The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey
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#5.
Thou shalt not force repetition on the player.
Violators:
Here's a very simple rule: Humans only find repetition enjoyable when they choose it. Let's say you sit on your bed one afternoon and, out of boredom, fling playing cards at a hat for two hours straight, just to pass the time. You amuse yourself trying to hit 10 in a row. Now imagine it's later in the evening and you're about to have sex with your girl. Suddenly she sits up, her boobies hanging out, and says, "Wait! We can't do it until you fling 10 cards into that hat over there! It's a rule in the obscure religion I practice!" Will you enjoy the card flinging this time? No, and in fact the repetition you found enjoyable before will become maddening, as you flip cards around your frustrated, wilting manhood. Well some video games are like tossing cards: sports games, fighting games, racing games. The fun is in repeating and practicing them. But other mission-based games are like having sex. There's a specific progression and goal in mind, and repetitive interruption only ruins the mood. Such as ... Having to replay levels due to limited save points. This is a throwback to the arcade/NES days when physical limitations in the system wouldn't allow you to save your progress just anywhere. There is no reason for this now. None. We're busy. We've got work, appointments, phone calls. We shouldn't tolerate an inability to save our progress in any piece of software.
Half Life 2 did this perfectly--it auto-saved every few minutes, behind the scenes. You didn't have to worry about it and you didn't have to re-fight enemies you had already defeated. There are people who say that preventing saves adds to the "tension" of the game. Sure, in the sense that the fact that your 360 could catch on fire at any moment also adds to the tension. Face it, if the only way you can think of to add suspense to your game is to disable a feature of the hardware, then you suck at making games. This is almost as bad as when you ... Force us to watch cutscenes repeatedly. This should be the law: If you've programmed your cutscene so that we can't skip it, then you should have your game programming license revoked. If you have placed your cutscene right before a spot where we're likely to die, and given us no ability to save after it, then you deserve a beating. God of War: Chains of Olympus does this. And you'd better hope you don't die during the long-ass Bowser fight at the end of Mario Galaxy, because you've got to listen to his fucking monologue every fucking time you start over. Unskippable cutscenes killed Nights: Journey of Dreams, as sure as a bullet to the back of the skull.
Seriously, what could be worse than this? Oh, wait ... Instant failure quicktime events. This has got to be one of the most diabolical inventions in the history of gaming. If you're not familiar with the term, this is when in the middle of a cutscene, suddenly the words "HIT THE A BUTTON OR DIE!" flash across the screen.
If you fail to hit the right button in that split second, the consequence isn't that you lose damage points. No, the consequence is that you have to watch the fucking cutscene again. And again. Until we turn off the game, get in our car, and drive to your office to deliver your beating. |
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Anybody remember the old Half-Life WWI mod? Probably not - too busy playing the Counter Strike mod. It was pretty freakin' awesome though. We definitely need more WWI games. And we definitely need to stop refering to guns by their fake Counter Strike names.
Addendum: The last game I played that had horrible errors (meaning that they derived from the actual game) was Fable II.
Superman glitch? Naaa. I'll play through it. I don't need to see the badassedness of killing people. Only two furniture stores? Well, I'll only have to furnish two or three love shacks, right? Oh, wait, there's an achievement for having assloads of realty? Wait, I have to make money with that? ...Yeah. Not to mention the others, too, which are far too numerous. I'd rather punch myself in the face repeatedly or maybe go watch Hobgoblins (1985) again.
For those of you who defend FFX---if you ever played FF6 you will never get me to understand why a game in the Final Fantasy series was changed into something like FFX in a huge hop-skip over a graphic-quality pond. Shoulda thrown that rock over into the story mudhole. It would have sunk a lot slower, at least.
FFX was the FIRST game I ever played where the characters' voices weren't just grunts or whatever noises thrown into the mix. AND I HATED IT. It was nothing like the beloved Final Fantasy genre I had come to know and love since FFV (because I started late). The voice acting, which I wasn't particularily fond of---wait, John DiMaggio was Bender of Futurama, Schnitzel on Chowder and countless other characters in numerous cartoon shows? Oh, what? A VOICE ACTOR trained to do only VOICE ACTING isn't an actual ACTOR? My bad. Guess I owe Crispin Freeman and Richard Horton an apology.
f**k that. FFX sucked because it took us hardcore gamers a grand total of 15 minutes to defeat the world-ending megamonster "I'll tidal wave your homes and swallow you like my girlfriend swallows my load" Sin, who was hyped throughtout the game like world unity is at the Olympics. I actually thought Sin was going to be awesome, and planned to reap the rewards of 72 hours---yes, SEVENTY-TWO HOURS OF f*****g AWFUL GAMEPLAY SPENT DEVELOPING MY SPHERE GRIDS---of making myself into an uber badass. Sadly, he was all the pent-up rage of a wet paper bag and had the hit points of the drunken hobo who is urinating on it.
