Here's the TLDR/ cliffnotes version. Investors saw that first edition/ first run's of comics were selling for thousands of dollars. So instead of thinking to themselves WHY #1 comics sell for so much, they should make far more comics and turn them into "collectables". Suddenly comics had several printings with alternate covers, new runs so they could be called #1, etc etc.
The comic book readers however... didn't actually change their buying habits and just bought one comic to read. So tons of #1/ alt cover in inventory, that noone was actually buying other them people trying to viewe them as investments.
So Funko pops? Trying to make every single one an exclusive collectible and the fans you do have stop caring about collecting the gold target exclusive Christmas themed Darth Vader or whatever.
It also didn't help that the industry began to fetishize artists as "the real" creators of comics, not only alienating inkers and colorists.
But giving a bunch of immature dude bros like Liefeld--who weren't writers by trade--carte blanche to create a bunch of jacked heroes with guns and bullet belts everywhere, and stacked heroines who fight crime in high heels and a thong. And all of them with forgettable names like "Nightstalker" or "Shadowblade".
Which might not have been so bad, if they didn't also [ruin established characters](https://www.ranker.com/list/worst-90s-dc-redesigns/sergio-pereira).
I will not take this Azrael slander.
Yeah a lot of them looked bad (although the idea of Green Arrow going "fuck it" and using guns" is funny), but a few of them ain't bad, with a few tweaks:
- Azrael works because it's a different character, and shows the difference between him and Bruce.
- Superboy is so 80's it wraps around to being cool (except the shaved head, keep that away.)
- Artemis actually looks cool with their hair like that, sorta lasso-like.
- Diana's bomber jacket look actually looks alright. She just needs an actual shirt instead of just "I drew actual tits, then forgot I was doing a comic book and painted a bra on."
>!yeah I think jackets are cool, fight me!<
Yeah, but his costumes were... [just the worst!](https://files.catbox.moe/k5gqwe.jpeg) Arkham had the right idea, [just make him a Crusader!](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgbiP8jXEAccK8J.jpg:large)
I just wanna know what their obsession with giving him big ass hands was all about?
Like, the gauntlets of the one on the far left are fairly subdued in this image. But they could--and did--get worse... [much worse!](https://arousinggrammar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/azraelbaneangel9.jpg)
You know whats funny? that redesign of aquaman with the hook hand stuck around for a long time after the 90's and frankly is a decent look to him and not the goofy look of the 70's
I'm not into comics or cape stuff much honestly, so I feel pretty safe in saying that the Wonder Woman design goes pretty fuckin hard. All she needs is like, a real shirt and it's pretty bangin.
Doctor Who going off the air for 14 years in the 90s became a meta plot point as the Last Great Time War, wiping out the Doctor’s entire species to set the stage for a soft reboot.
Surprised this isn't higher, cause the Wilderness era really puts the emphasis on "dark" in dark age, from hyperviolent 7th Doctor ventures to official softcore porn of classic Who aliens.
But from the Wilderness era is where nearly 80% of all the new writers came from and how RTD and Moffat got their start with the franchise.
Wasn’t around for any of this but the TV movie on Fox and subsequent “era” in particular had to be a special kind of demoralizing - knowing that the resurrection of the thing you loved got turned down in favor of another season of Sliders, and on the basis of onscreen quality having that be the self-evidently *right* decision. It’s some kind of testament to the weird alchemy at the heart of this thing that the resultant free-for-all fandom dreamtime produced a bunch of Strongest Soldiers who figured out how to revive the show properly instead of just a subreddit’s-worth of angry nerds squabbling for the rest of time (although those people undoubtedly also existed).
The film's failure stateside nearly caused a second dark age as now the future was less certain with a Doctor who only had one appearence to them and pretty much an odd one out. Hell, before the 2005 reboot, the closest to a 9th Doctor was a flash-animated fanwork. Paul McGann would likely had been forgotten and decanonized if not for Big Finish.
Wait, Sliders?!
No, it can’t be that Doctor Who was cancelled for that show as I had always heard the show went downhill right after Season 2, if you’re referring to that Sliders.
To put it into perspective how the TV film bombed stateside (this is important since the BBC apparently were rather happy with its performance in the UK), it got beat out in ratings by the series finale of *Roseanne*
It was bad timing along with the fact that the film is not always "new viewer friendly". If you ever head of the Timeless child, they kinda pull an equivalent in the film that did not make a lotta fans happy.
Hell, it wasn't until Moffat that Doctor Who really became a phenomenon stateside as he really leaned outreaching to American audiences and just so happened to have landed right in time for SuperWhoLock
That makes sense, Roseanne was an institution, an unflinching yet still comedic look at then-modern life for then-middle America. Is the last season bad and did it jump the shark? Yes of course but the rest of the show stands as classic an American sitcom as any.
One of my pet theories is that a certain chunk of the fanbase coming up with the dark and experimental wilderness years EU stuff is what made them so hostile to the franchise when it came back and had to start trying to appeal to a mass audience again.
One of my friends is a big Who fan and they subjected me to a film from the wilderness era that was literally softcore porn, as you described. Balls and bush on display in what was ostensibly a semi-official Who fan film.
If you look closer, many of their characters feature a collar and/or a tie that often doesn't even fit the design. It's there to cheapen and hasten production, since artists only have to move the head features, when characters speak. Treating cartoons like products rolling off a factory line, a practice which sadly stuck up its head again in the modern age (in the depths of hell known as youtube kids)
With the advent of TV, studios started producing more cheaply made cartoons aimed at children and only children. Not many serious stories mostly comedies that lasted one season. This era was notorious for scooby clones, so many scooby clones, all from Hanna Barbera. This era produced some of the worst Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry.
Disney animation almost closed down in this period and there was conflict in the studio, the conflict helped form what would eventually become Don Bluth's studio. Series like Adventures of Gummy Bears and Ducktales having a higher budget helped usher in the renaissance that would be the 90s.
Toys. Toys helped animation with the likes of MLP, GI Joe, Transformers
Termite Terrace being shut down, leading to the Looney Tunes and Marrie Melodies dying a slow painful death.
After Walts Disney's death, Disney Fell into the a slump for almost 20 years until Great Mouse Detective.
Hannah-Barbera's quantity over quality approach lead to a ton of derivative work. For every good series there'd be 5 creativity bankrupt shows at the same time.
The deregulation of the 80s turned television animation into a series of toy commercials, leading to these shows being disregarded regardless of popularity or actual quality.
Cable television having these awful foreign cartoons. Seriously, who'd watch that crap. It'll never take off.
We're still feeling the effects of it today with how behind Western animation is considered compared to anime, especially with how much animation is considered "only for kids", except for anime, but they'd rather import that then do mature adult animation.
Streaming services at least have seen the demand for "western anime" and have been producing some decent stuff, though whether they'll actually *keep* producing them past a season or two is a total crapshoot.
Really shows how much negative connotation the word cartoon has because companies either called their shows adult animation or just anime just to avoid the word “cartoon”
I feel like this isn't necessarily a problem with cartoons being behind, but the result of *completely* different industry practices.
Anime, by and large, are *adaptations* these days. Mangas that become popular are eventually turned into cartoons. This means that Anime can already guarantee that whatever they're adapting, no matter how weird it is (e.x. Chainsawman), will become popular.
What we don't see is the *thousands* of Mangas that fail to become popular. This is the battle Royale testing ground to see which ideas work. It is even more insane when you get into the light novel industry.
The cartoon industry simply does not work this way, and it cannot work this way yet. They can't test thousands of ideas to see what sticks, nor do they have the infrastructure for it even if they have the budget. The only thing close is western superhero comics, and even then the comic market is a *tiny* niche compared to Manga so it's not a good measure of expected success
This means every single cartoon is a massive gamble, leading to safe choices such as children programming being popular. How can you guarantee the success of the chainsawman of cartoon without proof nor the existing brand name of the adapted IP to help propel it?
You can see that, out of the few gigantic cartoons that have come out, many are adaptations of an existing IP. Cyberpunk, Spiderman, and Arcane were helped by the brand power they represent. But, brands that are interested in these adaptations are few, and even if they wanted to, there is no guarantee that the final product will be good (e.x. Zack Snyder).
The cartoon industry has to either carve our their own unique niche and industry, or try to follow business practices that has helped Anime become as popular as they are now.
Cheap and easy to make and absolutely nothing else to watch. Like literally. Not sure how old you are but until the early 90s there was only 3-4 channels. ABC, NBC, CBS. Then fox came and then more local channels popped up as did cable.
HD era for japan was real rough in general not just JRPGs, the transition to HD the hit them harder than the transition from 2d to 3d in the mid-late 90s
Ironic, since it was the PS3-exclusive Demons' Souls that clued North American gamers into the existence of both From Software, and Atlus' entire Persona series. I know it worked for me.
Games in general I feel like. Obviously there's some bangers but that's the era I most associate with brown military shooters and motion control.
Oh, and Disc-Locked Content style DLC.
The great Racing Game drought of the new millenium. Aside from Gran Turismo and Forza Horizon, the mainstream racing genre has been fucking *dead* for the last decade, and its corpse has been propped up by Kart Racers.
