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How can people not like 'Nintendo Games'?

"People fight in hand-to-hand combat" -> Beat n'Up -> "They fight in a match" -> Fighting Game
The "SSB is not a fighting game" joke get old.

Yes, Smash is a fighting game. Explain to me how its not. And that post says other companies do those games better, hence someone can think Smash is inferior to other fighters by other companies.

Smash Bros. is not a genre that is only occupied by it Sony's clone.

If you really think someone that loves Smash Bros. will REPLACE it with Street Fighter IV, you are wrong.

It's as stupid as thinking someone that loves Gran Turismo won't buy the next PS4 to play it because they can play Need for Speed on PC.
 
They were good, but gotten stale over the generations.
I outgrew them. Even Mario Galaxy didn't do anything for me. I just wasn't interested in playing it.

Edit: Ugh, the smash argument again? It's not a fighting game. It's its own genre that I'd call Party Platformer. There's nothing wrong with not calling it a fighting game. Any game can be considered competitive.
 
Luigi's Mansion is a superb example of how game design is an art form. It takes gameplay mechanics and utilizes them in an interesting way, environments that react to you, reasons to replay and discover new aspects of a level you missed on the first and second attempt.

Nintendo are masters at their craft, they make mistakes sometimes, but their overall content is among the best the industry has to offer.

Right and then wraps all of those interesting game mechanics in a grade-school story.
 
I'm not saying its impossible to deslike every single thing UNIVERSAL does, but its pretty fucking wierd and most like a very rare case of someone who has to hate alot more of everything else to make me believe such a claim.

If that same person also happens to enjoy most of what FOX and PARAMOUNT offers then I'm sorry but lol

Your analogy is faulty because you don't have to invest an additional $170 - $350 in order to watch a Universal picture.

Nintendo games being exclusive makes it more difficult for a gamer who is only interested in a few Nintendo franchises to play them.


Luigi's Mansion is a superb example of how game design is an art form. It takes gameplay mechanics and utilizes them in an interesting way, environments that react to you, reasons to replay and discover new aspects of a level you missed on the first and second attempt.

Nintendo are masters at their craft, they make mistakes sometimes, but their overall content is among the best the industry has to offer.

Agreed. It is my game of the year thus far. :D
 
In my opinion

Nintendo games: Mario, metroid, Zelda.
Playstation games: Gran Turismo, MGS, Final Fantasy
Xbox games: GoW, Halo, CoD

Its easy to see that it is fully possible to just stick with one of the above. Although there are more games out there, thosr examples manifests my own perception of what the consoles represent.

And that in my opinion is way over simplifying things. Every company on that list has a much larger library of games to choose from than that - and most of the people posting in here are talking about Nintendo's games which are not necessarily considered among their "killer IPs" - things like Fire Emblem, Golden Sun, Xenoblade, and F-Zero.
 
There is soooo much wrong with this. People cannot see what's right in front of them. There are plenty of complex game mechanics in Nintendo games. ESRB rating "E" means it's for everyone, not just children.

I find it odd some people like Crash Bandicoot and Ratchet & Clank, yet they won't give a Nintendo game the time of day. I'm not suggesting you are this person, it's just an example.

I don't want to play games designed for everyone, I want games that were designed to appeal to a smaller but dedicated crowd of long time gamers. Because that is what's going to challenge me and keep me satisfied at this point.
 
Nintendo creates games which largely share a very specific identity, one that is marketable to all ages and that doesn't offend. The problem for some, is that the majority of Nintendo software falls in this brand identity which is designed to cater to the needs of many people at once - and so this necessity to cater to all doesn't appeal to specific sensibilities and tastes of certain people (I'll generalise and say males age 18-30) so for some it's very easy to assume an ideal that nothing that Nintendo offers is anything they'd like. It's not about the individual games, or the quality of those games, it's about the Nintendo ethos woven into their products that doesn't appeal to certain people.

Boom, there you have it.
 
I'd love to agree with you OP, but doing so is not good for my sanity. Some people are just sandboxed into certain segments of taste, and Nintendo as a whole generally does not intersect with them. Like a guy who is all about Madden and COD, the stereotypical dudebro gamer, there is nothing WRONG about his taste, he just occupies a completely different sphere of taste reality than I do. I have no interest in his games, he has no interest in mine. People are different, sometimes that's just the way it's gotta be. And not just stereotypes of people, normal people too! Someone who mainly got into gaming in college playing Counter Strike at LAN parties is gonna have a WILDLY different set of interests than someone who grew up with an SNES.

