Soooo....Mass Effect 3

[Jester]

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.

Fair enough. The animal training genre is pretty small, but that makes sense. I don't know enough about Viva Piñata to say, nor Kingdom for Keflings. But The Sims predates Black and White - it's not enough to have a "sandbox game where you babysit creatures that have intelligent-yet-stupid AI," because that'd been done before - not least by Peter Molyneux himself, in Populous.

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.

Again, fair enough. But Black and White didn't begin that genre, although there's a pretty fair argument that Peter Molyneux did. It did experiment with a few ambitious ideas, that, after time and technology, were turned into something better. But something being "before its time" seems to imply that it was just not appreciated because it was so innovative, that the culture just hadn't come around to his vision. But here, the opposite was true - Molyneux's vision was lauded as revolutionary from day one in the gaming press. It just wasn't actually that good. A semi-failed prototype, rather than an underappreciated innovation.

-Jester