10 things we love to hate in gaming. part 1

[paecmaker]

This is a list I saw in a game magazine and thought that I wanted to share them(I translate them so it might be strange sometimes).

If you like it just hail me, I got plenty more where this came from

1

Angry birds

We love to think the game medium as an intelligent, creative and deeply humane. We are telling stories and conveys feelings as often as in movies and litterature. But still one of the most played game for the last years is about throwing angry birds on fat green pigs. It doesnt require a mathematician to find the problems in that equation.

We dont hate angry birds for being a bad game, on the contrary. Its a fun game full of charm and personality, we hate the game because it collides with how we look at the game medium.

What we are worried of is that everything good the game medium can offer will be hidden behind a a big fluffy cloud of feathers.

2


Water maps

Sooner or later it will come, the water map. For hours you have learned every little move your hero can do and you can almost do it blindfolded, you have trained up lightning fast reflexes and....suddenly all is taken away from you.

The water maps always results in loss of movement, and by some unknown reason the difficulty level also raises a few too many steps up. And it doesnt get any better with the knowledge that something big and ugly guaranteed lurks under the surface.

3


motion controls

One the paper motion controls are brilliant, when the Wii controles where shown up for the first time we saw massive potential. We had already spent a fortune on things like Sega rally, dance dance revolution, time crisis, top skater and other arcade games that was controlled in more "realistic" ways. Now Nintendo would move that thinking into our living rooms, the sport games would be changed forever, rpgs would see a new renaissance with the new controls and fps would be blessed with precise controls not even mous and keyboard could match.

But here we sit several years later and still sneeze at everything close to motion controls, so what happened?

Sony and microsoft tried to convince us that it was the primitive technology of the wii that was the problem, but as you probably know that wasnt the case. Instead of the games of our lives we have been fed with shortlived party games consisting primarly of small minigames and other silly things. Some still think that motion controls can be good but the hope is dying fast.

Rarely have such grand dreams of the future been thrown away so carelessly by the big companies.

4

Bobby kotick

The game industry is controlled by a handfull of multinational coorporations, their goal is not to make good games but to earn as much money as possible. Its hard to think about but to change that we need to change hte industry in the foundation, so its easier to blame everything on one evil guy. For 20 years ago his name was Hiroshi Yamauchi but today his name is Bobby Kotick who is the CEO at Activision Blizzard. We are extremely gratious to have someone to blame for greed, commersialism and other things that are a natural part of hte gaming industry(sadly)

5

Takeshis challenge

In the west Takeshi Kitano is mostly famous for his violent yakuza games. However home in Japan he is known for just about everything from standup comedian to slapstick humour to gameshows and famicom games. It is said that Kitano often were drunk under the making of takeshis challenge, that would atleast explain the rare game design where yo amongst other must sing in a microphone and survive a extremely har shoot em up map, however the strangest challenge is when you are ordered to put down your controls and just wait, for 60 minutes...

6


DLC

Downloadable content have been one of the biggest innovations in the current console generation. When already full games get extra parts or when we get newly designed maps the context DLC is shown from it best side, however as often we are tricked and almost extorted by the companies to buy worthless things or the privilege to change colours or graphics. The last part used to be free, then in a menu called "options"

7

L337

L337 sp34k, 3xc3p7 70 ch4ng3 c0nv3n710n4l l3773rs w17h c0mpl1c473d 4sc11- bu1lds y0u 4r3 g1v3n w0rds l1ke n00b, pwn3d 4nd 3xc1t1ing suff1x3s l1k3 "-x0r" 4nd "-4g3". But w3 w1ll s71ll w3n7 70 7h4nk L337 for 7h3 4bbr3v4710ns, w3 c4n d0 w17h0u7 7h3 r3s7.


8

Button mashing

Button mashing is totally necessary in games like track and field, in all other types of games its a totally unacceptable techique. To without any style or thought completely squish your fingers to the buttons in hopes of winning should be completely useless, but all to often even the best players can get caught off guard by this strategy. But what doesnt kill us makes us stronger and NOTHING motivates us more to train than a loss agains a filthy button smasher.

9


Statistics

Maybe this is a heritage from our arcade roots, maybe its about satisfying our ancient collector genes, maybe its just sadims.

All we know is that almost all games got some sort of statistics screen, wether it be a cute platformer to chainsaw massacre simulations. Here everything we ever done in the game get transferred onto numbers, how far haw we walked, hours done, people killed. On one hand its slightly satisfying to see all our accomplished things on one page, on hte other hand do you really want to know that you wasted 14 hours of your life to kill snails in a virtual cave.

10


hair

Modern game graphics are amazing. We can sync lips after what they say, let wathing eyes follow the player wherever he goes, animate individual fingers. We can even recreate the unique feel of fluffy fur. But humans have like already known not fur on their hair but haircuts, where thousands individual hair together form a haircut. And all this is shown to be almost impossible to create with a computer, even more with the limitations real time graphics means. Guess why so many games insist of having so many space marines with almost no hair or strict military haircuts. Its not because we love military fashion, its because we hate hair.

11


Hard

A couple of busted controles lies on the ground, the swear words are still echoing through the hallway. In the cough sits an exhausted gamer staring at the screen with the same desperate look as a student who forgot to study for the exam. He whonders why he got the bright idea to switch the difficulty level to the max, and curses that he cant switch it down again.

Then after several hours of trial and error, curses and broken controles he finally manages to kill the last boss. He fall exhausted down on the floor while he shouts with happiness.

You dont love a game more than you hate its toughest difficulty.

