So I've been playing Prototype for the last week-ish... It's a pretty good game; nice graphics, good sound, excellent controls, good central character, decent story (for a superhero game) and all the other pretty good features that make it above average. The character is also a hoodie! How cool is that!? However the game isn't what I'd call amazing. The graphics could be from an eighteen month old (but good for 18 months ago) game and the game play itself is very akin to Assassins Creed. Even the controls are very similar, and Altair's a bit of a "historical hoodie". I've probably spent around five or six hours playing through the story, and what's unusual about that is that I've played at most three single-player games for more than two hours in the last few years. I have no patience for them. Even the genre breakers and classics; I get bored. Prototype however, no sign of boredom yet. I'm surprising myself playing this game as I've surely played technically far better games and put them off after an hour... Are classics really classics then?My games library is pretty much a concise A to Z of triple A titles from the last ten years. I've completed GTA:Vice City, Tribes Vengeance, COD 4 and a bunch of driving games. Half-Life 2 lost my interest after Ravensthingy. I just don't really finish games anymore, which continuously does surprise me as I used to finish several games in any given week... None of the games that I do finish though, are what you'd call "hardcore gamer all-time classics" (or any actual term that I can think of). Yet I'm undoubtedly a hardcore gamer. I'm not sure that I really understand my own gaming preferences...
So what is it that makes any single game a AAA title... Let me run through the obvious features that apparently make a game awesome!- Graphics? Quite obviously not. Gears of War had some of the best graphics on offer for the PC at it's time of release; yet it got uniformly slated by PC consumers and several reviews.
- Audio? Definitely not. The only games that you ever hear mention of the audio in are either part of the Halo franchise or Horror games. It really is that under-valued. Unless you count all the Guitar/Band/Audio games that are mostly out on the consoles.
- Story/script? Hmm... To go back to Gears of War. There was a story. Something about aliens and soldiers. Actually, let me refresh that memory... Halo, Crysis, Half-Life, AvP, etc, etc, etc. Probably 75% of all FPS games ever released are goddam motherfucking aliens versus goddam motherfucking soldiers.
Playability? Well, I found World of Goo much more playable than Crysis. Crysis was meant to have bucket loads of playability... Where was it?!?
- Controls? I'm actually laughing at this part of gaming on the PC; if you've read my other posts here, the one about WASD highlights a tiny part of the problem in PC games' controls. Let me restate that whole post in one tiny sentence... "Fuck WASD!".
After having played "so much" (ho ho ho) of Prototype, I'm re-evaluating what I believe makes a G R E A T game...
The things I'm enjoying about it are the character, the controls (Assassins Creed also managed to syphon several hours of play out of me) and the story unravelling continuously in-game. Really, the AI is distinctly average and the character models are also fairly non inspiring, but the whole game just gels so well, that it's easy to just keep playing and find out the next piece of the story or open the next power. Why didn't Gears of War grip me like that? It's also a massively powered third person game, but it's so "butch" and the characters are 
the most cliched stereotypes that are around in contemporary games, that it's almost impossible to relate to. It's similar to watching an early Arnie film: plenty of action and big men with big guns (Ooooooer!) being all manly with and against each other. Unfortunately I have no latent homosexual tendencies, so maybe that's why this is all lost on me, along with American Wrestling, UFC, Football, pub bonding and Rob Halford from Judas Priest.
Well, I've wandered off topic, as I always do... What I'm essentially getting at is that Prototype, contrary to not being revolutionary is the best "this gen" game I've played since Assassins
Very good indeed sir looking forward to reading more of your rantings when you can be arsed to write them
ReplyDeleteCheers indeed Mr!
ReplyDeleteHoping to do one article-ish style entry per week, and maybe a smaller rant every few days aswell!
you forgot one point Mr Mute, in my noob, casual gamer's opinion, what makes a good game is the obsession factor. The repetition per se.
