Old Games Sparked the Industry Influx

If someone was to take a look at the gaming market about a month ago, gamers would realise that there is nothing worth playing.

This could even hold true now. At the moment, the only new game that is being extensively played in South Africa is Battlefield: Bad Company 2, purely because of its multiplayer functionality.

Single player games have just seemed to decline over the past couple of years. Most gamers can’t even remember the last single player game they finished.

World of Goo was one of the most recent games I remember finishing. The game brought hours of fun to everyone who ever had the chance of playing it. But things have just seemed to stagnate in the gaming industry.

This could either be because there are currently no new IPs that have been coming out, or because the market is just so flooded with average games that it has taken the zest out of playing these games.

Most of the popular games now are all based on previous IPs. Things like Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed II, Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and even the latest Battlefield: Bad Company 2 are all new games using old characters with a form of familiarity about them.

Heavy Rain was perhaps an exception to the rule, but gamers might feel that nothing new has been gracing their screen as of late, which comes as somewhat of a disappointment.

StarCraft II and Diablo III are eagerly awaited titles, but they are still more of the same thing, which some gamers might not find a problem; but it seems that companies may be more focused on money rather than releasing some truly unique games.

The days where players could enjoy sinking their teeth into a truly epic single player game are gone. Games such as Police Quest, Space Quest, Jones in the Fast Lane, Ultima 8, Space Hulk, Syndicate and Strike Commander were all very brilliant games for their time but these games have not been revisited for a long time.

They are all original IPs and were able to put some big money down at the time of them being made. Perhaps the studios have gone bankrupt or they are focusing on other things, but it’s probably about time that these games were looked at again in order to create a truly unique single player experience.

The slow and painful death of single player games seems to be something that is inevitable because every day publishing houses are making games much more focused on multiplayer. Although, in their minds, why wouldn’t they? Online games such as World of Warcraft have been able to make huge bank because of online subscriptions.

Gamers need the ability to play single player games in order to challenge themselves. Everything these days is too focused on multiplayer games but when a gem like Heavy Rain comes along, nobody mentions anything about multiplayer because the game has the depth to keep gamers involved for eight or nine hours to actually finish the game.

Maybe some gamers out there will agree that there are no original IP single player games out that are worth their salt. It could just be that some gamers have become bored of the same old thing because the market is so flooded. A perfect example of this would be God of War.

God of War started its own type of genre when it was first released on the PlayStation 2. God of War 2 also came out on the PlayStation 2 and then other companies started jumping on board. Now for the PlayStation 3, God of War 3 is out – but before it was out there were two, possibly even three games that borrowed almost everything from the God of War franchise and repackaged it as their own game with a different storyline.

In summation, here is a personal list of some of the most disappointing games with good reasoning for each submission.

10. Metal Gear Solid 4 (MSG4): Guns of the Patriots
MGS4 just couldn’t follow in the footsteps of the previous games. They took out most of the tactical espionage and turned it into a cinematic joke. Highlights of the game will include: Running around under a cardboard box and rolling around in a barrel in a vomit inducing whirl of disaster.

9. Star Trek Online
This game was supposed to be some form of a competitor to World of Warcraft to try and challenge the game and mix up the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) scene a bit. It didn’t.

8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Awesome game; no dedicated servers. What were you guys thinking?

7. Half-Life 2
More repetition of a series that should have died a long time ago.

6. Left 4 Dead 2
A repetition of its predecessor. It felt like more of an expansion than a new game and never really caught on with the public which would make this multiplayer game quite stagnant.

5. Dante’s Inferno
It tried, but was just never God of War.

4. Darksiders
It tried but it was also just never God of War.

3. Neverwinter Nights (NWN) 2
NWN was an awesome take on the Baldur’s Gate market using the same d20 rule set but ultimately couldn’t hold water at all because things were just too familiar.

2. Ultima 9: Ascension
What was supposed to revive the series and take all the best aspects of the past eight games and gel them into one ended up being a massive fail.

1. Hellgate London
When created, there was massive hype about this game because it had some of the original creators of Diablo II working on it. This game just fizzled out and became nothing a few months after release.