It happened again at lunch today. I was talking about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night with a coworker, and, unprompted, one of the first things they brought up was how good they remembered the music being. A couple of other people have said the same thing, and I have even read a preview comparing the music in our game to the music in SotN (in quality, definitely not in style). Unlike me, these people played the game when it came out (XBLA gave me a second chance to redeem myself), and they still find the music memorable. Trouble is, I can't for the life of me remember a single track from beginning to end, and I have just recently beaten the game a second time to get 200.6% and once more with Richter to get the full 200 achievement points. And then some to get 99 of everything the librarian sells including duplicators (I used the sword familiar glitch, but it still took a while). And then some more to grind up some levels. Fantastic control scheme, brilliant use of gameplay mechanics to implicitly branch the story, and support for a variety of play styles make this game one of the best of the PSX era. But wait, there was music playing in the background? I do remember some area had music that sounded like it would be better on an elevator than in a Castlevania, and the ending theme was far more emotional than the rest of the game tried to evoke, but the remainder of the tracks have not managed to stick in my memory.
I have begun to wonder if I am not giving enough attention to the aural aspect of game consumption. If ten years from now someone was to bring up SotN in a conversation, the first things I would laud would be the castle design and the risky decision to put so much effort into implementing and not advertising the second half of the game. The background tracks, while fitting and mostly just as polished as the game, would not even come to mind. But my experience has shown me that Symphony's music is in fact one of the first things people remember about the game. If you have played this title, what do you think? Is the music memorable to you? Is it as good as the gameplay or better?
That out of the way, there are a few titles that show me that I can notice and appreciate music in games. Eternal Sonata immediately comes to mind, as do many older JRPGs (almost any FF, Chrono Trigger, Lunar, Xenogears - pretty much anything done by Uematsu, Mitsuda, or Iwadare). I recently started playing Banjo Kazooie and marvelled at how the music changes dynamically from an ominous version to a softer version of the same tune when you approach the door to a world, or when you transition underwater. I even found myself relaxing recently to the title screen theme to the XBLA port of Uno when I left it running in the background. Conversely, when I played the original Castlevania again recently, I was cringing at how grating the three-channel NES tracks were. We put up with a lot back in the day...
How about you? What games have soundtracks that you remember years later (or will likely remember years from now if they are recent)? I would have to give mad props to the original Nights for having some of the most original, uplifting music in video game history (the sequel does a good job in this area as well) and to Doom64 for trading pop melody for darker atmospheric tracks (best in the series, imo). Another interesting question: is it possible for game music to be "too good" - that is, to be so outstanding that you are pulled out of the immersion and start appreciating it for its own merits? If this occurs, is it a good thing for the game as a whole?
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Games Aren't Elevator Pitches
So I had a dream last night, about a video game. Specifically, I was going through a crazy sequence of events and realized (felt), during the dream and immediately upon waking up, that these events and the setting around them would make for a cool game. The last time I had a game-dream so visceral and structured was about a Doom level that I ended up making into a Doom level the next day with satisfying similarity.
In the beginning of the dream/game, I am a young journalist who is called, via connections through my father, to fill in for a local news anchor that recently took his own life (or simply vanished, I can't remember). In this context, “local” refers to a submerged city located directly off the coast. Yeah yeah, like Bioshock. I never said my dream was original, just that it was “cool”.
During the prologue, I am walking around throughout the city and finding my way to my new living quarters. While doing so, I end up taking a written test for my new anchor job. One of the questions asks how I would lie to make an example news story more interesting, and I try to figure out how to write that I wouldn't though such an option seems left out of the multiple choice answer suite. I meet some girl in the living quarters, I think she is a typical “childhood friend” character that I haven't seen in a while because there is some unspecified, positive familiarity that I feel toward her. In other words, she is there to give emotional validity when shit eventually goes down.
