Consumer culture and expectations

I was a giant fan of Bionic Commando on the NES, so i followed the recent game very closely. I followed their podcasts, which were always awesome, and in general started feeling kind of like i was with the guys as they were going along. There was just a ton of effort made for the game to happen, and when it came out to the lukewarm reception it got, it just broke my heart. I personally loved the game, warts and all. Seeing the podcast go down was a weird moment, as Ben seemed really down, almost dismissive of the game.

So all that effort resulting in a game i thought was absolutely worth the wait, and you get all this scepticism from the media and a consumer culture that seems ready to crucify anything that isn't polished to an extreme degree.

In short, i simply don't think the game deserved the amount of bad press it got. It certainly had issues, even straight up design flaws that should have been fixed, but there are people out there calling the game really undeservedly terrible things, and it just makes me wonder about what people really expect from games these days.

I'll be first to say i don't appreciate it when my $60 purchase (599kr over here anyway, which is actually closer to $100usd, welcome to Europe) seems hell bent on causing me grief, but i also remember a time when i paid crazy moneys for games like Super R-Type and Battletoads, and that when i got to that underwater bit in TMNT, it wasn't the developer's fault that they'd made a frustrating and hard level, it was that i just wasn't good enough to beat it, and when Battletoads decided 2 players were not allowed after a certain point, that was just some shit you had to work around. You knew games were complex, and you knew they were going to have issues.

I'm a little lost for words, but i'm trying to get a sense wether this an artifact of games growing in complexity and consumers expecting more training wheels, or if consumers are simply so tech savvy that they get a sense that "they could do better"?

In the end, it still makes me think there are a hell of a lot of ingrates out there. We got it GOOD these days, and its frustrating to imagine game developers putting their hearts and time into their work and be met with zero tolerance and little forgiveness.

I was a giant fan of Bionic Commando on the NES, so i followed the recent game very closely. I followed their podcasts, which were always awesome, and in general started feeling kind of like i was with the guys as they were going along. There was just a ton of effort made for the game to happen, and when it came out to the lukewarm reception it got, it just broke my heart. I personally loved the game, warts and all. Seeing the podcast go down was a weird moment, as Ben seemed really down, almost dismissive of the game.

So all that effort resulting in a game i thought was absolutely worth the wait, and you get all this scepticism from the media and a consumer culture that seems ready to crucify anything that isn't polished to an extreme degree.

In short, i simply don't think the game deserved the amount of bad press it got. It certainly had issues, even straight up design flaws that should have been fixed, but there are people out there calling the game really undeservedly terrible things, and it just makes me wonder about what people really expect from games these days.

I'll be first to say i don't appreciate it when my $60 purchase (599kr over here anyway, which is actually closer to $100usd, welcome to Europe) seems hell bent on causing me grief, but i also remember a time when i paid crazy moneys for games like Super R-Type and Battletoads, and that when i got to that underwater bit in TMNT, it wasn't the developer's fault that they'd made a frustrating and hard level, it was that i just wasn't good enough to beat it, and when Battletoads decided 2 players were not allowed after a certain point, that was just some shit you had to work around. You knew games were complex, and you knew they were going to have issues.

I'm a little lost for words, but i'm trying to get a sense wether this an artifact of games growing in complexity and consumers expecting more training wheels, or if consumers are simply so tech savvy that they get a sense that "they could do better"?

In the end, it still makes me think there are a hell of a lot of ingrates out there. We got it GOOD these days, and its frustrating to imagine game developers putting their hearts and time into their work and be met with zero tolerance and little forgiveness.