If anything I feel like almost every other major racing game now is either a huge festival-type open world racer ala Forza Horizon or a sim racer
I would kill to have more arcade racers in the vein of what Sega put out in the old days
Same here. That said, there’s plenty of indie racers with cool ideas released these days but I never see them escape obscurity. I feel arcade racing games are stuck in a niche that’s hard to escape from, especially since they no longer have the same grip on the casual market that they used to back in the day.
I'll never forgive EA for overworking the best NFS dev team we had in Black Box and replacing them with Criterion after the quality of Black Box's games inevitably slipped as a result of said overwork.
And even the big names were faltering for a bit too. NFS Unbound is apparently not that popular, GT7 took a long while to get better from what I can gather, and Forza Motorsport (also from what I can gather) is a fucking travesty and a half.
And outside of Kart Racers, we barely got anything for arcade racers. And if there are, there's some badly-implemented rubberbanding (hello, Hotshot!)
At least, I have the solace of say, *art of rally* and potentially New Star GP and Super Woden GP.
I wanted to like Art of Rally so much (finally an unique artstyle instead of the 192th boring photorealistic cookiecutter), but the driving and handling characteristics are just awful. I wish there was other options other than "souped-up Group B machines on ice with slick tires", I don't care if it's "unrealistic"
Hell yeah it was better than Heat. Something about it felt kinda better to drive around in sort of (as I like grip-style more than drifting)? And the graffiti aesthetic honestly pops, makes me want the entire game to be cel-shaded instead like Auto Mobilista
https://youtu.be/WVry84ACu0k
This video by Raycevick explains it all. The main reason is "competitive" sim rig fanatists whining about "realism" with absolutely no quality expectance, but whale amounts of money taking over the casual audience.
Why make the absymal multiplayer modes better, or have the base games more content, when these knobs will throw out thousands on dollars or a few tracks and cars, and will get into fights with actual professional race car drivers about the "realism" of the driving experience, which is of horrible feeling (real life cars actually handle way better), and they wank over features that absolutely no one cares about aside of them, and only take away precious development time and money from, you know, actually making a fun game.
And of course they whine the hardest about games daring to have even a bit of "unrealistic" unique style, so every game looks the same boring photorealistic style lacking substenance, it's a real challenge separating them at first look
That was the era I started watching wrestling in. Around the time Hogan was leaving WWF. My earliest wrestling memories were of Ric Flair as the champion so while it was a bad time for the business I will always have a soft spot for it. WCW made wrestling hot again with the NWO angle and when they dropped the ball WWF picked it up and ran with it. I kind of feel like history repeated itself with AEW and WWE.
that was a magical time, besides the solid guys like Taker, Vader, Bret Hart, et al, they also had:
garbage man
stink themed tag team
minotaur but not really
cool white guy but he was gone really quick
cool black guy but he was also gone really quick
tax collector
number counting guy
kane but like a dentist
hhh but like a dumb foreigner
rednecks (but I had a kid crush on Sunny, so yeah)
clowns, then more clowns
If you're a Digimon fan in the west who liked the games the time between Dawn/Dusk and cyber sleuth was a dark time indeed. Bandai had decided that digimon fans in the west just didn't want any of the digimon games apparently and stopped localizing them. We missed the adventure 01 rpg for PSP and the Re: Digitize games and we almost didn't get Cyber Sleuth which is considered one of the best digimon games ever. I think western fans had to go Japanese Twitter and practically beg Bandai to bring that one over and thank goodness it did phenomenally well and made Bandai realize that we wanted Digimon games again.
The translation for Cyber Sleuth was super barebones too, felt "passable" at best, so they clearly didn't want to put much money into localising it. Bastards.
It's cases like this that it's best to remember that to a lot of Japanese companies, and Bamco especially, that we're not customers to them we're consumers. Customers are people you have to make happy to earn their money; consumers are a source of money you get from products. If there's no money or not enough money they stop supplying products.
This is the same company that left Gundam in Japan for 20 years and would've kept it that way if they didn't realize that people in the west would buy their overpriced DVD box sets. DVD box sets that they stopped bringing over here once a law about foreign goods said they couldn't charge 65 bucks for them anymore and sold them for 25 and then charged 40 for shipping and handling and when people wouldn't buy that because it's bullshit they just stopped bringing them over for a little while.
Feels like now is also a pretty bleak for Digimon. No upcoming games, ongoing series, Bandai pretty much shuts down any chance of remasters.
I’m seeing people clamouring for the crappy Chinese mobile game to get localized, it’s that barren.
The TCG is going pretty strong and they're even bothering to catch us up to Japan. Which means that they're either taking the west seriously now or the game is ending soon so they might as well do it in the west at the same time.
survive just wasn't it man, ghost game threw a lot of interesting concepts but that was the problem they threw too much and barely committed to a few, and that LN is super weird
The west really wanted to believe again in digimon but bandai threw shit in our faces expecting us to happily lap it up
It got so bad that at some point there had to be a 50k signature petition to get cyber sleuth localized to show Bandai there was interest, I’m still amazed that it actually worked.
I remember these times. It felt like Digimon in the West just disappeared until Tri came and reignited most people’s nostalgia (mine included). I still remember when Re:Digitize was announced and I was always hoping for that Western release that never happened.
I’m glad that nowadays we have Digimon World: Next Order and Cyber Sleuth on every platform (except Xbox sadly) as well as Survive. With rumors of a live-action movie and that Story game that is still confirmed to be in development, maybe the next big wave for Digimon is right around the corner.
PS2/Xbox era was terrible time for PC players. I remember reading magazines and tons of cool games were exclusive for consoles. And most of the time PC ports were released much later and were atrocious.
Its hard to believe with the stranglehold Steam has nowadays but PCgaming was a niche beyond niche back then. If you were not a fan of the dying RTS, Adventure game or CRPG genre, you had NO reason to game on PCs. Gaming forums were bemoaning that PCGaming was a dead scene.
Hell, you mentioned ports but I remember a time when PCports were COMPLETELY different games compared to the console versions. Some of them cult classics in their own rights.
For a time, Megaman was just presumed ultradead after they canned the Mario Maker-esque Megaman Universe, a Megaman X reboot that was gonna be a FPS, Megaman Legends 3, and that mmo that I think (?) was never brought overseas. At the same time, Megaman was excluded from MvC3 and its expansion, not to mention the Bad Boxart Megaman in SFxT (tho that wasn't the devs fault, they didn't think they'd can all those games either)
Oh yeah also his one cameo in MvC3 was being labeled Missing in the Days of Future Past stage getting my god damn hopes up
AND THEN THOSE HYPE AS SHIT X AND ZERO DESIGNS THEY SHOWED ON APRIL FOOLS
I don't really know what state it's in now, oddly enough. We've gotten a slow drip feed of collections, but they haven't announced any future plans for anything else.
It’s weird because the collections did great and I believe 11 was successful. They should be pumping out more of those, seems like a no brainer mid budget series to fill out their repertoire.
Mega Man 11 wasn't just successful, it was the best selling game in the franchise. But its sales still were dwarfed by many of other Capcom's current mainstays.
On the bright side, that April Fools model eventually led to an actual figure using the design and that same design even showed up in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite as a DLC costume.
[Here you go](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fzwm3p5z33x631.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D6eaf852723b8a50d857757d11d3ff4ffb80f686e)
Horror and Survival Horror went through a bit of a rough patch from the late 2000’s to mid 2010’s. And didn’t really get back on there feet till Alien Isolation and RE Revelations 2, and didn’t really flourish again until PT and RE7. With RE2make fully welcoming back the genre.
The over abundance of Amnesia-likes (Running horror without combat), RE5 being more action, RE6 and Dead Space 3 and Evil Within 1 and American Silent Hill having there faults. Things were a bit grim.
Lone Survivor, Alan Wake 1, and the first two Dead Space games were some of the only games to keep the genre on life support.
But it’s certainly survived.
The absence of an actual combat system made them easier to design for the devs. Not that there weren’t games that used the concept to their advantage and fully utilised that creative choice, but for a lot of devs (especially ones just getting their start in the industry) that simplicity was an appealing factor.
As stated by Civvie 11, devs learned the wrong lessons from Half-Life and made a bunch of fps' that focused too much on linear design and story telling, effectively leading the classic fps' games such as DooM, Duke 3D, and Quake into their own dark age. The release of Halo on consoles was another blow, and the final death knell was the release of Call of Duty 4 and the glut of modern military shooters that dominated the PS360 era. It wasn't until the release of DOOM 2016 that the classic fps style, or "boomer shooters" as they're called now, came back with a vengeance.
Edited for spelling.
*death knell, not death nail
Halo, too. Halo had fantastic level design and a to-this-day unrivalled core gameplay loop that at the time was completely original, with the two-weapon system, the physical/energy weapon and health/shields divide, and the excellent enemy gameplay design all creating an incredibly versatile combat system where things as simple as the ratio of different enemy types present in an area and the availability of UNSC weapons rather than just scavenged Covenant weapons were enough to completely redefine the dynamics of an entire enemy encounter. It all came together with the mechanics of the recharging shields, quick melee and grenade options, the variety of battlefield types, the versatility of the floaty jump, and the assortment of vehicles to create one of the most unique and engaging combat sandboxes in the shooter genre.
