On The Most Boring Videogames Of All Time

Thanks to 1UP.com for its feature documenting what the writers consider to be the most boring videogames ever. The intro explains the criteria: "These ten games weren't necessarily bad or good -- they were just really, really dull", before pointing to titles like Donkey Kong 64 ("a mediocre platformer bogged down by forty hours of useless doodad-hunting"), King's Field ("It's kind of like an RPG, and it's kind of like an FPS, but mostly it's like falling asleep"), and Aquanaut's Holiday ("...doesn't really have a point -- it's a blocky, dithered simulation of what it's presumably like to go deep sea diving.") What would your pick be?

Comments

Re:Metroid

[moonbender]

As developers fervently try to make every game Final Fantasy length, and as worlds become increasingly more time-consuming to build, developers are going to naturally seek to reuse as much content as they can get away with.

The conclusion is, of course, to make content creation easier. And I'm sure this is already being done: instead of creating a chair from scratch, I guess most world editors offer chair templates.

An extreme example of "Rapid World Developement" is the Neverwinter Nights editor, which also brings up the danger this can pose: everything kind of looks the same. But then, the NWN editor probably was balanced too much towards easy usability to enable players instead of professionals developers to easily create maps.
Nevertheless, I'm sure in the future even tools targeted at professionals will enable them to create world as rapidly and actually much more rapidly than in the NWN editor. Instead of creating a tavern yourself, there might be a "tavern wizard" which creates a tavern complete with associated NPCs, side-quests and so on. Conceivable the same goes for whole cities.
The side-quests could be drawn from a huge pool of quests developed by other folks and dynamically adjusted to the context they're used in: "Go to the carpenter and buy a replacement chair for the one you broke." in the tavern, "Go to the tailor and fetch the the curtains I ordered for a reward." in an NPCs home.
The main story then could be woven into the template world manually by the designer. Heh - it's fun to make this up. ;)

The final utopian way of world creation, of course, just takes a verbal description and transforms it into the right world, always doing the Right Thing when the input is too vague - a la Star Trek. I guess that's still some ways off. :)