Hexenwolf said:
Chaos Marine said:
I consider Microsoft the sole reason why gaming is going down the shitter for bringing in the sideways wearing hat yokels with monotonous tripe like Halo.
And I consider you rather narrow-minded. One company and one game?
But forgetting all that, I take particular offense to this: "gaming is going down the shitter".
Because Halo is the main game responsible for bring in the slack jawed idiot jocks into gaming who will accept any old trash generally lowering the bar for what's needed to make a great game.
Hexenwolf said:
I disagree. There are plenty of excellent and innovative games out there. The Left 4 Dead series is fun and innovative. Hard Rain looks it too. Assassin's Creed was quite different, Bioshock was amazing, here's hoping the second will be too. Starcraft II whenever it comes out. Really, who says gaming is going down the shitter?
I won't deny that there are good games, but for the majority, a lot of them are getting terribly simplified and you can thank consoles for that.
Case in point, look back to the original FEAR. That was, sure it suffered from a little too many office sections (Though it was mainly set in an office so what would you expect?) mainly developed for the PC and then ported to the consoles. Look at the sequel. It's so ridiculously different in almost every respect from the change of real-ish looking, near future weapons to plasticy, bright and shiny guns, with the entire Replica army getting an armour design face lift which was particularly jarring since they dont at all fit in with the original design scheme, particularly with their glowing I'm here shoot me! design. The sequel was supposed to occur literally minutes before the end of the first game and just about everything in the game bar a few names, characters etc are completely different. For all intents and purposes, you could have named it anything else and changed some names and it could have been it's own game entirely and unrelated to the original FEAR.
Then you have the difficulty which was absolutely reduced. Granted the first, even on the hardest difficulty setting was very easy to beat, the second wasn't even a challenge. I barely even needed any of the health items.
CoD4MW2. Enough said. And the game isn't even that good! It's actually worse than MW1 and the only great game who's sequel-was-such-crap-compared-to-it's-seequelwas Mechwarrior 3 with Mechwarrior 4 literally looking far uglier and playing horribly.
Deus Ex, the original is a rightly venerated PC classic and is one of the best all time RPG/FPS games and nothing else has come close to besting it. Then Deus Ex2 came along with tiny maps because the consoles at the time (PS2) were so limited in their ability to run it and every single thing about it was dumbed down from the universal ammo to the plot and choices.
But back again to Halo. That game is one of the most bland, uninteresting, dull, boring, monotonous shooters I've ever played. You basically play as a drugged turtle and I don't mean of the ninja variety either. The only thing, and I stress only thing, that the Halo had going for it was it's score which is pretty damned fantastic and it succeeded in giving the game a pretty epic feel. For as long as it took for you to realise that the gameplay was never going to even come close to the music. That is such a pity too.
Command & Conquer Red Alert 3: Good Hades did I hate this game. It is so ridiculously bad it's a veritible slog to get through and everything seemed so clumsy and poorly done. From oversized and under ranged units to the cringeworthy FMVs. The first RA was gritty with a slightly loopy tech base which was grand for the setting, the second had slightly crazier units and some camp characters and the third was suffering from intense ADD. Though I would suppose you could credit that to EA.
