Adam's Rant: 2011's Least Inspiring Games
With 2010 now long gone, and with 2011 already throwing down some games I personally feel it's taken an eternity to release, it's a time for excitement. Well, for the most part yes, but with the good always comes the bad. Or at least, what I feel will be the less compelling gaming experiences of the year. Bad game design, poor storytelling, agitating marketing campaigns and buggy release dates plague every year; while it's hard to determine which blockbuster hits may be epic failures sometimes we're given hits. Sometimes, it's fair enough to judge a book by its cover.
Thor: God of Thunder
I am an absolute sucker for comic-book oriented games no matter how hard they tend to suck, and in recent years they've actually been getting more and more interesting. Then I take a look at a game such as Thor and wonder what to think. It's clear from the intense montage of Quick Time Events that Thor is going to be a game that won't even try to bring anything new to the table. Not like that's a bad thing, really. There's no reason to try and improve upon something that's at least enjoyable, but that's no reason to think that replacing the God of War with the God of Thunder is going to yield impressive results.
Thor doesn't exactly have the most compelling storytelling experience either, at least in my own personal opinion. Generally held up by a vibrant cast of characters Thor's individual brute strength and ye-olde speech can only really stand alone for so long, and with the entire focus of the game's trailer being on combat I find it difficult to imagine the game being anything more than a limited amount of fan service to anyone who really, really enjoys Thor. Sort of like Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions, only without the star power and (slight) gameplay variants.
Warrior: Legends of Troy
Koei is probably most notable for Dynasty Warriors, a game which pits the legends of Asian ruling empires against hundreds of thousands of nameless faces. It's an experience that's certainly enjoyable once, but over the years has often times been criticized for being a little dry. Repetitive combat, same old characters, it can be hard to get into any series that doesn't really do much aside from little tweaks here and there. Not to mention it has been around since the dawn of the Playstation 2. So thankfully, Koei has decided to make a game featuring a slightly different kind of gameplay, in a slightly different war-torn moment of history, though still operating through relatively similar mechanics.
It's another case of yes-this-seems-interesting-at-least-for-an-hour-or-so, then where do you go from there? How many endless formations of men with wooden shields can one break down? I'm not against these kinds of games by any means, and it's certainly nice to see Koei stepping away from their traditional camera angle if anything else, but when a developer video goes on to talk about the 'wide variety' of enemies that are featured in the game and all I'm looking at is a wide variety of men with wooden shields, something feels lost in translation.
Man vs Wild: The Game
I think being able to turn on Discovery Channel and watch a man desperately attempt to survive in some random wilderness for no particular reason is absolutely fascinating. In fact, the only thing better than watching it, is watching that very same man attempt to feed you tidbits of information as he goes. You never really know when knowing the best way to approach a cobra, or how to properly fend off a shark attack on a makeshift raft, is going to come in handy. So enter Man vs Wild: The Game. All it took was a video clip of some faceless gentlemen moving left/right with the controller pad in order to properly stab an alligator in the head with a knife for me to know something was wrong here.
Where to begin really? The graphics that appear to be from an age that consoles should have left behind long ago. The controls visibly look to be either clunky, predictable, boring, or a clever combination of the three. My favorite part may be the false sense of urgency trailers for the title attempts to bring to the table. Rowing away from an island on a plank isn't really enough, not for this game. A shark also has to attack, in addition to a volcano needing to explode in the background. It's like everything they couldn't get nature to do on the show what needed to be done now. Only the budget wasn't big enough to make it look like Uncharted 2, so they just did whatever they could as fast as possible.
Night of the Sacrifice
Perhaps it's not fair to list this title here, after all these developers are going to be pushing toward using the Wii's existing technology in new and interesting ways. A survival horror game that makes use of the Wii Balance Board in order for characters to be able to move, run, and hide from enemies; it sounds pretty cool until I begin to unravel the scenario in my head. Constantly stomping up and down on a piece of plastic in order to flee and hide may seem interesting at first, but isn't the general goal of survival horror supposed to be ambiance? Creating mood and utilizing various storytelling methods in order to draw the player into a more believable (and therefore scary) world is the precipice that this entire genre sits upon. Running/walking in place seems counter intuitive.
It can also be fair to say that the game will most likely be playable with alternative controls, but really if the game is going to go ahead and advertise the board as it's 'cool feature' I would say it's fair game to also judge them upon it. Neat idea, but am I very excited to see it in action? Not particularly and with a game like Dead Space 2 just around the corner showing what dialogue and gameplay can bring to the table for the horror genre I get the feeling that something like this is more of a gimmick than a real source of immersion. More than happy to pass.
X-COM
The first Bioshock game was pretty fantastic, and though many would criticize it to be a clever remake of the classic System Shock it's hard to ague with the results. The plot twist and compelling character design behind both the world of Rapture and it's maker Andrew Ryan kept players pushing from point to point in hopes of finding more. Taking something and re-imaginging it is quite fine, but there is a certain limit to that. Very rarely have I ever seen a game turn away from its original iconic gameplay, and have that turn be for the better. So when I heard that X-COM was going to be coming back, only as a FPS, immediately my spider-sense starting tingling.
A look into the trailer only really furthers my curiosity. Blobs flying around all over the place in an 1950's styled home, the entire experience felt like Bioshock was being slapped into a whole different brand. I'm not naive enough to believe that the entire game will be just shooting blobs and shapes either, I'm sure there will be a couple other enemy types in there, but the entire idea of taking a classic series and regurgitating it right back into another mainstream FPS leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Who knows, perhaps the title will prove to be impressive beyond all our expectations, but for the time being I'd say it's safe to approach a game like X-COM with a healthy degree of skepticism.