I know a big part of your point is that "Nintendo" is such a wide-spanning term that it could certainly include at least a game or two that pretty much anyone could enjoy, but ehh.. there are undertones. You can usually tell when a game is a Nintendo game. I wouldn't be so into "Nintendo games" if there wasn't something that linked them all together. The game design philosophies are pretty consistent overall, and they just won't appeal to some people.

Sure, there can be plenty of ignorance when a person writes off an entire company's output, and plenty of people probably make their claims from that kind of place (a few in this thread even). But a reasonable person can arrive at the same conclusion, it's certainly not impossible.
 
I don't want to play games designed for everyone, I want games that were designed to appeal to a smaller but dedicated crowd of long time gamers. Because that is what's going to challenge me and keep me satisfied at this point.
It's much more fair to say you are uninterested. If someone in your position were to say they don't "like" them, for example, they are quite frankly full of shit. In general, a person can't dislike something they've never tried.
 
I don't want to play games designed for everyone, I want games that were designed to appeal to a smaller but dedicated crowd of long time gamers. Because that is what's going to challenge me and keep me satisfied at this point.

Metroid Prime.
 
Troll? Troll. Although, the word most implies that you do in fact like at least one Pixar movie.

Huh? I'm not trolling.

Ratatouille and Wall E are the only things that I can say I enjoyed in any meaningful fashion, and even then I'm kind of ambivalent towards them. That's it. Pretty much don't care about any of their other output or actively dislike what else I've seen, and I've seen much of their output. I tend to lean towards actively disliking most of their work. Hated Up, really didn't like Incredibles, didn't like Monsters Inc, etc.
 
Your analogy is faulty because you don't have to invest an additional $170 - $350 in order to watch a Universal picture.

Nintendo games being exclusive makes it more difficult for a gamer who is only interested in a few Nintendo franchises to play them.




Agreed. It is my game of the year thus far. :D

Does it really matter if they can't afford it? If they can't afford a Nintendo console and don't play their games shouldn't the statement be "I can't really comment on Nintendo's output" not "I don't like Nintendo games."
 
Nintendo creates games which largely share a very specific identity, one that is marketable to all ages and that doesn't offend. The problem for some, is that the majority of Nintendo software falls in this brand identity which is designed to cater to the needs of many people at once - and so this necessity to cater to all doesn't appeal to specific sensibilities and tastes of certain people (I'll generalise and say males age 18-30) so for some it's very easy to assume an ideal that nothing that Nintendo offers is anything they'd like. It's not about the individual games, or the quality of those games, it's about the Nintendo ethos woven into their products that doesn't appeal to certain people.

While this is understandable, it still doesn't change the fact that "I don't like Nintendo games" is a pretty ridiculous statement. Because what you're saying falls closer to a more general "I don't like Nintendo/Nintendo's general philosophy" since you admit that there are games that fall outside that description.
 
When people say they "don't like Nintendo games", they're probably not saying "I've tried all Nintendo games, and didn't like any of them." More likely, they actually mean "while I've enjoyed some Nintendo games in the past, their current output is less exciting to me than the output of other developers, so I play those games instead". Put that way, it doesn't seem unreasonable.

Most of Nintendo's titles are aimed at an extremely broad audience. Lots of people will naturally find that less exciting than titles aimed at their more specific tastes.
 
I will never understand fanboyism, neither denial. I mean people CAN or CAN'T enjoy Nintendo Games, whole of them or part of them. Is this so hard to understand?

While I just spent two posts defending those who don't really like many Nintendo games, I will rebut this particular concept.

Nintendo has published literally thousands of games at this point, ranging from big epic games like Zelda to quirky downloadable titles or retail releases like Rhythm Heaven.

If you honestly dislike the whole of them, then frankly that represents a mental block which cannot possibly be reasonable. It would be like me saying I dislike every single movie Columbia/Tristar pictures has ever produced; there are so many movies spanning so many genres with everything from wide critical acclaim to huge popular reception to everything in between, that no reasonable movie lover could ever say such a thing without exhibiting some form of bias.

