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Cracked.com's : The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey
- Thread starter Oblivion
- Start date
RevenantKioku
PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS oh god i am drowning in them
But the point is that far too often graphics are put at the forefront when it's gameplay that really should be.Guled said:
Pureauthor
Member
Slavik81 said:
:lol Awesome.
Anton Sugar
Member
That FFX clip is golden. I remember feeling embarassed when I wanted to show how "awesome" the game was to people and that fucking scene came on.
AHA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA
IT WAS YOUR IDEA LOLOLOL
AHA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA
IT WAS YOUR IDEA LOLOLOL
Spirit of Jazz
Banned
Where's Halo 3? Not only did it allow local co-op, it allowed local co-op online, sure that's where all game should be heading and they left it off of the list? I mean the vast majority of games mentioned are nintendo titles, which are most offline focused due to their inability to get online right.
RevenantKioku
PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS PEINS oh god i am drowning in them
Limiting it to 2 player was dogshit.Spirit of Jazz said:
Spirit of Jazz
Banned
RevenantKioku said:
What? Are you on about co-op? I'm pretty sure technical limitations would of been the problem there. Even then blatantly it was competitive the staple I was bringing up given it does it better than any other title out there, needless to say I can't help but feel the person who typed the article was sucking some major Nintendo wang.
AtomicShroom
Member
#2 is spot-on. Enough with releasing unfinished sluggish products with infinite load times.
This is why PC gaming has gone the way it has. Developers like shooting themselves in the foot, then blame whatever else, like piracy.
This is why PC gaming has gone the way it has. Developers like shooting themselves in the foot, then blame whatever else, like piracy.
A Black Falcon
Member
Not the greatest list, I definitely disagree with more than I agree... some of the points are good, though.
#7 - No, not always needed.
#6 - Sure, tedious fetch quests are annoying. But length isn't always bad. If you like the gameplay, you often don't mind more of it... though I would agree that spending more time and making that content good content instead of just filler is a good idea.
#5 - Agreed, checkpoints are stupid. All games should have save anywhere. I disagree with the concept that repetition is always bad, though. It can be very frustrating, but is it really bad that, for instance, in most Gradius games if you mess up and die it's easier to finish the game by starting over than by continuing? No, not really. That's how it should be in games like that... save-anywhere does make games like that an exercise in "how often can you load", but even so... the real issue with a shmup saving system is how to reconcile the fact that score matters in these games with the fact that saving is good. A suspend save that deletes when you load it is clearly good. A level select that lets you start from any level after you reach it (with a reset score) is also clearly good. Save anywhere? Very abusable... but still, not necessarily a bad thing. Save anywhere is always good... you just need to use it properly.
#4 - Minor point, not really important. Of course more realism here would be interesting, but the videogame conventions in this category are pretty harmless overall.
#3 - Not really. Conventions can sometimes be bad, but not always. These aren't exactly the best examples... Escort missions are usually annoying because of poor design, not poor concept. Sometimes they can be good. First-person jumping puzzles are annoying, but that problem is easily solved by giving you a third-person camera (see Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight). CPU squad-mates? Why not? And space marines... yes, they're overdone. Oh well.
#2 - Bugs are bad, agreed. This is why patches are a good thing. But I'm a longtime PC gamer, so patching issues really don't bother me at all...
#1 - Of course.
#7 - No, not always needed.
#6 - Sure, tedious fetch quests are annoying. But length isn't always bad. If you like the gameplay, you often don't mind more of it... though I would agree that spending more time and making that content good content instead of just filler is a good idea.
#5 - Agreed, checkpoints are stupid. All games should have save anywhere. I disagree with the concept that repetition is always bad, though. It can be very frustrating, but is it really bad that, for instance, in most Gradius games if you mess up and die it's easier to finish the game by starting over than by continuing? No, not really. That's how it should be in games like that... save-anywhere does make games like that an exercise in "how often can you load", but even so... the real issue with a shmup saving system is how to reconcile the fact that score matters in these games with the fact that saving is good. A suspend save that deletes when you load it is clearly good. A level select that lets you start from any level after you reach it (with a reset score) is also clearly good. Save anywhere? Very abusable... but still, not necessarily a bad thing. Save anywhere is always good... you just need to use it properly.
