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A Gamer's Manifesto
Krimszon writes "The top 20 things you always knew were wrong about games, but were afraid to talk about, since you thought that was just the way is was."
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Ah: jumping puzzles.
The most annoying part of FPS games, which require you to take a break from gleefully blowing the crap out of your enemies to make meticulously-timed jumps across platforms, like you've suddenly turned into Mario or something.
Personally, my biggest pet peeve is that the AI in strategy games hasn't advanced significantly in the past 10 or so years. More annoyingly, playing "harder" settings on these games doesn't change anything about the AI, it just lets the computer "cheat" to produce things quicker than you do.
The simple fact is that gaming companies have dropped the "let's be innovative and unique" idea long long ago. What was the most innovative and unique game to come out last year? Katamari Damacy? Donkey Konga? And how many copies did these games sell? The bulk of the gaming world unfortunately resides in the teenager category. And what do these kids want? Well look at how they dress or what they're into. These kids want something that they think will make them look cool, IE: the most overhyped product to come out. Take GTA: San Andreas for instance, that game to me was a big fudge up compared to VC. First they promised us so many things, then didn't deliver. Some of the things they did give us were lacking some of the depth and options they said they'd give us. Very few game developers want to take a risk due to the high cost of development. And most studios won't let them even take that risk even if they have a cash cow. If the game does bad the company is basically done for given the fact it probaly cost them at least 5mill to develope it. So what do we REALLY need? Either lower development costs, or more expensive games. Why? Because the average gamers again doesn't care about what has great gameplay or something unique to it, they want what the game with the best graphics, the most hype, and the one they're friends are likely to get. Yeah I probably screwed that up somewhere.
"How in the name of Islamic Fonzie did we ever let games get away with "Loading..." screens? The Gamecube doesn't have those, not on the games made by Nintendo. Hell, the 8-bit NES didn't have load screens 20 years ago."
Bwahahaha... that guy gotta be kidding on that one
Almost every game does this. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King there's actually a "run out of a crumbling building" level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can't jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.
This one really hits home, because it's exactly the reason that I didn't buy Guild Wars. Yeah, it might be a really fun game otherwise, but it's like your character is on rails. Hey, there's a cliff. I think I'll run off the edge... hmmm, nope there's an invisible wall preventing me from moving. In a game that's supposedly a cross between FPS and MMORPG, this is just super lame.
For all of it's fault, at least in WoW I could explore terrain, climb mountains, and roam aimlessly if I wanted to.
It's just impossible for a small company to create a small, nice, innovative game for a console. A new great idea along the lines of Tetris would never make it, no matter how addictive or playable the game was. All the new games are gigantic with minimized risks and huge budgets, and the price will be set accordingly. (The Sega Sports NHL/NBA/NFL 2K5 games being a notable exception to the rule.)
Game budgets have risen to the same ballpark as movie budgets, but, for console games, there is no alternative analoguous to independent films.
I have these new games that are pretty to look at and everything, but why do I miss a bunch of old, simple games from the C64 and Amiga days?
"Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?"
/. i have real life around me 24/7 and that's for free. if i invest precious time and money for playing a game, i certainly don't want more of the same.
this is obviously just another example of the ironic fact that most gamers would make very bad games if they were to design one.
it's simply amazing how many of them have no idea of what makes a good game.
they always cry for more, more AI, more realism, more micromanagement etc.
but all those things have nothing to do with a good game. they might make a good simulation, but games are supposed to be fun, a good simulation would be as frustrating as real life. excluding
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
OK, I am not a gamer and I hadn't seen Clones until last week on TV, but I am interested in graphics and adventure/SF/fantasy/whatever-the-heck-Star-Wars-i s-supposed-to-be. I also channel-flipped into Clones about halfway through, where in a great piece of Lucas dialog, Padme orders Anakin to "follow my lead" and they go into the battle droid factory.
Something about that part of the movie seemed so cheesy for something as big-budget and hyped as Star Wars, and I couldn't put my finger on it. Padme and Anakin go down this long corridor when suddenly all of those buzzing winged monkey creatures come out of the walls, and then Anakin defends himself and Padme by hacking them up with his light saber. I guess Padme leads by crawling through a hatch to fall into the actual droid factory with Anakin following that lead into the same mess, where they have escaped the buzzing winged monkeys but Anakin not only light saber all of the droids but also dodge these stamping presses of the droid assembly line while Padme rides around in a foundry ladle.