And down does the shit go. The dream skips ahead in time, during which I am somehow aware that there is more to the original anchor's death/disappearance than the news station lets on (when is there not?). Before I know it, the girl and I are running through the city, which is filled with Rapturesque glass tubes connecting buildings at the bottom of the sea as well as mammoth caverns carved by man into the coast. Predictably, there are monsters, and we are shooting at them, myself in the first person. I don't really know where these monsters came from, but that's okay because neither does my character.
We come to a particularly large cavern, about the breadth of a city block and high enough to store a handful of two story buildings. We are walking down a road when suddenly a huge mechanical scorpion climbs out of its resting place. Think the first boss in FF7, but ten times as big. We run around a building while the scorpion mech shoots at us with a rapid-fire gun. We manage to find the entrance to the building, which consists of two large metal doors that slide left and right. We run inside and close the doors, finding ourselves in a single room warehouse with a catwalk running around the edge.
The scorpion mech is not through with us. It walks around the building, shooting through glass windows on the first floor. We need to maneuver out of its sight to avoid getting hit. At some point, the scorpion brings its excavator-shaped tail down through the roof, hitting part of the catwalk and knocking it down to create a ramp to the second floor. The gamer inside me knows that I must go up this ramp to progress, and the designer inside me appreciates this pace-keeping hint.
From the second floor, we manage to get some better shots and better hiding angles, but it looks like the scorpion mech isn't going down from pistol fire alone. At one point, it brings its tail down through the roof again and gets it stuck in some large metal casing on the catwalk. Pulling the casing off reveals four large green cubes which I recognize as explosive mines. I tell the girl to get back, throw a mine out the second story window at the scorpion, then run back myself. The mine explodes, clearly damaging the scorpion, but not destroying it. I position myself and throw another mine, dealing more damage but failing to destroy my opponent.
Tired of this stalemate, the scorpion wants in. It uses its large claws to try and pry open the door. The girl and I each grab a side of the door and push back (explicit teamwork mechanics), somehow managing to force it closed. I assume the door's hydraulics are working with us. The scorpion backs up, and I somehow know that it is about to jump through the roof. Not taking the time to explain this clairvoyance, I lead the girl back up to the catwalk for an escape (I guess the door is broken and the first floor windows are barred or something?). Sure enough, the giant mech crashes through the feeble roof into the center of the warehouse. The girl and I jump out the hole that it created with its tail earlier.
While the scorpion is stuck inside the warehouse, we run in the direction we were heading before it interrupted us. We run down hill and enter a small cave that the scorpion could probably fit in, but not comfortably. There is a trailor up a hill, but it is in direct line of sight with the scorpion were it to find its way out of the warehouse. Instead of exploring the trailor (which probably has some interesting items due to its vulnerable location), we veer off to the left and run down hill and out of sight of the large cavern. We meet a woman who we both know somehow, a scientist of some sort. She presses some buttons on a terminal and we watch through a window as the warehouse explodes, an explosion much larger than those of the previous green mines. The warehouse itself is vaporized, but the scorpion still stands. While the machine charges up for another blast (however that works, I didn't question it at the time), the girl and I fight off some weaker monsters that inhabit the cavern.
Despite only getting five or six hours of sleep, I couldn't fall back asleep after waking from this dream. I kept thinking about it, how for a sequence of random neurons firing in my head, it had so much cohesion to it. I wanted to make this game. I don't now, now that the magic of having just experienced it in true first person has worn off, but at the time I did. I was thinking about how I would go about convincing my company to make it, how I would differentiate it from Bioshock, how I could add colors to avoid the typical gray/brown criticism that most FPSes deservedly receive, how the companion AI could operate to be an asset instead of a liability. I started thinking about the boss fight, what would happen if the catwalk fell on me or the girl after the tail came through the roof for the first time. Would that be a game over? Or, more interestingly, would one of us be pinned down while the other tried to find a way to save them? In the dream, I knew when the scorpion was going to jump through the roof simply because it was my dream. If the player was caught off guard by this and got crushed, it would be an unfair death. How would we communicate this to the player? I pictured a huge array of lights resting against the cavern wall just outside the warehouse, perhaps to brighten the cavern. If the scorpion could not jump but had to climb up the wall, and subsequently the array of lights, then the scorpion's shadow through the windows and roof (if the roof was glass) would serve as a fair and frightening indicator of what it was trying to do.
