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The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey

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#4.
Thou shalt make killing fun.

Violators:
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, the Half Life games, almost any game where you fight with sword.

There is a reason why almost every game on the market allows us to kill many, many living things. We humans have a primal urge to kill because, thanks to natural selection, all the homo sapiens who didn't have a primal urge to kill, were themselves killed.

Thus, we find killing very satisfying and video games allow us to go through the motions of killing without actually endangering ourselves or others. Why then do you do things that rob us of this joy? Such as:

Starting us with a bullshit weapon.

Yes, we get that earning bigger, fancier weapons is a reward to keep us playing. But don't make us start with a weapon we probably have in our real-life garage (hey, thanks for the wrench, Bioshock).


"Gordon, the whole world has been taken over by a race of malevolent aliens. All of humanity is depending on you. Here's a goddamned crowbar."

And once you give us the cool weapons, don't keep forcing us to go back to the shitty handgun due to lack of bullets for the non-shitty napalm-tipped shotgun. We're talking to you, Resident Evil series.

How the hell did this trend survive past Wolfenstein? We hate using the handgun. You specifically put it in the game because we hate it. You know you did. We paid money for the game; so why are you making us do things we hate? Ever?

Things like ...

Filling the game with tiny rodent enemies.

Every first-person game seems to have these tiny little enemies that hop at your face, are hard to hit and, worse of all, are unsatisfying to kill.

How many of us were enthralled with Elder Scrolls: Oblivion during the opening prison escape, only to find ourselves in a cave with a rusty sword, trying to kill freaking rats? Seriously? Rats? In the game that was supposed to change gaming forever?

How many of us still actually enjoy shooting head crabs in the Half Life games, having slain half a million of them? How many Wii owners were thrilled to have a frenzied shooter like Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles only to find themselves shooting those pathetic leech things off the floor in room after room?

The only thing less satisfying is ...

Bullets that have no visible effect.

If we shoot a zombie in the arm, we want his arm to blow off. If we shoot him in the knee, we want him to limp. And if we shoot him in the head, we want his head to explode. We want our bullets to create wounds. Now let's watch a bit of Umbrella Chronicles, and watch the zombies go down undamaged, as if beaned with a baseball:

Oh, hey, there's some of those leech things, too. Yay.

Sword-fighting games like Oblivion are worse. You can slash the bad guy in the face with your blade and it does nothing. The enemy looks perfectly normal until he finally falls over dead, as if he had a heart attack from the excitement. Why give us a sword if we can't decapitate people? Don't tell us the system can't handle it, we were blowing off zombie limbs in House of the Dead a decade ago.

It's not about our blood thirst (well, not just about that), it's about making us feel like we're accomplishing something as we work our way through hordes of cookie-cutter bad guys. Oh, hey, you know what else we hate?

Filling the game with hordes of cookie-cutter bad guys.

This is another one of those problems that are exacerbated by new-gen graphics. Now that we can do photo-realistic faces, it's suddenly very weird that we're killing hundreds of identical clones.

How hard would it be to randomize facial features and skin tones? That's what we want, to feel like we're killing hundreds of different people. Not a bunch of clones or twins. We want to know, deep down, that there are hundreds of grieving mothers out there, lamenting the terror of our dreaded blade.



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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

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