Caltrops - Rants





	[quote name="mrs. johnson"][quote name="Senor Barborito"] GTA1 (or 3) and Morrowind are both amazingly great, but I can't say that when I load them up I have as much fun as I just did when I loaded up Deus Ex two weeks ago and beat it start to finish for the ninth time. I don't feel compelled to replay GTA3, Morrowind, or GTA1 the way I do the games I listed. Of them Morrowind is the closest and it's probably unfair to include Privateer while failing to include Morrowind. I wish I could say that I thought Sam 'n Max was one of the BEST GAMES EVAR but it's different. Sam 'n Max comes from a genre with inherently little replay value after the first-second time you beat it because you've heard all the jokes. In both the case of Morrowind and Sam 'n Max the simple truth is this: life isn't fair. Morrowind suffered so many problems - and I'm not talking about technical problems but honest-to-God outright gameplay problems - that it's dropped off. Amazing vision, poor implementation at both the abstract and real levels. Sam 'n Max simply comes from a genre that reduces it to little more than a slightly-interactive and especially funny protracted episode of the Simpsons. It's one of my favorites purely in terms of subjective experience, but I can't honestly say that it (or, sadly, the entire Myst + humor adventure genre) deserves real critical acclaim for being something amazingly different. Thief and Deus Ex are the first two I'd drop from the list despite Thief being my favorite game of all time and the one I consider closest to honest 'art' (this despite it not being the game I enjoy the most). Why? Because they are, in the end, retro-fitted FPSes. What saves them is the way level-design in the game was approached such that there are several ways in which to accomplish nearly everything in the game - an attribute that their forthcoming sequels will supposedly emphasize, btw. And Planescape? Planescape is simply the best and most original CRPG known to man. Of the games I listed it is, in my opinion entirely, the second most likely to qualify as real 'art.' It is a tragedy for all of gaming that the primary person responsible has left the industry entirely. --SB [/quote] It is true that adventure games have very little replay value, but if we are talking pure replay value then nothing comes closer than Tetris. I've beaten Super Mario World maybe 15 times by now, and I am not tired of it at all. It soothes me. Planescape: Torment is indeed art, but then so is Final Fantasy 6. And so is any game that has made me <i>feel</i>. That maybe a ridiculous statement, but only a handful of games ever gave me feeling. Strangely Jedi Knight 2 is among them. The lightsaber battle system there is so wonderful, that it perfectly recreates for me what watching Star Wars did as a kid. And that is just pure excitement and feeling fucking cool. I never played sports much, but in some games of ultimate frisbee the pure feeling of amazing accomplishment is possible to create in video games. That's what I crave. Hell, the first computer game I ever played was Epic Pinball. the mrs.[/quote]