Anyone else think the current gen mainstream games are stale

[Para]

Isnt that why we are all here?

[Ack]

I think the comparison there is just off the mark a little. Stale or derivative games aren't the same as duds. While there have been plenty of big licenses that failed to deliver (like, say, Superman 64), plenty more are just decent-good games, but nothing more.

It's just harder to be objective with it. For example, you could look back on the scores of fighters that popped up in the wake of Street Fighter II. Plenty of them aren't half-bad, or have some interesting element to them. The fighters are clay, or monsters, or Ninja Turtles, or whatever. Realistically though, that's hardly different than something like Darksiders aping gameplay elements from other series and wrapping it up in a fairly well produced package.

Yeah, I wasn't making a direct comparison, nor am I talking about Darksiders specifically (I never played it, so I can't comment on it). I have seen a whole slew of FPSs pop up since Half-Life, and while that's great and all, many of them just suck, yet are still popular. I would consider them derivative, stale, and a dud. I'm not really trying to compare apples and oranges, but rather trying to get a broader perspective. You made me remember one game I can think of that was like that from the mid-90s: Clay Fighters. Stale and a dud. Although, I haven't played it in many years, so I could be misremembering it...

No, you remember Clay Fighter correctly, though certain titles in the series are better than others.

The point he's trying to make though is that this cycle of ripping off whatever is popular is frankly old news, but many of those games do have their own quirks that make them worth checking out. Case in point, they may be Street Fighter rip-offs, but I have a soft spot for World Heroes and Power Instinct.

I actually looked up a list of FPS games released in 2009, the same year as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. There were about 37 or so, but of those only six could qualify as Modern Warfare clones (including MW2), and of those six, several changed things a bit like being an FPS/RTS hybrid, based on a popular novel, or being a minor PC release featuring a nation's military that typically is never seen in a video game (France).

The multitude of others covered a variety of time periods (ranging from the Old West, to WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and of course a plethora of modern scifi or futuristic games). From there they could be further split based on their gameplay, which featured mixtures of stealth, horror, open worlds, and hybridization with other genres. The styles of gameplay varied too, ranging from the fast and loose shooting of Painkiller to the slow but relentless combat of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Two were WiiWare games, while a third was an iPhone port of an older FPS. And then there was Zeno Clash, which I have no real words to describe. JT can help far more with that.

The point I'm trying to make is that, even in genres that are said to be quite stale, innovation does occur, and the variety can be quite interesting.

[Xeogred]

There's a lot more old FPS's than you'd think:


I watched this entire series. Was worth it. Did most of them look good? Nope.

So most of you are very right in that there's always been crap games throughout the generations and we'll only remember the good stuff of every gen, but yeah. It's probably our digital era that makes everything just feel way worse thesedays. But I still standby and say there's more issues with this generation than ever before, DLC, social networking crap I don't care about, etc.