The gaming industry is filled with stories of technological marvels, awesome breakthroughs and business deals, but not everything is so rosey. From cocky executives to biological warfare in the name of a game. The industry has made many mistakes. Now I should stretch that this is limited to when the gaming industry made mistakes in games or in production. Anyways here's the list:
5. The SEGA Dreamcast in comparison to competition
The Dreamcast was essentially a package of Segas mistakes throughout the years. Sega always tried to be the first to the market after the Sega Master System, and the Dreamcast was no different. Because of this, they couldnt keep up with the launch demand for the console. The lack of DVD playback was yet another problem, because the Dreamcast used a GD-Rom (Segas usual format) drive, it could not play DVD movies. Now consider that Playstation 2 allowed this, consumers knew the PS2 was a better value since it was more than just a game console. To make things even worse, the GD-Rom drive had no copy protection, so piracy became a major issue for developers of the Dreamcast. In essence the Dreamcast was against competition it just wasn't possible to compete with unless they made a totally new console.
4. Errors in production A.K.A Red Ring of Death and Yellow light of doom A.K.A WTF? MY XBOX JUST DIED!!! F%&@#ING HELL!!!...
One of the biggest issues with games and one of the biggest points to bring up in console wars. PS3 gets yellow light of death at chances of something like 23% chance of occurance while X-Box gets Red Ring of Death at something like 61% chance of occurance. Another issue the X-Box 360 also presents is the scratching of discs because of their disc tray. This causes gaming corporations to have to face up to their mistakes and usually have to replace the broken consoles thus costing these companies hundreds of thousands of possible console sales to be given away for free. Overall this is a mistake that will probably just get worse with each new console as time goes on.
3. Overhype of games
A recurring problem in gaming today. When we as gamers look at game trailers and previews we can our great opinions to see that the games that seem cool in these trailers are either the next Ocharina of Time or the next Deus Ex. Often the most overhyped games often turn out to be real dissapointments. My example in this case is Resident Evil 5 and the latest Alone In the Dark. First of all don't get me wrong as I love every Resident Evil game and in no way was RE5 a terrible game. However, if one were to compare it to its predecessor, the masterpiece known as Resident Evil 4, RE5 isn't even in the same ballpark. The inventory was changed to something much more frustrating, the 'horror' element was removed entirely, the story was a train wreck, they turned one of the series' beloved characters (Jill) and turned her into some Dead or Alive reject, and the partner AI is surprisingly bad for such a polished game. Capcom has recognized the less positive critical reception RE5 received, saying Resident Evil 6 will be yet another reboot of the premier survival horror franchise. I'm going to desperately hope the series goes back to its roots and brings back the scares and shambling zombies. The new one which is apprently a first person shooter will hopefully be scary. Onto Alone in the Dark. I like my survival horror games. I like them a lot. If you don't believe me I have a thread of survival horror game in this section. Post in it. Alone in the Dark was one of the first real survival horror games and also one of the first Lovecraft inspired games. The series' entrance into this generation of consoles promised a ton of innovation, and supposedly the fire was going to change the way fire looked and functioned in games from then on. While the latter was only a little impressive, there's an argument to say the game might've aspired to be too much. It had some pretty original ideas, some worked, others didn't. The DVD style menu was a cool idea, and came in handy when I needed to skip over some of the more frustrating sections in the game, the dual joystick combat was a nice attempt at innovation but became too frustrating and was occasionally unresponsive, the inventory, while flawed, was one of the game's strongest features, and the visuals that were praised almost every time you heard about the game, failed to impress in the final product. But by far one of the game's weakest elements was its pacing. You start off trying to escape from the inside of a crumbling building; it's fun, intense, and serves as a good introduction to the game's world, then you get to the game's first car chase, and Oh My God this game went from a solid action game to one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. The story was something that seemed written by a hyper 5 year old and was just a major dissapointment a lot like ever other Alone game aside from the first one.
