LINK REMOVED CAUSE *** IS SHITTY
1. A Great Cast with a Dud Script
What the fuck is this shit? I don't even really know what to say. Sonic Unleashed? SERIOUSLY?
2. Unreal Engine Overdose
You're so stupid. Turok takes place mostly in jungles. Jungles that are green. Why are games like Resistance 2 "better still" than games like Bioshock? They're not. Here's a better point: we're fucking stupid and we can't separate artistic talent from incompetent programmers, and even then, we can't really pick out incompetent programmers.
3. Sequelitis
4. Too Human Syndrome
Okay, this one's not bad. Too Human seems to be the root cause of a number of problems.
5. Wii Production "Values"
This is like reading a GAF thread, except someone got paid to write this.
6. Sonic and Mario Visit the Rainbow Dentist (WTF?)
7. Motion "Control"
8. Promises, Promises, Promises
Promises are not killing gaming.
Anyway, this list sucks so far, but now we take a turn for the ridiculous.
9. STRONG FEMALE LEAD CHARACTER = EDGY, CLEVER AND DESIRABLE
What? This is BAD? Having strong female leads is cliché and uninteresting? Here's a list of bad characters: Alyx, Joanna, The Boss, Zoe and April, Jill, Claire, Ada, and Elika. Are you serious? Shouldn't we be aiming for this to not be special? Shouldn't having strong female leads in games be NORMAL? Who wrote this? Why did they write this? Are they retarded?
10. CASUAL GAMING
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
1. A Great Cast with a Dud Script
How many times has a game proclaimed its cinematic virtues epic story, Hollywood-grade (or at least, prime-time TV quality) voice actors in a staggering production of unparalleled genius? Then, when we sit down with the final game, the story and dialogue plods along limply before fizzling like bad internet fan fiction? There's nothing that can deflate the overall authenticity and quality of a game's setting than a poorly written story, sub-comic book pulp dialogue and bad cliche after bad cliché.
Solution? The writing department in your average developer is usually a tiny fraction the size of design, and many staffers end up wearing multiple hats in writing roles spending time creating manuals and support documents as much as creating a compelling setting. More focus on the writing process and creating a compelling world can pull a game out of mediocrity and make up for any visual shortcomings. Great examples are Braid, the Baldur's Gate series, the GTA series and just about everything that came out of the minds of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. You don't need A-list celebrities to tell a great story.
Worst Recent Offenders:
Gears of War 2
Prince of Persia
Sonic Unleashed
What the fuck is this shit? I don't even really know what to say. Sonic Unleashed? SERIOUSLY?
2. Unreal Engine Overdose
Once a claim to fame, Epic's middleware engine has become all too common in the industry. When in the right hands and with tech support from its creators the engine can make games sing. The engine is capable of a gamut of industry standard rendering effects and presets, allowing developers to take a few essential shortcuts and help get their heads around volumetric fog, high resolution bump mapping and so on. That's a best case scenario. At its worst, the Unreal Engine 3 tends to make games look very generic too, and sometimes at the expense of true artistic direction and skill. If every game looks like Gears of War, then Gears of War stops being special or interesting. Every landscape need not look like an industrial cyberpunk wasteland, tinted brown and pale blue. Games like Damnation, BlackSite: Area 51, Army of Two and Turok are all guilty of this.
Conversely, when the engine is used to fuel true artistic endeavor, the results can be marvelous. Just take a look at Mirror's Edge, Bioshock and Mass Effect. Better still are games that have been developed from what are essentially original engines entirely Grand Theft Auto IV, Pure and Resistance 2. All three of these games take the industry-standard effects and wrap them around an engine that looks just different enough from Unreal Engine 3 to stand out.
Worst Recent Offenders:
Damnation
Turok
Army of Two
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand
You're so stupid. Turok takes place mostly in jungles. Jungles that are green. Why are games like Resistance 2 "better still" than games like Bioshock? They're not. Here's a better point: we're fucking stupid and we can't separate artistic talent from incompetent programmers, and even then, we can't really pick out incompetent programmers.
3. Sequelitis
This is a contentious category because it is dominated by outside forces more often than not, meaning that developers are, to some extent, swayed by the influence of the markets buying their games. That means if a game sells well, it has established a brand name in the market and a sequel is almost assured. Two companies, beyond most others, are most guilty of this Activision and EA though they're clearly not the sole parties responsible for the glut of sequels and installments. To be fair, EA has recently taken steps to stem the flow of sequels and foster more original IP which we completely commend. Activision has yet to follow suit to the same extent; its business model still focuses strongly on brand retention and sequels.
Sometimes, an annual installment is a welcome thing some would argue that Guitar Hero needs its downloadable content and expansion discs to stay fresh. Others might say that the novelty has passed and that more time is needed between versions. You need only look at the ragged, sallow husk of a series that Need for Speed and Tony Hawk have become to see the results of oversaturation in the marketplace. The Sims is another; when The Sims 2: IKEA hit the market, gamers grabbed their buckets and worked through the nausea. Some never survived.
You might be asking yourself where Mario and Sonic are on this list, and it's true those two, Sonic in particular, have been played out and spun in weird, uncomfortable directions for too long now. See below for a more in-depth look.
