Dear Sega;
As a lifelong fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, I think I can safely say that the series as a whole has lost it's way. I am not the only person who thinks this; you need only send one of your interns on a Google-search for any Sonic product post '99 to see just what the community thinks of the frankly inferior products you've been producing. It's a shame because Sonic made Sega the name it is today in many parts of the world, and the character still holds a lot of respect and selling power. However a name is only ever as good as the product it is backing, and in this sense recent efforts have been distinctly wanting. For this reason among others I want to suggest, for future titles, that you immediately forthwith implement the following changes;
1 - Get rid of the third D
Seriously, games like Sonic just don't work in three-dimensions. Since the original games relied on a combination of fast movement and controllable two-dimensional physics adding a third dimension just confounds things further. Believe me, you're on the right track with the Sonic Advance/Rush series. You can still make good looking games using all those fancy bells and whistles that come with modern consoles. Trust me, Sonic works when you're limited to up, down, left and right (and a + start)
2 - Shut Sonic up
Sonic was infinitely more endearing when he didn't open his stupid trap. In the context of comics and cartoons then there's a pressing need to have him speak dialogue, but much of his personality can be shown through inventive idle animations, actions within the games and so on. It's bad enough you made the poor guy speak, but to give him the prototypical "radical dude" vocal tics was stupendously obvious and above all obnoxious. Bill and Ted has long since passed, let it go already.
3 - Get rid of Shadow
I can understand; one day you were scanning through the music channels and chanced upon something by My Crappy Romance or other such tosh and thought "hey, the kids are into this misery deal, let's go with that". But really, come on, was it that necessary to start making spin-offs with the guy? Beside the fact that he has the personality of a wet tea-bag, the guy plays like wank in the games. Chaos control can suck my balls.
4 - Stop adding so many supporting characters
Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and possibly Amy. That's all you really need to make a Sonic game right there. Robotnik/Eggman/Whatever the hell you call him as the main bad guy and a suitable robotic anthropomorphic representation of a main cast member as a mini-nemesis. It's simple, it's effect and it's not sickeningly annoying. I needn't remind you that you're starting to run dry on the whole cute animal stock. For every cute animal on this planet, there's a thousand evil ones. You know you're scraping the barrel when you start using bats. I mean really, bats? Are they really so endearing? Name me one character that ever made his or her name by being associated with bats. Yeah, I thought not.
5 - Would you let us collect Chaos Emeralds and get Super Forms again for goodness sake?
I love going all Dragonball Z when I get fifty rings. I love being able to dash through levels at the speed of light destroying everything in my path. It's an incentive to explore to find the posts/rings to get to the special zone, it's a reward for me putting in so much darned effort in the first place. Brief storyline-based levels that last a few minutes do not count.
6 - No more cross-species love interests
I don't think I need to elabourate more. Just don't do it, okay?
7 - Stop adding pointless gameplay mechanics
What, I've got to deal with souls and do tricks in the middle of the air to get through a level? I've got enough going on avoiding bad-guys and the like without arsing about with such things. We get it, you're trying to do something different, but at the very least if you're going to implement such things make them a passive choice for the player and not a necessity for play. Kind of like the Super forms. See how that works?
8 - Remake Sonic 3 + S&K
Dammit all, just create a modern version of Sonic3K. Really you haven't made a decent Sonic game since then. From then on just make extensions on that same game layout until the end of time. We'll all thank you for it.
I hope you take my criticism on board because I'm telling you, I'm this close to getting a Mario game. I haven't bought a Mario game since '93. Is that what you want? Do you want the plumber to win? Do you want some overweight Italian municipal worker usurping my loyalty? I didn't think so.
In short, get your shit together.
-Captain Maxx Power
P.S. Actually I just realised, there's Batman, Batgirl and the actual Bat Man (as in a man who's a Bat). But not that many people know about the last guy so he doesn't count. My points are still valid though so get to it, chop chop!
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Sunday, 17 February 2008
Cram it in; just how complex can games become?
It seems these days that more, not necessarily bigger, is better. At least when it comes to games. If you want to see direct proof of this then go look at the top list of games on gamefaqs.com for the PSP section. As of the date of this blog, three of the games - Monster Hunter, Monster Hunter 2 and Disgaea PSP - can only be accurately described as gargantuan in their scope. The Monster Hunter series offer a huge free-roaming world where you can do battle with various different types of weapons and abilities against loads of, well monsters. Disgaea is also a remarkably silly romp which involves stats so astronomically high as to be mind-boggling. This is certainly an impressive feat considering the small size of PSP games (somewhere in the region of 800Mb a piece). But do all these extra features mean that MH and Disgaea are the best games ever created?
Well no actually, it doesn't. I tried hard, so very very hard, to like MH. I mean if everyone else liked it so much, surely it must be good? Then I remembered that everyone also likes excessive drinking and Grand Theft Auto, promptly bringing me to my senses. The major problem with games such as Monster Hunter and Disgaea is that for most hardcore gamers such as myself who demand to see everything a game has to offer (being from the North of England I have a natural tendency towards tight-fistedness), putting in all of these features almost from the word go actually causes an interesting affect; I just don't want to do it. The sheer cliff face that is the world I've been given proves too much, so I go off and play iSketch instead.
