Abstract: In this text, I will discuss various subjects related to video games, including tropes and classifications, visuals and design, and my personal preferences as a gamer.
Warning: This is based on personal experience rather than statistics, and while others' opinions are considered, my own is the focus of the conclusions.
⦁ Early Days
I begin my gaming carrer (so to speak) at the age of ten, and unlike other kids I was too poor to own a laptop or computer of personal use able to run videogames. Most the times, if not all, my relation to games was through youtube streaming channels and watching my elder brother play. I believe this signed me as a person always on the lookout for new experieces and adventures, broad discoveries as opposed to others who are more inclined to competitive gaming and completionist that repeat levels until squeezing the very last drop of content.
While being a thrill-seeker might sound daring and intuitive, what it means on practical terms and to the outside viewer is that even after ten years of lots and lots of gaming, I still suck at games. More on competitive gaming later
While I made a hundred gold and struggled to buy basic equipment in Skyrim, my brother had already purchased every house and pretty much emptied every shopper from his gold, making tours through the map to exploit the restock mechanics. While I believe that the strange success of his endevours was partly thanks to online guides of where to get the better equipment, his nature was to min-max and try to exploit the game's loopholes, such as the dragging items out of sight to steal them without consecuences whereas mine made me do weird role-playing stuff such as slowly drifting in a river unto unknown lands or try to reach beyond the map, to no avail of course. Where my sister made a crystal castle with disigned windows and bridges, paintings and tables in Terraria, I would bomb a hole in the middle of enemy land and create a Pillbox of sorts, killing souleaters with wooden arrows and copper dagger for hours, or making a sort of trench that travesed through all the map. I also remember how quickly the game become boring to me after having discovered all biomes, and how pale the thrill of bossfights were in comparison to the first night zombie survival.
Horror games used to be nightmare fuel, and I vividly recall the Amnesia monster or the bloody vents from Outlast, and spending night with my dad descending into the dark mansion uncovering unspeakable horrors of torture was something to look forward..
⦁ Videogames as Escapism
When I had the unfortunate combination of events of a spiteful mother forcefully taking me away from the rest of my family, a hostile enviroment, my own pecularities and unprescribed psychiatric medication tossed my life in dissarey, I resorted once again to videogames, but this time it wasn't a happy memory or something I was looking forward to experiment adventures, rather it was a way to not think about the circumstances that surrounded me. In that time I played a variety of online games, from Rise of King to bubble head soccer, tycoon-management about boats, dressing games and even texas hold 'em without understanding what was I doing (I simply went "all in" every turn, for hours). It didn't really matter what it was nor do I remember much of that time, as a point of comparison, during said period of time I watched "Scooby-doo and the goblin king" two dozen times. My mom walked in one day and smashed the DVD to stop me from watching it again. Escapism is clearly differenciated form entertainment as it feels void and there's a feeling of sadness that lies underneth.
⦁ The Long-Awaited Return and Videogames as a Reward
When that situation was over there was a recuperation time when I was rendered practically savage, and my ability to parse and understand text was close to nill. To prevent me from slipping back into escapism-videogame my dad used the wildly known method of "you get your games if you do these other necesary stuff first". It was effective for a short while but went stale afterwards, since it isn't the best way to motivate someone. It did occured later that my PC only being able to run a single game (Baldur's gate II) forced me into learning english, and while I skimmed a lot of text and my knowledge at the moment was rather crude it was the cornerstone of what I accomplished later in said matter, though I couldn't replicate the event since it requires ginormous amounts of willpower to go from nothing to full language immersion.
⦁ The Golden Age
All my time as a high-schooler, as fortune smiled at me, I was able to adquire a good PC and play about every game I wanted. I've never bother myself with piracy morality and never hesitated to go to piratebay, kickasstorrents or more recently IGG, even Steamunlock. I've played from EA old games such as Sims, Black and White, Spore, dragon age origins, Simcity... They were mostly terrible but I enjoyed them. I also played other classic RPGs such as Fallout, Skyrim (again), Oblivion and smaller indie proyects like Don't starve that I recalled having played with my sister. I even played and enjoyed online games like Swords and Souls, and the first feelings I had about videogames were brought back, things were new and enjoyable and it didn't matter if the story wasn't all that coherent or the gameplay wasn't perfect, it was just enjoying the moment
⦁ Seen the Matrix?
