I'm gonna take a brief break from celebrating Satoru Iwata's life. To be honest, I'm getting a little upset by the questionably timed articles proclaiming that the Wii U wasn't so bad after all, followed immediately by a flood of comments insisting that the Wii U WAS that bad, along with the usual tired fanboy spew about how the Xbox One and Playstation 4 are what gamers really want (definitive editions of games they already own...?) and that they pwn u 4ever noob.
Look, the media's sudden reversal on the Wii U strikes me as oddly convenient, too. I'm sure Satoru Iwata would have better appreciated a second, less critical look at the system if he had been alive to see it. However, the backlash against these articles is in immensely poor taste and demonstrates a level of hypocrisy only the most blindly loyal system advocates could ignore.
What was a common complaint about Nintendo? They release the same games over and over, right? Well, who's actually guilty of that in this console cycle? Nintendo has been trying new things with its properties (Yoshi's Woolly World) and creating entirely new ones (Splatoon). Meanwhile, Sony and Microsoft have been churning out definitive editions of games that were released just a couple of years ago and were already perfectly serviceable on last generation systems. Tomb Raider. Sleeping Dogs. The Last of Us. God of War. Prototype. Uncharted. Darksiders II. And the list goes on and on and on, because the gaming media hasn't given Sony and Microsoft the proper scrutiny for reheating their leftovers. We've heard a lot of slag about how these systems are more powerful than anything that has come before them. Well, where's the proof?!
We're seeing a lot of buyer's remorse from guilty game journalists in the wake of Satoru Iwata's demise. However, all that backpedaling wouldn't even have been necessary if they'd shown some objectivity in this console cycle. Maybe instead of hungrily licking your lips at every Nintendo failure while pumping constant undeserved hype into Microsoft and Sony's respective systems, you could... do your jobs? Just a thought.
Random observations on the classic gaming scene, courtesy of the former editor of The Gameroom Blitz.
Seriously. The PS3 and 360 had a lot of last gen ports too, but they weren't the majority of the library, usually were at least several years old by that point, and the HD updates made a much more significant difference.
ReplyDeleteNintendo may make a lot of sequels, but people always criticize them for that while ignoring that like 1/3rd of the retail games industry today is slightly different flavors of BANG BANGs.
But first person shooters don't count apparently. I dunno, it doesn't make any sense to me, either.
DeleteThis post just serves to remind me that I sincerely dislike a large portion of both the gaming population and the gaming media population. Bleh, I say :(
ReplyDeleteI'm with you, man. Gamers are, by and large, jerks.
DeleteEver since the original release of the PS4 and the Xone, my joke has been that there's no new games for next-gen. All of the NEW games kept getting delayed not just by weeks, but by months or into subsequent years, leaving the major publishers to fill the gaps with buggy and unfinished annualized products and next-gen ports of previous-gen games.
ReplyDeleteIt sometimes makes me wonder how ahead of the launches the publishers got the development kits. You'd think that even by now they'd stop releasing such poorly optimized and buggy software, or would have gotten their development pipelines in order, especially since they seem to willing to throw the only different architecture under the bus for basically no real reason. And yet it keeps happening!
While some outlets are starting to make a deal about this, you're right that the majority of the mainstream gaming media is either ignoring the hypocrisy, or don't care and want to buy into the prevailing narrative that there's nothing wrong with these systems and the Wii U was a total failure.
My joke started off as a simple joke, making fun of how a few of the originally announced frontrunning titles for the PS4 and the Xone were being delayed past launch (and even past the "launch window"). Now it's just a sad commentary about the state of "next gen".
Yup. I can't really comment on the development tools available to Xbox One and PS4 game publishers, but considering that both platforms are essentially mid-grade gaming PCs, it really shouldn't be that hard for them to make games for them.
DeleteI feel like the industry has painted itself in a corner with the next generation of systems. They can't afford to fully exploit the hardware, so they just serve up reruns of what's already available and cheaply produced indie titles. Why would I pay $300+ dollars for games I can already get on older systems and my PC? It's idiotic.