Same here. I hated getting lost in the maze like levels of Doom and Wolfenstein back in the day. I find open world games with a compass to be easier to navigate personally.

could you come in to clarify what you meant by "Hollywoodlization" of games?

Yeah back in the day I didn't have internet to help me when I got stuck so it sucked. This is why I couldn't enjoy Zelda Twilight Princess it never told you were to go very well and you wasted time looking for the right place. Old and new are both great, but some people dwell to much in the past.

Well, really, look at almost any big game for the consoles, and they fit the description, besides maybe the sports games and a few more niche titles here and there. Games like Uncharted, Heavy Rain, God of War, Assassin's Creed, Dead Rising, RE5, the list goes on and on. Most big games these days (at least in the single player modes) adhere to that formula of taking more control away from the play and in the hand of the developer, through things like cutscenes, dialouge, tutorials, linear gameplay, etc.

And yes, the WRPGs tend be very open world and non linear, which is one reason they are one of the few types of games I play on my 360, like Fallout 3 and Oblivion.

Nintendo is falling for this bad habit themselves lately, look at things like Other M and Mario Galaxy, which are somewhat limiting to what a player can do compared to their older games. But at the same time, they are pioneering the revival of 2D sidescrollers, which I love because they are just pure fast reaction gameplay. They largely represent gaming as it was, before games tried to be movies.

You got to love when someone makes a post which literally takes all the exact words you wanted to say, so you dont have to...

I HEART you Metallicube!

The fact that some types of games are linear isn't really the cause of the Hollywoodification per se.  Not every types of game is designed to give you infinite freedom or a sandbox experience.  ¬_¬

Come back to the NES or SNES era.  You have games like Contra, a side scroller shooter.  You start a level, gun your way from point A to point B, beat the boss, then proceed to level 2, repeat process to reach level 3, etc...

How is that any different than a game like, say, Uncharted.  Where you start from point A, battle your way to point B, where there is usually a bigger threat waiting for you.   And then proceed to the next Chapter.  Are the polygonal graphics confusing your mind or something?  Some games are just linear by design.  And you could find gems from the past that would fit their modern category.  How is that any worse than it was back then for those cases?

Cut-scenes?  Yeah, they do make the experience richer for many gamers out there, but the gameplay isn't really affected by it now is it.  Apply the Uncharted formula to a side scroller game...  You would come up with something really close to something like Prince of Persia, or maybe Flashback.  How is that any worse now than it was back then?

Because the presentation and the visuals are now much better, allowing the developers to present the users some very awesome looking vistas (Uncharted series), or use incredible visual tricks to help create an actual mood (like the lighting of Alan Wake) that will engage the player much more than mere sprites with 3 frames of animation?

It's a lot easier to take examples on some kind of games, compared to others.   Games in the RPG and FPS genre most often than not suffer from the Hollywoodification of the industry in that they hardly try to innovate, become more and more simple in their designs, overly rely on flashy stuff to compensate and the game takes the hand of the gamer more and more.  Third person shooters or adventure games usually don't fit well with this phenomenon, because their game style has been what it is since just about forever.  They've always been pretty linear experiences.  

And I seriously don't see how Nintendo has been guilty of going the route of Hollywoodification with Super Mario Galaxy.  Seriously, how is Hollywoodification applying to that game?  That game is like the richest amount of design ingenuity applied to a modern platformer in the recent years. ¬_¬

I will reiterate my stance once more.  To me, the Hollywoodification of the gaming industry lies in the half assed sure bet sequels/remakes/copies that most major publishers keep on shoving up our [@*#!] every 10 months.  Just like Hollywood is doing for movies.  Heck, some of those developers even release DLCs the very week the actual game gets released!  Others, even go as far as having you pay for such DLC, that does nothing more than activate a feature that is already on the damn game disc! 

It's a good thing that there are games like Heavy Rain, Kirby Epic Yarn, Mirror's Edge, Flower, Little Big Planet, Mass Effect, Super Mario Galaxy,  Valkyria Chronicles, among many others.  Those are trying to push the medium forward and in varied directions, and make it so it's still a good time to be a gamer.

And that bold statement encapsulates perfectly what is currently wrong with the games industry. "Well, these cinema games are the types of games we are going to make, and if you don't like it, tough. Get with the times." It is this attitude that is leaving more and more gamers behind, because many gamers do not WANT their games to be like movies, and why the industry is declining all the time. They don't want less control, they want MORE control. The fact that this furthering of cinematics in gaming is viewed as "progress" is puzzling to me. If anything, I view this trait as a step back, because it usually means the gameplay mehchanics are dumbed down as a result and the game becomes more limiting to make way for the extra horsepower, while the controls get more complex.

I'm not saying these types of games should not exist, just that they will not be the dominant type of game (rightfully so), and they are not the types of games for ME, and I am not alone in this complaint. This is shown by the decline of the industry, the huge decline in sales of the PS3 from the PS2, and the success of things like the Wii, World of Warcraft, online multiplayer in Halo/Call of Duty, Farmville, smaller Iphone games, and Minecraft. All of these types of games reject the cinema style linear games, and not coincidentally, are all major hits.

Industry was headed in that direction in 2005...in 2010 its pretty much fully there. I don't think anyone expects videogames to play and behave any more like movies than they already do at this point.

I think that it's here to stay since those types of games have their fans, but less games with a million cutscenes will be made.  At first it was the new, cool thing and everyone wanted to have an excessive amount of cutscenes in their games.  It was kind of like when a synthesized keyboard was utilized in every song in the 80's.  They're still used, but not as much.    

Cinematics are there to stay.  As much as the games that are very light on them are going to stay too.

There's a crowd for both types of appraoch.  And there are even some developers who incorporate the cinematic element to the gameplay itself.  Take God of War for example.  Sure there are cut-scenes that you just sit through and watch, but most of them have you press buttons at the right time to make sure you're not idle and actually take some part in the action.  That kind of approach will surely evolve, as has been given a glimpse by the likes of Heavy Rain.  In which you don't only have to press buttons, but are also given a choice that will affect the outcome, instead of having only a single possible path to "button" through. 

This appraoch is still very young and I can see it becoming better and better over time.  Making the cinematics of the games become much more interactive, becoming an entire part of the gameplay experience, instead of "idle eye candy moments".