Tuesday, February 2, 2010

New Games

Going to take a break from my usual psymi-psychotic rantings about people who won't RTFM, and pose a sorta-rhetorical question.

David's continued comments to my last post have got me thinking about gaming on a wider scale than I have been recently, and I'm beginning to wonder:

What happened to video games?

Oh, they're pretty now, sure... but where are the engaging titles? We on the PC only seem to get two or three game types.

1) the MMO. There are three of these that seem to keep coming up. One is exactly like WoW except for some minor detail. Two is the exact opposite of WoW, and goes out of its way to be hard on you and discourage casual players and mindless kiddies - WAR comes to mind here. Three uses the tried and true formula of "Look, dateless losers: Our MMO has TITS! You know you want to play when we have our NPCs show you their boobs!"

2) COMBAT SO REAL YOU'LL THINK YOU FUCKED UP AND JOINED THE MARINE CORPS DURING A DRUNKEN BENDER! Except for the minor detail that their damage models are invariably based on how cool they think a weapon is, and not the cartridge it actually chambers. CoD4:MW and MW2 are the worst offenders here, but in days gone by, Battlefield was a classic example of "playability" passed off as realism.

3) Generic horror-themed game #616A, with the plot stolen from several Sci-Fi channel 3am movies. This is stuff like FEAR; Resident Evil 17: The zombies are still coming, damn it; and Dead Space.

I've gotta say, FEAR was one of the biggest gaming let downs for me, ever. Bought it a few days after release, dropped fifty bucks, and it was crap. Unscary, unrealistic weapons, done-to-death characters, and that bullet-time thing wasn't interesting when Max Payne did it in 2001. The entire scariness of the game consisted of scary-little-devil-girl appearing out of nowhere to give knee-jerk "scary" moments. Also: the ending? Total shit.

Now, System Shock 2, that was a creepy goddamned game. Even had the RPG aspects to make your character somewhat unique.

At least #2 has moved on to the modern battlefield. I don't know if I could play Omaha Beach again.

You know what we need? Another Mechwarrior game. I know a lot of people didn't like the 4 series, because Microsoft toned down the sim aspect, and made it more action-y, but I liked it.

There's little as satisfying as loading up 100 ton robot and laying waste to everything in sight with particle accelerators and rail guns.

What I've been saying for years is that we need a Mechwarrior MMO.

Dig this: open up the entire inner sphere as playable territory. You start as a mercenary with a lone dropship and one or two mechs (or C-Bill equivalent thereof), and you travel from world to world, taking contracts. Planetary defense, raids, auxiliary forces for a major house, whatever. Be sorta like MW4: Mercs, except that all the other mechs would be piloted by real people, too.

You run it as a persistent galaxy, where players' winning or losing battles shifts who controls the world.

You could have the ranks filled in with computer-driven mechs, but obviously live people would be preferred to fill out your unit.

Could eventually even work up to a standing contract with one of the house militaries for garrison duty or the like.

Bonus points for opening up the Solaris VII arena. Make the Grand Championship way more interesting, I'd wager. Even go so far as to allow broadcasting a stream of the weekly (or even daily) matches; get a real announcer to comment...

The technology has advanced far enough to allow all kinds of interesting options to turn it into a virtual, persistent galaxy.

Maybe even have computer driven Clan incursions that player units have to defend against.

It would be so cool.

I always wanted a realistic FPS like that. Something like ARMA, except persistent. Where players would assault and defend territory, that would stay took or lost until players did something about it.

Planetside's original model was supposed to be a sci-fi version of this, but for some reason it flopped. Didn't have enough half-naked blue elf chicks or something, I guess.

Even Joint Ops would have been decent, had they polished it a bit more.

I'd also like to see weapon selection realism instituted in an online game. I don't care how laid-back your CO is, people in the US Army do not traditionally get to carry AKM's, let alone RPG-7's, and I really can't see any other country carrying the M25.

This is another area CoD4 really pissed me off in. They had USMC able to carry the SVD, AKM, G36C, and RPG-fucking-7.

This was sheer laziness. Really, how much longer would it have taken to run up an M72 LAW model for the US forces?

We won't even talk about the Desert Eagle and StGW44.

