What is it that makes a game a classic? When I think back to the games I played when computers were making their first baby steps towards becoming the home entertainment systems they are today, I remember those early games in a much better light than I hold many today. Why is that? Is it because they simply were better, or is it nostalgia? I think in many cases it’s a little bit of both. When computers first started breaking into the gaming industry, the games were fresh and new, we hadn’t experienced anything quite like this before, and while they may not have been technological wonders, it was the wonder they inspired in us that has stayed with us.
Retro-gaming has become a huge sub-industry over the past few years, with the number of classic games available doubling and tripling each year. What should that be telling game developers? In short, I think it’s a case of saturation. Many games today are much of a muchness. You can find similar themes spread out over dozens of games, and even in different genres. They all boast dazzling graphics, and occasionally you get a gem such as the KoToR series or the much under rated Vampire Bloodlines, but more often than not, gaming today is quite bland. There are many lessons to be learned from our early attempts at gaming. Because they didn’t have amazing graphics to sell their games, developers had to rely on engaging stories and intriguing plotlines to hook gamers. When did this suddenly stop being the norm? I think you can go back a few years, when AGP really came into its own, and Direct X really started pushing the envelope and see that many developers starting using imagery and gimmick to sell a game rather than content and quality, and as consumers we got complacent and accepted what was shoved our way.
This could explain why the MMO industry is booming, while the general gaming industry has actually seen falling numbers for the first time in years. I think as consumers we have collectively woken up to the cheap imitations of the games of old, and are now demanding once again, to be touched by the gaming experience on a deeper level than simply visual. Some of the most successful games of the last year have been built around engaging storylines, and are often produced by smaller companies, and perhaps this grassroots development is what we need.
Old games were fun because the way they made the old games like GameCube was a system that you could play two players and it comes with many games you could play. And the old system controllers were more nice and they feel better. The new games have many thing on the controllers. The old ones have a little of stuff on the controllers. I think the main thing that sucks about the new games is that you need to pay to play.
What makes some books so well liked that they are read over and over and passed from generation to generation? How is it that a story that was written in 1949 and made into a movie 56 years later is still relevant and interesting enough to get numerous awards? There are qualities that make a book such a great success. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis possesses such qualities and can therefore be qualified as a classic.
During the 1990’s the video games were constantly changing.this decade saw tons of innovations in the gaming industry. The creation of 32-bit games and 3D games dominated the virtual world: Contra, Battletoads, Mortal Kombat, etc. Video game genres developed and branched out, creating some of the popular genres in video games today, such Role-playing games(RPGs),
During the early 1980s, Atari was the number one video game company in America. Atari had prophesized that they would turn an extreme profit during the time between 1980 and 1985. When Steven Spielberg came to Atari in July of 1982 asking to make a game version of his famous movie E.T., Atari promised him millions of dollars in royalties—even if the game failed—and that they could make the game by September of that year—an impossible deadline. At Christmas, 1982, E.T. The Game released. By the end of 1983, Atari had lost over $500 million and Warner Bros. sold Atari that year—leaving many thinking it was due to E.T.’s commercial failure. It’s rumored that E.T. The Game was so horrible that Atari took all the returned copies of the game and dumped them in a landfill in the New Mexico desert. Obviously, cause for a mass game “burial”. (Kent, 2001)
Let’s go back in time for a moment and recapture the epic crash to the video game industry in North America that took place in 1983. There was a flood of bad games that shrunk the games industry’s value from three billion dollars down to a few hundred million. The Atari 2600 system was pretty much the basic and most populated console in the states in the early 80s. Atari was mainly responsible for its lack of productions and marketing. Even the Commodore 64 and the ColecoVision had its share of failed productions along with many other brand consoles. Eventually consoles and game cartages became were sold at bargain discounts. This was great for customers not at all for the industry and the developers. Arcades were the only successful outcome the industry had but soon enough everyone was about to see the death of the video game era. While Atari failed to recover a small Japanese trading card and toy company rose to the occasion in the states and began marketing the greatest home console as we know of today, the Nintendo Home Entertainment System. Although Japan struggled to get North America to market the Nintendo system, Japan featured now and more exciting ways to play video games using the Zapper, ROB the Robot, story lines and saving data that couldn’t compare to how we used to play in the arcades.” No stranger to difficult times, Nintendo able to turn this crash into a good thing by surviving while many of their competitors did not”(History of Nintendo).
