Joey said:
See, Joey summed it up perfectly.
For 30 years, Mario has been leaping on the heads of crap enemies and getting chomped by plants with teeth.
We have Super Mario World on the SNES in the living room, and Minor_Furie bought Super Mario Bros 3 for the Virtual Console on the Wii. Both are supposed to be "the height of gameplay", but to me (who doesn't like platform games) - there's no difference between them and any other game of that type.
Yet dozens of years after release, we're still supposed to revere the Mario games as God-like. I find them dull and repetitive.
Super Mario 64? Yes, it gave us a whole ruck of equally dull and dreadful 3-D platform/Adventure games! Nice!
Tastes differ, and what is gameplay cream to one person is cloying and sickly to another.
The overall point is... If you have plot driven gameplay, you become involved in the characters and worlds created. Due to the time taken to create worlds in things like FPS, you end up with a very short game. Whereas in Mario, it may take you weeks, or months to complete - an FPS may take from a few hours to a couple of days.
It's just that the limitations on development mean the FPS type of games can't give as much. So, the player is left "wanting more". That means there has to be a quick sequel to feed the player's desire to keep on playing.
I don't know if you get what I mean? If you like jumping on the heads of crap enemies, then you get a LOT of it in a Mario game, many hours worth of it. If you like blowing the heads off aliens and living as a character through a story, then you can do it, but in much smaller doses - so you need more versions of that to be produced.
The thing that sticks out here are things like the Fifa and Madden games (however many there may have been, I don't care, I don't follow them at all
).
When was the last time that any of these games offered anything revolutionary? Surely a game of football is a game of football? If you love playing matches on Fifa '08. then what is Fifa '09 really offering you? Or Fifa '10? Updates to club details? Well, couldn't that just be sold as DLC???
I have the same issue with the Guitar Hero games. They're all essentially just the same, but you have a different set of songs. Well, for £40, you get 70 songs. You will know and like maybe 10 of them. Another 20 or 30 you may have heard of but don't give a stuff about. The last 30 you haven't a clue about.
Why not just buy one game and then buy the songs you like which are released as DLC? £40 will get you 40 tracks more or less of songs you actually love!
It's why Rock band aren't making a Rock Band III, but are trying to head out in different directions. Yet again though, the public are pouring money into GH 5 - I just think that sometimes people have their brains removed when they enter a games shop...
Erm, having said that, I bough GH: World Tour yesterday :lol: It was a tenner though, and has at least ten tracks I like. So it was worth the money. It's odd playing GH after playing Rock Band for so long. I hate the style and presentation of GH. It's
too cheesy and makes my skin crawl. The guitar is very "GH" too. Set patterns repeated. It may be realistic, but there's a nudge of diversity in Rock Band that makes it more interesting to play the guitar part on Rock Band.