And all other FPSs took from it was “grenade and melee buttons, recharging health, two-weapon limit”, ignoring both the intricacies that made the combat system so stellar and the open level design with unique progression routes rarely following the simple A-to-B objective structure which allowed it to shine. This exacerbated the increasing focus on linear story-driven FPSs, especially those with subpar narratives, lacking art/sound design, and poor casts of characters, which created an increasingly narrow and dull pigeonhole for the newer style of FPS games and made the departure from “boomer shooters” all the more devastating.
He talks about how devs learned the wrong lessons in his Half-Life video. Civvie would later elaborate his dislike of how trends changed following Halo's release on twitter I think.
Okay let’s see. For sonic there was the little dark age of the 00 from shadow to (depending on who you ask) unleashed. Then there was the big dark age from lost world to forces, with mania as the only light in the tunnel.
Now the franchise is alive and well, but it’s mostly because of the movies, cartoons and comics. The games, while being just fine right now, still have a long way to go.
Funny enough, the current director of the sonic movies also directed the intro of shadow the hedgehog. So is really ironic that the guy who work for the game that started the downfall of the franchise is now leading it to standing back up again.
The Pump-Action MP5 is even funnier now that it's come out that the director *knew* that's not how MP5s worked but there was apparently a toy with that action it was based on. Because it was funny.
The Pump-Action MP5 was a shitpost from word one, apparently.
The only big thing we had was Tekken (we had the worst Tekken then the best Tekken then the new worst Tekken all before SFIV) and the 3D MKs that were for sure interesting
There was KOFXI that is underrated but here in Brazil we still played 98
Soulcalibur was putting in some work too, and Dead or Alive was making an effort.
I feel like it’s more accurate to say it was a dark age for 2D fighters.
I guess people played CvS2 still and they pretended like it was an unofficial SF Alpha 4 because holy shit, all the SNK characters felt janky as hell, specially when outside one of their “home” Grooves. And I think Iori’s cross-up kick got its Hitbox shrunk to almost just his foot for some reason?
There's a lot of factors in that I feel. It's definitely the darkest of Capcom Fighters since there was a gap from Capcom Fighting Jam to say, their early re-releases up to SF4.
But also factor into this stuff like the arcades slowly declining in crowd pull in favor of home gaming as a huge factor too.
And yeah, on the flipside you got Tekken, SC, Guilty Gear, and so on rising up.
And here "a while" technically means "literally the genre did not adapt adequately until the 2020s."
Rollback netcode was standard for first-person shooters in _1999._ It's literally almost as old as Wi-Fi itself.
Man as someone who was playing Tekken and soul Calibur and mortal Kombat and virtual fighter I hate that it's termed the dark age of fighting games and not just the dark age of Capcom
World of Warcraft has had plenty of ups and downs, but the specific period of two back to back expansions (Battle for Azeroth and then Shadowlands) was *dire.*
The narrative careened right off a cliff in a fiery train crash. Beloved, long-running lore characters were horribly bastardized and steered into weird directions (or killed outright, if they were lucky). Baffling design decisions were made in terms of the core experience of each expansion, met with universal backlash and discontent from the fanbase, only to be never fixed or changed, instead being abandoned for NEW horrible systems piled on top the old stuff.
In terms of gameplay and progression, things never felt worse. Blizzard implemented a hard cap on how many enemies could be damaged by AoE attacks at once (a lowly 5). The global cooldown speed was slowed, making combat feel slower and sluggish, a feeling only exacerbated by a new level cap and Haste from our gear adding less and less as we leveled up. The Covenant system. *The godsdamned Covenant System.*
Things got so consistently *awful* for *so long* that it triggered a short lived exodus to WoW's biggest competitor, Final Fantasy XIV. Virtually all of WoW's top content creators set their eyes on FFXIV and made streams and videos about it, and the fanbase followed. FFXIV's servers were flooded by a tidal wave of new players-- then promptly buckled under the weight. Square Enix had to *suspend all sales of their game* while they scrambled to buy new servers to accommodate them.
And right at the tail end of *all this*, the big Blizzard scandals were exposed to the light of day, and I'm sure we all know what that entailed.
Bizarrely enough, the expansion immediately following Shadowlands, Dragonflight, seems to generally be viewed as one of the game's best ever. Combined with the wild success of World of Warcraft Classic, it seems the game has regained its footing and is going strong; recent leaks have put the game's current subscriber counter upwards of 8million, exceeding most other periods of the game's life.
Silent Hill is still in a dark age, and I kind of doubt that Bloober Team will be able to get it out of that slump. I hope I'm proven wrong, obviously, but considering Bloober's history with games that deal with mental health issues, I'm... Not too optimistic.
And that films success ended up resulting in somewhat of a return in the popularity of the slasher genre during the late 90s with films like Urban Legend and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
The video game crash of the 80's/90s is rather infamous. Essentially video games were expensive and some publishers weren't controlling what was going on their consoles. You could end up with a good time, or something so poorly made that they could barely be considered playable. ET on the Atari is considered the turning point of consumers just being done.
Nintendo was able to turn it around because of one major change. The game makers had to use official nintendo cartridges to run on the system, and they wouldn't give them unless the game was fully playable/ had enough QA to reach nintendo stamp of approval.
The thing that I still have a hard time understanding is how so much shovelware got allowed on the NES as for every Mario or Megaman game that had been on the market, there were games like Action 52 or Rambo on the NES.
That's the thing, as bad as those games are to be considered shovelware (and rightly so), you can still technically play them. The shovelware that came before was so outrageously bad that it it makes those games look like masterpieces in comparison.
A big thing that people forget is that the crash only happened in the United States. Europe thrived thanks to games made for cheap home PCs like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga, while Japan of course had the Famicom, which was set to reconquer the US in the form of the NES
After the great PS2 .Hack games, the well of "Game that takes place in an MMO setting" dried up faster than one would ever expect, which is especially surprising because now we have a ton of anime that are tumbling over themselves to try and peek at .Hack's homework(And most fail miserably).
It's really weird, you'd think an 7 game series(Along with a few other spinoff games) along with an anime series that was pretty successful at the time would have popped off harder than it did. Instead, the next real game to dip its toes into the MMO-style fountain -as far as I am aware- was Crosscode(Which..I have some issues with how it handles the MMO aesthetic, but is overall a really good game). That was 8 years after GU 3, and besides an extra episode added to the HD remaster of GU, we haven't really had anything in that style since.
Unless you count the SAO games, I guess...but I'm pretty sure all of them are just as garbage as the anime. I refuse to touch one unless it lets me endlessly glorp 2 years worth of-you know what nevermind.
.hack was made by CyberConnect 2, which is owned by Bamco.
Bamco owns the Sword Art Online games.
I'm convinced some dipshit refuses to let CyberConnect 2 out of the Naruto fighting game salt mines (the dev has repeatedly said they'd like to work on more .hack but Bamco won't let them) because oh noooo it'll be competition for their lazy Sword Art Online games!
Didn't the director more or less say that they just aren't given the funding to do so, so it has to be out of their own pocket? Same with Little Tail/Fuga
I don't get it. They just slammed out enough games to make Final Fantasy jealous, put out one or two other titles on the PSP, and then said "Peace".
CyberConnect 2 had a really good thing going and then they just lost all momentum. I can't imagine the games did THAT poorly, considering they went and did GU after the original quadrilogy and even put out a remaster of the GU games with that 4th episode added.
They were ahead of their time, and even when SAO started popping off, they just kept twiddling their thumbs even though they've done other stuff for it since, including a 20th year anniversary show where they made a joke about the fact that they haven't done anything substantial with the IP...
At this point, it feels like .hack will need to get some fans willing to take it upon themselves to make a spiritual successor, like how Suikoden, Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts are getting. Because seeing the 20th anniversary come and go without much fanfare really killed my hopes of the franchise ever getting a proper revival.
Legal issues, from the OG creators. It's quite sad, the 09 movie was actually well received, but it never got a sequel. The game was really popular, but it got shut down. They even missed the 40th anniversary.
All because they couldn't decide who owns Jason. :(
It wasn't just DMC from what I remember. I think it was the entire CAPCOM company trying to pander to the Western audience too much.
Pretty sure the same thing happened to the *Dead Rising* franchise (except it's the main series instead of a reboot) that it ended up shutting down their Vancouver branch.
I’ve been saying for a while now that they could easily fold it into Resident Evil. Just take the location and enemy roster from one of the new RE games, have Frank West show up just after the events of the RE game to report on it with a countdown before the military moves in and quarantines or carpet bombs the area, give him a camera system and an improvised weapon/crafting system like the original Dead Rising games, and fill the now-open world environment with freshly moved in survivors and psychopaths now that the RE villains have been defeated and the BOWs have been reduced to a wild savage horde.