If I said, "I generally don't like the stuff Columbia/Tristar produces?" Sure, that's possible. Maybe they produce significantly fewer films I'm interested in than does, say, Warner Brothers, and given limited time to watch movies I pretty much always watch other films. But if you simply cannot find a single one that interests you -- be that a Columbia/Tristar film or a Nintendo game -- that represents a mental block that is very unlikely to be based on sound reason.
 
I don't appreciate Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart, or Metroid. I wouldn't say I have no interest in any game Nintendo has ever made, but I have interest in so few as to mean effectively the same thing.

I liked Rhythm Heaven, for example. And Advance Wars was interesting. But their "system sellers" don't appeal to me with any consistency. As a fairly conservative system purchaser (I am completely happy to buy no systems at all for a full generation and just play on my PC), that means that "an occasional quirky title here and there" simply isn't sufficient to hold my interest. I'm sure the same basic logic applies to many one system owners; if you are only buying one system, a few occasional interesting titles from Nintendo simply isn't sufficient, and I'm fairly sure the easy way to say this without go in to elaborate detail is "I don't really like Nintendo games."

I would also point out that this isn't some new trend or something; people have been disinterested in Nintendo's franchises for quite a long time. It may be new to you, but that doesn't mean the behavior just recently sprung in to existence.

When people say they "don't like Nintendo games", they're probably not saying "I've tried all Nintendo games, and didn't like any of them." More likely, they actually mean "while I've enjoyed some Nintendo games in the past, their current output is less exciting to me than the output of other developers, so I play those games instead". Put that way, it doesn't seem unreasonable.

Most of Nintendo's titles are aimed at an extremely broad audience. Lots of people will naturally find that less exciting than titles aimed at their more specific tastes.

Pretty much this
 
If you really think someone that loves Smash Bros. will REPLACE it with Street Fighter IV, you are wrong.

It's as stupid as thinking someone that loves Gran Turismo won't buy the next PS4 to play it because they can play Need for Speed on PC.

Who said anything about replacing it?

It's about being better and there are better fighting games than Smash.

And you can't compare GT and NFS, because they are on opposite sides of the racing spectrum. One is in-depth sim and the other is arcadey, they both handle racing VERY differently.
 
Nintendo creates games which largely share a very specific identity, one that is marketable to all ages and that doesn't offend. The problem for some, is that the majority of Nintendo software falls in this brand identity which is designed to cater to the needs of many people at once - and so this necessity to cater to all doesn't appeal to specific sensibilities and tastes of certain people (I'll generalise and say males age 18-30) so for some it's very easy to assume an ideal that nothing that Nintendo offers is anything they'd like. It's not about the individual games, or the quality of those games, it's about the Nintendo ethos woven into their products that doesn't appeal to certain people.

This is probably as well put as it can be.
 
Your analogy is faulty because you don't have to invest an additional $170 - $350 in order to watch a Universal picture.

Nintendo games being exclusive makes it more difficult for a gamer who is only interested in a few Nintendo franchises to play them.

Exactly, thats why I also said this

Take it as grossly over-generalizing to convince oneself that a large and varied library of titles is not worth playing.
Maybe because money is short and its easier to ignore if you think you're not missing on anything. Maybe you dont have time to invest on a diferent system... whatever it is, most people saying they "dont like nintendo games" either dont entirely believe what they say, have a silly chip on their shoulders or are so misinformed they dont even know what they are talking negatively about.

But none of this excuses going out and claiming you hate everything they do. Thats just a stupid thing to say when you can just as easily justify your desinterest in lack of funds, time or having your gaming needs completely fulfilled by someone else
 
I never really got into their franchises like Mario and Zelda. They are fine games, but I never cared for them myself. I liked Starfox on SNES and Metroid GameCube though.
 
Nintendo creates games which largely share a very specific identity, one that is marketable to all ages and that doesn't offend. The problem for some, is that the majority of Nintendo software falls in this brand identity which is designed to cater to the needs of many people at once - and so this necessity to cater to all doesn't appeal to specific sensibilities and tastes of certain people (I'll generalise and say males age 18-30) so for some it's very easy to assume an ideal that nothing that Nintendo offers is anything they'd like. It's not about the individual games, or the quality of those games, it's about the Nintendo ethos woven into their products that doesn't appeal to certain people.

