WALL OF TEXT AHEAD
Hoo boy, video games. I was raised with Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64, and as such I have a deep love for all things Nintendo. Still, lately I've been very much in the computer gaming scene. If you haven't checked my Steam account that I linked in my signature, I've put 400 hours into Team Fortress 2, 200 hours into Day of Defeat: Source, about 130 into Garry's mod, and more in other games I'm too lazy to list, besides the fact I know you probably weren't that interested in the first place. So I think it's pretty obvious that I'm a FPS guy, but not on consoles. I don't have an Xbox 360 or PS3, and I really don't care about that "gamer score" whatever-the-heck-it-is that Xbox fans always seem to be talking about.
When it comes to companies that make games, these are my favorites;
Nintendo: For the Legend of Zelda series and Mario series. I'd list more, but sadly I haven't really got anything new for the Wii in awhile.
Valve: For the Half-Life series, the Left 4 Dead series, TF2, Counter Strike: Source, and all the free updates (seriously, CS:S was released about 7 years ago and they're still updating it for free. Most major game companies would have made at least 2 sequels by now).
Tripwire Interactive: For
Killing Floor and
Red Orchestra.
Wolfire Games: For Lugaru and Overgrowth (which I pre ordered).
Trends in the industry I like: personally, I never get tired of killing large amounts of zombies. Be it in L4D or Killing Floor (though if you want to nitpick, those are specimens, not zombies). So long as the games are well made, I like 'em. As for Nintendo, I haven't played either of the Super Mario Galaxies yet but I really want to. The new Legend of Zelda looks great too. While Twilight Princess was a good game (hooray for wolf transformation) and the darker storyline was quite refreshing, it lacked the subtleties that made Majora's Mask great. Majora's Mask, I'm not sure what it was about that game, but it seemed to me it had a certain dark sense of humor going on the whole time just barely in the background that just kept me enthralled. From the Skull Kid's sad story of betrayal, to new friendship, and eventual succumbing to evil, to the story of that one little girl living with her father in the middle of a deadly spirit infested wasteland, the whole game was filled with a excellent sub plots that, when combined, rival the main plot. While some decried the 3 day system, I personally really liked it. Seeing more people becoming terrified by the moon looming ever closer, until at the end of the 3 days you're almost in a ghost town except for a few people. And of those few people, one's an idiot, one's a tough guy who you actually find hiding in a secret back room scared out of his mind, and the post man who desperately wants to leave but his duty to his job won't let him (I'm pretty sure there's a few more, but I can't think of them right now). Of course unless you're beating the game, you just play the Song of Time and the whole thing starts all over again. Yeah, I could go on and on about everything that made that game great, but this isn't a Zelda forum. Suffice it to say, I doubt I'll ever play another game that will really match that experience.
What more games need is story telling like that. For a primarily multi player game, Left 4 Dead and it's sequel have a surprising amount of back story. It's revealed mostly through conversation between the Survivors, but there's more to it then just that. The walls of safe room's and a few other random places are covered with graffiti, from people mourning lost loved ones, telling family/friends where they went and with who, to people bragging about their zombie kill count. You can also infer most of the story from the environment, a fair bit in the first one but particularly in the sequel. Piles of dead bodies fenced off from everything else, a highway full of abandoned cars, traces of last stands (there's quite a few maps that have a single body either holding a gun or having one lying next to them), and the large piles of bodies who didn't look infected but were shot anyway. And still that game manages to be
hilarious. THAT right there takes skill.
Of course, to expect such high quality stories in every single game I play is a really high expectation. Some games don't really need a story to be great. If you have truly great game play, you can get away with not having a large complex story that explores the depths of human nature. For example, the Wario Ware series. Yeah, they have mini stories in them, but they're pretty much only there to set up the style of the mini game's you're going to play. Another game,
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, while possibly having one of the best names ever, doesn't particularly bother you with it's back story (though it does have one). All I really cared about was epic futuristic base jumping.
