Yahtzee your claims of lacking innovation don't really seem to hold water in this case. They're incredibly vague and you don't really explain yourself all that well. It's like you're writing an open invitation for people to jump to thier own conclusions and assert what they think you mean. What exactly IS it that these two games DON'T do that you felt would have significantly improved the experience?
Having played through both games a few times (in single and multi-player) I see innovative gameplay design all over the place, doing things that you couldn't really do with games of the past due to hardware limitations (memory restrictions, rotations, zooming) while presenting a sense of level design, enemy design, and straightforwardness that more than makes up for the sloppiness of most Mario games since the leap to GameCube.
What L4D2 does are both technical (redoing the engine to handle things the original couldn't) as well as design (killing corner camping, effectively injecting fear back into the game) and creating several memorable situations that give the gamer something to come back to that the one-trick pony L4D1 didn't do. Most importantly what these two games did was they made me realize is just how meaningless a large part of the "innovation" of the last 20 years hasn't really mattered much.
What these two games do is present a gaming experience that is an actual "game" and not a wannabe-director trying to cram his screenplay in between gameplay segments. When did every game have to be Metal Gear Fantasy Theft Halo 4? So many games nowadays are just pileups of previous ideas "but with this" thrown ontop of the pile. It's suffocating.
Stories are becoming longer and more the driving force of the "game experience", casting aside their old role as the framing device for an experience that you'll want to come back to. When did games become a "Multimedia Experience", and a more important question is, "Why?"
So many games nowadays are more and more becoming a massive grind, and not just in the World of Warcraft RPG-Quest mechanic sense, but in the sense that you're really only playing to see the next cutscenes. What's happening more and more is games having nothing left beyond that final cutscene to make you want to come back to, games that have no more value to them than a $15 trade-in at GameStop after the credits role.
This isn't why I got into games. I didn't put a quarter in the Donkey Kong machine because I thought it was cool that a monkey jumped ontop of a building, I saw barrels rolling down rafters and wanted to see if i could make it past them and save the little fat man's girlfriend.
When did game design start to matter less than the story? Why do games feel the need to cram a season 1 DVD box set of a tv series that never existed in between a series of scripted gameplay sequences and a badly written novel? When did a game's worth start being decided by how long the first run through takes rather than the staying power of a repeatable experience? Why are largely non-interactive, heavily scripted experiences being so celebrated over the ability to take a game mechanic and twist it into as many fun ways as they can? What Left 4 Dead 2 and New Super Mario Bros Wii do best I think is present a 'game' in it's purest sense. There are no pretensions of trying to be something that it isn't. The only thing that I can say they really do WRONG is having ridiculous titles that are dumb to type.
Also of note, in my circle of pals it was actually Luigi that we kicked to the curb in favor of the Super Toad Bros and their pal Mario.
Having played through both games a few times (in single and multi-player) I see innovative gameplay design all over the place, doing things that you couldn't really do with games of the past due to hardware limitations (memory restrictions, rotations, zooming) while presenting a sense of level design, enemy design, and straightforwardness that more than makes up for the sloppiness of most Mario games since the leap to GameCube.
What L4D2 does are both technical (redoing the engine to handle things the original couldn't) as well as design (killing corner camping, effectively injecting fear back into the game) and creating several memorable situations that give the gamer something to come back to that the one-trick pony L4D1 didn't do. Most importantly what these two games did was they made me realize is just how meaningless a large part of the "innovation" of the last 20 years hasn't really mattered much.
What these two games do is present a gaming experience that is an actual "game" and not a wannabe-director trying to cram his screenplay in between gameplay segments. When did every game have to be Metal Gear Fantasy Theft Halo 4? So many games nowadays are just pileups of previous ideas "but with this" thrown ontop of the pile. It's suffocating.
Stories are becoming longer and more the driving force of the "game experience", casting aside their old role as the framing device for an experience that you'll want to come back to. When did games become a "Multimedia Experience", and a more important question is, "Why?"
So many games nowadays are more and more becoming a massive grind, and not just in the World of Warcraft RPG-Quest mechanic sense, but in the sense that you're really only playing to see the next cutscenes. What's happening more and more is games having nothing left beyond that final cutscene to make you want to come back to, games that have no more value to them than a $15 trade-in at GameStop after the credits role.
This isn't why I got into games. I didn't put a quarter in the Donkey Kong machine because I thought it was cool that a monkey jumped ontop of a building, I saw barrels rolling down rafters and wanted to see if i could make it past them and save the little fat man's girlfriend.
When did game design start to matter less than the story? Why do games feel the need to cram a season 1 DVD box set of a tv series that never existed in between a series of scripted gameplay sequences and a badly written novel? When did a game's worth start being decided by how long the first run through takes rather than the staying power of a repeatable experience? Why are largely non-interactive, heavily scripted experiences being so celebrated over the ability to take a game mechanic and twist it into as many fun ways as they can? What Left 4 Dead 2 and New Super Mario Bros Wii do best I think is present a 'game' in it's purest sense. There are no pretensions of trying to be something that it isn't. The only thing that I can say they really do WRONG is having ridiculous titles that are dumb to type.
Also of note, in my circle of pals it was actually Luigi that we kicked to the curb in favor of the Super Toad Bros and their pal Mario.
).
