First-Person Shooters
There are some really great first-person shooters, for sure. Like Portal or Half-Life or FEAR or Bioshock. A lot of them are really good, actually.
But that doesn't stop one really terrible game from dragging them all down: Turok 2 for the Nintendo 64. Man, that thing just sucked. The levels were about a billion years long, and the platforming was quite possibly the most frustrating thing ever put in a video game ever. And here's the thing: I bet there are even worse first-person shooter games than Turok 2! Worse ones!
Minus 6 bullets.
Rhythm
For a long time, rhythm games were just too much for gamers, and by "gamers" I mean me, to bother with. They all required these expensive peripherals or pads or whatever just so you could play the bongos to the Donkey Kong theme music.
And then, one day, out of the blue, they weren't prohibitively expensive and cumbersome anymore, and people started buying them. I guess you could credit that to the blockbuster success of Guitar Hero, but I think it has more to do with the fact that people just suddenly had a hankering to have chintzy drum pads in their homes that they could use to make them feel like they were playing "Psycho Killer." I know I did.
Plus 2 bullets.
Racing
Here's the thing: Fuck Gran Turismo. Before those games, racing games were all arcade fun and bouncing around on off-road tracks and girls in bikinis giving you trophies and people somehow staying inside a convertible even when it flips over in midair.
And then every goddamn racing game got super-obsessed with realism and having to push a button to change gears and spending like seven goddamn hours deciding how many liters your engine is. And if I wanted to do all that shit, I'd go buy a race car or something. As for now, I want to actually goddamn race and have fun, you dicks.
Minus 8 bullets.
Puzzle
I'm going to make this one simple: Puzzle games are fun. A lot of them, anyway. I never really got "Dr. Mario," to be perfectly honest.
Plus, they gave us the Tetris music. That's a hell of a gift.
Plus 7 bullets.
Survival Horror
Somehow survival horror games have managed to be successful despite the fact that moving around their protagonists, as a general rule, is more or less akin to trying to drive a Sherman tank through a big pile of strawberry preserves.
The only reasonable explanation is that the terrible controls actually contribute to the games' scariness. I mean, not only is a zombie or a demon nurse or a ghost you have to photograph coming at you really quickly, turning around takes about twelve years. That's scary as fuck! It's one thing to be chased by monsters, but to be chased by monsters and also a coma victim, that's a whole other level.
Plus 3 bullets.
Real-Time Strategy
Oh yeah, awesome, I can tell different races of things to fight each other and build huts and farm and shit. Then I can spend like a month or something defending a power station or trying to take over a quadrant of a map.
That's what I want to spend my time doing.
Minus 4 bullets.
Comments
i would play video games... if i didn't have a sex life.
Posted by: donuteyes | October 17, 2009 8:51 PM
Actually, donuteyes, you don't.
King Oblivion has trapped you in an illusion, so you are actually neither getting video games OR sex.
Posted by: Voffvoffhunden | October 18, 2009 3:16 PM