My gaming diet consists mostly of
sequels and remakes of titles that I discovered back when elementary school
seemed tough and my biggest fear was that my baseball cap would fly off my head
as I whizzed around the neighborhood on a secondhand Huffy. Over the last
decade or so, I’ve felt a void left by a lack of new and noteworthy
intellectual properties.
It’s a void that grows larger as my
old obsessions get less substantial with every new iteration, slowly fading
from my favor. On Tuesday, Final Fantasy XIII-2 hit the shelves here in
America, but I was more excited that morning when I got Final Fantasy II (US)
working on an SNES emulator for PlayStation 2.
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| Serah, the main character of Final Fantasy XIII-2. |
Ten out of 29: That’s the number of
PS3 games I have that are entirely new intellectual properties. Gaming is
getting stale and there’s nothing but a bunch of cookie cutter clones to replace those fallen titans of the past.
It hardly seems possible that
Street Fighter II was ever new and that the likes of Chun-Li, Blanka and Guile
haven’t existed since the beginning of gaming itself. But there was a time when
Capcom’s cash cow was vibrant and fresh; I think they called it “1991.” The House
that Megaman built took a chance on a genre that had, up to that point, been
mostly gaming trash. The company’s gambit paid off and SFII paved the way
for big boys like Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters and even 3D brawlers like
Tekken and Soul Calibur.
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| Thankfully, the only polar bear you'll see in SFII is from Russia. |
But consider this: If Street
Fighter II had been as much fun as a polar bear with dysentery, players still
had a diverse sable of games to give them their next challenge. The Adventures
of Willy Beamish, Chip n’ Dale Rescue Rangers, Fatal Fury, The Legend of Zelda:
A Link to the Past, The Immortal, Princess Salad in the Tomato Kingdom, the
original Sonic the Hedgehog, Toejam & Earl, Street of Rage and even Final
Fantasy II (US) – they all came out the
same year as SFII and they were all unique games.
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| GENERIC SHOOTER |
By contrast, when I walk into Best
Buy or GameStop today, I have a choice of a yet another first person shooter, a
Grand Theft Auto wannabe or some arm-flailing shovelware for the Wii. Of course
I’m going to buy a sequel to something I loved as a kid because there’s not
much else to play. New IPs are becoming harder and harder to come by.
In the days when Nintendo’s grey
toaster ruled the gaming world and during the 16-bit console wars era that
followed, companies were willing to chance failure in the seemingly endless
quest for the Next Big Thing. There were hundreds of platformers trying to
steal Mario’s success to be sure, but there was also new, innovative stuff like
Snake, Rattle and Roll, Ecco the Dolphin and Panic! But with the multimillion
dollar budgets games have in the current era, failure isn’t exactly something
companies can just shrug off anymore. Indie games on PSN and Xbox Live
sometimes bring back a bit of that ground-breaking magic, but they lack the
“wow” factor of professional, disc-based releases. Unless you’re playing
something like Braid, these games are little more than a pleasant distraction.
At work last Tuesday, my friend
Chris wandered over to my desk and we were talking about how video games have
changed. I pointed out how it’s expensive to take a chance on a new
intellectual property nowadays.
“But if you can change only a few things
and make a new game, it makes sense from a business standpoint. So why not?” he
asked.
That sentiment echoes the business
practices of the Atari era – the same practices that contributed to the gaming
crash of 1983. I fear that if gaming companies keep going down this path, we’re
going to wind up with another gaming blackout.
It’s already begun in my world,
were I’ve been daydreaming not of the PlayStation Vita or Final Fantasy XIII-2,
but of finding the time to play though my favorite Super Nintendo classics
while games like Infamous 2, Mortal Kombat 9 and the Wii version of Punch-Out!!
sit unopened and unplayed on my shelf.