Or at least, what I think you think.
You think this is a generic FPS that I have an inflated opinion of because it came from a dream that I had, right? Of course you do. I feel that way too, now that the post-dream magic has worn off. But that is because you did not experience it, you merely read about it on a blog. What you experienced was a linear story, what I experienced was a dynamic world that responded to my actions, a unique challenge that was life-threatening yet fair. Perhaps because my subconscious was specifically tailoring the excitement for me, I dare say the pacing was perfect.
This brings me to the main point of this post: games aren't elevator pitches. You can not, Can Not fully appreciate a game without playing it. This is the inherent flaw in text reviews and image/movie based previews. It is also the flaw with the elevator pitch mentality that publishers have with game proposals. The strong point of any game is not the visuals, though unfortunately that is what gets marketed too often. Nor is the strong point how well the hindsight story reads when written on a blog. It is the interaction, of course. No, it is the full experience; interaction, immersion, and all. This is game design 101 here. Or 1001, if your college numbers their courses like mine did.
It's kind of odd that we are creatures that spend 1/3 of our lives vulnerable, unconscious, and hallucinating, amirite? Being an introspective person, I often wonder where my dreams come from. Consider this an addendum, if blog posts must be so formal in structure.
Obviously, I have played Bioshock and Fallout 3, both of which appear to have influenced the design of my dream-game. There is also a bit of Half-life 2 influence, as the girl can be compared aesthetically and mechanically to Alyx Vance. And interestingly enough, my friend was playing Final Fantasy 7 while on the phone with me and describing nostalgically his encounter with the first boss, just a couple of weeks ago. Finally, I was reading another person's blog last night where they described a dream they had. Finally (for real), I have been working on pitching a game design at my company, which may have primed the mentality needed for that dream to flourish.
Have any cool dreams where you are playing a new game or new levels for a game that exists? Is it ever as cool after waking up as it was while you were experiencing it?
The “Plot”
In the beginning of the dream/game, I am a young journalist who is called, via connections through my father, to fill in for a local news anchor that recently took his own life (or simply vanished, I can't remember). In this context, “local” refers to a submerged city located directly off the coast. Yeah yeah, like Bioshock. I never said my dream was original, just that it was “cool”.
During the prologue, I am walking around throughout the city and finding my way to my new living quarters. While doing so, I end up taking a written test for my new anchor job. One of the questions asks how I would lie to make an example news story more interesting, and I try to figure out how to write that I wouldn't though such an option seems left out of the multiple choice answer suite. I meet some girl in the living quarters, I think she is a typical “childhood friend” character that I haven't seen in a while because there is some unspecified, positive familiarity that I feel toward her. In other words, she is there to give emotional validity when shit eventually goes down.
And down does the shit go. The dream skips ahead in time, during which I am somehow aware that there is more to the original anchor's death/disappearance than the news station lets on (when is there not?). Before I know it, the girl and I are running through the city, which is filled with Rapturesque glass tubes connecting buildings at the bottom of the sea as well as mammoth caverns carved by man into the coast. Predictably, there are monsters, and we are shooting at them, myself in the first person. I don't really know where these monsters came from, but that's okay because neither does my character.
We come to a particularly large cavern, about the breadth of a city block and high enough to store a handful of two story buildings. We are walking down a road when suddenly a huge mechanical scorpion climbs out of its resting place. Think the first boss in FF7, but ten times as big. We run around a building while the scorpion mech shoots at us with a rapid-fire gun. We manage to find the entrance to the building, which consists of two large metal doors that slide left and right. We run inside and close the doors, finding ourselves in a single room warehouse with a catwalk running around the edge.
