Topic: Where are all the creative/fun/lighthearted/original games on the HD consoles?

Totally agree with this, and the following conversations talking about how downloadable games provide more experimental gameplay and interesting concepts. They don't always end up being keepers... but they do provide a great balance to the "triple-A quality blockbuster" titles that always feel suspiciously the same to me.

@Dru192 I'll have to think about that, but I will get back to you before the end of the day about it. Good questions!

oh yes, i do own PS3 and 360 and sadly there are really few creative original games like Braid

PS3/360 is a great console, if you like generic shooters with great prasentation like Halo 3, Uncharted 2 or Killzone 2... i think to make creative games aside from the mainstream the costs might be to high, so most studios do the safe thing and create generic games for a wide audience, especially the 1st/2nd-party stuff

i saw that the other day and thought the exact same thing. it's confusing how they can be so excited over what will amount to 100 hours of redundant shooting... could you even play two or three of those games in a row without getting bored? even if there were 10 metroids coming out next year, i don't know if i'd want to finish them all, and i'm a man who enjoys his metroid.

scratch that, the more i think about the scenario the more awesome it gets.

a) The PS3/360 are all fps games
b) The Wii has a huge number of garbage mini-games.
c) All of the above.
d) The PS3/360 aren't all FPS games and to be fair to the Wii the PS1/PS2 had tons of shovelware mixed in with their great libraries of games due to them having huge user bases for crappy devs to leech off of.

The PS3/360 do have a lot of games us Wii gamers don't have. The ones most people know about are the same crappy movies pushed on us from Hollywood, the same junk electronics you buy at Best Buy, the same garbage clothes you get from the Gap. Some of these blockbuster games are fun, some of them are all show. When I had a 360 (it died and I'd never buy another one) I played some surprisingly fun games like Lost Planet, Dead Rising (the wii version is lackluster), Crackdown, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and more. While none are perfect games they all opened my mind in different ways. I don't find I ALWAYS need unique game play, sometimes an engrossing story, sandbox exploration and interactivity more than make up for coming up with a new way to play a game.

The casual games available on Xbox Live Arcade are really quite good and there's no reason they couldn't be done on the Wii. Wiiware could be so much more and I'd say overall Xbox Live Arcade actually has more fun unique games available on it. I think some developers are too set on equating price to length of game. A lot of the Wiiware games feel like demos. The games are usually fairly simple to develop yet most are also really short.

As for the best Wii games...I still have a lot to play but many of my favorites so far aren't all that original but they are fun and many do have that lighthearted feel which is great. The Wiimote does take them to the next level but the core games play the same. Games like Dawn of Discovery which itself is a pretty simple RTS much like the Caesar games of old but the controls are a complete dream on the Wii. I can imagine playing it on PC but definitely not on a standard gamepad. The Wiimote adds so much to the RE4/Metroid controls. Even Zelda though some aren't sold on the controls I find flicking the Wiimote to be natural and quite enjoyable. Mario Kart though not quite as precise is fun especially with a group. Also what the Wii has managed is to make games that wouldn't be fun with a gamepad fun.

As a final note I do agree there are a too many games coming out with dark brooding skies, aliens/zombies, and big buff manly or scantily clad female characters. Talk about over dramatic. Then again the Wii has too many mini-games so it's not a 1 sided thing.

I forgot about an original game that is coming soon. Naughty Bear. It is creepy, but original.

@Dru192

First, my apologies for not replying yesterday as I said I would, I got caught up in Metroid Prime 3 (I hate FPS games, but it was cheap and I was bored lol) which made me rethink my stance on the first two, but that's a different post.

I like to believe that gaming is cyclical, not unlike wrestling in the US, in that innovation will always be important to growth but that nostalgia will come back from time to time and help influence said growth. What that has to do with indie developers is that by going back to the basics and building off of them they innovate games while factoring the nostalgia aspect. Take a game such as Braid for example, when you begin playing it you are immediately reminded of Super Mario Bros. yet as you go along you begin to see how the developer has taken a standard (so to speak, I am in no way making light of the importance of SMB, which is my second favoirite game of all time next to Burgertime) side scrolling polatformer and turned it into something else. It turns it into almost a philosophical narrative instead of a game to waste time.

The recent IGN article comparing New Super Mario Bros. Wii and 'Splosion Man and the lack of innovation in the former was half right. New Super Mario Bros. Wii did not innovate on the principles and ideas of the standard Mario 2D platformer, but that wasn't Nintendos intent. It was made to be a homage to the Mario series of games for a new generation of players and a thank you gift to the fans for 20+ years of support. However, what the article got wrong was the idea that 'Splosion Man was innovative. While it might seem so to people, what it did was create a puzzle game with platforms with the same mechanic that Metroid used 23 years ago with the morph ball bombs. This isn't a totally wrong notion however, since innovation now has to be taking things we have already seen and doing them a different way. Not unlike the depiction of The Joker in The Dark Knight. He was the same character we have seen for 60+ years just shown with a different light cast upon him.

I believe we will see more indie developers creating innovative games as costs become less prohibitive as time goes on. As many in the industry have said, we are reaching a plateu where things are as good as they can get and still be affordable for the average consumer. But like I said earlier the "new" innovation will be taking already established concepts and using them in different ways.

One thing that could hurt this, however, is massive companies such as EA or Activision buying up smaller development houses to work on cookie cutter games. Hopefully we'll see these companies allow these smaller developers to have a label of sorts (not unlike DC Comics has Vertigo) to release more experimental or smaller games. Yet, the final answer will be decided by the public. If we (not us in particular, but the gaming community) continue the trend of buying only AAA titles and not looking at the smaller ones, then all we'll see is Call Of Duty LXVII or Final Fantasy MCM. I'm a firm believer in the free market system and the only way we can gaurantee we see innovation in any form is to vote with our wallets.

(sorry this was so long, folks)

you don't see any way a simultaneous 4-player mario could be considered innovative? it took a lot more work than just adding 3 extra controllers, you know...

I would hope that current indies would look at what has happened to other independents and make the decision not to take the money. Getting shut down when you're not profitable or forced to work on an endless chain of sequels to your big hit game seem like major disincentives to taking that cheque.

Oh and check Pachter slating MW2's crap story and bemoaning the "shoot everything that moves" mentality in the newest Bonus Round: http://www.gametrailers.com/episode/bonusround/401?ch=2&sd=1