We finally made it to the final act! By now, you are probably sick of my weekend long manifesto on the things that I hate about modern videogames. I started off with mandatory tutorial levels and quick time events. Then I covered the flaws of modern action games with regenerative health and the flood of checkpoints.
 
Now it’s down to the last two. While neither do not relate to each other in the slightest, that does not make them any less relevant. What started of as a six minute and forty second talk with twenty slides has now evolved into a monster amount of writing. Still, I feel that it is an incredibly important to get my thoughts out in the open for any game designers to stumble upon this so that they may read and make their games better.
 
While I may not currently be in the videogame industry, I am still a gamer and a spending consumer. Not being a professional game designer shouldn’t make my opinions on these topics irrelevant.
 
Without further ado, here are the final two topics from my presentation!
 

6 Things I HATE About Modern Videogames

#5 – Tiny “High Definition” Text

 
This is the television I use for playing videogames. As a CRT standard definition set, it is practically a relic from the past. Now you may want to remark “But Kent, you are a Simulation Scientist! Can’t you just buy high definition televisions every week?” Well, no. When you are an adult, you have the misfortune of having to spend your money responsibly.

For the most part, a new TV wasn’t needed until I got an XBox 360 in 2008. I am still nonplussed by high definition games but they do one thing that pisses me off. Here is my first subject: Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.


 
If you click on the above image, you will see how text for newer games look on my television. I have no idea why but text in videogames keeps getting smaller and smaller. I couldn’t read anything when I played this game and all of the instructions for the game are delivered in text. I tried using gamer intuition to figure out what I was supposed to do but after twenty minutes I turned off the game demo and deleted it from my hard drive. I never played Banjo Kazooie again.



I mentioned before that I hate mandatory tutorial levels. In Street Fighter IV, there is a challenge mode where you can practice the moves of every character and go through trials to practice many of their combos. It’s a novel idea. Some combos are feasible in battle while others would rarely ever work.

Anyways, I have to stand real close to my TV to see what I am supposed to do. It’s pretty annoying. How am I supposed to get better for EVO!?

I’m not the only gamer who still rocks standard definition and because of that, in-game text needs to be bigger!
 

#6 – Anti-climatic Final Boss Battles

You ever play SNK games like Metal Slug and The King of Fighters? I love them. They are both frustrating and difficult and their final boss fights are so brutal that the term “SNK Boss Syndrome” had be invented to describe such anguish players felt while attempting to overcome those ordeals.

Despite how difficult those boss battles are, they are still beatable and when I finally did, a wave of euphoria spreads throughout my mind and body. It’s like making sweet, glorious love to a wonderful woman! It takes a lot of work and effort, but in the end it’s worth it. In all seriousness, beating those games becomes a life achievement that you can assign no amount of gamer points to. Above all else, it shows true mastery of the game.

So when I played games like Bioshock and Brutal Legend, I found myself disappointed in the anti-climatic final boss battles within both games.

Bioshock had a weird difficulty curve; it spikes up early on in the game and them plummets downward as you get more upgrades. The only real reason to venture through the underwater utopia known as Rapture is to uncover the plot set by the final antagonist. When fighting him, he doesn’t put up much of a fight. All my Plasmids and explosive shells were just too much for him to handle.

To contrast the analogy of love-making, finishing Bioshock was like meeting some hobag at a grody house party that smells like warm butthole and when you two get wasted you go back to your place have sex except she just lies there and does nothing except take it like a bitch. The whole experience leaves you unfulfilled. Yet, YOU ARE THE ONE who should be “lucky” to have had it in the first place!

Brutal Legend is just as meaningless. Actually, there really is no reason to play that game and the final boss is taken out with little effort in a matter of minutes. This just burns me. I think the reason this happens is so its easier for anyone to beat the game but I just feel cheated in the end.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it! There are actually more things I hate about modern videogames but I’d hate to sound like more of a bitter old man. I think the intentions of some of the topics I discussed were initially good: game designers wanted more people to enjoy their games. However, they were just dumbing them down and now cling to these concepts like a crutch to solve problems that could be handled in different ways.

Regardless of the reasons these six things occur in videogames, they all need to stop. They don’t make the games more fun and there are other ways to make games more accessible if they need to be. But most off all, they all ruin the interactivity of videogames.