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I've played a fair few games in my time, and as you might expect, some have been brilliant, some have been so-os and some have been downright rubbish - it's par for the course. But what really gets on my nerves is when there's a game that so easily could have been a smash, only to be marred by a major blunder. Usually one which could have been easily avoided. Here are some of the more infuriating ways promising games end up coming a cropper. Any budding games designers take note.
1) Poor AI.
It's not necessarily a bad thing when a game's enemies do little more than run into your line of fire in a - after all, it worked for Serious Sam. What really stinks is when designers try and make them intelligent and only do half a job. We've all seen bad guys who can hit you from a mile away if they know you're there, yet if you shoot one of their comrades in the head, who slumps to the floor next to them, they don't budge an inch. Conversely, there are games where you can silently kill a bad guy and every single baddie on the level knows - what are they, the Borg?
2) Bad voice-overs
It's great when a game to sports a fantastic storyline, with superbly rounded characters, giving you the incentive to keep playing just so you can find out what happens next. It's not so great when you bump into the first character in the game and they sound like a bored bus conductor who's just wandered in off the street. Take Forbidden Siren - a very spooky game, with an excellent Japanese voice-track, which was subsequently ditched in favour of voiceovers from a cast who would be thrown off the set of a soap powder commercial for bad acting. A major atmosphere killer, that.
3) Respawing enemies
It's one thing for a game to tax players, it's another for it to be needlessly difficult thanks to respawning enemies. I can live with the idea of reinforcments being called in when you're hacking and slashing your way across a complex, castle or whatever. But for them to just reappear behind you, when you know there's no doors the bad guys could have got through is a real pain. If you want enemies to keep coming, at least have them reappearing from a teleporter or something, don't just throw them at the player constantly. It's not big and it's not clever and if games designers want to make a game hard then they need to put more effort in than just bringing back dead foes.
4) Wonky camera angles
It seems like every other game these days shows the action from a third person view, which is all well and good, except that half the time you can't see what's going on thanks to dodgy camera angles. Sonic Heroes is a case in point, where it seemed the camera was going out of its way to stop you viewing the action from any useful perspective, even disappearing behind walls at some points. Worse are games with static cameras, often requiring you to run along corridors till the camera changes just to see where the bad guys are coming from. Or worse still, actually letting enemies creep up on you because they're obscured by the camera. Mentioning no Resident Evils, er, I mean names.
5) And last but not least... a change of location.
One thing that helps keeps games interesting is the new locations you get to explore as you wander through the levels. Unless, that is, you're playing Otogi or Halo, just two of the games which seek to extend the length of the game by looping the same areas over and over again. Otogi has you retracing your steps backwards and Halo through potatoprint room after potatoprint room after you. Certainly in the case of Halo, it sucked all the fun out of the game, wandering through the same location with not a glimpse of daylight or new scenery.
So there you have it - if you want to kill a game stone dead, by all means, apply all of these to your titles - just don't expect me to buy the resultant mess.
1) Poor AI.
It's not necessarily a bad thing when a game's enemies do little more than run into your line of fire in a - after all, it worked for Serious Sam. What really stinks is when designers try and make them intelligent and only do half a job. We've all seen bad guys who can hit you from a mile away if they know you're there, yet if you shoot one of their comrades in the head, who slumps to the floor next to them, they don't budge an inch. Conversely, there are games where you can silently kill a bad guy and every single baddie on the level knows - what are they, the Borg?
2) Bad voice-overs
It's great when a game to sports a fantastic storyline, with superbly rounded characters, giving you the incentive to keep playing just so you can find out what happens next. It's not so great when you bump into the first character in the game and they sound like a bored bus conductor who's just wandered in off the street. Take Forbidden Siren - a very spooky game, with an excellent Japanese voice-track, which was subsequently ditched in favour of voiceovers from a cast who would be thrown off the set of a soap powder commercial for bad acting. A major atmosphere killer, that.
3) Respawing enemies
It's one thing for a game to tax players, it's another for it to be needlessly difficult thanks to respawning enemies. I can live with the idea of reinforcments being called in when you're hacking and slashing your way across a complex, castle or whatever. But for them to just reappear behind you, when you know there's no doors the bad guys could have got through is a real pain. If you want enemies to keep coming, at least have them reappearing from a teleporter or something, don't just throw them at the player constantly. It's not big and it's not clever and if games designers want to make a game hard then they need to put more effort in than just bringing back dead foes.
4) Wonky camera angles
It seems like every other game these days shows the action from a third person view, which is all well and good, except that half the time you can't see what's going on thanks to dodgy camera angles. Sonic Heroes is a case in point, where it seemed the camera was going out of its way to stop you viewing the action from any useful perspective, even disappearing behind walls at some points. Worse are games with static cameras, often requiring you to run along corridors till the camera changes just to see where the bad guys are coming from. Or worse still, actually letting enemies creep up on you because they're obscured by the camera. Mentioning no Resident Evils, er, I mean names.
5) And last but not least... a change of location.
One thing that helps keeps games interesting is the new locations you get to explore as you wander through the levels. Unless, that is, you're playing Otogi or Halo, just two of the games which seek to extend the length of the game by looping the same areas over and over again. Otogi has you retracing your steps backwards and Halo through potatoprint room after potatoprint room after you. Certainly in the case of Halo, it sucked all the fun out of the game, wandering through the same location with not a glimpse of daylight or new scenery.
So there you have it - if you want to kill a game stone dead, by all means, apply all of these to your titles - just don't expect me to buy the resultant mess.