#4 - Minor point, not really important. Of course more realism here would be interesting, but the videogame conventions in this category are pretty harmless overall.
#3 - Not really. Conventions can sometimes be bad, but not always. These aren't exactly the best examples... Escort missions are usually annoying because of poor design, not poor concept. Sometimes they can be good. First-person jumping puzzles are annoying, but that problem is easily solved by giving you a third-person camera (see Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight). CPU squad-mates? Why not? And space marines... yes, they're overdone. Oh well.
#2 - Bugs are bad, agreed. This is why patches are a good thing. But I'm a longtime PC gamer, so patching issues really don't bother me at all...
#1 - Of course.
DeaconKnowledge
Member
It's funny because it's true.
I think that alot of it makes good sense, but I think that the 'padding' games thing is a little off base. Oblivion was enjoyable for me all 120 hours I put into it.
I think that the biggest thing they missed in the article is that developers should stop treating console gamers like idiots. I think that anyone who watched the way Rainbow Six has changed since it has become bigger on consoles and more mainstream should understand what i'm talking about. In a time when developers have more power to work with and technology to push their games, most of the 'big' titles have become more linear and give players less options.
I think that the biggest thing they missed in the article is that developers should stop treating console gamers like idiots. I think that anyone who watched the way Rainbow Six has changed since it has become bigger on consoles and more mainstream should understand what i'm talking about. In a time when developers have more power to work with and technology to push their games, most of the 'big' titles have become more linear and give players less options.
K
kittens
Unconfirmed Member
i actually like that "Top ___" list. weird.
ToyMachine228
Member
BigBoss said:
My second time through on Normal I used every tonic that I could find and pretty much played the entire game with only my wrench. Used guns for Big Daddy's of course, but the rest was almost all wrench.
GenericPseudonym
Banned
Terrible list. I didn't know people got paid for re-typing NeoGAF threads. Hell a lot of the complaints were more "I suck at games". Anyone complaining about Dead Rising's save system should go to hell.
I can't get behind this, and it's my biggest problem with the "no checkpoints" stance. I don't want the burden to be on me.
Include suspend saves if you have to, just don't give me total control of everything. Having to pace out reasonable save points is not what I'd consider an enjoyable part of a game.
Hellsing321
Member
Holy Shit! A list a agree with completely, especially #7.
If you're game has online multiplayer, and i can't play the game with friends in the same room then FUCK YOU!
If you're game has online multiplayer, and i can't play the game with friends in the same room then FUCK YOU!
Canadian Maniac
Member
CTLance said:
Of course it's exaggerated, it's a HUMOR ARTICLE! Why are people so insistent on analyzing it? You've already missed the point.
Damn.
bloodforge
Member
Why do people keep saying that Gears of War has "space marines" in it? Last time I checked they never left their home planet. Same with Haze. Or does having armor on automatically make you a "space marine".
People keep bitching about it, but they really aren't that prevalent.
People keep bitching about it, but they really aren't that prevalent.
A Black Falcon
Member
Tain said:
We just don't agree at all, essentially.
While I do ultimately think that save anywhere benefits any game, it is true that in some genres it fits more perfectly than it does others. This is reflected in the histories of save systems in various genres.
Games that make hard saves in between levels are also decent, though. Save anywhere is generally better, but if you get a permanent save at the end of every level completed, things often work out decently. For some reason, though, I make a differentiation between that and save systems that use checkpoints... maybe I shouldn't, and should think of reaching each next checkpoint as "reaching the next level" (and indeed, that is often the case)... the two certainly should be considered very similarly. Still, they do have some differences, if mostly in feel.
