I was browsing gametrailers.com and came across this:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/43330.html
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/39033.html

LOLWUT I hear people saying. Looking at this game it sure does look kinda shitty... or does it? Replace those tiny cars with Ferraris, put it on a 60" rear projection screen, add a steering wheel and pedals and you got pretty much every arcade racer from the past 15 years.

Gameplay wise, this shit doesn't look any different from any of the past 42 editions of Need for Speed. That is, if you ignore the fact that Need for Speed has blur... a lot of blur. And neon. Helluva loads of neon.

Which brings me to my point. Do games follow certain trends and fashion like clothes and haircuts and whatnot do? Let's take Need for Speed as example. NFS used to kick racing ass al the way up to its pinnacle with Porche Unleashed. Then, it got gay because tuning shitty cars became the new hype. And since then, NFS' moderate popularity grew into a cult of morons who were all of the sudden reliving moments from the Fast & the Furious movies. Now, it's a big ass hit with one shitty game after another... but still it sells.

Do we need to play certain games in order to keep up with trends and be cool? According to the new generation of gamers, we do. :o

I'd like to think that there aren't elitist assholes in the gaming world that believe the games that they play somehow make them cool, but that's sadly not true.

While we're on the topic of fashion, the Final Fantasy endorsed Roen suit (http://finalfantasy-xiii.net/images/roen_suit.jpg) that all the nerds seem to be jerking off over has to be one of the ugliest pieces of clothing I've ever laid my eyes on. It's a cheap suit that is worn by a video game character, with the exception that on the character the suit actually looks good but a little something was lost in the transition to reality.

um, no.. devs arent telling people what to play: by and large, they make games people want to play...

they (EA especially) are trying to hit the largest market possible... just so happens the largest market happens to be morons who fall into trends...

Yes... making games people want to play. A large portion of the market consists however of people who, ironically enough, don't want to play. I guess what I'm trying to get at is where in the 80s and 90s, gamers were by and large considered as outcasts and no life nerds, nowadays it's actually cool to play video games. Plenty of people I know who have a Wii in their living room just because it fits their "lifestyle".