I just wrote a post about the generic FPS games in this world, and I wrote a line about originality in games. I quickly changed my mind and deleted it.

This is a dilemma for me.

Since the birth of video games people have had original thoughts about it. Mario was made, Sonic was made, Wolfenstein, Doom, Half Life, Rachet and Clank, Tetris and so on.
The list is far to long to write.

But lately a lot of reviewers have started talking about lack of originality. I choose to quote Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation on his idea about a chef riding ants. He was ranting, but he sure made an original idea for a game.
But it would still need a framework. Would it be a sidescroller, 3rd person action adventure, RPG or what?

If you want to make a whole new game with a whole new framework you really end up in the 50-50 realm. Either people find it refreshing and it becomes a little genre of its own, or it tanks and people choose not to acknowledge its existence.

And we can not expect that kind of gambling from a big developer. They are in the industry to make money and hopefully a popular name for themselves for the future, and they will not take a knowing chance on a game just to be original.

To be honest I do not think most indie developers are that original either.
It comes down to doing something different with an already established genre.

The most original game I’ve seen lately has to be Fret Nice. Its a sidescrolling adventure that you play using your guitar hero or rock band guitar. Quite a funky game, but if we could have a show of hands on how many people who’ve heard about it or played it we could also see the popularity of it, and chance of it becoming its own thing.

Little Big Planet did something great. “We give you a cute sidescrolling game, and the tools to make your own”. Not exactly originality but a great way of thinking.

When it comes down to the bottom line I guess I prefer polish over originality. My examples are Ratchet and Clank, Batman. Arkham Asylum and Modern Warfare. Neither of the games pushed any envelopes, but they have been praised by most gamers.

And I think I know why: The developers looked back on games in their respective genres and took what worked, discarded what did not work and added a little something of their own. Ratchet can level up is weapons, the characters are great, the shooting and jumping is fun and the graphics are top notch. 
Arkham is the first good Batman game, it has some of the best 3rd person hand to hand combat in a game ever. The gargoyles ended up getting a bit tiresome, but that is a small scratch on a huge shiny surface.
Modern Warfare transfered FPS players from the PC to consoles and that itself should go down as a milestone in modern history. They perfected personal play in a FPS. Shooter fans were used to measuring their skill with their stock soldier, but now they can upgrade their soldier in almost any way they can imagine. It has made for a whole new FPS experience and people love it.

Is originality really that important to strive for when 95% of gamers have made up their mind about what games are?

The genres are as perfected as they can be at this point, so why not just make games out of the genres people know and love?
Adding something special of your own is not a bad idea , but you need to make it good (example here: Modern Warfare).  Singularity will most likely be my example on how not to do it, but I’ll rant on that when the time comes.

To finish up this post I’d like to imagine Yahtzee’s chef+ants game:
It would be a 3rd person action adventure where you as the chef ride on your huge and which you befriend in the start of the game by saving his anthill with a wondrous meal. The ant turns out to be a wizard transformed into a ant by a evil entity and his only chance of becoming human again is to use the last of his magical power to shrink the chief into ant size and let him mount up. 

The duo venture through the lower and smaller parts of the world, defeating enemies with rolling pins, frying pans and what not. As the adventure continues the evil entity senses that the wizard-ant is coming for his revenge and decides that this world must end. 
The ant-wizard and the chef meet the last bastion of good magic in the world which turn them both into human size and gives them the power to fight evil.  

This would be a weird ass game, and therefore the developers should pack as much weird humor into it as possible. In-game jokes and what not.
I can actually start to make out a mental image of this game here, and it looks slightly awesome!

I’ve just vented my head about a very important dilemma.
Please add a comment. 

Time for another game to whirl my trains of thought.

The game is Singularity. Under development at Raven Software.

First twirl: Why is Activision telling most of their developers to make FPS games?
Raven Software has a history of great games from other genres. They made the Jedi Knight games and Quake 4. Not the absolute best games in history, but good games none the less.
And now its time for Singularity.

Looks to be yet another generic headshot game with a small twist.

The twist is time manipulation. Its not been done like this in any game before it as far as I can remember, but to me it looks like yet another FPS twist - its something other than shooting people in a shooting game. 

The first time I noticed Singularity on teh intarwebs I got a glimse of the time manipulator ‘glove’ and my brain went into instant awesome-overdrive. 
After about 10 more seconds of the trailer I got bored.
Why?
The character pulled out a shotgun (or a rifle, dunno), and started blasting shells at his enemies.

I don’t understand this. I really don’t.

The FPS genre moved on from this a long time ago. CoD got a strike of genius with Modern Warfare with everything that game has to offer and polished it to a sparkling shine with its second release.
Why Activison wants yet another one of its developers to make a FPS is a mystery to me.

My clairvoyance tells me this about Singularity:
It will get around 7.5 from most reviewers and be completely forgotten in under half a year. The graphics will be on par with todays standards, and it should be. The shooting will feel on par as well. The time manipulation will be exiting at first, but will most likely end up as the power-ups in Bioshock. You find the two or three that really work for you, and you use them to beat the game. 
Did you have as much fun as what you thought when you saw the trailers? Most likely not. You will play it, beat it and forget about it, just like every other generic FPS on the marked. 

This might be just me, but still.

Star Craft 2 will (hopefully) be coming out just about 12 years after the first one. How many things have actually happened to the RTS genre in those 12 years?

A whole damn lot I tell you!

The latest to change it up was Tiberian Twilight. I wonder what might have happened to the RTS if that style became the norm… But that line of thought is for another time.

