5 Unrealistic Realisms in Video Games

Video games are getting more and more realistic. While this brings us amazing things like high-res graphics that actually look like people instead of an assortment of brightly colored blocks, it also brings with it a lot of technical problems. I can understand most of these things and I believe most people are willing to look past certain shortcomings with just a little chuckle. But for some reason it's also brought about some new forms of logic that feel like they came from an alternate dimension. I can forgive many of them, but some of them have become a staple of video game design and they really piss me off. Well, that's an exaggeration. Really it's more of an annoyed sigh when I see them and then I just move on. Uhhh, any way... here's five of whatever I was just talking about!

5. Gun Cocking

Not as inappropriate as it sounds, sorry.

It used to be that in a shooter a gun would never need to be reloaded. In Doom, you just magically attached your pistol to a 300 bullet chain and could just keep adding to that string with no worries. At some point someone realized "Hey... guns don't work like that" and games started acknowledging the existence of magazines and therefore guns needed to be reloaded.

This was a pretty good change. It meant that games could both be more realistic while also giving the player a flaw that he or she would have to manage properly in order to be successful against hordes of bad guys. We all were content to look the other way on how exactly it was that every clip was fully loaded and other ammunition management details, but one of those details creeped back in.

Cutting to the chase, if you pick up the latest Call of Duty game right now, this is how reloading works: if you reload before the magazine is empty (active reload) you will not need to cock the gun but if you fire all the bullets then you will. That... makes sense because there needs to be a bullet in the chamber for it to fire. But... what about everything else? Why bother wasting time making two reload animations on this? I mean, it's not like you lose the bullets that were remaining in that clip when you did that active reload. Yeah, buddy. You just teleported those bullets into your stash of infinite clips. To put it more clearly: you have limited bullets but infinite clips to load them into. It makes no sense! Numbers! AGHAA!

4. Fall Damage

At some point I was willing to accept this concept. That a fall could hurt you without killing you. Sure, fine. Makes enough sense. But not anymore!

In the Assassin's Creed series, they make it a point of having the main character jump off of insanely high objects only to break his fall PERFECTLY with nothing but a bundle of hay. Yet if you jump off a roof that's just a little too high it's like getting punched in the legs. For a game with no health regen, these chip off your total health just nag at you. Should you waste a healing item to fix it? And how exactly does this damage work, anyway? Does breaking your legs only hurt real bad but doesn't incapacitate you?

Ultimately I came to the conclusion that this is a waste of programming. It serves only to offer the player annoyance and brings either a groan or laughter with it. My solution? Have the fall kill the player if he or she isn't supposed to be falling there. Otherwise, no damage!

3. Being Locked in a Taunt Animation

If you've seen this South Park episode, this scene captures how this concept makes me feel.

I do love taunt buttons, and I know it's my fault for pressing them, but don't just stand there, man! Taunting should be risky, sure, because you leave yourself open. But... move! For God's sake! I'm pressing every button!

2. Driving a Car

Take just about any video game. The main character can shrug off getting shot and beat up to hell. He can headshot a dozen people from a mile away with just a pistol in a matter of seconds. He can perform a flawless 50 hit combo and juggle several large men in the air with his unstoppable strikes. But how well can he drive a car?

Pretty damn poorly. How many car crashes do you, the reader, generally get into in a span of two hours? I'm going to boldly estimate that the number is between zero and 0.00001. How about in a game like Grand Theft Auto? Probably anywhere from a dozen to a hundred!

Why can't I be awesome at driving a car? I do this better in real life! So stupid!

1. Delay in Shield Regen

I'm actually very proud of this question: why is there a delay between damage ending and shields coming back? Hm? This is both a game design question and a question of the ideas behind the technology in your game's world.

From a game design stand point, do you want players to constantly wait behind cover? Why can't they just continually fight? I'm not saying the character should be invincible. No one would suggest that. Find out just how fast it needs to be so that the player can properly take a beating but still has to be careful. Less downtime is good (unless you're milking players for gameplay hours' sake).

And from a technology stand point, what in real life works in a way to suggest this would work this way? I've never touched an electric fence before, but I would assume that overloading it would make it stop working altogether. This is because most powered things try to work as constantly as possible. My laptop has energy conservation methods for when power is low, none of which include turning off for 4 seconds before coming back on. Maybe if the battery is sputtering and dead. Are all video game heroes walking around using dead batteries?

Think about it! Think about all of these things!

Warriors Orochi 3

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: Beat-'em-up; Sub-Genre: Collecting?

