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Comments
Waitaminute, sorry, I thought you were for terms like FPS as valid genres >.>
"Action/Puzzle" would be great for Portal's genre.
This is what happens when I keep having to jump up and down from the computer
The point is that Portal is bundled with games like Bioshock, Call of Duty and Halo. If you didn't know much about games, just played Portal and asked a guy at a store to give you one of those new-fangled FPSs because that's what you heard Portal was, you wouldn't be getting a game like Portal.
Well, for example, let's look at Deus Ex and Bioshock. One is an RPG with a first person interface where make choices according to whatever way you want to characterize Adam Jensen, whereas Bioshock is a linear game with clearly horror-based aesthetics. There are some mechanical similarities, but the actual gameplay's not the same.
So, according to this and the rules I established beforehand, I would label Deus Ex as an RPG and Bioshock as a horror game, really. I wouldn't even call it a Survival Horror game as it doesn't rely on item management and it doesn't really put you at a disadvantage against monsters, as it gives you powers as well.
^Err that's what I thought.
But "horror" gives even less clues as to how the game actually plays than "first-person shooter" does. It only tells you the "feel" of the game, not anything about the actual mechanics of it.
Well, the "misaiming" of current genre terms does have the fun effect of causing players to unexpectedly discover other psychological experiences from new games.
But apart from that...
1. I know that Portal is bundled with Half-Life and Team Fortress 2, in part because all three were among Valve Software's first vastly successful offerings and also because they use the same game engine. Never heard of Portal being bundled with Bioshock, CoD, or Halo.
2. If you just played Portal, what did (hypothetical) you like about it? Was it the FPS perspective? Was it the problem-solving aspects? Was it the disembodied voice being strangely creepy yet hilarious?
^ I think FPS (or more broadly, "first-person") is a presentation format. It's like top-down stereotypical RPG format, or platformer format.
@glennmagusharvey:
Well, actually, Portal and TF2 were first released as part of the Orange Box, so it wasn't because they were already successful. It was because Valve felt they were too small to be released on their own, most likely.Oh, my bad then. I don't know Valve's history that well.
hrrn. True. The thing is, I'm rather unsure of using "First Person" as a distinction and I can't really think of a word to describe Bioshock's mechanics. It's the kind of horror that allows you to combat the monsters, so maybe it's "Combat Horror"? I dunno. But the thing is, I definetly dislike classifying things under the name of First Person whatever because First Person whatever doesn't tell me much about the game.
Objectivist Shooter would be far better descriptor than Combat Horror. Also, Action Horror is Resident Evil style combat.
First thing I thought of was Bioshock, and not for the reasons you intended.
The issue with any video game classification has always been (and may always be) describing the mechanics, tone and narrative elements in the game within a single phrase. I definitely agree with Portal being defined differently to popular first-person shooters, because it provides a very different kind of experience, and placing it in the same category is misleading. After all, the term "shooter" definitely implies consistent combat; Portal has occasional combat, but has a huge emphasis on puzzles that would not be found in something like Call of Duty. Since its content is so far removed from the likes of popular FPS games, it's useless to place it in the same category. Portal bears much more core resemblance to puzzle games, being a clever puzzle game itself.
Other mediums don't run into the issue of having to describe both the nature of the core content and the way the audience interacts with the piece, and different genres seem to be on different wavelengths when it comes to this. "First Person Shooter" is actually pretty good, because it describes both; "First Person" is both mechanical and narrative, and "Shooter" is mechanical. That also means it's pretty rigidly defined, so it's easy to have a first person game that defies those boundaries and becomes a different genre, thus the current confusion. The term "RPG" is a complete clusterfuck at this point, so I just take it to mean "influenced by pen-and-paper RPGs/previous vidya RPGs". "Adventure game" never described anything in the first place, because a game that isn't some kind of adventure (even if that adventure is hitting a ball) isn't much of a game. "Action game" is similarly meaningless.
Video game genres sure are pretty silly.
To me, "action" refers to a game that focuses on real-time combat. It's a broad category with a lot of subgenres (shooters being one of them).
"Adventure" to me is a game that focuses on exploration, where the path toward the next objective is not always clear. Which admittedly has little to do with the name adventure, but that's the common thread uniting most games described as "adventure" or "action/adventure" (the latter of course referring to the ones that also have real-time combat as a major featuer).
So guys, how about those Mario games and ports of games that people already played a few months ago?
SM3DL had a unique take on the general Mario formula by taking 2D Mario gameplay and applying it to a 3D perspective, and even the New Super Mario Bros games at least introduce different powerups, level designs, and gimmicks to keep things interesting enough.
As for "ports of games people already played a few months ago," keep in mind that some people don't have access to an HD console or a sufficiently powerful computer to play every AAA title that's released each month. Hell, the most graphically advanced game I have on my PC is Half-Life 2.
Seriously, I think the amount of saminess in nintendo games is well below average relative to other game devs.
No, but they did take up a majority of the conference. Hell, it was MARIO MARIO MARIO MARIO MARIO throughout the middle of it.
I, for one, am so glad that now not only can I play New Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros. Wii, but I can look forward to playing New Super Mario Bros. 2 and New Super Mario Bros. U! I can't wait until they make New Super Mario Bros. S III 4G One X Nexus Epic Touch Prime MAXX LTE with BEATS by Dre.