Extra Punctuation: Not All Sequels Suck
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
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Gotta love how some people have such a bug up their ass that Yahtzee can't even admit he's WRONG without a million people jumping up and down, wailing and gnashing their teeth. He has a point, as a general rule the sequel isn't as good as the original. There are exceptions but those make up the small minority compared to the vast amount of sucky sequels that exist.
Kinda drifted from sequels to indie developing toward the second page but a fun read none the less.
There's really a standard format for trilogies.. The first game is good but kind of a prototype, then for the second they know they've got a good audience for the franchise, and they expand upon it, sort of perfecting it. Then for the third game they feel they need to move into new territory, often working out quite unfavorably. However the rule for the third game has quite some exceptions.
I really liked this: "Better to rule in 16-bit than serve in 32, right?"
I agree entirely. I like games that know their technical limitations, and play to them, instead of trying so very hard to look pretty and realistic.
I'd rather play an 8-bit game that looks really good in 8-bit, than any Final Fantasy with it's "HOLY CRAP LOOK AT HOW AWESOME THE GRAPHICS ARE IN THIS CINEMATIC" that returns to horrendously blocky polygons. FFVII was fun when I first played it, but playing it now hurts my eyes...
Some of the best games for aesthetics that I played as a kid, were the games that just made old graphics a little bit better, instead of hopping on the new graphics bandwagon that everyone seemed to enjoy. I'll take my cartoony Megaman made 10+ years ago over any dirt-filter "realistic" shooter made less than a year ago, kthx.
I agree entirely. I like games that know their technical limitations, and play to them, instead of trying so very hard to look pretty and realistic.
I'd rather play an 8-bit game that looks really good in 8-bit, than any Final Fantasy with it's "HOLY CRAP LOOK AT HOW AWESOME THE GRAPHICS ARE IN THIS CINEMATIC" that returns to horrendously blocky polygons. FFVII was fun when I first played it, but playing it now hurts my eyes...
Some of the best games for aesthetics that I played as a kid, were the games that just made old graphics a little bit better, instead of hopping on the new graphics bandwagon that everyone seemed to enjoy. I'll take my cartoony Megaman made 10+ years ago over any dirt-filter "realistic" shooter made less than a year ago, kthx.
There's even at least one game dev studio that has the technical limitations incorporated into their philosophy. It naturally states that they always work in the reals of what is possible at the moment. That studio is "Irrational Games" by the way. Unlike that other studio (I'm talking to you, "3D Realms").Torrasque said:
I would go even further than that: always work in the realm of what your resources allow you to do. That's why my games will be in 2D. Unless I reach the AAA levels due to my very uncertain success, but the chances of that happening are about as big as me winning a lottery, so go figure.
Yeah and "Fallout 2" still looks just as good now as it did in '98, unlike "Zelda 64". I had just the same problem with it as Yahtzee did, even though I played through "Majora's Mask" in the time it was still new.
Funny though: have no prob playing "Metroid Prime" at the moment. It still looks quite nice, especially for almost a 10-year old game. I guess that's aesthetics for ya.
I grew up with Klik n Play (or however they spelled it) and The Games Factory. Both were pretty good tools for making 2D games: They had a fairly flexible event-driven engine with a bunch of prepackaged stuff for collisions and movement schemes, and you could make some decent games with it. It still had the problem that I didn't have any good ideas of what to do, but the examples they showed were neat.
It also had one really intuitive feature for programming the game: You could play through your incomplete game, and every time an event occurred that hadn't been programmed, it would pause the game and ask you what to do. So you could, for example, jump into spikes, then tell it that when you do that it should kill your character. Or you could shoot an enemy, and tell it that it should destroy the enemy and the bullets.
It also had one really intuitive feature for programming the game: You could play through your incomplete game, and every time an event occurred that hadn't been programmed, it would pause the game and ask you what to do. So you could, for example, jump into spikes, then tell it that when you do that it should kill your character. Or you could shoot an enemy, and tell it that it should destroy the enemy and the bullets.
The first half of the article was about how most sequels are just technological improvements on their predecessors, while the second half thinks up the idea of design software with a GUI as simplified as Windows.
To comment on the first half, isn't the whole point of a sequel just to be a continuation of its predecessor? If it flips the mechanics and overall gameplay of it, then it becomes a completely different game (think Banjo Tooie to Nuts and Bolts).
As for the second half, At the point when design software becomes that simplified, everyone would be making games, and if everyone made the games, who would play them? I don't know, maybe the select few who are too lazy to make their own games will play everyone elses, like me.
To comment on the first half, isn't the whole point of a sequel just to be a continuation of its predecessor? If it flips the mechanics and overall gameplay of it, then it becomes a completely different game (think Banjo Tooie to Nuts and Bolts).
As for the second half, At the point when design software becomes that simplified, everyone would be making games, and if everyone made the games, who would play them? I don't know, maybe the select few who are too lazy to make their own games will play everyone elses, like me.