03-07-2012, 11:14 PM
(03-07-2012, 10:20 AM)Jester Wrote: We are now 10 years past the release of Black and White, and it doesn't look ahead of it's time. It looks stranded in time, an overambitious experiment whose results went nowhere. Who else has tried for 1st person simcity? Trainable learning AI? Iconless control? Almost none of the things in that game have become standard. The genre itself is practically dead, except for some wacky Nintendo experiments like Pikmin. I guess the gesture system was ahead of its time? Even that's still kind of iffy.
There was nothing 5-star about that game except Peter Molyneux' self-opinion.
-Jester
Well that's a hell of a lot of hyperbole and an unbelievably narrow view of developments in gameplay.
Let's expand the PoV a bit shall we? Pikmin is a good example of a game which directly built of off gameplay ideas that were first introduced in B&W but that is a simple extrapolation. How about Nintendo's million selling series Nintendogs/cats? How about the newer Xbox Kinectimals? How about Viva Pinata and Viva Pinata 2? How about Kingdom of Keflings 1+2.
A lot of the key designs that B&W was initially playing with are only now being seriously explored. A lot of that has to do with interface and technology advancement. Like I said though, B&W suffered from control issues. I also believe I stated the game suffered from shoehorning a genre and gameplay elements onto it that didn't fit. Claiming a genre is dead that in my initial argument I stated didn't even fit the game we were discussing isn't a very strong point. And it's less strong when I've offered a lot of examples above which have found some level of critical or commercial success which definitely recently fall in that genre.