What's the problem here exactly? Perhaps it's me, maybe I'm just fickle. But I think it's something else. To me a game can be complicated and deep, it just needs the right pacing of just how complex and deep it gets. Take your average JRPG, a mixed bag of brilliant examples of narrative and hours-long trash that's as fun to sit through as genital mutilation. It would be absurd if you were given transport around the entire world, every single party member and every single spell, ability, item, weapon, armour and battery-powered dildo. There's a gradual incline of learning to be had, where new ideas are trickle-fed to you like a hamster at it's water tub. Now compare this to Monster Hunter; you're given an option of every weapon, a unnecessarily huge set of tutorials that will reasonably take double digit hours to sit through them all, and then punted out on your arse with nary a target in sight. Sandbox game or not, I need some direction, a reason to want to randomly mutilate animals besides increasing numbers.
Then there's other such issues, perhaps one that's always got my goat - multiple endings. Now the backs of games boxes are more than happy to shout out such features to the high heavens. Personally I see the term "multiple endings" on the back of a games box and feel slightly nauseous. I can say, without hyperbole, that not once in my gaming life have I ever been able to get anything positive out of multiple endings without a guide sat on my lap. Call me insane, but I don't want to have to go through however many hours it takes to complete a game and missing out on the "perfect", most expensively produced sequence because I forgot to visit Old Man Plot Device three times as oppose to just the two times I remembered whilst I was trying to play the game. I can see the virtue of multiple endings in some respects, but there's better ways of doing it. The Fallout series is easily the best example I've ever seen; you have one central storyline that always concludes the same way. What you do in individual towns changes the ending slightly; not a lot, but enough to make you want to do something a bit different to see if you can change the fate of Broken Hills (you can't by the way, I tried). Now contrast this to the J-Pop disaster that is FFX-2; not only do you need to maximize an arbitrary percentage completion that randomly increases, but you need to talk to a specific character, at a specific location, at a specific time, and a specific number of times. Are you kidding me? What happened to the days when such achievements were the realm of getting a higher score than the last player? It's sheer madness.
I personally would rather see more games being constructed that were more focused on their core elements rather than taking those same elements and spreading them out so far it becomes a tangled mess. Games such as F.E.A.R. are much more engrossing to play than something like Disgaea. It focuses itself on the tactical shooting and horror aspects to aplomb, while Disgaea complexity grows exponentially to the point where it all becomes too much to care about. It's a bit like choosing between reading a great novel or staring at a bunch of spreadsheets on a database. You're bound to get something out of both of them, but the question is just how far does your masochism go to learn all five hundred lines of the customer shoe catalogue?
Well no actually, it doesn't. I tried hard, so very very hard, to like MH. I mean if everyone else liked it so much, surely it must be good? Then I remembered that everyone also likes excessive drinking and Grand Theft Auto, promptly bringing me to my senses. The major problem with games such as Monster Hunter and Disgaea is that for most hardcore gamers such as myself who demand to see everything a game has to offer (being from the North of England I have a natural tendency towards tight-fistedness), putting in all of these features almost from the word go actually causes an interesting affect; I just don't want to do it. The sheer cliff face that is the world I've been given proves too much, so I go off and play iSketch instead.
What's the problem here exactly? Perhaps it's me, maybe I'm just fickle. But I think it's something else. To me a game can be complicated and deep, it just needs the right pacing of just how complex and deep it gets. Take your average JRPG, a mixed bag of brilliant examples of narrative and hours-long trash that's as fun to sit through as genital mutilation. It would be absurd if you were given transport around the entire world, every single party member and every single spell, ability, item, weapon, armour and battery-powered dildo. There's a gradual incline of learning to be had, where new ideas are trickle-fed to you like a hamster at it's water tub. Now compare this to Monster Hunter; you're given an option of every weapon, a unnecessarily huge set of tutorials that will reasonably take double digit hours to sit through them all, and then punted out on your arse with nary a target in sight. Sandbox game or not, I need some direction, a reason to want to randomly mutilate animals besides increasing numbers.
Then there's other such issues, perhaps one that's always got my goat - multiple endings. Now the backs of games boxes are more than happy to shout out such features to the high heavens. Personally I see the term "multiple endings" on the back of a games box and feel slightly nauseous. I can say, without hyperbole, that not once in my gaming life have I ever been able to get anything positive out of multiple endings without a guide sat on my lap. Call me insane, but I don't want to have to go through however many hours it takes to complete a game and missing out on the "perfect", most expensively produced sequence because I forgot to visit Old Man Plot Device three times as oppose to just the two times I remembered whilst I was trying to play the game. I can see the virtue of multiple endings in some respects, but there's better ways of doing it. The Fallout series is easily the best example I've ever seen; you have one central storyline that always concludes the same way. What you do in individual towns changes the ending slightly; not a lot, but enough to make you want to do something a bit different to see if you can change the fate of Broken Hills (you can't by the way, I tried). Now contrast this to the J-Pop disaster that is FFX-2; not only do you need to maximize an arbitrary percentage completion that randomly increases, but you need to talk to a specific character, at a specific location, at a specific time, and a specific number of times. Are you kidding me? What happened to the days when such achievements were the realm of getting a higher score than the last player? It's sheer madness.
I personally would rather see more games being constructed that were more focused on their core elements rather than taking those same elements and spreading them out so far it becomes a tangled mess. Games such as F.E.A.R. are much more engrossing to play than something like Disgaea. It focuses itself on the tactical shooting and horror aspects to aplomb, while Disgaea complexity grows exponentially to the point where it all becomes too much to care about. It's a bit like choosing between reading a great novel or staring at a bunch of spreadsheets on a database. You're bound to get something out of both of them, but the question is just how far does your masochism go to learn all five hundred lines of the customer shoe catalogue?
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