Now that we’ve finished our first boss fight, it’s time to play a very special level in Astro Bot!
Streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud
Around the same time Astro Bot was released, a story broke regarding a statement from a Sony executive, who claimed that the company was lacking in intellectual property. As the IGN article on it points out (and I incorrectly cited in the episode), this wasn’t in reference to just games, but their entire mass media operation. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of that statement with all the IPs, cameos, and references contained within Astro Bot was enough to spur the discourse(tm)(C)(R).
It’s not difficult to understand why. There are many properties in Sony’s gaming portfolio specifically that fans have been begging for new entries in for a long time. One such example, pertinent to the section from the start of this episode, is Ape Escape.
As much I love the old Ape Escape games, they were products of their time, before we established the “left stick move character, right stick moves camera” convention most modern games adhere. Since Ape Escape’s core gimmick was that the gadgets were controlled by the right stick, I don’t honestly know if one even could go back and make another one of those games without losing a fundamental part of what makes them what they are. Astro Bot may be able to wear it’s skin, and do a very strong impression, but it’s fundamentally not the same game.
We’ve broached similar conversations multiple times before, like when we finished the Sly Cooper trilogy here on this blog. Is it true that Sony doesn’t need to acquire more properties, it already enough and arguable already has too much (albeit no where near to the same degree as Microsoft). Is it also true that there a place in my heart for another Ape Escape game. Many of my generation hold similar candles for worlds and games that were once Sony-mainstays and have since languished in obscurity.
And yet, I think this conversation underscores a more fundamental problem with the IP machine that churns and churns. At the risk of sounding like an angry old man, “back in my day” we would have a trilogy of games in a series, and then the developer would move on, free to do something else: Something different. While there are certainly games I have nostalgia for, what I really miss is that sense of novelty and newness that came with a develop I respected moving onto a different project. I miss when stories had discreet beginnings, middles, and ends. I miss when developers didn’t need to intentionally lie loose threads dangling in the wind so that there was room for yet another sequel.
We can talk about the mine of IPs that Sony is ignoring, and we can talk about how they never made that sequel to that one game everyone loved, but that desire to bask in empty nostalgia inhibits the ability for creative teams to work on bold, new, interesting concepts. I don’t want to date this piece, but this is especially relevant to me now, since I’m currently playing through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is one of the coolest and most unique games I’ve played in a long time.
It’s something you couldn’t get from milking existing ideas.
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