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Post by Fryguy64 on Jul 31, 2011 4:06:50 GMT -5
You see, when I was young character mattered to me, but this was the era of the NES game. Games didn't have character, they had a story in the manual, and you imposed the traits from the manual onto the blank slate character in the game. I was always drawing Mario comics when I was a kid.
As technology improved, character development moved from the manual to in-game. Some developers saw this as an opportunity to bring in all kinds of secondary characters, story developments and so on. I noticed this is particularly prevalent in UK-developed games, and I suspect this is why the huge catalogue of classic characters from Western-developed games are dead, while the Japanese ones are considered iconic... where character development has been adding a grunt, a scowl or a woohoo, and no more.
It's a tough call. I'd certainly like to see the revival of a classic character like Dizzy, but I don't want him to be much more than a somersaulting egg... The recent attempt at a revival had him talking, joking around and not somersaulting... Too much. Reel it back. Get the game right and put in character development that doesn't distract from that.
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Post by kirbychu on Jul 31, 2011 5:15:01 GMT -5
There was a recent attempt at reviving Dizzy?! As technology improved, character development moved from the manual to in-game. Some developers saw this as an opportunity to bring in all kinds of secondary characters, story developments and so on. I noticed this is particularly prevalent in UK-developed games, and I suspect this is why the huge catalogue of classic characters from Western-developed games are dead, while the Japanese ones are considered iconic... where character development has been adding a grunt, a scowl or a woohoo, and no more. I don't know... Mega Man was doing that stuff before the technology improved, and he's still going. Maybe it's just that early Western developers were just unlucky. Back then Japanese games usually made it to the entire world, but I wonder how many of those early UK games made it to Japan, or even the US? And how many of the ones that did were actually noticed? |
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Post by Fryguy64 on Aug 5, 2011 8:46:40 GMT -5
There sure was! Blitz Games (where the Oliver Twins now work) put together this demo:
You would think they were unlucky, but actually it seems more a combination of over-ambition missing the mark entirely, and greed on behalf of publishers, buying companies in order to drive them into the ground. The above Dizzy remake was quashed by the marketing team at Codemasters who didn't believe the character would have global massmarket appeal...
Rare has tried to revive a couple of its early franchises for today's audience, but Rare also suffers from over-ambition. If you've attempted to play the GBA revival of Sabre Wulf after playing the original games, they're ludicrously different. The original Sabre Wulf was a top-down action/exploration game, while the most popular titles in the series were isometric action games. They weren't relay races with RPG maps in between...
On the other hand, the GBA also saw remakes/ports of British-developed titles Manic Miner and Robocod. But why not a new Manic Miner or Robocod? (There was a Manic Miner racing game for mobiles called Jet Set Racing... but that barely counts...)
Pretty much since the 32-bit consoles started to appear, many western publishers abandoned their ties to old styles of gameplay in favour of what they knew was popular - namely FPS and Tomb Raider style games. That Dizzy video looks like a Tomb Raider style game, which is not what Dizzy is about. Dizzy is an adventure game.
Would a new Dizzy game sell if it was a 2D cartoon adventure game? I hope so! Are there any developers out there who would give it the care it deserves rather than pump out a mobile phone piece of crap? I hope so... but probably not in this country...
It makes me sad. I would invest heavily in this area if I had a lottery win methinks.
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Post by kirbychu on Aug 5, 2011 9:33:16 GMT -5
Would a new Dizzy game sell if it was a 2D cartoon adventure game? I hope so! Are there any developers out there who would give it the care it deserves rather than pump out a mobile phone piece of crap? I hope so... but probably not in this country... Yeah, I would love a new Dizzy game, but only if it's actually a Dizzy game, and not a Tomb Raider game that happens to star Dizzy characters.  Speaking of forgotten British characters, I heard that a new James Pond game was released for the iPhone a month or two ago, but I don't know how that was handled. The screenshot I saw looked more like a graphical overhaul of the first game, but it said it wasn't a remake. |
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