The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey
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#1.
Better graphics do not equal innovation and/or creativity.
Violators:
Here are the three competing new-gen consoles, adjusted so that their size roughly reflects how powerful their hardware is in relation to each other.
Here are the same three consoles, adjusted so that their size reflects their worldwide sales in 2007:
Fascinating how that worked out. And yet, guys like Epic games president Mike Capps are out there making stupid-ass statements about how they would never lower themselves to develop for the Wii because that would be "going backward." This is epidemic in an industry that defines "innovation" purely by graphical horsepower and nothing else. Guys like him are utterly baffled that anyone could ever want a Wii, just because it, you know, offers a completely new playing experience. Somehow these guys have gotten it in their heads that nothing counts for innovation except bump mapping and pixel shaders. "However can any human enjoy these outdated graphics without literally vomiting with disgust?" Well, if these people would bother having a conversation with someone outside their own offices, they'd realize that the entire concept of "outdated" graphics is meaningless to 80 percent of gamers. Want proof? Nintendo DS games look like this:
So let's see how that machine's sales compare:
Go check for yourself. They've sold more than 60 million of them. Tell you what, Mike. The next time you see some casual gamer tapping away at their Nintendo DS, show them a screenshot of Gears of War:
Don't be shocked if they point out your game seems made up of three colors (brown, gray, and muzzle flash). Sure, hard-core gamers know the difference, they know the game is a marvel of technology. The rest of us just want to have fun, or be told a good story. And guess what, there are ways to give us that, and it doesn't involve spending millions on a whole new game engine that pushes the hardware to its limits. Such as ... Hiring real writers ... Hey, you know why Portal was such a great time? They hired top-of-the-line writers to write the story and dialog. ... then hiring competent voice actors to say the lines. Don't skip this step. Otherwise you get this ...
That retarded clip is from Final Fantasy X, a game that cost $32 million to make. Come on, guys. Fork over a tiny bit of that to your story team. They need the money. And after they're on board, remind them ... Put some work into the ending. You owe it to us. We worked hard to get here. Don't send us away with a 30-second cutscene of the hero riding into the distance on a jet ski before the credits roll. Whatever happened to the Final Fantasy VI endings? You know, the one that was 20 minutes long and wrapped up the stories of every single character even briefly glimpsed in the game?
It's cool-ass endings that make us want to keep playing. Instead, we get games that graduated from the Metroid school of single-frame congratulatory text.
After all, the idea is to reward the gamer for playing. Hell, maybe we should have just said that and skipped this whole thing. David Wong's descent into madness is chronicled in his horror novel coming out this fall. You may also enjoy his Gamer's Manifesto or his rundown of 7 Viral Videos You Didn't Know Were Staged. And speaking of video games, remember when the premises used to be about dinosaurs riding giant birds and all other manners of clown shit insanity? Ever wonder why? Find out in Video Game Pitch Meeting (1979). |
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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.