The scorpion mech is not through with us. It walks around the building, shooting through glass windows on the first floor. We need to maneuver out of its sight to avoid getting hit. At some point, the scorpion brings its excavator-shaped tail down through the roof, hitting part of the catwalk and knocking it down to create a ramp to the second floor. The gamer inside me knows that I must go up this ramp to progress, and the designer inside me appreciates this pace-keeping hint.
From the second floor, we manage to get some better shots and better hiding angles, but it looks like the scorpion mech isn't going down from pistol fire alone. At one point, it brings its tail down through the roof again and gets it stuck in some large metal casing on the catwalk. Pulling the casing off reveals four large green cubes which I recognize as explosive mines. I tell the girl to get back, throw a mine out the second story window at the scorpion, then run back myself. The mine explodes, clearly damaging the scorpion, but not destroying it. I position myself and throw another mine, dealing more damage but failing to destroy my opponent.
Tired of this stalemate, the scorpion wants in. It uses its large claws to try and pry open the door. The girl and I each grab a side of the door and push back (explicit teamwork mechanics), somehow managing to force it closed. I assume the door's hydraulics are working with us. The scorpion backs up, and I somehow know that it is about to jump through the roof. Not taking the time to explain this clairvoyance, I lead the girl back up to the catwalk for an escape (I guess the door is broken and the first floor windows are barred or something?). Sure enough, the giant mech crashes through the feeble roof into the center of the warehouse. The girl and I jump out the hole that it created with its tail earlier.
While the scorpion is stuck inside the warehouse, we run in the direction we were heading before it interrupted us. We run down hill and enter a small cave that the scorpion could probably fit in, but not comfortably. There is a trailor up a hill, but it is in direct line of sight with the scorpion were it to find its way out of the warehouse. Instead of exploring the trailor (which probably has some interesting items due to its vulnerable location), we veer off to the left and run down hill and out of sight of the large cavern. We meet a woman who we both know somehow, a scientist of some sort. She presses some buttons on a terminal and we watch through a window as the warehouse explodes, an explosion much larger than those of the previous green mines. The warehouse itself is vaporized, but the scorpion still stands. While the machine charges up for another blast (however that works, I didn't question it at the time), the girl and I fight off some weaker monsters that inhabit the cavern.
Waking Reception
Despite only getting five or six hours of sleep, I couldn't fall back asleep after waking from this dream. I kept thinking about it, how for a sequence of random neurons firing in my head, it had so much cohesion to it. I wanted to make this game. I don't now, now that the magic of having just experienced it in true first person has worn off, but at the time I did. I was thinking about how I would go about convincing my company to make it, how I would differentiate it from Bioshock, how I could add colors to avoid the typical gray/brown criticism that most FPSes deservedly receive, how the companion AI could operate to be an asset instead of a liability. I started thinking about the boss fight, what would happen if the catwalk fell on me or the girl after the tail came through the roof for the first time. Would that be a game over? Or, more interestingly, would one of us be pinned down while the other tried to find a way to save them? In the dream, I knew when the scorpion was going to jump through the roof simply because it was my dream. If the player was caught off guard by this and got crushed, it would be an unfair death. How would we communicate this to the player? I pictured a huge array of lights resting against the cavern wall just outside the warehouse, perhaps to brighten the cavern. If the scorpion could not jump but had to climb up the wall, and subsequently the array of lights, then the scorpion's shadow through the windows and roof (if the roof was glass) would serve as a fair and frightening indicator of what it was trying to do.
Let Me Tell You What You Think About That
Or at least, what I think you think.
You think this is a generic FPS that I have an inflated opinion of because it came from a dream that I had, right? Of course you do. I feel that way too, now that the post-dream magic has worn off. But that is because you did not experience it, you merely read about it on a blog. What you experienced was a linear story, what I experienced was a dynamic world that responded to my actions, a unique challenge that was life-threatening yet fair. Perhaps because my subconscious was specifically tailoring the excitement for me, I dare say the pacing was perfect.
