Staring at the Menus 002

I came home today and, as per the norm, one of the first things I did was look at my instant messaging client that I never close. I had a few messages from various times throughout the day, and the last one was simply a link. Naturally, I clicked on it.That link can be followed right here.

It took me to the fairly simple flash game that you likely see before you because, knowing gamers, you're likely an impatient little bastard. As you move around in the odd-gravity platformer that it is, more of the level shows itself to you. As you do so, soothing, gentle music plays. There's no enemies, no butt-bouncing, no score, no real objective even, but it's nearly impossible to not play it.

While I'm certainly not going to cough up 60 bucks for a game like this, big-name developers should give it a definite play-through. It has a sense of exploration, wonder, and discovery that very, very few retail games actually manage to capture with all of their fancy graphics and animations.

Portal is perhaps the most recent game I can think of that managed to capture some of it, though even then, the environments felt so pre-made and designed that it took away from a large part of that.

The best example of a sense of wonder and exploration that I can remember in a retail game has to go to Morrowind. That massive world, littered with ruins, small villages, and seemingly random characters was one that you wanted to walk in for hours, and many people have.

There's other good examples of this too, of course. You could easily place worthy arguments for Oblivion, Fallout 3, BioShock, Mass Effect, Borderlands, and even Halo 1 if you mean the more open levels. I pulled big-name titles, but compared to how many I have on my shelves, it's a very small number, and most are built with exploration or wonder as one of the main goals.

More and more open-world games are coming out all the time, but GTA and its clones aren't making their worlds any more interesting. They still feel very flat, lifeless, and built entirely for the player. If worlds were built with more levels of character interaction and backstory, it's already a step in the right direction. If you then follow that up with interesting level design, you really have something other developers just aren't doing.

Referring back to my previous list, Morrowind and Oblivion both have fairly good character/race interaction, making the world seem more politically grounded and plausible. Morrowind's interesting physical world adds to this by giving the story an interesting and diverse setting. Oblivion dropped the ball on the physical world, giving players only a few unique areas and then repeating the rest until you knew exactly was over the next hill.

Fallout 3 has an interesting world with it's 50's themes and bulky technology. Considerable variety makes the player interested in exploring this world, and a fair amount of loot to be found rewards such explorers.

BioShock is perhaps the most odd inclusion of the games in that list, since the game is fairly linear. But its interesting characters, story, and unique visual style make it one game that sticks with you.

Perhaps what the industry really needs is better writers that work with the level designers. What's important to remember about most games is that it should really be one team of people working on it, not all of the different departments working on the same thing but separate from each other.

Staring at the Menus 001

I am finally sitting down to do something that I have been meaning to for some time, and that is introducing this new kind of post that I am thinking of making relatively frequently. They aren't reviews in any sense of the word, rather, they are simply going to be me talking about video games. No specific topic. I'm just going to sit down and write about whatever I feel like sharing. Needless to say, a great many of these will sound very opinionated and ranting.

The name originates from those times that every gamer gets where you find yourself sitting in front of the TV, paging through the menus of your favorite game, and having absolutely no idea what you want to play. However, if anyone has a better idea for a name, please let me know at any of the three ways to contact me that I've helpfully arranged to the right of the column you're reading right now.

For my first opinionated rant, I want to tackle common themes in racing games. Specifically, the complete denial that anything but complete realism exists. Not all games are a victim of this trend, but I see fewer and fewer non-sim racers every year.

I grew up on racing games, and became a fan of Gran Turismo shortly after playing the first game, so it's not that I just plain don't like sim racers, but I do prefer the now much more rare arcade racers that used to fill most of my time. Blur is one of those rare arcade racers that still fills a good portion of my time.

Forza is the perfect antonym to Blur; there's nothing that shouldn't be in a pure simulation. In this, there is a certain beauty to it. However, this is also a shining example of most racing games that have released in recent years. Think back and try to remember the last big non-sim racing game that isn't Blur or Split/Second. Hard, isn't it? PGR is the only one I can think of, and even that series was closer to realism.

One big area of difference regarding racing games is in download-only titles, where they are smaller, quick-fire style games that are generally simpler and more arcade-y anyway. These games tend to have arcade physics, favoring quick acceleration, forgiving crashes, and grippy cars over their more realistic counterparts.

It's not that sim racers don't have a place in the market, but I want to know where all of the arcade racers have gone. Even Need For Speed is becoming cold and realistic. Is the problem really that games like Gran Turismo and Forza are as popular as they are, so they're muscling arcade racers out of the market? Or is the industry just so caught up in making everything look next-gen that they've lost sight of what makes a game fun? Only time will tell if arcade racers dies out, but I'm going to enjoy the ones we have for now.