jeudi 15 août 2013

The most annoying things in video games - Part II

Every single gamer, at one point in his life, said aloud or wondered incredulously : "Why/How is this thing/man not dead??" while he was playing a game. In some cases, it will be for a simple enemy you cribbled with bullets or sliced a half-dozen times with your katana, and other times it will be a boss you squashed with a train, made fall down a 50-stories high building while on fire. And he or it is still alive. And you're mad because it doesn't make a lick of sense.

And this has become a bigger problem lately, with all the emphasis put on graphical fidelity, realism and the slow death of hubs, energy bars and other increasingly old-school gaming concepts. You play a game where an enemy will react accordingly to where the bullet hits, you expect a couple bullets to the head to make him drop dead. But no! He or it doesn't die!

Obviously, in games like Fallout 3, Skyrim, other RPGs and many retro games, where damage and health is calculated in "points" via numbers or a health bar, this is not a problem because it's part of the structure of the game. But when I shoot a guy in the head twice while playing a "realistic" military shooter (online or offline), I don't expect the guy to continue living and acting as if he didn't have a bullet lodged in his brain. When I stab a guy twelve times in Assassin's Creed, I don't expect him to continue fighting as though nothing happened.When I shoot a random thug four times with a shotgun standing five feet away in GTA IV, I don't expect him to stand up and shoot me with ease.

When I throw a monster off a tall skyscraper, set him on fire AND run a freaking train over him, I don't expect it to be alive and transform for the fourth time into something even bigger and even MORE annoying. Yes, I'm looking at you, Resident Evil 6. It's stupid, it's annoying, it screams "Well we can't think of anything else, so let's put this guy again, just a bit bigger with more disgusting features. And again here. And again here. And again here."


Anyway, that sounded a bit like a rant, but as a gamer I hate to feel cheated by a game and I really dislike pointless repetition (fighting the same boss over and over again is repetition, no matter how much he has transformed). It ruins the fun, and fun is the main reason why anyone plays games.

jeudi 8 août 2013

Best Games I've Never Played - Part II



From 1998 up until 2008, I thought there was at least ONE universal truth in the gaming world : The best game of all-time was The Legend of Zelda : Ocarina of Time. In my head, it wasn't even a debate, it was a fact. An undeniable, solid and widely known fact.

When I first started to participate in gaming forums in 2008, I learned that some people actually had different ideas of what the best game of all-time was, and I was confused and somewhat frustrated at times, because I thought they were all wrong and that Ocarina of Time was better than anything else, period. I'm actually exaggerating, I knew that different people had different opinions and it's all a matter of taste, but I was surprised at the number of games "contending" for that basically-impossible-to-determine title of the best game of all-time. And there was one game that kept being mentioned, quite possibly even more than Ocarina of Time itself.

That game was Final Fantasy VII. On that particular forum, it seemed like FFVII was popping out everywhere, but that's not all. While reading people's posts, it occurred to me that other titles in the Final Fantasy franchise were mentioned by my fellow gamers, most notable FFIII. (Quick side note, I was also surprised that another Zelda game kept popping up : A Link to the Past. It's a superb game too, so it makes a lot of sense...)

And then it hit me : I had never played a Final Fantasy game in my life !!! I always knew the series existed, I knew it was popular if they had released at least 12 of them (I had no idea there were spin-offs as well), but it never occurred to me that it was as important for some people as the Zelda games were in my life. Obviously this can be explained by the fact that, when I was younger, my parents paid for things I bought and I only bought a few games and never ventured past the known pastures of Mario, Zelda, anything Nintendo made and a few other popular games like Sonic, GoldenEye or Street Fighter. And it has to be said that I never owned a SNES before 2008 (Made the jump from NES to N64 via a Sega Genesis, for some weird reason...) nor did I ever own a PSOne or a PS2, so it's not THAT hard to see how I never had the opportunity to try a Final Fantasy game.

I eventually tried FFXIII on the PS3, but I never could get into the game. Some people tried to explain by saying how FFXIII was too linear and that it never was a "real" FF game. Anyway, I got bored an hour in, because I never really liked anything with turn-based combat other than Pokemon games and the first Paper Mario. I also tried FFV or FFIV on the Playstation Store, but when I died without saving or knowing how to save for basically 90 minutes, I never touched it again... I kinda liked the game, but even then I could never get that much into it.

Perhaps one day I'll have the patience and courage to start a Final Fantasy game again - and I want to, if only for the fact that they're a staple in the gaming world - but until that moment I can't say I've ever PLAYED a Final Fantasy game.