Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN
http://www.cracked.com/article_16196_7-commandments-all-video-games-should-obey.html
Via Cracked.com, a pretty funny website that mixes broad humor with occasional dead-on assessments of pop culture, etc.
I agree with just about all of this, although not owning a PS3 or an XBOX means some if it is lost on me. But that bit about unskippable cutscenes is absolutely correct, and it affects games on every damn platform.
Wow, this is the most clever and valid video game industry criticism I've read in a while, if not ever. Everything is spot-on, without resorting to humor or insults to pad the context, prove a point, or entertain merely for the sake of entertainment.
Thanks, feitclub, great read.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 5/2/2006
Posts: 1020
Location: Boulder, CO
and I thought I was the only one tired and bored of the newer metroid and zelda titles. the first step of recovery is admitting that you have a problem. And I guess the first step toward getting nintendo to admit it will be to point it out to them.
And then I wonder, why aren't gamers running this business? Why are we [and that site] not taken seriously? I call for an uprising! THIS IS TASVIDEOS! NOW, WHO IS WITH ME?!
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
I agree with most of it but some of it strikes me as 'waaah games are too hard waaah'. Complaining about ammo being short in RESIDENT EVIL? Honestly?
Generation of wusses, I swear.
I agree with most of it but some of it strikes me as 'waaah games are too hard waaah'. Complaining about ammo being short in RESIDENT EVIL? Honestly?
Generation of wusses, I swear.
Same. I felt through most of the article like I was reading a spoiled adolescent, complaining mostly for the sake of having something to complain about.
Stickyman wrote:
And then I wonder, why aren't gamers running this business?
Developers create crap because people keep buying it; you ARE running the business.
I agree with most of it but some of it strikes me as 'waaah games are too hard waaah'.
In my understanding, the author was saying that challenge should not be artificial. In other words:
1) games that are meant to be easy should be easy, games that are made to be hard should be hard, and not otherwise;
2) challenge is supposed to be fun, at least for casual play, and not tedious or annoying due to having to wait, to waste time on filler, to memorize some unusually precise action, or something else like that;
3) giving a player challenge that suits their abilities is bound to be more rewarding than restricting their abilities to provide challenge.
Agreeable?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
moozooh wrote:
3) giving a player challenge that suits their abilities is bound to be more rewarding than restricting their abilities to provide challenge.
So very true, and yet I find it amazing how many people will fight against this sometimes. When RE4 was released, some people complained about how you couldn't move around while targeting. The response others gave them was, "Well, if you could strafe around your foes, where would the sense of tension be?"
As you said, tension and difficulty should not feel artificial like that.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
That's a fair point though I'd argue that people are too used to FPSes where you can circle strafe at full speed. It makes for some fun maneuvering but in a case like RE4 limiting your movement while firing makes it so you have to be a bit more tactical about where and when you fire. Now if they were touting RE4 as an FPS, I'd be agreeing with you.
I thought the whole idea of difficulty was to enhance the sense of victory after completion. He even goes onto say that endings should be 'worth getting to'. Now, I realise that you draw a line between natural and artificial difficulty, but when the hell is 'natural difficulty' when the entire game is the work of some guys in an office somewhere? The challenge in 'beating 1 guy, then quicksaving, then beating another guy' is not exactly the same as 'beating 10 guys then reaching a save point', is it? So neither is the sense of self-worth when you do it.
The other stuff is so bland and said years ago that it doesn't really matter one way or another. People will still buy bad games.
Oh and complaining about having to redo a section of a level because it's a 'throwback to arcades' or whatever nonsense he was saying is just... missing the point entirely.
I suppose next he'll want savestates built into every game anywhere ever.
Then again I'm the kind of person who will subject himself to a challenge that takes an hourperattempt where one death means you have to start completely over.
"If you don't want to replay a section, don't suck at the one right after."
#3.
Thou shalt admit when enough is enough.
I'm shocked that he made no mention of the biggest offender to this statement of all time: Megaman. Also, he should lay off the forced humor a little.
And apparently this guy has some personal vendetta against RE4. It's mentioned multiple times in multiple sections. Having to conserve your ammo is a good thing in my opinion. It forces you to be resourceful instead of just using the shotgun for everything. That would be boring as hell.
