An article that I wrote....

[ThirdMarioBro]

This is an article that I wrote on the video gaming industry. Tell me what you think....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is The Gaming Industry Becoming Soulless?-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On this board, I'm known as being kinda biased.....ok,
REALLY biased, so I'll try to make this as un-fanboyish
as possible. These are my observations on the gaming
industry as a whole. How I see it is that the gaming
industry is becoming soulless with each passing day, not
due to Sony or Microsoft.....*resists fanboy urges*..., but
more-so due to Hollywood meddleing in a place where they
don't belong. The invasion of casual gamers, has contributed
to this too. By the term casual gamers, I mean people who
only mess around with video games on their cellphone, and
buy a PS2 (or GameCube) for the sole purpose of playing the
new Shrek Game, or the new Charlie's Angles game, or above all
else.......the American Idol game (gag). They don't play games
for the purpose of playing games, but for the purpose of buying
a new licenced piece of crap that is created for the whole purpose
of promoting a movie/TV show/cartoon/bad amime. This is where
whole Hollywood interfearence thing kicks in. Companies like
Warner Bros. are getting their own game development studios, but
they don't understand how the gaming industry works, and as a
result, they create bad games. It stems from an endless cycle
that can't be helped simply due to the way things in Hollywood
movies are done.

Example: A new movie is coming out and the studio producing it
wants there to be a video game to promote it and release time. They
hire *insert developer here* to create the game. The developer
announces the development of *insert bad superhero game here* in a
press release and all the fans get excited. Then the developer
begins work on the game, but they need some info about the movie
before they can make the game, because the studio wants the game
to be accurate to the movie. The studio is tight lipped about the
movie because they don't want any details leaking to the press, so
development on the game is slow at best, because they don't have
much to work with. 8 months+ later, the movie is close to done,
and the movie is shown to the game developers. The studio then
demands that the game be finished in a completely unreasonable time
limit so it can be released with the movie. At that point, the
process becomes one of those 3 month slop jobs, and the game is pure
crap *cough* SHREK! *cough*.

Any true hardcore gamer would see that as shovleware being created
for the sole purpose of promoting the movie, but the casual gamer,
and the six year old kids who don't know any better will run out
and buy it faster than they can blink.

Another example is Kart racers. Ever since the creation of the
original Super Mario Kart in 1993, every company under the sun
thinks that their character needs to have some sort of cheap,
underproduced, and uninspired Kart racing game. Examples include
:Sonic Drift (bad Game Gear racer that was contradictory to the whole
Sonic franchise), Crash Team Racing (most blatent Mario Kart rippoff
ever), Komami Crazy racers (ditto), Shrek Swamp Kart (die, die, die)
, and Crash Nitro Kart (made to leech Double Dash's impending
suscess). Everyone from Bugs Bunny to Goeman has driven a go-kart
and they all suck, but casual gamers buy them like there's no
tomarrow. If the original Super Mario Kart had sucked, would people
have bought it? Heck yea, it had Mario on it, so of course it would
sell, but people sure as hell wouldn't have touched the sequel.

To close, my point is that casual gamers and other normal people are
invading the realm that was once reserved to geeks, nerds, and
hardcore gamers, and they are attack us for not falling into the
same endless pits of shovleware that they buy. Geeks are becoming
geeks in the place where they once thrived. Hollywood is trying to
merge the gaming industry and the entertainment/ industry into one
gaint cash cow, and Sony want's to mix it up with the music industry
(I'm a fanbooy, I had to blame them for something didn't I?).
Little by little, the gaming industry is losing the creativity and
originality that made the games fun to play in the first place, and
being replaced with endless mounds of underproduced games that
unknowing people rush to buy, which pushes the trend farther, and
makes less room for the good games, whichever system they may be on.
It's exactly what killed the industry in 1983, except this time,
Hollywood is causinng the collapse. It won't happen anytime soon,
but if things keep going they way they have, the gaming industry
will crash again, except this time, will there be anyone left to
save it?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Whay do you think?