I would love to spend 18 pages here describing every game that I don’t like and all the reasons that I don’t like them. I could pick at poorly made, B-grade critic fodder and all of us could laugh as I talked about how terrible all of the Star Trek games are, then we could have a nice go at Superman 64 and finish the day making fun of Aliens: Colonial Marines, but those are games that everyone already knows are bad. If you find someone who likes Colonial Marines, you know that they’re wrong, right off the bat.
This being the case, I thought I would point out games that most or alot of people like, and I’ll give you my perspective on how and why I actually hate them, that way you’ll probably think I’m wrong outright if you like the game, but at least you’ll have another piece of my perspective.
1. Dragon Age: Origins
When I first started playing Dragon Age, I really, really, really wanted to like it. I hadn’t played a good, well-written RPG in quite a while, and I was really excited as the stakes of the plot were slowly set higher and higher, even if you could see a good number of the twists coming from 18 miles away. While we’re on the subject, if I had an award for Best Formulaic Writing In A Standard Western RPG, I would probably give it to this game.
The only issue is that if I had another award for Most Goddamn Boring Thing I’ve Ever Played, it would get that one too.
I’m not saying that every game has to be Call of Duty or Jak and Daxter, but your character moves around the map at the approximate speed of continental drift, and the combat system manages to be both preposterously over-complicated and less exciting than watching a snail crawl through a vat of maple syrup. Of course, that’s when you even get to play the combat. Most of the real meat of this game is spent slogging around menus or tiptoeing through conversations.
It is worth noting here that one of my least favorite things to do is slogging around menus. If you’re going to plop me down in a fanciful world of magic and swords and mystery, I promise you that I’m there to do magic and swords and mystery, not to evaluate the the statistical chance the poison enchantment on my breastplate has to negate the fire enchantment on my sword.
[Side note: I always think that fantasy games, if they’re set in a normal setting i.e. medieval europ-ish magic and stuff, should have a lot fewer numbers. A really nice set of armor shouldn’t show up as a rating, it should be a little more subjective and vague like it actually would have been in medieval Europe. The same should go for enchantments; it would make a good deal more sense to me if enchantments were listed as “strong”, “normal”, and “weak” instead of the formulaic mathematical “15 fire damage to non-wildlife creatures of the abyss on the second tuesday of every third month as long as character is equipped with the purple hat of destiny]
All this being said, perhaps my biggest qualm with the game is the way the morality system works. Don’t be mistaken, I actually like morality systems in some games: Infamous 2 and the Mass Effect trilogy are some of my favorite games, but their systems are much less abhorrent to me. My big problem with the way it’s done in Dragon Age is that the “good” option almost always involves just spending more time walking somewhere.
I remember one instance where I was presented with two options. The “evil” thing to do was to kill a boy who had been possessed by some kind of super-duper-demon thing. In order to do the “good” thing and save his life, the player has to backtrack through the castle and town that they’ve just cleaned out of demon monsters, travel across the map to the mage’s tower and find someone there to save the little brat, and then backtrack through the mage’s tower, travel across the map once more, grind your way back through the castle and town and only THEN can you save the kid’s life. I felt bad about it for an instant, but ultimately I just don’t care enough to spend an extra hour or two, or even an extra half hour, just to do the “good” thing in a game. It’s like in Bioshock 2 when you can either harvest the little sister right away or go through a 15 minute escort mission, get half the adam and STILL have to fight a big sister.
2. Gears of War
I remember about 6 or 7 years ago when GameInformer magazine first gave a full-scale preview of the first Gears of War. There was an unhealthy amount of anticipation for the upcoming 360/PS3 era at the time, and late generation classics like God of War 2, Killzone, Kingdom Hearts 2, and Twilight Princess were generating a lot of excitement. Amidst this buzz, I read the full preview of GoW and something caught me then that still sticks with me now.
The somehow famous developer “Cliffy B.” said that he had been paintballing one day, crouched under cover, and it occurred to him that the apparently analogous experience of being shot at with real bullets while hiding behind real cover probably was not as much fun as video games had made it out to be in the past. Moving past this pathetic insight, he said that with Gears of War he wanted to build a game that more closely mimicked that uncomfortable, tense experience.
I’m sorry, but it seems to me that if you have an experience which you fundamentally evaluate as not fun, it seems to me that you’re digging yourself a hole if you decide to base a whole game around that premise. You know, the one that isn’t fun. When you’re making a game. A game that is supposed to be fun.
Furthermore, any aspect of the “real experience” of war that the developers were trying to work into this game was thrown out with their inclusion of the chainsaw bayonet, the most ridiculous, unnecessary and impossible theoretical weapon design to ever hit the Western gaming world.