Better/more eloquent way of saying what I was feeling and seeing. Good post.
 
I was listening to an interview with Jonathan Blow the other day and he said he didnt enjoy Mario Galaxy like, at all

blew my mind

I actually found Galaxy to be pretty joyless, but I could never put my finger on why. I was even more confused when I played Galaxy 2 and loved it to death, since they're basically the same game.
 
Luigi's Mansion is a superb example of how game design is an art form. It takes gameplay mechanics and utilizes them in an interesting way, environments that react to you, reasons to replay and discover new aspects of a level you missed on the first and second attempt.

Nintendo are masters at their craft, they make mistakes sometimes, but their overall content is among the best the industry has to offer.

Level design is probably their greatest ability. There are many people who don't get what Metroid is about, but it's just level design + backtracking. And I think Valve is the only company wich can compete on that side.
 
Who said anything about replacing it?

It's about being better and there are better fighting games than Smash.

And you can't compare GT and NFS, because they are on opposite sides of the racing spectrum. One is in-depth sim and the other is arcadey, they both handle racing VERY differently.

I can't compare GT and NFS just like you can't compare Smash with other fighting games.

That was my point.
 
I'm not saying its impossible to deslike every single thing UNIVERSAL does, but its pretty fucking wierd and most like a very rare case of someone who has to hate alot more of everything else to make me believe such a claim.

If that same person also happens to enjoy most of what FOX and PARAMOUNT offers then I'm sorry but lol
I totally understand what you are trying to say, but I don't know; personally I think videogame messageboards also have that recurring problem in which they overthink every comment made and make some sort comparison. "Well I never see this stuff happening in the movie industry or the music industry!"

I guess games are even more targeted towards someones tastes.
 
In my opinion

Nintendo games: Mario, metroid, Zelda.
Playstation games: Gran Turismo, MGS, Final Fantasy
Xbox games: GoW, Halo, CoD

Its easy to see that it is fully possible to just stick with one of the above. Although there are more games out there, thosr examples manifests my own perception of what the consoles represent.

You may not like Nintendo games and it's nothing wrong about. The problem are some of the reasons being told here which can be objected. These "kiddy" and "I'm too old" excuses aren't convincig reasons for disliking Nintendo.

While I just spent two posts defending those who don't really like many Nintendo games, I will rebut this particular concept.

Nintendo has published literally thousands of games at this point, ranging from big epic games like Zelda to quirky downloadable titles or retail releases like Rhythm Heaven.

If you honestly dislike the whole of them, then frankly that represents a mental block which cannot possibly be reasonable. It would be like me saying I dislike every single movie Columbia/Tristar pictures has ever produced; there are so many movies spanning so many genres with everything from wide critical acclaim to huge popular reception to everything in between, that no reasonable movie lover could ever say such a thing without exhibiting some form of bias.

If I said, "I generally don't like the stuff Columbia/Tristar produces?" Sure, that's possible. Maybe they produce significantly fewer films I'm interested in than does, say, Warner Brothers, and given limited time to watch movies I pretty much always watch other films. But if you simply cannot find a single one that interests you -- be that a Columbia/Tristar film or a Nintendo game -- that represents a mental block that is very unlikely to be based on sound reason.

Couldn't have said better.
 
Many of Nintendo's games are cut from a similar aesthetic design. If someone doesn't like the universe of Mario platformers they're not going to like Mario Kart/Mario Party/Mario Sports/Mario RPG even though those are all completely different genres of games. The same overly whimsical aesthetic also gobbles up Kirby, Donkey Kong, Starfy, Wario, etc. That's a huge chunk of Nintendo's output that is very similar in tone, aesthetic and universe. It works well for Nintendo, and it's why their crossover games generally work a lot better than the efforts from other companies but it can be a bit grating on people.

I'm sure someone will reply to me listing Zelda, Metroid, Fire Emblem, Custom Robo, etc. I suspect you'll find a bunch of people who "don't like Nintendo games" but have no problems with the four franchises I mentioned. The problem is that those four+ are pushed a tonne less, and released a lot less often than the games from the whimsical aesthetic.
 
