Apostrophe S

Just in time for Twilight Princess, I’ve finally beat The Wind Waker, which I’ve decided is one of the greatest games ever made for the GameCube that I’ve played. Right up there with RE4 and Eternal Darkness. It’s not exactly new, so I won’t go into the details of its coolness, but I will say that I probably put 40+ hours into the game and completed many repetetive tasks and never once got bored. As a matter of fact, I’ve been neglecting my my reading somewhat for the past week because it’s been getting down to the wire in the land of Zelda. So if you’ve got a GameCube, play this game if you haven’t already. I give it a 9.5 out of 10.

I’m going to roll some other thoughts into this post that I’ve had saved up for a while. I meant to write a long and thought-out diatribe against the current video game industry, but I fell flat somewhere along the way. So I’ll give you the wire framework I originally came up with.

The state of video gaming

Being a casual 23-year-old gamer who keeps his purse strings rather tight (which probably places me squarely in the median of the vidja game playing masses), these are a few thoughts I’ve had lately about the industry:

Upfront costs of making games is increasing exponentially, so developers are less willing to take risks. EA has made a racket out of convincing gamers to buy consecutive sequels of sports and franchise games, as well as adaptations of movie hits.

That’s not to say that derivative work is all bad. Some of the best games I’ve ever played have been derivative, such as Resident Evil 4 and Zelda: The Wind Waker. Even EA’s Lord of the Rings movie games are pretty damn fun. But it’s the innovative games that are becoming harder and harder to find. The Pikmins and the Beyond Good & Evils are just too few and far between. The industry is just too afraid of not making money to go out on a limb. Not that we can blame them. And they still make a buck. (Insert painfully out-of-date statistics.)

Out of the top 100 games sold in Japan during 2001, 10 were original titles, but that number was halved in 2002 and fell to merely two in 2003. #

And it seems the original titles don’t get the advertising support either, case in point Beyond Good & Evil. It came out against a couple of big sequels and completely fell by the sidelines. It was difficult to even find a copy for the GameCube. But totally worth it.

Another constant truth in the video game world is that newer almost never means better. It would be fair to say that most of the best games that will ever be made have already been made. How do you improve the original Legend of Zelda? Make sequels? People obviously still prefer the original. Every time Nintendo repackages it their old games, people buy them up. They’re even building a function into their next gen console that will allow users to download games from the Nintendo back catalog, perhaps all the way back to Famicom. The point is, some companies seem to think games have a shelf life of about 6 months in which they must sell new games. The fact is, the vast majority of people who will play a game will play it months if not years after it’s initial release. For me, it’s usually because the price has come down. Resellers make about 1/3 of their title sales from used games.

Over all, GameStop appears on track to generate about $3 billion in revenue this year. Of that, it looks like $800 million to $1 billion will come from the sale of used software, hardware and accessories. Just how profitable that segment is has only recently become clear to investors. #

Hell, I even asked a guy at EB if they make a killing buying used games for a pittance and selling them at a more affordable price. He agreed.

I suppose the point is that more and more, game developers are not enticing me to new titles. Instead I turn my attention to games released 1 or 2 years ago, if not more. Bring me some new shit! Make the good games and the kids will pay for them!

On another note, it looks like Tomb Raider: Legend will be ported to the GameCube. Not the most exciting news in the world, but at least I’ll be able to play it without getting a new console.

OK, that’s about it.