What do you think was the worst gaming fad of all time?

[marvelvscapcom2]

There has been so many great and not so great fads to take over and consume gaming as a whole since the early years of gaming up until now.    Which do you think was the worst fad in gaming history?

For me it was motion controls.  Never before did a fad really ruin so many classic and amazing games and just saturate a market.  Wii is the best selling Nintendo home console of all time and depended heavily on the consumption from moms, people who wanted to combine fitness with gaming, children and casual consumers, and the marketing worked perfect selling over 100 million consoles worldwide. but the only people who lost out were actual gamers.  Granted I love Wii and it has so many amazing games and even a top 10 game ever for me in Mario Galaxy but every great game it has could have been so much better without the motion controls. Than PS3 and Xbox hopped on the fad and made kinect and PS move, both were duds with little to no good games imo and the whole idea crashed especially as of recent even though nintendo messes with motion sometimes.   


Of course their are some huge ones recently like Pokemon GO and trick shotting and even genres or franchises can be considered fads too. But I think motion gaming didn't live up to it's potential or hype. 

What is your pick for worst gaming fad?

[kashell]

Motion controls and touch screens.

[98dgreen]

Micro transactions 

[cirno]

Yeah motion controls are a really blatant gimmick that rarely actually improve a game in any way, and they could outright ruin an experience if it doesn't offer any alternative control schemes. As much as I loved the wii there was a depressing amount of shovelware games that were practically unplayable because of the motion control gimmicks

[azure]

Micro transactions, if that counts. I remember when I worked hard to unlock a costume or weapon, not buy it. 

[indenton]

I'd agree with Micro-transactions and motion controls, though I will stand in to defend touch screens. 

[bikingjahuty]

I'm going to have to echo what many others have said and say motion controls. They were fun for a little bit, but when many of Nintendo's first party games and many games for the Wii and other consoles started forcing them that's when things got really annoying.


I was also not a fan of when FPS games dominated the console market from like 2007 to 2014 or so. I love the FPS genre, but because every game was trying so hard to be COD the genre really took a dive in quality around that time.


I don't know if I'd call this a fad or just a change in the industry, but for a while I remember when on-disk DLC was a big issue, specifically on a lot of Capcom titles.

[burningdoom]

-Motion Controls

-VR

-The crappiness of modern D-pads

-Style and graphics over gameplay in modern gaming.

-Digital games over physical games. I want to own and control what I buy.

[Warmsignal]

Re-releasing old consoles as plug and play. But not so much the plug and play consoles, more so the fad of collectors who already have said consoles and probably the games as well, buying them up in mass, and people scalping the crap out of them like it's a must-have item. Yeah you know where this is going - the Nintendo minis are overrated collector's trinkets, IMO. The worst fad of all time? I dunno, but it's kind of annoying.

That's an example of a fad - something that people do because everyone else is doing it. A gimmick is something slightly different. That worst gimmick ever in gaming, were Tiger handheld electronic games, or Tiger wrist-watch games.

[sworddude]

Everyone is talking about motion controls being bad, wii sports etc are crap I won't disagree

Sure there are many crappy games with motion controls but I cannot name a single really good game wich has this issue on the wii. Why would you play shovelware in the first place It's a waste of time

If they were included it was suddle and usually fitted the games pretty well in my opinion.

Zelda, mario kart galaxy wario shake dimension wario smooth moves you name it. They were not always your standard games so I have to disagree on that one worked quite well to be fair.

Also many games could be played with a normal pro controller and those games didn't have any motion controls gimmicks included so it was only done for certain games. 

[Warmsignal]

Everyone is talking about motion controls being bad, wii sports etc are crap I won't disagree

Sure there are many crappy games with motion controls but I cannot name a single really good game wich has this issue on the wii. Why would you play shovelware in the first place It's a waste of time

If they were included it was suddle and usually fitted the games pretty well in my opinion.

Zelda, mario kart galaxy wario shake dimension wario smooth moves you name it. They were not always your standard games so I have to disagree on that one worked quite well to be fair.

Also many games could be played with a normal pro controller and those games didn't have any motion controls gimmicks included so it was only done for certain games.

This. Excepty actually Wii Sports (whatever you might think about the type of game) was probably the most well implemented and practical use of motion controls on the system.

[sworddude]

Everyone is talking about motion controls being bad, wii sports etc are crap I won't disagree

Sure there are many crappy games with motion controls but I cannot name a single really good game wich has this issue on the wii. Why would you play shovelware in the first place It's a waste of time

If they were included it was suddle and usually fitted the games pretty well in my opinion.

Zelda, mario kart galaxy wario shake dimension wario smooth moves you name it. They were not always your standard games so I have to disagree on that one worked quite well to be fair.

Also many games could be played with a normal pro controller and those games didn't have any motion controls gimmicks included so it was only done for certain games.

This. Excepty actually Wii Sports (whatever you might think about the type of game) was probably the most well implemented and practical use of motion controls on the system.

Wii sports did it well fair enough but what games would you get as a result when fully doing so. Plenty of other games wich have equal or greater motion controls however in the shovel ware department.

Furthermore I'm not really getting exited to play wii sports resort, vacation, wii fit etc with even better motion + controls

Luckily the good games were balanced in this aspect it did ad something to the game but it didn't consume it. Some good games used it more than others but it fitted the games well.

If you would go for the 100% wii sports way you would end up with family mini exercise games wich usually are pretty bland lacking personality. However these are the kinda games that attracted so many casual non gamers to the wii wich resulted in huge sales placing them in 3rd most home consoles sales of all time. 1st place for nintendo home consoles only.

[shadowzero]

Well, if we're talking the WORST then feast your eyes upon the TIGER HANDHELDS. (Que music of your choice) These license wheel and dealing devils sucked up more twenty dollar bills in the 80s and 90s than I can fathom.  But we were so hungry for portable power back then we didn't care.  Honestly the "arcade" style artwork on most of these things not only served to give false impressions but also turned out to be the best part of these wicked bricks of plastic.  If you didn't have to crawl through the filthy trenches of tiger handhelds as a kid than you OWE it to those of us who did to watch AVGN Ep. 113 to better explain them. 

[73zvzv]

Releasing a half-finished game, patching it over the next six weeks until it finally works and selling the other half of the game through chargeable DLCs.

Oh, and those copy-protections where you have to enter word 7 of line 12 of page 6 of the manual.

[cirno]

Everyone is talking about motion controls being bad, wii sports etc are crap I won't disagree

Sure there are many crappy games with motion controls but I cannot name a single really good game wich has this issue on the wii. Why would you play shovelware in the first place It's a waste of time

If they were included it was suddle and usually fitted the games pretty well in my opinion.

Zelda, mario kart galaxy wario shake dimension wario smooth moves you name it. They were not always your standard games so I have to disagree on that one worked quite well to be fair.

Also many games could be played with a normal pro controller and those games didn't have any motion controls gimmicks included so it was only done for certain games.

They weren't really terrible but in the vast majority of games they weren't really used to add to the experience in any meaningful way or the game would've been slightly better without them. In Super Mario Galaxy for example, many of the sections where you actually have to extensively use motion controls, like the awkward ball rolling levels or the whole "grab this with a cursor" sections were usually considered the worst parts of the game.

Personally though I think my Wii experience would've been generally better if I didn't have to awkwardly use the wiimote like a mouse the whole time