Gimmick Games? Gimmick a break!

Posted by fuzzwobble on Mar 19, 2011 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

Forgive me for making a broad generalization, but the gaming industry is stagnant.

With how things are we can throw almost any recent mainstream game releases into two piles. The game is either a carbon-copy of a pre-existing formula, or it simple takes a pre-existing formula and tries to spice it up with a gimmick.

A carbon-copy game (typically produced by the AAA industry) will typically have dozens (if not hundreds) of clones. Most of the time you can only differentiate by noting differences that would be mocked by other entertainment industries if you even tried to pass them off as original content.

Essentially, carbon-copy games are trying to sell the same experience with barely-distinguishable differences. I could make a cup of instant coffee, put in another teaspoon of sugar, call it a ‘mocha-fantastico’ and give it to somebody. You know what? It’s coffee. All you end up with is somebody being disappointed and a hit to your reputation. Nobody wins.

They can be forgiven to an extent. Carbon-copy games know what they are and usually try to pull it off by making a slight improvement or by twanging at our nostalgia with a homage.

Gimmick games are made by pretentious companies with no imagination beyond a fleeting thought such as “What would [game here] be like if it had [this item/character] in it?”

A gimmick game is exactly what it sounds like. It takes a pre-existing formula that’s been proved to work and throws in a gimmick. You can probably think of a few examples of what you think are gimmicks right n0w, but many first guesses would more-than-likely be inaccurate. Portal would probably come to mind, but Portal was not a gimmick; it had unique characters, problems, gameplay and resolutions.

Here are some examples of common gameplay gimmicks:

• Forcing the protagonist to stop and solve ‘problems’ only solved by a ‘deus ex machina‘ device.
• Making a sequel and replacing the main character for no good reason.
• Remaking a game so the player controls a half-naked woman (skin-tight clothes also apply).
• Attempting (poorly) to loosely base a game upon a movie franchise.
• Changing where the enemies come from. You still fight in a city, but the fodder comes from the moon now; this game is different.

I could go on for hours but you get the picture. It’s an existing game with a difference to gameplay just noticeable enough to allow the designer to proclaim he’s not running a glorified xerox machine.

You know what the worse thing is about these gimmick games? They drown out the real potential. When you hear about a game from your preferred genre being a fresh and unique experience you immediately respond with scepticism. It’s this exact trained response which has put certain genres in a rut today (with the MMO market suffering the most).

Luckily the fuzzy animal era died out. I’m talking about that dreaded time where game developers thought that all you had to do was copy a pre-existing game and replace the protagonist with a cute/cuddly/fluffy animal that will still ‘kick your tail’. Glad that’s over with… at least for the most part.

Speaking of gimmicks, there’s something that has to be said and i’m throwing it out there. All of you game companies who release ‘expansion packs’ for Real-Time Strategy games and just tag on a couple of units then market the product based solely on that single premise: You should go find a mirror and frown at yourself in disappointment. Trust me, we’re all doing it already. We appreciate those new units, but you are NOT selling the new units. 90% of us buy your expansion pack for the extended campaigns, new maps and (if we’re blessed with you making the effort) additional faction/s.

When we buy an expansion to an RTS game to find it’s just got 4 or 5 new campaign maps tagged on and a couple of new units we feel RIPPED OFF. That’s probably why nobody buys expansion packs for most RTS games anymore. You’ve ruined it for everybody and you have only yourselves to blame.

I’m not just talking about single-player mode here. Do you even realize how many RTS communities died off because the expansion packs were so lackluster that alot of people just didn’t bother to buy them? Incompatibility is death. I guess we can call it a blessing in disguise that Red Alert 3: Uprising didn’t support multiplayer. I’m pretty sure Red Alert 3′s community would have crashed and burned.

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Okay, it’s out of my system now. Time to answer a few questions i’ve received over the past week:

“I have read with interest these 2 articles, but i’m confused, what is a First Person Shooter? And what does Real-Time mean?” -Brandon, regarding the AGS series.

A First-Person Shooter (FPS) is a genre in which you view the world as you would through the protagonist’s eyes. While many FPS games allow you to toggle to 3rd person mode, you often spend most of the game looking down the barrel of a gun and, usually, aiming by looking around and positioning the crosshair in the center of your screen over a target. It’s a safe bet that you’ve played one before.

The term ‘Real-Time’ when attached to a genre states that you have to respond in, well, real-time. In the case of a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) this simply means that while you are giving orders to your units the action doesn’t stop. Some games allow you to enter a gameplay mode in which you can control and give orders outside of real-time (and some of those games are still considered RTS) but usually you play ‘on the fly’. Some games simply don’t require this prefix; there’s no such thing as the genre ‘Real-Time Action’ for example, since the statement is redundant.

“How do you know Obble was his name somehow related to yours?” -Jeff, regarding the LoL/HoN comparison article.

The name similarity is somewhat of a coincidence.

Obble’s original handle was OMGBoomLOL for a long time. For some reason though, people would pronounce his name as ‘Obble’. From my understanding, he changed his handle as he migrated from his previously occupied games and forums to the faulty pronunciation. A few years later we ran into each other and, sharing the same enthusiasm for both games and the mechanics behind them, have been good friends ever since.

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Many other questions have been addressed via reply functions or through email. If i haven’t responded to you it’s probably due to the answer already existing in an article or, well, there was just nothing to say. I just thought others might find the answers to these two queries interesting or informative.

That’s all for this article. TTYL!