</grindspire>

this is expected of any medium as it gets more and more mainstream, but even so it is a shame to see creativity go down the pan as it were.

But take a look at games released/in development right now and there are rays of light passing through the heavy cloud of sequels and cashins.

Stalker: Shadow of chernobyl
Far Cry.
Evil Genius & blue vault

Eventually Im sure the situation will be like modern cinema, block busters & sequels you go to hollywood, for more in depth & original films you look elsewhere, The gaming industry might take on this guise in some way or another.

Not to say that sequels & licences are bad, its just that typically developers take the easy route with them, ie. copying a film exactly without doing anything new. Hopefully in the future dev houses will take the world of the film/licence and build a completely new story/game around that which can be very compelling and cool if done right. 

Hopefully in the future dev houses will take the world of the film/licence and build a completely new story/game around that which can be very compelling and cool if done right.

See: FAKK2. 

there are many examples out there already, but it can be taken further.

avp / avp2 is also a good example of taking established licences (in this case films & comics) and making some amazing games out of them while at the same time being creative. 

"The Hollywood film industry is facing a hardening of the creative arteries as aging movie goers' tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and films based on books, industry participants said this week.

With more and more titles chasing the success of their predecessors and content owners digging deep into their libraries to tap older material for quick fail-proof conversion into motion pictures, the industry is faced with a question more serious than rhetorical: What's new?"

---

to summarize. old news. people are constantly up in arms about this. and they're constantly knocking down a door that's been wide open for the last ten-fifteen, maybe twenty, years. I remember playing Platoon on my next door neighboors C64, it was what a gazillion years ago? I've played some fine-as-fuck games since, many of them original ones. and they seem to keep on coming too. you can all bet your saggy asses that fifteen years ago there was a bunch of rotund geek afficionados hogging their poor parents' phone-line with their single-digit baud modems, all but tripping over their own snickers-stained fingers trumphing themselves in spelling the doom for the budding video game culture.

so, boring. seen it. get the fuck off my internet. 

Rawr

I've always wanted to see FPS' that strayed from human-vs-alien/demon type stuff and we got it - Farcry, and um... other games I've never gotten the chance to play yet. 

great post wrath. =) 

American McGee should be president of the entire time continuum, John Carmack's brain should be implanted into a glass jar and kept alive hooked up to a super computer, and genius game-designer John Romero should make a movie-to-game adaptation of Gigli. Crisis averted. 

I had a film studies prof I hated who once called that whole sequel thing "the industry consuming its own flesh." I can only hope she heard that from someone else to justify my dislike of her. 

look at Raven Software. perfect example. Sure they are really good at making games, but when's the last time they made something original and it didn't bomb? that would be HERETIC ONE.

I actually hate games based on movies, I think it's a stupid idea until they can actually replicate the movie's actual environments. 

...this is the same old guff that has been going around since the game industry began and will keep going around as long as there are new people being born or people with poor memories getting "shocked" by the same news they read two years ago.

A more accurate article would have read...

"The Journalism industry is facing a hardening of the creative arteries as low quality hacks are forced to recycle old news on a disturbingly regular basis in order to try and fill the huge blank spaces in their publications that could only otherwise be filled by doing some proper hard thinking, hard research and hard work..." 

I thought Hexen was like a billion times better that Heretic, Hexen 2 sucked though. But Raven does hardly ever make anything "original." DarkForces sequels and Quake sequels seems to be it lately. Oh, and that X men game. 

Hexen, Hexen II and Heretic II were all good, but they were *all* based on Heretic. Their new games are based on Soldier of Fortune, Star Wars, Star Trek, Quake, etc. They tried making their own original games in the form of Mageslayer and some other game using the same engine, but they bombed as far as I know. I'm sure they could make an original game that would work if they wanted to, but Activision who own their asses, who probably not let them due to the greater risk.

And I would argue that today's game industry IS more derivative and unoriginal than in the past, simply because now you need a publisher to fund you and you have to convince them that your game will sell beforehand, rather than the days of a bunch of people throwing a game together in under a year. Of course, online development and modding is an exception to this. 

I still can't believe Raven is here in Wisconsin (Madison)... 

I still want Strife II, dammit. 

Diablo III

Stalker-Shadow of Chernobyl looks really interesting. Perhaps it and Far Cry are indicators of a turn towards whole environments as opposed to linear level progression. 

Raven is my best hope of getting into the games industry, it's only an hour from here in Milwaukee, I won't have to move too far (as opposed to Moving to Texas for every other game company!) but alas - they rarely hire and they don't have internships! I wanted to visit them on my campus tour of UW Madison but I didn't have time :( 

be nice to work there probably.

I had no idea you were in Milwaukee... I'm in Appleton. 

is an admin for a DoD server, there's a few guys who play there that live in appleton. 

I just got hired at Raven, and am now madly dealing with moving.

I'm pretty pleased about it. :)

It makes me feel funny in my pantal region.

[/derail]

And wrath's post is dead-on. People have been bitching about how "everythings always the same old shit" since the dawn of time. 

Different Decade 

when i'm done with college and if you still work there put in a good word for me, even though you don't know who i am 

Well, at least someone's gone back and done a proper re-hashing of old gameplay mechanics. This game is fun as hell, even with the trite killing zombies and devils action. It's just the sheer over-the-topness that they recaptured of the older games, like Doom1 :) 

It's all about where you look. And if you're looking for original games or commentary, why in the world would you start at yahoo, or cnn? :p
anyway here's a quick few games that are topical, and diverge a bit from the norm:

http://www.quvu.net/interactivestory.net/
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/photos/EGW/
http://www.gmlb.com/games/crash.html
http://www.gmlb.com/games/arcadia.html
http://www.gamepro.com/sony/ps2/games/previews/34708.shtml
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=54797 

So have any of you know of or played any original games recently? It'd be interesting to see all the examples that demonstrate how wrong the article is.

http://experimental-gameplay.org/
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tf_e.html
http://www.mogimogi.com/mogi.php?language=en 

you know what? I finally skimmed the article, and have just found out it's not so much about unoriginal games being made, as it is about gamers not wanting them....

oh well, I can't really argue with that...