The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey
|
#4.
Thou shalt make killing fun.
Violators:
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).
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. |
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Digg
Del.icio.us
FarkRecommended for Your Pleasure
-
6 Web How-To's That Are Apparently For Supervillains
by: David Dietle589,864 views -
If Video Games Were Realistic
by: CRACKED Readers505,153 views -
5 Awesome Cases of The Internet Owning The Mainstream Media
by: Robert Brockway497,247 views -
17 Terrible Jobs We'll Need In The Future
by: CRACKED Readers461,228 views
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.
Nice article ... i make a copy of my games with this great software i found
http://88ca78uk6y0t1p58sb6qt8r43r.hop.clickbank.net/
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…
My friends recommended me a very interesting place ~~~ AgelessFriends.com ~~~ It's a nice and free place for Younger Women and Older Men, or Older Women and Younger Men, to interact with each other. You may wanna check it out.
$30 nike jordan prada timberland supra,lacoste,gucci shoes
$25 CHANEL, GUCCI, LV, COACH, FENDI, BURBERRY, D&G, JUICY, Ed Hardy handbag
$30 coogi jeans,armani,Crow Holder,D&G,Evisu jeans,Diesel,Christian Audigier,Rock,True Religion,Affliction,Ed Hardy,RMC jeans etc
$35 Coogi,Crow Holder,D&G,Evisu,Bape,BBC,Diesel,Christan Audigier,Rock, True Religion, Affliction, Ed Hardy, RMC hoodies
$15 Michael Jackson, Armani t-shirts,Affliction,Coogi,Ed hardy,LRG,Crown older,Evisu,G-star,Polo,Christian Audigier t-shirts
Top quality! Free shipping!Free returns!No any extra cost!
Please visit http://www.netsowntown.com
Great article I must say.. but you forgot to mention BurgerTime as the best all-time game in the world. You're forgiven
wanna get laid tonight
join the biggest on line Sex community in the world use the following link:
http://www.Sssex.net
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 :(.
100% free dating site ____MyPlusSpace.c o m____! Many big beautiful women and big handsome men like to go there seeking for fun & romance!
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.
Wanna find a tall partner???
Here is a very nice place ----------- Tallfinder.com --------It's where Tall people look for someone to enjoy their lifestyle with. Come in and stay a while. Post a message, a pic of yourself and check out the hot photo galleries. You are guaranteed to find your special there...
"mirrors edge is the only game ever made that has first person jumping puzzles that work, the only reason for that is that you can see your feet, that is why 99% of first person jumping puzzles don't work. mirrors edge is awesome"
Well, being no good at jumping puzzles, I can say that the rope-climbing/jumping sessions in Dark Messiah of Might & Magic are pretty easy to master. Besides, for a first-person shooter/slasher/kicker/mauler, it's extremely well done, with a good storyline, lots of gore and flying body parts, but packed with enough humour to keep it from becoming just another bloodfest. Killing enemies has rarely been so much fun.
Final Fantasy Crisis Core would have been a great game, but the fact that it has 5 minute long unskippable cutscenes before every boss fight, including the final boss which is very hard to beat, makes it suck for me. Really. The removal of the ability to push start and directly jump into the fight has ruined an otherwise awesome game with great graphics, combat and story.
I loved all of your points right on. Except I found the last one a bit odd talking about the crappy endings when not too long ago I saw an article endorsing the elimination of all cut scenes. It mentioned especially long ones but basically wanted them all gone.
For the most part you can just press the [esc] key to end all cut scenes and get back to game play. However I love cut scenes they are usually my favorite part of the game though I would hate to have a 3/hr one in a game like Metal Gear but for games like Resident Evil where the story adds to the zombie killing rather then takes away from it, it's essential not to skimp. Some games after I am done I would almost like to have a movie version of it on a separate disc I could put in and watch. And no not just a youtube vid of me playing it :P
More on Tech
-
The 5 Circles of Baffling Web Comic Hell
870,030 views -
The World of Tomorrow (If The Internet Disappeared Today)
695,348 views -
The 5 Most Ridiculously Awful Computers Ever Made
694,890 views -
A Review of the Pirated Copy of Windows 7 I Bought On eBay
593,630 views
-
Curse of the Duck Hunt Dog
by: Tremendosaur60,782 views -
6 Types Of Youtube Videos There Are Waaay Too Many Of
by: Michael Swaim239,311 views
-
Articles
-
Videos
-
Columnists
-
More Cracked
-
About
Copyright © 2005 - 2009 Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. CRACKED, CRACKED.COM and the "CRACKED" logo are trademarks owned by Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.
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.