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Top Ten Game Cliches
1up.com has a piece examining game cliches that are just done. Really. From the article: "2.) Pushing crates. Note to evil masterminds everywhere: We understand that you're trying to run a business, which involves receiving equipment and food somehow. But leaving those giant crates just lying around your warehouse for any one-man army to use for supplies and climbing? It's no wonder most startup criminal organizations fail within the first five years. Even seen in: God of War (PS2) 4.) Ridiculous portrayals of females. Women have breasts. Get over it. Even seen in: Soul Calibur II (PS2/XB/GC)"
I remember when I got the Barrel Launcher mod for Doom II...I laughed myself sick. ^_^
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And the winner is... "Making Top Ten Lists of Game Cliches"!
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
Ridiculous portrayals of females. Women have breasts. Get over it.
Yeah, because game portrayals of male characters are so lifelike. It's not like their biceps are bigger than all of me curled up in a ball, with veins as thick as my fingers.
Game characters are caricatures. It's not sexist because it's applied to both sexes.
"Unnecessary stealth"? If you don't like stealth then you might list it as an annoyance, but it's not a cliche. That's like saying running is a cliche. And the "hero's town gets destroyed" isn't a game cliche, it's just a frequently-used plot device. For there to be drama, there needs to be conflict. In RPGs in which this conflict is between good and evil, what better way to reflect that than the villain destroying the hero's family and friends?
You know what's the #1 cliche for video game websites? Lists.
Why do I get the feeling Slashdot's main business now is funneling traffic to 5-10 sites, including that Roland guy, 1up.com, and John C. Dvorak?
rooooar
Wasn't there a website called pushing crates at one point? My friends first opengl programming gaem was a pushing crates game with an ascii file map format, good stuff!
Other gaming cliches of the 00's should be 'Naked Patches!'.
Quite a few games have that 'puzzle' section that annoyed people, sometimes on the amiga this formed part of the copy protection, which I liked!
The problem with a lot of the 'cliches' is they are just game elements... collecting things - that is a core game element - and bullet time, not even over used, slowing down game aciton ala action replays is a great thing, and I dont think it should be removed!
#1 was exploding barrels. *thinks* yes, in GTA you can shoot barrels to get rid of enemies, and in many other games... but I love it.
Boom boom boom.
I think the next list will talk about duping, crafting, selling things on ebay etc etc... or 'rare' items...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
#5 Unnecessary stealth
If you want to make a stealth game, then make a stealth game. Don't give us guns and bombs and swords and fast cars and explosions and then tell us to be quiet, just for a bit! If we want to sneak around, then we'll play a game that's designed for doing just that. In your game, we shall blow stuff up.
I call BS. First, this kind of narrowminded view of game making is why the industry is so piss poor right now. Variety in gameplay is good thing. Second, even if this was a bad idea, it's a recent trend, not a cliche. Exploding barrels, that's a cliche, or predictible boss fights. I liked a lot of those points, but #5 just didn't check out.
As for the exploding fuel cans, 55 gallon drums which splode are just too cool knock;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Jumping Puzzles.
Now, I'll admit that the last console I owned was the N64, so I'm behind the times, but back when I played video games regularly, there was little that pissed me off more than extended jumping puzzles, where you had to leap between 10 platforms in a row flawlessly, restarting if you failed.
Have they wised up yet, or did these guys just miss it?
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
I think it was pretty unfair to use this game as an example of unneccessary bullet time usage. The game is about time travel. Plus, the creators were very inventive with the concept - you have sand tanks that, when broken, reverse time temporarily. Considering much of the game consists of hard combinations of "run on wall, jump to pole, swing off pole, duck under spikes, roll to edge, jump to cloth, leap across doorway", it was a needed feature to not have every misstep result in "game over" and start and the beginning of the level again.
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Disappearing platforms. You have to jump quick or it'll disappear or drop. Wait a few seconds and it reappears. Somewhere in SuperMario Heaven SuperMario God is chuckling.
I know they flagged Metroid Prime 2 on this, but they seem to forget that is how boss fights work in the series. Look at the 2D Metroid games. Same way. It's not cliche when it's the way boss fights have worked in every single Metroid game to date.
If they want non-cliche boss fights, they can take the Cyberdemon and Spider Mind from Doom 1. No weak points, just need to lay the smack down on them for a while. Oh and lets not forget the insane amount of dodging you have to do from a fast rocket launcher or twin miniguns (depending on who you're fighting).
Pick your poison: boss fights where its like figuring out a puzzle, or mindnumbing slug-fests where the odds are not stacked in your favor.
Insert Sig Here
#1 Weapons are not just hovering about. Easy fix, poulate the world with places that would ordinarily have guns & ammo.
