that the player automatically knows to shoot to bring the bridge down.  How do they know this?  It's not because the physics bring anything new and revolutionary to the game in this instance - it's because players have seen this set up a thousand times before, only in the past its been a scripted explosion when the barrel is shot.  This time it's just the same thing, only the pieces of wood and the bodies fall in a more "realistic" way thanks to the physics.

What we want - what we need - are more innovations in games across the board, including sequels.  If more games managed to cram as much change and improvement in design as GTA3 did for its previous incarnations, GTA1 and GTA2, (content notwithstanding) then we wouldn't be ranting on this subject.

I'm found a little game called Paper Mario, and i like it very much!

The time I wasted reading these posts is time I could have spent leveling my Rogue in WoW.  Dammit.

unclejeet: like 'kids have no respect these days!' yours is one of those observations that loses a little force because it's been going on for*ever*. I clearly remember articles in my old Commodore 64 gaming magazines that say exactly the same thing - too many sequels, not enough innovation, blah blah blah. There will always be games on the marketplace that do not innovate (much). These will often be perfectly good games that people enjoy playing. There is nothing wrong with this. Contrary to historical moans along the same lines, there have always been games that innovated, and to be honest, I think there will be in the future, too.

Come on ,Ron, we know you are playing them... poser.

Adam,

Well, I'm just trying to live up to my name!  The cranky old Uncle that sits on his porch, yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his damned lawn.
Anyway, yeah it's a very old argument, but that doesn't make it any less valid.  For my money, the last truly innovative game was Deus Ex, and that was a good number of years ago.  I want to see games grow past the state that they have seemed mired in for years: the pre-pubesent daydreams of little boys.  Take Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, for instance, and compare it to Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.  The first was a fabulous game, filled with a dreamlike atmosphere and just pure gameplay fun.  The second has chicks with oversized breasts, wearing next to nothing.  One is even "armored" with a steel thong.  Come on.

It's not like nobody is innovating. It's just that, with the tunnel vision of the holiday game season, all anyone sees is the heavily-hyped, conservative games.

What about Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow? Or Katamari Damacy? Or, speaking of actually using physics, Psi-Ops?

I loved Ico, which was why the 'first' prince of persia was good, anyway.  Can't wait for their next game, Wanda and the Colossus.

Japan makes great games.  cough*japanrocks*cough

UncleJeet:  you're asking for innovation at Christmas time?  They tried that innovation thing last Christmas, with titles like Viewtiful Joe and Beyond Good & Evil and you didn't buy those games (you meaning us, meaning most gamers).  Then we made fun of the publishers the rest of the year for trying to release unknown creative titles during the heavyweight fourth quarter.  So which way do you want it?

Christmas is about making money off of existing franchises.  Save the innovating and creating for spring.  You know what I mean.  You can't expect that sheet year-round yo.

I played the first first PoP several years ago, so I'm fully aware the Sands of Time is, in fact, a sequel - no need for the quoting.
Anyway, yes Ico heavily influenced the design of Sands of Time in every good way possible.  Warrior Within manages to still be fun, but mostly in spite of itself, somehow.

How is Viewtiful Joe innovative?  Taking a very old staple of sidescrolling beat 'em up and replacing the sprites with polygons isn't really innovative.  It's just a different graphical depiction of the same tired gameplay.

Let me also clear up the difference between elevating games to a new height and simply being innovative.  A small, niche title that doesn't sell to the masses just isn't a sucessful game.  Even the game I praise the most, Deus Ex, didn't sell to the masses in the way that it could have.  It was hardly a flop, but in spite of its many innovations, its numerous flaws kept the game from becoming a major hit title and, without the sales that come with that, it doesn't matter how many new and great things a game does - it still won't matter.

We need simplicity in games - but note that I do not mean dumbed down games when I say that.  Rather, a truly rich and deep game with a simple and easy to use interface coupled with equally easy to get into gameplay will achieve the level of elegance required to bring a truly innovative title to the masses and thus elevate gaming to a new level of sophistication.  It's no better to be innovative and not sell than it is to be derivitive and sell a bazillion copies.