Worst Recent Offenders:
Guitar Hero series
Tony Hawk series
Need For Speed series
The Sims / MySims series
Tenchu series
4. Too Human Syndrome
Lesson learned: there are few things as needlessly arrogant as announcing a trilogy before the first game is out the door. Too Human, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Gears of War and Half-Life 2 Episodes, we're looking straight at you. Speaking frankly, look there's nothing wrong with ambition. You want to make an epic, sprawling universe? That's totally fine. But start with getting the first game right and then let the market decide if it actually wants a sequel, let alone a trilogy. If your team is stuck under the thumb of three games in a row, you're looking at potentially between five and ten years of development time which means you might be spanning two console generations or more.
Too Human: the trilogy nobody asked for. Incidentally, running on Unreal Engine 3.
Building needless anticipation of an epic series also causes disappointment if eager adopters never get the final chapters. Shenmue, anyone? If the first game doesn't shift the units, then you've effectively shot yourself in the foot by creating a game that never ties up its storylines and leaves gamers disappointed and unsatisfied. Never announce a trilogy before you've proven yourself in the marketplace or, do so at your own peril and at the expense of credibility and the potential loss of major dollars.
Worst Recent Offenders:
Too Human
Mass Effect
Assassin's Creed
Okay, this one's not bad. Too Human seems to be the root cause of a number of problems.
5. Wii Production "Values"
Something's gone very awry on the Wii. For the console with the greatest number of releases in 2008, it also had the largest number of games that scored 4.0 or lower on ***. That's almost a quarter of the Wii's catalogue and that's a shocking percentage. One in four games released on Wii in 2008 flat out sucked.
What's going on, Nintendo? What does that Seal of Quality stand for?
Houston, we have a problem.
Rhetoric aside, here's the deal, kids. This is why the Wii is chock full of shovelware: it's smart business. Games that only require three programmers, two artists and no marketing means that the overheads are low. If it costs you less to make, you stand to gain a hell of a lot more. The Wii is the perfect platform for this approach to development, as is Sony's PlayStation 2. The hardware is relatively inexpensive, which means that the adoption rate is high. If the console is in lots of homes, then the chances of someone buying your software is markedly higher. If your game only costs twenty bones on the shelf, next to a game that costs a hundred (in AU dollars), then which game instantly looks more appealing to mum and dad?
Who cares if the game looks sub-N64 and plays like a poor Flash game? If the cost is small enough and the concept has the potential to suck in uninformed parents, then you can count the dollar signs. We really hope that despite the Wii's massive install base the current glut of awful Wii titles in the market can't sustain itself. Surely stores will become oversaturated with third rate shovelware and they won't sell. There's only so much shelf space, after all, and Wii owners will only buy so much software.
Worst Recent Offenders:
PlayZone Movie Studios Party (Wii)
Balls of Fury (Wii)
Clever Kids: Pirates (Wii)
This is like reading a GAF thread, except someone got paid to write this.
6. Sonic and Mario Visit the Rainbow Dentist (WTF?)
There's a wide valley of difference between Super Mario Galaxy and something like Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. And there's an ocean between Sonic the Hedgehog II or Sonic and Knuckles and Sonic Unleashed. Why is this? As two console titans gradually start to age, the desire from big business is to keep their star characters active and fresh. In this case 'active' means 'frequent appearances', and 'fresh' means 'it's time to take Mario bowling' or 'Sonic now has wings and break-dance moves'.
Seriously, Sonic should kick his ass in like, every event. He's a tubby plumber.
The overuse of two of gaming's biggest icons has, in fact, watered down their appeal to the gamers who made them a success in the first place. By wearing out their welcome over and over again, the inferred quality of these brands is lessened even if sales remain steady. Ultimately, audiences will move on if the characters lose their appeal. Even expected sequels and updates like Mario Kart Wii need to ultimately do more than just the bare minimum to really maintain credibility long-term. Maybe it's time for other characters to have a moment in the sun? How about a Waluigi and Bigs the Cat double-team? Maybe not.
Worst Recent Offenders:
Sonic Unleashed
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games
7. Motion "Control"
Motion control can go one of two ways: it either works and is great, or it doesn't and it detracts from the experience. If you can't implement motion control in an accurate, convincing and most importantly relevant way, then don't bother. Both the PS3 and Wii have plenty of titles that don't utilise motion controls properly or only in a tokenistic way, and it's not pretty when controls go horribly wrong. Who can forget the disastrous Sixaxis implementation in Lair? Or who truly prefers motion controlled steering in a racing game like Mario Kart Wii when there's no resistance on the wheel?
Lair died at the feet of the Sixaxis, wriggling, spasming and thrashing.
Accuracy and fun are paramount, and if motion controls are loose or inaccurate, the experience ceases to be fun. Then it simply dissolves into gimmickry, which is just one short stop away from irrelevance which Nintendo has fought hard to prevent. Nintendo's upcoming MotionPlus peripheral is aimed at addressing just this problem; here's hoping developers learn how to leverage it, or Nintendo ultimately incorporates it into its remotes by default.