ESRB: T (For a whole lotta "Psh psh! Shing shing! Uwaaaa!")

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 30/10

Developer: Omega Force 

Wiki page

See that above? It takes 3 highly cluttered wallpapers to show all the playable characters in this game (which is about 132 in all). So if having a shit ton of options is your thing, then this game outdoes everything. But for those in the know, you might wonder why I gave this game more than one star. Does it introduce a lot of new concepts to round out the usual empty experience it offers? Nope. It's definitely still rooted to the franchise's determination to make the same game over and over. But you know what? Games like Call of Duty and Madden aren't entirely faulted by that from the fans. There's always some little thing here and there that's new enough for them. And I find the story less stupid than that of the usual realistic shooter, too. At least this game knows what it is. And the characters offer things that are more interesting, too. Like, Guan Yu has a cool ass beard. And Da Ji is some kind of bikini-clad elf demon thing. Their personalities and arcs are non-existant, but I find myself remembering SOMETHING about them.

Quick! Name this shooter character! You lose points for every second you hesitate!

Here's how a "Warriors" game works: you pick your character out of the million there are to offer (make sure to choose one that wields a big polearm for your first outing) and then you wade into hundreds and hundreds of enemy soldiers and mash combinations of X and Y until they are all dead. Oops, I mean "KO'ed." If you're smart, you'll press B to use your Musou (super move) to get yourself out of danger. And that's it. Do it a million times. Then get frustrated because 3 minutes ago some asshole general was like, "Help! I'm dying!" but you didn't hear him because of all the sword explosions happening on screen so he dies and the game says you lose. Very, very straight forward game for the most part. Just beat up tons of dudes.

Sword explosions all over your screen. Not kidding.

There's no need to even talk about the story. It doesn't matter. In fact, it matters so little that they didn't bother to translate the voices, just all the text. I'll go ahead and lay it all out right now so you know literrally everything. Basically, time travel/dimension ripping bullshit happens so the Chinese "heroes" of around 500 AD and the Japanese "heroes" of around 1800 AD meet up with a few stragglers from random other video games (like Ryu from Ninja Gaiden) and some other Koei games (like Joan of Arc and Achilles) to go fight some demons from various Oriental mythologies (Orochi and Da Ji, etc). Thankfully everyone speaks modern day Japanese otherwise none of this would make sense. But since they do, that just cements everything together in one solid "Weeeee! Fighting!" explanation. Somehow this has happened three times (although this game is number 2 in Japan, hence the screens at the beginning of this review) because demons get reborn as Hydras or some shit.

"Hey, what should we do for a the next game?" "A hydra." "Stop right there, that's all the ideas we need!"

Maybe you've deduced just how familiar I am with this franchise. The question then is: "Why did I bother?" The short answer is that I'm an idiot. But the long answer is that I've always felt there was some promise for something really amazing. I started with Dynasty Warriors 3, and the game hasn't done much to really improve in the ways I want it to. They always add more characters, add technical things to the game engine like swimming, and then shuffle around how the game handles itemization and character growth. The pinnacle of the franchise so far has been the first Samurai Warriors. It added talent trees, had a create-a-character mode with this weird but oddly compelling training mode, and you could roll. Which is what I want, man. I want to be able to shape a character with more depth. I want to have to deal with avoiding damage in a skillful way. But Omega Force seems content with what they are doing because they keep doing it! I suppose I really should just give up on them.

Conclusion:

Hey, remember the X-Men arcade game from the 90's? That's what this is like, but with way more... STUFF. If you're not exhausted with Dynasty Warriors games and you want the most mindless beat-'em-up action then check this shit out! It's even got splitscreen co-op! Remember when games had that shit? Wow!

Hope this image of Da Ji caught your attention. Some of the music in this game is brilliant, by the way.

Darksiders 2

Rating: 2 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)

Genre: RPG; Sub-genre: Platforming, Puzzles

ESRB: M (cartoony blood, feels more like a T)

Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 40/30

Developer: Vigil 

Wiki page

If there was ever a way I could show people how much better games are now than they used to be, I think this might be it. To say that THIS is what counts as an "alright" game is absurd compared to games of my childhood. There's just so much stuff in this game and I'm indifferent because I'm so damn spoiled now. In my defense, I made a list of about 25 problems I found with this game. I'll tack that on to the end since it's mostly nit-picking, but I found enough general stuff wrong that I didn't want to give it a strong recommendation.

Although if you want a game where you look like Casey Jones from TMNT, this game's got ya covered!

