Jeremy Parish writes a pretty good blog post on AAA games

[Himu]

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8968577&publicUserId=5379721

Man, that post yesterday sure makes it seem like I hate big or popular games or something! Yeah, that wasn't really my intent. Sure, I'm burned out on hype and tired of games that squander millions of dollars only to miss the point, but I can still enjoy a good blockbuster. My intent was to express my belief that those AAA titles are a single facet of gaming, and a part of a medium that is growing to leave them behind at that; yes, your core gamers are still going to eat them up, and they'll continue to dominate dormitories for decade to come. But dorms are no longer the sole provence of gaming, and I really hope the industry can come up with a comfortable midway point between the ultra-hyped big-budget games and the shovelware trash that seems to clog the Wii shelves. That's what has me intrigued about Dragon Quest X: I'm hoping it will pave the way to new, significant games on a Wii-sized budget.

That being said, I can't shake the feeling that the standard big games -- the ones that grace the covers of magazines and get the week-long exclusive previews on sites like this one -- are straying further and further from what makes gaming gaming. That's my complaint about Grand Theft Auto IV; I didn't get into the GTA series for its efforts to rip off -- er, "pastiche" -- the developers' favorite crime movie plotlines, but rather for all the freedom and playability in the spaces between the cutscenes. Unfortunately, GTAIV constantly undermines its own greatest strength by imposing someone else's idea of structure and dialogue on what should be a liberating adventure. The openness that defined earlier GTAs was discarded in favor of an uneven and infuriatingly self-contradictory plotline. For each thing the game's story does right it does several things wrong, and ultimately the shortcomings boil down to the developers using a video game as a stand-in for their frustrated Hollywood ambitions. (The same thing happened with Metal Gear Solid 4, which had the best action the series has ever seen...and the most infuriating cutscenes.) I feel like Rockstar lost sight of what made DMA's GTAs good, and maybe it shouldn't be a surprise: the man credited with GTA's original success, David Jones, headed off to Real-Time Worlds a while back. And, surprise surprise, the game he made there -- Crackdown -- encapsulates everything I loved about the older GTAs without the wanky gangster nonsense. As far as I'm concerned, Crackdown is GTAIV, and I'm hoping A.P.B. will be my GTAV.

But fortunately, there are plenty of big-budget games that get it right. Take Left 4 Dead for example. It isn't really a game that interests me (as I don't much care for multiplayer shooters and I find zombies boring), but it's great regardless. Why? Because it takes a Hollywood standard as a point of inspiration but then turns it into something intrinsically game-ish. Rather than trying to ape zombie movies, it uses that particular genre of film as a launch pad for an experience that could only be had in a video game. The point of the game isn't to mimic the appearance of a zombie film by forcing players to sit through 10-minute non-interactive zombie cinema sequences, but rather to drop several players together into the visceral, intense panic that the characters in a zombie film experience. It's a subtle difference, perhaps, but one that makes all the difference in the world. L4D players aren't watching their characters pantomime a movie, the players themselves are living the movie; I listen to my coworkers playing the game and hear them shouting corny zombie flick dialogue at one another with sincere anxiety in their voices. The game provides a premise, but the actual narrative varies from game to game, player to player, situation to situation. GTA used to be like that, before Rockstar decided it would rather impose its own ideas about how you should play their game on everyone. GTA III was rough as hell and buggy as an asylum mattress, but it rewarded creativity and inventiveness. Were only that true for its sequel.

A few people griped at me for praising Dragon Quest V's story while putting down GTAIV's. How dare I, etc. But don't take the comparison too seriously -- blogs like this are written off-the-cuff, which is why they're blogs and not editorials, you see. DQV came to mind because (a) a sequel was making news and (b) it's what I happened to be playing at the time. I could just as easily have said Ico, or Rez, or Super Metroid, or BioShock, or any of a multitude of games that present narrative as a function of gameplay rather than segregating it and making one feel like a punishing disincentive for the other the way GTAIV does. (And I don't really mean to pick on GTAIV; it just happened to be the breaking point at which I got sick of playing puffed-up, overhyped letdowns.)

