IS MARKETING KILLING THE WONDER OF GAMES?

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smash comes early in japan anyway, so even in melee secret characters were spoiled if you were anywhere near the internet. thankfully I wasn't but idk i think i'm just not a kid anymore and don't really get dazzled by unlocking in fighting games. the game at its core just needs to be good. sami for smash4 please
I dunno guys. I think it would have been awesome to discover that Megaman was a playable character in Smash Bros U as I was playing it, instead of 1.5 years before its release as it was blasted across every medium ever.

Though on the other hand Mega Man will probably be on the cover of said game.

And even in the dark ages of the early nineties there's no way there wouldn't have been someone who subscribed to a Nintendo Magazine and told everyone on the schoolyard: "Guys, Mega Man is totally going to be in the next Smash Bros game." "No way." "No, look it says so here in this article about games shown at WCES."
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Mega Man being in SSBU is not a great example, no.

On the other hand, I really don't need to know which two characters in Dragon Age 3 have their romance options with the main character race-restricted. Nor do I need to know that Leliana will explicitly mention her relationship with the hero of Dragon Age 1 if you import a save where you romanced her, and that the dialogue is different if you sacrificed yourself in the first game's ending. God dammit. The game is two and a half months away.
I think that the biggest wonder of games is killed by me simple knowing more about video games in general. Often when I see a trailer, I'll go "OK, this looks amazing, but the actual game won't be anywhere near that amazing" and then I don't get excited.

That said, I can usually avoid getting too much information easily enough. Besides, access to information is vital to avoid disappointments.

One of the games I anticipated the most is White Knight Chronicles. It looked amazing in the trailers and the interviews made it look like Level-5 had both solid and reasonable ideas. Unfortunately, the game turned out to be crap and thanks to the abundance of information, I was warned in time. Getting a little extra excitement from the great games is not worth the cost of accidentally buying crappy ones.
I still like to know about games, and having some exposure, but right now as a whole it's like the entire industry is marketing like a movie trailer that shows the entire plot AND resolution in 1 minute 30 seconds. You know the movie trailers that after watching you're like "Welp, that was enjoyable. Guess I don't have to see the movie now."

But what gets me with Smash Brawl where it was a hype "SANIC IS IN SMARSH BORS! AND SLOD SNACK!!" and then in the game itself they were "Secret" characters that you had to unlock. That was a shitty disconnect between marketing and gameplay.
sadly with third party characters the both nintendo and sega/capcom/konami want some sort of joint exposure. though there are still secret characters they won't reveal in smash4 unless you pay attention to japan leaks. i mean with the 3ds version being one month early it's probably gonna bum you out if you hope to get that freshness on wii u version's launch day.

as a side note: i will intentionally miss out on speedruns because im afraid of even seeing levels/stages i've never been to before.
I'd say the insipid need for everything to be shared and parroted and for everyone to be "in on the thing" has done a lot of damage to just about every form of media. So tangentially, yes I agree with kentona.

I remember, in my naive early teen years, going back through the catalogue of pre-7 FF games when I first discovered emulation and being blown away by the sense of discovery because frankly nobody except lame nerds gave a shit about those old-ass games anymore, at least nobody I knew of (it certainly didn't comprise any part of mainstream videogame talk in media or online), now being a lame nerd is pretty cool if you spend all your time on the internet (spending all your time on the internet is also cool now) so knowing/liking/playing classic titles is a badge of your trve nerd status and directly related to your capacity to repeat words you heard other people say in a thing some time because why not.

Nothing wrong with classics of course, in fact it's good to be aware of them, probably. But it kinda sucks how it seems like everyone kinda just went - "oh everyone loves the classics? let's cancel the future!" and proceed to re-hash the same ideas for eternity with some obvious exceptions and a generally technological improvements happening rather than any sense of the radically new.

(It seems lost on people that the reason classics are classic is because they were, for their time, in some capacity either themselves radically new or failing that - an example par excellence of a creative idiom that was fresh and wondrous at the time of its release - at least that's what I reckon? Either way you don't get that in something new by retrospective emulation/pastiche any more than you get a new Shakespeare play by chopping up his works and picking sentences out of the pile of clippings)

Of course I'd probably be defending that if I were one of those early people who helped build the tower of babel that is everything to do with videogame "culture" on the internet rather than going out and getting drunk like a teenager is supposed to.

wherefore art thou, videogames?
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=kentona
I still like to know about games, and having some exposure, but right now as a whole it's like the entire industry is marketing like a movie trailer that shows the entire plot AND resolution in 1 minute 30 seconds. You know the movie trailers that after watching you're like "Welp, that was enjoyable. Guess I don't have to see the movie now."


The trailers for games are fine. There's a lot more to a game than to a movie - it lasts dozens of times longer, so it's hard to really spoil much in that amount of time.

The twenty minute interviews, and the news stories by people who get beta copies four months early, are a lot worse.

I saw someone mention indie games earlier as a beacon of hope, but in fact with indie designers this is actually even WORSE because the way we keep our audience's interest (and our own motivation) is with design blogs detailing every single thing we're working on during development.
author=NewBlack
I remember, in my naive early teen years, going back through the catalogue of pre-7 FF games when I first discovered emulation and being blown away by the sense of discovery because frankly nobody except lame nerds gave a shit about those old-ass games anymore, at least nobody I knew of (it certainly didn't comprise any part of mainstream videogame talk in media or online), now being a lame nerd is pretty cool if you spend all your time on the internet (spending all your time on the internet is also cool now) so knowing/liking/playing classic titles is a badge of your trve nerd status and directly related to your capacity to repeat words you heard other people say in a thing some time because why not.


Yeah discovering emulation for the first time was weird, I only have rare glimpses of the NES in my childhood and only the standard platformer SNES game at a friends house. But then randomly in 2001 while having a gamecube I found myself discovering all these random SNES squaresoft titles in a time where a lot people still thought FF4 was 2. It's kind of a weird jarring moment because no one at school talked about final fantasy, just yugioh and smash bros. It's entirely possible for a 14 year old now to look up rom translations of a non-NA squaresoft title and feel some sort of wonderment, then again less of those occurrences will probably happen less as time goes on. Neo-retro nostalgia is weird.
Just like video killed the radio star, internet killed the gaming mag.

I remember back in the NES era with Nintendo Power subscription, I'd get excited with small bits of exposure for new games coming out: Super Mario Bros 3, Final Fantasy, Willow to name a few.

This trend even carried on to the first Playstation with whatever magazines they carried (which I can't remember). It was how I first came to learn of games like Wild Arms, the then upcoming Final Fantasy VII (which was the reason I grabbed a PS1 instead of an N64), and a few other assortments.

In magazines, editors could easily tease you along without revealing too much, and most people either didn't have the internet, or it wasn't as reliable as today, so they were left with whatever information was in the magazines.

Now it seems info gets dumped on you wherever you go, whether you want it or not, and the bits and bobs that once teased you and excited you are not tidal waves of content that you can't hide from.
I got really excited when they announced Megaman for Super Smash Bros. though.
I'm a sucker for the system D:
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