I agree that challenge should not be artificial, but in a different sense. Here's my biggest pet peeve in videogames in general: when a game uses the lazy way to increase difficulty. Increasing a boss's life, decreasing your health, decreasing the damage your weapon does, including a time limit (although that's more personal taste...I personally hate racing against the clock), etc. This doesn't make the game harder per-se, just more drawn out and quite uninspired to be honest. Super Mario Galaxy was a staunch offender of this. Daredevil runs, anyone?
If you want an example of a game that did it perfectly, look at Streets of Rage 2. First of all, it had a whopping 6 difficulties, and each one was significantly different (and more difficult) than the other. Enemy AI was changed for each difficulty (they were faster, smarter, and more aggressive), there were more enemies with more health, and most importantly, they didn't change the amount of damage enemies deal. This means that even in the highest difficulty (Mania), you can't get cheap-shotted in two hits like in a lot of other beat-em-ups which are guilty of this. It doesn't leave you saying "Well, this guy is still dumb as a brick, and he would be easy if he didn't deal 5 times as much damage as before!"
Now let's look at an example of the lazy way: House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return. Wide array of difficulties, but hardly any difference between them at all. All that really stands out to me is that enemies and bosses have more health. No AI changes to be found anywhere...not even faster enemies. Come on...wouldn't it be awesome if for Very Hard, Magician was a fast, tough SOB who mixed his attack patterns so you never knew what was coming?
Also, another difficulty pet peeve of mine is how the "easy" difficulty isn't easy, or the "hard" difficulty isn't hard. Going back to Streets of Rage 2, Easy was in fact easy, Hard was actually challenging, and Mania was ready to kick you in the balls rapid-fire. Going back to HOTD 2 & 3, Easy is NOT easy. It's the same absurdly hard difficulty for HOTD 2 and 3 that you're used to.
I'm shocked that he made no mention of the biggest offender to this statement of all time: Megaman.
I think it was because he mainly targeted the current-gen console and PC games, which is why stuff like Megaman, which barely touched the current-gen, fell out of the scope.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
atro_city: You can't be serious about Super Mario Galaxy and the daredevil runs, they're the most awesome thing in the game! In addition to luigi's purple coins, the sinking lava spire daredevil star was the only one I had to really try several times to get, the rest of the game was way too unchallenging.
Oh and the article was an ok read. The 7 manliest names article was better.
Sorry, but I'm just not a big fan of "One mistake and you're dead". I tend to make more mistakes than most people due to being naturally clumsy, so daredevil runs are particularly annoying to me. Putting someone in the exact same situation and tweaking their life or putting on a time limit may be challenging, but it's not fun or interesting at all.
With the exception of the non-timed purple coin challenges and faster enemies, I was very disappointed with the challenges in Super Mario Galaxy.
i can pretty much agree with everything there except for jumping in an FPS. Never had a problem.
P.s. Go Nintendo!
I'm sciencing as fast as I can !
______________________________________
<adelikat> once more balls enter the picture, everything gets a lot more entertraining
<adelikat> mmmmm yummy penises
Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN
Deign wrote:
i can pretty much agree with everything there except for jumping in an FPS. Never had a problem.
I only hate FPS jumping puzzles when there are a finite number of lives or limited save situations, as in the recently-TASed Turok. In games like Half Life or Portal, I'm fine with trying a couple times until I get it right.
Heh, the part of number 7 mentioning Super Mario Galaxy's ability to have a second player shoot stars is almost verbatim what David Sirlin wrote in his review of the game;
http://www.sirlin.net/archive/super-article-galaxy/Sirlin wrote:
Mario Galaxy is primary a 1-player gamer's game (lots of hard fun), but it includes a brilliant 2-player feature that will surely become a standard. Some dismiss this feature as "tacked on," but something that strikes such an exactly correct note was surely a carefully considered feature. The 2-player co-pilot feature is intended for a non-gamer to enjoy the game alongside a gamer. I call it "girlfriend mode," and it adds a lot of social fun to a game that would otherwise have nearly none of that kind of fun.
And the reproduction
Hack Writers wrote:
By the way, some of you are scratching your heads about having the obviously single-player Mario Galaxy up there on the list. Well, it turns out Nintendo included an option so that at any moment, a friend can pick up the second controller and, with the pointer, help the first player collect items and shoot at enemies. It's a small thing, but it means a guy can get his girlfriend in on the action and cut off her complaints that his gaming is taking away from his time with her.
