Every bad videogame design decision

[Zeta]

http://www.cracked.com/article_16196_7- ... -obey.html

I could not have said it better. So I won't try. This sums up more or less every complaint about every videogame design I've ever had.

[Cuckooguy]

[Zeta]

Actually, it didn't mention artificial difficulty. But close enough. I'm surprised the article didn't single out any of the Sonic games at all in it, considering their reputaiton.

[Esrever]

"DAMMIT I JUST WANT TO FIND A SAVE POINT SO I CAN GET TO BED"

I sure laughed at that one. Sounds like me in the Phazon mines!

[P.P.A.]

"DAMMIT I JUST WANT TO FIND A SAVE POINT SO I CAN GET TO BED"

I sure laughed at that one. Sounds like me in the Phazon mines!

Also the entity of Metroid 2. And numerous RPGs.
The sixth page seems to be dedicated to Sonic 06.

Something I miss here is that in almost any JRPG ever, your main-character is a sword-wielding teenager with spiky hair who's not really good but neither really bad at magic. I wouldn't mind the spiky hair and the teenager that much, but why do I always get a damn sword and weak magic? Why can't there be more JRPGs that make the main character a skilled mage (or the option to manually decide or influence the evolution of the character)?!

[Ritz]

Something I miss here is that in almost any JRPG ever, your main-character is a sword-wielding teenager with spiky hair who's not really good but neither really bad at magic. I wouldn't mind the spiky hair and the teenager that much, but why do I always get a damn sword and weak magic? Why can't there be more JRPGs that make the main character a skilled mage (or the option to manually decide or influence the evolution of the character)?!

I've always loved how the main character of Breath of Fire III, while still a swordie, was the game's primary white mage. The other weilded a rocket launcher, and had the second highest physical attack stat of all the other characters.

Also, the inclusion of that FFX video in the final article was just so perfect.

[G.Silver]

I really don't like this article, because while these sound like bad ideas, they're basically gaming tropes and a lot of them exist for a reason, there are cases where it's good AND bad, or at least not that annoying and frustrating.

And then they talk about artificial game length and they show a picture of a car sequence in Half Life 2, and I don't know what he's trying to say there. I grew to like those car sequences, and if we had Popcorn in here he'd be throwing a fit, because those sequences, while long and fairly uneventful, actually establishes a rather eerie atmosphere and I think it's important and good that it's there. A lot of it just feels like unresearched opinion, and if he didn't like those parts, well, I didn't like the parts where I had to wait for an elevator while flaming zombies tried to kill me and all my friends, but I guess that's covered in escort missions.

So speaking of Valve and Escort missions, didn't they just release a new map (of what, 5 existing maps?) for TF2 that is JUST escorting? Then you have Ico, one long escort GAME, or to an extent, Yoshi's Island, and then I can't think of escort missions without thinking of GunGriffon, the second game in particular, which had some intense escort / protect / intercept missions that were a blast, and when you figured out how everything was going to hit, it was like beautiful clockwork.

Shorter games are great, but I especially like his little tacked on "as long as the price reflects this" bit. I hate to get on my "back in my day" horse, but it used to be we paid $50 for a game that would be finished in under 2 hours (if you could finish it at all) and we thought those games were pretty great. At $20, any game that was any good at all seemed like a fabulous deal, and then Portal was for me at least several hours long and so many people are saying it was this great satisfying experience. But we'd NEVER pay a full price for a game like that, even when it offers considerable replay value with its extra missions and speed-throughs and exploits (for those of us who are into that), because the only thing that really matters is how long it is. It's no wonder developers seek to pad their games, because for some reason to gamers these days length counts for so much, a key comment on any review is "how long will it take to finish?" Is that the only economic worth of a game? The problem is really with the continued inflation of games to match the hardware that powers them, as they grow bigger and have more and more money thrown at them. Developers and publishers have too much invested in the $50 price point, I don't think high profile developers are interested in releasing games for less.

I love the line in the Dwarf Fortress manual, "Dying is fun!" because that's what it should be. It's a chance to try again and do better, and the next time you play, you'll do even better and die even less, and if the game was any fun in the first place it ought to be fun the second time too. That's MY rule, but yet this guy has the exact opposite rule, don't kill me, don't interupt my fun, don't make me play the same sequence again ever. And if I'm playing an RPG or some other stupidly long game, then I agree with him, but these "rules" don't apply to everything.

