The Thing About Mainstream...

I'm not going to be pretentious enough to condemn "the mainstream". As far as I'm concerned, popular things are mainstream, and popular things are popular for a reason. For instance, jeans are very popular because they're a good combination of ruggedness, comfort and they look pretty good. There are also weird anomalies in what's mainstream: surely everyone knows that most movie tie-in games are terrible and all tv tie-ins are worse, yet people still make CSI games and people still buy them, despite discovering that the last one they bought was shit.

It's not all bad though; it seems that the more popular Rockstar Games get, the better their games are. The original Grand Theft Auto games were fun, but that was then, and now they just hold nostalgia value, and while GTA IV may be slow to get going, it's still fantastic and one of few games that's going to stick in my memory as something that actually lived up to my expectations.

The thing about mainstream though, is things that try to be mainstream. The easiest way to make something mainstream is to make it passive, unoffending and indiscriminate. Not that discrimination is a good thing, it just majorly sucks when something gets popular due to its fans, then that thing betrays its fanbase to attract more sales. Case in point, the Tony Hawk games. Example of justice? Again, the Tony Hawk series - the games steadily got worse to the point where it became one of the biggest casual gaming flops I've ever seen. Speaking of which, did anyone bother playing Tony Hawk's Ride?

I came to a startling realisation of the damage done to gaming by the mainstream not long ago. I'm a big fan of the Fable series, always have been, and it's mostly because of what I think can be done with it, rather than the finished games. While playing Fable III, the one thing I couldn't get out of my mind was the abysmal lip-syncing, on par with Thunderbirds. I can't really call it a bad game; I never called Fable 2 a bad game and at least Lionhead actually bothered to attach the storyline to the character this time.

Someone once asked me; "What's Fable III about, then?" and my only reply was, "Erh, well... it's got Stephen Fry, Simon Pegg and Jason Manford in it". Despite personally realising this was a retarded answer, the response was; "Ooh, sounds like my kind of game". I haven't been able to get this out of my mind. I actually sold a game on star power because I can't properly articulate criticism for it. Having owned various crap PC's and played so many games, I've learned to ignore glitches so my entire thoughts on Fable III are that as a game, it's heavily scripted and quite bland; for some reason, I prefer to think of it as a book, you iron out the creases in your head and fill in the gaps with your imagination and properly get stuck in while waiting for the soothing tones of Stephen Fry.

I hope that once geek chic stops being popular, we can get some decent chewy games again.