I Miss the Crazies

Tim Schaffer has gone mad, in a bad way. The beacon of absurdity that leads the way into unimaginable worlds has been infested by this industry's narcotic obsession with realism. With his latest release, Brutal Legend, it's obvious that he's been lobotomized into just another programming zombie, twitching with imagination that marmalade itself atop a fundamental game of water-boiled chicken meat blandness. You still get some wacky witch characters, but they're just sprites peeling over some very real people. Blech. If I wanted to talk with real people or hit them in the face with an axe, I would have!

But I shouldn't be too hard on Mr. Schaffer, at least he's done the minimum of overlaying boredom with some imaginative demonic version of Narnia, which is more than what I can say for most other developers. And that's a real shame because the most successful franchises in history up to the present have always been bat-**** insane. Mario stars some Italian plumber on an acid trip. God of War introduces a shirtless maniac with twin-blades who thinks he can take on the gods. Pong answers the question, what happens if the world consisted only of 2 lines and a ball. I mean, if some guy walked up to me on the street and introduced me to an adventure of Marco Polo's alien potions, I'd toss him some change and tell him to screw off.

And that's the essence of it, really. Games are childish. We did not fall in love with games as adults, we did as kids. And it's because the games took us down the rabbit hole of fantasies and super power possibilities that we've decided as a collective that games can evolve beyond the video equivalent to Toys R Us action figures. But somewhere in that evolution, we've lost the kid. In this race to convince the older bourgeoisie that these video games are as mature as the Godfather movies and shouldn't be regarded as a children's afternoon plaything, this industry has decided to eject its original soul.

More importantly, games aren't real. Games are a canvasless pieces of art. And if you're going to spend the next few years, dedicating your soul and your marriage to a piece of art, why not make it interesting? Recreating real life sounds as interesting as recreating cheese--it's been done, let's move on. I don't want real people with real rag-doll physics. And I'm sick of all the characters starting to look alike because we're running out of customizable options to dress the same avatar in every single game. I want to shoot someone in the face with a nuke only to have it deflected back at me with some subatomic proton canon. I want to be some sort of mystical featherless duck and scale the Tower of Babylon Mirror's Edge style with Prince of Persia's sand abilities. I want some real innovation. I want my crazies.

And some developers have the audacity to simply don on some new shiny spacesuits and call it a job well done. No. Take off those helmets and armors, and it's just a boring and repetitive shooting in the nude that's been done a million times before. **** you Vanquish! How many times can I shoot some sprite in the head before I start to get repetitive stress syndrome?

Something needs to be done before we pass on the legacy that the most successful generation of gaming, the Golden Era of our media, is all about shooting people in the head. Innovation doesn't require that we abandon all sense of reality, surprisingly. Indigo Prophecy and Uncharted 2 had both managed to be deeply rooted in realism and also be completely insane. But unfortunately, formulas sell. Take a crosshair and some marines, and that's a guaranteed blockbuster hit. So when we're all inevitably playing a match of Call of Duty 500, just imagine me rocking in my armchair, with a smug grin on my face as I whisper into the mic, “I told you so.”

[Cajun Chicken]

I think one of the worst things is the fact that Shiny, Planet Moon and Interplay getting developers to make instalments in later franchises as we knew them don't exist anymore. Earthworm Jim, MDK, Wild 9, Messiah, MDK2, Giants: CK, Armed and Dangerous...

Lack of Oddworld Inhabitants thanks to MS dumping them last gen, EA not bothering to actually market Strangerer...

Yeah, those days have temporarily gone...at least we have Croteam.

[rbrtchng]

Ah yes, thank goodness for gog.com