So here I'm hitting the best medium in the face with some stupid things. And unlike Fox News and your parents, I actually play the damn things. Expect some really specific shit! Like...
5. Last Level is a Volcano
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| Looks stable enough to build an evil lair in, right? |
Apparently someone in the video game industry saw a James Bond film 30 years ago and decided that this was the best place to have a duel to the death AND that it would never get old. And how deadly is lava if you can build catwalks over it and spend years carving out the mountainside like no one's business? Here's a tip: if you are close to lava, you will explode into flames. And everyone knows that. Also: inactive volcanoes are inactive, and active ones are to be avoided (see above picture).
When I get to a level where there's lava all around me, I instantly think, "Welp, guess it's time to fight the last boss." I get that it's a rather climactic scene, but by hell it's so cliche it's like "the chicken and the egg" now. Which came first? And is that phrase or this concept more cliche? I can't tell.
4. Exploding Barrels
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| I keep at least 4 of these in my bedroom, don't you? |
Dear Exploding Barrel Factory,
Why do you make these barrels? Who does your marketing to make such a useless product so very in-demand? I sincerely hope you advise your employees not to shoot guns at each other around the workplace, as such has proven to be so very popular by your consumers, because that would certainly ruin your entire business in one shot.
Whatever the case, you've killed far more bad guys than any one-man-army hero-type has ever done. So that makes you the world's greatest super hero. Good on you, buddy.
And what substance is it that explodes instantly on contact with bullets? We're all so very curious.
P.S. How do you convince your customers that these make great cover against gunfire? I mean, who else would tell them that?
3. Unnecessary Penalties for Death
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| Here's a picture of an unnecessary death penalty, waka waka! Please no political commentary. |
Very few games treat death in a realistic sense. I don't want to get into the whole conundrum of infinite henchmen who throw their lives away for pennies on the dollar. Rather, I'm talking about the player character specifically. Diablo 2 has a hardcore mode where death is permanent and if a player wants to keep playing he or she will need to start from the beginning. XCOM: Enemy Unknown has an iron man mode where the player is forced to rely on auto-saves and cannot save manually; thus any mistakes made in the game are not correctable. But every game is forced during the design stages to consider how to make players understand- nay- FEEL the fact that they have truly failed when they die. In the old days, the cost was very real: 25 cents straight out of your real life pocket. Because of laziness, this carried over into home gaming systems by giving players a limited number of lives. In fact, Nintendo still does this in many games because they're old fogies who don't know what the hell they're doing.
Here's another free tip, gaming industry: you don't have to do anything. Look at games with manual saves, like The Elder Scrolls. In such games, the player is told he or she is now dead and will have to revert to a previous save. That's it. Take a game like World of Warcraft, where there is no manual save, and the developers are forced to get creative: the fight resets, the player is sent miles away to a graveyard, their gear takes damage that costs in-game money to repair, and enemies respawn. Holy shit! That's easily two extra things, if not three. Players are more afraid of death in WoW than real life. Just watch them chug Mountain Dew and Cheetoes dust, you know I'm right. When I used to play, everyone constantly complained about it and the fear of failure shaped what players were willing to even attempt.
It's like developers have some sort of existential crisis when pondering the meaning of death in their game. Like, they get high and start saying things like "far out" and "whoa" for that design meeting. Seriously, guys. Figure it out. When you tell us that we've lost... WE GET IT. Just let us get back to having some Goddamn fun already.
2. Patience Equals Difficulty
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| The next "Ninja Gaiden", folks. |
Pacing is a big deal to me. It's a big deal to video games, as well, being founded on the concept of instant gratification. But I'm not even talking about that. Games that are slow like Lords of Shadow and every-JRPG-ever are fine and understandable to me. I'm not talking about that. No, these are games that make the player wait in various ways as part of the actual freaking gameplay.
In WoW, everything is a time commitment. See an item you want? A good player can figure out how many times they have to do X to get Y before Z can happen. And sometimes there are many more steps than that! In games like God of War, the game will just abruptly stop. And you're forced to figure out what can be clicked and where before you can continue. Fight Night furthers something that occurs in every game by requiring the player to wait on an opening to make their move. Which is like boxing, sure, but it penalizes the aggressive too heavily. Land 100 clean and mean hooks on your opponent? That's nice, try landing ONE counter-punch some time. It'll win you the fight.
Put it this way: if Grand Theft Auto made the cops chase after you for running a red light, getting in a collision, or driving on the sidewalk would you play it? Probably not since at that point you'd have to drive safely. And who the hell would want to do that in a video game? No one. Because patience is for dealing with real life, and video games are for going nuts in pretend land.
1. The Silent Protagonist
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| Thank you, Cast Away, for not featuring an hour and a half or more of solid silence. |
I'm referencing "Cast Away" because the makers of that film must have come to the realization at some point that no one would watch a movie where a guy just silently lives on an island by himself for a few years. So they gave him lines of dialogue and a beach ball named "Wilson." What'd they get for it? Several Oscars. Or maybe zero Oscars, I don't remember. Look it up if you're so curious.
The people who make video games, conversely, seem to think having the player being some kind of mute person is a good idea. The idea behind it is that the player will more easily think of themselves being in the game or some stupid shit. I'm actually curious: does ANYONE like or prefer this? When everyone around you talks and asks you to do shit and you just idly stand there and accept what you're told without a word? It's not like you can yell at your TV and have them hear you (maybe Kinect can bring this feature to life, eh?). So for me, I don't feel like I'm imagining myself as actually in the game. No, what I imagine is some dopey guy standing there with his mouth agape who simply nods his head when the smart people are talking. Or Harpo Marx. Either way, my character seems kinda goofy.
Seriously, what is this shit? In the old days, it was just limitations in the hardware and software. Or limitations in the narrative. When I was a kid, a "cutscene" consisted of seeing a girl getting punched in the stomach and then the two playable characters chased after her (Double Dragon). Nowadays, you got games like Metal Gear Solid 4 that have like 93 hours of cutscene footage where people only speak in weird, incoherent sentence fragments.
We have games like Mass Effect and Uncharted now where players get to enjoy actual conversations. I know video games are pretty far behind in terms of quality writing. Those two examples have some of the best the medium has to offer, and they're still on par with B movies... or "dumb action" movies at best. But look at Halo and Gears of War: the first one stars a faceless, bio-engineered mutant man and the second is a cast of men made of blocks of meat. But they all still talk. Those games made money, right? No more silent protagonists! Say something!
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