Dr_Steve_Brule said:
King Kupofried said:
Sorta makes you wonder why they didn't take the time to put in some crisp fresh lettuce instead, since there are people who like that, and there are those who lose their appetite when they find their burger with an old wilted plant hidden under the bun.
Maybe everyone should stop telling a man who's picky about his lettuce to tell you what he thinks about your new favorite burger when you know it's usually served with sub par salad.
Yay exhausting metaphors!
You're missing the point.
Fine, you want your lettuce fresh, I don't have a problem with that, but you can't judge the entire burger just from the lettuce perspective. The lettuce is not the main focus here. Even if you take it out, it's still a very good burger.
Yes, you should pay less for it, but it's still a good burger.
I think I just crossed the metaphor limit.
I like where this metaphor is going.
Okay, so you've got your burger shack with its various additions and condiments and you've got three customers. One customer just wants meat - he doesn't really care about the extras as long as the meat is good. One customer is even easier to please - he'll be satisfied as long as any part of the burger is worthwhile. One customer wants the total package - if the bun's sweaty and gross or the lettuce is spoiled or the tomato's gone bad, the ketchup's just water that drools onto your hands, any of that, will obviously have a negative effect on the burger as a whole and lessen his enjoyment of it as a result.
Judging a game with both single- and multiplayer modes based on its single-player experience, assuming the two modes are based on the same mechanics (a game that plays like an FPS in single-player and an RTS in multiplayer wouldn't really work for this as they are, for most intents and purposes, completely different games rather than the same game but with additional players) is asking for the burger, the meat of it, to be good. If the extras (multiplayer) are good too, awesome! That makes it an even better burger, well worth the price of nomnomming. If the extras are crap, eh, you're still full and the meat was well-cooked. Maybe better to buy when the shack's having its weekend special deal for half-off on burgers. -- This obviously doesn't apply to multiplayer games - games that either do not have a single-player mode at all or in which the single-player is, at best, a framework to introduce you to the multiplayer. If there's a single-player campaign,
you aren't playing a multiplayer game. You are playing a game with a multiplayer option. That the multiplayer is more polished than the single-player does not make the game a multiplayer game; it makes it a game in which the multiplayer is the only part worth playing because having other people around compensates for the otherwise unsatisfying gameplay. (Left 4 Dead/Left 4 Dead 2 are difficult to classify as the single-player and multiplayer games are...the same game. Except in one you have idiotic bots and in the other you have players. I might be inclined to label that a multiplayer game given the bots qualify - barely - as "players" even in the single-player mode; you can't really play it alone unless you mod it to be able to save yourself or you remove the special infected, either of which would dramatically alter the game. Difficult to judge.)
Judging a game with single- and multiplayer modes based solely on the multiplayer experience is customer #2, the guy who'll accept anything burger-shaped as long as something about it is good. Everything inside the bun might be shit, but damn that bun is nice - sold! If more than one thing in the burger is good then it must be a completely awesome burger, right? Or so it would seem, given this customer has grown accustomed to devouring a lot of crap that resembles hamburger given his extremely high tolerance for low-grade meat and expired condiments masked by excellent bread. -- Again, doesn't apply to MP-only games using the above reasoning.
Customer #3 rarely eats anything and weighs seventy pounds. He plays Portal, Starcraft and Thief and only occasionally deigns to speak with anyone who plays with anything else, most often to inform them of what their chosen games lack. He is unlikely to live for much longer for reasons of malnutrition...or so the doctors would have him believe. However, Customer #3 is far too savvy to be fooled by this sort of misinformation.
You see, Customer #3 is well aware of the global conspiracy amongst the world's most successful game developers, movie producers and licorice merchants to enslave the masses and do away with those too enlightened to manipulate into assisting with their diabolical plans. If pressed he might admit that this is the real reason he partakes of so few forms of electronic recreation or processed foods, knowing what he does about the subliminal signals sent out by the former and the nano-machinery embedded in the latter, a pairing with the synergistic purpose of turning a living, breathing, thinking human being into little more than a blind consumer, a slave to join the growing chain of bodies wrapped around a corrupt core of single-minded pursuits guided by the unseen hand of a council spawned in the shadowed crevices sheltered by the facade called Capitalism. The evidence of waning creativity in the world's gaming is in actuality evidence of once-creative minds being drowned by suppressive influences, silently ground into dust by the unceasing pressure of a massive ever-present will not their own forcing innovation from their thoughts and replacing it with sex, bullets and betrayal. Customer #3 knows the truth: the greatest betrayal is hardly those we can see, these idiotic hand-puppets propped up as obvious targets so clear we can mark them for death long before they physically earn their imminent murders. They are a smokescreen shrouding the overthrow from within, the spirits we thought so independent and critical, so keen in observation of a morbidly predictable world that they never think to observe their own gradual self-destruction.
Customer #3 knows that we are the conductors of our own evolution into oblivion and he refuses to play that music any longer. He will not compromise. He will not accept a weapon firing at his very being in the guise of a half-finished game with a purposely addictive and competitive goal, an obvious trap to snare those with potentially threatening urges to lash out in a rebellious fashion, a pre-emptively cast net grabbing up those who could grow into a dangerous factor if ever they realized the true darkness growing in the world all around them, within them, indeed created by they themselves in walking the path set out before them without question. Customer #3 is the future, the last hope we have of surviving this deepening marsh of mediocrity and vanishing expectations.
He also enjoys Swedish Fish.
