The best comparison I can think of is the movie industry. As the gaming industry gets bigger and bigger, it's harder for small fry to compete. And big companies don't want to gamble profits on things they can't put in a nice risk equation - things like fun.

Hence, we get 3407 Deer Hunters for every Vib Ribbon. (OK, mixing PC and console isn't fair, but you see my point.) Oh wait, Vib Ribbon? Wait, did I ever even SEE that in a store? Oh yeah, I didn't.

Well that proves my point even more, then. The movie industry only puts out 'fun' movies - Memento, for one - rarely and usually not by the big labels, although recently the whole "big studio buys indie flick" trend meant arthouse stuff went mainstream ... perhaps the game industry can have the same thing happen? Sony will buy Dink Smallwood and release it to the masses making 34 gabillion dollars?

The only example I can think of for 'small fun game that hit the big time' is Serious Sam - think Doom, but with hundreds of bad guys on screen at once...in very pretty 3D. Croteam - a bunch of Croatian guys - developed it for fun/as a tech demo, and GODGames said "Hey...wait a minute...that's FUN! Let's sell it for $20!" ... and they did. And man, was it worth the money. But it's one game. I can name 40 cookie-cutter games for that one game, which is sad.

Every now and then we get an awesome title from a 'big company' - probably because they realize fun is important, too. You PS2 users will soon experience Deus Ex - assuming the port is well done ... and man, did that game rock. Who made it? Ion Storm. (No, not the Romero branch. :) ... so it does happen every now and then.

So basically, I guess my random rambling has led me to arrive at my conclusion: Games aren't fun for the companies who make them. They're for profit, by and large. (Exceptions, of course, are around but by no means are the rule) ... and profit is hard to bank on when you market a title as "Fun!" ... so we don't get fun. We get random encounters in RPGs because X game had them, and it sold, so damn it, Y game with random encounters will sell too!

...Or something. Basically, as the stakes get higher, unbankable things like fun are the first to go. And the stakes in video games have gone up and up ever since the 'fun days' of Space Quest II, where they could put basically anything in there and nobody would sue, since nobody knew what the hell it was :) Now? Haha, yeah right.

To steal something from George Carlin, "I have no ending, so I take a small bow."

-Daedalus

But that's just where the fun starts! The soundtrack is what makes the game the pure unadulterated trip it is. You would think that there would be only so many ways to remix the words "Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsiman! Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsiman!", but you would be wrong. After some frustration (the game isn't easy by any means), I popped the CD into my CD player, and it played the music! Boy, this letter sucks. Anyway, it's a fun game. Yeah.

--Wrestlingboy47

Three days with almost a total absence of sleep followed. Everyone knows what makes the game great, so there's no need to say anything extra other than that it was unlike anything the boy had ever experienced before--it was very much like what Final Fantasy III had been, but in Chrono Trigger, there was new and exciting things EVERYWHERE, with not an inch of wasted space, with little pixel collections of characters who acted with human means and motives, and did so with an enormous sense of hope.

Years passed and the boy grew up, both literally, and with game systems. Many games flew by from the excitement. Plenty were fun, plenty were addicting (Chrono Cross, I may as well mention, was a week-long extravaganza with short breaks to go to school,) and plenty had the stuff you look for in a game--cool characters, neat music, graphics to make eyes pop. But all of it seemed a little dark, a little gloomy... an imaginary world that was no better than the one we live in anyway.

Then one, one day, his mail-ordered Final Fantasy IX arrived in the mail. The case with shattered from shoddy shipping practices, but the discs had survived. Being the selfless little Squaresoft fanboy that he'd always been, the boy put disc one into his Playstation 2 and turned the power on, and suddenly he was back. He was back in a world that was bright with sound and color, with people that had interesting and witty things to say, with characters that held onto hope in everything that they did... be it saving the world, or making dinner. It was filled with plot and character and music and it had REFERENCE POWER GALORE. It lit a fire that hadn't been more than a occasional spark since that glorious Christmas years ago. It was a triumph; everything that a person expects a video game to be... but more importantly, it was fun.

