Permabanned
- Joined
- 22 Aug 2004
- Posts
- 9,204
Realisation is a tricky thing, often its bad, like when you first discovered there was no santa, walls of mystery fell away, the magic died, and everyone you'd ever trusted was a liar. The first time you investigated a noise that turned out to be your mother getting demolished doggy style by your dad who, now you recall it, had more tatoo's back then.
These negatives however can be overwritten, The first time you figured out your pee-pee wasnt just for pointing urine streams at passers by, the first time you stayed up all night drinking beers with your best buddies, the first really good story you were read, told or shown.
It is the way of things however, that as we age the positive realisations fade and become overwhelmed by the dissappointing ones. Religeon, middle aged women, annoying children that your supposed to 'raise' because you 'wanted them'. All of which brings me to - Need or Speed : Hot Pursuit.
Specifically the difficulty of the AI, or the AI itself since in a racer the AI + car handling = difficulty. Now dont get me wrong, I am not intending to rag on this game, one of the best in the need for speed series thus far, I simply wish to highlight an area of modern gaming with which im becoming increasingly disillusioned.
So there i was, grinning inanley, i had my bright yellow Lambourghini LP - 640 redlining at max speed over the crest of the winding clifftop road, sun glinted off distant boats the roaring whine of the engine a beautiful contradiction to the serene panorama laid out before me, THIS was gaming at its finest. Just seconds before i had weaved my way between an out of control aston martin and a police roadblock, simultaneously evading the attention of a Mercedes SLR Police vehicle that went slamming into the barrier flipping end over end into the ocean below. I was free! The carnage piling up in my rear view mirror was devastating, the next few miles to the finish would now be simply a matter of course.
You would think wouldnt you, less than a second later with no corners to negotiate and still firmly on the redline i am overtaken, somewhat implausibly by a vastly inferior porche panamera and, if my eyes are not decieved, that same Mercedes that i sent plumetting off a cliff not 5 seconds before, worse still neither are boosting thus leaving no explaination for their apparent ability to bend space and time.
It was at this point where all sense of 'fun' was broken for me, i distinctly remember thinking "oh, so your one of those games." By which i mean the games that need to create a sense of excitement rather than allowing player skill be reward enough. Every race had been a sham, my skill level meant nothing, in fact all medals are basically allocated based on your performance over the last mile or so. Simply saving up a full turbo for the last section will be enough to get the win in each straight race.
Excuse me for feeling a little indignant towards a game when i realise my thumbs have had puppet strings attached for the last 11 hours. All this so gamers who are less capable can experience exciting thrills and spills and feel like awesome race car drivers.
In itself this is hardly something to revile, why shouldnt everyone, age 6 to 60 feel the same as i did on breaching that roadblock? But when we defend videogames as a medium we often point out the importance of our involvment in proceedings, this trend toward adaptive one size fits all faux difficulty takes this away from us, puts gaming in with movies a passive experience. Worse still since gaming narratives are inferior to almost all but the worst hollywood claptrap then, in reality, our AAA games are poor b-movies at best, and thats an insult to the b-movie genre.
If games like COD and NFS must insist on this masquerade in order to rope in the mass cattle, they could at least have the decency to enable it to be turned off. Fundementally this is very simple in racing games at the very least. I'm pretty tired of large games companies deciding what I will find 'fun', for me fun might be completely demolishing the AI competition due to having a better car or driving well. It might be ramming AI cars off the road or into parked traffic, like dick dastardly picking on simpleton racers. I want a developer to give me a world and let ME find my fun, i dont want to be spoon-fed set peice action to keep me coming back for more, and i especially resent the fact that they think i wont notice.
But it's wrong to rant, some things just are the way they are, that thrill that - buzz, i felt breaking through that roadblock, maybe it was just a gentle fraud. Something maybe i would never have had otherwise, maybe it would have just been another humdrum racer. Worse still would other, younger, more innocent gamers have been deprived of enjoyment as the game frustrated and beat them down?
Personally, like a grown man recalling the discovery of the 'truth' about santa, i start to think its a happy fiction we are given, that we can experience the escapism of being great at things we are genuinely not. But somewhere at the back of my mind i want to pull on that beard and realise its all real, there are no lies and that magic does exist. The realisation today is a negative one, because it doesnt and that bloke with tatoo's wasnt my dad - or santa.