If it weren't for all of us being fans of the Star Wars franchise, when you think of it, this kind of hero and damsel in peril cliche gets much, much better treatment by the Indiana Jones movies. But there was something I just didn't get about the Clones scene until I read the Gamer's Manifesto post. The hero triggered the alarm and had to fight off hundreds of BWMs (buzzing winged monkeys), for no good reason to the plot or the character or the story apart from when you walk down some long corridor with nothing in it, hundreds of BWMs will appear from seemingly nowhere -- it is just the formula. Also, after escaping the BWMs, you will have to fight droids and have to engage in what I guess is called a jumping puzzle -- avoiding the stamping presses, and I guess, also jumping across moving platforms now that I think about that scene in Clones.
Not only is single-handed combat against hundreds of BWMs followed by a jumping puzzle a gaming cliche, it has crossed over to become a movie cliche, and I guess it is just as lame in the movies as it is in games.
You might be right, but for those of us with lives and families online gaming can be a pain.
:-)
I only have a few hours a week to play games, and those come at odd an unpredictable times; thus it is a royal pain to log onto a server of join a clan, etc.
Hell, I play games because I want to gedt the hell away FROM having to interact with other people!
Give me the following:
1- GREAT AI
2-unpredictible replay
3- DVD install
4- supreme realism (e.g if you get shot with a 9mm round your subsequent performance WILL be seriously impared, DOH)
5"good enough" graphics - nice but will not make up for bad design as afar as the immersive experince goes.
Do the above and I'll gladly pay $100 or so several times a year for a good PC game. I'm 44, I've been playing games since Spacewar in 1976 and rebuilt my whole PC to play Wolf 3d when it came out; cost is not an issue, quality is.
No slam on teens and 20 somethings, was there and still think that the average gamer is above average intelligence, but my demographic is a little different.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
With all due respect, that does seem rather like buying a hammer so you can bang screws in more efficiently.
The reson for your complaints? That would be because all the strategic, intellectual, clever, thoughtful games for the PS2 are... on PC.
Seriously, dude - you buy a console, aimed squarely at fast-paced arcadey twitch-gaming (the occasional good strategy/RPG notwithstanding), then slate it because it doesn't do well what it patently isn't designed for?
Like I said, there's a market segment catering to the very areas you identify - it's called PC gaming. You even list your "ideal" games in the post - C&C, Allied General, Civilisation - see any connection? They're PC games.
Buying a PS2 for lobotomised knock-off PC strategy titles is like buying a hammer to install screws. You might be able to do it, but it's patently obviously The Wrong Choice.
The console marheteers know their audience - you've just bought the wrong product, is all.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
I largely agree with this one, though I also think there's room for pattern-based attacks. Doom III isn't a tense military sim with realistic opponents. It's a shoot-'em-up in 3D. The original author's missing the point here.
Where the enemy's supposed to have advanced AI, though, it needs to be better. Duh.
The End from Metal Gear Solid 3, perhaps?
To greatly oversimplify, in fact. There are plenty of approaches to AI that don't rely on scripted routines that are hit by in-order processing. And I don't believe that even the limited scripting-based AI that tends to get used these days is going to be in any way reduced from what we have now. "We won't be able to do more of the same, but faster," cries the author, in an article where he spends most of the rest of his time bitching about the fact that games are just... doing more of the same, but faster. Woo!
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.
Not so easy, is it?
There are games that break with existing genre convention - that do something new, and do it well. There have been every generation. And they've been limited in number every generation, because for each idea that works well there are a hundred total abortions.
I loathe the idea of innovation solely for the sake of innovation, and I always have done. I'd rather play a mediocre 2D platformer than a godawful pre-op transsexual simulator. It's great that despite the wailing and moaning of the people whose favourite game is bitching about the game industry innovative games still get made. And lo, some of them (like Katamari Damacy) are great. But the level of innovation involved will never make me excuse the shittiness of your game.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Don't be such a stupid bastard, then. You know what the games look like, don't expect them to suddenly become photorealistic. Apply some critical thinking here.
Yes, it's the fault of anyone who falls for it. But that doesn't mean you're subject to it if you don't fall for it - it's pretty much trivial to find screenshots online for any released game.
So would you care to explain why I should be lectured on what gamers want by someone who didn't start gaming until the PSX? That's the only conclusion I can draw from someone blaming Square for something that's been around since day one. Anyone else remember the 8-bit game boxes with the beautiful screenshots and the small print reading "Screenshots may be from a completely different version of the game - yours will be shitty two-colour graphics with hideous colour clash"?
4. Nipples?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.