Battle for Middle Earth, for example, will be a large seller simply because of the license.  The game is also extremely simple in its interface and gameplay, but very rich in depth of how the game can be played.  A strong command of high level strategy coupled with low level tactical decisions is important in the game, but at first glance the player won't realize this.  Many "hardcore" gamers will (and are) saying the game is a "dumbed down rts" for the masses, and anytime anything comes along that is going to sell well runs the risk of the very small, but very vocal, minority crying out about it being stupified in order to sell.  In a game like Deus Ex 2, this is entirely true - although the game was still far too flawed to attract major sales, the innovative things about Deus Ex were missing as well.

What's the answer?  I'm not sure, really.  We need games to have a spit-shine polish to them.  We need the interfaces to be as simple and as elegantly transparent as possible, and we need to find that ever elusive "easy to play, difficult to master" gameplay.  While doing that, we need to also inject real characters with real emotions and, above everything else, we have to make the game fun.  When you figure out how to combine all of these things, let me know so that I can invest in your studio before your game explodes onto the market and changes things forever.

"In the gaming press, both print and online, all of these games were very heavily hyped before release.  The mainstream media rarely hypes games of any sort, and if it does it's only for very high level console titles.  The only media we can judge a game's hype by, then, is the gaming press."

Alright, so these five games were only really hyped in the gaming press.  And yet they all have sold exceedingly, almost surprisingly well to mainstream audiences, with the possible exception of Halflife 2 and WoW.  I think that this illustrates my earlier point rather well.

As for the whole innovation thing, yeah, that's great.  I love innovation too.  It'd be totally sweet if every game could be the equivalent of a Sgt. Pepper's or a London Calling or Bitches Brew.  Maybe somebody could give out game development licenses or something?  And the licenses get revoked if a developer is suspected of placing too high an emphasis on keeping their job or just trying to create a solid, enjoyable game for the fans.  

Of course, innovation would only count when it deals with gameplay.  Innovation in aesthetic presentation or storyline themes or the incorporation of internet multiplayer aren't really valid areas to innovate in.  Studies have shown that people who appreciate these elements of video games tend to be really stupid and also smell bad.

Really though, sarcasm aside, it seems to me that A) good games are hard to make, B) innovative games that work are hard to make, and C) professional-quality games are expensive, and therefore financially risky to make.  Those things considered, I actually think that we do see a pretty decent amount of creative, innovative stuff coming out.  Yes, it's not even close to ideal, but until some key things about game development change (like the associated costs), I think that it's unrealistic to expect a lot more.

Though that's not to say that people like us shouldn't keep up the pressure to innovate.

Of course I don't expect every game made to be a brilliant and shining example of human achievement.  I just wish that we'd have more than one come along every five years or so.  That's not too much to ask for, is it?

The point is, once a game that is truly innovative and fun and wonderful and is the Sgt. Pepper's of gaming then the inherent nature of the industry will spawn a million copycat designs.  If a fraction of those copycat games are as good as the model from which they're drawn, then presto - the industry has changed and you've got a whole new ballgame.

Check out this indie game "Gish" I downloaded for $20.  I feel good about this cuz:

http://www.chroniclogic.com/gish/

1) supports the lil guy
2) the game is really cool
3) it's $20 instead of $50

I admit I too got suckered into Halo2 (liked it), GTA:SA (also liked it), but haven't wanted to deal with HL2's Steam nonsense enough to throw down the $50.

I too am a sucker, Mr. Gilbert. I bought the "Gold package" of HL2 online. I am already finished with the game, and have yet to receive my package in the mail. HL2 did have some stuff going for it, but it was a revolutionary game. Just evolutionary. Nothing new that I haven't seen before, in previous games. Plus after 5 years of waiting, we find out that the developers took out a lot of stuff that was supposed to be in the "finished game".

Personally, it looks like a rushed product(even though it took 5 years), just like Ultima Ascension was for Richard Garriott(Lord British).

