Once Original, Now Common cleanup (formerly "Seinfeld" is Unfunny)

This is on YMMV.Spyro The Dragon 1998:

• Seinfeld Is Unfunny:
  • While no one is going to say that the original game is bad, some fans and even critics in recent years are not at all convinced that the first Spyro has earned it’s reputation as one of the best 3D platformers ever made. While the soundtrack, atmosphere and general design are still praised, it is often pointed out that the game really suffers from a lack of variety, the combat can get very repetitive after a while, and it has many of the camera issues that are common to early 3D games, not to mention some rather unimpressive boss fights. The game's graphical prowess depends on one's nostalgia for PS1-era graphics, although as with Naughty Dog's Crash series, Insomniac's impressive engine eliminates common PS1 issues like texture warping and visual seams. Even Spyro's Mascot with Attitude nature is no longer impressive due to the concept falling out of favor shortly after his series heyday.
  • The biggest place the game suffers from this reaction is in the whole concept: an open world 3D platformer on the PS1. At the time, nobody thought it was even possible; look carefully at the major games released during or before this on the console and you'll see they tend to take place in tight quarters or heavily controlled spaces^note Crash Bandicoot was confined to hallways that cleverly loaded scenery in and out of view with a strictly on-rails camera, while Metal Gear Solid took place in small rooms and always from a top-down perspective, to name two examples. It was the one area people thought only the Nintendo 64 could excel at. This game completely shot all of those doubts in the face, and more importantly, it did it well, with draw distances not yet seen at this point^note The big thing it did to accomplish this was by heavily relying on LOD (level of detail) changes as things moved further from the camera. Look carefully at the world geometry the further away you get and you'll see how it gets more and more primitive. Nowadays, with its sequels being more in line with the major platformers the rival console was seeing due to all the improvements, plus the console being further pushed to its limits as it tends to happen, some may not catch on to how big a deal this was when it came out.

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These read more like Hype Backlash, they're also a bit long.

Edited by RainbowPumpqueen on Oct 12th 2021 at 1:31:36 AM

Sandbox help wanted.

Cut the second point, trim the first one down, and move it to Hype Backlash.

Be kind.

Here's the trimmed version, is this good enough?

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• Hype Backlash: While no one is going to say that the original game is bad, some fans and even critics in recent years are not at all convinced that the first Spyro has earned its reputation as one of the best 3D platformers ever made. While the soundtrack, atmosphere and general design are still praised, it is often pointed out that the game really suffers from a lack of variety, the combat can get very repetitive after a while, and it has many of the camera issues that are common to early 3D games, not to mention some rather unimpressive boss fights.

Edited by RainbowPumpqueen on Oct 17th 2021 at 7:34:55 PM

Sandbox help wanted.

Mostly so, yeah. I'd just make a few adjustments to better indicate that this is a shared view:

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• Hype Backlash: While no one is going to say that the original game is bad, some fans and even critics in recent years are not at all convinced that the first Spyro has earned its reputation as one of the best 3D platformers ever made. While the soundtrack, atmosphere and general design are still praised, many criticize it for a lack of variety (particularly in its combat and boss battles) and for suffering from the same Camera Screw problems as other platformers of its era.

Be kind.

