I miss when video games were, y'know, video games.
That's an overly dramatic and exaggerated statement, and quite frankly it's a really stupid one too. But it's often how I feel about the current state of games. So many games today are focused on creating an experience or forming a narrative that they often seem to lose sight of why people play video games.
I've been playing Outland, Housemarque's sublime 2d action game that blends elements of bullet hell with classic Metroid-style adventure. Outland has what many people would call a retro or oldschool style: you hit start, there's a quick cutscene explaining the game and then you're in and playing. There isn't an expansive backstory to what's going on. An in-game tutorial might consist of a quick on-screen message telling you that pressing down + jump will cause your character to slide. There isn't any dialogue outside of a narrator explaining the origin of the world and even that's a little heavy-handed for a game of this style. Simply put, there's no fat to Outland. Everything that's there needs to be there and adding anything more would be counterproductive.
Several other things stand out in Outland. The first is that it employs a unique mechanic that doesn't really make sense but is awesome to play with. Outland features a polarity system that is ripped straight out of Treasure's classic shmup Ikaruga. You can switch between light and dark and absorb bullets of the same colour while you can only hurt enemies of the opposite polarity. Why can you do this? Who knows. It's not explained and frankly it doesn't need to be. Sometimes it's more fun to just play with something unique and fun rather than have everything make sense.
Outland often has enemies of light polarity hiding inside a wave of dark bullets. Why don't the bullets hurt the enemies when they hurt you? Because that would ruin the game. It doesn't matter if the game doesn't follow the rules all the way through. It's all about crafting a gameplay experience that makes you feel good while playing it. Outland often has sections where you're dealing with enemies of one colour while two different streams of bullets are filling up the screen. You're constantly shifting around the screen and changing polarities. The gameplay is exciting and frenetic to the point where you sometimes take a step back and marvel at what your hands are doing. Outland is a game that makes your hands feel smart.
Most modern games lose this sensibility. For example, this week I've been playing Assassin's Creed. Assassin's Creed is a fun game: flawed as hell but enjoyable nonetheless. Like Outland, Assassin's Creed takes elements of preexisting games and patches them together into a new experience.
Begin playing Assassin's Creed and you're treated to a trippy sequence where you're not sure what is real and what's not. You're then left playing catch-up as pseudo-main character Desmond also trying to figure out what the hell is going on. From there you're jammed into some kind of reality simulator where you will then go through a 10 minute tutorial on all the nuances of the controls. There are no less than 15 unique buttons and you have to hold buttons down in order to access some of your commands. Once the tutorial is done, you then go into the real game where there's a longer, more expansive in-game tutorial. All told, it will be an hour before you can actually play Assassin's Creed.
The issues do not end there. Assassin's Creed is a game that strives for realism. The game has you doing some seriously mundane tasks: riding a horse in a straight line for ten minutes to get from location to location, patrolling the streets to look for information on where your assassination target is, cutscenes that are utterly uninteresting and lack any kind of persuasive narrative. I am told that the game's narrative picks up towards the end but that strikes me as a huge design mistake. The payoff should be throughout the game and not jammed at the end after you've done everything.
But there's a larger issue with Assassin's Creed that really stands out in my eyes: realism. This is a game that focuses on being a real person with real abilities. Everything that you do in Assassin's Creed is based on the rules of reality. Powerups are in the form of new weapons to kill people or new ways to knock guards down. Compare that to a game like Outland where you might get a power that lets you absorb bullets and use them to destroy all the enemies on the screen. You will never find anything like that in Assassin's Creed.
There is but one enemy type in Assassin's Creed: humans. They might give them different weapons but ultimately they're all the same. The game is restricted by the rules of nature. There's a nifty parkour mechanic that keeps it interesting as you climb from ledges to rooftops, but that's the only thing making the game stand out from a gameplay perspective. And the gameplay is often compromised by having menial tasks to do or having to sit through drab scenes. If Outland is a lean game then Assassin's Creed is a fat one, full of nonsense and tedium.
Let's take a better game: Uncharted 2. Uncharted 2 would get my vote as the most impressive game made during this generation: amazing cinematics blended with exciting gameplay mixed with decent shooting mechanics and fun platforming. Still, Uncharted 2 has the same limitations that Assassin's Creed does: a limited array of actions and enemy types. The platforming -- if you can even call it that -- comes down to finding the spot where you can jump and following that predefined path to its only conclusion. The different enemy types are defined by how many bullets they can take and what weapons they have. Later on you encounter some weird blue guys that seem like Avatar ripoffs (though Uncharted 2 probably predates Avatar), but overall it's nothing new. There's no mechanic in Uncharted 2 that stands out. You can run, you can jump and you can shoot a gun. Again, it's based on reality. The focus is on shaping a narrative over offering a game that's fun to play on its own merits. Uncharted 2 is absolutely successful in this regard.
But why have we gone down this route so heavily? Why is everything so heavily based on realism and a narrative? This can sound like a 2d vs. 3d thing or an old-school vs. new-school philosophy, so let me offer another example. Shadow Complex is a fun game, the very essence of Super Metroid channeled for the new era. But where Shadow Complex falls short is in its inability to offer anything different from beginning to end. In the beginning you are shooting regular people with a gun and in the end you are still shooting regular people with a gun. Shadow Complex features some fun mechanics like a speed boost and a triple jump, and the progression of the character from weak every-man with a flashlight to armoured supersoldier is very fun, but the graphic style is extremely plain and the enemies are as well. Compare that to Super Metroid, where you fight dozens of different types of enemies and progress through all kinds of different environments. Shadow Complex, by comparison, are a bunch of military complexes for 90% of the game. It is visually uninspired due to the constraints of reality.
Video games have amazing potential. We have the ability to create amazing environments and incredible variety, but most modern games seem to strive for hyper-realism and an obsession with crafting a story. It is a testament to developers today that this generation has been the best one for games: there are 2d action games and sprawling RPGs and space operas and online beat-em-ups and who knows what else. And yet it would be so much better if we took a step back and asked ourselves why we keep striving to make live-action movies instead of going for a fun gameplay idea or something completely alien and unique. Why are we always a human fighting other humans? Why not some bizarre creature? Why are we always in a city modeled after one of our own? Why not an alien planet or an underground world or something truly unusual? Isn't the point of video games to be an escape or to offer something you can't do in real life? Why settle for real life when we can strive for something more?
These are the directions I would like to see games go. Some games already have but I wish we could see more going forward. Any steps away from narrative experiences would be a welcome change as well. I love me some long-winded RPGs and atmospheric experiences but at some point we have to go back to just making games that are fun to play on their own merits. Hopefully we can see more games like Street Fighter 4, VVVVVV, or Portal 2 that have really fun mechanics to exploit and less scripted experiences like a Call of Duty or a SOCOM 4. That's where I would like to see games go.
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