And of course, no disrespect to Ron, but most of our erstwhile host's games are/were hardly innovative. Every graphic adventure ever made by LucasArts was basically Maniac Mansion with better graphics and neater puzzles. But, hey, we all enjoyed playing them, and had a bloody laugh. I'm sure had blogs been around in 199whateveritwas some 1980's arcade designer type would've been posting an embittered muse on the lack of innovation in the gaming industry and the undeserved hype being lauded on sequels the day Monkey Island 2 came out...:)

/troll

If you want a creativly awesome game for this season, get a copy of Paper Mario 2: The Thousand Year Door for the Gamecube.

The Gamecube the most creative system there is.

Want a popular, innovative game?

Katamari Damacy.

I'm tellin' yah all, they should never make more then one or possibly two games in a series, it always kills it.

I'm a big fan of trilogies.  Done right, they can provide a ubber three act arch over the whole story/game that can mirror the smaller arches taking place in each story/game.

It's why The Empire Strikes back is so dark and meandering.  It's the second act.  It's supposed to be.

Mario 3 and Zelda 3 were both of those series' repsective high points.

At least play WoW... It's a work of art... Gameplay, story, graphics, dynamic... And it's the kind of game that even if you just want to play for 30 min or 1hour (not my case, lol), it's still rewarding and enjoyable... Really worth it!!!

Meh.  WoW is still just an mmog, and the art style isn't THAT refreshing if you've played Warcraft 3.

As for trilogies - yeah, [i]when they're done right[i].  The original Star Wars trilogy was a good example of doing things right.  The Matrix "trilogy" is an example of doing things horribly, horribly wrong.

I wish we could have seen a proper Monkey Island trilogy, although Curse was fun enough in its own right, there was still a big disconnect from Monkey 2.

That said, I think a trilogy really needs to be written as a trilogy from the get-go.  There's really very little room for making one game/movie/book/whatever and leaving it open for a nebulous "sequel" if you want to try and stretch it out into a trilogy.  Why?  Because a trilogy is a three act play....done in three plays, so to speak.  Yes, each one needs a beginning, middle, and end - but each one needs to be part of the whole narrative.  Empire being so dark and meandering and, in the end, depressing is because it was truly the second act of the story arc - where everything traditionally goes wrong for the hero(es).

I don't think I've seen a real trilogy in gaming yet.  The closest thing that could come to it would be the Ultima series, IV - VI was, I suppose, a trilogy of sorts, as was VII-IX.  I think 7-9 would have been a better trilogy had Origin not sold to EA in the middle of working on VII, with Garriot leaving after 8.  Ah well, so died another industry staple.  C'est la vie.

Hooray for my inept tagging abilities!

Well, a lot of the old-skool Apogee games were trilogies of a sort - for four or five years all their games were delivered as 'trilogies' of three episodes, one distributed free as shareware, the other two you get when you register. Doom, Wolf3D, Commander Keen, Crystal Caves, the original Duke Nukem, Wacky Wheels, Halloween Harry (aka Alien Carnage)...all trilogies in this sense. :). Some of them also made a reasonable crack at writing stories in proper trilogy fashion, too - Commander Keen pretty much manages it, though of course it's a fairly lame story in the first place.

in case anyone was about to nitpick, I know there's 6 episodes of Wolf3D. There were only 3 at first, though. The other 3 came afterwards. I've got every version of the shareware and registered Wolf, I know. :)

WoW is the first MMO designed as a game first instead of business model first.  It's great fun and people shouldn't miss out.  The other games (most especially Half Life 2) can take a walk....

I'd argue that City of Heroes was the first mmog designed to maximize player fun rather than publisher profit (which, of course, only served to increase the latter more than the reverse business model would have, so everybody wins.)  Besides, EQ2 and WoW are so incredibly similiar in almost every area, to proclaim one or the other as the first anything is just a tad silly.  They both play almost identically, with EQ2 edging in a bit more depth at the expense of traditional mmog traps of complexity, while WoW keeps a faster pace and is much more attractive to the "casual" gamer.  They're both fine games that must have both been reading the same "What to do in the next generation of mmogs" articles, since they both have done so many things so much the same.

