The Official Metroid Other M Thread

[mai]

RolStoppable said:

KylieDog said:

Thats an empty example, because if VHS players DID start selling the tech would still be outdated, same as many Nintendo games are.  Nintendo games always get special treatment where Wii owners for example will complain about one game not having VA or cutscenes then not hold the next Nintendo game to the same criticism.

You made me consider the possibility that my interpretation of the word "outdated" is wrong and that's why this argument isn't settled yet. So I looked it up on dictionary.com.

–adjective

no longer in use or fashionable; out-of-date; outmoded; antiquated.

Turns out I wasn't wrong about its definition. Which means you are 100 % wrong in calling games with little to no cutscenes outdated. There's no way around it. You are wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can see his point if it comes to pure technological aspects (like in VHS-DVD example), i.e. being outdated equals to being technologically inferior regardless of success on the market, though to some extent pretty much everything on the market may be considered outdated the day it became available. But the argument doesn't hold water if it's applied to entertainment, which games are, since there're no objective scale to measure such things which isn't the case with forementioned example (quality of video output and most other features could be objectively measured).

But even being treated purely like technology I can't see how lack of VA and cutscenes may be considered outdated in games. The most common example of using VA and cutscenes in games is to tell a story, but I can't see how games could be solely appreciated thanks to their stories and nothing else. Even if they could be appreciated that way there're no direct relation between presumably bad story (or at least the one that lacks VA and cutscenes) in game and being 'inferior', there're no objective measure for such things. In fact, I doubt anyone would insist that lack VA and  cutscenes  automatically implies bad story, since you may as well assume that literature is always inferior to cinema since tools it uses are 'technologicaly inferior' to VA and cutscenes.

All in all trying to present VA and cutscenes as superior to anything is fallacious, since there're no directly comparable things that may be deemed as absolutely inferior in every aspect possible, if ain't superior you can't argue that lack of them makes games outdated.