The games with the most obvious problems with save anywhere are, as I said, arcade-style games where score counts and save anywhere would make it easy to abuse the game and get an artificially high score. This is why I said that suspend and level select are perhaps best for such games. However, it is true that with emulation, you get save anywhere, and this has not stopped people from having score competitions with specified rules that just leave it up to each person to not cheat. People usually follow such rules, as far as I've seen... I'm sure some cheat, but really, they're only hurting themselves. And the benefit, of being able to actually finish games which were made to be ridiculously hard, is a good one.
For other types of games, though, any potential benefits of not having save anywhere quickly fall away. There are some types of games that, even on PCs, traditionally had (or have) saving that only takes place between missions or levels (autosaves, generally) instead of having save anywhere. These genres include space sims, mech sims, 2d and 3d platformers (for the most part), and few others, though scattered sports, FPS, RPG, or strategy games also would have limited save systems.
Space mech sims -- for some reason, PC mech and space sims traditionally included auto-saving between missions but did not allow you to save during missions. This save system works reasonably well. It is true that if you messed up, you had to start over... but these games were usually simulations, so realism and the idea that the player should be punished for failure put save systems like that in place. I never minded these; sure, some missions are hard, but once you complete the mission, you know it will save. It works reasonably well. Missions need to be balanced for this, of course, but in most such games they were. Because of the freedom you are given in many such games, something like a "checkpoint" wouldn't work here, usually; and even if it would, it would impact realism. Save anytime could work, but would not be implemented because of how much easier it would make the games. That's okay... not everything has to be easy.
Platformers, both 2d and 3d, also usually used save-between-missions, not save-anywhere, even on the PC. Platformers which didn't allow you to save were somewhat rare on the PC by the late '80s, quite different from (and much better than) the situation on consoles at that time. But like space and mech sims, games in this genre have clear levels to finish, so such a breakdown works. Levels are also usually not particularly long. I can only think of a few PC platformers with true save anywhere... but in them, it does help (for instance, Claw or Realms of Chaos). But generally, being able to save anytime between levels works well in this genre.
For sports games, I think there is absolutely no excuse for all sports games not to have save anywhere. The first sports game I loved was Hardball III, a PC baseball game from 1992. It had save anywhere, so you could save a game in progress. It was a great feature, but it was one I took for granted in the genre... until I played some console baseball games and learned the horror of "you can only save between games". (Note that Hardball III, '94, and '95 for the Sega Genesis DO have save anywhere! It can be done on consoles too!)
Some early FPSes also only allowed you to save between missions (Dark Forces, for instance), but as missions got longer and longer, in-mission saving quickly became an obvious necessity. It did the genre nothing but good -- Dark Forces was very frustrating because of how one mistake would make you restart the entire mission over from the start. In this genre, save anywhere is always good. I understand that save anywhere in an FPS can reduce it to an exercise in "quicksave, get past challenge, quicksave", but even so, the sheer frustration and annoyance of savepoint locations outweighs this.
I guess, then, that that is my real point: It depends on where your save points are placed, how common they are, and how easy they are to use. There are games with checkpoint-based (not end of level based, but checkpoint based) saving where I didn't mind it much, such as Oni or Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. Well, the long save times for BGDA were annoying, but save points were frequent, so it was never a big hassle. But in games where the checkpoints are far too far apart, or there are no checkpoints (or saving) in dungeons so that if you mess up there is absolutely no safety net... well, that's just annoying. For examples of how NOT to do save systems, again see Secret of Mana (I'll get into this soon).
But this gets into the related discussion of how much people should be punished for being killed in games... as this post makes clear, I'm not entirely certain of what I think on that matter.
