This Five Nights At Freddy's Craze

[E-Man]

Considering that Pewdiepie played this game himself, I think this video provides an explaniation on why Five Nights at Freddy's is so outrageously popular.

[Koopaul]

Game Theory guy annoys me. Can you just tell me what he said? I don't want to watch it.

[E-Man]

In a nutshell, Pewdiepie's large fan base provides a lot of publicity for the games he plays. Like it or not, Pewdiepie is capable of making qwirky games more popular than they should be, which is a huge reason why Flappy Bird was such a huge deal.

[Koopaul]

Ah I see. What I don't see is PewDiePie's appeal. Why do people like him?

[Koh]

He's got a mostly young fanbase. Kids, pre/teens, early teens. So they find the whole random, loud noise thing more amusing than us old folk. *cracks back* As you age, your tastes change as well. Most of us probably wouldn't go back and watch the likes of Dora the Explorer again, for example, except maybe for the lols. But little kids would watch it all the time. It's no different for PewDiePie. Many of us have simply outgrown his humor style, however, there are always going to be more people who get turned on by it, than people who get turned off from it.

As for this game, I don't think it's BAD, but I can't accept it being called innovative when it simply isn't. This whole scene has been done before with the aforementioned Night Trap and Double Switch, albeit those require memorization, instead of being random. If this is innovative, then a Mario clone that decides to place a limit on how many times you can jump per level is also innovative.

[Koopaul]

I watched some old Sesame Street recently and that still tickles my funny bone. It helps that they actually have CHARACTERS on the show. Dora is a lifeless robot who has no personality. I don't think a 5 year old me would like the show at all.

Ahem. What were we talking about again?

[Kosheh]

So it's basically the Security Camera game Miyamoto showed off at e3, but with Chuck E. Cheez robots?

If by that you mean "Tower defense" than I guess? But you can't shoot at the animatronic animals?...?


I haven't played it yet (because im a scared little baby) but it seems more like if Pac-Man was a tower defense game. The entire mechanic of the game feels like you're trying not to get attacked by spooky things that are essentially the Boos from Super Mario (only move when you're not looking), but instead of turning you into a tiny Mario they just go right for the jump scare and frighten the living bejeezus out of you - and they also have unique ways of getting into your office to do so.

You, on the other hand are...a baby-ass security guard who can close his door and finagle with the lights.



Wait, can this game even be beaten lol?

[E-Man]

I'm just wondering if the player isn't the first security guard and the management actually did get sued for something like this. Sure, no court is ever going to believe that someone gets dismembered by a possibly haunted animatronic, but I think some sort of investigation by the police is not out of the question.

[Koh]

I've sat on my response for a while, and this is what I have to say; it's still anything but innovative.

Using Portal as an example, this game was truly innovative. Using the idea of a portal that instantly translates objects from one location to another, and the reality of physics, these mechanics were combined to create a new mechanic, Portal Physics, and a game experience that was never before seen within the gaming industry, and instantly became a hit. The game is well designed all around having the player think outside of the box, within the realm of its newly executed idea of Portal Physics.

Five Nights at Freddy's does no such thing here. What it does is takes three concepts, camera switching, trap usage and limited resources, and doesn't actually bring a new gameplay style to the table. Just like its predecessors, you still sit around and do absolutely nothing, waiting for things to happen, before you gauge when to activate the traps. If the game were to actually allow the player to have more hands on interaction with the world, and allowed you to activate traps around the area through a remote switch, while you navigate around to escape/catch the baddies, then it truly would have been innovative. Instead, it retains the same exact gameplay style as Night Trap and Double Switch, and therefore cannot be called innovative.

As I've said before, this doesn't mean the game is bad. It just means, it's not doing anything new. A game can still be decent, but not be innovative. I personally wouldn't call this much of a game though, since there's barely any interaction here. It's about as interactive as playing with the menus on a DVD.