The ideology invented by Sega of America in SNES/Sega age is ruling ideology in videogaming today.

The turok game was an abomination. It really went in the opposite direction of what made the N64 games good.

The others, I don't really consider similar at all. Star Control has no real equivalent except the remake that someone is doing, and when I said prehistoric pulp novel theme, I meant this.

And by industry, I mean the big AAA publishers. I haven't bought one of their games in years. I think the only companies I wouldn't like to see crash are Mojang AB, and Arenanet.... and maybe Creative Assembly.

2008 Turok made me die a little inside. As a game on its own it wasn't TOO terrible, but as a Turok game it was abysmal.

The first company that moneyhats that franchise and makes it into an open world dino game along the lines of Far Cry 3, but based around the comic book and possibly a remake of the original gets all of my money. It would probably be the one game that would get me to buy a new console at launch, whatever the price, whatever the caveats. I still play the N64 ones actually and aside from the crazy ass controls compared to what we have now, they are still excellent.   

Just had to give my two cents on that one. 

The turok games are among my top games for the N64.

I don't even think the controls are that crazy. They're like keyboard and analog stick instead of keyboard and mouse. I think they make a lot more sense than Goldeneye's controls.

Same here...I don't even know what it is about them....they are just awesome.

Yeah, but going from dual analog to that is a bit wonky. After a little bit, nostalgia memory kicks in and it's all gravy from there. Goldeneye is definitely insane....forgot about that. I think Jet Force Gemini might take the cake though. I don't think I got a hold on the controls when it was first out.

What we are seeing isn't the slow onset of a crash, but a all typical contraction that takes place after a market bubble bursts. When Nintendo unleashed the Wii into the market, and a few game developers had incredible mega hits that were massively profitable. Speculative investors stampeded into the industry to unload their wallets in the hopes of making easy money. That in turn created a boom town mentality. Studios expanded to get a bigger slice of the new frontier, and borrowed heavily to fund that expansion.

They even adopted new management styles more in line with mass manufacturers who employ assembly line methods, and are only concerned with volume. The net result is they strip mined the marketplace, and engaged in escalation theatrics rather then thinking side ways. In other words if first person shooters were the big sellers. Then everyone had to churn them out. Even though there really wasn't room for everyone at that table. These companies have rebuilt themselves to pump out the volume, or concoct new revenue streams. Rather then addressing the issue of long term sustainability.

That said this industry is hardly crashing. It is about back to where it was before it boomed. Yes some of the bigger publishers, and developers are hurting financially, but a great deal of that is pining for the boom times. They just can't be as big as they allowed themselves to get, and they aren't going to be generating the kind of profit they once were. They have to shed a lot of dead weight, and discharge their overpriced managers. Who's only reason for being hired in the first place was to offer fast turnaround profits to investors. Which can't happen anymore anyway.

Further more that isn't to say that there aren't developers who aren't in fact doing well in spite of this contraction. They were just the ones who focused on conservative business practices. That didn't let themselves get bloated, or fall into the rampant stupidity that is carbon copying previous games. They kept their products fresh by not over exploiting them, creating games that were more works of art, and not spending lavishly on things they didn't need. In other words they went meek, and now that the market is contracting they are in a position to murder their rivals who ran like old western mine towns.

The reality is that the likes of THQ were actually buoyed by the boom, and would have probably succumbed sooner. Let us be clear about something. That company was about the worst excuse for a developer/publisher there was in the market. What did they produce for the most part. Licensed shovel ware. When well over ninety percent of what you make is crap, and you have to pay out the ass for the privilege to use the intellectual property of another company. Your already walking on the edge of a knife.

Electronic Arts shameless exploitation, and very open disdain for its own customers. Was a open revolt waiting to happen, and as for Square. They don't seem to know their ass from a hole in a ground, and that is really fucked up considering that they are servicing a niche market. As a casual observer I have gathered that their fans want a Final Fantasy VII remake, a new Kingdom Hearts game, and they really disliked Final Fantasy XIII. So what does Square do. They don't give them what they want, and give them more of what they obviously do not.

Anyway these things aren't surprising, because they should happen in a just world. As for game budgets exploding. It isn't really the games that are increasing the costs. It is all the bureaucracy that sprung up in the boom times. Over the coarse of time the costs should go down as tools improve, experience is accrued, and templates are established. The only reason that hasn't been happening is that a lot more people then need to be are getting a cut.

Watch some game end credits, and tally off all the wasteful spending you see there. I shit you not some games actually have over a dozen localization teams. This isn't true for all games. Especially from well run developers/publishers. They just don't go for that level of overkill.

Agreed.  "Crash" is too harsh of a word to use.

One thing though with Square:  They are ass backwards, but so are their fans.  For the Final Fantasy VII remake:  The fans don't want a remake.  They want FF VII, with all of its outdated 17 year or so old mechanics and level designs, to have the graphics of Final Fantasy XIII.  They want a 100 million+ graphical remake with nothing else changed but the graphics.  They want no voice acting, no updated music, no new battle mechanics, no added story, no updated level design, no new features... nothing.  They just want pretty graphics and believe it will sell another 10 million copies in today's market.