So, in closing, graphic quality at the expense of game content? Bad trade.
I feel like I have to pipe up in defense of Final Fantasy X. That was before voice acting was the norm in video games (good voice acting now is in games like Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed, where the actors are actual f*****g movie stars), and the whole premise of that clip was that the characters were fake laughing.
Also, the story telling was so good that my girlfriend actually enjoyed watching me play just to see what happened to the characters (except side quests--f**k arbitrary and difficult side quests just to get gear that you need to complete the game). At the end of the game, my girlfriend cried. That's right--cried. And then I got booby.
Your play, Cracked.
Nice article, although u missed some very important stuff like making games more user-friendly by for example allowing the player to chose any mission once unlocked instead of making him go through all the boring stuff all over, or letting him change the difficulty level without starting all over since words like normal or hard really don't do it (take for example Far Cry 2, all the difficulty levels are roughly the same). And about the saving checkpoints: Being able to save at any point of the game can ruin it, specially for FPS games where it leads to just saving after a lucky shot and loading when unnecessarily hit. I'm not saying it should be like GTA where you gotta drive 20 minutes just to save(or spend half your f*****g money to buy a closer safehouse)but a quick load/save system will always lead to abuse. You might say you won't use it that much but it's like having a pile of pot on your desk, you will regret it, but hell it's gonna be more fun.
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jaja great article, dont quite agree with everything, but with most of it yea… graphic quality does matter, unless its a really incredible f****n game… like mario kart for the 64…
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Great article I must say.. but you forgot to mention BurgerTime as the best all-time game in the world. You're forgiven
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Pretty darned good article if I do say so myself, but I was pondering this the other day and it occured to me: It would be very difficult to make a WW1 shooter, especially a realistic one. Think about it:
Once your commander orders you, you cross a mined no man's land constantly bombed by your side and your enemy's side, once your 75% there, you get shot at by machine guns, if you make it past that, you have barbed wire to contend with , and if you're lucky to survive ALL THAT, you have a pistol, a knife and a single shot rifle with which to kill your enemies, who now thoroughly outnumber you.
I can see A LOT of gamer's getting frusrated with the gameplay and moving on. Escort missions won't seem so bad after that.
The Wii wins in sales because it's a family console. Something anyone can play. The DS is even more versatile.
Microsoft and Sony tent to aim at those who want to put days at a time into a game, not minutes.
While you could skip them (at the expense of knowing wtf is going on) the cutscenes in metal gear solid 4 were unbearably long, sometimes including a series of cutscenes up to almost an hour long. I always laugh when it records my "play time"
I disagree with the 'padding' one. I actually like it when games have a lot of similar content. I figure if the game does something I like, I want it to do a heck of a lot of what I like. But, I guess normal people don't think this way :(.
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You know anymore I only go though the whole thing of buying maybe five or six games a year these days. Usually games that are over a year old and people tell me "dude It's awesome" cause like I'm broke.
But I honestly can't tell if the video game industry is screwing with us since they know that the average person who sells out the cash for these things is over 26. In that people around this age had to deal with a lot of crap in video games our whole lives. Either that or we forgot about having to deal with this kind of crap and now just expect it not to be there.
Screw it I'm gonna go play Contra.
"#2. Thou shalt make sure your game actually works."
I've got an Addendum to add to that:
Easy Disc Errors
(Violators: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 & 2, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion)
It is frustrating as HELL to have a game where the minute it suffers the TINIEST scratch, it keeps getting a disc read error. Hell, some even do that if they're perfectly clean and have no scratches. Many times you have to restart the game, or in the case of Ultimate Alliance 2, you can't even PLAY the f*****g game until you luck out and start it without a disc error.
It's also bad in that many times you think the console itself is crapping out on you after you've cleaned the disc or see a few weak scratches.
Wonderful article. Thoroughly enjoyed it man.
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i don't agree with the oblivion in the "thou shall make killing fun". that cave was a sort of tutorial. it was the begining of the game and you are breaking out of prison of course you're going to have a crappy sword, but you also had magic fireballs to shoot them with. and there were also goblins in the cave and evil guys to kill before you got to the open world. and found better armor and weapons before getting out as well.