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[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

I was doing some quick research to see if I wanted to to buy Monster World IV off the PSN or not this morning.

I shouldn't even have to be doing this, except there is literally nothing new worth playing on the video landscape, and there hasn't been for nearly a century now.

I am pretty much starved for anything new. I was reminded of MWIV because I fired up the recent "Capcom Arcade Cabinet" demo I'd downloaded a while back just to see what had become of it. Capcom still wants you to pay 30$ for 17 old arcade games. Most of which are not really playable. Anyway, MWIV was suggested while I doing my best to find the Capcom thing in the new PSN store, because apparently the game can't sell its own games from inside the game. It won't even tell you about the games before you buy them. Even though that is a feature of the "game". And neither will the PSN store for that matter.

Anyway, researching MWIV reminded me that Dragon's Trap on the Master System was the only really strong Wonder Boy / Monster World game. So I started reminiscing about hours with Dragon's Trap as a kid.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/wonderboy/wonderboy3.htm

I've played with just about everyone of these older games. When people talk about video games that talk usually excludes older games like these, but when I talk about video games, I exclude just about everything else by default.

But I discovered a new one that somehow I'd never even heard of before:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/dragonbuster/dragonbuster.htm

Check out the solid cover art. And I can't get enough of PC88 graphics like these:




But more than anything else, check this concept art out:



Scratch the the little man out of the picture squatting on it like a fly. You don't get anything like this in video games anymore. Video games have in short failed to realize the vaulting picturesque imagery that used to adorn the artwork crafted to ignite your imagination in preparation for the adventures that lie ahead.

And mind you, this kind of stuff was everywhere in the 70s and 80s. Just about all anime and some choice Hollywood productions brought it all into life. You have a handful of big budget things like Labyrinth that I am pretty sure were singularly responsible for the JRPG. We were supposed to have sweeping exquisiteness the likes of which we've never seen and will never see beyond our wildest imaginations. But instead we've gotten round after round of tired uninspired clumsy uninteresting unattractive unimaginative completely predictable 21st century drivel.

In short, it would be hard not to do so much better. I hope to hell/high heaven Sword of Moonlight proves to be a beacon of light and not one more nail in the sensory deprivation coffin that wrests our collective imagination in its seductive bed of lingering death


PS: Another thing that worries me:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/127945-Dark-Souls-II-Director-Wants-Next-Gen-Physics-Not-Graphics

I really worry that game directors don't understand that physics aren't games. If a game doesn't behave in a well defined (controlled, reliable, and easily reproducible) way it ceases to be a game, and becomes a simulation. Therefore physics are only useful for visual effects, and visual effects are not physics, they are graphics.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]