#2 Coins/Health. All items have to be in context. Dead Enemies exploding into coins & health is bullshit we all know it. Sure, dead guy might have a few bucks, but they don't just fall out of his pocket.
#3 Why can't I see my feet, Damn it. Still working this one out. I do know some of the reasons now.
#4 Killing everything is not the way to win. Single player against 2000 enemies is fine, but as an objective, kill all 2000 sucks. Objectives need to be difficult without shooting anything. Enemies should impede your progress not be your progress.
#5 Realism. Why go through all the trouble to make it all look so real and then break the realism with bullshit short cuts.
Ship Date. When its done. I'll be sure to let you know. Linux & Windows.
Now I've made a list. Look Ma I'm a journalist too.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
They're still around. I'm not a big console gamer, but the most recent example I saw was when my fiancee was playing some Harry Potter game on the PS2 last year. It was, of course, needlessly frustrating due to the required flawlessness.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Second off, the problem isn't so much that the stealth is unnecessary, but that it's poorly-executed. Play Wind Waker sometime and you'll see what I mean. Trying to put variety in your gameplay is good, but putting something that your engine is not really designed for in there is not.
Can someone comment the article's text? I can't access from where I am and it doesn't seem like it's too huge of an article. Thanks!
I also didn't agree with the boss fight cliche. Those kind of boss fights come from one genre (where the boss fight is harder, because the boss has a vulnerability pattern rather than just being always vulnerable, in addition to extra hitpoints), whereas the other genres (bosses that can only be killed by really lots of missiles, bosses that require a special trick, etc) can be much more frustrating because it's less obvious what you need to do.
Bosses with obvious weak points and patterns are not avoidable in a practical game- they are essential to keeping the game fun (for most people). A boss with no obvious weak points or any way for the player to anticipate its actions- and figure out how to defeat it- is just frustrating.
You just described World of Warcraft!
How about the cliche of "encumbrance doesn't matter" a.k.a. "the walking armory".
Listen, in real life just carrying an AR-15, a shotgun, and a single box of 20 5.56 rounds gets to be difficult - you sling the rifle, you sling the shotgun, take a step, and one or both slings will slide off your shoulders. You crouch and either the but of the weapon hits the ground or the barrel is way in the air.
And ammunition is *heavy* in real life.
Yet here you are, carrying a rifle w/ scope, a selective fire carbine, a rocket launcher, a minigun, three pistols, several alien lifeforms, several rockets, several clips, several HUNDRED rounds of ammunition of different types.
Yes. right.
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The writer of this article seems to have lost sight of the fact that games should be first and foremost fun. Who cares if the characters have big heads as long as it's a good game? Why do games always have to be super-realistic? So what if their are stealth moments as long as they are a fun break from the norm?
I don't mean to be so harsh, but it sounds like another wannabe game designer who couldn't quite cut the mustard in the real world, probably from getting the priorities wrong in their designs.
There are the old witches in Zelda 64, all those strange round headed middle-aged women in Wind Waker, tiny wisps of anime girls in RPGs, Princess Peach's strangely bell-shaped body...
There are tough independent women and ridiculous oversexed women and and women who need to be saved and overdoting mothers and girls who look weak but turn out to have PSI powers...
There's Samus. Hot, but completely hidden from view.
It's really a pretty decent variety. I'd say it compares favourably to movies. Have you watched the academy awards? "And the award for the Best Actress in a role that requires her to cry for five minutes straight is..."
Society as a whole still has an unsubtle view of women. That's not a cliche, it's a lack of cultural depth which comes from women only having been allowed into mainstream society for perhaps fifty years.
There's also a purely anatomical problem. Women do have breasts. Breasts are fairly obvious things. Even when they're tastefully hidden in a game like Beyond Good and Evil, they're pretty obvious. Women also have hips, and you certainly can't hide those when you've got a character jumping all over the place in a third-person view.
The issue there is that a woman's anatomy is inherently considered a symbol of sex in our culture. There isn't an equivalent thing to do for men. If you try to imagine some way that you could create a game that equally exploited the visual sexual possibilities of men, I think you'll find that the only images that come to mind have a certain flavour of homoeroticism. The brass harness armor which is fairly low down the item tree in FFXI is a good example of this.
The question to consider are these: How would you create a game in which none of the women ended up being accidental sex symbols? Would this be easy or hard? Could you create a dozen such games? Could you create enough to balance out the flood of sexist games?
Flip those around and ask the same thing about men.
You'll find that with women it's very hard. It would have to be the primary goal, the goal of a zealot. With men it's a piece of cake, practically automatic. This is clearly a bad thing, but it's not a problem with games specifically. I highly doubt the solution will come primarily from the world of games. We aren't sticking to stereotypes, we're lacking in archetypes.