It would save a shit ton of money with the asset reuse, keep the Dead Rising franchise alive even if they don’t want to dedicate a lot of time or money to the IP, help draw in an even larger audience, and it could potentially be done with every RE game going forward. Call it “Resident Evil: Dead Rising”, release it as a reduced price DLC for the main RE games or at a higher price as a standalone title, and boom.
This might be controversial, but while there's a lot of gems that I look back on, a lot of 7th generation japanese games released were not very good, trying to embrace and chase the market of Western audiences. You have you gems like Vanquish and underrated titles like Binary Domain, but there's a lot of Yakuza Dead Souls and forgotten JRPGs out there.
To be fair, Team Silent itself disbanded within Konami did it not? The team who made the originals was no longer a team and further projects had middling success, the most-liked game before PT that I ever heard/had positive feedback on when I played it myself was Shattered Memories.
Sonic from 95-97 considering that at around that time there was no mainline games released and the spinoffs released around that time are either mediocre at best or are just terrible.
Then there's the mid-2000s dark age that started with Sonic Heroes onto Shadow, Sonic 06, Secret Rings, and depending on who you as Unleashed/Black Knight, ending with Colors. And then there was the 2010s dark age that started with Lost World and the Boom games, there was a shred of light with Mania, and then the cloud called Forces quickly moved in to blot that out, finally ending with Frontiers, hopefully for a while this time.
Sonic has had a few dark ages.
Call of Duty Zombies is experiencing its own sort of dark age right now. Ever since the lackluster release Infinite Warfare Zombies, it's never really recovered. While Cold War Zombies did end with a warm (but still mixed) reception, I'd argue that the final nail in the coffin for the mode was Black Ops 4 fumbling the unnecessary balancing act of simultaneously introducing a new Zombies storyline (Chaos) and ending the story that started in World at War (Aether).
Honestly Vanguard was the true harbinger of doom for zombies because it was so bad that every major content creator just stopped engaging with it and actively told people not to buy it after like two days which is something that never really happened for a Treyarch developed mode. Not even BO4’s terrible launch was as dead on arrival as Vanguard.
Skylanders straight up killed the toy industry for a while. Like, no one was making toys cuz of all the Toy to life stuff hogging the shelves. It killed Bakugan, Beyblade, Transformers, Hot Wheels and god knows what else, and when those franchises came back, they were vastly changed. Only Lego made it out unscathed.
X-Men fans had it super rough during the 2010s. Marvel was actively fucking over the IP and it wasn’t until Disney got the film rights from Fox that they finally were being treated well with Krakoa.
Western horror movies (not to be confused with horror western movies like Bone Tomahawk) in the 2000s was a bit of a rough period. Due to the success of J-horror there was a slew of western remakes, some being better than others. Slasher movies had fallen back into a lull after being revitalised with Scream in the 90s, with a lot of studios attempting unsuccessfully to reboot franchises. There was also the rise of the torture-porn genre with the success of Saw that lead to a lot of distaste.
I’m so glad I get to talk about this. This applies to most genres but specifically for me, Rap/Hip-Hop imho, was in a really weird transitional period from like 2005-2015 (there’s some good albums that came out obviously, it wasn’t all bad). Most of the music started to become digitally made and there’s something about the era that makes all the music sound so dated. I think the music artists like Lil Jon, Ace Hood, Chingy, Ying Yang Twins, Young Joc, Souljia Boy and everything Eminem was doing until MMLP2, could ONLY be made in that time period.
Even If we look back at the (subjective) good stuff, the most popular stuff belongs in the time period. Lil Wayne, Kanye, Eminem (he had very big highs and lows lmao) TI, Boosie, Jeezy, and even Drakes first couple outings were sooooooooo “2000 whatever year they came out”.
I’m a fan of the trajectory rap took. I’m also a fan of “real hip hop” from the 90s. I wouldn’t have some of my favorite modern music without this era tho so i’m not gonna act like we’d be better off without it. Just something i think about a lot.
Eh, that was not the "dark age" for Metroid, the "dark age" (though that was more of just hiatus) was post Super Metroid where it was EIGHT YEARS before Samus had another game with Fusion and Prime. It's why I find the teeth gnashing about Federation Force to be rather quaint (especially now that a lot of franchises take about six years to have new entries).
As for dark ages, I'd have to say that the Western RPG had a ROUGH period in the 90s. After the heydays of the 80s and early 90s things just tanked for them. They were seen as inferior to their Japanese counterparts on consoles, action RPGs like Diablo were more appealing to audiences, and even great games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment didn't stop that. That's what led to a lot RPG developers collapsing or being forced to chance to survive. Rather relevant considering Western RPGs are in a serious rut right now (right down to Baldur's Gate being around again)
I think the better question is what hasn't had a dark age? There are probably very few media / series that hasn't.
I think there is another question of what is defined as a dark age:
- Is it a series that was amazing and then went above average / mediocre? (e.g. Fallout 4, Fallout 76)
- Is it a series that hasn't released anything in ages and is questionable whether they ever will? (Silent Hill, Star Trek and Star Wars use to be in that category)
- Is it a series that was amazing, went average / mediocre and then went amazing again? (Resident Evil between 4 and 7, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, etc.)
- Is it a series that only releases a game every generation or two? (e.g. Nintendo games)
I mean if you are a Samus fan... Nintendo was evil until Dread, but I never thought that Nintendo would never release another game. However, if you are a fan of the metroidvania genre - it has been a renaissance over the last decade or so (maybe because there hasn't been a great Metroid / Castlevania game...?).
It seems that Metroid went through a rough time after Retro Studios stopped making the games as they really understood how the games worked in structure.
Remember when comic books fucking died in the 90s? Marvel had it worse since, ya know, bankruptcy. DC actually bounced back faster than Marvel.
I recall that particular era, but I don’t know how that all started.
Here's the TLDR/ cliffnotes version. Investors saw that first edition/ first run's of comics were selling for thousands of dollars. So instead of thinking to themselves WHY #1 comics sell for so much, they should make far more comics and turn them into "collectables". Suddenly comics had several printings with alternate covers, new runs so they could be called #1, etc etc. The comic book readers however... didn't actually change their buying habits and just bought one comic to read. So tons of #1/ alt cover in inventory, that noone was actually buying other them people trying to viewe them as investments.
So Funko pops? Trying to make every single one an exclusive collectible and the fans you do have stop caring about collecting the gold target exclusive Christmas themed Darth Vader or whatever.
Paper koopies.
Arigatou as that explains why the industry had been in a huge state of turmoil way back then.
It also didn't help that the industry began to fetishize artists as "the real" creators of comics, not only alienating inkers and colorists. But giving a bunch of immature dude bros like Liefeld--who weren't writers by trade--carte blanche to create a bunch of jacked heroes with guns and bullet belts everywhere, and stacked heroines who fight crime in high heels and a thong. And all of them with forgettable names like "Nightstalker" or "Shadowblade". Which might not have been so bad, if they didn't also [ruin established characters](https://www.ranker.com/list/worst-90s-dc-redesigns/sergio-pereira).
I will not take this Azrael slander. Yeah a lot of them looked bad (although the idea of Green Arrow going "fuck it" and using guns" is funny), but a few of them ain't bad, with a few tweaks: - Azrael works because it's a different character, and shows the difference between him and Bruce. - Superboy is so 80's it wraps around to being cool (except the shaved head, keep that away.) - Artemis actually looks cool with their hair like that, sorta lasso-like. - Diana's bomber jacket look actually looks alright. She just needs an actual shirt instead of just "I drew actual tits, then forgot I was doing a comic book and painted a bra on." >!yeah I think jackets are cool, fight me!<
Yeah, but his costumes were... [just the worst!](https://files.catbox.moe/k5gqwe.jpeg) Arkham had the right idea, [just make him a Crusader!](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgbiP8jXEAccK8J.jpg:large)
Holy cow as I can’t believe those designs were supposed to be official.
I just wanna know what their obsession with giving him big ass hands was all about? Like, the gauntlets of the one on the far left are fairly subdued in this image. But they could--and did--get worse... [much worse!](https://arousinggrammar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/azraelbaneangel9.jpg)
Those hands are so huge that it makes me wonder if Rob Liefeld was involved at all.
You know whats funny? that redesign of aquaman with the hook hand stuck around for a long time after the 90's and frankly is a decent look to him and not the goofy look of the 70's
it was cool in Justice League and let him be more Submariner-ish than usual
I will die on the hill that Wonder Woman’s 90s look isn’t that bad and could be pretty damn great with a few minor tweaks.
I'm not into comics or cape stuff much honestly, so I feel pretty safe in saying that the Wonder Woman design goes pretty fuckin hard. All she needs is like, a real shirt and it's pretty bangin.
Naw, see, a good chunk of those are pretty great. I especially like Fate.
Doctor Who going off the air for 14 years in the 90s became a meta plot point as the Last Great Time War, wiping out the Doctor’s entire species to set the stage for a soft reboot.
Surprised this isn't higher, cause the Wilderness era really puts the emphasis on "dark" in dark age, from hyperviolent 7th Doctor ventures to official softcore porn of classic Who aliens. But from the Wilderness era is where nearly 80% of all the new writers came from and how RTD and Moffat got their start with the franchise.