A game like DQV (or Ico, or BioShock, or whatever) works while GTAIV leaves me cold because the former titles don't force their stories on me; their best parts are the experiential, quiet moments woven into the fabric of the gameplay. As much as I wanted to sympathize with Niko Bellic, I just couldn't; he began the game lamenting how tired and remorseful he was from years of killing...then promptly went about taking on missions in which he killed dozens of people in cold blood. Occasionally the game would offer a choice between killing a target or ignoring them, but those felt contrived and hollow after I'd gunned down dozens of other people in the course of the story missions. Meanwhile, the sandbox elements of the game were muted and compromised by the constant nagging phone calls from Niko's irritating pals. "Niko! It's your cousin! I know you're having fun doing silly jump off ramps and trying to see how many cars you can detonate with a single grenade, but if you don't take me to go look at big American titties I won't like you any more!" Ultimately, the story and game sat at odds with one another, rather than meshing smoothly. A real letdown.

Meanwhile: DQV stars a hero who never says a single word but who follows in his father's footsteps and whose story arc quietly reworks the usual clichés of the Dragon Quest concept. Unlike GTAIV, the game never stops and shouts "DO YOU SEE HOW DEEP AND MEANINGFUL THIS IS!" -- it lets you make your realizations for yourself, many of which stem from your familiarity with its predecessors and the resulting subversion of your expectations. I don't care what you think of Dragon Quest; that is good video game narrative, because it could only work in a game. Listening to your cousin's tearful backstory while driving across town to complete yet another "shoot some dude for a gang boss" mission...not so much. That's more akin to a Chris Claremont comic book page where a character explains a split-second action with a paragraph of text (referring to himself by name in the third person in the process): functional, but graceless and inelegant.

The problem with so many AAA games, like most AAA movies and major music releases and any commercial media created with a major budget funded by a publishing company that exists for the purpose of making money, is that...well, they're funded by a publishing company that exists for the purpose of making money. Executives get in the way. Producers have to worry about milestones and sales figures and whether or not that one really subtle story bit will be obvious enough to some guy in Minnesota who's trying to play the game with a few beers in his system and a noisy kid running around distracting him. Are there enough bullet points for the box? Do we need to tighten up the graphics on level three? Is the hero suitably badass? Ultimately, with so many concerned parties involved, the creative vision of the people involved in the game's conception ends up filtered, strained and reduced to an unrecognizable mash of buzzwords and compromises.

Just look at Mirror's Edge: an amazing-looking game, and a seemingly genuine effort from Electronic Arts to answer criticism that the company subsists on nothing more than rehashes and sequels. But the general critical consensus on Mirror's Edge is that it was ultimately compromised in an effort to make it salable. The immersive point-of-view was abandoned for the sake of "cool" cutscenes, and there was a palpable air of this is an amazing new franchise, prepare for the sequels! about the whole thing. I wonder; if EA hadn't had so much riding on the success of this game, if Mirror's Edge had been allowed to simply be a good game rather than a corporate pillar propping up the company's fourth quarter, would it have resulted in a better product? But then, that was the problem: Mirror's Edge had to be a product rather than just a game.

Of course, sometimes that's all the developers want to make. I dinged Gears of War 2 yesterday, but I don't really think that was fair. I feel like Epic did exactly what it wanted to with Gears: make a big, dumb, badass action game with some cool mechanics and cutting-edge visuals. It's not my cup o' tea, but Gears is exactly what it set out to be, and it deserves the success it's found. There's room for popcorn flicks in gaming just as in cinema, and there's no shame in loving a game that revels in its own nature.