12


Fanboys

The fan culture which has come to grow around the gaming industry is double edged. On one hand it has given us things like cosplay festivals, game music concerts to creative uses of post it notes http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BeeMFFSKXK...ost-It%2B3.JPG

However it has also caused an infected war on sites like youtube and different forums where the "rightfully faithfull" defends their favourite company or product whatever happens. And mostly they both defend their "own" companies while attacking the "others", often without any sense of reason and honest discussions.


13


SNK Bosses

There are hard bosses, and there are SNK bosses. No matter how cool Omega Rugal, Geese Howard and Goetnitz their purpose was at first to devour as many coins as possible in the japanese arcades. However they are also used today as cheap ways of making the difficulty harder. Often they have extremely strong attacks with short "cooldown", massive amounts of projectiles and massive super attacks that are impossible to avoid. And then we havent even mentioned their extreme health or the fact that they often cheat.


14


Fetch quests

For a mission designer with a lack of imagination there is always a last way out, to order the player to fetch an item. This is a really effective way of making the gamer more annoyed by the game than any bugs could ever hope for. However some times they might do some good, you might be able to explore new parts of the world that you missed earlier. Or you can atleast try to keep that in mind when you are ordered to fetch 17 boar hoofs.

15


Yearly "updates"

Its simple to dislike things that are none of your concern, so despite that capcom has gotten their share of criticism of their yearly updates of the Megaman and Street fighter series there is nothing the hardcore audience loves more than to mock Electronic arts yearly sport series and laughs for ourselves when we think about the fans that every year spends lots of cash to get some new statistics. However we are also happily unaware that sports games takes much less time to develop compared to for example fps and action games, like call of duty.

16

Loading screens

You have probably spent more time looking at a loading screen than on Midgar, Black mesa and Hyryle together. So its not strange that the developers are trying to make the loading screens more entertaining. The most used way is to give the player small advices and information while waiting, no problem in that. The problems begin when you are forced to watch at the same advice over and over again, while we slowly go from reading the hints curiosly to literally hate them.

17


Modern FPS design



This picture sums it up pretty good. On the first picture we see the level design of the original Doom, with all its corridors, rooms and places it almost looks like a squid. If the look at the second pic we see almost any modern fps today, basicly just a hallway full of scripted secvences and cutscenes. When the FPS games got more and more advanced, more complex with advanced characters and massive battles the level design was evolved in the totally different way. Its easy to understand from a technical point of view but its also easy to hate.


18


Silent heroes

The heroes which only dialogue is "...." are extremely ordinary in any JRPGs, which itself is kinda strange thinking of how the genre allways has been about story telling and strong characters. You can of course say that the silence gives the hero an aura of mysticism. However the classic saying that a silent hero is easier to identify with is just bull****, unless yourself are silent of course(in a way that you cant speak)


19


Peter Molyneux

Hype will exist as long as games doesn, hype is a part of the industry. As long as new games are made some will always be raised to the skies with extremely high hopes, and as often they are broken when the game is released. However Peter Molyneux isnt just driven by innocent enthusiasm, he have always put in massive hype in his games. Just think of games like Black and White, The movies and Fable, all of them would change the world of gaming for ever thanks to game functions that only existed in his mind.

However he has promised to take it easy from now on, lets see how that goes.

20


Terrifying voice acting

No other genre gives us so many fantasti

[norid]

Hmmm nube tactics might be one to add and JRPG's. I find a lot of people hate those, I like the list through.

[Trunks]

I could not read the 1337 thing to save my life. lol, I feel like the grammar is incorrect and it made me unable to understand a lot of it. Just a bunch of bits and pieces that didn't form full sentences.

[Synge]

Never understood the Angry Birds hate. It's a fun little game and a good way to pass the time when you're stuck/bored in random places.

Also, EA needs to be on this list..

I could not read the 1337 thing to save my life. lol, I feel like the grammar is incorrect and it made me unable to understand a lot of it. Just a bunch of bits and pieces that didn't form full sentences.

"Leet speak, except to change conventional letters with complicated ASCII-builds you are given words like noob, pwned and exciting suffixes like '-xor' and '-age'. But we will still want to thank Leet for the abbreviations, we can do without the rest."

As you said, the syntax ins't good, so even translated it's a bit annoying to read.

[Trunks]

"Leet speak, except to change conventional letters with complicated ASCII-builds you are given words like noob, pwned and exciting suffixes like '-xor' and '-age'. But we will still want to thank Leet for the abbreviations, we can do without the rest."

As you said, the syntax ins't good, so even translated it's a bit annoying to read.

ohh, I couldn't make out conventional and had no clue was ASCII builds are. Then xor and age threw me off too. all makes sense now when I look at it. My dyslexia gets all f'd up when you throw numbers in with the letters.

[paecmaker]

Never understood the Angry Birds hate. It's a fun little game and a good way to pass the time when you're stuck/bored in random places.

Also, EA needs to be on this list..



"Leet speak, except to change conventional letters with complicated ASCII-builds you are given words like noob, pwned and exciting suffixes like '-xor' and '-age'. But we will still want to thank Leet for the abbreviations, we can do without the rest."

As you said, the syntax ins't good, so even translated it's a bit annoying to read.

I will add more , I am sure EA is on one of them.

Also the leet entry was extremely annoying to translate.


:edit, sorry EA isnt on the list, except for Obsidian no company is directly targeted.

[TheGateKeeper]

Lol the part about the DLC is so true. Games nowadays are released with 90% content at full price, and the other 10% is released gradually as DLC.

[paecmaker]

I just added point 11-20

[Dess]

What's REALLY going to grind your gears, is Angry Birds is coming to Xbox... for the low low price of $40 you can play it on the xbox too! lol. It's supposed to be Kinect compatible, and have a few versions... but still.. $40 for Angry Birds????

[paecmaker]

Damnit....-_-