Headshots & Friendly Fire: Round 3
The gaming industry has gotten bigger and better with each passing year, but sometimes they just don’t do things right. Whether it’s gameplay, story, pricing, or business practice, sometimes the industry needs a little friendly fire from the gamers to keep it in line.
Other times, developers look down their sight and fire off a well placed bullet right into our unexpected head. This is Josh & Cameron, and this is Headshots & Friendly Fire.
A Bit of Friendly Fire
- Infinite Respawning Enemies – Sometimes the infinite respawning enemies mechanic can work. Ratchet & Clank Future had pods that spat out little crabs until you destroyed the pods. The crabs by themselves weren’t much of a threat, just more of an annoyance. You only had to worry about them once there were more than 10 of them on screen. Games like R&C that rely on faced paced action can get away with it. However, games like Killzone 2 and Call of Duty: World at War that rely a slow, progessive advance, turn the infinitely respawning mechanic into a mind-numbingly frustrating experience. I’m sure they are trying to recreate to intense pressure of war, but if the enemies are smart enough to challenge your shooter skills, you don’t need respawning enemies. Besides, I’m not a historian, but I’m pretty sure the Germans didn’t have 1 billion soldiers in Berlin.
- Single Player Length – I understand that Multiplayer is where a lot of developers are putting their time and effort and that is where most players will spend their time. But does that excuse a developer from releasing a big budget game with a 6 hour long single player campaign? A great example of this was Call of Duty 4, whose single player clocked in at an amazing 5-6 hours. Now I am not saying every game should have a 15+ hour single player experience but it could at least get somewhere close to 10 hours. Not everyone likes playing online and to pay 60 bucks for a game that only lasts you 5 hours with very little replay value is not cool.
Male Lead With Strong Female Sidekick – Prince of Persia 2008 actually made me ashamed to be a man. You play as an idiotic, self-obsessed “prince” who spends the entire game protecting a woman who can’t do anything on her own, and can’t control her female hormones, but don’t worry, the “prince” is there to comfort her and make her feel all better about her life. After playing through a quarter of the game, I was hoping Elika would just let the “prince” fall to his death, and I could play as her the rest of the game. After all, the only attacks that are worth a damn are hers, and she obviously gets around the environment faster. Listen developers, if you want to put both a male and female on screen at the same time, the female needs to actually be a person and not just a “react to what man says/does” machine. Uncharted 2 has upped the ante with 2 sassy female sidekicks. Whoa! Get ready for a story with a complex love triangle, seeing as how women can’t live without a man. But what can you expect from a developer whose last game franchise involved a love interest between two bandicoots.
- Movie Tie-in Games – Yes just stop, thats all. Its getting old seeing a movie come out only to see yet another crappy game made to try and capitalize on the movies success. I have no problem with a game coming out alongside a movie, that is fine because a lot of these movies would make for a great gaming experience. My problem is that there is no thought, time or effort put into these games. They are just slapped together, stamped with a name and thrown out to the masses. Some of the recent ones that come to mind include Transformers, Watchmen, and Terminator Salvation. All of these had the potential to be great games as they have great characters to pull from, good stories to get behind and what would seem like great playability. Yet none of these really delivered, felt rushed and showed once again that most developers just want to hurry the product, slap a name on it and try to bank off the movies success.
Check out our Headshots on Page 2
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12 Responses to “Headshots & Friendly Fire: Round 3”
Very nicely put. Except the last one about movies… You are absolutely right and I was sure no movie based game would be good. But Batman Arkham Asylum was great and even though it is its own story, isn’t it also based of the batman movies and the comics? But that is one of the very very few good movie based games.
1) Male Lead With Strong Female Sidekick – Great point. A thinking man’s point.
2) @ GunaK
Batman: AA is not based on a movie. That’s not what the author means. When games are a movie tie-in, too much money is spent on the license and $ for development is lacking. Not only that, but they usually have to have the game out at around the same time (many times the same day) as the movie, which means it’s almost always not enough time (think Iron-Man from Sega) to polish it. As a gamer, you know how often games are delayed for development reasons. Movie tie-ins are NEVER delayed. What does that say?
Great article! Glad to see more stuff like this.
l agree with the single player part. CoD 4′s story was so uninteresting l never even finished it, l just played the multiplayer.
@wtGP
UNINTERESTING?! Either you lacked the patience get to the nuke where SGT Jackson died, or you are waaaay too hard to please.
oh right. One scene in the game makes up for its lackluster story.
imagine awesome games with good story plots such as FF7 and MGS were just defined with one moment of glory
@Odium_Generis
I think he said that the story was predictable, because after dying 364 times, we all knew that SGT Jackson would once truly die and never respawn again. Anyway I think the only Friendly Fire there is on that list is the unlimited respawn. BTW the German army had not got 1 mil. soldiers, they had precisely 1kazillion 367billions 125millions 762k 010 soldiers…. At least I killed 1kazillion 367billions 125millions 762k 010 soldiers in the veteran of CoD W@W. And loads of Nazi Zombies
Everyone be aware that there is a second page
yes everyone, there is a page two so please do not miss it.
@Gunak,
Batman has a seperate story from the recent movies and that I think is what made it so great and not a movie tie-in
Very true article. I have yet to see a good movie game. The only good movie game that I could think of was The Punisher from PS2 (if it was a movie game), and X-men Origins: Wolverine. The Watchmen game could be great if they made it like Batman: AA. That’s how it should’ve felt like.
I wish there would be more developers-to-community interactions. With console games can’t have community mods in it (unlike PC games), it would be great to see developers putting up community ideas and implementing it in games. Developers and Publishers needs the support of the gamers more than the gamers need theirs.
I too have problems with the length of some games. It’s really not an excuse to not give a great experience and length on the single playing campaign because they just boast their multiplayer. Why even create a single player campaign if you won’t be dedicated to it. Look at MAG, they don’t hide the fact that they just want to make a great multiplayer experience. And thus it is respected. I don’t really need 100hrs, or 50hrs, not even 30hrs. Just something along 10ish would be good with some great replayability.
I’m not a historian either and I don’t think one person is able to take on those 1 billion soldiers.
@Max Power
Agreed.
How about some innovation by developers there. Every FPS(and many others) is about some bad@ss guy who can take on hordes of enemies over and over without dying. Can anyone come up with something different? Heavy Rain comes to mind, but someone should find a way to make more games believable.
It’d be more immersive if you were playing a squad based shooter and when one character died you had to take up another’s role. Maybe you could get reinforcements occasionally but if everyone died, game over. Maybe people would learn to strategize instead of just running in guns blazing.