You do not know what you think you know.
By Dio
Wot I Don't Get.
No person likes everything. Our tastes are often random and eclectic – most people take one look at my CD collection and then try to work out why I’m not a 55-year-old biker, they take one look at my car and wonder if I’m a 40-year-old middle management PHB or they take one look in my wardrobe and can see clearly that someone else convinced me to buy my clothes. My tastes don’t match. What I’m saying is that I’m like everyone else – some stuff I like and some I don’t.
Day off Dio.
So I’ve established that I’m an ordinary Joe, just like the rest of us. Some things I like and some I don’t. But, really, it’s time someone spoke out. Why is it that ‘we’ give plaudits to games that I just don’t, can’t, see the point of. This doesn’t mean “I don’t like them”. It means that I can’t understand why anyone likes them. There are plenty of games I hate – but I’m not talking about those because I can see how some people could like them. This list is for the irredeemable dross that for some completely unfathomable reason gets praised to the eyeballs.
Let’s begin with a modern classic, the baffling Half-Life. Why do people love this game? I was bored out of my teeth by the second ventilation duct, fed up of going into the next room to see what’s there and having it predictably bite your ankle or shoot at you.
In fact, you can take every FPS since Doom and stuff the lot of ‘em. Quake, Quake 2, Unreal, Serious Sam, RTCW, Call Of Duty, Far fucking Cry, Doom3, everything. Boring boring boring. I’ll let off the deathmatch games since the opposition is at least interesting, and Jedi Knight 2, where at least they give you the lightsaber just before you throw the box away in disgust - eliminating the ‘shooting’ bit of it just in time.
Let’s also not even mention Halo, since anyone who finds that playing FPS games without a mouse doesn’t make them smash your joypad into tiny little pieces of pathetic black plastic is clearly on their way to the funny farm.
Leaving one genre behind, let’s look at driving. Grand Theft Auto? It’s Carmageddon without the continual splattering of pedestrians. No steering wheel, so it bears no resemblance to driving. Where’s the point?
“Look! I’ve made something utterly pointless. Please laugh with me. Wiiiiith MEEEEE.”
Gran Turismo? Utter bollocks. See above comment about steering wheels: without one YOU CAN’T DRIVE. IT ISN’T ANYTHING LIKE DRIVING WITHOUT ONE! Good pure driving games went Pole Position, Daytona, bugger all else. Yes, you Outrun lovers, you are all a bunch of deranged weirdos as well. It was crap the first time, and it’s still crap now.
Let’s jump further back. As I write this, the most popular Ultimate game from the Spectrum days (according to World of Spectrum, at least) is Sabre Wulf. SABRE WULF? That was Ultimate’s worst game. It’s was just a stupid bloody maze game and every now and then there was a monster you can’t kill. Whoop de flippin’ doo. Ooooh, isn’t it colourful? Ooooh, isn’t it shite.
And don’t claim Knight Lore was much better. Pretty – yes. Fun – not remotely. “Hey, this game’s totally bloody impossible!”
“Yes, but isn’t it pretty?”
Stick pretty where the sun don’t shine. I want enjoyment.
What about Carrier Command? I’m sure it can’t be just me that never got this. First of all, you needed two mice, a joystick, six hands and three brains to keep the game under control; second, two thirds of your time was spent doing nothing; third, whenever you did see the enemy carrier, it would turn and run away faster than your planes could fly! Time required to play one game and win: 800 hours. Time before boredom sets in: 5 minutes. Not much chance of getting very far in that one.
That little bloody Italian plumber isn’t getting away either. Two hundred games – not all bad, but any one of them that’s had a jump key in it is complete arse.
Yeah, dance you cunt.
And then there’s Elite. Every five years or so, a game comes out that gets hailed as “The New Elite” without realising that, if you look back, Elite was actually a game built around fantastic quantities of tedium. Carry box A from point B to point C to make money. Then carry box D back from point C to point B again. Rinse, repeat. Oh what fun. Variety: none. Fun: wearing thin very rapidly. Point: limited. The authors even realised that docking was such a mindblowingly tedious, frustrating experience that you needed a way to skip it. It’s unsurprising then that no “New Elite” has ever made it big. The reason? The original was shit.
Fine. Don’t agree with me then.
I’m off to play Tetris. That’s a proper bloody game.
(The author would like to point out that he doesn't take things too seriously and is merely overreacting in criticism to overreactions of praise. Assassination threats in response he would consider overreaction. Some of these games he even allegedly kind of enjoyed. Perhaps. Just a tiny little bit. He’ll deny everything. Everything, I tell you! Hahahahahaha…)
May 2005
|