Five years ago, I teared to my dad that I was afraid of growing old and stop liking videogames. My dad said that I shouldn't worry about it, since change is a part of life and that I would find other things I would enjoy. These past three years I played a lot of games, as in... A lot. According to my broad estimations, over six hundred games have passed through my hands, or well my computer really. Trying to make a comprehensive list would be the hight of madness, but many of the titles I've seen I reviewed unlike in other years. The first thing I've noticed is that AAA games and big companies started to lose their shine to me, partly due the changes that came with time. Undoubtly, San andreas was better than GTA V and System shock II is way better than the things EA is releasing now. AAA games are hardly worth it anymore, since the high budget makes the producers not want to take chances and make cliché sequels or remakes of overly-extended sagas, such as resident evil, or games that are simply too long for me to have interest in playing such as Horizon or Cyberpunk 2077. If I were to play now titles that were of my interest at the moment, such as Mass Effect, I'd find them dull since the flaws now come as evident to me, such as the terrible three-choice ending or the empty planet exploration with recycled assets. I started, then, to play lots of indie games, such as cult of the lamb, binding of Isaak, Darkest Dungeon, and well many others, but the average enjoyment I get out of playing having played so much gives diminishing returns, even though I have made pauses of course. I can see the flaws of games much more than I can see their virtues, and having seen so much I clearly know where the limitations are rather than having that nouveau feeling of "everything is possible" that I associate with childhood. I can see where I'm inteded to go and how much the plot suffers in an open world game where most locations are just empty placeholders, with maybe some named bandit that's slightly tougher than the others. I've checked older games and this problem has actually been allivieted over time since resources are more readily available now compare to then, but at least in matters that concern PC I feel that gameplays have become too looped and storytelling is better as a movie, series or book since I can't choose the direction I'm going. When the interactible fiction you're consuming feels like it's not interactible anymore, you've reached this point.
Typical Versus People Make
1. Indie VS AA, AAA:
This is a typical debate, where indie usually wins simply because there are ten AA, AAA titles in a year, and there are two hundred indie titles that cost barely a portion of the budget to make, but that's from a consumer's POV. For me, as a pirate, I don't care about budgets. AA, AAA games are the first to see because there's a lot of money and people ensuring the game works. A bad game with a budget is going to be entertaining for at least a while, even if no original concepts are handled. Indie games are great for experimenting, but they require a lot of browsing; nine out of ten indie titles are outright bad, either because they're a copy of another game, like all the "survivors" that came after Vampire Survivors, or because they handle a concept that didn't quite work, like mascot horror titles such as "Bendy and the Ink Machine" and "Garten of Ban-ban", or because they didn't have enough budget or creativity and were abandoned without enough content, such as "Zelter", or simply because of bad quality, like "Maiden and Spell" or "Gnosia", which is a game I still don't understand how it got such good reviews. In summary, AAA games are better on average, but indie games are more of an experimentation ground, and are better only if you cherry-pick the crème de la crème.
2. Graphics VS Gameplay VS Storytelling:
Another absurd question. These three elements, in a well-done game, act in synergy. You can't take Silent Hill's storytelling and put it on a Roguelike gameplay because psychological horror doesn't do well with Roguelike, and you can't have a FPS deckbuilder. That said, storytelling usually takes a backseat since the primary point of games is the interaction, aka the gameplay, which depends on the type of graphics employed. You could compare similar titles and try to force the versus, such as Skyrim vs Oblivion: "Skyrim has better graphics but a worse story; Oblivion's gameplay is more complex, but Skyrim's more accessible". Ultimately, these are all futile comparisons since Oblivion's graphics are from 2006 and Skyrim's are from 2012, and nobody is going to make a game with older graphic engines, as it makes no sense. With today's tech, if you're not satisfied with, say, Morrowind's graphics or outdated mechanics, you can just use one of the mod packs that make it look like Skyrim.
