You have to laugh at how many people don’t even know the difference between a teaser trailer and a gameplay trailer. A gameplay trailer is footage of someone playing the game. A teaser trailer is little more than cherry picked parts placed in a montage that doesn’t really show the game being played.
For example, this is from Twilight Princess. While it has gameplay shown, it is not gameplay footage. It is just a teaser trailer.
Now, here is actual footage of the game being played.
Now, let us look back at Metroid Prime 3 which was the last Metroid game released for the home console (and released for the Wii as well). Granted, I agree the game was quite a mess. But at least it had the balls to show us actual gameplay footage as opposed to a blackout on footage and seeing only ‘teasers’. Remember the Metroid Channel that was downloaded to your Wii? All it had was clips of gameplay footage.
At the very end, there is a clip of gameplay footage. As the release date approached for Metroid Prime 3, more gameplay footage clips were added to the Metroid Channel.
Where is the gameplay footage? There are only flashes of a montage strung together. Only at the end there is footage that is longer than two seconds and even that is nothing more than to show Samus bouncing around with auto-aiming doing the weapon work.
Nintendo has had people play the game. Why not actually show them playing the game? What is the harm in just watching someone play it? Why is there so much darkness over the game?
The marketing strategy for Other M appears to be selling the game on its style as opposed to its substance. With Mario games, they show gameplay footage. With Zelda games, they show gameplay footage. With the Metroid Prime games, they even showed gameplay footage.
Other M’s teasers have been so cinematic heavy that people are confusing no cinematics to mean ‘gameplay footage’. Gameplay footage means showing the substance of the game. It means showing someone playing it as is. It does not mean cutting and pasting a montage of three to six second clips intermixed with yet more flashes from the cinematics (cinematics are still highlighted in this trailer). Gameplay footage means footage. Three to five second clips are not footage in any shape or way.
One thing Nintendo has asked, and I am referring to an interview Miyamoto said back when the Wii launched, is for people of disinterest to speak up. If you wonder why people of disinterest do not speak up, it is because they are constantly being shouted down. When you look at the reactions to any of the Other M trailers, for example, anyone who isn’t drinking the hype who is uncomfortable with the game get screamed at. Now, who wants to be screamed at over the Internet? Since people of disinterest don’t have any interest, they’ll just leave and all you will hear are people crying and sobbing over how great a trailer is. Then the game comes out and, despite glowing reviews and Internet praise, the game performs badly. This is the pattern.
In my own experience, when I said I do not like 3d Mario but only see the 2d Marios as true Mario games, people just scream at me. Why? Can they not live with someone disagreeing with them? Apparently not. From NSMB DS, Nintendo knew 2d Mario was very much in demand and knew it was big enough to place as their flagship game for the 2009 holidays. However, what they did not anticipate was just how deep the demand was for Super Mario Brothers 5. A massive tidal wave slammed into the sales charts that completely obliterated the huge stockpile of Wii Nintendo had. Ironically, Nintendo cut their price on the Wii as sales declined. Price cut didn’t do anything. Then after Mario 5, boom. Wii sales shot up dramatically all over the world.
Or take Zelda. If I say that Zelda is becoming irrelevant because the gameplay of Zelda games have more in common with the Adventures of Lolo than with the action/RPG hybrid that used to be Zelda, I’d get shouted down. People would be screaming at me for posting my own honest thoughts on my very own website. Why are people so upset? The only people who should be upset are those of disinterest since products are not coming out that they want to play! But after Spirit Tracks, it was undeniable that something with the direction of the Zelda series isn’t right.
Metroid is the most interesting of cases. Unlike the more popular Zelda and Mario series, Metroid people squeal like stuck pigs if you voice any dis-satisfaction with Other M or even Sakamoto. I, myself, have even had Metroid fans say they want to punch me, inflict violence on me, just for posting my own honest thoughts on my very own website.
What right does anyone have to tell someone else to shut up about their honest reaction to a game?
And you can see people trying to shut up those who did not like the new Other M trailer. They are very blatant about it. You do not see those who did not like the Other M trailer trying to shut up those who did like it. I’m looking in forums now and when someone says something like, “This doesn’t look like Metroid to me,” an avalanche of hate filled posts target the poster.
So what is going on here? Why all this Metroid batshit insanity? Why the hostility to people who hold disinterest?
Human nature is funny in that when someone invests emotions into something, they defend it tooth and nail to the end. For example, if a guy finds out his girl has like ten kids all fathered by different men, the guy would respond by saying, “She isn’t easy,” or some derivative of that. People invest emotions first and are unwilling to dislodge them once facts come to light.
Anything someone says along the line of “Other M is not a Metroid game”, these people corkscrew themselves into incredible spins and loops in order to say Other M is a Metroid game. If we find out in Other M that Samus got married and had kids, they would say, “Well, that is no different than in any other Metroid game!” What the hell!? So when someone points out the cutscenes, the big boobs, the constant chatter and talking, all the NPCs (“Remember me?”), the auto-aiming, limit on weapons being determined by Adam’s “authority”, and so on and so forth, they amazingly polevault in trying to point to a previous Metroid game. It has gotten so absurd as some are saying that Other M’s voice acting is great because of the voice acting in Super Metroid. While these people might hang around in their herd of thinkgroup, they do not realize how absurd they sound and how ridiculous their ‘arguments’ are.
They accuse those of disinterest for the faults they are committing: “No matter what the game is, you guys will just hate it!” Isn’t that what they are doing? When Sakamoto talked about Samus’s ‘maternal feelings’ and how Other M will talk about that, they began, absurdly, to say that ‘maternal feelings’ is what Metroid has been all about. What. The. Hell.
It is gotten so bad they do not know what gameplay footage is. They think a teaser trailer not entirely being cinematics is ‘gameplay footage’. It isn’t. But they are twisting everything to mean what they want it to mean.
If you notice, through this I have not yet expressed any opinion on the new Other M trailer except to point out that it isn’t really showing gameplay footage that isn’t chopped up into a few seconds. I am more curious how gamers are trying to shut up other gamers. These other gamers are not trolling. They are giving their genuine thoughts. Why try to shut them up? Perhaps it is because the interest in Other M is still, at this point, only hype based, not substance based and is as fragile as glass?