Hey, remember when a game was a wondrous adventure you could totally get lost in for weeks on end? Alone?
Depending on your age, there's a good bet that in your teens at least one Final Fantasy game sucked you in with a force that no novel ever could. What happened to games like that, when the single player was a sweeping, epic story rather than five hours you could blow through in a Friday night?
"Now let me tell you the entire history of the War of the Magi."
Of course, those games were created back when the main story was something other than a one-day crash course intended to train you up for the multiplayer. These days, multiplayer is like a "get out of a bad game free" card. Game makers don't have to worry about AI or plot or progression or variety, because the real game is out there on XBox Live, where it's all about players shooting each other until the time limit expires or a point cap is reached. Everything else on the disc is just window dressing for, "point, shoot, die, respawn."
1894 Comments