No Random Encounter this week, I’m too busy prepping for next week’s excellence!
‘Nerd Culture’ is a very unique thing; we place much of our spirits upon movies and games, the things which entertain us the most. We become inextricably attached to these things, and we grow to love or nurture them, investing a part of ourselves in them as much as any of the people who have worked to create them. All of these emotions invariably build up to a fall. We’ve seen it time and time again. The Star Wars prequels could not have possibly lived up to the standards they were being held to over generations of anticipation and speculation. They could have been excellent movies, far better and culturally significant then they turned out, but not matter what it would have been impossible for them to fulfill everything they needed to. This is not always the case, however, as many franchises of movies and video games have proven to live up to or even exceed the expectations placed upon them. You can’t always believe the hype, but you should be just as skeptical of the anti-hype.
One of the most common situations this happens with is a franchise. A game becomes so popular that it warrants a sequel, and the quality only continues to improve to the point where you get a series of excellent games all based around similar ideas, characters, or settings. One of the longest running franchises in video games is Final Fantasy. Many of you may remember this, but when an early demo of the latest game Final Fantasy XII was released, public opinion was very withdrawn and hesitant. Many people even went so far as to say it was terrible, and that they’d lost all hope for the final game. Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade were very vocal about the combat system being a travesty, and that they considered the demo to be absolutely horrible. This was very disheartening, as I’ve played nearly every Final Fantasy game and I really love how the series has evolved and changed over time. Happily, once the final game was released the guys at Penny Arcade were the first to admit they’d been mislead, and that the innovative new combat system actually managed to accomplish something quite exquisite. It took the monotonous actions taken in most RPG’s out of the player’s control and automated much of the mindless fighting, but also allowed for great flexibility and customization during more crucial encounters and boss fights. This example clearly shows how an early opinion, based on an unfinished product, can lead to false assumptions, and worst of all bad press leading to a bad reputation.
I read over and over about how terrible the name Nintendo chose for their new system was. People reacted very badly, initially, and the name Wii was parodied countless times. People were jumping the gun to judge the entire console system not based entirely upon its name, but the name certainly tarnished everything else about it. The remote controller was another point that was ragged on, people thought it looked stupid and had no idea how well it would work. There was a large share of hopefuls, sure, but there were just as many people standing by to cut down anything they tried to argue. Now the system is released, you can’t find it anywhere, and no one really seems to be talking about how stupid the name Wii is anymore. This is a great case of the end-product being so superb that it actually destroys and surpasses much of the anti-hype it had to contend with before it hit the market. Not every console or game is as lucky as the Wii.
Oblivion is the fourth game in the Elder Scrolls series, a franchise for sure but definitely not a powerhouse on its own. By this I mean that the Elder Scrolls games as a whole are not regarded as being a fantastic franchise that automatically includes wonderful games, yet Morrowind and Oblivion are each recognized as excellent games in general. The problem with Oblivion is that the series seems very much meant for its die-hard fans, yet the first two games (Arena and Daggerfall) are considerably different then the two newest games. What you can see in looking at this franchise is a shift in game play and production, if not a shift in theme and content, which for some fans of the original games was a big disappointment. The issue that arises here is nostalgia, most gamers have had some wonderful experiences with particular games, and when a sequel comes out we want nothing more to recreate those experiences precisely. We are each subconsciously hoping for a Diablo 2, which was a game that recreated the original almost exactly but added more content and material. Morrowind and Oblivion embody this evolution of game creation, and the latter game has never fully escaped the scrutiny. This constrains the creativity of video game producers, and most fans don’t realize it, but what you’re really asking for is the original game again, rather than a full-fledged sequel.
Now we come to my personal favorite franchise, that of the world in which Samus Aran lives. The first Metroid was released in 1986 for the NES; the second game came out in 1991 for the Gameboy, followed by Super Metroid for the SNES in 1994. All of these games are side-scrolling adventure games with a ton of platforming and shooting. The series then sat dormant for 8 years, until Metroid Prime was released. Leading up to 2002, rumors surfaced that the game might be a first-person platformer/shooter with some aspects of exploration. At the time this idea was near unthinkable, and gamers are very lacking in the faith and trust departments, no one was expecting the game to be worth its price tag, much less did they predict it would retain any aspects of the old Metroid games. Then, in November of 2002, the game came out and nearly everyone was blown out of the water. The music, visuals, interactivity, interface, and mood of the entire game were spot on with what fans had grown to love, respect, and most of all expect from the series.
So now, hopefully, you see that you can’t always trust the anti-hype. There may be plenty of times that everything said is one-hundred percent correct, but that’s no reason to lose hope. This goes out in particular to the people who are tearing Fallout 3 a new one, many of them citing the very complaints about Oblivion that I referenced above. They look for anything they can find to discredit the end product. Why, you ask? I’m not entirely sure, some people are born pessimistic; others are simply looking to be on the popular side of the curve or in the “I told you so” camp of trying to make themselves feel smarter. At least now you know that you don’t have to believe them, and in fact it might be wiser not to.
