Bad Games: Whose Fault are They?
We’ve all played them, the games with wonky controls, broken camera angles that point wherever you are not and graphics so bad that they make your eyes hate you. We’ve all eyed up that game in the corner of our collection that we can’t bear to ever play again and wonder why. Why did this game happen? Because as gaming technology becomes more and more advanced, the number of terrible, terrible games seems to be increasing along with it. So why do bad games get made? I think that I have it down to three points. Playtesting, Lack ofI have been lead to believe, as you probably have, that all games are play tested extensively by a team of crack gamers. The purpose of this is to find bugs in the game and remove them, make the game easier or harder or to suggest changes to control systems. So why are games so full of glitches, unresponsive controls and impossibly hard or ridiculously easy levels? Tony Hawks games have, for as long as I have been playing them, been full of game ruining glitches. Many is the time that I have come off of a half pipe and found myself wedged into the corner of a wall, suspended 20 feet off the floor with no hope of escape. The only way out of this glitch was to quit the game, losing any points that you have gained in that round. Every gamer I have played Tony Hawks with knows this glitch, so why was it missed by playtesters? Were Neversoft callous and cold-hearted money makers who ignore the pleas of testers in the name of profit? Or did the testers not find the glitch, because they don’t have enough time to test the game? When a playtester was handed a copy of Big Rigs: Over the road racing, what did he say? Did he say that this was the worst game ever, with graphics that looked like a bad Playstation 1 game; with opponent AI that would have difficulty outwitting a pocket calculator and controls that make you want to cut of your own fingers? I don’t think that any playtester ever went near this game. No sane person would ever want to inflict this upon another person.
Money, Sod all We all know that Rockstar and EA can afford to spend more money on the latest GTA or NFS than is spent on many Hollywood films. They have teams of highly paid, well-motivated programmers working around the clock. Smaller studios can obviously not compete. However, there are free games available on the Internet that outshines almost any budget console game. These games are done out of love by people working from their parent’s basements. And development costs… None (Apart from the actual computer and take away pizza. Small developers with no money seem to have apathy about them. A meeting of my fictional small studio would probably go something like this.
Focus Groups, The bane of good games are Ever heard the expression “Too many cooks spoil the broth”? Sadly, it can be applied to many modern games. I know that it is tempting. Assemble a group of consumers, ask them what they want from their games, put everything in, make millions! This is bad. What focus group could have come up with Metal Gear Solid, a game where you play as a super soldier infiltrating a military base captured by zany bad guys with more plot twists than loading screens? The work of a single visionary created this universe and Hideo Kojima’s untempered genius flows throughout it. The sad fact is that gamers do not know exactly what they want. If you asked me what I liked about FPS games, I would tell you about things that I have already played. So any game you make from this data would be a rehash of existing ideas. Urban Knife Ride 3: The Redeadening may seem like a great idea on paper, combining the elements of 6 chart topping games, but I doubt that it would be a very good game. So what can we do?
Quite simply, the only way to stop bad games from being made is to stop buying them. The fact that somebody bought Big MuthaTruckers obviously confirmed to the developers that they had made a masterpiece, so they made a sequel, Big Mutha Truckers 2: (I shit you not) Truck Me Harder. If we stop buying bad games, then developers will get their acts together and make better ones. But when a developer can make an easy buck without any discernible effort, why should they care what the reviews say?
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By Snake-Drinker Contributing Writer Gamer's Perspective |
It is common practice to not send a copy of a game to reviewers when you know that it is bad, but I believe that an even more common practice is to not test a game before unleashing it onto the public. It’s not too hard a stretch of the imagination to believe that nobody at Stellar Stone, the developers of Big Rigs: Over the road racing, has ever played this game.