TLDR: When comparing games, priorities are: Gameplay, Graphics, Storytelling.
3. PC VS Console:
Console is better as a whole, I'm told, but PC has pirate games, so PC.
Questions
1. Early access? Early Access is a Plague:
Early access games are paying for an unfinished product in the hopes, often vain, that with the extra budget, devs will make a better final product. What they encourage instead is clogging the market with unfinished products that just remain early access for a decade, and here's the funniest thing: when they actually come out, they're as mediocre or even worse than they were when in early access. The only decent E.A. game I've seen would be Project Zomboid, and I don't expect it to go 1.0 until I grow old.
2. What's the best game of all time?
It's hard to predict the future. Of the games I remember, the ones I enjoyed the most were Streets of Rogue and Intravenous, but other mainstream games are also good, like Borderlands or Skyrim.
2.5 How to pick good games?
Red flags:
Visual; never Anime artstyle, never RPG maker, never same looking chubby models, never suspiciously sleek unity-style rendering (those are prebought models), never game that has similar artstyle that's distinctive of a notable title (case Darkest dungeon --> Edge of sanity, curse of mad gods or Don't Starve ---> Wizard with a Gun)
Pricing; never free to play (microtransactions), never price suspiciously high (it's on a hype bubble)
Review Filtering: Never mixed or below, reviewers online are too lax
Playstyle: Never page collecting, never soul-like, never games that have a fifty hour completition, never grindy mechanics.
Others: Never Early access, never based on movies or series. Yeah Walking dead is shit, sorry.
3. Which game has the best storyline?
For what I've seen, games tend to have terrible storylines. Let's take celebrated examples: Bioshock is about a dude who makes a drug that drives everyone crazy, and the plot twist is that you're hypnotized by someone. System Shock 2 is evil AI vs. the cliché parasitic bio-monster that she created. Mass Effect is big bad robots that kill people for no valid reason vs. a bunch of aliens that act and look like humans. Life is Strange is pure teenage drama; Skyrim is the chosen one vs. evil dragon, and Oblivion is the chosen one vs. demon cult. Still, Wakes the Deep can't get any more Lovecraftian cliché, with a drill. I'm not saying that having basic plotlines is bad; plotlines in games are just context for action to happen. If you want a good storyline, you need to switch media.
4. What's the most difficult game you've ever played?
Pretty much every game tagged "soul-like" was impossible for me to beat. No, scratch that, every soul-like game was impossible for me to beat, even Soul Knight, which was the easiest. I suppose Code Vein was the one I quit the earliest. In my opinion, difficulty doesn't make a game good; it makes it frustrating. But I heard of players who think that because they spent ten hours killing a boss, they've accomplished something.
5. Which game has the best multiplayer?
None. Multiplayers are toxic environments that leech out of making players feel like trash compared to the top players who are usually paid users in the case of free-to-play or min-maxing speedrunners, the worst kind of person. I have yet to try a multiplayer where I can small talk without feeling like I'm a nuisance.
6. What's the scariest game you've ever played?
Horror is a ramp that goes downward the more horror you see. When I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I couldn't sleep, or well, I probably did because I'm a sleepy head, but it did scare me. Now, it doesn't matter if I play an actually scary game (unlike Dark Descent); I don't get scared.
Extra: Notes on genre tags and their actual meaning
"Action": The player gets active involvement in the game. Nine out ten that active involvement is pressing A to attack, the other one adds more realistic combat spending several millions so you can also press B to parry.
"Adventure": The player is presented a story randomly cropped into episodes in which he might or might not (most likely won't) have influence in said story other than doing fetch quests,solve some either extremely easy and dumb puzzles or unnecessarily contrived and counterintuitive ones.