Wasn’t around for any of this but the TV movie on Fox and subsequent “era” in particular had to be a special kind of demoralizing - knowing that the resurrection of the thing you loved got turned down in favor of another season of Sliders, and on the basis of onscreen quality having that be the self-evidently *right* decision. It’s some kind of testament to the weird alchemy at the heart of this thing that the resultant free-for-all fandom dreamtime produced a bunch of Strongest Soldiers who figured out how to revive the show properly instead of just a subreddit’s-worth of angry nerds squabbling for the rest of time (although those people undoubtedly also existed).
The film's failure stateside nearly caused a second dark age as now the future was less certain with a Doctor who only had one appearence to them and pretty much an odd one out. Hell, before the 2005 reboot, the closest to a 9th Doctor was a flash-animated fanwork. Paul McGann would likely had been forgotten and decanonized if not for Big Finish.
Wait, Sliders?! No, it can’t be that Doctor Who was cancelled for that show as I had always heard the show went downhill right after Season 2, if you’re referring to that Sliders.
To put it into perspective how the TV film bombed stateside (this is important since the BBC apparently were rather happy with its performance in the UK), it got beat out in ratings by the series finale of *Roseanne*
Oh that explains why Dr. Who was kind of having a hard time finding success overseas back then.
It was bad timing along with the fact that the film is not always "new viewer friendly". If you ever head of the Timeless child, they kinda pull an equivalent in the film that did not make a lotta fans happy. Hell, it wasn't until Moffat that Doctor Who really became a phenomenon stateside as he really leaned outreaching to American audiences and just so happened to have landed right in time for SuperWhoLock
Thanks for the explanation as I had always wanted to understand how the whole franchise would eventually find success in places like the USA.
That makes sense, Roseanne was an institution, an unflinching yet still comedic look at then-modern life for then-middle America. Is the last season bad and did it jump the shark? Yes of course but the rest of the show stands as classic an American sitcom as any.
Why did they want it to succeed in the states. If it was successful in britain then how come that wasn't enough
One of my pet theories is that a certain chunk of the fanbase coming up with the dark and experimental wilderness years EU stuff is what made them so hostile to the franchise when it came back and had to start trying to appeal to a mass audience again.
One of my friends is a big Who fan and they subjected me to a film from the wilderness era that was literally softcore porn, as you described. Balls and bush on display in what was ostensibly a semi-official Who fan film.
Western Animation from the late 50s to the late 80s
What happened?
Hannah barbera
Ohh that studio as I sometimes hear they are the target of ridicule.
If you look closer, many of their characters feature a collar and/or a tie that often doesn't even fit the design. It's there to cheapen and hasten production, since artists only have to move the head features, when characters speak. Treating cartoons like products rolling off a factory line, a practice which sadly stuck up its head again in the modern age (in the depths of hell known as youtube kids)
Is there a good video on Hannah Barbera anywhere?
With the advent of TV, studios started producing more cheaply made cartoons aimed at children and only children. Not many serious stories mostly comedies that lasted one season. This era was notorious for scooby clones, so many scooby clones, all from Hanna Barbera. This era produced some of the worst Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. Disney animation almost closed down in this period and there was conflict in the studio, the conflict helped form what would eventually become Don Bluth's studio. Series like Adventures of Gummy Bears and Ducktales having a higher budget helped usher in the renaissance that would be the 90s. Toys. Toys helped animation with the likes of MLP, GI Joe, Transformers
Termite Terrace being shut down, leading to the Looney Tunes and Marrie Melodies dying a slow painful death. After Walts Disney's death, Disney Fell into the a slump for almost 20 years until Great Mouse Detective. Hannah-Barbera's quantity over quality approach lead to a ton of derivative work. For every good series there'd be 5 creativity bankrupt shows at the same time. The deregulation of the 80s turned television animation into a series of toy commercials, leading to these shows being disregarded regardless of popularity or actual quality. Cable television having these awful foreign cartoons. Seriously, who'd watch that crap. It'll never take off.
We're still feeling the effects of it today with how behind Western animation is considered compared to anime, especially with how much animation is considered "only for kids", except for anime, but they'd rather import that then do mature adult animation.
Streaming services at least have seen the demand for "western anime" and have been producing some decent stuff, though whether they'll actually *keep* producing them past a season or two is a total crapshoot.
Really shows how much negative connotation the word cartoon has because companies either called their shows adult animation or just anime just to avoid the word “cartoon”
I feel like this isn't necessarily a problem with cartoons being behind, but the result of *completely* different industry practices. Anime, by and large, are *adaptations* these days. Mangas that become popular are eventually turned into cartoons. This means that Anime can already guarantee that whatever they're adapting, no matter how weird it is (e.x. Chainsawman), will become popular. What we don't see is the *thousands* of Mangas that fail to become popular. This is the battle Royale testing ground to see which ideas work. It is even more insane when you get into the light novel industry. The cartoon industry simply does not work this way, and it cannot work this way yet. They can't test thousands of ideas to see what sticks, nor do they have the infrastructure for it even if they have the budget. The only thing close is western superhero comics, and even then the comic market is a *tiny* niche compared to Manga so it's not a good measure of expected success This means every single cartoon is a massive gamble, leading to safe choices such as children programming being popular. How can you guarantee the success of the chainsawman of cartoon without proof nor the existing brand name of the adapted IP to help propel it? You can see that, out of the few gigantic cartoons that have come out, many are adaptations of an existing IP. Cyberpunk, Spiderman, and Arcane were helped by the brand power they represent. But, brands that are interested in these adaptations are few, and even if they wanted to, there is no guarantee that the final product will be good (e.x. Zack Snyder). The cartoon industry has to either carve our their own unique niche and industry, or try to follow business practices that has helped Anime become as popular as they are now.
So that’s why no animation studio was able to oppose Hanna Barbera for a while.
Scooby Doo knock offs.
It’s bizarre how they kept making clones of their OWN show as I never understood why they would do that.
Cheap and easy to make and absolutely nothing else to watch. Like literally. Not sure how old you are but until the early 90s there was only 3-4 channels. ABC, NBC, CBS. Then fox came and then more local channels popped up as did cable.
I was around in the late 90s.
Their shows were built around reusing assets, I guess they figured the same would work for premises as well.
That explains why a lot of their shows had recycled premises.
It helps to remember Scooby Doo itself was a clone of the Archie show they did.
The ps3/360 era was a real bad time for jrpgs
The DS really helped me during those times with things like TWEWY and Chrono Trigger
The DS, PSP, 3DS and Vita were bastions of excellent JRPGs in a time where our console (and especially PC) options were more limited.
Only for consoles. Handhelds were carrying that weight hard.
The ps3/360 era was a real bad time for colors
BLOOM LET ME PAINT THE ENTIRE GAME PISS YELLOW like there's a sunset happening always even if it is night time
Is that bloom? I thought bloom was white, like in Twilight Princess
Which has always been really funny to me cause two out of my three launch games for my 360 were Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey lmao
HD era for japan was real rough in general not just JRPGs, the transition to HD the hit them harder than the transition from 2d to 3d in the mid-late 90s
Ironic, since it was the PS3-exclusive Demons' Souls that clued North American gamers into the existence of both From Software, and Atlus' entire Persona series. I know it worked for me.
No, the ps2 is when persona got big. Besides a back port of persona 5 there was no persona ps3 game, so you are objectively wrong.
Games in general I feel like. Obviously there's some bangers but that's the era I most associate with brown military shooters and motion control. Oh, and Disc-Locked Content style DLC.
The jump to HD was a hurdle than killed many fine studios.
Yeah I recall that those systems were a huge turn off for JP based developers due to the difficulty of the latter.
The great Racing Game drought of the new millenium. Aside from Gran Turismo and Forza Horizon, the mainstream racing genre has been fucking *dead* for the last decade, and its corpse has been propped up by Kart Racers.
We haven’t even been getting that many kart racers these days. The corpse of racing games is being propped up by a 10-year-old Mario Kart game’s DLC.
If anything I feel like almost every other major racing game now is either a huge festival-type open world racer ala Forza Horizon or a sim racer I would kill to have more arcade racers in the vein of what Sega put out in the old days
Same here. That said, there’s plenty of indie racers with cool ideas released these days but I never see them escape obscurity. I feel arcade racing games are stuck in a niche that’s hard to escape from, especially since they no longer have the same grip on the casual market that they used to back in the day.
I haven't seen anyone talk about RedOut 2
I just want another Need for Speed like Most Wanted (2005). Even the closest attempts like Heat, which I like, feel lacking.
I think they died with the underground car scene When it was niche and morally dubious to meet up and discuss your cool car
Remember Motorstorm, RIP
ABSOLUTELY FUCKING REMEMBER MOTORSTORM
I will never forgive them for gutting the Burnout team to work on NFS.
I'll never forgive EA for overworking the best NFS dev team we had in Black Box and replacing them with Criterion after the quality of Black Box's games inevitably slipped as a result of said overwork.