Personally, when I look at the games that have piqued my interest this year, they've tended to be either smaller titles or else those rare big-budget creations that seem to have been allowed a little breathing space. Valkyria Chronicles? An interesting (and fairly original) take on strategy RPGs. Mirror's Edge? Even if it missed the mark a bit, it's parkour meets Ico meets first-person action -- a winning concept. Fallout 3? Classic RPG franchise meets modern format. Mega Man 9? Looks old, plays like the concentrated essence of 20 years of game design wisdom. The World Ends With You? Like the Beatles, proof that good things come from dropping acid. And then there are all the little games that I didn't even have time to really experience; I hear good things about Persona 3 and 4, Aquaria, Soul Bubbles, World of Goo and plenty of others. If only I'd had enough free time to play them.

Gaming's in a weird spot right now, with the traditional core gamer feeling threatened and pushed aside by the new wave of mom-friendly fare. I can understand why people who have been supporting the industry get so annoyed by the popularity of something like Wii Fit, or by seeing their favorite franchises drop into unexpected new formats. The Wii in particular seems to symbolize the systematic defanging of video games to many people, a fear reinforced in no small part by the way Nintendo has castrated the likes of Wario Land and Mario Kart on the system. But hopefully this is all simply a matter of the medium finding its footing -- or rather, spreading its wings and venturing beyond the comfortable confines of EGM cover fodder. There's a place for that sort of game, but for many other kinds of games as well. The trick now is for the people who are making the games -- or rather, bankrolling them -- to figure out how to reconcile the demands of different audiences, balance cost versus creativity, and basically keep the medium as a whole from breaking up into a bunch of separate, stagnating pools.

Like I said yesterday, I hope DQX plays a part in that process by bringing together lower-end hardware and a top-tier franchise. Sure, it could turn out to be a collection of waggle-based minigames...but realistically, it won't. Japan's DQ fanbase doesn't deal well with change; did you guys see what happened when it looked like Dragon Quest IX was going to be a multiplayer action RPG? Rioting in the streets! Shinjuku set aflame! Etc., etc. So there's no way they'd stand for a DQX that plays like Dragon Quest Swords. Nah, DQX will be a classic Dragon Quest...and, hopefully, combined with the enormity of Monster Hunter III, it will be enough to convince Japanese publishers that it's OK to shift their solid B-tier franchises from PlayStation 2 to Wii. Or, dare I dream, that they could maybe even focus on making respectable entries of long-running franchises (i.e. not crap like Castlevania Judgment) on Wii. The thing that excited me most about Wii when it was first announced was its modest technical demands, which make it more accessible to developers without blockbuster budgets.

DQX is exactly the sort of thing I hoped to see, not a bunch of cheap shovelware. If it doesn't turn out to be a herald of a brighter future...I dunno. I'll give up, I guess. But at least I have the old, good games we cover in Retronauts to keep me company.

Eh, enough of this crap. Tomorrow I'll upload pictures of puppies or something.

(Seriously, though -- Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Mega Man Legends 3 on Wii, anyone? Make it so.)

Agreed 100%

[y2kev]

He's never played any SMT games. Why does he think SMT would be well suited for wii? Because going to PS360 is going to make it "hollywood"?

[Himu]

I don't know. That was pretty out there but the content of the blog post made me look past it.

[cool breeze]

he used heart as an arguing point

the second you try and use 'heart' to describe the quality of something, you make your entire argument invalid

[Don Flamenco]

I. JUST. DON'T. CARE. ANY. MORE.

[drew]

gaf level overanalyzation of videogames

stay away satan ✝

[demi]

he thinks KH > KH2

who cares what he says?

[Great Rumbler]

Oscar-worthy stories are bad, subtlety is good.

There, I just boiled his whole article down to one sentence.

[drew]

But fortunately, there are plenty of big-budget games that get it right. Take Left 4 Dead for example. It isn't really a game that interests me (as I don't much care for multiplayer shooters and I find zombies boring)

he is also a woman apparently

[Eel O'Brian]

 

[Don Flamenco]

Oscar-worthy stories are bad, subtlety is good.

