42Bytes

Remember the days of your old Gameboy Pocket and Nintendo 64? I do. And boy, those were the days. Games were simply fun and had reached a point where they had great gameplay and good enough graphics. Ten years on, you don’t call games like Crysis or Call of Duty 4 fun…you say they are awesome or crazy. So where has all the fun gone in these new hit titles?

In the beginning, there was no fancy graphics, just the gameplay. So this is what designers focused on, making games as fun as possible. I went back and played my Gameboy Pocket recently and had so much fun playing Kirby’s Dreamland and Tennis. The graphics in these games were great because they didn’t steal focus of the game itself. Kirby’s Dreamland was a legendary game, flying along, sucking in the evils of the world and launching them back at the enemy. The graphics in it were great enough to allow the player to imagine the world in reality and had a gameplay that kept me and my friends amused for over an hour. It was the gameplay that was key to the games of that era.

But now, in a game like Call of Duty 4 though it is an awesome and epic game, I don’t play it because it is fun. I play it because it has an surreal, blood-pumping experience. The game has almost realistic graphics but your gameplay is nearly the same as every other FPS, run around tactically shooting people. The graphics have become the major selling point for most games and this leaves the true gamer disappointed as we are always looking for innovation. Innovation in graphics is great but innovation in gameplay is even better.

And before anyone jumps on me and eats my head off, I know there is more to a game then just gameplay and graphics. There is soundtrack, storyline, concept, etc, but these are like the graphics. They are meant to compliment the gameplay itself. Not a single person in this world could successfully argue that gameplay is not important to a game for the simple fact that, that’s why they are called games.

Very few hit games now offer just plain and simple fun gameplay that a true gamer yearns for. But this plain and simple fun is what Nintendo has always been good at. And with the release of the Wii over a year ago, the Wii reminded everyone why we still play video games…for fun. Games like Wii Sports used the old concepts that everyone can relate to and innovated with it’s motion technology.

Though the new hit games are epic and awesome they don’t compare to the hours of fun we all get from playing Tetris or Kirby’s Dreamland. Sony and Microsoft offer us surrealism and epic storylines but Nintendo offer us fun. And sure, surrealism is great but I wish that games could get a balance.