This brings me to the main point of this post: games aren't elevator pitches. You can not, Can Not fully appreciate a game without playing it. This is the inherent flaw in text reviews and image/movie based previews. It is also the flaw with the elevator pitch mentality that publishers have with game proposals. The strong point of any game is not the visuals, though unfortunately that is what gets marketed too often. Nor is the strong point how well the hindsight story reads when written on a blog. It is the interaction, of course. No, it is the full experience; interaction, immersion, and all. This is game design 101 here. Or 1001, if your college numbers their courses like mine did.
The Catalysts?
It's kind of odd that we are creatures that spend 1/3 of our lives vulnerable, unconscious, and hallucinating, amirite? Being an introspective person, I often wonder where my dreams come from. Consider this an addendum, if blog posts must be so formal in structure.
Obviously, I have played Bioshock and Fallout 3, both of which appear to have influenced the design of my dream-game. There is also a bit of Half-life 2 influence, as the girl can be compared aesthetically and mechanically to Alyx Vance. And interestingly enough, my friend was playing Final Fantasy 7 while on the phone with me and describing nostalgically his encounter with the first boss, just a couple of weeks ago. Finally, I was reading another person's blog last night where they described a dream they had. Finally (for real), I have been working on pitching a game design at my company, which may have primed the mentality needed for that dream to flourish.
How About You?
Have any cool dreams where you are playing a new game or new levels for a game that exists? Is it ever as cool after waking up as it was while you were experiencing it?
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Grand Theft Agency
"Open World", "Sandbox", "Playground" - these are all words that we hear thrown around in gaming parlance to describe a design trend that only increases in popularity. The promise is that players will be put in a fully simulated world, guided into plot-specific missions but generally free to do whatever they want. Time and time again, we fail to fully deliver this promise.
I had rather high expectations for GTA IV, I really did. In fact, I am enjoying the game a great deal - it's not quite as fun as Mario Kart Wii or Brawl, and I have even been putting more time into the under-appreciated Professor Layton, but GTA IV is a much more immersive experience. Yet despite the perfect atmosphere and engaging side-quests, I am really disappointed that the latest torchbearer in the series that defined the open world experience, a title that has even become the fiscal leader in launch success, earning more than any launch event in any medium of entertainment in history, still drags me around on a very short leash through the main quest.
I'm not very good at GTA IV. I've never been good at the series. As such, I have failed quite a few of the early missions. I don't really mind this, as all of the failures seemed fair - but I am extremely disappointed in how they are handled. From my experience, if you fail a mission for any reason, you are forced to do it again until you get it right - even if you didn't die. This has happened to me several times in just a few hours, and each time I feel my immersion crash faster and harder than Niko in that embarrassing little incident when I handbraked into a cop car stopped at a red light.
The latest incident, the one that caused me to shake my head in disappointment and add another crufty entry to my blog o' complaints, occurred in an early mission where Vladimir ordered me to spook up a laundromat owner for "insurance" money. When I arrived, he got scared and took off out the back, hopping in a van and fleeing. I hot wired a car and sped after him; a pretty fun experience. I managed to knock the sucker off the road into some trees. He wouldn't get out of his car, and kept trying to escape, halted by my t-boning him into more trees. After a couple of minutes of this, I got tired of his antics (and unsure of what to do to trigger the mission progression) so I got out of my car and shot him in the head. He fell onto his horn; that and the gunshot must have been heard by the police, for the area was immediately bathed in blue lights dancing to the tune of sirens. I hauled it out of there and gave Vlady a call.
He was not happy, claiming there was no way to get insurance money from a dead guy. Okay, so I blew it, I figured I would do a better job with the next "client" - and perhaps word of the laundromat owner's uninsured death would make future clients more compliant. I returned to the discrete bar to talk to Vladimir once more, and as I entered I was faced with an all too familiar cutscene.