What I really hate is this holier-than-thou attitude the article presents, as if the players of games have some kind of rights. I'm not defending games' right to be bad, but as more and more players latch on to this sense of entitlement: "The game is punishing me!" "The game does not reward me for playing it!" I do not care for the development of this vocabulary, I don't like it when criticism falls into such neat little phrases that, once coined, pop up everywhere (I do not like the term "flow" in regard to Sonic). I don't think people are realizing what the problems really are.

Don't make shitty games, don't frustrate the player. Those are the rules.

[Esrever]

You can't take these "top ten whatever" articles too seriously... they're created strictly to generate traffic.

I work in the magazine industry, where "numbered list" articles are a longstanding and utterly infallible tradition. "The 200 dating tips you NEED TO KNOW!" "15 make-up tips you can't live without!" "10 signs it's time to dump your dude!" One older designer I know summed it up in two words: "numbers sell." Always. The reason why nearly every Cosmo cover has at least one headline like this on it is because people always want to read it and it always, always works.

So now it's practically an obligation. You have to have a numbers article, because the titles grab people's attention so well. In fact, usually they come up with the title first, and then some writer or editor just bangs out any old nonsense to fill the list. I hope that no one thought those "10 signs it's time to dump your dude" were based on any kind of meaningful research... because the place they really came from was the top of some magazine editor's head, one day before deadline.

It bothers me that the online gaming sites are starting to notice what a powerful draw these stories are. I think Game Daily has at least one "numbers" article every day now, and theirs are even worse. Each one looks like it was written in about five minutes. And look how they code them... each one of the "top ten" things is put on it's own page, which means that as you compulsively click through them all, you are generating ten times the number of ad impressions that you would reading a regular article or news story, all from an article that required no research and was only about ten sentences long. No wonder these things are everywhere now!

[Zeta]

So speaking of Valve and Escort missions, didn't they just release a new map (of what, 5 existing maps?) for TF2 that is JUST escorting?

Escort missions are a problem when the character you're escorting has the endurance of a piece of tissue paper. The TF2 Escort missions are all escorting carts, bombs, or otherwise indestructible machinery, which is what makes them fun.

[Green Gibbon!]

I think I'm going to instigate a new rule effective immediately: no linking to articles about top 10 anything. No matter how clever or relevant you think it is, because I can tell you definitively that it, well, isn't.

[Malchik]

I don't know how he could say Portal was well written. The dialogue was fantastic but other then that the plot (The bare essentials to move the game) was a thin as a catholic’s condom. You don't even know the character's name until the end or even know what significance she plays other then to test a gun and maybe her endurance or why she has the abilities she has. This was the only thing I hated about Portal because it builds on cool visuals and themes but in the end that's all that holds the game together. That and the team knew they were making a meme. But I guess it's that thin and fun game play that truely makes it special.

[Neo]

Are you being sarcastic. The vague plotline was the whole point of the story progression!

In Portal, you start out by simply waking up in a room and get dragged throughout this facility, being told what to do by an omnipresent computer, without knowing how you got in that situation, what exactly is happening around you and how will it eventually end. It's this lack of info about the surrounding world that adds to the eeriness and mystique of the game: you're forced to draw out your own conclusions, and by the time you reach the final test, it's finally evident what's going on. GLaDOS is insane, it's trying to murder you as it made you murder your faithful companion cube, and on top of that lied about the cake and grief counseling, so from then on it's a battle for survival until you can repay the favor.

I really don't get where you're coming from when you say Portal's plot sucked. It's what made me play the game. The various and increasingly difficult puzzles were just the icing on the cake.

[Isuka]

That must have been the biggest, baddest bitchin' BAAAAAWWWWWW ever. From now on, I shall refer to that article as B^4.

Also: THANKS FOR SPOILING IT TO ME, NEO!!

[Neo]

There's really nothing to spoil, though, except for the companion cube part, I guess. The beauty of the story is how it's played through the great and hilarious dialogue (or monologue?) by GLaDOS. I got the game "spoiled" for me too and it didn't affect my experience negatively in anyway. Just go play the game already, you should've done so months ago.

[Delphine]

How were you not spoiled for Portal before this? It's the only thing the gaming blogosphere talked about for friggin weeks.

[Majestic Joey]

I think that's true about countdowns sell. I seriously hate countdowns because I think they're bullshit but at the same time I just...can't...look...away. it's weird, it's like I can't rest until I know what game they think is the best or who was the coolest boss (which always ends up being Psycho Mantis) or etc. Magazines are like working the psychology, except it's reverse.