Hello Master!
I was thinking about this year’s E3, which was the worst I can remember. I was thinking about how come they haven’t shown A SINGLE game that I wanted to play. And it came to me, even stronger, the feeling that I should be doing MY OWN games if I want them to exist. Sony won’t make them. Microsoft won’t make them. Hell, even Nintendo, who should make them, won’t make them.
So to hell with all these fuckers. I will be acquiring the skills needed to be a game developer. I already have some of them. I will be my own Nintendo from now on. Nintendo is my competitor now. Just wait.
Maybe some other reader of your blog feel the same as me. Let’s make our own games. To hell with The Game Industry. Take them down, I tell ya! Don’t buy anything from them anymore, invest on being your own Nintendo. This is my manifesto.
Historically and even today, the video game market is extremely competitive and stressful. The founder of Nintendo of America, at the end of Gamecube era, said ‘fuck it’ and retired in Hawaii. “This market is too stressful!” he would say. This also explains why the classic games were so good. They had to be.
I get the sense that Nintendo, and most of the Game Industry, wants to put a stop to the ‘terrible stress’. They just want to chill, pretend they are creative geniuses, and make games. I really get that sense from Nintendo these days.
If Nintendo streamlined their development and only is making games for one console, how could they show so little for E3 2018? They showed MORE when they had TWO consoles to make games for.
“Smash Brothers, Malstrom! OMG!”
Smash Brothers is soooo amazing, it didn’t save the Wii U, did it? Nooooope! I don’t like how Nintendo is putting all their eggs into the Smash basket. Switch is made up of adventure gamers via sales of Zelda, Mario, etc. Where are the adventure games?
Why an expansion to Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and not, say, an actual expansion to Zelda: Breath of the Wild (put on its separate cart)? They could re-use the engine and even some of the assets. Hell, they could make a new Metroid type game using Breath of the wild engine. The sheikah slate physics are already in the game such as spheres rolling, bomb blasting, and so on. Maybe Samus’s morph ball can be upgraded to be the new type of ‘mount’ to tranverse distances? The game already has lasers and shit.
To make a video game, you need good technical skills to program it, and artistic skills to give it beauty and sound great. But I believe there is another skill that I do not see games today have (that they used to have).
If you ever encounter computer scientists, they all seem effeminate in a type of ‘super ego’ way. They think they are the smartest people around (they aren’t). They say ‘tech’ and thinks it means only computers (it doesn’t). These people are not down to earth.
In the past, the game developers were down to earth. I criticize Miyamoto only because people see him as a GOD. He is not a GOD. He is a mortal person. But Miyamoto is very much down to earth (most of the time). Guys like Richard Garriott, once he became rich by selling Origin to EA, ceased to be down to earth.
The problem these days in video games is the content. The graphics is fine. The programming is fine. Even the gameplay is largely fine. But the content is terrible.
How does one create quality content? When you look at quality content creators, such as famous writers, you find that they had very interesting lives where they did different things and traveled to different areas. With their ‘book’, people use that to create tv shows (Game of Thrones, Altered Carbon), movies (so many are from books), and even video games (e.g. Witcher series).
What I find fascinating is if you remove these books and prior classic media to force these ‘brilliant’ and ‘genius’ technicians of programming and art to make their own stuff, the result is absolute disaster. They do not know how to make their own content. They only know how to steal or ‘remaster’ old shit.
Content creation is a reflection of the person. Anyone can have technical skills, but very few people can create quality content. Consider Miyamoto’s ‘happy clouds’ and ‘happy bushes’ (yes, I know they are the same). The point is that defined Mario’s content and no one, then, or even now, thinks in those terms. It is a reflection of Miyamoto to have ‘happy clouds’.
So when I see video game content that is post-apocalyptic, gray, swirling around the anti-hero, I think to myself, “These developers are not people I want to meet!” As human beings, they are shitty people.
Why are there so many shitty people in gaming today? Because there is money, and it is seen as a legitimate industry today. But go back in time before. The reason why video games had so many ‘good people’ in it because there was no money, it wasn’t legitimate, and it was seen as a career death sentence to ‘make video games’.
If the video game industry was like it is today, people like Iwata above would never get into it. The game industry is full of assholes who make asshole moves.
“Why are gamers online such assholes?”
Because it is a reflection of the game’s content? They didn’t use to be this way. Online gaming in the early 1990s or 1980s had people much nicer. The reason also may be the IQ requirement was much higher. As soon as online gaming and Windows got combined, BAM, did the kiddies and toxicity truly begin.
Above: Miyamoto says “I would never get hired at Nintendo today.”
When I play many games today, I get the sense that there are assholes on the other side of the developer glass. It is why I stay away from most AAA games.
If you want to make your game, go make it.
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