A lot of the sentiment I read in this thread is sheer wankery for wankery's sake. It reeks of those comments on 1up.com's comment threads for games that haven't been released yet. You know, the ones by L3wftBa11 who gave Halo 2 zero out of ten scorewise and wrote "HALO SUX CAUZE XBOX SUX11! SONNY WAS IN THE INTUSTRY LONGER THAN, MICROSOFT (bill gate's dick is micro soft LOLZ) FACT: PS WILL MAKE XCOCKS THERE BITCHEZ!!!!!!!!!! WEST SIDE!!! SHIT PISS TWAT HALO ASS......................... RFLOL"

It seems you're not a 1337 gamer until you hate games just because.

Well, up yours!

Here here.

Of course, you know your art form is picking up steam when you get the Indier Than Thou crowd...

Um, ok.

Personally, I don't hate games "just because" - and I actually hate only a handful of games.  Of the games originally listed, I played them all and found something to like in each of them.  However, in some of them, there was a lot more that I just didn't like.  Still, I try and take the good and bad in every game and see who is doing what.

The round of sequels this year followed the "if it ani't broke, don't fix it" method of development, meaning that Halo 2 is pretty much Halo 1 and likewise for Half Life 2.  I think HL2 brought a little more novelty to the table than Halo2 with its inclusion of physics and Valve's capacity for designing believable settings to run around in.  Sadly, the physics weren't integrated into that believable world in any really interesting way but were used in obvious places where scripting could have performed the same task.  Halo 2 was great when it was on Earth and on-message considering its marketing, but those levels were short and few and it eventually just morphed back into Halo 1, only with a really, really bad ending.

San Adreas follows the same line of reasoning, but with a dose of "more is better" added to the "if it ain't broke" philosophy.  This time there are three big cities and tons of countryside to roam around in - and the good part is there's almost always something to do in these vast expanses of area.  The drawbacks to GTA:SA are the same as the drawbacks to GTA3 and GTA:VC - the non-driving game is poorly implemented, and the decision to set it in the very-close-to-home-for-many-people 90's era gangbanging setting put many people off that would have otherwise given the game a go.  Rockstar did try to sprinkle in a little novelty with the Fable-esque crafting of the main character and, in my opinion, succeeded much more strongly than Fable did with its efforts.

World of Warcraft, together with Everquest 2, represent the latest generation of mmorpgs and both fix a lot of the problems traditinally associated with the genre.  I've played both, and I think EQ2 has the deeper game with more staying power (for me) whilst WoW has instant appeal and immediate gratification in a fast paced, easy-to-play universe.  I see WoW as Diablo and EQ2 as Gothic.  Both are fine games, both bring many improvements to the genre, but one is going to appeal to one type of player and the other to another.

My desire for innovation in games and for gaming as a whole to mature to a new level of sophistication doesn't mean I'm so jaded that I just dismiss any game that doesn't meet my wishlist.

The very fact that these games fall neatly into genres is sign enough that they are not uberinventive. I also felt that Half-Life 2 was just Half-Life 1 with awesomer graphics and physics; it genuinely felt old-timey at times, but with that old-timeiness came a very smooth ride devoid of gimmicks -- which is a good thing. The franchise reinvented itself just as much as an established writer would reinvent him or herself between two books. Pollock was reviled by the art community when he totally changed his style after his trademark splotches, which led to his deterioration. The new paintings weren't bad, they just weren't what people were expecting and he was hated for it.

Halo2 was just an embarrassment as far as it being literally more of the same. San Andreas is somewhere in between. Still, they're all good games. Not revolutionary, but strong at what they do.

