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So, bought any 3DO games recently? I'd give any gamer 10 minutes max. before they crack up playing one of this publisher's games. Why do 3DO bother? They get panned in the gaming press, they get bad review scores, EVERYONE knows by now to avoid them and yet they still release games for consoles. How have they kept going?
Avoid 3DO Games.
Leaving the bane of gamers to one side for now, with any game, do you sometimes find that from the outset you just KNOW you aren't going to enjoy the experience? I got that with XG3: Extreme-G Racing recently. The startup screens didn't impress, the introductory sequence seemed bland and uninspiring, and the gameplay itself was basically a stripped-down Wipeout Fusion on two wheels instead of anti-grav. After just one race I turned it off and played Wipeout Fusion instead. Maybe I should give it more of a chance on a rainy day. Maybe I should have done more research before buying it so that I could have realised in advance that Wipeout Fusion already satisfied that particular gameplay gap in my collection.
Avoid Clones.
Moving onto unofficial addons and peripherals, how many of you have had save game files just 'vanish' overnight? All that hard work you did levelling up your Final Fantasy Characters or collecting over 200 cars in Gran Turismo or your James Bond Agent Under Fire hi-scores just disappearing because you opted for that cheap alternative piece of plastic they sold you as a 'memory card'? I've never lost save game files from an official memory card, nor had any problems with any official peripheral. I suppose the moral here is:
Avoid Cheap Plastic Imitations.
RTS games (Real Time Strategy) are another bee in my current gaming bonnet. If it takes you a year in real life to select a piece of land, build a city, encourage your city to grow, develop and expand, why do most RTS games speed everything up? In Sim City 3000 you can get a few skyscrapers going within hours. In Command and Conquer games your first base is up and running within minutes. Real time? Why can't they just call it Strategy instead? In any case, this annoys me to the extent that I advise everyone to
Avoid RTS Games.
Last but not least, have you ever browsed on the internet or in your local shop for games that you'd heard about and then discovered there are a couple of extra games on display that you've never heard of? But they're new because they have a 'NEW RELEASE' sticker on them? But they're only priced at £24.99 and you can't believe your luck so you buy one? And you can't believe that out of the last 3 gaming magazines and websites you've browsed through you haven't seen any word whatsoever written about these games?
That's because the publisher has rushed it, done everything in their power to withhold information from the gaming press to avoid negative images being formed by the buying public, and released it with no fanfare in the hope that we'll be duped into buying it because it says 'NEW RELEASE' and 'BUDGET PRICE' and the box looks pretty. You get it home only to discover that in reality you've got ugly sister instead of Cinderella. (And I mean ugly as in falling out of the Ugly tree and hitting every branch face first on the way down).
Avoid 'NEW' Games At Budget Prices.
----------------
So guess what I bought the other day? 'Army Men RTS.' Published by 3DO, it's a RTS game full of cheap plastic soldiers which look like clones, it's an imitation of Command and Conquer only with more slowdown, but it was 'NEW' and on Budget Price; even though I hadn't heard anything about it I thought it was worth a try. I lasted 5 minutes. It's now gathering dust.
So from now on I'm going to print off this post and carry it around taped to the inside of my wallet whenever I go games shopping.
So yes, go play.
> Avoid RTS Games.
Thats a pretty generalised statement. RTS games rock! In real life it may take an age to make a real base and some real tanks, but who the hell is going to sit at a computer waitng 45 days for 1 apocalypse tank to be completed? Nobody, you see we dont REALLY want RTS in the true sense of the word, because we live in the fast lane.
And it seems that the RTS veil which this army men game is weilding has clouded your judgement, just like there are bad examples of FPS, driving, platform and every other genre, you cant lump them together and say, oh thats poo, so erm that looks the same so it must be poo as well.
Christ if everybody thought that there would be no Return to Castle Wolfensteins, or Half life's or Allied Assaults, because everybody would have given up when South Park the game was made.
You bought an Army Men game, after being sexed up by the RTS bit in the title. Everybody has bought a stinker, just go and play your classic titles again (and sell that monstrocity on Ebay)and you will feel much better.
3DO publish the games, but who make them? I have my fair share of developers I'd avoid like the plague, too.
it didn't work the first time...
or the second...
or the third...
Why Bother?
So, bought any 3DO games recently? I'd give any gamer 10 minutes max. before they crack up playing one of this publisher's games. Why do 3DO bother? They get panned in the gaming press, they get bad review scores, EVERYONE knows by now to avoid them and yet they still release games for consoles. How have they kept going?
Avoid 3DO Games.
Leaving the bane of gamers to one side for now, with any game, do you sometimes find that from the outset you just KNOW you aren't going to enjoy the experience? I got that with XG3: Extreme-G Racing recently. The startup screens didn't impress, the introductory sequence seemed bland and uninspiring, and the gameplay itself was basically a stripped-down Wipeout Fusion on two wheels instead of anti-grav. After just one race I turned it off and played Wipeout Fusion instead. Maybe I should give it more of a chance on a rainy day. Maybe I should have done more research before buying it so that I could have realised in advance that Wipeout Fusion already satisfied that particular gameplay gap in my collection.
Avoid Clones.
Moving onto unofficial addons and peripherals, how many of you have had save game files just 'vanish' overnight? All that hard work you did levelling up your Final Fantasy Characters or collecting over 200 cars in Gran Turismo or your James Bond Agent Under Fire hi-scores just disappearing because you opted for that cheap alternative piece of plastic they sold you as a 'memory card'? I've never lost save game files from an official memory card, nor had any problems with any official peripheral. I suppose the moral here is:
Avoid Cheap Plastic Imitations.
RTS games (Real Time Strategy) are another bee in my current gaming bonnet. If it takes you a year in real life to select a piece of land, build a city, encourage your city to grow, develop and expand, why do most RTS games speed everything up? In Sim City 3000 you can get a few skyscrapers going within hours. In Command and Conquer games your first base is up and running within minutes. Real time? Why can't they just call it Strategy instead? In any case, this annoys me to the extent that I advise everyone to
Avoid RTS Games.
Last but not least, have you ever browsed on the internet or in your local shop for games that you'd heard about and then discovered there are a couple of extra games on display that you've never heard of? But they're new because they have a 'NEW RELEASE' sticker on them? But they're only priced at £24.99 and you can't believe your luck so you buy one? And you can't believe that out of the last 3 gaming magazines and websites you've browsed through you haven't seen any word whatsoever written about these games?
That's because the publisher has rushed it, done everything in their power to withhold information from the gaming press to avoid negative images being formed by the buying public, and released it with no fanfare in the hope that we'll be duped into buying it because it says 'NEW RELEASE' and 'BUDGET PRICE' and the box looks pretty. You get it home only to discover that in reality you've got ugly sister instead of Cinderella. (And I mean ugly as in falling out of the Ugly tree and hitting every branch face first on the way down).
Avoid 'NEW' Games At Budget Prices.
----------------
So guess what I bought the other day? 'Army Men RTS.' Published by 3DO, it's a RTS game full of cheap plastic soldiers which look like clones, it's an imitation of Command and Conquer only with more slowdown, but it was 'NEW' and on Budget Price; even though I hadn't heard anything about it I thought it was worth a try. I lasted 5 minutes. It's now gathering dust.
So from now on I'm going to print off this post and carry it around taped to the inside of my wallet whenever I go games shopping.