Excrément said:
You call that "dumb-down", I think it is just a revolution.
I call it bad journalism on one hand and bad marketing on the other. Note that Half Life 2 has more plot and a more RPG like feel than many earlier FPS. Oblivion is being marketed as having more visceral action, and less RPG minutiae.
I like roleplaying minutiae and I like visceral action. Daggerfall had both. Oblivion will still have both, but not to the degree that Daggerfall had. I don't see Oblivion as the fantasy Half Life Too, that dubious honor goes to Dark Messiah from Ubisoft.
My problems now are less with the game and more with inexplicable things done in the last week by Bethsoft. Either the devs are clueless and hate the ideal established in Daggerfall, or they are under the thumb of suits who hate anything that doesn't bring in the instant cash.
I'm still buying the game and look forward to playing it on the PC I'm building. I got a great deal at Fry's on a P4 630 bundled with an ECS RS400-A. All for $179. I love those "one per customer" offers and this is the first bundled board that I've seen with PCIe at Fry's lately. All the others have been for AGP.
Thrawn05 said:
Actually, it goes beyond video games. Children in general no longer have any real type of imagination since there is no need for it. Everything is explained away. Take a look at the toy section at the store, every single teddy-bear and doll and such comes with a name. There is no longer a need for a child to give that doll a name anymore. So all a child does now is soak things up like a sponge without any type of output.
Little things like that are all over the place and it is becoming a problem.
As the father of a 5 year old, I have to say that kids have great imaginations. My son can mix a bit of HOMM and a bit of TES and end up creating a complex story that involves a "fat daedra" storming a castle defended by orc archers and one behemoth. Then, he'll throw in some anime and have a mixed up angel and a nice demon show up with an ucky undead army.
He does all this with a mix of toys, from dinosaurs, to movie related kids meals figures, to classic monsters and even some old plastic AD&D figures from the early '80's. He's freaked out mundanes before with his fantasy play. Nothing scripted, no names given to toys by the companies, but just what he wants to do with them and what story he wants to tell.
When I was his age back in the sixties, it was all American and Japanese soldiers shipwrecked fighting dinosaurs. I couldn't read my foster brother's comics, but I saw the pictures and made up my own stories with the toys I had. My son does the same thing. So, I think he'll survive the education system and the marketing machine with his imagination intact.
WouldBeCreator said:
Thrawn05 said:
... start with anime, which is horribly uncreative and uninteresting (I except, say, Miyazaki here)...
Around 40% of any season on Japanese television is animated. That's why there's such a wide variety of anime. From classics like Space Battlecruiser Yamato, Urusei Yatsura, Lupin the Third to neo classics like Tenchi Muyo, Slayers and the original Dirty Pair.
The new season in Japan has several shows that are fantastic, I get fansubs of them and will buy the DVDs if ever released in the U.S.; shows like Ayakashi to shounen "harem" comedy like Kage Kara Mamoru.
Anime is not just Pokemon, Digimon and Dragonball Z. Even popular shows on U.S. television like Full Metal Alchemist tell complex and interesting stories in ways that American animators can only envy.
Why don't you try the fansubs for Ayakashi? You'll be surprised at the first story:
http://www.animesuki.com/series.php/741.html
Hey everybody, be happy we took out all the boring RPG crap and turned it into HL2! (Because all anyone really wants to do is play a FPS running around mindlessly killing everything for no reason and gawking at the pretty graphics.)
