spotanime.mydadisageek.com

Turns out all these holiday releases do more than give us all sore thumbs, they’ve inspired a slew of bloggers to critique the people who are critiquing all those AAA titles, especially when so many are falling in the love-it-or-hate-it bin. I’ve been on this bandwagon before, and I’m also at it again, but let’s see what some other folks have to say on the subject:

From The Guardian UK’s Games Blog, Keith Stuart wrote:

I found the IGN review particularly depressing. Not only does the writer suggest that the combat system could have done with an extra button (wha? Why?! Why add extra layers of complexity? Since when was that an artful response to anything?), but he ends with:

The ideas are there for a very cool experience, and I truly hope that a sequel is spawned, but this first attempt falls just a bit short.

Can you imagine, for a second, critics emerging from the press screening of Apocalypse Now, or The Magnificent Ambersons, or Bladerunner and proclaiming, ‘yeah, it had some good ideas, but it wasn’t perfect – I’ll look forward to the sequel’. I suppose there’s an argument that, as films are only ninety minutes long, we’ll accept a more flawed experience, but are notions of quality really so tightly governed by longevity? I hope not.

I think most critics have the right idea but wrong execution for this argument. I’m in software development, and we thrive on iterative development and design. There’s iteration on a project level, but also iteration on a portfolio level as well (with portfolio, think franchises for gaming). A perfect case study would be the Crash Bandicoot franchise. The first one was Sony’s entry into the mascot race on the original Playstation. I think everyone at the time thought it was pretty mediocre with some underlying potential. Naughty Dog was able to iterate on that original game with the feedback they received from the community, and good golly miss molly if Crash 2 wasn’t an improvement if not defining moment in the 32-bit sweeps.

Taking the argument to film, as did Keith, look at The Transporter or Austin Powers. Both weren’t huge successes at the box office, but they found enough of an audience in the secondary market to convince the studios to fund two sequels each. So in this case, yes, people do actually say, “I like what I see, now give me more of it and better!”

Therefore, I agree with IGN’s statement in concept. Just to add, John Waters once said there should be more remakes of bad movies than good ones; the “sequelitis” to which Keith referred is really just this opportunity for developers to iterate on a good concept which might have been buried in bad execution. And hey, he should be happy videogames have this opportunity; the film industry is still busy remaking classics like “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Psycho”.