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Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Did we peak with the SNES?

XYZ Computing seems to think so:

The main problem with the Xbox and the PS2 is that the games themselves are dropping in quality. While complexity is increasing and graphics are becoming more impressive, many current games simply have nothing more to offer than eye candy. Most of them are completely bereft of a plot, character development, or the indescribable characteristics which made early games so great, which, for lack of a better term, has often been labeled as "soul".
-- SNES- As Good As It’s Going to Get

The GATE offers up a great rebuttal, which I'm inclined to agree with. Hey, I've bemoaned the decline of innovation plenty - but simply decrying the entire set of libraries on the Nintendo 64, Dreamcast and Playstation seems completely off ... not to mention our current crop of machines. Heck, the Dreamcast alone blows the theory out of the water in my book. Somewhere between Shenmue and Soul Caliber, I don't think I've had quite the varied and highly excellent experiences on another single console.

4 comments:

Winkyboy said...

And one certainly cannot write off the innovation that the dual analog controls brought; Play Ape Escape on the PS1 and anyone'll understand.

Josh said...

Excellent point. You can't ignore all the hardware innovations we've had as well. Dual analogs (heck ... analog), memory cards, VMUs, etc.

Josh said...

oh yeah, not to mention ... ergonomics :)

Thomas said...

CD-based media brought more innovation, to my mind, than almost anything else in recent generations. The ability to have massive amounts of storage--for worlds, code, movies, music (can you imagine a DDR before CD media?) not only really created a lot of new developments, but it also led to the memory card.

So it's got that going for it.