There, I just boiled his whole article down to one sentence.

the irony is that JRPGs tend to bludgeon the player with symbolism and character developing dialogue.  Xenosaga makes GTAIV look like Mr. Subtle Subtlestein from Subtleville, Subtleichigan.

edit: i dunno if DQ does this as well.

[tiesto]

Oscar-worthy stories are bad, subtlety is good.

There, I just boiled his whole article down to one sentence.

the irony is that JRPGs tend to bludgeon the player with symbolism and character developing dialogue.  Xenosaga makes GTAIV look like Mr. Subtle Subtlestein from Subtleville, Subtleichigan.

edit: i dunno if DQ does this as well.

Not really. Stories in the game are pretty basic and memorable, devoid of pretension. DQ is more about the individual, small stories you come across and play a part in, than the overarching storyline.

[recursivelyenumerable]

why would you write a post that uses as its points of reference two games neither of which anyone but the developers (in DQ10's case maybe not even them!) knows anything about

sigh

[TVC15]

(Seriously, though -- Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Mega Man Legends 3 on Wii, anyone? Make it so.)

You agree with this stupid bullshit, Himu?

[demi]

parish probably told himu to turn into a turrurist. himu doesnt know how to think for himself.

[WrikaWrek]

Fuck this douche, this guy is a Wii lover.

go play some party games cigarillo

[Himu]

(Seriously, though -- Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Mega Man Legends 3 on Wii, anyone? Make it so.)

You agree with this stupid bullshit, Himu?

No, not that, no. I don't even know why he threw that out there.

[recursivelyenumerable]

gaf level overanalyzation of videogames

not just that, but overanalyzation of videogames that don't even exist yet in any form!

[Don Flamenco]

SMT4 360 would be so hot.  so so fucking hot.  "You killed god! 50g"

[TVC15]

(Seriously, though -- Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Mega Man Legends 3 on Wii, anyone? Make it so.)

You agree with this stupid bullshit, Himu?

No, not that, no. I don't even know why he threw that out there.

Then why was your response

Agreed 100%

why do you lie so fucking much?

[Himu]

SMT4 will be awesome

(Seriously, though -- Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Mega Man Legends 3 on Wii, anyone? Make it so.)

You agree with this stupid bullshit, Himu?

No, not that, no. I don't even know why he threw that out there.

Then why was your response

Agreed 100%

why do you lie so fucking much?

Okay, you got me. I agree with pretty much every thing in the article but that. But honestly, at this point, I'd take SMT4 or MML3 on any console. What is wrong with that?

[BlueTsunami]

Parish is like the John Malkovich of Video Gaming journalism and not the awesome aspects. The dude sounds pretentious as fuck.

[WrikaWrek]

Okay, you got me. I agree with pretty much every thing in the article but that. But honestly, at this point, I'd take SMT4 or MML3 on any console. What is wrong with that?

What the fuck.

It's in the OP 

[cool breeze]

just to spread some more light on what type of person Parish is, you have to know a few things:

-he's the same guy who enjoyed and tried to explain and deconstruct the Halo 3 story
-a lot of the games he has an opinion towards he hasn't played
-he's a hypocrite towards things he wants in games. example: difficulty in MM9 is good while in UG&G it's bad

still, he does make retronauts and I enjoy that podcast

[Himu]

just to spread some more light on what type of person Parish is, you have to know a few things:

-he's the same guy who enjoyed and tried to explain and deconstruct the Halo 3 story
-a lot of the games he has an opinion towards he hasn't played
-he's a hypocrite towards things he wants in games. example: difficulty in MM9 is good while in UG&G it's bad

still, he does make retronauts and I enjoy that podcast

I'm generally not a fan of Parish. I disagree with him more often than not, but for the most part, I think that article was a good piece is all. His enthusiasm towards Wii puzzles me though.

I remember his Mega Man article where he reviewed every MM title. It had me shaking my head.