Worst Recent Offenders:
Lair
Mario Kart Wii
8. Promises, Promises, Promises
The promise of downloadable content. The promise of patches. The promise of a sequel or series or TV spin-off. The promise that this is the next big thing or the only big thing. Get onboard the hype train or risk losing out. The gaming industry is full of promises, and most fail to live up to the shiny marketing words.
Best movie game ever? Well... we'll see.
If you call your game 'the best movie game ever made', you damned well better prepare to put up your dukes, 'cause thems fightin' words. This exact sentence was proclaimed by marketing materials for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and underlined by the game's producers on video. Now, it's great to see that level of ambition and confidence in a game but come on pride comes before the fall.
Just ask Dennis Dyack.
On this same point, we'd also like to put on our cynical hats for a moment (or is it already on?) and call out publishers who release a game just to put out a 'premium content' with extra features and gameplay at exactly the same time. This is a really ugly practice given the content really should've been included in the retail release of the game.
Worst Recent Offenders:
Too Human
Gears of War II
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Promises are not killing gaming.
Anyway, this list sucks so far, but now we take a turn for the ridiculous.
9. STRONG FEMALE LEAD CHARACTER = EDGY, CLEVER AND DESIRABLE
Well, sometimes this is the case Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, the old Lara Croft (from circa 1996 or thereabouts) and Samus Aran from Metroid all spring to mind; even your character from Portal sometimes stoic, always tough and entertaining. But lately, there's been a resurgence in the 'strong female lead character' category, and we get the feeling that this isn't about sexual equality or women's lib. It's about boobs and ass and forced sexual equality. It's manipulative, in fact. She might be 'one of the boys', but she's still eye-candy and catwalk-perfect.
This is your fault.
Take Mirror's Edge's lead character, Faith; Asian to appeal to the Asian markets, female to soften up the lads and potentially sell to a female audience too. How about Elika from Prince of Persia? That's not clever design - that's clever marketing. There's a big difference. The Final Fantasy series has had its share of strong female characters, like Yuna in X-2 and now XIII. Again, it's a deliberate move (particularly X-2, which aimed at a female market with fashion-based equipment and magic-slotting).
Lara Croft still kicks around, as does Samus. But alongside those two comes Alyx Vance (Half-Life 2), Joanna Dark (Perfect Dark), Rayne (BloodRayne), The Boss (MGS), Zoe and April (Dreamfall: The Longest Journey), Jill, Claire and Ada (Resident Evil series), Elika (Prince of Persia) and the list goes on. It's not clever anymore; it's not special. It's become a bad cliché that is as predictable as it is ultimately degrading. Let's stop pretending that's it's still a unique feature.
Worst Recent Offenders:
Resident Evil 5
Mirror's Edge
Prince of Persia
What? This is BAD? Having strong female leads is cliché and uninteresting? Here's a list of bad characters: Alyx, Joanna, The Boss, Zoe and April, Jill, Claire, Ada, and Elika. Are you serious? Shouldn't we be aiming for this to not be special? Shouldn't having strong female leads in games be NORMAL? Who wrote this? Why did they write this? Are they retarded?
10. CASUAL GAMING
Our final point is ultimately one that has divided gamers and the gaming market as a whole and it's as much a positive point as a negative one (again, look out for our next feature, where we'll delve into the positive points of casual gaming). Nintendo has a lot to answer for a lot of it good, a lot of it not so good. While Nintendo's 'Blue Ocean' strategy has unquestionably broadened the market, bringing in new demographics to the fold, it has been at the expense of genuine game content.
Gone is the time when games were simply challenges and stories and adventures with rules and levels and boundaries. Now, the game has become the toy a device, a thing with a set function or goal Brain Training, Wii Fit, Ubisoft's Imagine series EA's casual games. Equally, it has also become about short-burst games that are quick and easy to develop (relative to traditional games), can be played on your iPhone or DS or downloaded from an online service like WiiWare, PSN or Xbox Live Arcade.
Hey - at least it's not running on Unreal Engine 3, right?
Now developers, hoping to make a quick buck off the back of a particularly prevalent trend, are flooding the market with knock-off products that take proven successes like Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training and Wii Fit or Wii Sports and turn them into something almost indistinguishable from the source material. All kinds of mini-game collections, maths tutors, language teachers, calorie counters, cookbooks, e-books and other 'toy/device/function' games eat up shelf space alongside an ever-shrinking number of traditional game releases. And this applies to every platform out there, from Xbox 360 to PSP.
It's not a pretty picture if you're one of the many long-time players who just don't find these kinds of products appealing but that's the way the market is going right now. You're going to have to contend with products that aim at housewives and techno-grannies and your kid sister, while you and other 'core' gamers slowly begin to wonder where all the games have gone as you realize that Nintendo's half a dozen first-party releases (in a good year) may not tide you over.
And to you we say: have you ever considered taking up French or mastering the thrills of Sudoku?
Worst Recent Offenders:
Wii Fit
The Ubisoft 'Imagine:' series
Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training
Minigame collections of all kinds
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
With magazine covers of Nathan naked covered in leaves, or shirtless with rain and dirt covering his body..