Contrast this with games and xenophobia. Movies are sometimes xenophobic. Independence Day, War of the Worlds, the Hunt for Red October. Games are xenophobic almost without exception. There's generally some group of sentient beings which is by definition abominable, and of whom you must kill as many as you can.
*That's* a games problem, not just a societal problem. It's not all that difficult to imagine a gameplay mechanic where thousands of intelligent creatures aren't marked for death, but we continue to stick to the idea of "bad guys" anyway.
Give it fifty years. If games are lagging behind society then, we'll have something to address. In the meantime, let's not sit around navel-gazing and trying to force a visual equality where none yet exists.
Yeah, I agree.. it is pretty comical at times. Ever wondered why the rockets in quake will knock a player back 10 feet but the recoil doesn't move the shooter one inch?? But at the same time, games that do actually account for such things seem less fun to me. Quake is all about run-and-gun action, and I think that ditching the "burden" cliche would make it less enjoyable. That's just my opinion though, tons of people like Rainbox Six so your mileage may vary.
I tend to give the "laws of physics" cliches a pass. Yeah, you can't really alter the course of your jump in mid-air but how frustrating would the alternative be?
On the other hand, stuff like the usage of crates in level design have got to go. I can't tell you the last time I walked by or even saw a wooden crate in real life, but goddamn if you can't get through a fan-made counterstrike map without walking by at least a dozen of them. Jesus, is this a shipping yard or something? Even professional level design is guilty. Yeah, I know you need to have a hiding space, or a way to allow the player to hop on the roof, but come on.
Someone kicks/shoots/spears you until you're 90% dead. Are you:
People with almost no health move slowly, so that the body parts that are still attached stay attached. Yet very few games implement this. Why? Because reality sucks.Now, I'll admit that the last console I owned was the N64, so I'm behind the times,
Compared to me, you're on the bleeding edge. My last console was a Magnavox Odyssey 2. No, I'm not kidding.
All these things are only clich(where's that stupid fancy e-thing... ah)é because most of us have spent years playing video games. I don't know how often I've had this happen, but I'll be watching my girlfriend or sister play a game and she'll get completely lost and frustrated because she doesn't know what to do while I'm struggling to keep my mouth shut because it's completely obvious to me. There's always some kind of crate to move or person to sneak by or objects to collect. It's just become part of the rules of video games. This is not to say that there isn't room for revolution. There are always more and more clever ways to disguise or warp these elements to make them less repetitive. I, for one, enjoy going through a game and once in awhile having to complete one of these stapes of gaming. They're like dribbling a basketball or touching all the bases before heading home. Bad analogy, I know, but you get the meaning.
So the article talks about collecting things as an overdone cliche, but while I'll admit it's done all over the place I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of people really like collecting things. I've heard all kinds of theories about why this is (some researches think it's because we used to be hunter-gatherer types, though I'm not sure if I buy that reasoning) but ultimately the why doesn't matter. Lots and lots of people like collecting things. Based on that I'm not sure that the collecting is overdone at all.
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I liked the idea of the article better than the article itself, but it's worth a read. I thought they were overly-harsh (or at least lacked a sense of nostalgia) for criticizing Doom 3's use of exploding barrels, since they were as distinctive adn well-remembered a feature of Doom 1 & 2 as were the zombies, imps, and (dare I say it?) BFG. They definitely didn't deserve the #1 spot, either, as they're not as common a cliche as some of the others.
My personal #1 choice from those on the list would probably be the box-pushing puzzles, which are a monotonous device that seems to be commonly (i.e. overly) used in third-person console action/adventure games to break up the monotony of hack'n'slash and climb'n'jump gameplay.
I also think they should have been harder on Japanese RPG cliches, an area which deserves a top 10 of its own. In fact, I think I remember seeing one once - anyone got links?
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
I have found that in games with spells (particularly ones based on D&D) that invariably you will have a wide variety of spells with all kinds of neat effects, and just as invariably, the only ones that you will ever have a use for are the single best offensive spell and the healing spell.
I've seen this in more games than I can count. Although the latest game I've been playing is Warlords Battlecry III and in it, the balance of spells are a bit more useful than usual.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Gameplay doesn't have to be realistic or original to be fun. There is nothing wrong with reusing game mechanics over and over again until the end of time as long as the content is updated.
Articles like this fuel the tinkering that wrecks good games in future iterations. "Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within" is a perfect example of that. Saying you shouldn't make another game with 'cliche' mechanics and a new plot is like saying they shouldn't come out with any new books unless they have an updated page turning mechanic.
#0: BOSS FIGHTS
Stupid, stupid cliché that has been done to death now.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This one reminds be of The 7th Guest. That game was made up entirely of puzzles that you had to solve to get into the basement, learn information, etc. The 3-D haunted mansion might have been the framework, but as far as gameplay went it was secondary to the puzzles.
