7 Fads That Seemed Like a Great Idea at the Time

as people with our fingers firmly on the pulse of modern culture we've been suckered in by many an exciting new trend that turned out to be a short-lived fad remember when I blew the entire year's prop budget on visit spinners then forget I said anything and as people generally thrilled by both games and Technology we're particularly susceptible to a buzzy new video game gimmick that in retrospect was fattier than extreme planking sure it's obvious now these trends couldn't last but at the time they were hotter than the Harlem shake circa 2013 you and I may think that the reason people play video games is to get away from physical activity but that's why you and I haven't sold a hundred million consoles like Nintendo did with the Wii video game manufacturers were so convinced motion control was the future of gaming that they were trying to make it happen from pretty much the beginning with such high-profile failures as 1993 Sega activator which looked like something you'd imprison a Superman villain in every punch every kick every move you make instantly result in an on screen action then after a fallow period motion controllers came back into vogue with the success of the Wii for a time everyone was trying to shoehorn unnecessary motion controls or Kinect functionality into their games but these only served to underline the lesson that there are some things only Nintendo can pull off successfully we call this the donkey konga bongo effect as a result many a gamer was invited to make flailing awkward gestures when previously they would have simply pressed a button asked anyone who had to shake their controller to recharge their flashlight batteries in the last of us or shake their controller to break a zombie grapple in dead rising or shake their controller to vigorously towel off Ethan Mars in heavy rain and they will tell you that this was bad [Music] oh great now we've got to tell the rest of him [Music] very brief glorious period in the mid-2000s you couldn't move for games with unique specific peripherals like literally couldn't move the number of times I've fallen over the rock band drum kit yes guitar hero and rock band figured out we were all prepared to strap on plastic instruments to fulfill the fantasy everyone had of being a rock icon [Applause] but then spin-off game band hero tried to fulfill this other fantasy no one had where you strands honestly along to a Spice Girl song that doesn't actually contain a guitar part [Music] and that was the moment the music game genre was killed ladies and gentlemen mark the time of death has midnight on November the 3rd 2009 and it wasn't just music games peddling peculiar peripherals once publishers suspected they could sell hunks of plastic for much more than your average game they'd happily ruin a beloved franchise like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater with trash like Tony Hawk's ride which came with a willness plastic skateboard controller everyone's gonna like the game it's fun you know something different and riding this slab of industry hubris was hairier than Chewbacca's shower drain flip the skateboard push like you're skateboarding you can grab the skateboard turn the skateboard yeah when you fall off it snap your ankle and it confined to your bed for a week at least you'll have a plastic dinner tray to eat off of peripheral mania reached fever pitch when a third party company released the inflatable game boat the use would be boating portion of Kinect Adventures the idea was that you would inflate this enormous raft and then stand in it to play the river rafting minigame for I guess enhanced immersion guys the Kinect sales pitch was you are the controller not your inflatable dinghy are the controller is much less catchy really not here oh yes not so easy they will want that suit I think back in the day you couldn't release a blockbuster movie without also releasing a tie-in video game to mop up whatever remaining dollars your movie-going public hadn't spent on cinema tickets and souvenir popcorn buckets which was a cracking idea for studios selling lucrative licenses but also in retrospect and industry fad doomed to die on the rack of history on account of how these games were almost universally more forgettable than a really dull dream who tried to recall half an hour after waking up like who remembers the Iron Man video game from ten years back or how about spider-man 3 the game or 2001 Shrek 2 the Xbox and GameCube literally know what I was looking at the gameplay not four seconds ago and I've already forgotten what it was let's have another look so there's a green thing maybe it's the Hulk sorry I'm just it's all gone again [Music] we're all pretty deluded in the 90s thinking cargo pants looks good and Joey and Friends was the funny ones but the greatest mass delusion was the concept that to be successful a game needed to have an animal mascot on the box this industry consuming trend was triggered by game companies looking at Smash Hits Sonic the Hedgehog and assuming Sonic was popular because it had a hedgehog in it and not you know because the game was good before long every game maker Under the Sun was spawning its own animal mascot the only criteria seemed to be that said animal had to be as morphic and possess a rad stick it to the man attitude that mostly manifested in collecting acorns or something this bizarre fad gave rise to mascots including but not limited to Titus the Fox Bob see the Bobcat awesome possum jazz jackrabbit and gets the gecko and I don't think I'll be offending anyone if I say these mascots were not exactly plastic to be totally fair though we can reflect on the animal mascot era as a weird fever dream it wasn't all terrible Crash Bandicoot for instance was one mascot with attitude who still has plenty of fans today [Music] and the mascots you didn't make it will always be preserved in our memories as a defining slice of 90s pop culture like a mosquito trapped in amber if that mosquito had sunglasses and loved to skateboard we can look back fondly even if most of those games were flat-out terrible except for gex gex was good that's right whether in movies television or video games the history of screen based entertainment has been intermittently bedeviled by the fad of stereoscopic 3d from as early as 1982 game makers