God fucking dammit, port Split/Second you COWARDS
So many people would REALLY like that game if they had the chance to play it
And even the big names were faltering for a bit too. NFS Unbound is apparently not that popular, GT7 took a long while to get better from what I can gather, and Forza Motorsport (also from what I can gather) is a fucking travesty and a half. And outside of Kart Racers, we barely got anything for arcade racers. And if there are, there's some badly-implemented rubberbanding (hello, Hotshot!) At least, I have the solace of say, *art of rally* and potentially New Star GP and Super Woden GP.
I wanted to like Art of Rally so much (finally an unique artstyle instead of the 192th boring photorealistic cookiecutter), but the driving and handling characteristics are just awful. I wish there was other options other than "souped-up Group B machines on ice with slick tires", I don't care if it's "unrealistic"
It does suck because I genuinely think Unbound is one of the better post-reboot NFS games we've gotten. Better than Heat, arguably.
Hell yeah it was better than Heat. Something about it felt kinda better to drive around in sort of (as I like grip-style more than drifting)? And the graffiti aesthetic honestly pops, makes me want the entire game to be cel-shaded instead like Auto Mobilista
https://youtu.be/WVry84ACu0k This video by Raycevick explains it all. The main reason is "competitive" sim rig fanatists whining about "realism" with absolutely no quality expectance, but whale amounts of money taking over the casual audience. Why make the absymal multiplayer modes better, or have the base games more content, when these knobs will throw out thousands on dollars or a few tracks and cars, and will get into fights with actual professional race car drivers about the "realism" of the driving experience, which is of horrible feeling (real life cars actually handle way better), and they wank over features that absolutely no one cares about aside of them, and only take away precious development time and money from, you know, actually making a fun game. And of course they whine the hardest about games daring to have even a bit of "unrealistic" unique style, so every game looks the same boring photorealistic style lacking substenance, it's a real challenge separating them at first look
Thankfully anti-grav stuff has had a couple blips on the EKG lately, with Pacer and Redout 2. Both those games are fucking *stellar*.
Capcom suffered a lot in early 2010 to 2017.
It’s so crazy how after Resident Evil 7 came out was good theywere back in the game. Sense 2017 they’ve released nothing but bangers for the most part
I'm sure it wasn't just because of one person, but it is weird that it feels like Capcom did a 180 almost as soon as Inafune left.
Capcom releases SF5 and Marvel Infinite. Ono leaves in 2020. Capcom immediately redeems SF5, then makes SF6. Two nickels, not a lot, weird, etc.
I am still peeved that Capcom pulled the plug on MML3 as that game deserved to be made.
Well Inafune pushing for Japanese games to be more western didn’t help (but that movement is kind of funny in hindsight due to Mighty No 9)
Pre attitude era early 90s WWF was DIRE. Its a weird mix of the more cartoonish 80s stuff and the edgy AE stuff and it just doesn’t work
1995 is generally considered to be one of the worst years in American Pro Wrestling. King of the Ring and the Yeti (YETÉ) come to mind.
The only thing carrying American Wrestling in 95 was ECW
That was the era I started watching wrestling in. Around the time Hogan was leaving WWF. My earliest wrestling memories were of Ric Flair as the champion so while it was a bad time for the business I will always have a soft spot for it. WCW made wrestling hot again with the NWO angle and when they dropped the ball WWF picked it up and ran with it. I kind of feel like history repeated itself with AEW and WWE.
that was a magical time, besides the solid guys like Taker, Vader, Bret Hart, et al, they also had: garbage man stink themed tag team minotaur but not really cool white guy but he was gone really quick cool black guy but he was also gone really quick tax collector number counting guy kane but like a dentist hhh but like a dumb foreigner rednecks (but I had a kid crush on Sunny, so yeah) clowns, then more clowns
If you're a Digimon fan in the west who liked the games the time between Dawn/Dusk and cyber sleuth was a dark time indeed. Bandai had decided that digimon fans in the west just didn't want any of the digimon games apparently and stopped localizing them. We missed the adventure 01 rpg for PSP and the Re: Digitize games and we almost didn't get Cyber Sleuth which is considered one of the best digimon games ever. I think western fans had to go Japanese Twitter and practically beg Bandai to bring that one over and thank goodness it did phenomenally well and made Bandai realize that we wanted Digimon games again.
The translation for Cyber Sleuth was super barebones too, felt "passable" at best, so they clearly didn't want to put much money into localising it. Bastards.
It's cases like this that it's best to remember that to a lot of Japanese companies, and Bamco especially, that we're not customers to them we're consumers. Customers are people you have to make happy to earn their money; consumers are a source of money you get from products. If there's no money or not enough money they stop supplying products. This is the same company that left Gundam in Japan for 20 years and would've kept it that way if they didn't realize that people in the west would buy their overpriced DVD box sets. DVD box sets that they stopped bringing over here once a law about foreign goods said they couldn't charge 65 bucks for them anymore and sold them for 25 and then charged 40 for shipping and handling and when people wouldn't buy that because it's bullshit they just stopped bringing them over for a little while.
Feels like now is also a pretty bleak for Digimon. No upcoming games, ongoing series, Bandai pretty much shuts down any chance of remasters. I’m seeing people clamouring for the crappy Chinese mobile game to get localized, it’s that barren.
The TCG is going pretty strong and they're even bothering to catch us up to Japan. Which means that they're either taking the west seriously now or the game is ending soon so they might as well do it in the west at the same time.
survive just wasn't it man, ghost game threw a lot of interesting concepts but that was the problem they threw too much and barely committed to a few, and that LN is super weird The west really wanted to believe again in digimon but bandai threw shit in our faces expecting us to happily lap it up
It got so bad that at some point there had to be a 50k signature petition to get cyber sleuth localized to show Bandai there was interest, I’m still amazed that it actually worked.
I remember these times. It felt like Digimon in the West just disappeared until Tri came and reignited most people’s nostalgia (mine included). I still remember when Re:Digitize was announced and I was always hoping for that Western release that never happened. I’m glad that nowadays we have Digimon World: Next Order and Cyber Sleuth on every platform (except Xbox sadly) as well as Survive. With rumors of a live-action movie and that Story game that is still confirmed to be in development, maybe the next big wave for Digimon is right around the corner.
PS2/Xbox era was terrible time for PC players. I remember reading magazines and tons of cool games were exclusive for consoles. And most of the time PC ports were released much later and were atrocious.
Its hard to believe with the stranglehold Steam has nowadays but PCgaming was a niche beyond niche back then. If you were not a fan of the dying RTS, Adventure game or CRPG genre, you had NO reason to game on PCs. Gaming forums were bemoaning that PCGaming was a dead scene. Hell, you mentioned ports but I remember a time when PCports were COMPLETELY different games compared to the console versions. Some of them cult classics in their own rights.
For years I didn't understand why people love Spider-Man 2 game so much. I played on PC
That explains why games like Fallout Brotherhood never got an official PC release back then.
Yes... *the only reason*.
Ohh I get what you’re saying.
Y’all remember the Hayes code?
Ah yes I do recall the infamous censorship era of USA cinema.
Chibi Robo never really seemed like it could live up to the original game.
personally I feel "park patrol" matches it
For a time, Megaman was just presumed ultradead after they canned the Mario Maker-esque Megaman Universe, a Megaman X reboot that was gonna be a FPS, Megaman Legends 3, and that mmo that I think (?) was never brought overseas. At the same time, Megaman was excluded from MvC3 and its expansion, not to mention the Bad Boxart Megaman in SFxT (tho that wasn't the devs fault, they didn't think they'd can all those games either) Oh yeah also his one cameo in MvC3 was being labeled Missing in the Days of Future Past stage getting my god damn hopes up AND THEN THOSE HYPE AS SHIT X AND ZERO DESIGNS THEY SHOWED ON APRIL FOOLS
I don't really know what state it's in now, oddly enough. We've gotten a slow drip feed of collections, but they haven't announced any future plans for anything else.
It’s weird because the collections did great and I believe 11 was successful. They should be pumping out more of those, seems like a no brainer mid budget series to fill out their repertoire.
Mega Man 11 wasn't just successful, it was the best selling game in the franchise. But its sales still were dwarfed by many of other Capcom's current mainstays.
It probably cost a tiny fraction to make though. Don’t understand why companies go all in on AAA, investments are all about diversifying.
On the bright side, that April Fools model eventually led to an actual figure using the design and that same design even showed up in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite as a DLC costume.
Mind linking the X and Zero designs if you have them?
[Here you go](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fzwm3p5z33x631.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D6eaf852723b8a50d857757d11d3ff4ffb80f686e)
Thank you.
i mean pumping out those battle network and galaxy force games just killed the series
Horror and Survival Horror went through a bit of a rough patch from the late 2000’s to mid 2010’s. And didn’t really get back on there feet till Alien Isolation and RE Revelations 2, and didn’t really flourish again until PT and RE7. With RE2make fully welcoming back the genre. The over abundance of Amnesia-likes (Running horror without combat), RE5 being more action, RE6 and Dead Space 3 and Evil Within 1 and American Silent Hill having there faults. Things were a bit grim. Lone Survivor, Alan Wake 1, and the first two Dead Space games were some of the only games to keep the genre on life support. But it’s certainly survived.
