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It is going to be a spectacular year for gamers Anticipation is growing… Angel of Darkness, the latest instalment of Tomb Raider is about to hit the streets, Deus Ex: Invisible War is coming soon, Doom III is snarling its way towards us and the most anticipated of them all, Half Life 2 will soon be on the shelves.
After the disappointment of the by-the-numbers Unreal 2, the bug-fest of the otherwise promising Devastation, the even buggier CFS 3 and that mixture of complete genius and forehead-to-keyboard annoyance that is Splinter Cell, I think on balance it will end up a fulfilling year for hardcore gamers.
One of the things the (relative) failure of Unreal 2 suggests to me is that for single player games, great graphics and effects are just not enough anymore… those are more or less expected now. For a game to really rock a gamer’s world these days, there needs to be betters quality plots and an engaging story (which is what made Half Life and Deus Ex such durable successes and in so doing, raised the bar).
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And don’t forget STALKER (depending on which release date you believe). Also, UT 2004 looks promising, if not a bit of a Halo ripoff, as long as they give a rebate to those who bought UT2003 (as has been rumored). And the continuing expansion of Battlefield 1942 and Medal of Honor, two games that are aging quite well. Yep, it’s a good year to sit on your ass and shoot aliens and Nazis and blow up stuff.
I’m with you on the need for good stories for single player. No One Lives Forever 2 was a breath of fresh air to all the multiplayer only games. And you have to figure the boys at Valve will hit a home run, the Half-Life 2 demo from E3 simply looked amazing. Can’t wait for Sept. 30th.
Also, I like that you equate “gamers” with PC gamers, as opposed to consoles, which is really where most of the great games reside. (that should get the board rolling).
What was unique about Half Life was that it didn’t actually have a story. There were queer goings on in the background, overheard conversations and curiousity arousing radio chatter, so through the true spirit of play and pretend your imagination did all the work. Only when you finished it did you realise there was scarcely any “plot” at all.
This is an area where FPS are especially vulnerable to screwing up. They stretch and belabour a weak and/or uninteresting narrative to the point of grief, when they need only conjure a rich atmosphere to feed the fevered, Pixie Stick and Mountain Dew addled mind of yer average gamer.
Quality not quantity and all that.
Well the Tomb Raider games have been lackluster at best. Mostly they are designed so that young men can play and then wax poetic…about Lara. DXII does look damn impressive, as does HLII. Halo is suppose to be coming to the PC & the Mac, not that I care. I have played Halo on the Xbox and was underwhelmed. Max Payne II is supposed to be a corker too. Let’s hope this time the game is longer than the last one and maybe even less linear.
MMORPGs have a ways to go, still being a bit samey after you level 3 or 4 characters. Shadowbane help a lot of promise but failed to deliver. They are improving the game but very slowly. If its around in a 3 months it might be fairly good, but I cant see playing it for more than say 3 or 4 months. Planetside, released to much hoopla gets old very fast and even the Star Wars MMORPG is not getting the best of reviews.
Console games are different than PC/Mac games. For the most part the only thing that are really good on consoles are sports games (which are horrid on a PC) an fighting games. For FPSs there is way too little control for me on a joypad. I am a leftie who prefers using the num pad for movement. Consoles and PC/Mac s have their own specialities and long may it stay so.
Game consoles are just one more symptom of an out of control consumerist culture. How many millions of those worthless things have been produced with precious resources? What’s even worse is they make the old consoles go obsolete very quickly and then build up a whole new batch of the things while the old ones eventually end up in landfills. Common sense environmentalism is dead, people are willing to rape the Earth for the most useless and pointless things.
Woohoo! Game consoles make Gaia cry!
[ (…) symptom of an out of control consumerist culture. How many millions of those worthless things have been produced with precious resources?]
Jesus… That’s why I’d call “picking peanuts out of poop”, really.
I understand you may hate the video game entertainment industry for some reason (no, I don’t want to know which one) but for Tetris’ sake, bringing the “assault against Mother Earth” argument in is one of the best nonsense I’ve seen lately.
I disagree with Kit though. There was a plot in Half-Life – at least compared to the Quake series 😉 – and even though I’ve always considered the ending to be outrageously weak (How boring were all these levels on Xen) I’m definitely waiting for the sequel.
Particularly after watching this 25 minutes demo from the E3.
Agreed with Perry about the graphics/Unreal II issue. Never really enjoyed the first one anyway, even though the graphics were top-notch at the time.
But UT… Aaaah. That’s another story :p
Hey guys if any of you like MMORPG’s buy star wars galaxies when it gets out… its insane. Best graphics I have ever seen, any skill imagineable is in it, with about a dozen planets and thousands of factions. Its insane. Best game I have ever seen or played.
Games Suck: having a bad day? Get rid of your anger by shooting some in one of the games suggested.
