Video games are dead to me
So I’m playing Space Marine, right? And I’m thinking, hey, these parts where I’m mowing down orks with a meltagun are pretty slick, but why the fuck are they so far apart? There is a huge amount of just like walking around, and way shitloads of cutscenes. Hey game developers: cutscenes suck. Especially when you can’t skip them. Why can’t you learn this? I paid you fifty United States dollars so I could mulch greenskins with a chainsword, not so I could listen to polygons argue boneheadedly about the meaning of bravery and duty.
This is how I am these days when it comes to AAA games. Does anybody actually play these anymore? It doesn’t show from the reviews; all anybody talks about is cutscenes and who’s in the voice cast and triangle fill rates and stupid shit like that. Who cares? Take Gears of War 3, for example. Have you heard anything about it that isn’t cutscenes, cutscenes, Ice-T, Old Spice Guy? Because I haven’t. Because nobody’s said anything else. For all I know there’s no game involved at all, and it’s just a really long Old Spice commercial with aliens in it.
I mean, Metro 2033 is on sale on Steam today, so I went to check it out. No demo, but there’s a trailer. But does the trailer show any gameplay footage at all? No it fucking doesn’t. It’s like three minutes of samples from the goddamn cutscenes. This will convince me not to buy your game, THQ.
And when I do play a AAA game? I’m frustrated by the cutscenes, sure, but also by the mechanics. Who decided it was a good idea to put save points in the goddamn boss fights? Because every game does that now, and it sucks. It turns the boss fights into grindfests, since you can’t really lose anymore; if you die, you restart partway through the fight will full health and ammo. So you just keep shooting and dying, and eventually you win. That’s horrible. It also encourages developers to put assbrained gimmicks in the boss fights, like in Metroid: Other M, since you just keep doing the same part over and over until you finally figure it out.
Also, why does nobody understand how to make a video game look good? Hey, I’m glad Rage’s miraculous new engine can shart polygons all over the screen, but if all the polygons look exactly the same, who gives a shit?
Remember when video games were fun? Yeah, I don’t either.