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I've played a fair few games in my time, and as you might expect, some have been brilliant, some have been so-os and some have been downright rubbish - it's par for the course. But what really gets on my nerves is when there's a game that so easily could have been a smash, only to be marred by a major blunder. Usually one which could have been easily avoided. Here are some of the more infuriating ways promising games end up coming a cropper. Any budding games designers take note.
1) Poor AI.
It's not necessarily a bad thing when a game's enemies do little more than run into your line of fire in a - after all, it worked for Serious Sam. What really stinks is when designers try and make them intelligent and only do half a job. We've all seen bad guys who can hit you from a mile away if they know you're there, yet if you shoot one of their comrades in the head, who slumps to the floor next to them, they don't budge an inch. Conversely, there are games where you can silently kill a bad guy and every single baddie on the level knows - what are they, the Borg?
2) Bad voice-overs
It's great when a game to sports a fantastic storyline, with superbly rounded characters, giving you the incentive to keep playing just so you can find out what happens next. It's not so great when you bump into the first character in the game and they sound like a bored bus conductor who's just wandered in off the street. Take Forbidden Siren - a very spooky game, with an excellent Japanese voice-track, which was subsequently ditched in favour of voiceovers from a cast who would be thrown off the set of a soap powder commercial for bad acting. A major atmosphere killer, that.
3) Respawing enemies
It's one thing for a game to tax players, it's another for it to be needlessly difficult thanks to respawning enemies. I can live with the idea of reinforcments being called in when you're hacking and slashing your way across a complex, castle or whatever. But for them to just reappear behind you, when you know there's no doors the bad guys could have got through is a real pain. If you want enemies to keep coming, at least have them reappearing from a teleporter or something, don't just throw them at the player constantly. It's not big and it's not clever and if games designers want to make a game hard then they need to put more effort in than just bringing back dead foes.
4) Wonky camera angles
It seems like every other game these days shows the action from a third person view, which is all well and good, except that half the time you can't see what's going on thanks to dodgy camera angles. Sonic Heroes is a case in point, where it seemed the camera was going out of its way to stop you viewing the action from any useful perspective, even disappearing behind walls at some points. Worse are games with static cameras, often requiring you to run along corridors till the camera changes just to see where the bad guys are coming from. Or worse still, actually letting enemies creep up on you because they're obscured by the camera. Mentioning no Resident Evils, er, I mean names.
5) And last but not least... a change of location.
One thing that helps keeps games interesting is the new locations you get to explore as you wander through the levels. Unless, that is, you're playing Otogi or Halo, just two of the games which seek to extend the length of the game by looping the same areas over and over again. Otogi has you retracing your steps backwards and Halo through potatoprint room after potatoprint room after you. Certainly in the case of Halo, it sucked all the fun out of the game, wandering through the same location with not a glimpse of daylight or new scenery.
So there you have it - if you want to kill a game stone dead, by all means, apply all of these to your titles - just don't expect me to buy the resultant mess.
1) Poor AI.
It's not necessarily a bad thing when a game's enemies do little more than run into your line of fire in a - after all, it worked for Serious Sam. What really stinks is when designers try and make them intelligent and only do half a job. We've all seen bad guys who can hit you from a mile away if they know you're there, yet if you shoot one of their comrades in the head, who slumps to the floor next to them, they don't budge an inch. Conversely, there are games where you can silently kill a bad guy and every single baddie on the level knows - what are they, the Borg?
2) Bad voice-overs
It's great when a game to sports a fantastic storyline, with superbly rounded characters, giving you the incentive to keep playing just so you can find out what happens next. It's not so great when you bump into the first character in the game and they sound like a bored bus conductor who's just wandered in off the street. Take Forbidden Siren - a very spooky game, with an excellent Japanese voice-track, which was subsequently ditched in favour of voiceovers from a cast who would be thrown off the set of a soap powder commercial for bad acting. A major atmosphere killer, that.
3) Respawing enemies
It's one thing for a game to tax players, it's another for it to be needlessly difficult thanks to respawning enemies. I can live with the idea of reinforcments being called in when you're hacking and slashing your way across a complex, castle or whatever. But for them to just reappear behind you, when you know there's no doors the bad guys could have got through is a real pain. If you want enemies to keep coming, at least have them reappearing from a teleporter or something, don't just throw them at the player constantly. It's not big and it's not clever and if games designers want to make a game hard then they need to put more effort in than just bringing back dead foes.
4) Wonky camera angles
It seems like every other game these days shows the action from a third person view, which is all well and good, except that half the time you can't see what's going on thanks to dodgy camera angles. Sonic Heroes is a case in point, where it seemed the camera was going out of its way to stop you viewing the action from any useful perspective, even disappearing behind walls at some points. Worse are games with static cameras, often requiring you to run along corridors till the camera changes just to see where the bad guys are coming from. Or worse still, actually letting enemies creep up on you because they're obscured by the camera. Mentioning no Resident Evils, er, I mean names.
5) And last but not least... a change of location.
One thing that helps keeps games interesting is the new locations you get to explore as you wander through the levels. Unless, that is, you're playing Otogi or Halo, just two of the games which seek to extend the length of the game by looping the same areas over and over again. Otogi has you retracing your steps backwards and Halo through potatoprint room after potatoprint room after you. Certainly in the case of Halo, it sucked all the fun out of the game, wandering through the same location with not a glimpse of daylight or new scenery.
So there you have it - if you want to kill a game stone dead, by all means, apply all of these to your titles - just don't expect me to buy the resultant mess.