were trying to trick our eyes with the illusion of stereoscopic depth usually with some kind of eyewear gadget and for a while the cheap option of anaglyph modes were the go-to solution for stereoscopic gimmickry this was the deal where you wore those blue and red cardboard spectacles that decided your color vision was a sacrifice worth making in exchange for the illusion that reddish bluish things were coming out of the screen at you [Music] well the most recent significant push for 3d and possibly the straw that broke the stereoscopic camel's back was instigated by the electronics industry betting big on 3d enabled televisions we're introducing a PlayStation branded 3d display this is a 24 inch display developed specifically to provide consumers with affordable access to best-in-class 3d entertainment catching this wave of 3d enthusiasm dozens of games came prepped to be compatible with 3d TVs or in some cases to work on 2d TVs with so-called in fit color glasses made by developer trioviz in a purple green anaglyph 3d system known as riddler vision and if you don't recognize any of those words there's a reason no one bought this stuff also I made up the word riddle of vision yep despite there being a respectable collection of 3d compatible titles the trend didn't stick around in fact many of these 3d enabled games have since been re-released in collections with none of their 3d features carried over it's your LD Tori de la Lala even the widely embraced Nintendo 3ds no longer makes a big deal of its 3d capabilities since many a player has the 3d slider permanently planted in the off position and it's just as well those old-school 3d systems have bowed out as they've cleared the way for the properly immersive properly expensive occasionally similarly nauseating VR systems which truly are the future now see Bo's answer fat all right look let's all meet back here in five years and if we're all using VR headsets as ironic sleep masks I owe you a coke I'm since scat team commander scat mission to 3:05 teenage girls on the way to a weekend house party at the old Lake Shore winery house of mr. and mrs. Victor Martin and a two children Jeff and Sarah if your problem with video games these days is that they don't contain enough grainy clips of people doing green screen acting then you would have loved the scene in the early 90s when FMV games were at the height of their power most games at this time were still using blocky 2d sprites so the full motion video in these FMV games really stood out as did the performances but different reasons looks like a healthy bunch yes it should be a good weekend too bad we must visit the augs tonight I much rather stay here and enjoy our new guests Victor we can't forget about the poor augurs oh you and your charity work is beginning to be much too much to be honest this was the real appeal of FMV games the weird stories kooky performances and occasional glimpses of Hollywood a-listers slumming it in video games and no matter what you were into there was an FMB game for you from light gun games [Music] just spooky puzzle games more it smells horrible to to whatever was going on in harvest it you tell me do you know people who watch violence become violent themselves [Music] that's mom the only limit is your imagination and the many technical limitations of FMV games some of these games are still remembered fondly such as enigmatic puzzle game missed or grungy shooter sewer shark but the vast majority of FMV titles were barely games at all they can more accurately be described as not very good movies with which you occasionally superficially interacted by the end of the nineties actual video game graphics had moved on and people were ready to forget about FMB games for good that's not to say they don't sometimes try to make a comeback mysterious crime drama her story won an armful of BAFTAs in 2015 [Music] and Microsoft went big with it a few years back with quantum break basically a spiritual successor to the FMB game and featuring another compelling accent from Aidan Gillen you've already seen tonight on the island he'll be there and he'll want revenge need him stopped now still we've come a long way since the days of American major games which is a shame because I had a really good pitch for them which is like Mad Dog McCree but in space [Music] as anyone who played barbarian and managed to lop off an opponent's head will tell you gore and video games have long gone hand in hand but it was the release of mortal kombat in 1992 that prompted a real change a change of this kids shorts for example after Kano tried to kill him what have combat inspired a slew of copycats including tattoo assassins which featured 2196 finishing groups 2196 of which were totally hat stabbed [Music] this trendy girl went beyond just fighting games take first-person shooter Shadow Warrior in which you cleaned enemies into two equally disgusting halves well there was driving game Carmageddon which was initially refused certification for its violence which was shockingly realistic for the time shockingly realistic for the time in relative terms things have settled down a bit since the gruesome heyday of the 1990s this is partly down to the fact that graphics are a lot more convincing nowadays and nobody wants to see photorealistic disembowelling on the regs I mean apart from the mortal combat guys they're still at it [Music] maybe someone might want to go over there and check on them is all I'm saying maybe put them on some sort of watchlist thank you so much for watching like and subscribe if you enjoyed this and if you'd like to see more their video up here about gimmicky peripherals that were a an accident waiting to happen essentially including the Kinect game modes and down here we were talking about 3d earlier we have games that went 3d a little bit too soon from outside extras so please enjoy those videos and hit the subscribe if you haven't already right here

Channel: outsidexbox

Views: 1,303,181

Rating: 4.8093657 out of 5

Keywords: list, countdown, top 7, 7 things, best, worst, funny, funny moments, motion controls, wii, fmv games, animal mascots, 3d games, stereoscopic 3d, movie games, outsidexbox, outside xbox, fads, kinect, 3d, playstation move, tony hawk ride, game fads, game gimmicks

Id: f__fMGI8PyU

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2018