Show Posts
451
Nintendo Gaming / RE:Was anyone else disappointed by E3 this year?
« on: July 17, 2007, 01:36:24 PM »Quote
Again the assumption that hardcore gamers like the same sh!t again and again. I hate repetitive stale crap. Both Nintendo and their diehard supporters think that a hardcore gamer just likes stale sequels.
Quote
I don't think so because from a gamer perspective I don't see a response to the problem. Nintendo found a problem and are now avoiding it by targeting a different group. It's like if the NHL's response to people losing interest in hockey was to become a handball league.
Part of the issue is that the terms 'hardcore' gaming and 'hardcore' gamers have become so bastardized that they really aren't good for the industry anymore. What's a stereotypically hardcore game? Something set during WWII? Science-fiction based FPSes? Real-time strategy games? Guess which consoles became inextricably associated with those types of games? First the XBox, and now PS3 is desperately following suit. Most 'hardcore gamers' don't think of games like Zelda necessarily as hardcore (although in the best situations they have a whole lot of respect for those games). They think of teenage boys, professional gamers, people playing games like Resistance, Halo 2...maybe if you look at PCs you get Counterstrike and HL2. What games are played for money on a professional level? XBox-type games! What games were played at WCG last year? Counterstrike, Need for Speed, Starcraft, Quake 4. These are all games that almost all people would associate more closely with the XBox than with the GameCube or the Wii. Now you have 'hardcore' gamers and self-proclaimed/wannabe 'hardcore' gamers who have bought into the general mindset that those games represent. And there are lots of true/faux 'hardcore' gamers- just look at the sales numbers of the games I mentioned before.
Now, where is all the innovation going towards when it comes to the 'hardcore game'? Better technology. Better graphics. Look at the XBox and PS3's focus on hardware, as well as Microsoft's ballyhooed new DirectX10. Why did Sony and Microsoft spend hundreds of dollars per machine on the latest hardware? Not for 'innovative experiences' or things like better AI or better environments, but because they wanted more polygons. Look at all the 'hardcore' games released recently or in the pipeline: Halo 3, Killzone 2, Gears of War, UT3...do any of those games really innovate even within their genres? Is Halo 3 bringing anything really new to the FPS genre that wasn't present in Halo 2? Do any of these games really do anything revolutionary besides produce new graphics? To a 'hardcore gamer', it's these sort of things that comprise innovation.
Yes, Nintendo does sequels. They also do gamer's innovation, on a good day. But their sort of innovation isn't the 'innovation' that hardcore gamers take kindly to.
What about Smash Bros? Is that a 'gamer's game'? It's certainly not a non-game. Although it might be slightly more intuitive than a conventional fighting game, it's definitely not something Grandma's going to pick up one day and immediately become engrossed. And yet, when it first came out, a lot of people were not willing to consider it a 'real' fighting game. They called it things like a 'fighting platformer' or other nonsense, but because there weren't 10-button combos and the only way to die was equivalent to a 'ring out' it wasn't a real fighting game. But both games in the Smash Bros series take as much skill to play well (they have as much depth) as any 'respectable' fighter. Still, Smash Bros versus...say, Halo 2 in terms of generally perceived 'hardcoreness'?
Nintendo's dilemma is as such. The 'hardcore' gaming market is already 'lost' to them. Competing on the basis of primarily hardware performance is a Faustian proposition, as MS and Sony have shown. When they do release games that innovate within their genres, people might accept them as good on their own merits, but not 'hardcore' enough to be compared directly to the true 'hardcore' pantheon. Yeah, there's a distinct Mario-Zelda-Metroid-Smash-et al 'Nintendo hardcore', but it's not exactly growing any bigger. Nintendo's not going to attract all those self-proclaimed 'hardcore' and 'hardcore' wannabes by working with them on their own terms. Where else are they going to get new customers?