While I just spent two posts defending those who don't really like many Nintendo games, I will rebut this particular concept.

Nintendo has published literally thousands of games at this point, ranging from big epic games like Zelda to quirky downloadable titles or retail releases like Rhythm Heaven.

If you honestly dislike the whole of them, then frankly that represents a mental block which cannot possibly be reasonable. It would be like me saying I dislike every single movie Columbia/Tristar pictures has ever produced; there are so many movies spanning so many genres with everything from wide critical acclaim to huge popular reception to everything in between, that no reasonable movie lover could ever say such a thing without exhibiting some form of bias.

If I said, "I generally don't like the stuff Columbia/Tristar produces?" Sure, that's possible. Maybe they produce significantly fewer films I'm interested in than does, say, Warner Brothers, and given limited time to watch movies I pretty much always watch other films. But if you simply cannot find a single one that interests you -- be that a Columbia/Tristar film or a Nintendo game -- that represents a mental block that is very unlikely to be based on sound reason.
I like you.
 
Right and then wraps all of those interesting game mechanics in a grade-school story.

Works to my favour because unless it's a remarkably good story, I never pay attention to what the story is in a video game.

The only time I ever cared about a story is Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, and those games don't directly tell a story either. It's told in the items, environments, things that aren't directly spelled out.

So I think Nintendo has it right in that regard as well.
 
nintendo_zps8d511c3b.png
 
When people say they "don't like Nintendo games", they're probably not saying "I've tried all Nintendo games, and didn't like any of them." More likely, they actually mean "while I've enjoyed some Nintendo games in the past, their current output is less exciting to me than the output of other developers, so I play those games instead". Put that way, it doesn't seem unreasonable.

Most of Nintendo's titles are aimed at an extremely broad audience. Lots of people will naturally find that less exciting than titles aimed at their more specific tastes.


This

Most people who ive met that said they do not like Nintendo games have played the super popular games such as 2D and 3D Marios, Mario Kart, Mario Party and recently the Wii _____ titles that, yes technically are also Nintendo games.

This means that they have missed the lesser popular ones, and imo far better games in Super Metroid, Earthbound, WarioWare, Prime, Fusion etc.

It is no different than someone seeing Halo and CoD and instantly dismissing the entire FPS genre as "brown dudebro shotters", because they were not exposed to Half Life 1, System Shock, Deus Ex, Unreal and Quake.
 
Metroid Prime.

I put a couple of hours into the first one when I had the trilogy collection on Wii but it bored me so heavily that I stopped playing and eventually sold it when I ditched the Wii. Granted it's a pretty old game by now but in this era of the FPS I've played a lot more interesting ones.
 
you know, nintendo's main games have input from a lot of the same people. the way they're designed is mostly the same as well. there are two camps from what i can tell, and they're either koizumi/aonuma or tezuka/miyamoto.

koizumi and aonuma seem to prefer their games to be larger and sprawling, with focus on atmosphere and storytelling. tezuka and miyamoto prefer focusing much more on game mechanics- to the point where if storytelling gets in the way, then it should get out of the way. when you have two camps, and when one wins out most of the time, it's easy to start feeling like you've seen a certain type of design before. a good recent example is probably luigi's mansion and paper mario. both solved the problem of being handheld version of franchise titles the same way, with levels to be completed in just a few minutes. the gameplay is wildly different, but the design choices are generally the same.

when i played rayman 2, it was my favorite 3d platformer, and it was my favorite 3d platformer for a long time... until mirror's edge, or so. there was just this feeling i had about that game i couldn't put my finger on. when i played beyond good & evil, into the first hour of the credits, that same feeling returned. i even remarked to some people here that the last time a game elicited this weird feeling out of me was rayman 2. at that time, i had no idea michel ancel was the director of both.

and i don't think it's limited to nintendo. i personally don't care for sony franchises. sony has a tendency to push a design philosophy i care very little for, which is making their games as immersive and cinematic as possible. generally, i feel you lose a lot on the game mechanic side when you start pushing the background elements more. they don't make bad games (unless you're david cage), but i don't get excited for god of war or uncharted. despite being in very different genres, they seem so very similar to me, and as a whole, uninteresting. i still buy and enjoy some of their first-party titles like littlebigplanet, and i'm looking forward to the last of us and the last guardian (when i get my ps4 in 2016), but nothing they make will have me rushing out to buy a console. so for me it's easy to see why someone would think the same of another company that dabbles in many different styles and genres.
 