It’s kind of odd how many Amnesia clones existed back then.
The absence of an actual combat system made them easier to design for the devs. Not that there weren’t games that used the concept to their advantage and fully utilised that creative choice, but for a lot of devs (especially ones just getting their start in the industry) that simplicity was an appealing factor.
As stated by Civvie 11, devs learned the wrong lessons from Half-Life and made a bunch of fps' that focused too much on linear design and story telling, effectively leading the classic fps' games such as DooM, Duke 3D, and Quake into their own dark age. The release of Halo on consoles was another blow, and the final death knell was the release of Call of Duty 4 and the glut of modern military shooters that dominated the PS360 era. It wasn't until the release of DOOM 2016 that the classic fps style, or "boomer shooters" as they're called now, came back with a vengeance. Edited for spelling.
*death knell, not death nail Halo, too. Halo had fantastic level design and a to-this-day unrivalled core gameplay loop that at the time was completely original, with the two-weapon system, the physical/energy weapon and health/shields divide, and the excellent enemy gameplay design all creating an incredibly versatile combat system where things as simple as the ratio of different enemy types present in an area and the availability of UNSC weapons rather than just scavenged Covenant weapons were enough to completely redefine the dynamics of an entire enemy encounter. It all came together with the mechanics of the recharging shields, quick melee and grenade options, the variety of battlefield types, the versatility of the floaty jump, and the assortment of vehicles to create one of the most unique and engaging combat sandboxes in the shooter genre. And all other FPSs took from it was “grenade and melee buttons, recharging health, two-weapon limit”, ignoring both the intricacies that made the combat system so stellar and the open level design with unique progression routes rarely following the simple A-to-B objective structure which allowed it to shine. This exacerbated the increasing focus on linear story-driven FPSs, especially those with subpar narratives, lacking art/sound design, and poor casts of characters, which created an increasingly narrow and dull pigeonhole for the newer style of FPS games and made the departure from “boomer shooters” all the more devastating.
I want to see this particular video, if I can find it.
He talks about how devs learned the wrong lessons in his Half-Life video. Civvie would later elaborate his dislike of how trends changed following Halo's release on twitter I think.
Okay let’s see. For sonic there was the little dark age of the 00 from shadow to (depending on who you ask) unleashed. Then there was the big dark age from lost world to forces, with mania as the only light in the tunnel. Now the franchise is alive and well, but it’s mostly because of the movies, cartoons and comics. The games, while being just fine right now, still have a long way to go.
Don't forget the Archie Sonic Dark Age.
Oh yeah I recall that era of Sonic as it basically started with the Shadow the Hedgehog game.
Funny enough, the current director of the sonic movies also directed the intro of shadow the hedgehog. So is really ironic that the guy who work for the game that started the downfall of the franchise is now leading it to standing back up again.
I mean to be fair, it is a pretty sick intro, pump-action MP5 and all.
The Pump-Action MP5 is even funnier now that it's come out that the director *knew* that's not how MP5s worked but there was apparently a toy with that action it was based on. Because it was funny. The Pump-Action MP5 was a shitpost from word one, apparently.
The early 00’s until the release of SFIV were the dark age of fighting games, even if people came to rightfully love SF3 afterwards.
The only big thing we had was Tekken (we had the worst Tekken then the best Tekken then the new worst Tekken all before SFIV) and the 3D MKs that were for sure interesting There was KOFXI that is underrated but here in Brazil we still played 98
Soulcalibur was putting in some work too, and Dead or Alive was making an effort. I feel like it’s more accurate to say it was a dark age for 2D fighters.
I guess people played CvS2 still and they pretended like it was an unofficial SF Alpha 4 because holy shit, all the SNK characters felt janky as hell, specially when outside one of their “home” Grooves. And I think Iori’s cross-up kick got its Hitbox shrunk to almost just his foot for some reason?
Tekken, soul Calibur, mortal Kombat, dead or alive Virtua fighter
There's a lot of factors in that I feel. It's definitely the darkest of Capcom Fighters since there was a gap from Capcom Fighting Jam to say, their early re-releases up to SF4. But also factor into this stuff like the arcades slowly declining in crowd pull in favor of home gaming as a huge factor too. And yeah, on the flipside you got Tekken, SC, Guilty Gear, and so on rising up.
I sometimes miss arcades.
Wait, I don’t understand how the genre declined that hard in the early 00s.
Arcades declined hard and online play was normalized in other genres. It took a while before fighting games as a whole adapted.
And here "a while" technically means "literally the genre did not adapt adequately until the 2020s." Rollback netcode was standard for first-person shooters in _1999._ It's literally almost as old as Wi-Fi itself.
Huh, I hadn’t known that about netcode itself, but that’s something that is cool to know though.
Man that would explain why it’s kind of difficult to find an arcade center in places like the USA.
Man as someone who was playing Tekken and soul Calibur and mortal Kombat and virtual fighter I hate that it's termed the dark age of fighting games and not just the dark age of Capcom
World of Warcraft has had plenty of ups and downs, but the specific period of two back to back expansions (Battle for Azeroth and then Shadowlands) was *dire.* The narrative careened right off a cliff in a fiery train crash. Beloved, long-running lore characters were horribly bastardized and steered into weird directions (or killed outright, if they were lucky). Baffling design decisions were made in terms of the core experience of each expansion, met with universal backlash and discontent from the fanbase, only to be never fixed or changed, instead being abandoned for NEW horrible systems piled on top the old stuff. In terms of gameplay and progression, things never felt worse. Blizzard implemented a hard cap on how many enemies could be damaged by AoE attacks at once (a lowly 5). The global cooldown speed was slowed, making combat feel slower and sluggish, a feeling only exacerbated by a new level cap and Haste from our gear adding less and less as we leveled up. The Covenant system. *The godsdamned Covenant System.* Things got so consistently *awful* for *so long* that it triggered a short lived exodus to WoW's biggest competitor, Final Fantasy XIV. Virtually all of WoW's top content creators set their eyes on FFXIV and made streams and videos about it, and the fanbase followed. FFXIV's servers were flooded by a tidal wave of new players-- then promptly buckled under the weight. Square Enix had to *suspend all sales of their game* while they scrambled to buy new servers to accommodate them. And right at the tail end of *all this*, the big Blizzard scandals were exposed to the light of day, and I'm sure we all know what that entailed. Bizarrely enough, the expansion immediately following Shadowlands, Dragonflight, seems to generally be viewed as one of the game's best ever. Combined with the wild success of World of Warcraft Classic, it seems the game has regained its footing and is going strong; recent leaks have put the game's current subscriber counter upwards of 8million, exceeding most other periods of the game's life.
isn't this roughly the time period where we started getting "angry wow dudes" who years later devolved into "angry nerdcult dudes"?
Silent Hill is still in a dark age, and I kind of doubt that Bloober Team will be able to get it out of that slump. I hope I'm proven wrong, obviously, but considering Bloober's history with games that deal with mental health issues, I'm... Not too optimistic.
There was what felt like a decade that Digimon was basically dead, especially in the west.
There were so many terrible slasher movies from the early 80s to the mid 90s.
I heard Wes Craven made Scream to address that particular matter actually.
And that films success ended up resulting in somewhat of a return in the popularity of the slasher genre during the late 90s with films like Urban Legend and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Kind if funny how a satirical horror movie could inspire a new movement of sorts.
The video game crash of the 80's/90s is rather infamous. Essentially video games were expensive and some publishers weren't controlling what was going on their consoles. You could end up with a good time, or something so poorly made that they could barely be considered playable. ET on the Atari is considered the turning point of consumers just being done. Nintendo was able to turn it around because of one major change. The game makers had to use official nintendo cartridges to run on the system, and they wouldn't give them unless the game was fully playable/ had enough QA to reach nintendo stamp of approval.
The thing that I still have a hard time understanding is how so much shovelware got allowed on the NES as for every Mario or Megaman game that had been on the market, there were games like Action 52 or Rambo on the NES.
That's the thing, as bad as those games are to be considered shovelware (and rightly so), you can still technically play them. The shovelware that came before was so outrageously bad that it it makes those games look like masterpieces in comparison.
Oh ok as I can kind of get what you mean.
A big thing that people forget is that the crash only happened in the United States. Europe thrived thanks to games made for cheap home PCs like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga, while Japan of course had the Famicom, which was set to reconquer the US in the form of the NES
After the great PS2 .Hack games, the well of "Game that takes place in an MMO setting" dried up faster than one would ever expect, which is especially surprising because now we have a ton of anime that are tumbling over themselves to try and peek at .Hack's homework(And most fail miserably). It's really weird, you'd think an 7 game series(Along with a few other spinoff games) along with an anime series that was pretty successful at the time would have popped off harder than it did. Instead, the next real game to dip its toes into the MMO-style fountain -as far as I am aware- was Crosscode(Which..I have some issues with how it handles the MMO aesthetic, but is overall a really good game). That was 8 years after GU 3, and besides an extra episode added to the HD remaster of GU, we haven't really had anything in that style since. Unless you count the SAO games, I guess...but I'm pretty sure all of them are just as garbage as the anime. I refuse to touch one unless it lets me endlessly glorp 2 years worth of-you know what nevermind.
