What’s Wrong With Video Games

August 9th, 2005 by ironsoap

I know it isn’t just games (watched any TV lately?) but writing is bad all around—and as bad as it is in movies and on TV, it’s 20 times worse in games. Writing dialogue and stories for games needs to not be something that just the mega-budget games can afford (or something that mega-budget games horribly abuse). Games need to all be given the benefit of a native-language speaking writer who actually knows how to write stuff. Ideally, it would be someone who knows how to write games. At least someone who understands the mindset of the gamer so we don’t end up with crossovers gone awry.

Movies are expensive. They cost about $9.00 per person around here for non-matinee showings and I grumble for days if I pay for a movie with crummy writing. Video games cost an average of $50. The math is yours to do if you wish, but anything past the price of a badly written hardcover book is too much to pay for this kind of thing.

5. Pushin’ Forward Back

My final beef with video games is games that continue to make mistakes that should have been resolved as soon as the technology or the innovation to correct them appeared. I’m talking about things like save-anywhere. Really, in today’s day and age of gargantuan quantities of dirt cheap disk space, games that require you to “find a stopping point” don’t deserve shelf space in the bargain aisle of Jimmy’s Vid Shack. People are busy, adults with responsibilities play games too, let us save where we are and come back later. No, I don’t want to collect save crystals or typewriter ribbons: I want to save where I am exactly and come back to the same point when I have time. No backtracking, no save-of-doom, no hassle.

This same concept can be applied to entire games such as the Tomb Raider series who, in spite of ever shrinking sales from gameplay that was broken by way of overexposure, continued to be rehashes of the previous games for years. Reluctant kudos go to Resident Evil 4’s design team for finally doing something about the oft-maligned “tank walker” control scheme of the previous games, but it certainly shouldn’t have taken five games to get the clue. I have yet to see a Tomb Raider game that does anything TR2 didn’t. Oh, I’m sorry, is it still possible to defeat a skilled Soul Calibur player with some random button mashing? Wow, that’s some great fun there—and a real incentive to practice, too!

Let Me Explain. No, There is Too Much. Let Me Sum Up.

I suppose that at some point I will probably find a new system or game or something that will attract my attention again. Perhaps I will one day be complaining as much about war gaming as I am now about video gaming. But with so many games being showcases for some 3D artist’s portfolio instead of something I really want to spend my time playing, I have a hard time wondering if I’ll have to wait a long time for video games to catch up to my expectations or if at some point I’ll just have to lower them to make do.

In the meantime, I’m keeping busy and while I’m not sure if I’m excited yet for the new systems to launch, I’m still open to trying a great game that flies below the radar and gets a lot of this stuff right. Got any ideas? I’m listening.