2. Flops
Surely SoM nothing can be worse than a game being a total and utter flop right? You'd think so but no but we'll get to that in a bit. I will present two games forward with this claim. The two games are E.T for the Atari 2600 and Psychonauts for the Playstation 2, X-box and PC. Here are two games that were hyped to be the next great game to hit their respective console(s). E.T was panned by just about every critic at the time for its obviously rushed development which is painfully apparent in its gameplay. The game was a much sought after gift for Christmas and sold very well in well and around two million titles making it one of the best selling Atari 2600 games. Sadly they weren't done. About 4 million more units of this game was ordered world wide and around 2 to 3.5 million units went unsold. In one year the game went from costing $49.95 to less than a dollar in the US. Next Generation Magazine reported that Atari earned $25 million in sales, but netted a loss of $100 million. Pure evidence of a flop. Psychonauts is a strange one. Surely a game that was marketed well and recieved widespread acclaim would at least break more than a 100,000 copies? Unfortunately, in the case of Psychonauts, the answer was "no." Its lackluster sales were so bad, in fact, that publisher Majesco resolved to no longer develop "big budget" games after netting a loss of $18 million shortly after the game's release. Persoanally I blame Tim Schafer, the guy can't seem to ever be a success with a game except maybe with Brutal Legend but apprently it is just breaking the boundaries of flop status.
1. The abuse of sequels, spin offs and film adaptions
This has always irritated the living shit out of me in terms of gaming. The former is more evident in the case of SEGA. SEGA has awesome characters such as Alex Kidd and most importantly theres the king of Segas franchises, Sonic. Segas mistake here is how theyve treated these franchises. Although not necessarily as strong as Nintendos cast, Sega still has a place amongst the older (and still biggest) market share of the game industry. However, with the constant release of mediocre games based on these franchises (recent examples include Sonic Unleashed and Golden Axe Beast Rider) it really does make one question Segas judgment. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with changing the direction of a franchise (see Resident Evil), going in the complete opposite direction tends to alienate the already existing, and most likely dedicated audience. Taking Golden Axe, a well known co-operative arcade beat em up, and turning it into some plot-heavy single player game, is a good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) example of this. I've already mentioned Alone in the Dark and theres In terms of film adaptions I don't even need to explain do I? Just look at Jaws Unleashed and all the other shitty adaptions made. Hell I'm gonna mention E.T again because it was just that bad. NOBODY wanted to play an overhead game where all you did was pick up pieces of a phone on the same map for EVERY FREAKING LEVEL. As for game spin offs that just plain sucked? Two words: Super, Mario. You can't mention crappy spin offs without mentioning the numerous spin offs the game made that plain out sucked. I'll just mention the worst one; Mario Hotel. Other sucky spin offs included Death By Degrees where you played as the always sexy Tekken character Nina Williams and Shadow the Hedgehog where the main idea was "Shadow with a gun= BAMF". This wasn't the case.
Feel free to voice you opinions freely but that's all from me.
5. The SEGA Dreamcast in comparison to competition
The Dreamcast was essentially a package of Segas mistakes throughout the years. Sega always tried to be the first to the market after the Sega Master System, and the Dreamcast was no different. Because of this, they couldnt keep up with the launch demand for the console. The lack of DVD playback was yet another problem, because the Dreamcast used a GD-Rom (Segas usual format) drive, it could not play DVD movies. Now consider that Playstation 2 allowed this, consumers knew the PS2 was a better value since it was more than just a game console. To make things even worse, the GD-Rom drive had no copy protection, so piracy became a major issue for developers of the Dreamcast. In essence the Dreamcast was against competition it just wasn't possible to compete with unless they made a totally new console.
4. Errors in production A.K.A Red Ring of Death and Yellow light of doom A.K.A WTF? MY XBOX JUST DIED!!! F%&@#ING HELL!!!...
One of the biggest issues with games and one of the biggest points to bring up in console wars. PS3 gets yellow light of death at chances of something like 23% chance of occurance while X-Box gets Red Ring of Death at something like 61% chance of occurance. Another issue the X-Box 360 also presents is the scratching of discs because of their disc tray. This causes gaming corporations to have to face up to their mistakes and usually have to replace the broken consoles thus costing these companies hundreds of thousands of possible console sales to be given away for free. Overall this is a mistake that will probably just get worse with each new console as time goes on.