I would just like to point out that Deus Ex, which you, UncleJeet, said was "the last truly innovative game", could easily be viewed as "more of the same" when you consider that it was preceded by games like Thief, System Shock and its sequel, the Ultima Underground games, Daggerfall, and Quake/Unreal/Whatever.  What did Deus Ex bring that wasn't in any of these games?  Aside from a load of refinements, a handful of neat ideas, and the modern/cyberpunk trappings, nothing so far as I can tell.  I think that they absolutely adopted an approach of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" in many cases.  I wouldn't consider it a "truly innovative game", but rather a virtuoso realization of what Warren Spector & co had been doing for the past eight years.  Does that make Deus Ex any less of a great game?  Not to me.  

Ironically, I think there are probably a lot of people who wish that Harvey Smith and Ion Storm had adopted a similar "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" approach to Deus Ex: Invisible War.  There's a fine example of ambition to create something innovative gone wrong.  I think that they were precisely trying to create a game that couldn't be criticized for being "more of the same", but reality, being the bitch that it is, clamped down hard.

By the way, to those who loathe sequelitis, I think that some solace can probably be found in that, when you look at history, rather few franchises reach a third game without having some serious reconstructive surgery done.  It seems like you usually get the first game, and if it does well, there's the inevitable sequel, often done with the exact same engine and many of the same resources.  After that point though, it seems like franchises often fall into something of a torpor, and if they get picked up again, it's by a new team or it's using a new engine or it's moving in a new direction.  To name just a few: Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Monkey Island, Warcraft, Gothic, Baldur's Gate, Quake, Doom, Jagged Alliance, Age of Empires, GTA... the list could go on and on and on.  So at least there's that.  Perhaps when Halo 3 comes around it'll actually be something interesting and fresh.

Gothic? There are three games in the Gothic series?

This sortof ties into what we're talking about: why did I love the first Gothic game as much as I hated the second one?

The third one has just been officially announced I believe, and will be done on a new engine.  RPGdot.com has a pretty good amount of news on the Gothic series, if you wanna check that out.  

Heh, I can't speak for you of course, but I prefer the first one over the second because the second game runs like ass on my computer.  The world's just too big for my measly 256 mbs of RAM.

How many ways could you work around a problem or through a level in Thief?  System Shock?  Daggerfall?  (Not that I think Daggerfall falls at all into the same category.  Freedom of exploration is not really the issue here.)  What Deus Ex did that neither Thief nor System Shock managed was to truly offer the player many, many different ways to complete a task and work through a level and the game as a whole.  It offered an unequaled illusion of complete freedom (when, in reality, the game was very linear - but what something is may not always be as important as is how something is perceived), unparalleled interaction with the environment, and just brought the whole package together.

Like I said earlier, doing something really great for a small niche does not equal success.  Many people tired of Thief's one-shot approach to playing the game, that being stealth.  System Shock 2, (much moreso than 1) allowed a slight variation on how one approached combat, but it still came down to combat.  Deus Ex allowed you to play out the whole game with stealth, typical FPS action, hacking, etc, or you could choose to sneak your way through just one level, or fight your way through just one part of one level then switch to stealth.  It was this sort of freedom of choice of approach that made Deus Ex the most successfully innovative game to date.

Actually, Thief gave you quite a few options, most of which you ascribe to Deus Ex. Maybe you should try it again sometime. It is a chore to get it to work on newer machines, but it is not impossible.

The MMORPG is the most damaging genre to ever plague the gaming industry. Every single one that has been released (including WoW) features no real plot. No real reason for doing what you're doing.

When you play D&D (pen and paper) do you kill monsters (annoyingly referred to as MOBs in MMOs) for the sole sake of xp? No. You kill them because they are in front of you, blocking your path (physically or story-wise).

This concept of killing for the sole purpose of leveling (or for pathetic excuses for quests in the case of WoW) is just sad.

What happened to story telling?

I've played all three Thief cames multiple times, and really the only options open to you are: kill guards or knock out guards.  Every now and then you can try and distract them, but that's about it.

I love the Thief games, don't get me wrong.  But they simply did not have near the level of interaction and freedom that Deus Ex gave you.

Similarly, in Deus Ex, your only options are to kill the bad guys or tranquilize the bad guys. 'Tis arbitrary. I'm not agreeing with you here.