And there also is no great hatred of XIII (disclaimer:  I liked XIII for what it was, but it was rather flawed... and they should have ended and XIII in my opinion.  Just throwing that out there before the "fanboy" flags show up).  It's polarizing, very much so.  Rather flawed, hell yes.  But if you look at user reviews on most sites, you'll see reception generally around an 8/10 with thousands of reviews.  Some places even have it at above a 9/10 with thousands of user scores.  Even on Gamefaqs XIII has a 7.7/10 with nearly 6,800 scores given.  You have to take in consideration that this is the fanbase that exclaims "WORST GAME EVER" with each new title.  Before XIII, XII was the worst FF ever.  Before then, Final Fantasy XI was an abomination despite the fact that most fans never played it to know that.  Before that, Final Fantasy X-2 was the worst game ever.  And so on.  And this is also the fanbase that hates its own franchise.  Dissidia is a piece of crap.  All sequels to Final Fantasy games are automatically crap.  Final Fantasy VIII is terrible.  Final Fantasy VII is overrated.  Final Fantasy X is terrible.  Final Fantasy XII was terrible.  FF has been dead since X.  FF has been dead since VII.  FF has been dead since VI.  It just never ends with the fans trashing their own franchise.

 So while Square is ass backwards, saying they should listen to their fans is a death sentence.  And when Square gives them what they want with XIII-2 with towns, more freedom, less cutscenes, added back in shops, more minigames, more sidequests, no level caps, alternate endings ("paradox endings"), more ways to earn gil, etc?  They claim XIII was the better game and that XIII-2 was the last straw... even though half of them didn't buy it and are going off of rumors and what they saw in videos.

Don't get me wrong, Square is unbelievably insane with many of their decisions and are hardly above criticism.  Final Fantasy XIII was flawed, Final Fantasy XIV was atrocious, Final Fantasy Versus XIII is an industry wide joke at this point, they are bleeding money due to their run away budgets, the list goes on.  But as someone who is actually a fan and interacts with the fanbase I gotta tell ya, I don't know who is more insane:  The fans or Square.

There were groups of FF fans that hated XII because it did not 'feel' like a FF game, however it was not universally hated by fans, there was a large group of advocate that hailed it as one of the best FF ever.

XI was an MMO, it is NOT a FF game, numbered game or not, that shit is a spinoff and not relevant when discussing the quality of FF game.

X-2 was again considered terrible by many because it deviated significantly from a stylistic point of view, many fans thought the idea of 'Dress Sphere', an entirely female caste and an cheesy intro ala Spice Girl simply abominable, despite this, it was generally consider one of the best and most enjoyable FF mechanically, with arguably the best combat system Square ever created.

From an execution perspective, FFXIII-2 did a lot of the things FFXIII did wrong, but on a personal level, and this is an opinion share by ALL of my friends who have been FF nuts since the PS1 days and HAVE tolerated X-2 and XII...

XIII-2 isn't a bad game, the plot was still bad, the gameplay still good, the fuction was much improved.... but the ending, dear good was the ending is a messed up piece of garbage that just screamed sequel bait, it was unsatisfying to the extreme and made us all wonder why the hell we even played the game.

And lo and behold there was also a sequel.

I have a friend who have bought every single FF religiously (except the MMO), even getting a gamecube just to get crystal chronicle and then blackmailing all of us into getting gameboys just to play that game properly... he, and all of my other friends equally passionate about FF have told me that they are not going to get Lightning Return. They got burnt by XIII, then they got burnt again by XIII-2.

That tells you something, that tells you that Square is no longer resonating to its fans... and that connection is different from just plain LISTENING to them and DOING what they ask.

Squares predominant problem is the same one that is vexing most Japanese developers. Many of them are fixated on the notion that they can, and should do everything in house. Even if it is entirely counter intuitive, and even more than that counter productive. This company developed a game engine in house for Final Fantasy XIII, and for the life of me I have no clue whatsoever as to why. Other then they didn't want to have to layoff staff. There was nothing at all that the game engine they made. That couldn't be done cheaper, and for that matter faster with any of a number of third party engines they could have just purchased off the shelf.

This is after all the primary reason Western developers are eating their Eastern counterparts alive, and though many in the Japanese industry have acknowledged that this is their biggest problem. It is like an addiction they cannot seem to kick. I don't know maybe it is a Nationalistic pathology, but what I do know is that Square keeps churning out games that run on their own proprietary engine, and the real irony of that is its is entirely superfluous.

Their games aren't so mechanically complex that they need a engine to do something that other engines cannot. This isn't like a Bethesda situation. Where the games engines needs to maintain real time tracking of hundred or thousands of variables in the environment. Outside of the cut scenes their games aren't graphical glory holes. That all said if they are going to insist on doing things in such a antiquated way. Then they should at least be making the case that they are doing it out of the ideal that they are serving the desires of their customers.

EA, hopefully. The successors would drop the silly feud with Nintendo, the mismanaged but very talented developers trapped under EA's helm would likely go somehwere more appreciative, and the NFL monopoly would be broken (or at least sent to a company that wouldn't take it for granted right away)