3. Overhype of games
A recurring problem in gaming today. When we as gamers look at game trailers and previews we can our great opinions to see that the games that seem cool in these trailers are either the next Ocharina of Time or the next Deus Ex. Often the most overhyped games often turn out to be real dissapointments. My example in this case is Resident Evil 5 and the latest Alone In the Dark. First of all don't get me wrong as I love every Resident Evil game and in no way was RE5 a terrible game. However, if one were to compare it to its predecessor, the masterpiece known as Resident Evil 4, RE5 isn't even in the same ballpark. The inventory was changed to something much more frustrating, the 'horror' element was removed entirely, the story was a train wreck, they turned one of the series' beloved characters (Jill) and turned her into some Dead or Alive reject, and the partner AI is surprisingly bad for such a polished game. Capcom has recognized the less positive critical reception RE5 received, saying Resident Evil 6 will be yet another reboot of the premier survival horror franchise. I'm going to desperately hope the series goes back to its roots and brings back the scares and shambling zombies. The new one which is apprently a first person shooter will hopefully be scary. Onto Alone in the Dark. I like my survival horror games. I like them a lot. If you don't believe me I have a thread of survival horror game in this section. Post in it. Alone in the Dark was one of the first real survival horror games and also one of the first Lovecraft inspired games. The series' entrance into this generation of consoles promised a ton of innovation, and supposedly the fire was going to change the way fire looked and functioned in games from then on. While the latter was only a little impressive, there's an argument to say the game might've aspired to be too much. It had some pretty original ideas, some worked, others didn't. The DVD style menu was a cool idea, and came in handy when I needed to skip over some of the more frustrating sections in the game, the dual joystick combat was a nice attempt at innovation but became too frustrating and was occasionally unresponsive, the inventory, while flawed, was one of the game's strongest features, and the visuals that were praised almost every time you heard about the game, failed to impress in the final product. But by far one of the game's weakest elements was its pacing. You start off trying to escape from the inside of a crumbling building; it's fun, intense, and serves as a good introduction to the game's world, then you get to the game's first car chase, and Oh My God this game went from a solid action game to one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. The story was something that seemed written by a hyper 5 year old and was just a major dissapointment a lot like ever other Alone game aside from the first one.
2. Flops
Surely SoM nothing can be worse than a game being a total and utter flop right? You'd think so but no but we'll get to that in a bit. I will present two games forward with this claim. The two games are E.T for the Atari 2600 and Psychonauts for the Playstation 2, X-box and PC. Here are two games that were hyped to be the next great game to hit their respective console(s). E.T was panned by just about every critic at the time for its obviously rushed development which is painfully apparent in its gameplay. The game was a much sought after gift for Christmas and sold very well in well and around two million titles making it one of the best selling Atari 2600 games. Sadly they weren't done. About 4 million more units of this game was ordered world wide and around 2 to 3.5 million units went unsold. In one year the game went from costing $49.95 to less than a dollar in the US. Next Generation Magazine reported that Atari earned $25 million in sales, but netted a loss of $100 million. Pure evidence of a flop. Psychonauts is a strange one. Surely a game that was marketed well and recieved widespread acclaim would at least break more than a 100,000 copies? Unfortunately, in the case of Psychonauts, the answer was "no." Its lackluster sales were so bad, in fact, that publisher Majesco resolved to no longer develop "big budget" games after netting a loss of $18 million shortly after the game's release. Persoanally I blame Tim Schafer, the guy can't seem to ever be a success with a game except maybe with Brutal Legend but apprently it is just breaking the boundaries of flop status.
1. The abuse of sequels, spin offs and film adaptions
This has always irritated the living shit out of me in terms of gaming. The former is more evident in the case of SEGA. SEGA has awesome characters such as Alex Kidd and most importantly theres the king of Segas franchises, Sonic. Segas mistake here is how theyve treated these franchises. Although not necessarily as strong as Nintendos cast, Sega still has a place amongst the older (and still biggest) market share of the game industry. However, with the constant release of mediocre games based on these franchises (recent examples include Sonic Unleashed and Golden Axe Beast Rider) it really does make one question Segas judgment. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with changing the direction of a franchise (see Resident Evil), going in the complete opposite direction tends to alienate the already existing, and most likely dedicated audience. Taking Golden Axe, a well known co-operative arcade beat em up, and turning it into some plot-heavy single player game, is a good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) example of this. I've already mentioned Alone in the Dark and theres In terms of film adaptions I don't even need to explain do I? Just look at Jaws Unleashed and all the other shitty adaptions made. Hell I'm gonna mention E.T again because it was just that bad. NOBODY wanted to play an overhead game where all you did was pick up pieces of a phone on the same map for EVERY FREAKING LEVEL. As for game spin offs that just plain sucked? Two words: Super, Mario. You can't mention crappy spin offs without mentioning the numerous spin offs the game made that plain out sucked. I'll just mention the worst one; Mario Hotel. Other sucky spin offs included Death By Degrees where you played as the always sexy Tekken character Nina Williams and Shadow the Hedgehog where the main idea was "Shadow with a gun= BAMF". This wasn't the case.
Feel free to voice you opinions freely but that's all from me.
