Thanks to some Internet and real life issues, I've been out of commission for a while. The same can be said of my PS2, sadly. It died on July 24th at roughly 11 PM. It is already missed. The week was already bad, thanks to this news about Persona 3 being delayed til' August. Obviously, there's always room for things to get worse.
Originally, this was intended to be a response to this article about Roger Ebert's position on videogames as artistic expression.
Thankfully, I realized that the Games-As-Art debate has been completely exhausted years before. So I canned the idea. My late PS2 gave me another one.
In your life as a gamer, you have had consoles stop working, for one reason or another, by your own doing or as the result of a manufacturing mishap. Hands thrown up in the air, perhaps even controllers in the air, cursing all the while. DREs. Brickings. Dead pixels. Red ring of death.
Do I have you cringing yet? If I don't, consider yourself lucky. You've dodged the bullet. Chances are, you've had a console die on you in a different way. How, you ask? Well, for example:
Dreamcast. PS1. Saturn.
This fate is a common one. The bigwigs decide when a console has overstayed its welcome on the market, and replace it with something newer and shinier and most importantly, more profitable. Sometimes, consoles that are six feet under come back, as you may already know. Take the Dreamcast, for example. Years after its official "death", games are still being ported over from arcade boards to everyone's favourite little white box.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. When a console breaks, it's shipped back, re-bought, and what-have-you. Obviously, that can't happen when a company stops supporting their console.
So who should step up to take their place?
Indie developers.
Face it, games these days are just way too expensive to make. What was once a solo effort, and cost about the equivalent to a day at the beach is now a multi-million dollar affair, with teams of hundreds working for years to realize their goal. So expensive that smaller development houses and publishers can't quite keep up, so they're left producing sub-standard, mediocre, third-string titles. The only way to make it as an independent in this business is to get yourself eaten by a bigger fish, and lose all control. (Rareware, the N64 goliath development studio that got absorbed comes to mind here...) So why not stop fighting against the current? Last I checked, all three next-gen consoles are backwards compatible. So is the Nintendo DS.
In other words, more developers should take advice from the big N and stop trying to compete directly with the competition, and once the stampede has passed, keep on panning for gold. Amazing, Earth-moving things can happen if you simply stop trying. Case-in-point: Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari in Japanese), arguably one of the best non-Metroid games to actually get the Metroid formula down perfectly. I bring it up for those who aren't aware: Cave Story is the work of one man. That's all. No million dollar studio. No artists. Just one bored Japanese salaryman, working for a programming company, programming in his spare time.
Must be a fluke, right?
Wrong.
Touhou games, Melty Blood, La Mulana, Radurgy, Kourous....The list goes on. All of these created by small, independent development teams. All excellent games. All from Japan.
Are our companies that afraid to take a gamble? Clearly, there's a market for these independent games here; all the titles up there have earned a place in our gamer "fringe". Games by small development houses have huge underground followings even today. Take the original Fallout games. Black Isle Studios, makers of Fallout and Fallout 2 were small by today's standards. The same is the case with all old PC RPGs. I've been playing a lot of Wizardry 8 lately, a game developed by small time Canadian developer Sirtech. So, what became of Black Isle and Sirtech? Well, that's the other half of the equation for indie developers. Unless backed by a big company, being niche will make you run out of cash very, very fast.
If things continue as they are, it will eventually be nearly impossible for anyone to be able to even fund a new project unless they're on the top profits-wise. Staying on the top profits-wise means sacrificing creativity and not taking risks.
That isn't to say we're doomed, quite the contrary. This generation has seen Nintendo's Virtual Console and Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade take the forefront, allowing small development companies to create original games readily available for mass consumption. That's the best way to make sure the little guys can stay in the game. They may not be our last hope or anything dramatic like that, but they will prevent us from a future wrought with sequels, sports games, and unimaginative drivel.
And that's a good thing.
Originally, this was intended to be a response to this article about Roger Ebert's position on videogames as artistic expression.
Thankfully, I realized that the Games-As-Art debate has been completely exhausted years before. So I canned the idea. My late PS2 gave me another one.
In your life as a gamer, you have had consoles stop working, for one reason or another, by your own doing or as the result of a manufacturing mishap. Hands thrown up in the air, perhaps even controllers in the air, cursing all the while. DREs. Brickings. Dead pixels. Red ring of death.
Do I have you cringing yet? If I don't, consider yourself lucky. You've dodged the bullet. Chances are, you've had a console die on you in a different way. How, you ask? Well, for example:
Dreamcast. PS1. Saturn.
This fate is a common one. The bigwigs decide when a console has overstayed its welcome on the market, and replace it with something newer and shinier and most importantly, more profitable. Sometimes, consoles that are six feet under come back, as you may already know. Take the Dreamcast, for example. Years after its official "death", games are still being ported over from arcade boards to everyone's favourite little white box.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. When a console breaks, it's shipped back, re-bought, and what-have-you. Obviously, that can't happen when a company stops supporting their console.
So who should step up to take their place?
Indie developers.
Face it, games these days are just way too expensive to make. What was once a solo effort, and cost about the equivalent to a day at the beach is now a multi-million dollar affair, with teams of hundreds working for years to realize their goal. So expensive that smaller development houses and publishers can't quite keep up, so they're left producing sub-standard, mediocre, third-string titles. The only way to make it as an independent in this business is to get yourself eaten by a bigger fish, and lose all control. (Rareware, the N64 goliath development studio that got absorbed comes to mind here...) So why not stop fighting against the current? Last I checked, all three next-gen consoles are backwards compatible. So is the Nintendo DS.
In other words, more developers should take advice from the big N and stop trying to compete directly with the competition, and once the stampede has passed, keep on panning for gold. Amazing, Earth-moving things can happen if you simply stop trying. Case-in-point: Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari in Japanese), arguably one of the best non-Metroid games to actually get the Metroid formula down perfectly. I bring it up for those who aren't aware: Cave Story is the work of one man. That's all. No million dollar studio. No artists. Just one bored Japanese salaryman, working for a programming company, programming in his spare time.
Must be a fluke, right?
Wrong.
Touhou games, Melty Blood, La Mulana, Radurgy, Kourous....The list goes on. All of these created by small, independent development teams. All excellent games. All from Japan.
Are our companies that afraid to take a gamble? Clearly, there's a market for these independent games here; all the titles up there have earned a place in our gamer "fringe". Games by small development houses have huge underground followings even today. Take the original Fallout games. Black Isle Studios, makers of Fallout and Fallout 2 were small by today's standards. The same is the case with all old PC RPGs. I've been playing a lot of Wizardry 8 lately, a game developed by small time Canadian developer Sirtech. So, what became of Black Isle and Sirtech? Well, that's the other half of the equation for indie developers. Unless backed by a big company, being niche will make you run out of cash very, very fast.
If things continue as they are, it will eventually be nearly impossible for anyone to be able to even fund a new project unless they're on the top profits-wise. Staying on the top profits-wise means sacrificing creativity and not taking risks.
That isn't to say we're doomed, quite the contrary. This generation has seen Nintendo's Virtual Console and Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade take the forefront, allowing small development companies to create original games readily available for mass consumption. That's the best way to make sure the little guys can stay in the game. They may not be our last hope or anything dramatic like that, but they will prevent us from a future wrought with sequels, sports games, and unimaginative drivel.
And that's a good thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment