The gaming industry has gotten bigger and better with each passing year, but sometimes it just doesn’t do things right. Whether it’s gameplay, story, pricing, or business practices, sometimes the industry needs a little friendly fire from gamers to keep it in line.
Other times, developers look down their sights and fire off a well placed bullet right into our thrilled heads. This is Josh & Cameron, and today we have a special guest for Headshots & Friendly Fire.
A Bit of Friendly Fire
Cougars
Those things are like little furry ninjas. They come out of nowhere and one hit kill you in the back. At Least the bears growl and run at you kind of slowly. Come to think of it, those ninja characters that grabbed you from behind in Uncharted 2 multiplayer were annoying too. If there are going to be ninjas in my game, they have to be like the Just Cause 2 ninjas. i.e. loud, over-the-top, and puffing into smoke every 5 seconds. Having an enemy sneak up behind you and incapacitate you in one hit is just frustrating…Pirates are cooler anyway. At Least they have booze.
WakeBoarding HD
I don’t know who this game is suppose to appeal to. I played a free PC game a year ago that was a lot like this game. I don’t mind if the developer takes an idea for a game and builds upon it to create a whole new game, but this is almost the exact same thing. If developers expect gamers to pay for these games, they can at least update more than the graphics.
Real Time Game Clocks
What is the advantage of having a real time clock? Isn’t it just as arbitrary as any other game clock. Lets say I am given a goal in a game and I have to complete it in 5 minutes. If a game doesn’t use a real life time scale, then maybe that amount of time in game equates to an hour or 2 hours. Game developers tend to want to express time in convenient numbers. They will design an hour to take as long as they want it to. But if they use a real life time scale, they might have to say a goal should take 7 minutes, 8 minutes, or 12 minutes. But a developer isn’t going to say “complete the goal in 8 minutes,” they will just set the time scale to 5 or 10 min. So the time scale is no longer an accurate length. Sure, a gamer will instantly know how long real time is. 5 minutes is 5 minutes, and a game has to become accustomed to an artificial time scale, but anyone with half a brain can figure out a games time scale within the first hour. If they don’t, they have bigger problems than the game’s time scale.
No Swimming In The Old West
Seriously, Rockstar? Your going to go back to not being able to swim in your games? If you want to prevent the player from swimming to Mexico before they are suppose to, then just put sharks in the water or have people patrolling the water. Because when I finally open up the entire map and I happen to be trapped by the water by, oh lets say a bloodthirsty cougar, I want to be able to jump in the water and swim to safety. Am I to believe that John Marston never learned to swim, but Niko (I can barely drive a taxi) Bellic can swim like Micheal Phelps? Even Darksiders had underwater swimming, and that game barely even had a combat system.