• Harry Potter, while not the first to come up with its concept, was a pretty big influencer of young adult literature:
  • They received critical and commercial acclaim, in a time in which Young Adult books (at least, what we would call Young Adult books today) were kept on a single shelf in the back of the bookstores - behind the science fiction and fantasy books. While it is far from the only Young Adult book to escape the ghetto, it was among the first. These days many Young Adult works are made into films and often find their ways onto best sellers.
  • They were considered to be quite large by the standards of the time. A lot of publishers didn't think kids in particular would have the attention span to read something above 300 pages, whereas adults would find the premise to be too juvenile, and would be ashamed to read a children's book. When The New '10s began, books became much much thicker, since Harry Potter was one of the first books to teach publishers kids did in fact have the attention span for these.
  • Its setting was an Urban Fantasy - a rarity in a time in which most childrens' books were on the more scientific (but not too far forward) side of Speculative Fiction, historical period pieces, the present day, or a Standard Fantasy Setting. In the days of Isekai, copiers, and more, it seems to be rather stale - but young adult books just did not have things like this before.
  • It combined issues teenagers experienced alongside more fantastical elements. Characters would angst over the school's Big Game or teenage school drama, then angst over an exam over magic theory and brew potions. Most books that talked about real life issues would often focus solely on them and set it in the present day.
  • Harry Potter also had a Myth Arc - while far from the first to do this, most childrens book series were episodic in nature with the occasional passage of time, (But not too much), with a few having a well defined Myth Arc. After books like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and A Series of Unfortunate Events, it's hard to believe just how much this meant back in the day.

(The Harry Potter YMMV page also has a similar entry, under the "Books in General" folder [1].)

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I don't think any of the bullet points as written fall under the definition of "Seinfeld is Unfunny". IIRC, the books were considered very long at the time but wouldn't be out of place on a YA shelf today, but length isn't something that makes a work cliche or no longer innovative. Being urban fantasy, talking about teen's issues and having a myth arc are also very general things that I don't think can be attributed to Harry Potter. Would appreciate other people's opinions.

Reviving this. The following was posted to the Live-Action Films subpage:

• Ed Wood: While not box-office hits, this film and two Spiritual Successors by the same writing team (Scott Alexander and Larry Karazewski), The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon, reinvigorated the Biopic genre in The '90s. Their subjects were not the kind of publicly respected/loved "great men" traditionally seen as "deserving" of biopics but disreputable, if not societal outcasts — yet were treated with kindness and dignity. On top of that, the first and last films took a playful rather than reverential approach, interpolating aspects of the subject's art into the style and structure of the film. This helped pave the way for films like The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, I'm Not There, Bernie, I, Tonya, and The Eyes of Tammy Faye, among others.

Since this doesn't mention the film being seen as stale today in its innovations, would this be a better fit for Genre Turning Point or Genre Relaunch?

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

About the Spyro example above, I think there is a valid entry in there, though it's badly set out. It might work as:

• When it came out, it was the only game on the PS 1 that offered an open 3D world with wraparound scenery; other games had to restrict the playing spaces or the camera. By having distant objects lose details, Spyro offered much further draw distances than anything before. Today this approach is standard and new players are unlikely to notice the innovation.

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.

On YMMV.Doom there's a bunch of Once Original, Now Common entries, though not really sure if all entries here are valid.

