Featured  

The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey

article image
#6.
Thou shalt not pad the length of your games.

Violators:
Mass Effect, The Godfather games, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion IV, ah, fuck it. Any open-world game this generation.

See, here's the thing. We don't mind short games. Portal was a short game, everybody loved it. It was four hours of joy. Short is fine, as long as you adjust the price accordingly.

What you have started doing instead, game industry, is taking your short game and inventing some arbitrary way to pad the length. Such as:

Putting huge stretches of land between objectives.

Wow, what an awesome sprawling landscape your game inhabits. So sprawling that we have to ride a fucking horse for 20 minutes to get to the next mission. You also make it so that it's often not clear what the next objective is, and thus we must wander around aimlessly until we stumble across it. You then add up all of this cumulative horse riding and aimless wandering and boast that your game has "50 hours of game play."


"We must reach the citadel! It's 800 miles that way."

It's padding, plain and simple. And so is ...

Adding pointless, mandatory fetch quests.

The Metroid Prime series is guilty as hell of this, letting you get near the end before you have to track back across all the old levels and retrieve a bunch of shit. Twilight Princess turned us into a dog and made us go retrieve magical pearls for what felt like days at a time.

Games like Oblivion and Mass Effect give the illusion of almost infinite length, but their endless "go into another identical dungeon and retrieve X" side quests are just slightly remixed copies of previous levels.

Those games get a little bit of a pass because their repetitive side-quests are optional. Which brings us right to ...



Submit to: Reddit Facebook StumbleUpon Digg Del.icio.us Fark

Oh god, 7 is one of my greatest pet peeves. Duke Nukem 64 had f*****g split screen, and the XBLA port doesn't.

I swear, if Resident Evil 5 does this I'll choke a b***h.

Posted on 11/15/2008 11:51:37 AM

"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. "


YES!!!!! Finallly! get off my back women!

Posted on 11/13/2008 11:58:26 PM

I bought the game Pure.
No multiplayer.
I had motostorm.
No Multiplayer.
I bought MotoGP08.
No multiplayer.
Brand New nostalgic golden axe.
No multiplayer.
Whats next?
Mortal Kombat that doesn t support multiplayer.
F U C K Y O U ! ! !

Posted on 11/12/2008 12:58:25 AM

All I have to say is that on page seven: A-f*****g-MEN!

Posted on 11/9/2008 6:57:09 PM

Motorstorm IS multiplayer you can play on a split screen (im' in europe but I don't think that changes anything)

Posted on 11/4/2008 9:03:01 AM

I think skatoolaki is a whore.
Only idiots will hate the Wii and/or its games.

Posted on 9/29/2008 12:07:56 PM

I f*****g hate escort missions in a certain game called z*lda (damn straight i use that asterisk!) no matter how good you are at it, if the ai loops, the carriage f****n goes to the bats and you end back uo at kokoro gates!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted on 9/29/2008 3:03:07 AM

I thought Gears was a horrendous game, though I won't go off on you for liking it. However, I have a problem with your proclamation that "Epic is god" and they make games for the "hardcore" crowd. In fact, it's the exact opposite.

Epic has made it a point over the years to tell their true hardcore fans to f**k off and die (see Unreal Tournament 3) and have only made efforts to advance the graphical aspects of their games over the years. I can't really blame them for that - I mean, half of what they're selling is their engine. On the other hand, there are companies who work diligently on improving the visuals without sacrificing gameplay. Look at Valve's Source Engine...pretty games that also deliver brilliantly with their gameplay.

There's also the fact that Epic has a brigade of talking heads whose sole purpose is to spout off idiotic, ass-brained comments in the press (CliffyB, Mark Rein, Mike Capps). It seems like every week one of these colossal morons is waxing vitriolic about PC piracy, PC games dying, etc. etc. despite the fact that PC gamers constitute the majority of their customer base.

But at the end of they day, I guess it's all about how you define "hardcore crowd"...if you mean the people who like to whack off to the latest advances in bloom in glorified engine tech-demos, then Epic does a very good job in supporting you. If you mean "hardcore crowd" as in the people who play games competitively for 5+ years with no patch support, anti-cheat, or what have you from the developers, then Epic is doing a very bad job.

Regarding the rest of your post, Lampshade, I definitely disagree with Capp's statement about how developing for the Wii would be regressive. If there's any console right now that could completely redefine the way FPSes are played, it would be the Wii. Unfortunately, like you said, Nintendo and other devs have done little to harness the console's incredibly unique hardware. Brawl, the biggest game for the console, can be played with a Gamecube controller. It's a shame really.

