Sony’s PS3 and the Xbox 360 are at war where gaming is concerned, it is surprising to see most boards rant about games released on these mean machines but very few people would actually acknowledge the fact that if it was not for the good ‘ol big N, none of us would have been sting glued to the television sets and drooling over Gears of War which has become a pop culture icon of sorts. Heck, if it was not for Nintendo I bet we would have a blossoming social life. Everyone at one point in our lives has stepped into Nintendo’s wonderful world of imagination, the first stepping block has always been given by Nintendo and we have chosen to evolve into mindless Zombies henceforth.
In my opinion, Sony killed gaming with the machine they labeled as “THE PLAYSTATION”, the strategy of throwing everything in has worked really well leaving the corridors of gaming a mundane affair. When was the last time did you see a slew of really good games hitting your console one after the other, the developers have also gotten smarter, they release a bottleneck of games during the last three months leaving the rest of the year with mediocre games and expect you to splurge on each of them.
It will be surprising to note that the number of mediocre titles has drastically increased over the last generation, with numerous small time developers mushrooming up, competition has become really stiff in the industry, and Sony’s Playstation has been the root cause of this change to a large extent, experimentation has been sidelined to grab a quick piece of the gaming pie, each game has some elements borrowed from other games which results in an Inevitable comparison with the original game. Wolf 3d might have been the Grand daddy of FPS but it was nothing more than a game of “Final fight” from a different perspective. I believe Half-Life was the game that defined what the genre could actually do. The game was oozing with atmosphere, which made it such a huge success. The only game that can be deemed as the successor to Half Life is Monolith’s F.E.A.R. this game relies on sheer atmosphere to tell an intriguing story.
The Playstation gave freedom to experiment around and hit upon a successful formula for a certain period of time and then the formula would be applied to its sequels which were to appear on a yearly basis till it got rusted and old and the developers had to go back and experiment once again. If we were to put Nintendo out of the picture there would only be a handful number of games which were responsible in shaping up the next generation of gaming, the biggest hit was the advent of Sandbox games (read GTA III), suddenly everything was in a living breathing city and letting the player choose how he played the game, 75% of games used this to technique, the other 25% mimicked the antics of Devil May Cry and Halo and when Nintendo came out with its amazing Wind Walker it was heavily criticized for using Cel shading
Great games in today’s generation are more of a hit or a miss, Viewtiful Joe, Metroid Prime, Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, Ico, Shadow of Colossus are only a handful of games that sparked a huge wave of originality which were to be drowned into an ocean of silent whispers. They failed to strike the right cord to make gamers go drooling all over them.
A lot of this cord actually depends on the hype machine surrounding such great games they are not as hyped up as certain other games. Killzone is the biggest example of the hype machine going haywire. I sometimes wonder how much Sony had to pay all the big game websites/magazines to create hype full of air behind their so-called Halo killer .The game was so pathetic in the end that the developers resorted to showcase a CG version of its sequel.
Sony did nothing to reinvent the gaming scenario, which is making them suffer now. It was Nintendo always picking up the pieces of its broken heart and coming back yet again with really innovative titles and the success that they deserve is not a one day story but is spread over period of 21 years.
–Neelesh Mukherjee