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Sunday, July 17, 2005
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Some time back in an NTSC-uk thread, Saurian - who'd fallen head over heels with the game being discussed - had a bit of a rant about how some people simply don't deserve to be able to play decent, innovative and imaginative games. "This shit," I think it went, "is wasted on dicks like you."
I didn't agree with him in that particular instance, but it's a sentiment that I can totally empathise with in general terms. At the moment, nearly all my gaming time is being eaten up by Killer7. It may hide a relatively traditional videogaming mechanic underneath the superb audio/visual hit that it provides, its lunatic energy in mixing and matching styles and its barking mad storyline - a mechanic which, in essence, boils down to "go here, solve this puzzle, shoot these enemies as you make your way to the next one" - but the framework around those basic foundations absolutely lifts it out of the ordinary.
A fundamental part of this is the revolutionary control scheme (detailed in the link above), but, unfortunately, that control scheme is bringing the trolls and the imbeciles - Saurian's "dicks" - out of the woodwork in large numbers. "There's no control," they whine, idiotically. "It's just a lightgun game," they moan, displaying a total inability to give more than three seconds' worth of thought to the subject.
I'm not saying that I don't understand why these complaints are being made, but understanding them and believing that they're valid are two very different things. Because these complaints *aren't* valid, not in the slightest way. I can guarantee that if control over the movement of your character had been shifted over to the analogue pad, rather than the A=run/B=turn button configuration, they wouldn't be bitching. Keep the game's corridors as rigidly channeled as they currently are but allow these knobbers to hold the stick forwards to run and pull it backwards to turn around - in other words, make it like every other control scheme in any third-person adventure out there - and they'd never even notice that their freedom of movement isn't as free as they think. In all honesty, you're no more forced down a fixed path in Killer7 than you are in Resident Evil, Silent Hill or - whether you're prepared to accept it or not - Zelda's dungeons.
So this post goes out to all those who've wasted everybody's time, ioncluding their own, by posting such nothing comments as "the control is shit" or "this game is rubbish and if you like it you're an idiot" - the sort of bullshit that'd even get you thrown off GameFAQs as a troll. You don't deserve this shit - it's wasted on you. Piss off back to whichever licence or sequel is currently clogging up Game's top ten sellers, but make sure that you're completely aware of the fact that you will have no right whatsoever to complain about a lack of original thought or innovation in games later on - try it and I'll shit on your eyeballs. You should be championing those few remaining developers and publishers who demonstrate the will and ability to push the medium in new directions, even if the results of their labours aren't entirely successful (for the record, I think Killer7 is almost entirely successful), because otherwise the cunts - the moneymen, the marketing departments, the publishers who'll only finance a game if it's part of a series that has a proven record of profitability, the same name as the latest movie blockbuster or is indistinguishable from the biggest seller of the day (which is itself only the biggest seller of the day because its publisher could afford to have its name etched across the surface of the moon in thousand mile-long letters, should it desire to do so) - have won. You'll go into a shop to buy a new game and find that there are only five different titles on the shelves, all of which include the year of release as a part of their names. And then I'll shit on your eyeballs a second time, just for the hell of it.
I'd take a failed attempt to innovate over a polished, but thoroughly bland generic clone any day of the week.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 19:59
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Losing the fight against mediocrity for the last few years. Fire a volley |
