Need a Dispenser said:
Me:"Hey are you going to buy the new SSX?"
People:"No, it's to unrealistic."
I honestly don't get why some people want to play a realistic snowboard simulator.
What happened to the times when people wanted to play something unrealistic and just have fun? Now the games are all about the graphics and how close it is to real life, and I find it sad that people tell me with a straight face that they would rather play something like Shaun White's Snowboarding than SSX.
So Escapist, what's your take on SSX and Realism in games in general?
A wish fulfillment fantasy I think, if things get too wild it can be hard to suspend disbelief. When your dealing with something like a sports simulator in paticular, the crazier it gets the harder it is to take seriously as the sport in question.
If your say a snowboarding fan, and someone a game like SSX or Shaun White is presumably aimed at, you kind of wish you were one of the guys out there doing that stuff and that's what you want to simulate. If you start routinely doing things that would probably be impossible for the real top of the line athletes in the sport to pull off reliably, that kind of ruins it. If you can say outpoint a world class snowboarder's record in a game that should be an epic feat, not something you just do in day or so of play.
The appeal of realism (not to be confused with being utterly realistic or a simulation) in games varies with the genere. The trick to a good game is to get you to suspend disbelief within the context of it's reality, to have the game convince you this COULD happen at least for a while, some games are just too crazy for that to happen despite pretensions of being based on realistic subject matter like sports.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned this on The Escapist, but one thing I've talked about before is how I kind of wish they would remove mechanics like the "dodge roll" from various games simply because full body rolls like that, especially one after another, are not a casual manuver and when linked into a combat system in a game otherwise going for a sense of realism they tend to break immersion for me to a great degree.
I think one of the worst examples for me was "Silent Hill: Homecoming", see, I don't mind the idea of there being a combat capable protaganist in Silent Hill who can kill monsters a little more easily than others that have ventured there. But some of the specific moves he used were what ruined the immersion. If they had paid more attention to the choreography but otherwise kept the game itself, I think the game would have been better received... as one example from a non-sports game.