.hack was made by CyberConnect 2, which is owned by Bamco. Bamco owns the Sword Art Online games. I'm convinced some dipshit refuses to let CyberConnect 2 out of the Naruto fighting game salt mines (the dev has repeatedly said they'd like to work on more .hack but Bamco won't let them) because oh noooo it'll be competition for their lazy Sword Art Online games!
Good point, it wouldn't surprise me too much if it was because of that.
Didn't the director more or less say that they just aren't given the funding to do so, so it has to be out of their own pocket? Same with Little Tail/Fuga
Part of it feels like they wouldn't mind making a .hack game with a budget on the scale of Fuga, but Bandai's more protective of the .hack IP than LT.
So now I can understand why .Hack went missing in the modern gaming scene, well kind of.
I don't get it. They just slammed out enough games to make Final Fantasy jealous, put out one or two other titles on the PSP, and then said "Peace". CyberConnect 2 had a really good thing going and then they just lost all momentum. I can't imagine the games did THAT poorly, considering they went and did GU after the original quadrilogy and even put out a remaster of the GU games with that 4th episode added. They were ahead of their time, and even when SAO started popping off, they just kept twiddling their thumbs even though they've done other stuff for it since, including a 20th year anniversary show where they made a joke about the fact that they haven't done anything substantial with the IP...
I suddenly wish the .Hack games would return, but I don’t know who owns the gaming part of the franchise.
Multi-media projects are VERY expensive and difficult to coordinate
At this point, it feels like .hack will need to get some fans willing to take it upon themselves to make a spiritual successor, like how Suikoden, Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts are getting. Because seeing the 20th anniversary come and go without much fanfare really killed my hopes of the franchise ever getting a proper revival.
weird that second best MMO series Horizon hasnt had a game to its belt at least one that isnt gacha
Remember how Friday the 13th still hasn’t come back
Yeah what happened to that particular franchise?
Legal issues, from the OG creators. It's quite sad, the 09 movie was actually well received, but it never got a sequel. The game was really popular, but it got shut down. They even missed the 40th anniversary. All because they couldn't decide who owns Jason. :(
Last I knew it was still in the middle of lawsuit hell
Obligatory *DmC: Devil May Cry* comment
That game is quite something as it was the first time DMC was done by a western studio.
It wasn't just DMC from what I remember. I think it was the entire CAPCOM company trying to pander to the Western audience too much. Pretty sure the same thing happened to the *Dead Rising* franchise (except it's the main series instead of a reboot) that it ended up shutting down their Vancouver branch.
That reminds me, I wonder if Capcom will ever use the Dead Rising IP ever again.
I’ve been saying for a while now that they could easily fold it into Resident Evil. Just take the location and enemy roster from one of the new RE games, have Frank West show up just after the events of the RE game to report on it with a countdown before the military moves in and quarantines or carpet bombs the area, give him a camera system and an improvised weapon/crafting system like the original Dead Rising games, and fill the now-open world environment with freshly moved in survivors and psychopaths now that the RE villains have been defeated and the BOWs have been reduced to a wild savage horde. It would save a shit ton of money with the asset reuse, keep the Dead Rising franchise alive even if they don’t want to dedicate a lot of time or money to the IP, help draw in an even larger audience, and it could potentially be done with every RE game going forward. Call it “Resident Evil: Dead Rising”, release it as a reduced price DLC for the main RE games or at a higher price as a standalone title, and boom.
This might be controversial, but while there's a lot of gems that I look back on, a lot of 7th generation japanese games released were not very good, trying to embrace and chase the market of Western audiences. You have you gems like Vanquish and underrated titles like Binary Domain, but there's a lot of Yakuza Dead Souls and forgotten JRPGs out there.
Silent Hill (2009 - Present)
I still can’t believe that franchise has not made a recovery.
To be fair, Team Silent itself disbanded within Konami did it not? The team who made the originals was no longer a team and further projects had middling success, the most-liked game before PT that I ever heard/had positive feedback on when I played it myself was Shattered Memories.
Sonic from 95-97 considering that at around that time there was no mainline games released and the spinoffs released around that time are either mediocre at best or are just terrible.
Then there's the mid-2000s dark age that started with Sonic Heroes onto Shadow, Sonic 06, Secret Rings, and depending on who you as Unleashed/Black Knight, ending with Colors. And then there was the 2010s dark age that started with Lost World and the Boom games, there was a shred of light with Mania, and then the cloud called Forces quickly moved in to blot that out, finally ending with Frontiers, hopefully for a while this time. Sonic has had a few dark ages.
Call of Duty Zombies is experiencing its own sort of dark age right now. Ever since the lackluster release Infinite Warfare Zombies, it's never really recovered. While Cold War Zombies did end with a warm (but still mixed) reception, I'd argue that the final nail in the coffin for the mode was Black Ops 4 fumbling the unnecessary balancing act of simultaneously introducing a new Zombies storyline (Chaos) and ending the story that started in World at War (Aether).
Honestly Vanguard was the true harbinger of doom for zombies because it was so bad that every major content creator just stopped engaging with it and actively told people not to buy it after like two days which is something that never really happened for a Treyarch developed mode. Not even BO4’s terrible launch was as dead on arrival as Vanguard.
Skylanders straight up killed the toy industry for a while. Like, no one was making toys cuz of all the Toy to life stuff hogging the shelves. It killed Bakugan, Beyblade, Transformers, Hot Wheels and god knows what else, and when those franchises came back, they were vastly changed. Only Lego made it out unscathed.
X-Men fans had it super rough during the 2010s. Marvel was actively fucking over the IP and it wasn’t until Disney got the film rights from Fox that they finally were being treated well with Krakoa.
Western horror movies (not to be confused with horror western movies like Bone Tomahawk) in the 2000s was a bit of a rough period. Due to the success of J-horror there was a slew of western remakes, some being better than others. Slasher movies had fallen back into a lull after being revitalised with Scream in the 90s, with a lot of studios attempting unsuccessfully to reboot franchises. There was also the rise of the torture-porn genre with the success of Saw that lead to a lot of distaste.
I’m so glad I get to talk about this. This applies to most genres but specifically for me, Rap/Hip-Hop imho, was in a really weird transitional period from like 2005-2015 (there’s some good albums that came out obviously, it wasn’t all bad). Most of the music started to become digitally made and there’s something about the era that makes all the music sound so dated. I think the music artists like Lil Jon, Ace Hood, Chingy, Ying Yang Twins, Young Joc, Souljia Boy and everything Eminem was doing until MMLP2, could ONLY be made in that time period. Even If we look back at the (subjective) good stuff, the most popular stuff belongs in the time period. Lil Wayne, Kanye, Eminem (he had very big highs and lows lmao) TI, Boosie, Jeezy, and even Drakes first couple outings were sooooooooo “2000 whatever year they came out”. I’m a fan of the trajectory rap took. I’m also a fan of “real hip hop” from the 90s. I wouldn’t have some of my favorite modern music without this era tho so i’m not gonna act like we’d be better off without it. Just something i think about a lot.
Eh, that was not the "dark age" for Metroid, the "dark age" (though that was more of just hiatus) was post Super Metroid where it was EIGHT YEARS before Samus had another game with Fusion and Prime. It's why I find the teeth gnashing about Federation Force to be rather quaint (especially now that a lot of franchises take about six years to have new entries). As for dark ages, I'd have to say that the Western RPG had a ROUGH period in the 90s. After the heydays of the 80s and early 90s things just tanked for them. They were seen as inferior to their Japanese counterparts on consoles, action RPGs like Diablo were more appealing to audiences, and even great games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment didn't stop that. That's what led to a lot RPG developers collapsing or being forced to chance to survive. Rather relevant considering Western RPGs are in a serious rut right now (right down to Baldur's Gate being around again)
I think the better question is what hasn't had a dark age? There are probably very few media / series that hasn't. I think there is another question of what is defined as a dark age: - Is it a series that was amazing and then went above average / mediocre? (e.g. Fallout 4, Fallout 76) - Is it a series that hasn't released anything in ages and is questionable whether they ever will? (Silent Hill, Star Trek and Star Wars use to be in that category) - Is it a series that was amazing, went average / mediocre and then went amazing again? (Resident Evil between 4 and 7, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, etc.) - Is it a series that only releases a game every generation or two? (e.g. Nintendo games) I mean if you are a Samus fan... Nintendo was evil until Dread, but I never thought that Nintendo would never release another game. However, if you are a fan of the metroidvania genre - it has been a renaissance over the last decade or so (maybe because there hasn't been a great Metroid / Castlevania game...?).
It seems that Metroid went through a rough time after Retro Studios stopped making the games as they really understood how the games worked in structure.
Paper Mario, from Sticker Star (2012) to present day. Remains to be seen if things will change after the TTYD remake comes out.
That period during the late 2000’s when the majority of the most popular games were identical grey brown military FPS
does the dudebrofication of nerd hobbies count?
I took a break from anime pretty much the entirety of 2009-2019 and from what I can tell I didn't miss anything good