The Artsy Sidescroller
Made famous by: Braid
Also found in: Limbo, And Yet It Moves
Braid garnered plenty of attention for its distinct look and gameplay mechanics. It was also one of the first downloadable 2D sidescrollers that wasn't a remake or a rerelease. After its success, it was inevitable that we'd see other games follow in its path, each more pretentious than the last. They're kind of like the hipster-music genre of gaming. Everything is sort of dreary and emotionally confusing -- but ultimately kind of simple.
Bland Morality
Made famous by: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Also found in: Fable 2, BioShock, Infamous
The whole morality issue only used to come up in role-playing games, but now we have to deal with it in our open-world games -- like Infamous -- and first-person shooters -- like BioShock. It's one thing to give the player the ability to make their own moral choices, but these "choices" are almost always on opposite sides of the evil/good spectrum. Do you give an orphan an ice-cream cone, or do you kick him in the nuts?
Here are a few more signs that your game has a lazy morality; the game has a good and a bad ending; it features some sort of bar in the game's menu showing you just how evil/good you are; everything evil is red and everything good is blue; or you begin to grow horns after killing a few civilians.
Regenerative Health
Made famous by: Halo: Combat Evolved
Also found in: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption
Remember when health used to be a finite thing? Once you lost it, it was gone. You could only replenish it with items like potions and hearts. All you need to do these days is hide behind some rock and wait for your health to regenerate.
I'll admit that the notion of gaining health from items never made much sense. How exactly does eating a giant slab of meat cure you from a near-death state? But the logic of just waiting out a few dozen bullet wounds doesn't fly any better. I guess time really does heal all wounds.
Heh...that was a good line. I'm going to close right there.
A friend of mine and I actually discussed the possibilities of a post-apocalyptic Harvest Moon, where your dog helped you fend off zombies and part of building your farm was setting up perimeter defenses. Inevitably the player would have to choose between putting his dog down or waiting until it finally turned and became a zombie dog, and thus a fierce opponent.
I'd still kind of love to see such a game made, honestly. I mean, we have a fantasy harvest moon and a sci-fi one. Why not? As lame as this zombie craze is there's a lot of bad assery that could be had with such a mash-up.
@Chris So, basically, I Am Legend on a farm instead of in New York (and, of course, as a video game instead of film).
I'd play that.
This was dead-on, funny, and it had zombies!!! :)
Audio logs greatly enhance the story telling in games. I much prefer it to a cutscene which takes you out of the game. If it's a cliche it's one I hope stays. It made games like System Shock 2 wonderful and made a game like Doom 3 tolerable.
I for one look forward to raising zombie livestock, selling their rancid eggs and curdled milk. Sowing fresh zombie seeds in rich tilled earth, so that when the Dread Harvest comes I can go forth with my scythe and cull the fields of the damned.
Actually that would be pretty cool. This drive is all-consuming, now. Much like zombies.
I'm sick of the evil/good meter. Just let me do good/bad deeds at will without some metric tracking my course to heaven or hell. These are great, Mike. But why do the guys on pg. 2 look like they have boobs?
@Jason Hey, those Gears of War guys have those. Don't blame me!
Haha, these are hilarious! Great job.
"...each more pretentious than the last. They're kind of like the hipster-music genre of gaming."
This made me cringe a little, and I'm not totally sure what it means. I try to watch how I use the "P' word.
Other than that I thought this was really funny! I like audio logs and regenerating health -- they solve the problems of cutscenes and item gathering, respectively -- but they are pretty contrived.
I think the problem with the "2d artsy games" is that the developers of them can't afford to make 3d artsy games.
@James To be honest, I don't mind games that are a little pretentious. It helps offsets the 99% of games that are just dumb.
I'd rather a good "2D artsy game" in which some pretentious critic releases his/her on pretentiousness onto it than an average to awful 3D game whether it's he result of budget or just desire to make a 2D game.
A lot of people really need to get off their "something isn't good if it doesn't include 'my arbitrary bulletpoint list of 3D, multiplayer, true HD, etc' " vibe. Especially considering how much the same people gripe about developers putting stuff in just to have something in the back of the box and it not being quality.
I'll take simpler game that does what it sets out to do well over some game that sets out to be a big feature-fest and turns out into Darkest of Days everyday of the week.
@Mike Heh. That's true.