Instead of the franchises popularity having a positive impact, overtime, it infected the gaming market along with it’s consumers and developers such as Microsoft Game Studios and EA. It has become an aggrandized cancer on the face of video games everywhere, destroying franchises a...
Through games we are learning how to master motivation and engagement. Games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for a long time, build relationships and trust between people, and develop their creative potentials.
One example of a great RPG is Final Fantasy VII. The game came out in the late 90’s. It was popular in both Japan and America. Engulfing players across multiple consoles and PC’s in an in-depth world filled with adventure and fun. Final Fantasy VII changed the way RPG’s are made and revolutionized RPG’s as a whole with its intense in depth story line and its multi-leveling. “FF7 is, without a doubt, the new benchmark for console titles.” (Boor, 1997, para.1).
Although video game interaction is boundless, gaming can't be referred to as the new way of socializing because it revolves around on the game itself. In the video game community, a player is assumed to have a neutral identity. Even though social interactions are present in MMORPG's, these interactions are not about the individual's traits, emotions, memories, or other personal characteristics; it is all about the game and the environment that surrounds it.
Since its emerge as a genre of science fiction in the 1980s steampunk has transformed into a sub-culture with developing fan communities all around the world. Its distinctive features based on Victorian fashions, recreation of this fashion with modern tools and equipment, and solving modern day’s problems with steam powered, bronze coated unrealistic machinery. (Ferguson 66). Although the elements that created steampunk were mainly based on fashion, Rebecca Onion expanded this idea by claiming most steampunk works based on aestheticism, and a relationship of visuality between retro-Victorian style and contemporary technology (Onion 138). This relationship between style and technology helped creating a unique connection for popular entertainment of today and became intriguing for the generations of modern age. As one of the most popular ways of entertainment, video games were the most suitable choose for answering public demands and steampunk games started to be published by game developers. The children of the modern age showed their interests almost immediately and steampunk themed video games became one of the most loved genre for video game enthusiasts.
In society’s current era of technological advancement, video games have gone a long way since they were first created. Video games in the twenty-first century are no longer just toys or junk in the lifestyles of the youth. They have become innovative inventions that not only entertain its users, but also help aid the people in both the academic field and in jobs. The influences that video games bring about in the culture of the youth today are, in fact, not the negative influences that most people think. Video games are actually this generation’s new medium for educating the youth. The information they learn are also mostly positive and useful things that they may apply in their future lives (Prensky 4). In a generation that revolves around technology and connectivity, developers and educators have already been able to produce fun and interesting games that can teach and train people. Video game developers and educators should continue to collaborate in order to create more positive, educational, and appealing games.
During the past 10-15 years video games and movies have been in constant competition. Whether the game plot is original or has developed from a movie, the same with movies. There have been plenty of times when videos games have been made into to movies and have been least successful than the game, also vise versa. Both movies and games have a hand in advertising through there specific medium, and many experiments has conducted to figure out which one if more influential. Depending on which medium and whats it is portraying also determines if a movie is more influential than a video game.
People suspect the growth of this competitive scene is due to the gambling aspect of gaming. In 1994, the Kiplinger Washington Letter stated, “Gambling will be the fastest growing industry of the Nineties.” This statement is very true and applies to competitive gaming as well. As soon as you enter the world of competitive gaming, it's nearly impossible to leave. The industry of competitive video gaming has been up and coming, but now it is at it's peek. The world around us is changing every day, similar to the world of competitive sports, but the world of competitive gaming is here to stay.
Video games have been around about 50 years and they contribute a big part of the U.S. economy. People interact with video games every day throughout different ways, such as cell phone devices, computers, consoles or whatever which has a screen on it. In fact, it has always affected people’s lives. However, not so many people understand the benefits of video games. With video games, people can not only relieve themselves from stress and suffering, but it also improves people’s social experiences while they are exchanging and absorbing knowledge with other people; more than that, people can learn many other things from video games which can help them to achieve great things in lives.
Many people believe that video games change people and mislead them to do bad things, such as drugs and alcohol, but it is the opposite. Gaming prevents people from such acts and actually helps to keep them away from the substances. Lots of people, mainly parents, believe that video games harm people so they try to keep their children away from them. In reality, video games make your life better. Video games can provide many benefits to your lifestyle as “numerous academic studies indicate that playing video games has many psychological and even physical benefits” (Guarini). Gaming helps stimulate the brain and advances your problem solving abilities. There are disadvantages to gaming, which is true, but the amount of benefits outweigh them by far.