These negatives however can be overwritten, The first time you figured out your pee-pee wasnt just for pointing urine streams at passers by, the first time you stayed up all night drinking beers with your best buddies, the first really good story you were read, told or shown.
It is the way of things however, that as we age the positive realisations fade and become overwhelmed by the dissappointing ones. Religeon, middle aged women, annoying children that your supposed to 'raise' because you 'wanted them'. All of which brings me to - Need or Speed : Hot Pursuit.
Specifically the difficulty of the AI, or the AI itself since in a racer the AI + car handling = difficulty. Now dont get me wrong, I am not intending to rag on this game, one of the best in the need for speed series thus far, I simply wish to highlight an area of modern gaming with which im becoming increasingly disillusioned.
So there i was, grinning inanley, i had my bright yellow Lambourghini LP - 640 redlining at max speed over the crest of the winding clifftop road, sun glinted off distant boats the roaring whine of the engine a beautiful contradiction to the serene panorama laid out before me, THIS was gaming at its finest. Just seconds before i had weaved my way between an out of control aston martin and a police roadblock, simultaneously evading the attention of a Mercedes SLR Police vehicle that went slamming into the barrier flipping end over end into the ocean below. I was free! The carnage piling up in my rear view mirror was devastating, the next few miles to the finish would now be simply a matter of course.
You would think wouldnt you, less than a second later with no corners to negotiate and still firmly on the redline i am overtaken, somewhat implausibly by a vastly inferior porche panamera and, if my eyes are not decieved, that same Mercedes that i sent plumetting off a cliff not 5 seconds before, worse still neither are boosting thus leaving no explaination for their apparent ability to bend space and time.
It was at this point where all sense of 'fun' was broken for me, i distinctly remember thinking "oh, so your one of those games." By which i mean the games that need to create a sense of excitement rather than allowing player skill be reward enough. Every race had been a sham, my skill level meant nothing, in fact all medals are basically allocated based on your performance over the last mile or so. Simply saving up a full turbo for the last section will be enough to get the win in each straight race.
Excuse me for feeling a little indignant towards a game when i realise my thumbs have had puppet strings attached for the last 11 hours. All this so gamers who are less capable can experience exciting thrills and spills and feel like awesome race car drivers.
In itself this is hardly something to revile, why shouldnt everyone, age 6 to 60 feel the same as i did on breaching that roadblock? But when we defend videogames as a medium we often point out the importance of our involvment in proceedings, this trend toward adaptive one size fits all faux difficulty takes this away from us, puts gaming in with movies a passive experience. Worse still since gaming narratives are inferior to almost all but the worst hollywood claptrap then, in reality, our AAA games are poor b-movies at best, and thats an insult to the b-movie genre.
If games like COD and NFS must insist on this masquerade in order to rope in the mass cattle, they could at least have the decency to enable it to be turned off. Fundementally this is very simple in racing games at the very least. I'm pretty tired of large games companies deciding what I will find 'fun', for me fun might be completely demolishing the AI competition due to having a better car or driving well. It might be ramming AI cars off the road or into parked traffic, like dick dastardly picking on simpleton racers. I want a developer to give me a world and let ME find my fun, i dont want to be spoon-fed set peice action to keep me coming back for more, and i especially resent the fact that they think i wont notice.
But it's wrong to rant, some things just are the way they are, that thrill that - buzz, i felt breaking through that roadblock, maybe it was just a gentle fraud. Something maybe i would never have had otherwise, maybe it would have just been another humdrum racer. Worse still would other, younger, more innocent gamers have been deprived of enjoyment as the game frustrated and beat them down?
Personally, like a grown man recalling the discovery of the 'truth' about santa, i start to think its a happy fiction we are given, that we can experience the escapism of being great at things we are genuinely not. But somewhere at the back of my mind i want to pull on that beard and realise its all real, there are no lies and that magic does exist. The realisation today is a negative one, because it doesnt and that bloke with tatoo's wasnt my dad - or santa.
and yes, I agree.