ReplyDeleteI don't play epic games. I might have ADD, but they bore the shit out of me and ask too much of my precious housewife time. If I want story, graphics and amazement, I can watch a flick or read a graphic novel. If I want soundtracks, i can listen to my extensive collection of handpicked tunes.
What i want is a game which doesn't surprise me but gives me this sense of achievement everytime I play it for 5 minutes.
Think Columns, Peggle, think Tetris, think any Dash game out there or even Dad's Arkanoids. There's no real surprise there, controls are basic, graphics are shite at best, the music is rudimentary, the story erm.. and yet how many addicts around the world??
Sometimes people just want to feel kick ass, just want to solve a wee puzzle for the sake of feeling smart and with it in days full of lost battles with their bosses, colleagues or oven cleaners that don't work as well as in the advert.
Maybe that's the wee schoolgeek in me, the one who was looking forward to the tests, or could get lost in a game of hopscotch or checkers.
Or maybe i am just lazy...
Heh, all valid points Mrs A'Mous. Epic doesn't necessarily relate to just 1st and 3rd person high action games though; you can have strategic games building empires and armies, that are most definately epic. It's a genre that seems to defy conventional expectations of who plays them. There are 8 year olds up to 80 year olds who're all what I'd consider compulsive players of their strategy tipple of choice...
ReplyDeleteHowever, as for effects and soundtracks all being found in other places, well it's mostly true for now. Games media shouldn't be ruled out as being capable of producing exemplary forms in the various arts. I know it's hard to define something in a game; seen to be marketed at children and angsty teens, yet it would be unexpected to think that modern Japanese advertising could be artistic, but it's got more collectible art forms in it than probably any single other grouping of media in recent times.
Movies were laughed at just a few decades ago when people said it could be beautiful or art.
Modern music, the same.
Actually, this is making me think my next post is going to be about the future of games and how the COULD be artistic, moving and beautiful.
Still, I think I've yet again wandered off point...
I guess Art with a big A only exists via a spectator... not someone who participate and shapes it up. Interactive art leads us to obscure Yoko-Ononess. Eat the apple, be part of it... you know the score...
ReplyDeleteFor now I can only see gaming going in the entertainment way... which is great because games are meant to do just that, amuse us, get us to be the hero, not to be struck with awe.
plus when you are right into a action packed sequence, do you really pay attention to the beauty of the pixel? I don't really, and many are like me i guess...
I am fed up with this graphics conversation, who cares as long as the action is flowing and the controls are manageable.
look at all those pixar rubbish. I don't mind them but even though they are beautifully made and the nec plus ultra in matter of computer generated visuals, they still don't cut it against the painstakingly hand drawn Snow White for example... too cold, too cut off from reality which is the single most important missing quality for something to touch us. To be touched you need to relate to it. If people cry at Shrek, it's not the ugly pixel block that moves them, but the human feelings proposed by the story.
I think art could actually get in the way of playability.
anonymussmuss
That's the point though, as a spectator, I can see games that have came out in the past, and I consider them to be artistic; which I guess equates to them being Art...
ReplyDeletePeople have varying opinions as to what makes art, and modern art struggled for a Loooooong time to get it's place in the art world.
Should games be different? Certain vehicles are considered artistic, yet they're also interactive. The process of drawing or painting is interactive, but the result is art. Maybe someone playing a game is interacting but a spectator can see something more artistic as they watch (i'm reminded of the Katamari game/s here) ?
so would gaming nights turn into happenings?
ReplyDeleteThere already are...
ReplyDeleteThe Demo scene in mainland Europe is most definately a fusion of Art and Technology. There's a very good article on it in an issue of Games(tm) from a couple months ago. It's very big for being an underground scene, and it's already been going for somewhere around twenty years.
I know it's slightly different to Games themselves, but it's close enough to fit in the same overall category of Digital Entertainment.
I'm actually still playing this... Wonders never cease, eh!
ReplyDelete