What really defines the success of a game is just the gameplay. That’s all that really matters. Just consider that there are still tens of thousands of people playing Counter-Strike.
I’m a level designer, and looking at the levels in the original Deus Ex almost made me cringe. They’re hideous. But the gameplay and story were awesome, and it was one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played.
I’m looking forward to Star Wars Galaxies myself–not because of fancy graphics, but because any game which includes smuggler as a profession shows considerable promise. 🙂
Arjuna is insane. Star Wars Galaxies is going to be GARBAGE for months, if not forever. Yes, I am in the beta test and while they haven’t lifted the NDA yet, I don’t really care since the game is so broken. Give it several months to get fixed up before risking your time or money on the game. It is NOT done testing, they’re just shovelling it out the door to make paying customers test it for them.
Also, Halo on the Xbox is a superb game, more than worth the whole price of an Xbox just to play it. If you only played the first few levels and didn’t like it, wow, I feel sorry for you. Try it again, it really gets amazing. Halo 2 should be even more astounding.
So, the bad news is that the government is systematically destroying the balance of the UK constitution, raising taxes, and expanding the welfare state. And the good news is there’s going to be lots of good games.
sigh Pass the soma.
“consoles, which is really where most of the great games reside.”
Well… as long as you don’t mind not being able to play any FPS or RTS games. Give me a damn mouse, not a joystick! Maybe if I were flying a plane, not aiming a gun…
But anyway. Neocron is really a great MMORPG, but it’s in dire need of a marketing blitz stateside. Everybody here should start playing it. mmkay?
To the console vs. PC issue:
Certain games simply work better, as pointed out above, on a particular platform. Basketball, football, tennis, baseball, fighting, driving, etc. games are very difficult to play on a PC without aftermarket joysticks and gamepads.
Consoles fall short in games where extremely precise motion and aiming are needed (e.g., aiming in Grand Theft Auto III, Unreal, Quake, Splinter Cell, turning in Onimushu Warrior) and where a conventional gamepad lacks the buttons (and mouse accompaniment) to deliver all the necessary options (Warcraft III, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Rainbow Six). The genius of consoles is in games like Gran Turismo, Halo, Soul Calibur, Tekken, Street Fighter, and Devil may Die.
I await HL 2 with some bated breath, particularly after seeing a demo video floating around the Internet.
I made a “gamey” post at my blog yesterday, right HERE.
Well, I still have a huge back catalog of good, cheap Dreamcast games to collect. They look really nice on my monitor via the VGA Box.
For new console games, there are a lot that make me drool, but MotoGP 2 is the game I can’t wait to play (my brother owns an Xbox, so I’ll have to wait to visit). The first one was amazing, and they’ve fixed anything wrong with it, added features, and updated the bikes to reflect the first actual MotoGP season (with the four strokes).
UT2k3 just never appealed to me the way the original UT did. There’s a game I played a couple *thousand* hours over two years. You guys are right on the money about Unreal 2–it was quite lackluster.
Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 will be events. And Planetsite looks great. But the PC game I’d love to see sequelized is Freedom Force. The kitsch was great, and beating “commies” with a giant hammer was priceless.
Oh, and the “out of control consumerist culture”, “raping the earth” thing was great, class A stuff.
I’m working as a concerned environmentalist to collect old consoles (I have two so far).
And S Massey, of course there are grievous problems; games, like books, movies, hanging with friends, sports, holidays, etc. provide a much-needed respite from thinking about the state of things.
Kevin White: yessir, and its precisely that need for a “respite from thinking” so widespread among the UK populace that inspired me to fuck off to the States when it became obvious that the Care Blair Bunch were about to destroy the freelance consulting market with their IR-35 legislation…
A thought just occurred to me.
Germany has extremely oppressive videogame regulations. Will the EU force those upon all members?
It would really suck if Brits couldn’t play RTCW or Medal of Honor or Barbie’s Fashion Designer (pretty much any game in its original state).
I also suspect that the Xbox will be banned in the EU because it’s American. Windows will also be banned to make way for EULinux. Have fun with those ‘EU Approved’ games, folks!
i’m looking forward to splinter cell 2 and halo 2. mmm…
Perry, nice article but you only talk about single-player games… clear trend is that games that offer great multiplayer capacity seem to sell more and more. (BF 1942, Raven Shield, for example)
You can have a superb story, great graphics and so on but the feeling of beating real-life opponents … now that’s the stuff…!
Scarshapedstar: I meant to say the PC was where the best games are. Wow, I wrote that statement poorly. I’m not a console man at all, though I can’t wait for Halo for the PC.
I haven’t played a complex PC game since Gabriel Knight 2, which works if you can believe that Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria was a werewolf and can remember that Gabriel doesn’t speak German (irritating for those of us who speak German and know right away what to do). A good story is better than shooting at people any day, IMO.
