In this world, everything is becoming simpler and simpler, stupider and stupider; constantly being dumbed down. Music, movies, television, literature—it is all becoming more basic and more cliché. But nothing suffers more from this plague of unoriginality than video games.
Almost all popular video games these days are the same thing: Simplistic shooters with no good story or characters, no underlying message; nothing. It’s a shame that such dull and mindless games constantly get good reviews. Most shooter games follow the same formula of war between two races, countries, or planets where you go through each level shooting astoundingly dumb enemies.
A perfect example of games becoming more simplistic is Halo Wars. The game strays from the path of real time strategy games where you plan out your fight, and skillfully judge where to place your buildings and resources to just spawning forces until the other side dies! Not only that, but it perfectly uses the famous name of the Halo series and the lure of new maps for Halo 3 in its advertising, assuring the game high sales from the mindless consumers.
If there is any recurring theme in video games these days, it’s the absurdly boring protagonists. They’re all the same now, a big tough bald (or just shaven head) guy, often a space marine, fighting in an army, or as a mercenary. If you’re lucky, the protagonist gets a dark past to go with his super muscular simplicity. Good examples would be the leads of many games: the Gears of War series, Halo Wars, Chronicles of Riddick, Prototype, Mass Effect, Army of Two, Crysis, Kane and Lynch, Grand Theft Auto 4, STALKER, Hitman, Too Human, Resistance: Fall of Man, God of War, Fracture, Star Wars: Force Unleashed, and many others. Why are developers so scared to stray from this overly done lead?
Another thing abundant in games is the terrible environments. It’s always brown, grey, olive, and black now. Supposedly it’s “realistic,” but all I’m seeing are dull colors. The war zones, are often post apocalyptic settings, now with cover thrown about that just happens to be perfectly sized for any soldier crouching down; a seemingly great contribution to the games of today from the Gears of War games. Even one of my favorite games, Fallout 3, suffers from the brown syndrome, For whatever reason, you can always find dusty looking snowflakes falling in the air in these games too. I may sound like a nostalgic loser saying this, but whatever happened to all the vibrant games from just a few years ago?
Just several years ago, everyone complained about all of the WWII shooters, and playing as Joe Everyman the infantry soldier, but now we’ve just moved onto the newer games and ideas that are rehashed again and again. I surely hope that original games that stray from the norm like Okami, Mad World, Katamari Damacy, No More Heroes, Portal, Flower, Shadow of the Colossus, and the Mother series will keep being created, or I will lose all interest in games. Sure all the monotonous shooter games can be fun, but it’s pathetic that they are constantly heralded with high reviews.
-FRUIT