However, what really makes the best game is the combination of those two factors. It's a delicate balance, but it's been pulled off. Just look at Portal and it's
sequel. It has that one gimmick, the portal gun, and it changed the way we think about puzzles. And yet, it still managed to keep players entranced with the slowly more threatening GLaDOS and her promises of cake. Also, once again subtleties really make that game stand out. The connection with the Borealis ship that you can see in HL:Ep2 that clearly bears the Aperture Science logo, just makes the whole thing that much more intriguing.
While that's all well and good (I can't wait for Portal 2 or HL:Ep3 to come out), there's other ways of telling a story. In Team Fortress 2, that story is pretty much between the players. Yes, I know TF2 is slowly getting a
massive back story explaining the origins of the RED vs. BLU war, but that wasn't there originally. When that game first came out, it had what no other multi player only game had, each class had it's own distinct character. Every part of them is memorable, from the gutsy American Soldier (
who actually wasn't a Soldier), the Boston-accented Scout, the huge rumbling Russian giant that is the Heavy Weapons Guy, and every other class, as they'd interact with each other hilarity would ensue. The domination and revenge lines (yes, I know those really weren't added upon to make them the awesome level they are now, but they keep in spirit with the character interaction) are all hilarious (so long as you're not the one being dominated), and again it's the subtleness that makes the game shine. Stuff you would expect, like the character's increasingly frantic call of "MEDIC!" as their health lowers, are there. Also, the TF2 team specifically put in the taunt system (combined with the death cam) for every character to further increase the player interaction and just reinforce the personalities of the already extremely colorful cast. The Sniper jauntily waving to his headshot victim, the Soldier giving the Loser sign instead of a salute while giblets fall around him, and of course the Heavy hugging his minigun.
Yeah, I could go on and on about those games, but let's get to something else.
Trends I don't like in gaming: shovelware. Just shovelware. Whenever my sister comes home with a new game for her DS, and I see it's "Catz 2" or some other crap like it, I die a little inside. She's young, she's seduced by the pictures of the cute kitties on the box and the "edgy" use of a z instead of a s, but I know she'll play it 3, 4 hours tops before she realizes this is a game pumped out by developers specifically targeted at her, because they know almost all little girls like kitties (ok, pretty much I'm the one who'll realize that. She'll just realize it's a stupid game). That, or maybe Grandma will get confused when choosing a game and just get something she thinks looks cute, when she can buy something genuinely good for someone that age (Nintendogs, the DS New Super Mario Bros., etc). Ok, sadly, this problem is largely restricted to the Nintendo consoles much more then the Sony and Microsoft ones. I don't know why, probably because those consoles are generally more likely to have the demographic those developers are hoping to trick into buying their game. Anyway, it's saturating the market and is shaming the Nintendo name.
While that problem is pretty much Nintendo-exclusive, here's one that PS3 and 360 owners probably recognize. First person shooters may be the biggest thing on the market. As such, a lot of them are of the "dime a dozen" variety. It seems at least half of the new games coming out are FPS's. I'll admit, more effort is put into them the generic DS game that replaces the s in a title with a z. Still, new Medal of Honor game, there was that Wolfenstein game awhile ago, new Call of Duty, Halo Reach, so on and so on. Now, while I didn't really care to seriously get into CoD's multi player (I never bought the game, just played it on friend's machines), I did kinda like the single player. A lot of work had been put into it. What bugged me were the infinitely spawning enemies, the entire rooster-and-bull notion that even if you're shot, so long as you don't get hit again for a couple seconds you'll be right as rain, the one-hit-kill knife slash, and the indestructible riot shields just ruined my suspension of disbelief.
Granted, if first person's shooters were very realistic, they wouldn't be much fun (there's a couple of exceptions, like Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising and Red Orchestra, and even they have their flaws). Do you think as many people would play CoD if just one bullet would seriously debilitate you, if not kill you? Deeper then that, gun muzzle velocity and recoil aren't really accurately represented. I feel kind of bad for picking on CoD so much, but it's its own fault. To loosely quote Penny Arcade, "What's modern about a guy running around stabbing people? He's not a modern warrior, he's a psychopath."
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I will continue with this thread of thought later, but right now it's almost 4 in the morning. Good night (morning) for now.