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The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey

By David Wong April 29, 2008 3,395,307 views
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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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350 Comments

Ragnarok - I think he was picking on it because of the laughing voices, and how they sound absolutely pathetic.

While the game was a marvel, there were definitely bits and pieces that could be easily made fun of.

Hilarious article, and I agree with every bit of it.

7/2/2009 11:49:16 AM
tdug1991

I mostly agree right up to the last bit, where you picked on FFX.

That scene was just over a minute long, how can you attack the story of that game from watching thet little scene? FFX has over 100 hours of gameplay, hell, then main story of the game takes over 30 hours to complete.

So please, try and know what you're talking about next time, or else you just look like jackasses.

6/28/2009 9:43:37 AM
Ragnarok05

I think that this has been pointed out before but the sole reason why the Wii or the Nintendo DS have outsold all others is because of their lower price. That's why Toyota Yaris has sold way more cars than BMW Series 7 models. Wii also has the worst games out of all consoles, if you don't trust me head over to http://www.metacritic.com/games/wii/ and compare it's games to other systems. Even tho I agree entirely with everything you've written about I just can't agree that the Nintendo has sold more because it's more fun, it's just aimed at poor-er people.

6/23/2009 9:07:23 PM
Broloc

they think its bad that oblivion had a huge map? or any game thats like that? thats what made them awesome! sandbox games arent that great. open worlds are amazing! thats why games like oblivion and fallout 3 got game of the year!

6/22/2009 9:14:34 PM
atheistnation

There is hope though. Look at Fallout 3, which I believe to be one of the best games ever made. The only commandment it breaks is the lack of multiplayer, which it was really never designed for anyway. The team AI is limited to a single person, but it's fairly intelligent, the world is huge and hiking can take a long time, but there's just so much stuff to do between destinations.

Oh, and if you're looking for "bullets that create wounds", there isn't a better game out there. Hell the game even slows the bullet down so you can see it rip the guy's arm off in slo-mo. How cool is that?

6/11/2009 1:16:44 AM
One_Above_All

Epic article. for #3, the solution to keeping "tension" is to have a suspend & save system, where you can suspend at any time (quitting your game), but when you start it up again, the suspend data is cleared so the tension is still there.

In the 360's case, the suspend data shouldn't be cleared, for obvious reasons ;)

6/10/2009 11:32:23 AM
headcase88

lollll, i'm on my wii looking at this article and when i scrolled down to the screen shot of, i think it was, gears of war, a message popped up that said something about not enough memory. ironic.

5/26/2009 1:15:21 AM
elkatieface

A few other things I think are f*****g horrendous in games: Sewer levels, this isn't like a strict rule or anything, it's just that I've still to play a sewer level that I actually enjoyed; they should give what they advertise, remember the advert for Heavenly Sword, the one where you see her do a massive triple flip whilst sliding down a rope then kicking the ass of a million guys, they said that it was "actual game-play," but they didn't tell us that it was all executed with a single button!

5/18/2009 3:14:57 AM
microhendy

@asdfzxc920

Be that as it may, you're gonna get s**t for that.

5/13/2009 10:48:53 AM
PeakJ

I only agree with 1 and 2. Everything else is clearly written by somebody who has NO IDEA how games are developed.

4/29/2009 3:41:41 AM
asdfzxc920

There should be a rule like this about MMORPGs:
"Thou shalt make a MMORPG that have more than just PvE, PvP, leveling up and getting better equipment, AND anything related"

Because, let's face it. MMOs like WoW, Warhammer, Silkroad and anything else based in good graphics and killing the hell out of everything in sight is just a big pain in the ass. It's no wonder people like to hop from MMO to MMO.

4/28/2009 11:22:33 PM
Yaridovich

funny , i will uploaded this to tall dating site ___Tallmingle.com____ to share with my best friends,especially the hot models.

4/28/2009 10:16:55 AM
Shirleyxx

Thank you for the multiplayer comment. I can live with GTA4 for not being multiplayer.

What gets me are the FPS's. Oh sure their "techniqually" multiplayer... but guess what?
I don't have any freaking internet access in my basement!!!
Medal of Honor: Rising Sun let me and one of my friends duke it out with computers on split screen. Or even me alone if I wanted to.

Now what do I get with this generation?!? Running around an empty field picking up weapons and dreaming of shooting 59 other guys...

...I can only replay levels so many times.

4/24/2009 3:20:30 PM
ijpowers

It was good.
Get rid of that surplus watch, books, car, toaster, sewing machine, or clothes by the selling format of Uploaded.TV. Simply shoot a video of the item that you want to sell and upload it in www.uploaded.tv. Now relax, watch your video on real TV, and see how people queue up worldwide to show interest to buy your belonging.

4/20/2009 5:27:20 AM
debasree

I'm sorry, but if you aren't killing nazis or nips then you just aren't killing.

4/19/2009 1:46:24 PM
zombies!

one of the best games i have ever played involved dicking around o horseback for ages to find the next 'boss'. the game was shadow of the collosus and it was absolutely brilliant. i once spent five hours on ecstasy trying to make one jump over a chasm. totally fucked it up every time. came down. did it in one go. i still count those five hours as some of the best five hours of my life. so slagging a game with travelling sequences off just aint right

4/18/2009 8:26:17 PM
fireprism

And, at the end, an ad for "CIVONY": "A WORLD YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE, A STORY HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD, A CAMPAIGN YOU REALLY SHOULD FIGHT WITH, A HOMELAND NEED YOU TO PROTECT!"

4/18/2009 1:03:43 PM
tydaeus

Yeah, in fairness it was EA who screwed the pooch on the PS3 port of Orange Box. Proof that the biggest publishers/studios aren't always the best. Otherwise this article was spot-on.

4/14/2009 2:44:12 AM
DasBroose

Heh, Hl2 is pretty good, you just don't like the style

4/10/2009 11:59:26 AM
LCP

EA developed the PS3 port of Orange Box, not Valve.

4/9/2009 7:09:45 PM
yournamehere

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