They are why Thief is my favouritest game in the world, and why Half-Life 2 and Bioshock make me do the dance of joy, and why Shadow of the Colossus and Ico and Prince of Persia make me squee. Because when I'm playing them, I feel like I'm in the world they present to me and I am the character that I control. This is something totally unique to games, I feel. Movies and books and comics and TV and pictures are about watching, but games are about doing.
Team Ico, the guys behind SotC and Ico, really understand this better than just about anybody except possibly Valve (and LGS, sigh), and they tailor their stories to take advantage of that. Shadow of the Colossus in particular takes the fact that you do certain things to proceed because, if you didn't, there would be no game, and stabs you with it. No softening, no "you did what you had to", no 'good' path. It knows you did this because you wanted to, and now, you will deal with the consequences.
And that atmosphere is what sells it; the lands you ride in are forbidden, and they feel like it. Not Mordor-esque, but empty of anything but you and your horse and your foes and filled with crumbling ruins. Beautiful, but unutterably lonely. You get a lot of time to think.
Valve, on the other hand, take a different tack by never telling you anything outright. It's like they took 'show don't tell', turned it up to a zillion and applied it to the game's backstory with a shovel. They never tell you the Combine drained the seas, they never tell you there haven't been any children born in something like sixteen years, they never tell you humans are enticed to join the Overwatch because they get rewarded with food and sex, that earth animals are modified into weapons, that they simply dropped those dozen-kilometer-high Citadels out of the sky. But you know, because you see it in every line and look and place, if you pay attention. And it feels real.
ANYWAY. WOW that was a tangent. The other thing that'll make me really like a game is charm, especially clever writing and interesting art direction.
What turns me off a game: I'll answer the other question here as well, and it's two things. One is gratuitous violence - wait, WAIT, I can explain. I am just fine with violence, but I am not fine with violence as the center of a game's appeal rather than just window-dressing. I giggled like a schoolgirl in HL2 when I found out hitting an antlion with a shotgun blast makes it pop like a balloon, but I felt kind of skeevy playing God of War and throwing spears at civilians for health. I know GoW has other things that make it good, but after an hour of play I started to realize that pulling wings off things and twisting monsters' heads off like bottle caps and shoving swords down throats in fountains of blood was supposed to be entertaining me, and it wasn't. It still doesn't. It just feels ugly. (Also, God of War gives me a headache. SO LOUD.)
The other thing that really throws me off is unnecessarily frustrating or time-consuming and repetitive gameplay. I don't actually have a lot of time, these days, and I don't want to spend it on gameplay that I may as well walk away from leaving a brick on the X button, or things that make me want to scream and pull my hair out. This is why I've never really managed to fall in love with JRPGs; they seem to take pride in devouring huge amounts of time with nothing but the same fights, over and over and over. I hear there's a game where the final boss fight takes six hours, and I'm sorry, but that is not good game design. It's probably not altogether suprising that two of my favourite games in the world are criticized for being too short; myself I feel they have everything necessary, and I was never angry at them.
This is basically why I hate the Soulforge. Good idea, foul and terrible execution.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 10:27 am (UTC)Atmosphere and immersion.
They are why Thief is my favouritest game in the world, and why Half-Life 2 and Bioshock make me do the dance of joy, and why Shadow of the Colossus and Ico and Prince of Persia make me squee. Because when I'm playing them, I feel like I'm in the world they present to me and I am the character that I control. This is something totally unique to games, I feel. Movies and books and comics and TV and pictures are about watching, but games are about doing.
Team Ico, the guys behind SotC and Ico, really understand this better than just about anybody except possibly Valve (and LGS, sigh), and they tailor their stories to take advantage of that. Shadow of the Colossus in particular takes the fact that you do certain things to proceed because, if you didn't, there would be no game, and stabs you with it. No softening, no "you did what you had to", no 'good' path. It knows you did this because you wanted to, and now, you will deal with the consequences.
And that atmosphere is what sells it; the lands you ride in are forbidden, and they feel like it. Not Mordor-esque, but empty of anything but you and your horse and your foes and filled with crumbling ruins. Beautiful, but unutterably lonely. You get a lot of time to think.
Valve, on the other hand, take a different tack by never telling you anything outright. It's like they took 'show don't tell', turned it up to a zillion and applied it to the game's backstory with a shovel. They never tell you the Combine drained the seas, they never tell you there haven't been any children born in something like sixteen years, they never tell you humans are enticed to join the Overwatch because they get rewarded with food and sex, that earth animals are modified into weapons, that they simply dropped those dozen-kilometer-high Citadels out of the sky. But you know, because you see it in every line and look and place, if you pay attention. And it feels real.
ANYWAY. WOW that was a tangent. The other thing that'll make me really like a game is charm, especially clever writing and interesting art direction.
What turns me off a game:
I'll answer the other question here as well, and it's two things. One is gratuitous violence - wait, WAIT, I can explain. I am just fine with violence, but I am not fine with violence as the center of a game's appeal rather than just window-dressing. I giggled like a schoolgirl in HL2 when I found out hitting an antlion with a shotgun blast makes it pop like a balloon, but I felt kind of skeevy playing God of War and throwing spears at civilians for health. I know GoW has other things that make it good, but after an hour of play I started to realize that pulling wings off things and twisting monsters' heads off like bottle caps and shoving swords down throats in fountains of blood was supposed to be entertaining me, and it wasn't. It still doesn't. It just feels ugly. (Also, God of War gives me a headache. SO LOUD.)
The other thing that really throws me off is unnecessarily frustrating or time-consuming and repetitive gameplay. I don't actually have a lot of time, these days, and I don't want to spend it on gameplay that I may as well walk away from leaving a brick on the X button, or things that make me want to scream and pull my hair out. This is why I've never really managed to fall in love with JRPGs; they seem to take pride in devouring huge amounts of time with nothing but the same fights, over and over and over. I hear there's a game where the final boss fight takes six hours, and I'm sorry, but that is not good game design. It's probably not altogether suprising that two of my favourite games in the world are criticized for being too short; myself I feel they have everything necessary, and I was never angry at them.
This is basically why I hate the Soulforge. Good idea, foul and terrible execution.