(Disclaimer: I am not implying that I know Fallout 3 will be any good when it’s released, all I know is that I really dig the people at Bethesda Soft and I trust them to come out with a premium quality product. Please don’t sue my pants off.)
In regards to video games there tends to be consistency between sequels and their originals, especially with companies like Blizzard that separate games in a series by many, many years. On the other hand, the cinematic and music industries are the exact opposite. There are very few instances where sequels surpass their predecessors, and once bands hit it big, their albums become progressively worse (at least in the rock genre). Personally, I feel that this is because the latter two industries are much bigger money mongrels than the video game industry, which is much more humble.
The video game industry probably has room for growth while film is probably shriking, I wonder if their behavior’s will become more similar as they converge?
The video game industry does indeed have more room for growth, and that is why sequels are often equal to or better than their predecessors. But I’m not talking about economic growth here. I’m talking more about technological and conceptual growth.
Despite considerable advances in graphical capabilities, there is still a lot of room to improve. Better graphics are an easy way for a sequel to match or surpass a predecessor, though obviously it takes more than that. Similarly, the speed and raw capabilities of each new console generation (or each new faster/’stronger’ computer) make new things possible that older, predecessor, games could only dream of.
Take for instance the Warcraft real time strategy series. In Warcraft 1 you could control only 4 units at once. In Warcraft 2, you could control 9. In Warcraft 3, I can’t remember how many you can control – but it’s more than 9! The increase in the number of units controlled wasn’t because the programmers thought that human RTS players were becoming more skilled and thus better able to handle increased numbers of units. Rather, the increase was because the faster/more powerful processors that existed when the later versions of the game came out allowed for more things to be going on at once. In other words, the room for technological growth in video games (in our example, real-time strategy games) allowed for an ‘easy’ way to improve upon predecessor games.
But the movie industry doesn’t have as much room for technological improvement. While CGI does continue to improve, the use of CGI in movies is often marginal. Yes, there are exceptions in which significant portions of a movie are done in CGI. But most movies don’t have CGI in every scene, or at all. Most of the technological advancements and ‘techniques’ in the industry (lighting, camera angles, camera types, sound, etc) have already been standardized, and improve only very marginally. And even when they do improve, it often goes unnoticed. After all, movies have a great deal to do about story and acting, and technology has little to do with those.
Same deal for music. There are all sorts of high-tech ways to modify your music in the studio. And these improve, albeit marginally. In the end though, it’s your talent and ability, combined with your creativity, that make your music good – technological modification techniques are a small percent of what would make an album ‘good’.
But I also think that video games have more room to grow conceptually, or ‘mechanically’ if you will. I am NOT talking about coming up with new stories here. I am talking about new ideas about what should be in a game or how you control an aspect of a game. For instance, in the original Final Fantasy game for the NES, if you ordered your characters to all attack a monster (the same one), and the first character hit the monster and killed it, the other characters would proceed to…..attack the dead monster. Which meant that they did nothing, essentially. Now, somewhere along the line, Squaresoft got the idea that if you ordered your characters to attack the same monster, but the monster died before the slower characters could attack, then the rest of the characters would re-target their attacks to a different monster. That way they wouldn’t be swinging at thin air and actually do something. Now that right there is a conceptual advancement. The ‘concept’ of your characters automatically re-targeting did not exist in the Final Fantasy 1 era, but was invented and allowed later versions of Final Fantasy an ‘easy’ way to improve upon the original.
Now compare that to ‘concepts’ in the movie industry. Now, a director might say “hey, I’ve got a great idea – we’ll shoot the scene with dimmed lights and then rotate the camera just as the car goes by so it will look more dramatic”, to which his camera crew chief replies “right sir, same thing we did in those other 50 movies we made”. The point is that there’s not many new ‘concepts’ as to how a movie is supposed to be made – most of them have already been thought up.
Now music, on the other hand, has plenty of room for new ‘concepts’, i.e. “hey guys, let’s cut the guitar during this part, but keep the drums, and we’ll clap along with the beat as we transition into the end chorus part – that’ll really get the audience into it!” Music has a lot of creativity in it, and there’s no limit to the combination of notes, instruments, words, etc. that an artist can come up with. The problem is that, unlike the video game industry, you can’t keep using the same ‘concepts’ over and over again! Take the Madden NFL games for instance. Each game adds, in addition to updated rosters and better graphics, a few new features that advance the game-play or that try to make the game a little more realistic. But, when you get down to it, a Madden game is pretty much the same as the Madden game from the year before. Now imagine if a band had a hit song, and in the next album, released the same song, only the second time around they added a drum solo, and some crescendos and decrescendos, but it was essentially the same song. Would it be a hit? And what if they released a third album with the same song again (still with the drums & crescendos) but this time added a harmonica in the background and a banjo melody. Would it be a hit? Probably not.
As it stands right now, video game sequels have a much better chance of living up to predecessors than movies or music because they have more room to grow technologically and conceptually.
I would say, as I was arguing with DrScotto in another post, that 300 has done an excellent job of openning up the Movie Industry to new ideas, and especially new ways of making movies and using them artistically as well as representationally?
Thanks for the excellent replies!