"Puzzle" - Feel smarter by moving wires and pipes around
"Simulation" - The thrill of tasks you normally would have to get paid to do, like running a farm or managing a city.
"Role-playing": The player assumes the role of the protagonist, as he always does, save now he gets some very black-or-white decisions that generally barely have an impact.
"Open world": The player gets his usual main storyline, generally killing some big bad, and on top of it he gets a ton of same-looking landscapes to aimlessly wander around and a bunch of non-consequent shit-tier quests about killing bandits or finding lost objects for a meager reward. There's occasionally the half-decent quest that everybody knows is the recycled scrape of the main storyline brainstorm.
"Dark": Pretend your game is mature by dimming lights and adding some edgy comments
4 exes: Explore (blindly stumble your way through fog-of-war) Expand (queue same building x10) Exploit (set villagers in the farm and miners in the mine) Exterminate (clash your troops dumbly into not-bonded-by-same-rules AI, outcome depends on luck regarding whether you dug up more ore than AI before the clash or not rather than actual "real time strategy")
"Fighting and Martial arts": Street fighter but different sprites, press a random bunch of keys moving like a spastic until you find the correct "combos" then struggle to actually make them useful.
"Open-world-survival-craft": Players get a hunger bar. That's it. As to whether it is actually challenging or entertaining to fill it, that's another matter entirely. The open world part just means a lot of same looking spaces and craft usually just means sharpening sticks and building huts in a fornite-like unrealistic fashion for no good reason other than fulfilling the "hey, there's your craft" promise
"Survival": As opposed to the one above. Player waits for a countdown to tick as he dodges a swarm of indistinct enemies that fly straight for him like a metal to a particularly powerful magnet.
"Metroidvania": Action plataformer but with superiority complex
"Rogue-like": Player dodge red dots and shoot blue dots while playing gacha with semi-permanent upgrade items until they stumble upon some OP build. Not relations to 1980's game "rogue" whatsoever
JRPG: Imagine your run-on-the-mill fantasy game, then develop it in RPGmaker tossing turn-based pokemon like combat and there you get the JRPG role model. Insert a couple of bosses with "god" titles in the hope to hook someone in
"Horror": Pick a generic horror scenario, like mental asylum, abandoned hospital, dark forest, silent hill city, abandoned school or prison, then spawn a bunch of keys and closed doors and have the player keyhunt while hiding from generic monster that's usually big humans but with claws, messy hair and extra limbs
"Survival horror": Same as above but add a handgun with limited munition to shoot at other, weaker generic monsters while the main one is invincible for plot convenience reasons
"Soul-like": Make a boss rush game, but the bosses have super inflated stats. Watch the players bash their heads against said bosses and praising you for the fight that has the same Dark souls mechanics that we know like the back of our hand, by the time they realize there's no plot whatsoever nor any gameplay outside the Boss Fights the refund period will be over
"Incremental" aka "Idle": Cookie clicker on different sprites
"multiple endings" In a finished game, add a ten second cutscene where the main character dies if he didn't pick up a certain item. Congratulations! Now the game has multiple endings.
"Lovecraftian": the monster has tentacles, there's probably a sanity meter somewhere for no reason that you'll hate
"Early access" Give me money, please
"Difficult" We don't have enough content for a full game, so we made it so that you can't win in the first playthrough. There's probably three scenarios.
"Replay value" There's unlockables that don't matter
"Strategy" Follow the instructions we gave you to play, you can't do it your way.
"Anime" This game is terrible. Absolutely terrible, yet it has good reviews. (Literally wasn't able to find one "mostly negative" in 11000 titles)
"Sports": Play the latest release that looks the exact same than the previous 20, all to feel more athletic while sitting on your couch
"DLC": More stuff we should have included in the game in the first place but we wanted to make an extra penny from
"Story Rich" Overabundance of cutscenes and exposition to compensate for lackluster gameplay.
"Choices Matter" A marketing term used to deceive players into thinking their decisions have consequences, when in reality, the story is largely unaffected.
No comments:
Post a Comment