Saturday Soapbox: In Defense Of Crappy Games
Saturday 11 July 2009 @ 10:12 pm | By Ivan 'Nahu' Lozano 9 Comments
As the years go by and I become older I find myself feeling like there are very few good games out there, nothing worth playing for months at a time. Certainly not like when I was a kid. Man, even the NES had so many awesome games. Sure the mainstays like Mario, Zelda, Castlevania and all those others, but there was also the TMNT games, the Felix the Cat game, that one Flintstones game and Top Gun! Oh man Top Gun was good! So many memories. They don’t make so many good games games anymore.
Except they do.
In reality many of the games we enjoyed when we were kids were franchise garbage. Recycled ideas with a familiar face on the box. Hell, most plataformers were pretty much all the same and yet we still talk of the near death of the genre as if it had been very alive in the first place.
Most of us today wouldn’t be caught buying many franchise games, even if we love the franchise. The Wanted game, those Harry Potter games, even the Naruto (*shudder*) games if you’re into that. You most likely know they will suck and cast them aside for your little brother or nephew to buy. We’re discerning gamers, we know better, we’re hardcore.
But these new franchise games, they aren’t that much different from so many of the games we loved in years past. In fact most of them are pretty entertaining, at least entertaining enough. The young ones still buy them and I bet in 10-15 years they’ll be reminiscing about how much fun they had with those.
It’s not gaming that has changed, we’ve changed. We’re old and bitter more mature and complex, we look for different stimulus in entertainment and frankly it’s quite hard to find it. The best the industry has been able to give us are murder simulators in twenty-seven thousand shades of brown. Gaming hasn’t changed, we have.
You go to your local game shop and look at all that shovelware on the shelves and think how awful it is, while in fact it’s much better than 10 years ago. You can bet your ass no sane 20+ year old person would have found the Felix the Cat game very entertaining, but my 8 year old self sure did! I thought it was one of the best games ever! At least we now have options, you can play one of the 30 shovelware titles or one of the 8 current ‘bald-man carrying guns’ games of the season.
There’s a need for a different kind of games, maybe the technology isn’t ready yet, maybe there simply hasn’t been a brilliant enough idea to show us what we could do. Gaming right now is probably comparable to the last years of silent movies. We can only hope gaming evolves soon enough, before we start outgrowing violence simulators.
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Abraham 'Velcor' Duarte
David 'KidKobun' Bruno
Ivan 'Nahu' Lozano
Random J
Sol
I prefer the old and bitter comment.
Well, there’s always quirky indie games from the east and west to tickle our imaginations. There are good games out there. It’s just that while we did grow older, many of us are looking in the same place.
My sentiments exactly. I don’t know how many hours I wasted playing shovelware and franchise games when I was younger, simply because it was amusing and entertaining. God, they were full of glitches and bad programming. Of course, my gaming library consisted of a handful of titles, so I spent all my time exploring every nook and crannie, finding every exploit I can.
I remember the days of those good olf franchise games. I could remember myself sitting down and playing Goof Troop for hours on end. Makes me wonder if there are any good franchise games anymore or if they really just suck =/
Some of those shovelware and franchise games were good enough. I am sure some of them, if not all, are ment for the lil’ kids around the household (little cousins, nephews, the child of a co-worker, and sometimes your inner child) and as long as there is a certain market that will purchase it, the franchise games will continue comming. Though, some were better than others. If you compare the Warlock game vs the Universal Soldier game, the comparison will be evident, specially since Universal Soldier was a rebranding of Turrican II.
To be honest, if the PSP Transformers game was good enough, i would get it, alas, it is NOT. . . come one, the Transformers sprites are not big enough!
Great article!
When you were younger, everything was ‘cool’. But as you mature so does your taste in games. Its common sense with everything.
You’ll always have a soft spot in your heart for some older games (that you may even remember being better then they actually are), but that’s what your childhood is all about (think back to alot of the things you liked. then try watching/doing them now)
Anyways, there’s alot of ‘franchise’ games, that i honestly give a chance. And they sometimes turn out to be pretty decent. The Naruto games definately come to mind… hell, i’m not even much of a fan of the show. But most of the games i’ve played are pretty solid (the ps2 ultimate ninja games, the 360 ones, and even the ps3 one)
Most people immediately write them off as garbage, and don’t even give them a chance. But in the end, it’s their own loss :p
Naruto Ultimate Ninja Heroes was pretty good :D
i spent countless hour in front of them crappy games back in the day… and i must confes that at 29, pushing 30 i still break out the emulator (my nes was always a loaner… owned from snes and beyond.. and all the nintendo portables (virtual boy was NOT portable >.>) and still play them games
and still i fond them more entertaining than the current shovelware titles…
and i think that the reason is that the formula was simple…
now even the shovelware titles are trying to be complex… and failing badly at it…
now if you excuse me i gotta go play Duck Tales for the 87234^237497.18 time o.-
Oh Duck Tales. Back in the day when everything Capcom crapped out was pure gold! One of my favorites was Chip N Dale: Rescue Rangers on the NES. I still have some of the music from that game randomly creep into my brain :p
I had the opportunity to play Chip & Dale on the NES with one of my childhood friends almost everyday for so long but, since we were like 7 or 8 year old, we never got to beat the last boss.
Today it would be an effortless victory but the memory stays fresh in a special place in my 8-bit heart.