Random thoughts / How I learned to quit worrying and love the game |
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BY Greg Lockwood July 27th, 2008 |
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No one can claim this fall & winter are not going to be good seasons for videogame releases, as there will be plenty of blockbuster titles coming out on every console. Perhaps the game I am the most excited about is Fallout 3. I wasn’t really following it until the developer walkthrough that they showed at E3 came out, and now I’m retardedly excited about it. The inclusion of the Fat Boy is what pushed me to the must have section. But after my excitement had settled in for a while, I realized that this was the first time I had been this giddy over a videogame in quite some time.
My next question for myself was why don’t I get unquestionably excited over games very often? I know when I was a child a game did one of two things for me. It looked really fun and I absolutely had to have it, or it didn’t catch my interest. The problem that plagues us nowadays, especially for those who read and/or write for websites such as That VideoGame Blog, is that we tend to over-analyze everything. A good example for this is Mega Man 9. Like Fallout 3, I am simply excited about Mega Man 9. But when it was announced, many people wanted to break it down. The fact that it had a woman robot master, whether or not it was good to go back to 8-bit graphics, and how the story was going to fit in the canonical Mega Man plotline.
Another example, personally speaking, is Grand Theft Auto. I was 14 years old when Grand Theft Auto III came out, and all I knew was that the game was bliss. You were in an open city, free to do whatever you wanted, or so it seemed. I was too busy enjoying my time in Liberty City to notice all the flaws we would point out today. Fast forward to the current era, and Grand Theft Auto IV has just come out. Was I excited about GTA 4? Yes. Did I enjoy playing it? Again, I did. But I was too frustrated with the driving controls, micromanagement of friends, and the generic mission setups to lose myself in it.
Now, I’m not saying we should just blindly be happy about videogames, completely overlooking any flaws that are presented. Far from it, as most of us can’t buy every game that catches our eye, therefore we have to decide if the games will be worth it. But at the end of the day, videogames are for fun. If you are too busy breaking down and analyzing every detail about the game, I hardly see where there’s time to have fun, and if you’re not having fun, then why play videogames at all?
July 27th, 2008
at 5:49 pm
I find it harder to be excited becasue I’m constantly updated with every detail thanks to these damn gaming blo…wait.
I mean, you know why people aren’t as excited, it’s cause they don’t read TVGB. That’s why!
July 27th, 2008
at 6:05 pm
I heavily analyze a lot of games too, but I reserve judgement until the final version releases. I’ve found that getting caught up in the hype of a game before it releases almost always leads to disappointment. I’ve also found some real gems that scored abysmally after their release on certain big name review sites, but deserved much higher scores in my eyes.
I rarely buy games now days compared to when I was younger. In fact, several games that have managed to pass my preliminary quality analysis to earn a buy from me, still managed to fail miserably in my eyes after the first 20 minutes of playing, so badly that I decided never to touch the game again.
Overly harsh? I don’t think so. I feel like my free time these days is highly valuable, and only a certain amount of it can go to playing games. There are tons of great games out there I have played and would like to still be playing, but just don’t have the time to between new games that come out and my standby favorites. So if a game doesn’t deserve a 99% in my eyes, then I have a real hard time continuing to play it just for the novelty of beating it or getting my money out of it. I’d rather go back to an older, better game that I didn’t get to spend enough time with instead.
I know how hard it is to make a good game and I appreciate the hard work of the people who make a lot of these games [that I can't bring myself to keep playing], but I still feel I owe it to myself to be as critical of a game as I am. Just because I am very critical of some games doesn’t mean I can’t have fun, it just means that I won’t compromise my with the quality of my “fun time”…if that makes any sense.
July 27th, 2008
at 6:09 pm
Damn, I think I just wrote a mini editorial within your editorial! :X