Dork Age/Video Games: Difference between revisions

* The Electronic Entertainment Expo ([[E 3]]) is widely believed to have gone through a dork age between 2007 and 2008. Once a Mecca for gamers the event was made invitation-only and attendance dropped from 60,000 down to a low of 5,000. As a result E3 went from being the ultimate expo in the video games to a low key event. It didn't help that the E for All trade show meant to replace it turned out to be a dud. Also to make things worse the announcements and game demo's E3 is know for were rather lacking in comparison to previous years. Fortunately the event has since been reopened to the gaming audience and recent E3's have been much more well received.

* [[Nintendo]] fans try not to remember the [[Virtual Boy]], an allegedly portable clunker of a gaming platform that was supposed to deliver the cutting edge of 3-D virtual reality gameplay but instead gave us eye strain, neck strain, and hideous graphics in only two colors: Red and black. To add insult to injury, damn few of the games put out for it (there were less than 20 in all) made any use of 3-D and could just as easily have been produced for a better gaming platform. Gumpei Yokoi, the victim of executive meddling, ended up [[Kicked Upstairs]] before quitting Nintendo (the only game for the system that gets a pass is ''Virtual Boy Wario Land'', which managed to be genuinely fun despite the headache-inducing graphics).

* The early [[Nintendo 64]] era was something of a [[Dork Age]] for Nintendo. The overly long development of the N64 caused some Super NES gamers to jump ship to [[Play Station]], and the decision to use expensive proprietary cartridges instead of discs caused developers to jump ship, too (most infamously [[Square Soft]], whose ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series was a Nintendo mainstay until ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]''). While Nintendo's first-party games on the N64 were as awesome as ever, there simply weren't enough of them to go around. The system launched with ''two'' games total, and it only had about one new release a month. So if you were tired of playing ''[[Super Mario 64 (Video Game)|Super Mario 64]]'' for the umpteenth time, your choices in early 1997 were ''[[Pilot Wings]]'' and ''Cruis'n USA''. That was pretty much it. The Nintendo 64 gained something of a reputation for releasing three unique and groundbreaking games a year, and absolutely nothing else.

** This wasn't helped by Nintendo's historic lack of support for third parties; one big selling point of the N64 hardware was custom microcode, but Nintendo never released information on how to use it, fearing it would be copied by their rivals. Among other groin-punches, they also patented using the N64 pad's C-buttons to control an in-game camera, meaning every non-Nintendo game had a shitty camera system, and continued in their usual habit of meddling with in-game content to be more 'family friendly'; for example, forcing ''[[Perfect Dark]]'s'' 'Adrenaline Pills' to become 'Combat Boosts', and ''[[Duke Nukem]]'''s steroids powerup to become 'Vitamin X'.

* The ''[[Silent Hill]]'' franchise is notorious for its horribly [[Broken Base]], but most fans will agree that the series peaked with ''[[Silent Hill 2]]'', and the existence of a franchise [[Dork Age]] is nearly-unanimous. The general summation of this is a reverence for "Team Silent" and a mistrust of the games in which this development team was not involved. The general consensus is that ''[[Silent Hill 4|Silent Hill 4: The Room]]'' is where the slide began, however, even though it was the last of the "Team Silent" entries. The recent ''[[Silent Hill Shattered Memories|Silent Hill: Shattered Memories]]'' has broken the fanbase further, between those convinced that the series remains mired in suck, and those who believe this new entry was fresh and compelling enough to possibly signal a revival of the franchise.

* ''[[Twisted Metal]] 3'' and ''4'' were developed by 989 Studios rather than series' original developers, Singletrac. When the former staff members of Singletrac formed Incognito to develop the newer games in the franchise, it elected to wipe the events of those two titles from continuity.

** ''Wrath of the Lich King'' is seen as one as well, but due to gameplay-based reasons rather than story-based reasons.

** With ''Cataclysm'' both of these are now being stated as [[Golden Age|Golden Ages]] and the current expansion is the Dork Age. There are already people people claiming the next expansion is a Dork Age for having Pandas, and proclaimed to be great expansion because of the Pandas.

** It's far more likely that it was just the final absurd twist in a game full of them than any sort of deep statement about the characters.

* The makers of the MMO ''[[Star Wars Galaxies (Video Game)|Star Wars Galaxies]]'' decided it wasn't successful enough, so they came up with the New Game Experience, which involved massive changes to the game mechanics, combat system, character classes, and pretty much everything else, in the hope of attracting a whole new demographic. The result was an existing player base that was thoroughly (and vocally) pissed off, a new player base that never materialised, and a huge drop in subscriptions (not officially admitted, but confirmed by user-written in-game surveying tools before the company caught on and disabled the tools). Other MMOs have dome similar things on a less spectacular scale, but SWG's NGE is the infamous example everyone points to.

* ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2]]'' is widely considered the weakest of the franchise, centering mostly around a [[Replacement Scrappy]] and featuring [[Gainax Ending|an ending that had a Cthulhu-like effect on most gamers' sanity]]. Whether or not it came perilously close to killing off the entire franchise, however, is debatable given that the game was still a critical and commercial success. The widespread belief that Hideo Kojima made it bad on purpose because he wanted to quit making games is also perpetuated by MGS2's [[Broken Base]] - Hideo has repeatedly insisted on stepping down as director, only to return time and again of his own volition to and turn out a spectacular effort like ''[[Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker]]''.

** A non-canonical example could be the game, Metal Gear 2: Snake's Revenge, an American follow-up to the original [[Metal Gear]] game for the NES. The game not only completely changed Snake's character and his relationship to the franchise but also took the game that introduced the concept of *stealth* gameplay and turned it into a generic shoot-em-up.

* The [[Sega Saturn]] period was the dark ages for Sega in the West, along with the late [[Sega Genesis|Genesis era]]. In Japan it is a well-known and loved console but in the West it is considered a failure due to poor marketing, a lack of [[No Export for You|exports]], no ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' main games, and fierce competition. The [[Sega Dreamcast]] out shined the Saturn, but in the end it faded too in the West.. In Japan it went on until around 2007.

** SEGA's dark age as a whole really began with the [[Other Sega Systems|Sega 32X]]. While the Sega CD could be considered just as bad, it's more of an [[Ensemble Darkhorse]] nowadays due to a few gems ([[Sonic CD]], Snatcher, [[Lunar]]) among massive amounts of shovelware, but the 32X really kicked off Sega's mismanagment in the west. Then the Saturn's surprise launch came along with [[Vaporware|Sonic Xtreme]] stuck in [[Development Hell]], and then Sega hired [[The Millstone|Bernie Stolar]]...yeah, things didn't really go well for them at all until they went third-party, considering the Dreamcast was [[Too Good to Last]].