Gaming Trends 02.21.07: Failed Gimmicks
Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 02.21.2007
Just because the idea seems good doesn't mean it actually is.
Sometimes, there comes along a gimmick in video games that works so well that it becomes a successful trend others want to copy. Pokemon's "two-game-split", online gaming, music games with totally different peripherals, and more. Unfortunately, there are gimmicks that look good but just don't catch on for some reason. That's what this week's gaming trend's is all about as we look at some of the many failed gimmicks out there.
GBA to GC Connectivity Who needs to pay $20 a month when you can pay $280 for 4 GBA's plus $40 for 4 link connectors plus $50 for the game itself ($370 total)?
The year is 2003, and the people are ready to take their gaming online. With Microsoft succeeding with Xbox Live and Sony getting somewhat ready, how was Nintendo preparing to go online? Funny thing was...they weren't. Nope, Nintendo decided that going online wasn't worth it, so they came up with a different alternatives: GBA to GC Connectivity. How did it work? Simple, all you need was a GBA and the GBA-GC cable, then get three friends who also have the GBA and their own cable. I mean, isn't that better then paying $10-$20 a month for some online game nobody's going to play in two years? I hope you can tell I was being sarcastic.
I can understand Nintendo not wanting to go online, but the alternatives that they provided was insanely ridiculous. Right up there with Mario Kart's LAN play (how many people actually did do that?). To play a great game like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles or The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure to it's fullest, you needed so much different equipment that it became a convoluted mess. So unless you had friends with their own GBA's and link connectors, you were going to get screwed out of a lot money for a feature that was basically used for only two notable games. Was it any surprise that sometime after this gimmick third-party support was out the window?
Nintendo seems to have learned their lesson, because they've taken their DS online (though the Friends Codes are annoying; I blame stupid sue-happy parents) and Wii is set to go online with...Pokemon. At least it isn't going to cost hundreds to play.
GBA E-Reader The predessessor of micro-transactions?
Of all the gimmicks to fail, this one disappoints me because I liked the e-Reader. With the ability to scan cards into it, it seemed to have so much potential. You can play NES games for $5, it added news features to Animal Crossing, certain Pokemon TCG cards had mini-games you can play, and it even had a Mario Party board game based on it.
The e-Reader seemed like a good idea in theory, but for some reason it just never took off in America and died a quiet death in early 2004. At first I didn't understand why it didn't catch on in the American market. Then when I learned about the compatibility issues that it had with the GBA-SP and DS, then the fact that weren't many (maybe any) NES games released weren't really must buys. The e-Reader could've had so much going for it, but Nintendo failed to come up with any great ideas as to why the buy this thing.
But what really bothers me is that despite the e-Reader's failure, Nintendo released "NES Classics" for $20 each and some of the games were already on the e-Reader. What, exactly, was Nintendo THINKING when they decided to release the $20 NES Classics?
The PS2 Hard Disk Drive So...what does this do besides play Final Fantasy XI?
With FFXI being an MMORPG, it was a natural fit for the PC. But what about the consoles? How would you take a game that would need so much space for all the extra stuff coming from expansion packs and put it on a console? Solution: introduce a new peripheral called the "Hard Disk Drive".
In March 2004 Sony released the HDD in America alongside Final Fantasy XI, and it would only be a matter of time before we found out about other things we can do with our HDD. Then in November 2004, Sony released the slim PS2 that was not compatible with the HDD, thus pretty much killing it instantaneously. Besides FFXI, there was also a whopping eight other games that could use the HDD, but they were either for reduced load times or to store additional maps. FFXI was the only game that really needed the HDD to work, so in essence, you were buying an expensive for a game you can only play on the original PS2's and that barely anybody plays it anymore. Feel stupid yet?
You could of used it to copy PS2 games to it thanks to HDLoader and HDAdvance, but Sony sued them because it was illegal. So besides that, the PS2 Hard Disk Drive turned into just a big waste of money in America.
F-Zero AX/GX Memory Card Swap The American arcade market is dead, cremated, and it's ashes are scattered throughout the ocean
Here's an idea that just didn't work because of the American arcade market being dead. If you had F-Zero GX, the console game, you can take your memory with the saved data and put it in the F-Zero AX arcade machine. Doing this allowed you to unlock everything much quicker in the game. But since arcades haven't been popular in America for several years, this kind of memory card swapping just didn't catch on.
But of course, you didn't really need this feature since you can unlock everything in F-Zero by going through the super hard courses on super hard difficulties. Good luck with that!
Lifeline It's bad enough women in real life don't listen to me...
Here's a great, innovative idea for a video game: using a microphone to tell the characters what to do in the game. That was the basis behind the PS2 game Lifeline. Of course, for a game like this to be fun and innovative, it actually had to work. When it came to this particular game, the person you were supposed to be controlling doesn't listen to a thing you say.
You tell to pick up an item? She'll run around in circles. Tell her to enter a hallway? She'll waste a healing capsule. Tell her to shoot a certain enemy's body part? She'll shoot the wrong thing. Monster about to approach her and kill her? You try warning her, she ignores you, and then she starts to get killed and asks why you didn't warn her.
So in the end, the innovative control scheme was broken and so it was almost impossible to play the entire freaking game. Even though it was a failure of a game, it somehow wound up getting on the PS2's greatest hits list. What?!
Overall
Those are just some of the gimmicks that failed to catch on, and based on their outcome, it's obvious why most of them do: because the potential was lost. The e-Reader, Lifeline, and the PS2 HDD could've done so much more if more planning was put into them. Oh well...the International Game Developers Association says that the rate of commercial failure was around 95%, so maybe it's not all that surprising.