@James And I know you know that I'm actually a huge Braid fan.
@Mike No, it's not that. I just worry that when people call things pretentious other people will jump on them and call them self-aggrandizing or, yes, pretentious.
It can lead to ugly debates where people start implying condescension and stuff. But you know what? I should just trust in faith to the civility of Bitmob's readers!
@James - If something merits the label, use it. If the claim hold any actual merit, as many people will support and defend as much as hop all over it. But let's be real, there's a certain degree of pretentiousness inherent in criticism, particularly published/broadcast criticism in any arena. Some people do have the background and credentials to backup it up but let's not pretend, whether a person embraces the role as a condescending jerk or with some humiliity, that the nature of writing an opinion piece of any sort with the expectation that people should read/listen/watch and be taken seriously is in itself a bit of a self-important act. So there's on some level a degree of "pot calling the kettle black" when a critic decides to go there in the first place.
I just find it baffling that people seem to think that Health packs are outdated and archiac, when recharging health, in reality, is totally unrealistic. If they're so archiac, how come nobody complains about them in Half-Life 2, TF2, or whatnot?
Fun article. The audio log picture is very funny. You know what else I hate is the damn sci-fi protagonist. No face, cool armor (often upgradeable to look more badass), etc. Halo, Crackdown, Dead Space, Crysis, etc. Although I am looking forward to Dead Space 2. Anyway, good article.
This article bothered me, but overall made me examine why I feel like you are wrong and in turn, made me love some of the games you pointed out more. You bring up good points about regenerating health, but the rest of your points feel incomplete. You ignore games that give moral decisions constantly (Fable, Oblivion, Fallout, to name a few recent titles) where your character can thrive in the gray area between good and evil. You ignore that your point about zombies is criticizing a whole genre (it'd be like going after games about the future "what's up with all these games happening 1000 years from now") and you seem to miss that in said genre is a ton of diversity in gameplay (sandbox vs. multiplayer vs. strategy). You call on two 2d titles both of which went into development around 2005/2006 and didn't know about the other until their subsequent release (Braid and Limbo). And on that topic, from the perspective of the developers of Limbo, if I've got 90% of a 4 year project completed, I'm not stopping when someone releases another game that plays on an "artsy" style you've spent years creating, especially if it's my only title to date (see: Playdead). I want to like you and this article because your humor seems really great, but I can't brush aside a general feeling over overall lack of knowledge where these points are concerned. It seems like you've just made a list of the things you dislike most about recent games and created an article saying they are "modern cliches."
Recharging health works if you're Wolverine or a D&D troll....
@Jen I never said I didn't like any of these games. A lot of them are actually among my all time favorites (Bioshock, Braid, and Red Dead among them). I think you're assuming a lot more malice in this article than I intended.
@Mike, ok, I do believe you like a good deal of these games. I still feel like my points stand that the article (although funny and well written) is lacking on the side of research. I can take the feeling of malice out of my interpretation of what you wrote, and I still feel the same way about how it all boils down. :\ sorry!
I thought exploding barrels were the new exploding barrels?
Another recent game that had audio logs was Mass Effect 2. Ahhh..good old audio logs. The lazy developer's narrative device.
@Michael I don't really lump Mass Effect 2's Codex in with audio logs because a lot of the stuff in it doesn't really have any massive effect (groan) on the story. I think Mass Effect 2 (and the original's) way of doing it is great because you never have to listen to any of that stuff. But if you're really into the fiction of the universe, you can go learn about Volus economics, the Asari matriarchal structue, faster-than-light drives, and mass-lowering effect fleids. None of that info is crucial to your understanding of the plot, and not everyone is going to care about it, so BioWare doesn't clutter up the main narrative with a bunch of (possibly) boring details.
BioShock on the other hand reveals key info about the fall of Rapture and the lead baddies of the game's various areas via this method. The worst example I can think of, actually, is Raven's new game Singularity. It's just like BioShock, but you can't even walk around when you listen to them because the are all reel-to-reel recorders lying around on tables and stuff.
That said, Singularity is totally underrated and everyone should go out and buy it now. It needs the love that Activision isn't giving it!
The move to regenerating health over health packs was a solution to smooth out the pacing of a game. It may seem unrealistic to regenerate health but it makes more sense than constantly quick saving and quick loading. This really gave developers an avenue to fine tune an experience or setpiece for the player.