--Almasy Marquis

How nice of you to use my topic! Anyway, here goes.

My last true blast of sheer fun with a video game had to be NiGHTs Into Dreams. Yeah, that game was amazing.

Anyway, it does seem that with the advent of polygons, companies decided ot use this realism to turn gaming from the fantastical and quirky, to the realistic. Even the fantasy based games have touches of realism in them. The FF series is a perfect example. Every single FF has been the cutting edged in technology, pushing fantastical and fictitious worlds on you. But, it was too damn REAL.

Realistic games can be satisfying and enjoyable, but not new or fun, because you've done it before. You've fallen in love, most have probably faced life or death situations, you've lived the angst.

Games like NiGHTs and Bubble Bobble take you to a world where none of this exists, and none of it matters. It turns you lose, defies physics and just throws pretty colors,. cute characters, and quirky objectives at you.

There is hope however. Game Boy Advance. The thing is just a shinier, prettier SNES, souped up and made portable, and with a color pallete that far surpasses what it was modeled after.

Throw in four player with one game, and we have a a chance at some real FUN here.

But on the at home level...I think quirkiness and fun are due for a resurgence. Rhythm games and DDR's assault on America that has left us demanding more. Super Smash Bros manages a quirky fun, but can get competitive, and the Mario Party titles were a good try, but blew too much.

At least there are some steps being taken, and hopefully Sega will make a portable NiGHTs title.

Peace,

Ray Stryker - battling the flu, strep throat, or anthrax. If he doesn't write in again, you know what happened...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-000084677oct24.story

-Fares

In all honesty, I don't think Fun with a capital 'F' has really faded so much from the videogame scene. Even Toejam & Earl was a rarity in its own day. I think part of the reason why it seems Fun is less evident today is because, as you said, we're older now, and cynicism has kicked in. We have a lot more things on our minds, and I think we've lost a lot of our ability to run with our imaginations.

Beyond that, the dynamic of games, ever since the shift from 2-D to 3-D, has gotten increasingly complex. We have to worry about things like camera angles and targeting, and we look at blocky, blurry characters instead of lively hand/mouse-drawn ones. It's only in Jet Grind Radio that I"ve seen an example of how characters can be made Fun in 3-D. But so far it's still not as versatile as 2-D animation. The Monkey Island games of yore yielded Guybrush a far greater degree of expression and amusing antics than Escape from Monkey Island did. At the very least, it wasn't as strange watching a cartoony Guybrush as it is watching a geometric Guybrush.

Videogames of the Fun variety will always be rare, in part because it's probably hard to figure out how to successfully make a Fun game, and also because of the nature of the business. It's more difficult to get financial backing for something kinda off-the-wall than it is for, say, a Resident Evil.

Here's hoping the next Toejam & Earl will rock.

- Walter

Just a thought, but playing games for a living really isn't all it's cracked up to be. I spent my entire summer doing it, and after you've gone through a plot arc 50 times in debug mode looking for that one hard-to-trigger piece of dialog so you can see if there are any problems with it, you really want to throw the Dual Shock through the TV. Of course, I guess you do get to have your work seen in high-profile games, and you do get to leave little jokes in them, depending on what you're hired to do, but there's a lot more general unpleasantries involved with it than most people think.

--Sean

-Der Schaffer

P.S. The jukebox never played 'Yellow Submarine' damn it!

P.P.S. Where's rabbit #3, vwee hee hee!"

Plenty of recent (and upcoming) games are fun as hell and dont neccesarily owe it all to any suppossed "innovation." And who cares if its art or if it poses a challenge. As long as it's fun, who cares! I mean, just because it... wait, hold on! This just in: THE FOLLOWING GAMES ARE APPARENTLY NO LONGER SEEN AS FUN:

And every streamlined racing game thats about RACING (gasp!) and not this car customization bullshit.

~Action Jackson, who thinks that youre thinking more along the lines of nostalgia than actual fun.