Actually while his taste is differant from mine, he does have a few points he is relatively consistant on, and I sometimes point this out, especially when for some reason he seems to rag on an element he claims to have liked elsewhere, without explaining exactly why it didn't work in the game he's talking about.
That said, we DO AGREE on a simple point, and that is that older games were in many cases simply better than the newer, increasingly derivitive stuff you see now. Most of the games are designed by committee by increasingly greedy game companies who are less interested in taking the risks needed to innovate. We pretty much see the same things again and again, and it comes more about how well something was done, rather that what it brings to the table that is genuinely new.
This is not to say that old formulas are bad, for example I (unlike Yahtzee) defend turn based RPGs and Strategy games and say that there is no real need to change a formula that is almost zen-like in it's perfection for what it sets out to do. The big issue of course being that the audience for what it sets out to do while being large, is currently outnumbered by fans of other sorts of games who knock everything they aren't interested in, in hopes that more of what they want will be produced.
At any rate, the point I'm getting to is that the original "Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time" included a number of unique mechanics like the time manipulation and the like, and had a lot of time spent on it's story. The current "Reboot" is pretty much a "color by number" type of remake that does most of the same things, but doesn't achieve them as well with the new technology, while having less of a creative process involved in writing, and bringing in things like the temporal manipulation with minimal writing and justification because "it's his thing" as Yahtzee puts it.
When it comes to stealth games, there are no real reasons for some of the current stealth games to be on rails to the extent they are when previous generations of games have shown that it is possible to create a more interactive, sandbox, type stealth scenatio. It's hard to praise a current stealth game when the central mechanics and gameplay of games like "Thief" which are now ancient were better.
What's more, while it gets into a genere Yahtzee doesn't like, look at the recent claims by Squeenix when it comes to "Final Fantasy VII". They are saying that they simply cannot do a game on the level of what they previously achieved with the current technology. The reasons for this are irrelevent, the key elements is "can't do what older games did". Something that is universal between generes it seems. Basically the current technology was not an advancement and it's quite probably that current games blow chips comparitively because simply put nobody can do the kinds of radical things we saw in previous game generations. I mean we why Squeenix claims they can't do Final Fantasy VII with current tech, basically that the systems are hard enough to work with and they've gotten so greedy in what they expect to be paid, that it would cost too much money and take too many hours for people to put in the needed time. The same basic logic probably applies to why you don't see more "Thief-like" stealth segements, to design those kinds of missions in numbers for current games would probably take similar amounts of money from paying overpriced graphics artists working with the current technology. Doing things on rails takes less time, and is both easier and cheaper.
Basically this seems to get to what me and John Funk have our back and forth about periodically. Let's say you need someone to design a wall. Today's code monkey wants tons more money than he did in proportion to today's market than he did back when you had games like "Thief". So basically the more differant looking wall-spaces and objects you want, and you need lots of them for a true "sandbox" enviroment, the more expensive it is (obviously) and with the rising amounts of money being demanded, even in house from the companies themselves, it's actually regressed gaming.
Whether he agrees with my line of thought or not and the specific reasons, I think Yahtzee's ultimate conclusions/message is similar to what I'm saying.
For those who read this far, keep in mind that games have bigger budgets than ever before. People talk about the changes in technology and so on, but consider it doesn't actually cost that much to rent office space, and buy even hundreds of computers and various electronic gizmos when your talking these budgets that are in the tens of millions of dollars. You can rent office space for a long time, and buy a lot of computers for a million bucks. So basically if you figure they threw a couple million into each thing your looking at staggering amounts of money that can only be going one place: human resources.
As has been pointed out in articles here (talking about things like a desire for gaming billboard awards and rankings and such) the gaming industry plays the numbers very close to it's chest. Professional analysts can only pin down the gaming industry and what it spends/makes into a very general ballpark, and truthfully I think there are reasons for this, and there would be a lot of issues with consumer outcry and such if those numbers came out. I tend to look towards "Ryan Quickbender" on ENN and how he starts out his industry commentary segements by calling us all "Cashbags". Humor aside I think that actually is the attitude about consumers from an industry that knows it's deeply in need of reform, but of course doesn't want to do so. When you have companies saying that they literally cannot produce the equivilent of games a decade or more old, despite having budgets of absolutly ginormous proportions that should be fueling all kinds of undistelled gaming awesomeness, you know there is a problem.
Congrats to those who read this far. Hopefully I didn't ramble too much in getting to my point.