In RPGs in which this conflict is between good and evil, what better way to reflect that than the villain destroying the hero's family and friends?
You murdering the hero's family and friends which earns you enough xp to level up and then selling their personalobjects to a local NPC vendor and have exactly enough money to purchase that new vorpal +1 sword.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
And I quote...
"Games can be rated and compared based on the shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas."
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"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
#10=Big Heads, I agree they aren't usually funny.
# 9=Home town destroyed. Cliché allright but, since it is just the begining of the game you really can't complain that it spoils the fun, specially since it usually happens during the non-playable intro anyway...
# 8=Unneccesary stealth. Zelda games are known for their varied gameplay and the fact that playing it is like playing a movie. We, Zelda fans in fact DEMAND this kinds of surprises. It is actually you fault for purchasing the wrong game.
# 7=Predictable Boss fights. Are you complaing that the boss fight is predictable or that the boss's weakpoint is predictable?
Having a boss attack you by surprise sounds very exiting but knowing beforehand where and when the boss lies is exiting too.
It's like the feeling you get when you see someone is going to tickle you. They don't even have to touch you, just the thrill is enough. Some people like this feeling in games too.
Now if you are complaining that the boss's weak point is usually highlithed then I agree with you. As of late bosses are getting really easy to beat. Oldschool bosses were better IMHO.
# 6=Out-of-place puzzles. Like with #8, don't play these games. I find puzzles very realxing. Do your self a favor and ask you frineds before buying games.
# 5=Collecting. Is it okay if it is only optional? What's with this obssession with optionality as of late?
Collecting should be optional, stealth should be optional, killing should be optional, bosses should be optional, actually trying should be optional...
If you just want to see the FMVs buy a cheating device there is no shame about liking FMVs...
# 4=Ridiculous portrayals of females. Men like it, get over with it.
# 3=Cliché allright.
# 2=Pushing crates. This is related to #6. You don't like wooden crates? would you preffer generic cubic poligons instead? If this is going to be a puzzle game at least the blocks should look like something more exiting..
# 1=Exploding barrels. Cliché but still fun...
But... the future refused to change.
To anyone interested, this exact article was in an issue of EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly).
That's Virtua Fighter Kids for the Sega Saturn. I thought it played better than VF2 did.
DooM was the first game I remember to have exploding barrels, It only makes sense that DooM3 would use them as well. The crates however,
Here's the Grand List of Console RPG Cliches: http://www.project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html
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The Incredibles (she's hot, he's fat and balding). Mario and Luigi (he's fat, she's hot). Captain Olimar from Pikmin: Fat and bald. Killer7: Old, disabled. Wario: Fat and ugly. Most male Dragon Ball characters are bald and ugly, none of the female cast is ugly. X-Men: Xavier, Blob, Wolverine: Ugly (well, Wolverine isn't ugly in the movie). Female cast: Pretty.
Have you actually ever played a video game?
Bag of Holding
(Hey, it's as good an explanation as being able to just run over a med kit and be healed)
I just want to say, some of those ideas sound really damn cool. :) I'd love to see that incorporated into a game.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
I don't mind a stealth level in a game, it does add some variety. However, I do dislike games where if the guards, enemies, ect. see you, you instantly fail. On of the best stealth levels I've seen in a game is in ST Voyager: Elite Force.
Sneaking through the Scavenger Base levels is was fun, however, if you were seen then enemies generally sounded an alarm/alerted the area and called for re-enforcements. Instead of going back to the beginning of the level, it just got harder becuase you had limited ammo and enemies that knew you were there.
I guess my complaint about stealth levels is this, if you want to put it in the game great. But don't force level restarts if the player is seen, spawn some more enemies to make the level more difficult for run and gun tactics.
In the game _Discworld_, based on Terry Pratchett's hilarious fantasy series, the main character is followed about by an indestructible, infinite-capacity chest w/ legs.
Well worth running down a copy of the game (_and_ the hint book --- the game is almost unsolvable w/o it) 'cause it's delightful for those who enjoy this sort of thing.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Not to mention the standard video game convention that you can come back from the dead -- but only a fixed number of times!
Let's face it, this is all fantasy, and there's no point in examining the technical details.
I'm reminded of that TV show Highlander, where the immortal hero went around fighting battles with a sword. At first he carried it around in a case or something, until the writers realized that they couldn't possibly contrive to have the sword available every time he needed it. So whenever a battle started, they'd just cut away for a second, and when they cut back, he'd have the sword in his hands -- as if he'd pulled it out of his hip pocket! That used to bother me more than the silliness of him not being killable.