• The first game was credited with popularizing the entire FPS genre, creating the A Space Marine Is You formula, garnering attention for its shocking violence, and introducing game modding. Naturally, some would draw unfavorable comparisons by modern standards. Many younger shooter fans would consider its gameplay to be simplistic and its story to be lazily shoehorned compared to likes of Halo and BioShock. Likewise, while Doom garnered much infamy during the 90s for its violence, modern graphics can depict far more realistic and disturbing acts of violence; today, Doom's low-resolution gore just comes off as quaint.
• At its time, Doom was considered fairly challenging, but modern players looking back on the game would find it fairly easy and simple. This can generally be attributed to Doom's controls: it released at a time when control schemes, especially for the still-fledgling FPS genre, were still being standardized, and as a result defaults to rather clunky control schemes that make use of just the mouse or keyboard rather than both where, for instance, you can only strafe by using a modifier key to temporarily change the "turn left and right" buttons into "strafe left and right". Even among players who have used the provided control scheme of mouse and keyboard, aiming a camera with the mouse was unheard of and thus the muscle memory hadn't formed to do so. These days, mouse and keyboard is widely accepted as the optimal setup for shooters since the mouse enables very fine control over aiming, and gamers have developed their skills using this setup. Thanks to this, playing through the original Doom from a modern perspective feels rather quaint, at least until the fourth episode released a year and 4 months after the first three — during which players had time to build up their first-person shooter skills — and is generally accepted to be as difficult as it was back then.
• Certain ports have had this happen to them as well, in part because of the game's continued easy availability and the evolution of fan-made source ports while the systems it was officially ported to have fallen out of favor and been replaced with more modern ones, making it easier and more feature-rich to just keep playing on PC and contributing to the idea that Doom console ports were an epidemic in the mid-90s. The PlayStation version, Nostalgia Filter aside, is looked at with a certain amount of disdain nowadays because of features it had to remove, including a handful of maps and the Archvile, but at the time it was probably one of the first console ports to stack up to the PC original, even holding its own in some regards such as introducing colored lighting, replacing the soundtrack with a downright creepy ambient score, and even featuring Doom II monsters in Doom 1 maps if played on the higher difficulties. The Super Nintendo port is likewise seen nowadays as a very shoddy port, but in its day, getting a game of its technological complexity to run at all on the SNES hardware, even with the addition of the Super FX chip, was seen as an amazing accomplishment, especially considering it only lost a handful of levels, and it also had one of the best renditions of the original soundtrack on any platform.
• With its modding community having been active for close to 30 years by now, it's only natural that quite a lot of fanmade content has fallen to this as well. Older mods which were once well-acclaimed can seem downright primitive nowadays, between evolving mapper skill and the introduction of increasingly-user-friendly mod tools which make it easier to add fine detailing, custom textures, and what have you, and as maps get more recent it becomes less common to see maps that don't make use of several custom textures or soundtrack, to the point that seeing heavy use of the default textures and/or music usually means it's the wad's primary gimmick, mostly seen in map packs aiming to replicate the style of original Doom developers (a-la "the way Id did").
  • Memento Mori was one of the very first full 32-level megawads ever released, releasing back in December 1995, a good seven months before Final Doom, and at its time was considered one of the absolute best WADs. It was so revered that not only was it at the top spot for 1996^note despite releasing in 1995; '96 was when its final version released in Doomworld's "Top 100 WADs of All Time" list that preceded the now-annual Cacowards, it was the first of the very few WADs that Compet-N ran speedrun leaderboards for. In the modern day however, it reeks of many mid-90s design philosophies that have long since fallen out of favor, with its maps looking drab or outright ugly, using mapping exploits to the detriment of gameplay.
  • Eternal Doom had message boards chatting when it was released in 1996 and there are levels that stand out visually even by today's standards (impressive, considering that the WAD had to be compatible with the barebones engine in the days before limit-removing source ports existed). However, its switch-hunt gameplay feels dated and is especially puzzling due to how complex the maps tend to be, to the point that even in 1996, there were frequent messages asking for help. The level styling is also all over the board, with the first 12 levels being perhaps the most visually refined and consistent, compared with the Eternal Doom 2 mapset that was added to fill out the remaining map slots in an update.