I dunno. I was never extraordinarily good at online FPS games - save Starsiege: Tribes, where my innate ability to think in three dimensions let me rule the fucking battlefield while the Quake and UT refugees stood on the ground bitching - but I still miss getting to play. Joint Ops was especially interesting, as it had not only realistic weapons (with fire mode selectors, no less) but also had Co-op mode.

Moving along in a traveling overwatch with six other players, putting concentrated fire on insurgents that tried to ambush from the jungle... all very fun and exciting. Of course, that was a game that rewarded stealth and aiming, and didn't even give you the provision of bunny-hopping.

2 comments:

  1. What happened to video games?

    You know I spent time thinking of this and really have past few years. I can remember a game on the snes with a disk flip part playing a jet fighter game when I was a kid. It was really basic just aim and fire a one hit missle after some voice parts to blow up the enemy. Really basic and nothing major but I can still remember it after all theses years then we have a few more in my head from the system and then really back to the old school pong.

    shining force for the Sega Genesis was my all time game I fell in love with. A basic turn based rpg that I enjoyed. I still miss it now and have been debating to toss it in and play it as I still own the system somewhere.

    I don't really need top graphic images for a game just a good story line so that kills out any mmo's and really the only mmo I play is a text based mud even then after close to four years of it I am moving away from it.

    What happened to video games? Companies who make them just want more and more money really. So they put in the top three game areas. FPS, MMO's and the over done science type games that make no sense or have been done so many times it is not funny.

    Any shooting games with war and random guns will sell and they know this so they throw out any research and toss in any gun that looks cool and has a loud bang.

    The MMO's well they look at WOW and make games based off that even now are making a Star Trek one it seems which makes me sad as I grew up with Star Trek watching it when I was a kid and yet they fail all the time at making a stand alone game but now they are trying to make a MMO one. Kinda sad on a few levels.

    I like the idea of the Mech one and really it could be done. Might go look at engines to test that idea on yet I know I fail at any program to make images and my coding is not the best but really I could see that going off.

    What happened to video games? We may never know but I hope this little reply helped some and I guess it did as I have spent some time working on it and fleshing out my view if that counts for anything.

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  2. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate pretty games. I really do.

    Oblivion, once I kicked on higher res and HDR, has some jaw-droppingly gorgeous sunsets, and rainy weather around lake Rumaro so realistic that I keep catching myself expecting to get wet.

    But I can't support form in lieu of function. If a game isn't fun, or interesting, or playably bug-free, no amount of pretty makes up for it.

    I miss the days of older games, back when a game had to stand on its own merits, instead of being the latest (insert name of popular game here) killer. Halo killer, WoW killer... is it so wrong to want an original game?

    That's one of the biggest pissers of Fallout 3 for me. It had the potential to be one of the greatest games ever, but the creators were too lazy to do anything more than ship a half-assed product in order to shove DLC down peoples' throats.

    I also miss the days before the internet was wide spread. Back when a game had to work from the box, because patches required shipping out disks.

    Can't say as I overly miss the NES days. I remember most of the games being pointless movie franchise tie-ins that rode on the coat tails of whatever was hot that month.

    It did start the Final Fantasy series... but still, by and large the games were crap.

    Actually, now that I think of it, most of the decent console games to come out of those days were Japanese RPGs. I had a huge thing for Phantasy Star IV on the Genesis.

    Nah, I've always preferred PC gaming. Duke Nukem and Commander Keen and Wolf3D, and Doooom (insert ominous sound of thunder and lighting flash here). I wasted so many hours blasting badly rendered sprite-demons it's not even funny.

    Wish I had a PC that could still run some of that stuff. There was an old game in the Battletech franchise (pre-Mechwarrior for those younger folks in the audience) that was the first RTS I ever played. At ten I had no idea what I was doing, and was quickly frustrated by the game... but I think these days I'd get a kick out of it. I remember, it was also the first game I ever played that had sound that wasn't MIDI. As you started it up it would go "The Crescent Hawks' Revenge..." and launch into music. So. Cool. Even if it was in eight khz mono.

    That, and King's Quest IV. So... much... typing... But again, at age eight I just didn't have the mental capacity to keep up with a game like that, where I'd enjoy something so huge these days. Eight colors not so much... but the story was interesting.

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