Archive for the ‘Editorial’ Category

So this is the other half of the discussion I started the other day with an article about games I didn’t love, but still managed to finish.  This other half involves games that I thought were good, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to play.  Not that I won’t play ever them, but these are great games that always seem to sit idle while I play others, both good and mediocre.

So why do these otherwise great games get pushed aside?  In some cases the problem is clear.  GTA4, for example, has two very clear reasons.  The first is that not having checkpoints means enormous chunks of time can be rendered pointless because of small mistakes; ie. getting killed.  The other is that although the cell phone and the relationships that came with it were interesting and valuable to the story, being punished for not going to the strip club while I’m already very busy (ie. trying not to get killed) kept me from just fooling around.  Doing whatever you want in a GTA game is one of the great draws to the series, but you were constantly dragged away to play some dumb mini game.  If you didn’t get punished for saying no, I could put up with phone calls, but losing friendship benefits over darts was irritating.

Others aren’t so clear.  There can be much more subtle reasons that a game doesn’t get chosen for my occasionally sparse video-gaming time.  These are the cases I want to explore a little more.  These are games that I have enjoyed and have won several awards each.  Why aren’t I playing them?  Well, Mass Effect 2 is really good, so playing it keeps me from playing these others, but there has to be a reason I stopped playing them in the first place…

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I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the original Unreal Tournament.  There is something about the original’s unbridled ass-whoopn’ that has never quite been matched by any other game.  The game was violent, blunt, and unforgiving.  The arenas were rough and dark, abandoned structures given a second life as the perfect places to watch competitors fight for their own.

The games that followed (2003, 2004, III, and Championship 1 and 2) never retained that feeling.  The environments became overly intricate, even delicate looking in some instances.  The players went from simply dodging to flipping and twirling off walls.  These are supposed to be hardened warriors, not ballerinas!  Nevertheless, these games have added some great things to the series and still provide a fun, competitive gaming experience despite how far they have strayed from the original game.

Even with the series’ advancements there is one thing, or rather a collection of things, that the Tournament has never gotten: a true sports game treatment.

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Making it to the end of a game has always been a significant milestone.  Many early arcade games didn’t even have “endings”.  They were often a constant barrage of harder levels until the player finally succumbed to the difficulty and hopefully got their name on the high score sheet.   Most older console games didn’t have the ability to save your progress and provided a limited amount of lives.  So even if a game had a story, getting to the end in single session was challenging, to say the least.

In the time since then gaming has made many changes, including saving, checkpoints, difficulty levels and regenerating health, that have made it somewhat easier to reach a game’s conclusion.  With the popularity of multiplayer, some stories are also getting shorter as more development time is spent focusing on online features.  Some game still make it difficult.  Fallout 3, Oblivion, Far Cry, and now Dragon Age all push the length of a single player story to the extremes.  But the point of this article is not to talk about how the difficulty of games has changed.

The point is that reaching the end of a game usually takes a certain amount of dedication from the player and it should be a momentous occasion. Unfortunately, sometimes it is not.  An unsatisfying ending can really tarnish an otherwise good game.  So I’m going to take some time to jot down my thoughts on what a good ending should have.

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It is important to know that I am a big fan of Harmonix and my music gaming platform (yes, platform) of choice is the Rock Band series.  I have also played several of the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero games, but they just don’t provide the same level of enjoyment for me.  It is also important to know that as much as I have enjoyed these types of rhythm games, there is no doubt in my mind that the video game market is seeing a few too many of them right now.

I also haven’t played DJ Hero.

So then why am I writing about DJ Hero?  I am writing because of all of the new music titles being released since The Beatles: Rock Band, this is the most interesting idea.

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