I had to start the mission over again. I had "failed" it.
Feeling my frustration wax and my immersion wane, I headed back for the laundromat - only this time, to speed things up, I thought I would be clever. I knew the owner was scripted to run for it, and I knew which car he would use. I was using my foreknowledge from a previous mission attempt to game the game. My immersion already spent, I decided to break the forth wall myself, a wall that Rockstar apparently built out of hay and elmer's glue. I went around back and tried to break into the van to drive it far away. The door was locked, but Niko has street smarts and knows how to break a window with his elbow. To my surprise, when I do this I see a message saying that the laundromat owner got scared and escaped out the front. Niko pulls out his cell phone to tell Vladimir the bad news.
I had failed the mission again.
Similarly, in an earlier mission, I let a loan shark get away. My cousin complained at me and told me that now we would be up to our necks in loan sharks trying to get revenge. I was excited, naively thinking that my failure had thrown me down an exhilerating narrative branch. But it didn't; Rockstar took the weakest copout they could and forced me to play the mission again. I'm not asking for an exponential branching tree at every mission to give me a game with 1024 unique endings, but I also don't think it would be terribly hard to allow the player to "half-pass" missions by performing suboptimally, giving them less of a financial reward but letting them continue the game. This mentality of "you can play however you want as long as it is the one way I thought of" is still holding back modern game design. Time and time again, developers promise everything in the kitchen but the sink, and when we accept we find ourselves in a room with dust-covered counters, bare cupboards, and a fridge with a spoiled smell so nauseating that we are loathe to open it.
There is a phrase called "next gen" gaming. It is basically a horrible marketing ploy/misnomer used by Microsoft and Sony to make you think you are getting more out of your games than you really are. Firstly, this is not the "next generation" of gaming, it is the "current generation". The "next generation" will be the, well, "next" generation of consoles (or equivalent "large" step forward). It hasn't arrived yet. Secondly, I would argue that we haven't really left the generation of games that we've been in for about a decade now. Sure, the graphics have improved, and we have begun to realize that not every gamer wants to die five times per missions, but, well... we still have missions and death and failures leading to retries structuring almost all of our commercial titles.
Grand Theft Auto IV is a fun game. Really. It currently has a score of 99/100 on metacritic formed from several dozen reviews, which is simply phenomenal. It saw launch week success surpassing that of Halo 3. In many ways, GTA IV is the pinnacle of current gaming, if not in quality alone then in the attention that it will hold for years to come. Unfortunately, I can't help but feel as if Rockstar has given me a mic and a stage to say whatever I want to say without them listening, only hearing what they want to hear. The sandbox is large, but the sand itself is low quality, too dry, and all my castles fall to dust within moments of divination.
I'm through venting. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go tear up Liberty City in my stolen taxi, save my cousin's debt-drowned ass, and take Michelle to the bowling alley while contemplating solutions to this treadmill the industry walks perpetually.
I had rather high expectations for GTA IV, I really did. In fact, I am enjoying the game a great deal - it's not quite as fun as Mario Kart Wii or Brawl, and I have even been putting more time into the under-appreciated Professor Layton, but GTA IV is a much more immersive experience. Yet despite the perfect atmosphere and engaging side-quests, I am really disappointed that the latest torchbearer in the series that defined the open world experience, a title that has even become the fiscal leader in launch success, earning more than any launch event in any medium of entertainment in history, still drags me around on a very short leash through the main quest.
I'm not very good at GTA IV. I've never been good at the series. As such, I have failed quite a few of the early missions. I don't really mind this, as all of the failures seemed fair - but I am extremely disappointed in how they are handled. From my experience, if you fail a mission for any reason, you are forced to do it again until you get it right - even if you didn't die. This has happened to me several times in just a few hours, and each time I feel my immersion crash faster and harder than Niko in that embarrassing little incident when I handbraked into a cop car stopped at a red light.