Nowadays, I just play Go over the Internet. 🙂
What the heck? Is that a piture of Lara’s flat chested little sister or something?
And Andrew, if all it took was pixelated boobies to make a blockbuster game, then the market would be flooded with clones. Like it it now with FPS or “Warcraft” clones.
A: You can have a superb story, great graphics and so on but the feeling of beating real-life opponents … now that’s the stuff…!
Certainly you are correct that multiplayer is popular but I find them tedious… been there, done that, got bored. It is a matter of personal taste for sure but I find them very repetitive. The only way to really interact with people is to shoot them or cooperate in shooting people. I like something with a plot to unravel and a story, something more like an interactive movie… and shooting people
EIDOS is milking the Lara Croft series as long as they can partly due to the fact that they have really not come up with anything that special since.
I like MP in small doses, the trouble with most MT games now is there are so many haxxors and cheaters. Counter-strike and MOA are ruined by this right now, so was Q3. Not that I minded, I have always been a UT over Q3 guy. UT2K3 is nothing special imo and just an update. Too bad U2 was a graphic masterpiece that could constipate a bleeding edge machine but failed on plot. One hopes that Doom III wont be a similar graphics fest, with no plot and only playable on a few machines. (Signs are it just might be though. At one point the game would have been unaplayable on any currently sold machine.)
MMORPGs are interesting for MP play too, especially if you find a decent guild/clan/etc. Its amazing how much more tolerant you are of lag and minor bugs when not surrounded by pre-pubes acting like total neanderthals.
As far as I can tell from MMORPGs (both from exp and talking to others), you should avoid any of them like the plague for about 6 months unless you are very patient. Looks like Shadowbane might have pulled themselves from the dust heap of gaming history, but only just. PS looks good but is boring quick and SWG has got some mega-problems.
As far as tree-hugger. Computers are a waste of resources too. Why don’t you go back to using an abacus or your fingers?
Stephen M: have their regulations changed from two years ago? I played a couple clan matches against guys from Germany (one of the nicest clans we every played). That was in Unreal Tournament, which, okay, is not Postal II or Soldier of Fortune II, but it still has “violence” (although I turned off gibs for the sake of framerate).
One of the MMORPGs, maybe it was Asheron’s Call, seemed to try to combine plotlines and global events into the small group hack n slash/level up gameplay.
For a while, it seemed as if great storyline and gameplay freedom were inversely related, but Vice City seems to have changed that equation. It really is a remarkable game.
I used to be a PC-gaming snob until I got my first modern console, an Xbox, which was released within days of my son being born. Now I just use the PC for complex strategy games and hop on the Xbox for everything else, from NFL football action to rally racing to shooters like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Sure, a PC typically offers sharper graphics and tighter controls. But anyone who’s played an Xbox has to admit the graphics are pretty damn burly. Plus I can play it on my 32″ TV with surround sound while sitting in my couch. As a big FPS player, the control and precision aiming issue hasn’t bothered me. The gameplay is usually tweaked to compensate for that, plus if you play deathmatch, your opponents are similarly handicaped. But the best thing about a console for me is that it is simply easier to play given the time constraints of having a kid. No game installation, no boot-up times, no load times. Just pop the game in and play. This has allowed me to keep gaming beyond what I could have done with just a PC. Anyway, Perry is right, there are a ton of good games coming down the pike, and I’m excited at the prospect that the gaming industry is shaping to be a strong new entertainment force. You’ve got good Hollywood talent voicing in these things, and the storylines and aesthetics are just getting better and better. Even if “Enter the Matrix” is the piece of junk I hear it is, it has at least pioneered a new level of intergration with movies that should lay the foundation for some more cool stuff in the next few years.
personally, i’m bored to tears with most of the games you mention… yeah, fine you can sneak around with a gun & shoot some dudes, but really it’s just goldeneye in fancy clothes. I’ve still got goldeneye & an N64, still haven’t completed all the levels at all difficulties, so why do i need another “sneak around & shoot em” game?
I want more japanese madness cartoon games; the kind Nintendo used to do so well (& still occasionally do, tho’ it seems they don’t get over here very often thanks to the number of boy gamers who’re only interested if their games are a lacklustre simulation of ‘reality’ rather than crazed multicolour feats of imagination). Anyone else feel this way? or am i all alone? [sob]
Agree about fighting games tho’… made for consoles! And also, why is it only Nintendo who seem to allow for more than two people playing at once; 4 player sessions rule!
Single player FPS’s as far as I am concerned are a dying breed. Honestly MM and on-line games are far more enjoyable. Games like Battlefield 1942 and Desert Combat have better gameplay then most games. Nothing beats outsmarting a human opponent rather then AI.