You know according to my statistics and calculations you will never find a game category that is better than the other. Even the sports section as good as the famous TD games. Most people judge games by category, but we should judge by an individual game. People seem to like action games more than puzzle games, however Cut the rope, an apple ipad, ipod touch game is on 2nd place in top apps. Because it was the game-makers idea and imaginative creation that won the players hearts. So it is IMAGINATION AND IDEA that matters how good the games are. People love J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, but will people like the same story idea written by another author? Definitely NOT! That is why we should judge games by how creative the idea it is. If it is a fun game but simple, fine, but we should see the features in the game that is different from the other games. Therefore, we should also judge games individually not by category, because we never know if we could find a game that deserves 10/10 in puzzle games.
That's kind of a no-brainer. People are free to prefer certain genres, but they'll always be those ignorant ones going "Hurr dis suckz caus it puzzl gaem", so pointing it out really isn't anything groundbreaking.
Would people like a Harry Potter-ish story, that isn't a ripoff, but has a different take of the wizard-trope? Of course they would, given that it's a well-written story and well-established world. I mean, they sure liked their Harry Potter didn't they?
You're actually contradicting yourself when you say
We shouldn't just judge games just for being of a similar genre! We should judge their individual merits., but then you turn around and essentially say
Nobody would like a story that's similar to Harry Potter! Why not judge it on its on merits, just like you suggested?
As for IDEA AND IMAGINATION, I'll have to disagree completely. A games idea or "originality" are merely concepts. Just having those does not make your game good, because you could have the most incredible idea and imagination ever, but it'll be worthless when it doesn't render very well into a video game (I believe this is also the downfall of a lot of indie games being made today).
Sure, something like Portal is very interesting, but not because of its ZOMGoriginality, because I'm sure none of you have actually played the game that Portal was based on (it used the same portal gameplay, albeit very undeveloped). There is no single solitary thing that should be considered "the most important" that a game needs, because there's
a lot of elements that go into it, and as such are equally important to making a classic game, but I'll elaborate on the one that seems the most on-topic for this thread. :P
I'm talking about
CONTENT.
Mind you, I'm not talking about the definition of game-industry PR-guys ("We have 534 modes and 42 characters !).
Let's look back at literature again.
One might be tempted to think that Harry Potter is "just" a story about wizards or magic. But it's actually much more than that. It has its own "universe", with its own sets of rules to follow. The "world" of Harry Potter is designed very well. And THAT is what makes it so compelling. The content of Harry Potter is very interesting.
Look at Lord Of The Rings. "Just" a fantasy story, right?
What about Star Wars? "Just" a Science-Fiction story?
The same holds true for games. You'll notice that the most popular games also have good content. Of course, that isn't to say "Content" is just the game world, because it also answers a very important question:
Why should someone play your game? Something like Mario has very interesting content, because it also allows you to explore a vastly different world of our own (which also leads to a "I wonder what the next level is" kind of thing). Look at Pokemon: It has a big world with lots of exploration and about 10 billion Pokemon to catch.
These things make those games very interesting,because it answers the WHY in a meaningful way.
What about something like Tetris, which doesn't have any sort of game-world to speak of? It too answerws the question of WHY!
Why should someone play Tetris? Because it's a fast paced Arcade game with lots of
interesting choices. That's yet another important thing, but I won't elaborate here, because it'll blow this thread up even more.
And that's also why so many modern games tend to feel same-y: they all have similar content with a new graphics paintjob.
"Why should I play your game?"
"You're in this post-apocalyütic world trying to survive !"
"Lots of games have that"
"Mine has Zombies !!"
So I think that when people ask for more CREATIVITY AND IDEA, they aren't asking for more gameplay, they're asking for fresh content.
To close off, just a few nitpicks. Feel free to ignore them if you want. xP
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"here is a game with awesome fun times ahead enjoy"
"Please by the slightly updated version for full price later this year!"
Guess what game is essentially Mario with a Prince of Persia time-travel mechanic that was also one of the most critically acclaimed titles of 2008? You guessed it! Braid.
ಠ_à²
Just having platform elements does not make it like Mario. Neither does having little gimmicky easteregg-ish throwbacks.
Braid is a puzzle game. Mario is not. Both very different.
When a game tells you it's a game without telling you, and that in the game you can achieve more than anything you can possibly imagine, you have a game that can captivate the masses EASILY.
And yet, of all those supposedly good examples, only Minecraft is the one that actually got wide-spread popularity and even that is far from "mass-market appeal"
Good Story (vital to EVERY game)
Tetris, Pacman, Pong and the list goes on.
Originality (there's nothing quite like a game coming out of nowhere and dominating. Portal is a perfect example)
This can happen even with an "unoriginal" game.
Proper Difficulty (no one likes the one-shot kill principle, regardless of who gets it. Haha. You get it, no competition. Enemy gets it, no point)
Contra, anyone?
Epic (a good dosage of epicness applies to many games).
A term so terribly overused, it hardly means anything anymore.
There isn't any specific order - it depends on what the game WANTS. Would you say that FPS' are renowned for their astonishing stories?
The industry certainly seems to think so, with all them scripted movie-like cutscenes.
I've tried the FF MMORPG but that was something I couldn't adjust to.
Which, incidentally, is nothing like any other Final Fantasy game.
platformers
......can still have lots of interesting choices in how you play them, making them non-linear, in a sense.
I figured it's the way Fable is meant to be played, and I think this was said in an interview with Peter Molyneux prior to the release of Fable III - at least from what I saw.
Which is doing it wrong for ANY kind of RPG, or even game in general. It's like saying playing Zerg is "the way Starcraft is meant to be played". A game should allow all kinds of choice, and limiting certain ones is just bad.