I do think that save anywhere works with that philosophy, though. If you want to make it easier and save more so you are punished less for dying (like, say, Zelda: WW or TP), you can. But if you want to save less and make it harder so you are punished more for dying (like any Zelda up to and including OoT), you can do that too. It's up to you... it's not so much the lenient save system as it is the fact that it is forced on you that I really have a problem with with saving in a WW or TP. In games like that, I want to choose for myself when to save... But either way, it is possible to show how save anywhere IS better. For instance, look at the Mana series. The first game in the series, Final Fantasy Adventure, had save anywhere. It was true save anywhere, and you could save to either save slot at any time, even during boss battles, and it saved your exact location and status, as well as the enemies'. It worked fantastically well. FFA has by far the best save system in the Mana series. Secret of Mana uses save points, and limits them ridiculously by only putting them in towns. You can warp back to town with the rope item, but that item doesn't work in boss fights, so if you reach a boss at too low a level you're doomed and can do nothing but lose a lot of progress. I don't think the fact that FFA let you save anywhere hurt the game in any way, even though it did let you get permanently stuck (if you get into certain parts of certain dungeons without enough keys or mattocks to get out). Perhaps that would annoy some, but if you use common sense it works fine, and being able to save anytime was one thing that helped make the game great. It's unfortunate that aside from handheld RPGs which often have suspend saves and very rare cases like FFA, console RPGs and action-RPGs almost never let you save anytime.
PC RPGs also have save anywhere, though some of them (the Infinity Engine (Baldur's Gate, etc) don't let you save during combat. It certainly doesn't affect the games or make them easy. Console RPGs or action-RPGs very rarely have that kind of save system, though the Lunar series games all have save anywhere in the overworld but don't let you save in battle. Of course there were also PC RPGs with more limited save systems, like many MMOs, Diablo, etc, but those at least always save your character's state when you quit, even if they do not save your location.
PC graphic adventure games always had save anywhere. Consoles got their hands on them (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc) and what happened? Savepoints! Blah. Not good. It doesn't help them.
Well, no pony for me then.Canadian Maniac said:
But whatever.
There's a certain ironing in you overanalysing my rather innocent comment.
I didn't intend for my last sentence to be misunderstood as analysis. Now I know I should've written "I see what they did there" and saved us both the trouble, eh?
Teddman said:
Oh come on, how little challenge do you people want? GTA's save system is fine. So is Dead Rising's. The quicksave whiners are so ridiculous that I can't believe they even have the balls to whine so loudly. :lol
That said, it's distressing how so many developers don't seem to grasp the idea of checkpoints. I was just (sadly) playing Iron Man a while ago and I can't believe that if I die at the end of a 30 minute level I have to go back and do the whole thing again. Start me at the last objective before I died, you twits.
Dr. Zoidberg
Member
I liked this article. I agree with most of it and I think it's pretty funny.
Yes, some of you are pointing out that these are things we've been complaining about for years now. Some of the things that everyone hates have been around for ages and everybody knows what these things are.
The funny thing is, WHY do some of these KEEP HAPPENING!??!
REAL gaming journalism, which barely exists, would go to one of these developers and say "you know, everybody fucking hates escort missions, this has been known for some time, and yet your game, released this year, features two of them. Care to explain that to our readers?"
Yes, some of you are pointing out that these are things we've been complaining about for years now. Some of the things that everyone hates have been around for ages and everybody knows what these things are.
The funny thing is, WHY do some of these KEEP HAPPENING!??!
REAL gaming journalism, which barely exists, would go to one of these developers and say "you know, everybody fucking hates escort missions, this has been known for some time, and yet your game, released this year, features two of them. Care to explain that to our readers?"
Hairyiguana
Member
Sounds like this guy mainly just sucks at video games.
rollingstart
Banned
MattKeil said:
GTA is still bad because they dont have mission checkpoints, but Dead Rising's save system is amazing.
I've been preaching that lack of split-screen complaint since I the original Xbox started having games that did that. I think it was RtcW that sparked it. How dare these assholes assume we have no real friends to play with. Or maybe it is the fact that they're greedy jack asses.
BobFromPikeCreek
Member
Ice wrench was unstoppable.BigBoss said: