They left off Flight Simulators… that genre has been dead a long while. I remember when I had to decide what I wanted to buy in a given month.
I’d say fighting games oddly enough are dying also. The old standby’s have still been churning out it’s year or 2 sequel, but I think people are getting sick of the same thing over and over. Last fighting game with any innovation I’ve played is GGXX, but even that is getting sequel-ritis.
What about side scrollers? They used to be the games platforms were built from (at least for the 8- and 16-bit eras), and now they’re non-existent.
I want my Wonder Boy.
Heh. I didn’t read the subject for your post before I posted that :Þ
I think many of these genres existed at least partly as a result of their programming paradigm; there’s only a certain few successful and engaging things you can do with a handful of hardware sprites, a 7mhz 16 bit cpu with 256k of memory and 2-4 layers of static background.
many of these “styles” of game still exist (platform, adventure, beat-up, maze, rpg, shooter, flightsim, puzzle) they just all seem to be taking place inside a slick “immersive world which uses modern military-grade 3d simulation hardware” game engine.
one recent trend I’m noticing is games trying special “not completely realistic” rendering modes, to imbue their game world with a characteristic feel. For example, the warm and heavy outlines of harvest moon, the scene-bleaching sunshine and wind in ico, the cartoon rendering of zelda, the monochrome vectrex of vib ribbon. I was worried for a while that all game designers were just going to take to licensing a quake / counterstrike game engine and forget about visual artistry, but it seems to be safe for a little while yet.
They left off Flight Simulators… that genre has been dead a long while. I remember when I had to decide what I wanted to buy in a given month.
I’d say fighting games oddly enough are dying also. The old standby’s have still been churning out it’s year or 2 sequel, but I think people are getting sick of the same thing over and over. Last fighting game with any innovation I’ve played is GGXX, but even that is getting sequel-ritis.
What about side scrollers? They used to be the games platforms were built from (at least for the 8- and 16-bit eras), and now they’re non-existent.
I want my Wonder Boy.
Heh. I didn’t read the subject for your post before I posted that :Þ
I think many of these genres existed at least partly as a result of their programming paradigm; there’s only a certain few successful and engaging things you can do with a handful of hardware sprites, a 7mhz 16 bit cpu with 256k of memory and 2-4 layers of static background.
many of these “styles” of game still exist (platform, adventure, beat-up, maze, rpg, shooter, flightsim, puzzle) they just all seem to be taking place inside a slick “immersive world which uses modern military-grade 3d simulation hardware” game engine.
one recent trend I’m noticing is games trying special “not completely realistic” rendering modes, to imbue their game world with a characteristic feel. For example, the warm and heavy outlines of harvest moon, the scene-bleaching sunshine and wind in ico, the cartoon rendering of zelda, the monochrome vectrex of vib ribbon. I was worried for a while that all game designers were just going to take to licensing a quake / counterstrike game engine and forget about visual artistry, but it seems to be safe for a little while yet.