Am I the only one who thinks this is strange?

The game industry, as big as it is, has had its share of strange games. Some never went past the first few screen shots, while others were released and even became successful. It is sometimes hard to clearly define strange, since its meaning has changed over the decades. In the '80s, the very concept of video games was strange. Are they still strange today? The answer: some of them yes... And they can be cataloged: strange by longevity, strange by innovation and simply strange.

The first type, strange by longevity, is best represented by the Sims franchise. From Sims 1 to Sims 3, the franchise has probably the most video games ever made on a single subject: life. It has expansion packs with magic tricks, pets, new jobs, new entertainment facilities, new characters, college and new life stages. It even has the three Sims Stories game that have, as the name suggests, a story mode, something new from the rest of the games which are freelance. Not to mention the Final Fantasy series, with at least 13 games.

The second type, strange by innovation, is best represented by games that bring new things to the industry (that doesn't mean games that have new things, but games that are new as a genre or at the core). At first, RPGs were deemed strange since they allowed you to make the character that you want. Now, strange games are games that I hate or don't like; games like Total War or stealth games. Total War puts you in the role of a general commanding an empire, so you have to not only do battle, but make sure your population is happy, take into account religion, gather taxes and build buildings in your territories. Also, the way you battle is strange since you control armies of units and have to strategically place them to win (I managed to defeat 70,000 French soldiers with 60,000 Byzantine soldiers by luring their army with the pikemen and hitting their flanks with my hidden Cataphract cavalry; but by the time all the turns were up and the game ended, I had only conquered Turkey, North Africa, parts of Araby and the Balkans). Let us hope that Empire Total War or Napoleon Total War will be better. Stealth games are also annoying since you have to sneak, assassinate, hide bodies, dress up like soldiers and avoid detection; why can't you just barge in guns blazing? I mean, at Hitman 2, I needed to read a walkthrough twice to manage to pass the first mission and at the seventh mission I used cheats to become invincible so that I can just massacre all those sons of b*tches, and at the end I was rated the worst hit man EVER!!!!!!

Finally, the last type, simply strange, has some prime examples: there was a planned SimMars in which you would run a Martian colony just like you would run a city in SimCity, but that was canceled in 2000. But another EA game, Spore, got more attention and was praised by critics. In it, you have to build your own creatures and guide them through Cell, Animal, Tribal, Civilization and Space stages (awkward, at the very least). And last but most f*cked up of all, a Japanese Nintendo DS game called Love Plus in which you need to be a girl's boyfriend (which includes kissing her by touching the screen or saying 'I love you' a hundred times in the Nintendo microphone). It is so popular in that Far Eastern country (and I'm happy it's far from me!) that one guy even married the video game character. THAT is strange...