Things That Bother You About Gaming

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The thing about Ninja Gaiden is that the NES games were considered to have serious stories....for their time. They have not aged well at all in that regard, but are still quite fun in terms of how ridiculous they are, looking back on them (and the people who have taken their nostalgia-goggles off would notice this). To me, the 3D games basically kept things in that same vein, as they are totally ridiculous with far more focus on gameplay and a very paper-thin plot that just serves its purpose of being an homage to the NES NG style of story-telling. Actually, to be fair, NGB probably has a more serious story than any other NG game out there, but even that one is still pretty crazy when you stop to think about it.

I think my main problem with the MGS games was not how silly their stories were, but how long the stories were and how much time the player was expected to invest in it. For hour-long cutscenes, I better have some pretty intense drama to keep me on the edge of my seat, as I do not have nearly enough patience to watch a ridiculous story that I'm expected to invest so much time in. To be clear, I don't mind silly stories in games at all, but they need to have limited amounts of cutscenes interrupting the story, in that regard. Literally 80% of every MGS game is nothing but story, but the problem is that at least 50% of the story consists of ludicrous moments, which REALLY takes me out of any possibility of me having taken it seriously. In the end, it just becomes quite grating, IMO.

To me, a good example of a story that can be quite ridiculous with a few touches of some seriousness and drama to it is DMC3. Most of the cutscenes focus on ridiculous action and nonsensical enemies, and its actually quite fun to watch since they don't last that long, and every now and then there will be a serious cutscene that moves the main story along that actually doesn't feel all that out of place in the game. To me, that's the right way to do that kind of story for a game.

[gunswordfist]

Dammit,you can skip all the MGS cutscenes. Leave the series alone.

[Spark Of Spirit]

No.

[Rosalinas Spare Wand]

When the most anticipated game of the year is the annual entry of an expensively promoted but budget produced generic shooter that panders to the lowest common denominator and completely alienates other companies from directly competing with it or even forces them to ape the boring ass aesthetics or dumb down their own gameplay systems to bring in that audience, you know gaming is in a rut.

Yeah, fuck Modern Warfare 3. Fuck Activision in general, these assholes are a soulless, cynical entity that has single handedly turned this generation into a race to squeeze as much money out of a customer as possible.

[Spark Of Spirit]

The day the last COD game came out, I was at EB preordering Sonic Colors and DKCR (I did not plan this). There were people older (some far older) and younger (some far younger) than me there purely for COD and I felt totally out of place. I even remember one kid saying something like "All I do is play COD all the time!"

Geez, when I was a kid we played everything. Platformers, fighters, RPGs, racers, beat em ups, shooters, and sometimes even sports titles if they were different enough. Do all people really do now is play FPS after FPS? Gamers really have stagnated.

[Foggle]

I won't even mention how many times I've heard people say "Red Dead Redemption is the best game of all time!" at various different GameStops. I mean, I liked RDR, but come on.

The guys at the GameStop I usually go to are total bros, though. Duke, Suda51, and Persona Team fans, the lot of 'em.

[Spark Of Spirit]

It's just like there's a dumbed down version of every genre outselling the more creative or feature rich versions in the same genre, despite not having a massive marketing budget.

It used to be that the best of the best would (for the most part), be the high sellers. Now it seems like as long as the game has cinematic presentation, people will buy anything.

Like, why would you buy Black Ops over Bulletstorm? Uncharted over Vanquish? Dragon Age 2 over... Anything? I'm not saying those games are bad, but they all offer far less than the other game which hasn't sold nearly as well.

[gunswordfist]

I won't even mention how many times I've heard people say "Red Dead Redemption is the best game of all time!" at various different GameStops. I mean, I liked RDR, but come on.

The guys at the GameStop I usually go to are total bros, though. Duke, Suda51, and Persona Team fans, the lot of 'em.

I hear RDR is that good.

[Foggle]

I won't even mention how many times I've heard people say "Red Dead Redemption is the best game of all time!" at various different GameStops. I mean, I liked RDR, but come on.

The guys at the GameStop I usually go to are total bros, though. Duke, Suda51, and Persona Team fans, the lot of 'em.

I hear RDR is that good.

It's not. I'd say it was the most overrated game released last year if Black Ops and New Vegas weren't also released last year. And I like RDR and New Vegas.

[gunswordfist]

I won't even mention how many times I've heard people say "Red Dead Redemption is the best game of all time!" at various different GameStops. I mean, I liked RDR, but come on.

The guys at the GameStop I usually go to are total bros, though. Duke, Suda51, and Persona Team fans, the lot of 'em.

I hear RDR is that good.