Kill the bad guys?  Ok, how?  With melee weapons?  With a silenced rifle (which you'd have to have spent skill point in to use effectively?)?  Maybe you set up a trap for them with some LAMs?  Maybe you just have a good old fashioned pistol shootout, or maybe you used a rocket and blow up as many as you can.  A grenade, perhaps?  What if some of them are cyborgs or robots?  You're going to need an EMP if you have one.

Knock out the bad guys?  Ok, how?  Use the tranquilizer dart from the crossbow?  Or maybe sneak up on them and, if you have enough melee skill, you knock them out with a baton?  Or maybe you just stun them with the stun gun and run past, or knock them out whilst they quiver.

Now for the options you left out.

Use the environment.  Use air ducts, use boxes and barrels to gain access to higher ground.  Maybe use your Speed enhancment, if you installed an upgraded it, to just run past the bad guys as a blur.  What about all the cameras and bots and turrets?  Hrmm, maybe you use your enhancement and make yourself invisible to electronics - but what if you don't have the enhancement, or haven't upgraded it enough?  Maybe you can hack a security terminal and shut them down?  Or maybe you can hack a bot and turn it on its masters.

It's possible to not kill or stun anyone in most of the levels.  You just have to use the skills of your character, based on how you've designed him, and the environment.  Sometimes you use the bad guys against themselves.  Sometimes you turn their technology on them or at least make it work with you.  Sometimes you rely on brute strength, sometimes on pure stealth, and others on pure electronic wizardry.

Clearly, Deus Ex presented the player with a much great range of choice in how to play the game than Thief did.  Thief was, and still is, great at what it does - stealth gameplay.  Beyond that, there's not much room for improvisation by the player.  The good thing about that, though, is the stealth game is spot-on accurate and is as good as it could possibly be because of the focus.

"It's possible to not kill or stun anyone in most of the levels.  You just have to use the skills of your character, based on how you've designed him, and the environment.  Sometimes you use the bad guys against themselves.  Sometimes you turn their technology on them or at least make it work with you."

oddly enough, that much of the paragraph applies equally to Doom. Discounting boss levels, there is one level in the original Doom (E4M6) and three in Doom2 (MAP02, MAP17, MAP26) that have not been completed 'pacifist' style (never firing a weapon in such a way as to cause harm to a monster). This often entails making the monsters fight each other. As for technology, well, sometimes you can crush 'em under crushing ceilings, how about that? :)

Deus Ex? Innovation? Pfah! :D

The lack of story based motivation is slowly changing in mmorpgs, and I suspect we'll see something grand very soon.  I'm putting a lot of faith into Richard Garriot's upcoming Tabula Rasa mmorpg.  It really sounds like it's a single player game in a massively multiplayer universe.

Actually TorynFarr in WoW you don't get much XP from killing "Creeps" (monsters)... Someone that goes around just killing won't level up much... XP is obtained mostly through quests... So there's a purpose in killing them... I agree that killing for killing sake is boring (that's why I don't like most FPS... but Half Life 2 is great btw!) And quests in WoW are great... Lots of them refer to events of the previous WarCraft games...

Ron, to answer your point about trilogies, I like them if the story was written like that. Where like with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings  they were written to be in three parts. Not like Halo, or Half-Life, where after they got big the desided to make another one and had to write a whole new story for it.

Yeah about that I've actually bought the Half Life 2 and Half Life: Source package thing. And as the Brazillian said back there even if you already have games like Counter strike or earlier Half Life games it still takes ages to install on your computer. After that as soon as you get into the bloody game throughout the game its fairly easy and it's not like any of the AMAZING puzzles are that hard infact the first one is pushing a bloody box to jump through a window. And several other whome which are similiar. I'm telling you these puzzles are mind benders :P Heh. Oh and excuse the grammar too, I'm not brazillian. It's just like 1 in the morning :)

Well said

PONG ANYONE?

if you already bought them, the bad thing is done. ea games or valve don´t matter if you PLAY them.