Posted on 9/28/2008 8:49:12 PM

Gears of War rocked and cutting edge graphics certainly made it better. For a company like Epic Games (God bless em) that focuses on making kick ass shooters for the hardcore crowd going to the Wii would be a step backwards. Look at Call of Duty 3 for the Wii.

The Wii had a few good games but the problem is there is nothing good coming out now.

Posted on 9/18/2008 12:14:18 AM

Lemme tell ya: when I spent a hundred and fifty years in a Lithuanian prison camp for eating the face of a screaming child in public last week, the only thing that really kept me going was Zelda 3. That's right, they made you play video games while beating you with your own spinal cord and insulting your mom in their own bizarre barbarian tongue, all in the hopes that when you finally escape during their drunken orgies with pigs, those video games will carry such painful associations that you'll never be able to play them again. Like in 1984, except with Zelda. But for me it backfired. It was Zelda that kept me going in there. Zelda that drove away the demons at night, the ones that saw me standing over the grave of another dead president. It was Zelda that made me finally take part in one of their drunken pig orgies and find out that at the end of the day--they weren't such bad guys after all.

Posted on 9/14/2008 11:51:11 PM

I agree with the last one.

Posted on 9/13/2008 9:19:01 AM

Everybody sing it with me... 'Metal Gear Solid'

that franchise never fails to deliver... its got an amazing story line, its always had 'ahead of its time' graphics and lets face it...god must be proud to know that the people he created, have created metal gear solid!

Posted on 9/4/2008 8:17:59 PM

Ok, I've just got two things to say about number 4. First of all, the wrench in Bioshock was awesome. It almost made the game believable, and we're talking about a game in which a man willingly hops in a submarine that takes him down to some lost Atlantis-esque city where he proceeds to inject himself with insane chemicals that he picked up off the floor. Secondly, I find it much more gratifying if you don't use a weapon in Oblivion. The feeling of killing a rat with one well-placed punch is extremely gratifying, even if it is a video game, and it also relieves you from the "why did that guy's arm not fall off?" paradox.

And don't get me wrong, I think this is an awesome website full of hilariously useless information, but that was just bugging me.

Posted on 9/4/2008 6:39:54 PM

I look back at gaming history and I still conclude that oldschool games like Zelda III and Castlevania S.O.T.N where way better than most of the high tech s**t they created today. Unless its something like Fable?

Posted on 9/4/2008 6:28:31 PM

How is Halo 3 not mentioned on this list? It breaks commandments 5 and 4, and it absolutely rapes number 3, regarding Space Marines.

Posted on 9/4/2008 1:24:49 PM

If a guy put in GTA IV, he could totally touch my boob. Screw Mario Galaxy.

Posted on 9/4/2008 7:53:55 AM

how about being able to replay cut scenes?

Posted on 9/4/2008 7:05:38 AM

I think the most chintzier ending wasn't the original Metroid, but the one in Contra where after you finally destroy the main boss. You end up getting a dark screen with the words CONGRATULATIONS! flashing across the screen.

Then the game resets, making you wonder, 'What th? I just wasted several hours beating this game, and this is ALL i get?!?'

Posted on 9/3/2008 5:15:27 PM

You forgot that all RPGs must have a random treasure-chest/box monster that can kill your entire party with a "claw" attack, meanwhile the last boss is a demi-god who shoots lightening from his eyes and rains fire down from outer space, yet somehow you can still beat it like a black stepchild.

Posted on 9/2/2008 2:51:51 PM

..... then put the rest into dumpsters. shhhh. lawsuit.

Posted on 9/1/2008 2:04:38 PM

More Tech


Popular stuff


Avatar
Ross Wolinsky
Posted: 11/19/2008 2:29:34 AM
Post Subject: The 5 Lamest Forwarded Emails (And Why Your Mom Loves Them)

Since the dawn of time, man has sought ever-easier means of communicating. Smoke signals gave way to the Pony Express. Then came telegrams, then singing telegrams, and eventually the naked ones we a ...

Avatar How To Train An Army of Animals To Do Your Bidding
If you're like most Cracked readers, you have a deep and fierce loathing of everyone around ...
Avatar CNN Thinks Gift Cards Are Complicated (or Contest Winners, Rankings and preparing for the end)
Well, six people won the HBN Contest, and they each get a scanned version of a Patrick Semple or ...