  • Hell Revealed, released in May '97, was a landmark megawad, being the first ultra-hard megawad made for those who thought Plutonia was too easy, and would serve as the standard at which the difficulty of hard WADs was measured against, while like the aforementioned Memento Mori, also being venerated enough to have Compet-N run speedrun leaderboards for it. Aside from its difficulty having since been well exceeded by other WADs, the means with which it achieved that difficulty are scorned by modern players, with its maps relying on having clairvoyance to survive without saves or looking up a guide, a lot of times its difficulty coming down to sheer tedium, as well as traps being so unfair that they can veer into Luck-Based Mission for even the best players. Its maps are also considered ugly by today standards, and Hell Revealed offers little else aside from difficulty. Players nowadays looking for an ultra hard mapset are more likely to be recommended more modern megawads which have more restrained difficulty. While Hell Revealed is still played online by many, most do it only in order to see how far Doom mapping has evolved.
  • Community Chest and Community Chest 2, released in 2003 and 2004 respectively, were among the earliest high-profile megawads created by a public community collaborative effort and would popularize the trend of community projects, which remain popular with Doom mappers and players to this day. CC2 would even win one of the first Cacowards. However, while they do have a couple maps that are still held up as gems (The Mucus Flow from CC2 in particular is one of the most revered Doom maps of all time, placing third in 2018's list of the top 100 most memorable maps), they're emblematic of the problems that often afflict community projects; with a lack of proper oversight and quality control, the two megawads are extremely inconsistent in map design, quality, and difficulty (with the maps ranging in difficulty from as easy as Doom 2 to stuff only the most hardcore players could ever beat saveless), while also containing a lot of blatant filler maps (with some even being old maps reused for the project) and maps so overtly grandiose that were clearly not reigned in by the project leads (Citadel At The End Of Eternity from CC1 is particularly notorious, with its UV-max speedrun being nearly as long as the entirety of Doom 2's). Naturally, Community Chest 3 and 4 would iterate on the community grabbag megawad idea in a more refined manner, a characteristic also present in the Nova series afterh the first, and most project designers are much more strict on the mapping rules, like forcing a specific theme^note a good example being the various Doomer Boards Project WADs, each of which revolves around one theme and one theme alone — Cyberpunk, Film Noir, Wild West, a recreation of Doom³, you name it or only allowing mappers who don't have a lot of experience.
  • Knee-Deep in ZDoom was groundbreaking when it released in 2007, being a remake of the first episode of Doom that showed off a number of ZDoom's new features like skyboxes, custom monsters, and scripted events; nowadays, it's considered to be average at best, between its new monsters being unbalanced, its levels being huge, sprawling mazes that are easy to get lost in and often overdetailed to the point that it's hard to see any resemblance to the original level, and following on from a legitimate battle against new and improved versions of the Barons of Hell that ended the original first episode with a new Final Boss that comes right out of left field. Even the writer of the 2007 Cacowards, where KDiZD won, admits as much when returning to the mod 15 years later in the form of Knee-Deep in Knee-Deep in ZDoom, a wholly-vanilla-compatible joke re/demake presented In the Style of a The History Channel-style loose retelling of the original episode, which won more for its technical wizardry than the gameplay of the maps.
  • ZDoom's features in and of themselves have fallen to this in a lot of mods made around when they were added, because a lot of mapmakers did what anyone does with a new toy and played with them to the point of overindulgence, resulting in a lot of older ZDoom-specific mods being a chore to play at best and actively unable to be completed at worst, depending on how your source port of choice has been updated since the mod released and/or what other mods you run alongside it, and sometimes a specific mechanic showing up at all can date a map. 007: Licence to Spell DooM is another good example from 2002: when it released, it was so highly-regarded that it made it onto the "Top 100 WADs of All Time" list, but with twenty years of hindsight it's readily apparent that it was made less as a full map set than it was an experiment in messing around with as many of ZDoom's features as possible, even when they actively hinder the gameplay by making navigation a chore or increasing the difficulty in ways that are simply not fair. Nowadays, many people prefer (and are even suggested) to start off mapping with either classic or Boom format before tackling ZDoom's features.

Not sure if the custom fan-made content could qualify; not helped by the fact that the entries makes it sound like the megawads described have been Condemned by History, which is not entirely true, and generally come off as having too much complaining about something that didn't age well, something "Seinfeld is Unfunny" trope was about.

Edited by DukeNukem4ever on Feb 14th 2024 at 2:27:46 AM

Fan content really isn't applicable for most tropes considering they're not actually part of the work in question (unless the work is about user-generated content).

Then cut almost all Fan Works?

Absolute Rainbow

If they're listed as part of the source material then they should be cut. If they're listed on their own in the Fan Work folder then they could be valid.

For this trope in particular it's important that the fan work actually feels unoriginal as a result of its ideas permeating into the fanbase, not just feeling generally dated.