New Release Day

Tuesday rolls around once more, and since I haven't stopped playing the games I mentioned before (Warriors Orochi and Locoroco 2), I shall instead turn my attention to the new releases of this week... of which there is only one really: Madden 2011.

Normally this is where the gaming community has an issue. "It's the same game every year, why doesn't EA do something new with the franchise? Why do people keep buying the same old crap every year?" My response to this is... well, why DO you buy the same game every year?

Don't get me wrong, I get why EA does it: It sells. Gaming, as much as we'd all like to pretend otherwise, happens to be a business, or at least the making OF said games is, and if you guys keep buying them, they'll keep making them. Also, when you get something right, why bother changing things?

Mario has ostensibly been the same game for the last two and a half decades (collect coins, run from one side to another to clear X number of levels in Y number of worlds to save the princess from Godzill... err, Bowser), same thing with Zelda (go to a dungeon to get an item, use that item for the rest of the dungeon, SPOILER ALERT: Link gets the Master Sword), Halo (shoot the aliens), any other shooter (kill the guys with different hats than you), Street Fighter, and ... well, anything financially successful.

Street Fighter really is the worst offender of that list. At least with the other games the storylines change to a limited extent. Link has new dungeons to go to, Mario gets some kind of new super power, something about them changes. But Street Fighter is literally the same game with each new installment. Case in point: Super Street Fighter 4. Nothing really new added to the gameplay, all of the characters from Street Fighter 4 come back, with the same moves and same button combo's to do said moves, and most of the characters have similar if not identical inputs to perform those moves. Ryu and Ken are identical characters with a pallet swap and slight variations on animations.

Older SF titles did the same thing. How many versions of Street Fighter 2 were there? Or Street Fighter Alpha? Look at the Wii's Virtual Console and you'll see at least 4 different versions of the former, and sadly enough that's not even all of them to my recollection.

The sad part about this is that people kept buying them. What nowadays would be better suited to a patch or as DLC (the boss characters added, plus Turbo, and any little tidbits they added with subsequent releases), Capcom released as separate games, and it sold really well. Why? Because in the end, people want something that's familiar.

Sure, the newer SF games sport about thirty some odd characters, play a few rounds online and you'll see the same faces: Ryu, Ken, Sagat, Bison, and a few Dan players as some kind of In-Joke without a punchline. All characters with similar (if not identical) movesets and inputs, and let's face it: it works! It's effective, and fun for a lot of players.

And that is all EA is doing. Keeping with a familiar play style, and game play. Are they any more wrong than Capcom for shoveling the same game down our collective throats? Absolutely not, since we keep buying them. If the games were too different, we'd complain that it's different and go play the older ones anyways. It's sad, but keeping the game pretty much the same is what we show the industry that we want, so it's safer to do than bring out a new game each time.

So, to show that we (and by "we" I mean "you", since I personally don't care one way or another) don't want the same game each time: Stop buying the damn games. Sitting on an internet message board and crying and complaining about it isn't going to affect EA's sales records, since chances are you already forked over your seventy bucks to have the game in your possession. They already won the fight before you decided you wanted to fight in the first place. Either stop buying the games, or stop complaining that they're the same. Period.

Now I'm off to play Warriors Orochi, where not only is every Warriors game the same, but what you do in each level is identical; If they're wearing a different hat than you, kill them. A free cookie to the first person who actually knows what I'm referencing here in the comments. Their name will be the title of my Saturday Post. From PSTP, I'm Chris Taylor wishing all a pleasant gammage.