It's not. I'd say it was the most overrated game released last year if Black Ops and New Vegas weren't also released last year. And I like RDR and New Vegas.

Bleh, I'll have to play it myself. I heard some great opinions on it from some other reliable gamers.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I thought that the critics panned Vegas for being extremely buggy and glitch-heavy and being released in an unfinished state. Is it really so highly praised that its overrated? That's news to me. Of course, to be honest I found Fallout 3 to be overrated as it is, so with or without Vegas my opinion still stands on that.

[Spark Of Spirit]

TBH I find most Obsidian and Bethesda games overrated due to being so buggy and rushed. It usually takes months before the game doesn't seem like it's in beta state.

[Foggle]

I thought that the critics panned Vegas for being extremely buggy and glitch-heavy and being released in an unfinished state. Is it really so highly praised that its overrated? That's news to me. Of course, to be honest I found Fallout 3 to be overrated as it is, so with or without Vegas my opinion still stands on that.

Actual gamers tend to love it, not critics. And while it is fun (if you look past all the bugs), I can't agree with the people who say it's "amazing."

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I know this may come off as pretty obnoxious on my part (but to be fair I'm only referring to games that I have played or tried playing), but I feel that within this generation there has been something lacking from most games. And I finally figured out what it was for me: replay value. Now, don't get me wrong, I have played some awesome games this generation and there are some that I have come back to replay which offer up some good replay value, but I haven't played a single game this generation aside from Ninja Gaiden II (yeah, I know, what a surprise) that I could literally spend hours on at a time and really keep coming back to, and in this regard even NG2 is a letdown of sorts compared to NGB.

Even the big popular titles of this generation eventually underwhelm me. I'm beginning to feel that the first Mass Effect game got severely overrated. Once again, I enjoyed it on my first time through it, and I loved BioWare's KOTOR games enough to replay each of them one time through after beating them, but the thing that prevents me from doing that with Mass Effect is honestly its stale and really repetitive gameplay. Yeah, I said it. The gameplay sucks and I finally realized that myself. Now, don't get me wrong, I still want to play the 2nd game to continue the story which got really interesting at the end of the 1st game and I hear that the combat is much improved so I want to try it out, and I'm not saying that I think the game sucks on the whole or anything, but all of the gameplay issues seriously hurt its replay value for me. I'm just simply not having fun with it anymore.

As for other games, I can come back to F.E.A.R. every now and then but that doesn't really count as a current-gen game (even though the port is for the XBOX360) since it originally released on the PC a month before the release of the XBOX360, so it once again goes to support that games before this gen were much more replayable for me. Hell, the only games that I currently have that are playable on my XBOX360 that I think I want to play again are games like DOOM and Max Payne because I can't find anything from my current game collection that I want to play through again (I was replaying NG2 but I refuse to put up with the horrid Chapter 9 to get through to the rest of it).

Right now I can't help but compare games from this generation to my favorite games from previous generation. Namely, I haven't found a single game this generation that personally ignites that "flame" in me of sorts that gets my gamer spirit pumped. The last game that truly did that for me was....yeah, if you haven't guessed by now, you clearly don't know me very well.

But, honestly, I know it feels like I'm being obnoxious and I'll admit that its really my problem rather than something that would bother other people about games these days, but whether its modern retail games or retro-style DLC, I can't find much stuff that I can come back to.

When I think about it, a lot of this may have to do with the fact that I own an HD console and am stuck with the sorts of games that release for them, not that they are bad at all but they are more limited in contrast to my particular tastes, but honestly I somehow doubt owning a Wii would change my mind all that much on most games from this current generation.

But, when I think of my favorite game from later generation, NGB, it offered so much (and to this day its still a wonder how its so overlooked in retrospect by most gamers; for me personally), and a lot of other games from previous generations going all the way back to the SNES could get a lot of replay value out of me. But, with this generation, I just can't find that one game that really manages to hook me, so its really been bugging me for a while. I mean, the closest that a current-gen game has come to that for me by far is NG2, which is hands down my favorite game of this generation despite its numerous flaws, and once again, even that is far and away from being quite as engaging as other top games were for me from previous generations.

I'm not trying to be one of those "everything was perfect in the past and worse now" kind of people, because I do still like this generation on the whole, but overall I just don't have the passion for any current-gen games that I had for older classics. That's just me, though.

[gunswordfist]

Mass Effect 1 is Damn near unplayable. I am going to have to suffer through it again to do every decision I want to right for a Paragon and a separate Renegade file. Ugh.

I wish developers would focus on filling in the blanks that older 3D games had instead of focusing on gimmicks.