I agree with the other posters who have said that they don't like Nintendo's generally throw-away storylines. I like characters that have more depth than children's books.
You mean like Metroid, Earthbound, Mario & Luigi RPGs, Xenoblade, some games of the Zelda Series (for example Majors Mask), Fire Emblem, Sin and Punishment, etc. There are many shades of story depth. Nintendo games balance them self between light and above mediocrity. You don't get the depth of games like Planescape Torment or Baldur's Gate with there thousand layers. But many Nintendo games have some of the best written stories in gaming. Especially because they are not unnecessary complex and very focus (and then there is Metroid other M).
 
While this is understandable, it still doesn't change the fact that "I don't like Nintendo games" is a pretty ridiculous statement. Because what you're saying falls closer to a more general "I don't like Nintendo/Nintendo's general philosophy" since you admit that there are games that fall outside that description.

People don't think in specifics though.
And it's not something that only Nintendo suffers from.
Many people would say something like 'I don't like MS games. All there is, is shooters and dudebro shit.' Which is factually incorrect, but when you think 'Microsoft' you relate it to 'Halo' not 'Viva Pinata'. It's ALL about brand identity. (Which Microsoft understands, and is in the process of changing to appeal to a larger demographic.)
The philosophy is reflected in the software and hardware, they're businesses, it's in the products.
 
Loved Nintendo games through the Cube. Galaxy is the last one to really grab me. Stuff like Mario RPGs stopped doing anything for me, I've just seen the Mushroom Kingdom too many times to care anymore.

They seemingly go out of their way to make Zelda games more annoying.
 
Ahh this thread delivers. Nothing cracks me up as much as the pearl-clutching of Nintendo fans panicked to awake a world were not everyone likes what they like.


But, to answer the OP question: they don't and have not historically made games I care for. I don't like platformers, and for a time the biggest most popular Nintendo games were exactly that. Since I didn't care for the primary draws of the hardware I never bought any of the hardware, so the wondrous breadth of Nintendo quality - apparently spanning all possible genres! - is naturally lost on me. I get by.
 
I put a couple of hours into the first one when I had the trilogy collection on Wii but it bored me so heavily that I stopped playing and eventually sold it when I ditched the Wii. Granted it's a pretty old game by now but in this era of the FPS I've played a lot more interesting ones.

/rips hair out
 
I used to love nintendo games and although I had both consoles (genesis, snes, playstation, n64) I liked nintendos games the best.

However i think they have done a very poor job of growing with the industry. They don't really have many new ips to offer. I like the rhythm heaven/fever games. But just like modern games like uncharted (which started to feel a little tiresome during 3) I am going to get tired of the same game series after playing it so much.

As the industry changes my taste tends to change somewhat as well as I find new things I enjoy. Mario games (well most platformers) just don't have any appeal to me. While I like Zelda and have always enjoyed zelda (got a wii for TP) I could not bring myself to play past the first dungeon of Skyward Sword. The game felt very tired and unimaginitive (hard to explain this, but it felt like it was too constrained by the zelda theme as almost all zeldas follow a similar story path/progression and gameplay). The motion plus also felt like crap when I played it and it was too bothersome.

Metroid is a series I have always enjoyed, however they stopped after 3 for the prime series and the game also did a lot of things that no other games did at the time that was really fresh. I was really hoping for a new 2d metroid game on ds or 3ds but doesn't look like that's happening (dread never came out).

Pokemon I liked on the original gameboy back in the day, but I can't play that game anymore. I got diamond and it was the exact same game but different names/pokemon but mostly everything else the same... I want new experiences not the exact same game with a new coat of paint.

I want them to succeed and by that, I want them to create games and products that I find appealing. Right now what they have to offer doesn't interest me anymore. After having a 360 and PS3 (and steam) it baffles me how far behind they still are on the online front/technology front.

Basically I feel like Nintendo doesn't want me to play their games as I am not their target demographic. They seem to have lost that push for core games and pushing the power of the systems that they had back in the days of NES/SNES/N64 (even gamecube).
 
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