3. Final Fantasy (all of them)
I really just can’t stand any of these games. That might be a little hypocritical, since the Kingdom Hearts series is one of my personal favorites of all time, but I always feel like Kingdom Hearts only really works because it manages to mix the unwieldy, heavy-handed tone of Final Fantasy with the light, whimsical, thoughtful childishness of Disney. Stripped of that lightness and whimsicality, I feel like all of the Final Fantasy games end up sagging under the weight of how seriously they take themselves.
Similarly, I’ve never felt like these games have understood how to develop a character for a western audience. I don’t really have anything more insightful to say on that point, but I’ve never really felt like the characters develop in any sense that I understand beyond their first impressions.
Also, I frankly tend to despise the aesthetic of these games and the whole concept on which they depend far too often that a ragtag group of teenagers with quirky weapons and variously undersized or oversized clothing manage to cut down thousands upon thousands of terrifying monsters and trained soldiers. It always just begs too much of my suspended disbelief.
[Sidenote: Whenever I see it, whether in gaming or movies or comics, the whole BS where some people use swords against people with machine guns and win because “they’re just that good” bugs the hell out of me. No one has that reaction time. Literally goddamn no one, and if they did, they’d be a lot better of just using a goddamn gun. There’s just no plausible scenario in which someone blindingly deflects bullets that quickly or any other mind-boggling insanity like that. People with guns kill people with swords, and no amount of gaming, movie, manga and comic book fantasy will ever change that.]
4. Grand Theft Auto (all of them)
This is one where I sometimes think that something must be wrong with me. I like mob movies, and the GTA series are essentially all really long mob movies where you get to play the hero. While doing that, you get to go around a city and do whatever terrible thing you want that you couldn’t do in real life. Sounds great right? Right?
The execution on these games has just never felt right to me. I played Vice City, San Andreas, and number four, and in all cases the game left me underwhelmed and disappointed. I realize that GTA kind of pioneered the popular sandbox game concept, and that games I love like Jak II, Far Cry 3, Infamous 2, Crackdown and Assassin’s Creed are all indebted to this series, but it’s simply never been fun to me.
The vehicles always move like their wheels are made of butter and the roads you drive on are a hot frying pan, and the on-foot controls often feel similarly clunky. Adding on to all of this, I have yet to play a single one of these games where the gunplay was anything that even mildly approached fun. Maybe the next one will take a few cues from games like Spec Ops and Mass Effect and figure out how to do a solid, functional, mobile over-the-shoulder camera, but until the gunplay I showed up for works, these games will always feel broken to me.
Also, I feel like I can’t help but talk about the elephant in the room here. It seems to me, and any one of you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but half the point of all the GTA games is that they’re a cathartic, escapist fantasy. Almost everyone who’s played a videogame has gone on a murderous rampage in GTA at least once because, well let’s just face it, that’s what you do in this game. It’s built from the ground up in every installment to be a kind of violent, drug and crime filled fantasy. Without raising the question of censorship I feel like it’s worth asking whether or not that what we really want for the medium we love? If you ask me, these games are trash. They’re violent for the sake of violence, painting one of the uglier faces of modern urban life in a kind of misguided “Yeah, but it’s so cool” light that I can’t help but think is harmful, and they tend to do so with characters that are the broadest of broad gender, racial, ethnic and regional stereotypes. I fail to see what there is to love here, and I wish that gaming as a whole would grow up from this kind of trash.
5. Shadow of the Colossus
I know that this is supposed to be one of the high watermarks for the PS2 generation from which I generally hail, but really I couldn’t stand this game. I never played ICO, which might be a central problem, but I found it hard to empathize with the protagonist.
Okay, I get that his girlfriend or whatever is dead. Okay, I get that he gets her back by killing the Colossi, but after I sent the first gorgeous Colossus tumbling to the ground, I lost the ability to empathize the main character. “Jesus,” I thought to myself as I promptly turned off the game, “I’m supposed to kill 11 more of those, just to get my girly-wirly back? I must be an asshole.”
Now, I’m willing to acknowledge that this is probably a rare case in which a game is designed so well that I don’t like it. After all, it had to be gorgeous and engrossing for me to have such a strong negative reaction to killing only the first colossus of 12, but there’s still something to be said for motivation. I get that what you’re supposed to do is kill all 12 of them, but I didn’t want to, and if I was supposed to be the character, killing the first one led me to a lifelong change of heart that lead me to put down my sword forever and go live in a secluded mud hut while I spent my days in tired regret of the single, great, beautiful rock monster that I killed because my girl was apparently that important.
6. Bioshock: Infinite
I despise this game more than most games I can recall playing recently. However, for the sake of time, length, and getting my readers to return once again, I’ll be covering that in my next article, “Infinitely Perplexing”
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