I put that the primary genre is RPG, but honestly most of the time spent in this game is platforming and figuring out puzzles. I know developers are afraid of putting a bunch of grinding in their games, but avoiding having nice long fights is a mistake. The only time you get in meaty bouts is if you do side stuff like the Crucible or the Soul Arbiter's maze. Not that I felt the combat was perfect. I really found myself wishing they would have just stolen the combat system from the recent Batman: Arkham games. But it does seem like there was a lot of attention spent on it. A big problem I found was with the talents. All they add are a set of secondary spells. No passives to make Death better at using guns, or open up different combat styles. The two trees offer either "a couple summons" or "a couple more melee moves." And holding LB to bring up the spell list and the length of the casting animations felt clunky. But overall the talents are functional. The platforming, on the other hand, is complete garbage. Death is too damn slow. I found only one time where the game put my skills to the test, and the goofball kept jumping up when I had him running sideways along a ledge. From what I could figure, he needed to be at the very edge of the ledge AND he needed to do his little looking animation before he would accept jumping in the direction I was pressing. It sounds trivial, but all of his platforming skills are like this. And his ability to jump is virtually nil. The puzzles are more of the usual from a modern game being what I call "non-puzzles." But at least this game will test your knowledge of the mechanics, instead of just forcing you to search for what is clickable.

I really don't like this skill tree.

I'm not sure what I can say about the story in this game, good or bad. I find it reminiscent of what are known as "cosmic" comic books. There are no set rules in this world. Everyone is some kind of angel, demon, deity, guardian of some element of the universe, that kind of stuff. Earth is already destroyed, so all the things at stake are entirely intangible. And the ending is rather nonsensical, too. I can't talk about why without giving it away, but it has to do with exactly what I'm talking about: magic powers and cosmic mumbo jumbo. The levels don't help either. I do appreciate their decision to stick with purely "video game" levels, as opposed to putting any effort into making them resemble places where people might actually live or perform some manner of function. But while that helps gameplay, it keeps the story from being understandable, too. I think my final call is overall positive, if only because it has to be so much more creative than other games because it has no solid ground to place it's feet on. How do you tell a story about a man trying to save his brother when that story has no people in it? So philosophical.

Some people find all this philosophical gibberish as headache inducing. I like it just fine!

Conclusion:

A game that's derivative of a lot of other games, but does so with a little style. Not strong enough to stand out of the crowd, but worth a shot if it's your style. I would probably recommend other games before getting to this one.

Time once again for bitching!

1. Quests that cannot be completed at time they are given. For example, a quest from Thane at the beginning of the game can only be completed roughly 15 gameplay hours later. I find this frustrating having it stare at me from my quest log for so long.

2. Dodge move has no invincibility frames. I just always want 'em, dammit!

3. Combat too hectic. All I can do is dodge and poke, fight the camera in smaller places.

4. Button press memory? No! Do the thing I am currently pressing! I don't care that I pressed X three times, I'm pressing Y now! Do Y!

5. Kind of a lot of buttons. LT for targeting isn't very useful. LB for spell list is hard. LB+RT for Reaper form feels unnatural (what's wrong with X+Y or another face button combo?).

6. Dodge then X move is horrible! When I'm dodging, I'm trying to move in and out fast. Do not want slow move here!

7. Stats make no sense. At no point does the game bother to explain any of them. What does "Arcane" do? How am I supposed to know!?

8. Too many moves syndrome. I only use like 2 or 3 of these combos. What a waste of time on these animations.

9. Boss that is inexplicably level 20? Was I supposed to know that fighting all the level 18's along the way?

10. Usefullness of reaper mode?

11. Usefullness of executing?

12. Usefullness of fast secondaries?

13. Reaper form plot convenience. It lets Death fly and one shot people at will. Why is he not in this form at all times?

14. Keeps gun out for too long. Have to dodge to get him to put his hand down. What is the point of this?

15. Delay before reloading gun. No explanation here. Why not make the reload slow and the delay non-existant?

16. Two dead lords glitch? I rescued one and it gave me two. Then when I rescued the second, I still had two.

17. Slow speed of dead lords.

18. Vulgrim does not sell general items!!! Why is he marked as such on the map?

19. Hookshot bad targeting. Even when the RT prompt comes up, he still will fire the hookshot at nothing.

20. Axe training cannot be learned. Obvious bug.

21. No enemy variance until second zone? Why? First zone has only two enemies, rest of the game has plenty.

22. Speed test! Platforming in this game officially FAILS! F! F! F! F! F!

23. Assigning a button to swap to gun/hookshoot dumbness. Hookshot and the gun are the only two items/powers with use in combat. So it's advisable to have both mapped. But why doesn't the game let you make it just one button that switches back and forth? I don't have enough buttons for all my spells because of this!