Otherwise, the list is really good, and still not even in the top ten of Cracked articles I've read. While the site has plenty of duds, it's up there with Collegehumor in terms of random, funny material.
Edit
After reading number five, about save game systems and unskippable scenes, something Sirlin has ranted about thousands of times, and in virtually identical langauge, I think there's more than coincidental evidence the author plagiarized.
One thing I dislike a bit about this article is that it's clearly the author's own opinion, but it's written as if the author knew the general opinion of all gamers. That's a bit presumptuous.
As for the individual points:
"Thou shalt let us play your game with real-life friends."
Not all games are designed to work as multiplayer games. Even many of designed-for-multiplaying games are not designed to be playable on the same screen by multiple players. You can't demand that *all* games be playable by multiple players on the same screen.
Sure, there may be some games where there's no excuse why they couldn't support multiple players (on the same screen), but he's writing as if that was the case with *all* games.
"Thou shalt not pad the length of your games."
I disagree with the claim that Oblivion was artificially made longer by "padding". The whole idea of the game is to have a huge world you can explore freely. I don't believe the size of the world was selected to make distances (and thus traveling) longer per se. The purpose was to create a realistic world, just like an RPG should have (and they succeeded pretty well at that). I agree with the lack of variation in dungeons, though.
HL2:Ep2 is shown in a screenshot as another example. That one I don't understand. The whole point in Ep2, its story, is the journey to the rebel base. What does the writer would have preferred?
"Having to replay levels due to limited save points."
There's a type of game where the idea is to complete it in sections. Some people may not like that type of game, but some may. It's no different than someone not liking, for example, RTS type games or puzzle games. You can't please everyone. People have different tastes and dislikes.
Clearly some people *do* like section-by-section type games because they sell. You can't just go and give a generic rule that "you must not write that type of games" if people like it. It's as absurd as me saying "you must not create RTS games" for the simple reason that I find RTS games unappealing.
"Instant failure quicktime events."
Again, it's a type of game. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean nobody likes it.
"Starting us with a bullshit weapon."
I agree that in most FPS games they should come up with a good and believable storywise reason why you start with a single weak weapon (most FPS games don't even attempt doing that), but I don't agree with the view that you should be able to start with a kick-ass weapon from the very start.
"Bullets that have no visible effect."
Most FPS games are not physically realistic in this regard, and that's completely intentional. If they were realistic, one single shot would usually take down any enemy, which would not be very challenging.
Admittedly sometimes it's just laziness from the part of the game developers.
"Filling the game with hordes of cookie-cutter bad guys."
Sometimes there *are* technical limitations to this. There's just so much memory in your graphics card. Models have an ever-increasing amount of polygons, and they have to fit into that tiny amount of memory. If you changed the facial features of all the enemies visible on screen, that would increase the amount of memory required from the graphics card. It might not be enough.
Although, once again, admittedly this is also sometimes just laziness from the game developers.
"Thou shalt admit when enough is enough."
If a game genre sells, then it sells, whether you like it or not.
"CPU-controlled squad teammates."
It's not impossible to create well-working sidekicks in games. IMO HL2:Ep1 and Ep2 are good examples of this. Don't diss a game feature simply because most games get it wrong.
"First-person jumping puzzles."
Again, just because you don't like certain game types doesn't mean nobody does.
"The grizzled space marine."
What does it matter what you are? It's not like it affected gameplay.
"Hiring real writers", "then hiring competent voice actors to say the lines."
I have to agree with this. A game is a story, and a story needs good storywriting and good acting. Nothing destroys a good story more effectively than bad writing or bad acting.
Definitely a good read. The one I agree with most is the whole issue with unskippable cutscenes. With some games *coughXenosagacough* that could almost tie into the whole padding the game violation. At least Xenomovie was almost, if not entirely, skippable.
There's enough damn buttons on these controllers nowadays. I think developers can afford to use one to skip shit if we want to.
As for the comment earlier, I tend to agree and yet disagree.
Super Mario 1 took me years to get good enough to complete it.
Super Mario Galaxy took me a few days.
Super Mario World I did in a couple of hours.
Are they easier now than then? Maybe. Maybe not.
At least with a number of good games, they have a nice range of difficulty levels (see Ace Combat series for one), and some even have special treats at the end if you beat it at a harder difficulty (Contra III, Phalanx, Philosoma...). It's a tough one to call on that.
