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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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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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
#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.
twitter.com/gravitronic
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.
#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
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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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.
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.
Behold the Power of Cheese!
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.
Little Red Wagon.
Think about it - as part of your wanderings, you find a little red wagon, where you pile most of your stuff. As you need it, you need to go to the LRW and get it. Thus, you have to be a bit more picky in what you are carrying, since you can only carry a few items and the rest are on the LRW.
Also, when you go squeeze through the ventilation system, you have to leave your LRW behind - so choose your gear and choose wisely.
You could also do fun things like:
You also get into the situation where you might have to drop different items at different points down the hall, to battle a Big Bad Guy on the other side of a door: "OK, drop some chain gun ammo here, some more a few feet further down, a rocket here, another here. Some plasma ammo here. OK, here at the door, I'll ready a proxy mine, open the door, step back, and start wailing on the bad guy!"
Just think of how much fun it would be to see a Manly-Man hero (Duke, Sam, Gordon, or Sarge) pulling this child's wagon behind him!
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