24. Camera needs to pull back a little bit.

25. Instead of wrath pots, reaper pots! In general I wanted Wrath to be handled differently: lower spell costs, faster regen, stuff like that. This version is kinda boring. Usually potions are meant to save your life. Health potions do, obviously, but Wrath ones... not so much.

5 Ways to Make Your Video Game Impossible

A common complaint among people who never beat video games is that they are too easy. Which is funny because that's the exact opposite feeling they should be having, right? And then some people who do beat video games wish they were harder as well. I do find myself thinking this at times, but really if every game was super hard it'd just be too damn stressful. And some games aren't about difficulty to begin with! For example, Fable is about trying to get married and divorced in the most hilarious ways you can figure out. And Kingdoms of Amalur is about trying to waste as many hours of your life as possible. Nevertheless, the people have spoken! So I'm here once again to help the dev's of the world out!

5. A Stealth Game Where the Enemies Never Stop Spinning

One of the big ways to get caught in a stealth game is when the NPC's don't have realistic animations and just arbitrarily perform 180 turns when you completely don't expect it. And isn't that great? All that patience from waiting and watching thrown down the drain to weak AI design?

So why not just have ALL enemies spin around at ALL times? Clearly this is the best way a guard can patrol his beat. Just make sure to stand in the center of a big opening and make like a top; nothing with get past your gaze!

Of course, in real life the guard would just see nothing but blurs and then fall over. But worrying about stuff like that is for stupid people!

4. A Beat-'em-Up Where the Enemies Never Stop Swinging

Generally in a beat-'em-up every enemy already enjoys having higher priority on their attacks than the player and they also have either higher health or higher numbers. This means that in order to survive, the player will need to wait for the enemy to be done attacking before he can work in some damage safely.

Why DO the bad guys stop attacking? Right now I'm playing Darksiders 2 and there's an enemy who performs something like a 10 punch combo while both dashing across the screen and locking on to the player's location. If he just kept doing that until I died, I'd stand no chance!

And just imagine an ocean of fists all just mindlessly swinging at the air. There's no way a player would be able to move through that! Again, in real life people would get tired and probably hit their own buddies a million times each, but whatever. Details!

3. Random Holes in the Ground

Yeah, ET the game. I went there.

This one's maybe more personal. I'm not talking about just general death traps that the player is meant to jump over. That's just a platformer. But sometimes a level will inexplicably have a very hard to see death hole in the middle of a big combat arena. I'll be distracted playing a video game, and then all of a sudden my character will disappear and I'll be informed that I've died. When I respawn I start looking around at the ground. You know, when my screen isn't full of bullshit. And I notice, "Ah, yes. Someone has placed a death hole here in the middle of the otherwise stable-looking ground. Good plan."

You see, the thing is the human eye is pretty good at spotting these things in real life. But when your eyeballs exist 10 feet behind you and are at a slight angle and the color scheme of the level is all meshing together, I often times miss these things.

So yes, bad guys? Just dig random holes in your base and put spikes in them. Don't worry about where to put them, just anywhere like: your main hall, your courtyard, your own bedroom. Don't think about things like "flow" or "traffic." It'll work out.

2. Impassable Objects

Definitely can't fit between those bars. Nope.

Heroes can jump from helicopter to helicopter, off buildings and onto the wings of a moving plane, from car to car, over a 50 yard well of hot lava, but they can't jump over debris. Like, just a few rocks and some broken wood. It just doesn't interest them.

Bad guys, don't bother building a complicated and impenetrable fortress. Don't waste money on clever traps and henchmen. Just surround yourself with a 3 foot high wall of garbage. No one can beat that!

1. More Breakable Objects!

This was one that had me laughing out loud when I encountered it in Max Payne 3. There were all these windows all over the place, and I just had to break them all (as Bart Simpson explains, "Smashy smashy!") Then- without any prior warning or indication or a timer- the game said I took too long and that I lose.

That got me thinking about other games where breakable objects actually have stuff in them. So if a bad guy just hid a bunch of moderately valuable stuff in a bunch of barrels and never told the player his plans or motivation, the player would never make it in time!

I know this one is less unbeatable than the lower numbered entries. I just love the idea of this counter-intuitive gameplay. Hell, with all the collectable achievements going around this one already sort of exists. Trick the player with shinies! Yes!