Game Developers!

Yes, yes, I know what you're thinking; not another one about game developers. Well, here's what I'm thinking: This is me blogging, not you, shut up!

So anyway, with quite a few high profile releases having come out over the past couple of year that illustrate all the highs and lows of video game development, let us have a look at the big do's and don't's of the industry!

First of all, there are a number of things that add up to a complete video game, from a developer's standpoint. There is the story, the gameplay mechanics, the coding, the graphics and the sound department. Now, unsurprisingly enough, the big cruncher in actually making a game is how well the developers manage to balance the different factors into an end product.

If you look at any modern gaming catalogue, you'll find games with highly variable balance in this respect; there are games that are extremely well coded, but have gameplay that amounts to no more than a shit'n'chips sundae. Conversely, that are games that are so pretty any gamer will instantly want to have children with it, but is so badly coded that you run of the risk of causing a time-altering paradox destroying the universe, and crashing the game, if you so much as use the quickload button at the wrong moment.

Now, I'm not saying there must always be an absolutely even balance between them, because I'm not, and if you think I am you are clearly incredibly thick and shouldn't be entrusted with going to the lavatory by yourself for fear of you somehow drowning in the toilet! Rather, developers that try to achieve perfect balance is going to end up in that ninth level of hell that belongs to "People who make games that does everything poorly and nothing fucking well". As I've said before, alot can be made of a finely crafted plot that ties everything together and where everything makes sense without feeling predictable, but if you stick that into a game where the fun is derived entirely from running over old ladies while surfing on top of a car and shooting a rocket launcher at innocent bystanders it's just going to make you look like a fucking pretentious prat, which you are!

Case #1: S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl
The game looks more gorgeous than that classmate you always had a crush on, and has more atmosphere than jupiter, but there's just something odd about the game, namely the fucking atrocious coding. A game that constantly crashes and in which enemies can't decide if they love you or should ejaculate lead straight into your bloodstream in the middle of firefights is not bloody good! I don't know about you, but I've grown slightly tired of the old Oblivion-finger, namely that physical deformity that comes as a direct consequence of having to quicksave every .0 seconds for fear of losing progress when the game all of a sudden realizes that you're playing and decides that it's gonna have none of that, no siree!

Case #2: Saint's Row 2
Yet another game with coding that is simply a fucking pile of steaming garbage, but this time with developers who know what it is they are trying to accomplish. The story is at best a shallow and irrelevant necessity that you use to distract you inbetween butchering innocent bystanders and clearing out entire fortresses of goons with just your extremely overpowered pistols with infinite range, ammo and auto aiming (Yes, that's right, auto aim, even in the PC port), and at worst a shallow and irrelevant necessity that smells. Thing is, the story seems to be aware of that you're not expected to give a shit about it, and thus decides to take the scenic route by having you mow down an extraordinary number of enemies at every turn without all the action being hogged up by cutscenes (Yes, I'm looking at you, Metal Gear Solid...fuckers...). It's neither a smart game, nor a sophisticated one, but it's not trying to be! It's trying to be mindless fun, with things like jumping in front of cars for insurance money and riding around town hosing it down with feces to lower property value! Mindless fucking fun! Which brings us to...

Case #3: GTA IV
Here we're looking at something with the potential of being one of the best releases of the decade, expanding upon all the things that made the GTA series great and making full use of the current hardware to deliver an experience that amounts to nothing less than the gaming equivalent of an orgasm!...or possibly not just the equivalent...
Problem? It doesn't.
It's just one of those games that doesn't deliver at all. What made the previous GTA games good? As I've said countless times; Mindless fucking fun! What did not make the previous GTA games good? Trying to woo a boring middle-aged housewife and constantly getting phoned by your cousin to go play darts with him!
Quite clearly, Rockstar knew perfectly well what it was that made GTA III great, managed to distill it down to the pure essence of awesomeness, and then poured all of it down the drain in favour of a bland, dull and brown mess that had none of the appeal of it's predecessors. Largely, it boils down to that Rockstar somehow forgot all about the point of the series, that elusive Mindless fucking Fun, and instead opted for a more realistic depiction of life in a big american city seen with the eyes of a disillusioned immigrant. Who the fuck wants that?! Who wants to play a game wherein the main character has a life that is no better than yours or mine, and is boring as all hell to boot?
Sure, you can watch television and take your cousin out for drinks and drive home drunk as a lord, but who on earth would ever want that out of a game? Games are played for escapism, people don't play games to experience the very things people desperately want to run away from in real life, dammit!

The world would be a much better place if developers could simply get it into their immensely thick heads that the primary objective of any game is fun, and it shouldn't be fucking compromised by realism, or anything else that they ought to know doesn't belong!