Topic: Is the Wii U a failure?

You can swipe at things, run up walls, swim poorly, dive from midair, run up flag poles, sprint after running consistently a while, etc.

Any more nuanced details don't really matter until I'm playing the game. I, like most people, am not reviewing it, I'm evaluating the Wii U's library and the types of games on it. Precisely how fast the cat can run does not factor into that purchasing decision. It's not going to magically make the game a JRPG nor even a different kind of 3D platformer when I press buttons in it for the first time.

It was an example of how a game with simple rules can't be understood fully until you play it. In terms of the actual gameplay a boardgame like chess is far simpler than a game like Splatoon. A uni student could sit down and code a game like chess having never actually played it. But writing the AI? Even if your a genius there's no way you're going to be able to write good AI for that game. Especially if you've never actually played the game against someone who is far better at the game than you.

and by god, this lets play generation of gamers. Think they know everything about the game based on what some dude has said about it. They don't understand how influenced they are by the opinions of those players are.

If I judged games on what I saw on videos (even for entire playthroughs), I would assume Saints Row 3 and Heavy Rain are some of the best games ever made and nearly every RPG is complete garbage.

3D World is stale after...one game like it? Gotcha. By that note most games must be stale by this logic.

That's fair. I do the same with the PS4 and Xbox to give reasons why I won't own them as of now.

I don't know that anyone here is part of the let's play 'generation,' that you mentioned with such disgust. Anyone who isn't half sheep can make their own decisions even from a video with someone else's commentary in it. Not to mention there are plenty of videos with no commentary out there. Not to mention not to mention that some games aren't worth slogging through just to see what they have to offer. Some gameplay is just dull and tedious. Plenty of games have very drawn out gameplay.

I don't see how it's anything but a connivence.

Heck, going off bezerker's comment, I noticed quite a few comments about Hyrule Warriors calling it "simple". I can tell you that I thought the same until I actually played it. The game is a hell lot more complicated than a simple button masher. Most maps will slaughter you if you only mash buttons

Simple =/= button mashing.

You're a generation younger than me, you've grown up with youtube. Odds are you'll see lets-play videos in the same way that I saw grainy screenshots in a magazine. The difference being that I knew the grainy pictures told me nothing about how the games played. When lets play videos came along? I'd already learnt that the only way to understand how a game played was to actually play it. Even the skill of the player in the video can seriously misrepresent how the game plays.

For some reason there is a sub-set of your generation that seems to think that lets-plays are gospel. And yes, I'm going to refer to this attitude with disdain because I think it's a load of bull. You talk about "sheep" as if you're a youtube commentator talking about some grand conspiracy. Some plucky teen who thinks they know how the world works. But in reality we all know jack. You should be far more cautious about what you claim to be an expert on.

Well, you got me, I'm 13. Yep, totally a teen. Definitely wouldn't be creepy for me to spontaneously walk into a middle school. Lol, your assumptions are so off-base, man. I read Nintendo Power, I didn't even have a computer when I was younger and youtube didn't even exist.

And videos are infinitely more informing about 'video' games than static screenshots are. For action games screenshots can only show the graphics, really. Animation is totally lost.

3D Land and 3D World follow the same formula as NSMB, just in a different dimension. So it's not really 2 games, it's 6.

Right, who needs another Mega Man when we have all these 1st and 3rd person shooters.

...

What does that have to do with anything?

If you want to boil it down as far as it goes, mega man is just call of duty with one less dimension. Final fantasy is DND with less customization. Pong is stale because it was preceded by all physical games before it. If you want to boil it down, every new game follows the same formula as the game released before it, "do X to win." There you go, no game can be original, because they are following the same formula. It's not 6 games, it is every single game that has preceded it.

How about we go to a restaurant, you pick a meal, I eat it, and you tell me how it tastes?

Edit: Or I could just go to a restaurant by myself, and upload a video of me eating it, then you tell me how it tastes?

Without experiencing a game yourself, you are missing the most important part of the interactive medium we call Video Games, interactive

If you do not interact with it then you do not understand the full experience. With enough experience you can tell if you will enjoy a game or not without playing it, normally. However you would not be equipped to review or judge the game. The game might look boring to you from videos, but that doesn't make it boring. Just like a game might look exciting from videos but that doesn't make it exciting.

Haru17: Male, 19, United States

You were 9 when youtube launched, you've grown up with this stuff around you. When I was a kid the only thing even remotely close to a lets-play video were clips on TV. Most of the information we got from games were from magazines. And I don't mean that magazines existed I mean that that was it. I'd get games purely based on what the screenshots on the back of the box looked like or word of mouth. That was it.

As I said, you're not old enough to understand how little you know. That's not a slight on you, that's not me insulting you. That's just me telling you how it is. When I was 19 you can bet that I was precisely the same. Only difference being that lets-plays were not even close to being a thing.....

Again, you're wanting to argue with me rather than actually listen to what I'm saying. I wasn't saying that lets-plays and grainy screenshots are equivalent. I'm saying that I grew up with grainy screenshots and you grew up with lets plays. I've learnt that you can only really judge a game based on how it plays. Apparently your generation has skipped that and think they already know just based on a video. I have nothing against lets-plays, all I'm saying is that it's hard for you to be critical of something you're native with. You clearly don't understand its limits. At 19 you don't even really understand your own limits of understanding.

I can vouch for what skywake is saying about kids' opinions on games being straight from Let's Plays. But I will say that most everybody judges games without playing them.

To be fair we all kinda have to do it to some extend because you can't buy everything. Every game purchase has to involve some sort of judgement about how we expect the game to play. And we usually even limit what we see for a lot of titles to avoid spoilers.

But it's one thing for me to say that I won't get a game because it doesn't look like something I'd really enjoy. It's entirely another to then go and argue how uninspired the game is having not played it. Gameplay footage tells you a lot but it doesn't tell you everything. Just by looking at gameplay footage you'd assume that Sticker Star is a fantastic game. I haven't played it so I couldn't tell either way but apparently it's not. You just can't take gameplay footage as gospel.

You're oversimplifying things. Mega Man does not have the same formula as CoD. You can't wall jump and absorb enemies' powers in CoD.

NSMB vs 3D Land/3D World on the other hand, shares more similarities between them and aren't really distinct from each other in terms of mechanics. The characters play the same from game to game and rarely even differ from each other. The levels have the exact same objective and you progress the same way between them. Powerups work the same and many of them are shared from game to game. The only things they usually change between games are the powerups, other than that it's largely the same from game to game.

Now the collectathons vs. the linear platformers are more distinct from each other because they actually differ in terms of level design, game progression, and character moves and abilities, while still retaining the same core Mario gameplay. The collectathons in general are a much better example about how Mario games be handled really, each one (except for Galaxy 2, which is glorified DLC) is distinct from game to game and introduces unique abilities and gameplay mechanics, and actually feel like different experiences.

I was just about to say the same thing.

When I'm buying a game, I go trough alot of trubble on getting information about if this is a game for me. I watch trailers, gameplay videos, check if it has co-op multiplayer, read rewievs and watch in-depth videos with developers talking about it.
After all this I make an opinion of the game and conclude rather I want it or not.

I would say, if I played the previous games in the series, this would leave me with enough information about if the game bringing something new to the table. At least enough so I can make a rational judgment and general opinion on the game.

This isn't black and white.
Sometimes I would have to play a game to realise how good it is. Other times the game was what I expected or maybe even worse.