The latest incident, the one that caused me to shake my head in disappointment and add another crufty entry to my blog o' complaints, occurred in an early mission where Vladimir ordered me to spook up a laundromat owner for "insurance" money. When I arrived, he got scared and took off out the back, hopping in a van and fleeing. I hot wired a car and sped after him; a pretty fun experience. I managed to knock the sucker off the road into some trees. He wouldn't get out of his car, and kept trying to escape, halted by my t-boning him into more trees. After a couple of minutes of this, I got tired of his antics (and unsure of what to do to trigger the mission progression) so I got out of my car and shot him in the head. He fell onto his horn; that and the gunshot must have been heard by the police, for the area was immediately bathed in blue lights dancing to the tune of sirens. I hauled it out of there and gave Vlady a call.
He was not happy, claiming there was no way to get insurance money from a dead guy. Okay, so I blew it, I figured I would do a better job with the next "client" - and perhaps word of the laundromat owner's uninsured death would make future clients more compliant. I returned to the discrete bar to talk to Vladimir once more, and as I entered I was faced with an all too familiar cutscene.
I had to start the mission over again. I had "failed" it.
Feeling my frustration wax and my immersion wane, I headed back for the laundromat - only this time, to speed things up, I thought I would be clever. I knew the owner was scripted to run for it, and I knew which car he would use. I was using my foreknowledge from a previous mission attempt to game the game. My immersion already spent, I decided to break the forth wall myself, a wall that Rockstar apparently built out of hay and elmer's glue. I went around back and tried to break into the van to drive it far away. The door was locked, but Niko has street smarts and knows how to break a window with his elbow. To my surprise, when I do this I see a message saying that the laundromat owner got scared and escaped out the front. Niko pulls out his cell phone to tell Vladimir the bad news.
I had failed the mission again.
Similarly, in an earlier mission, I let a loan shark get away. My cousin complained at me and told me that now we would be up to our necks in loan sharks trying to get revenge. I was excited, naively thinking that my failure had thrown me down an exhilerating narrative branch. But it didn't; Rockstar took the weakest copout they could and forced me to play the mission again. I'm not asking for an exponential branching tree at every mission to give me a game with 1024 unique endings, but I also don't think it would be terribly hard to allow the player to "half-pass" missions by performing suboptimally, giving them less of a financial reward but letting them continue the game. This mentality of "you can play however you want as long as it is the one way I thought of" is still holding back modern game design. Time and time again, developers promise everything in the kitchen but the sink, and when we accept we find ourselves in a room with dust-covered counters, bare cupboards, and a fridge with a spoiled smell so nauseating that we are loathe to open it.
There is a phrase called "next gen" gaming. It is basically a horrible marketing ploy/misnomer used by Microsoft and Sony to make you think you are getting more out of your games than you really are. Firstly, this is not the "next generation" of gaming, it is the "current generation". The "next generation" will be the, well, "next" generation of consoles (or equivalent "large" step forward). It hasn't arrived yet. Secondly, I would argue that we haven't really left the generation of games that we've been in for about a decade now. Sure, the graphics have improved, and we have begun to realize that not every gamer wants to die five times per missions, but, well... we still have missions and death and failures leading to retries structuring almost all of our commercial titles.
Grand Theft Auto IV is a fun game. Really. It currently has a score of 99/100 on metacritic formed from several dozen reviews, which is simply phenomenal. It saw launch week success surpassing that of Halo 3. In many ways, GTA IV is the pinnacle of current gaming, if not in quality alone then in the attention that it will hold for years to come. Unfortunately, I can't help but feel as if Rockstar has given me a mic and a stage to say whatever I want to say without them listening, only hearing what they want to hear. The sandbox is large, but the sand itself is low quality, too dry, and all my castles fall to dust within moments of divination.
I'm through venting. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go tear up Liberty City in my stolen taxi, save my cousin's debt-drowned ass, and take Michelle to the bowling alley while contemplating solutions to this treadmill the industry walks perpetually.
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