[dark1x]

He really comes off as believing that the Wii is the only suitable platform for this type of shift (though I don't believe he REALLY means that).  Large budgets existed on lesser hardware in the past just as smaller budgets can result in an excellent experience on more powerful hardware.  I agree with some of his points, but I do not believe the Wii is a good platform for this to take shape.

Also, I think he's a bit off on his Mirror's Edge comments.  I don't believe the game was compromised for larger audiences at all.  Quite the opposite, really, as the best aspects of the game are unlikely to be appreciated by the masses.

Seriously, though -- Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Mega Man Legends 3 on Wii, anyone? Make it so.

This really just doesn't make sense to me.  I mean, I think many people would want to see these games...but why single out the Wii as the only possible platform?  He really seems to believe that 360/PS3 release must equal huge budget when that isn't really the case.  Again, large budgets games existed on last generation machines.

[ManaByte]

I just want to see the GAF thread when Squenix announces Kingdom Hearts 3 on Wii and not PS3.

[demi]

I can imagine it - "who cares about kingdom hearts anyway"

demi - "ME ME MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" (but with a hint of sadness behind it)

[WrikaWrek]

I just want to see the GAF thread when Squenix announces Kingdom Hearts 3 on Wii and not PS3.

As if people expect otherwise.

[dark1x]

I just want to see the GAF thread when Squenix announces Kingdom Hearts 3 on Wii and not PS3.

I would actually be pleased as I really DO hate that franchise. 

[Bebpo]

I used to think Parish was a good writer.  But his blogs lately seriously make me not want to read anything he writes.  He makes too many broad blanket claims that are completely wrong and basis his theories off them.

Like ME is bad because of....cutscenes?  wtf...they were maybe 1% of the game?

[recursivelyenumerable]

I doubt we'll see KH3 for Wii unless FF13 and Versus bomb or something.  Nomura's already said he wants it on "high-spec hardware".  Maybe h.a.n.d or the Musashi/BBS team will do a Wii spinoff.

[dark1x]

Like ME is bad because of....cutscenes?  wtf...they were maybe 1% of the game?

Seriously.  Not only were they like 1% of the game, they were used more to hide a technical shortcoming in the engine (loading times) rather than appeal to the mainstream (does he REALLY think those scenes are trying to be "mainstream"!?).

[ManaByte]

I doubt we'll see KH3 for Wii unless FF13 and Versus bomb or something.  Nomura's already said he wants it on "high-spec hardware".  Maybe h.a.n.d or the Musashi/BBS team will do a Wii spinoff.

If Nomura wants to do it on PS3, then he'll be doing it without the Disney characters.

[drew]

Parish is like the John Malkovich of Video Gaming journalism and not the awesome aspects. The dude sounds pretentious as fuck.

precisely why the neogafs lap his and the rst of 1ups shit up

if its not pretentious theyre soft vag's.  example: 1upshow fallout 3 review gore talk

im embarassed i even lookd that up and watched it

[Himu]

People lap Parish's shit? I thought most of people at gaf hate on him on the regular.

[demi]

thread turning into gaf thread. delete y/n?

[drew]

every time i bring up gaf it gets noticed

you motherfuckers talk about them on the daily

spoiler (click to show/hide)

y

[close]

[demi]

drewsy becoming arrogant. delete y/n?

[drew]

n

[y2kev]

I doubt we'll see KH3 for Wii unless FF13 and Versus bomb or something.  Nomura's already said he wants it on "high-spec hardware".  Maybe h.a.n.d or the Musashi/BBS team will do a Wii spinoff.

careful, we have insiders on the board

[recursivelyenumerable]

If Nomura wants to do it on PS3, then he'll be doing it without the Disney characters.

are you basing this on an EGM rumor or something?  Disney doesn't know how to make megahit games from their properties.  I doubt they'd second-guess SE's choices, unless SE's KH games stop selling.

[Bebpo]

KH3 is on PSP, what you guys haven't heard?