Video game luddites
I’ve been thinking about that cracked.com article I linked to earlier, and specifically about that bonehead comment from Epic’s Mike Capps. You know, the one where he says that developing for the Wii would be "going backwards," because apparently his head’s shoved so far up his polygon fill rate that he’s having a hard time locating the gaming.
There’s a pronounced attitude (and has been for some time) among a lot of the gaming public that says that American games suck, and that American game developers suck. You can be damn sure that the people who say that aren’t talking about Portal and Bioshock; they’re talking about the endless stream of terrible movie-licence games churned out by shlock-merchants like EA, and they’re talking about — this part’s for you, Mike, so you might want to read it twice — the legions of bland, uninspired first-person shooters that justify their tired mechanics and dull graphics by claiming "realism."
Half-life was great, sure, but the legions of Half-life knockoffs were not, and I must admit that it does appear to be the case that the American development scene is almost singlemindedly focused on making those sorts of brown-and-grey shooters. This is not unrelated to the reason why Microsoft can’t give Xbox 360s away in Japan — both the making and the playing of derivative, visually uninteresting shooters is largely an American phenomenon, since we’re caught in the grip of blinkered developers who just keep polishing the same turd over and over again. Mike and his co-religionists think the Wii is a step backwards, but, hey Mike, the rest of us are packing up and moving on without you. There’s a reason why the Wii has sold more units than the 360 and the PS3 combined, and that reason is because a lot of people care more about fun than about how many different texture maps you can mix to get your grey walls smeared with the exact right combination of blood and dirt.
Here’s one other fun point. This is a screenshot from Super Mario Galaxy, and this is a screenshot from Halo 3. I think we can agree that those count as representative, high-profile titles on their respective systems, yes? It’s down to personal opinion, of course, but you tell me which one looks better.
