Brevity
Tuesday, December 16th, 2003 at 1244I don’t know how many of you are ganesplayers gamesplayers, but recently I’ve been getting a little ticked off with the “Single Player Experiences” that games companies are offering these days. Back in the day ™ you could hack away at a single player game for weeks on end and finally, after a couple of decent plot twists you’d reach the end, satisfied. As I see it, going to watch a movie costs about 4 pounds, a game costs 10 times that and thus should last 10 times longer. We’re talking 20 hours minimum. MINIMUM. No, hell, even 20 hours is too short…
Games that I’ve completed in the last week (I must point out I don’t play for extended periods of time) include Armed and Dangerous, Zero Hour and XIII. A friend of mine also completed Broken Sword 3 in a measly 13 hours. Of all of these, only XIII presented any kind of challenge and even that didn’t amount to much. What’s going on? Why are we being fed game “trailers” ? One reason may be the spiralling development costs and the amount of work, graphically, that has to go into an average game these days. Another reason may be because “they” know they can get away with releasing a game that will barely last you a weekend? I even read in a review of Deus Ex 2 that Ion Storm had decided to release a “More compact, more streamlined storytelling experience”. Read through the bulldust there gentlemen to see “We couldn’t be arsed to produce something you could really sink your teeth into because we’re sure you’d buy it anyway”.
True, multiplayer/online gaming is big business now, but the whole idea of being able to take part of a long, twisting story is something that the multiplayer genre can’t provide and is something that the single player genre is slowly losing sight of.
Bring back the likes of Shadowrun. Hail, a game that lasted longer than your average Blockbuster rental period.
Oh, and don’t get me started on PC-XBox cross development. You’ll quite possibly make me explode.
I remember buying games for £1.99 from woolworths (Werewolf in London to be precise) and had the spectrum 48k version on one side, and the amstrad version on the other! :O
How could they afford to do this? Were they similar platforms?
whats a ganesplayer ??
The games that you mention were all developed for the US market. Its a well known fact that games percived by the US buyers as ‘Difficult’ never sell well. Hence the dubmed down games which are too easy and swiftly completed. Don’t complain… Buy British! (Or European I suppose).