Bottom line: Star Craft 2 is really making 12 years of RTS development obsolete.
The “new and fluid gameplay” from all the other developers and so forth is about to go bye-bye really fast.

I do not have an opinion on this being a good or bad thing because I’ve not spent enough time with the beta yet, but it is kinda funny.

Its like someone using 12 years on developing a new bicycle and people are starting to come around on the new weird invention. But then a old dude opens up a ye olde bike shop and sells good old bikes like they used to be. Imagine how pisssed the inventiors must be when all their customers go “nah thanks man, the original was better.”

You can see EA on the face of those bike inventors right? Its not just me? 

Its been some time since I finished GoW3 now, but I’ve got some free time for my blog, so why not write something that should be said by a fan.

This is not the best GoW game I’ve played and that is a shame since it is the most technologically outstanding one of them, and its the end of the story.

I will try to make this into an understandable list of issues.

1.  Its simply too short. It took me one about 7 hours to finish, and that is too damn short even for an action adventure game that is usually about 10 to 15 hours.
When I startet getting towards what was clearly the end I asked my girlfriend how long I’d been playing and she said about 6 hours.

I have to admit that the story is good and well told by outstanding actors and a great design team. But I feel like they should have had more. Do not ask me what. I just want MORE. 
I feel like refering to the pizza analogy of the last GoW post. If someone hands you a slice of pizza you’re happy to eat it, but why not save me the discomfort and just hand me the whole damn pizza?!

2.  Way to many items.
Kratos has his chain blades, right?
Do you really need anything else?

I do admit that the Nemean Cestus had its handy moments, but I could not give a rats ass about the others. The spinning blade thingy thing you get from the “smith god” had one use only and that was to power the platform outside Afrodite’s room. I had no use for them what so ever outside that area.

Hades’s claws? Really?
My answer: No.

3.  Bad ending.
This one comes from my personal taste and experience with the God of War story and franchise.
I really like the GoW story. Its something about this mythological stories that really get under my skin. Its the same with movies.

But when I had played the game to the end and watched the last cut scene (before and after the credits), I could not let go of this feeling of not being satisfied.

Kratos was a mean S.O.B. from start to finish,  I will agree fully to that one, but there is just something about the final chapter of the story that does not sit well with me. 

He was a fearless leader, he got into some deep shit and asked for help. The aforementioned help turned out to be not so helpful after a while, and thus it is time to end the helper. By killing Ares (god of war) Kratos became the God of War and started playing with the power at hand. He played a bit too much with it and after a visit to earth to “help” his people Zeus strips him of his powers and kills him for his insolence. 
Kratos cheats death a second time and goes after Zeus. GoW2 ends when Kratos is klimbing towards Zeus with his new friends.

This is where number 3 starts.

Kratos tries to klimb olympus and gets sendt to Hades again. Hades is pissed and takes on Kratos himself. He ends up with a brain comparable to mashed potatoes and the hunt for Zeus continues. And this is where it gets hazy.

Kratos is sent after Pandora’s Box again, only to find out he needs the key, which happens to be a girl, but its not really a girl its the spirit of the magical key, but the box is actually empty and the Key tells you that the box was not important, the hope of Kratos and the rest of the world is all that matters. And the Hera shows up for the second time and gets pissy about what was (or not really) in the box. Kratos kills himself (but not really?) and that is the end of it.

After trying to summarize the story in my head, all I could do was light up a desperate cigarette and ask myself: What The Fuck.

The WTF moment does not have to be a bad thing. Plenty of games have these, but its when they are not intentional the trouble comes along.

And there it is. I’ve said my peace about God of War III and now I’m of to bed. 

The game is on shelves and one of them is currently spinning in my PS3.

I’ve gotten to Hermes so far, but I feel that what I’ve seen so far gives me a good idea of what to write here.

First of all, an analogy to food: Pizza has been made basically the same way for centuries now. We all know how to make one, and we all know what one should taste like. Its supposed to be one of the best things to ever enter your mouth.
And if you feel like it you use some more spices, rings of onion, strips of bacon and so forth. It only makes it better, whilst staying the same.

God of War III is like that. Not much has changed. Light attacks, heavy attacks, grabs, magic and everything else is the same as before, but the extra spices gives it a really special taste.

This is the most brutal game I’ve ever seen or played. There is no getting around that one. But after enjoying GoW 1 and 2 over and over again I could not expect anything else. Blood and guts fly everywhere in 90 percent of the encounters and it is really all good. But seriously: the label that says 18 on the front is there for a reason. This kind of detailed mutilation is not made for kids. If any 10 year old plays this, his parents should get a straight jacket.

The game looks great. There is not a person in this world that could deny that fact. The camera work, the pure graphics, the music, the lighting - everything is top notch. 
It also plays great. The controls are responsive and good, but I have a little concern. If they start tacking on much more to the buttons it could get a little crowded. For such an action game the player is more reliant on pure muscle memory that actual thinking in the heat of battle.

I don’t have much more to say about the game. It is a very good example to the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and Santa Monica Studios has done a great job.

PS. I will update this post if there is more worth mentioning during my time playing it.

So, Crystal Dynamics is making a new Tomb Raider game.
Or, I guess we can’t really call it that since it won’t have the words tom raider in the title. They are going to take the Tomb Raider recipe and add a mountain of new spices.

Not the worst decition I’ve heard in years since most people have done nothing but complain about the recent games in the series. 
But is Tomb Raider really the game you want for such a revamp?
I think of Tomb Raider (I really do mean the good ol’ ones) as the adventures of Lara Croft (and the wonder twins) where most things could happen within the limits of “boom boom”. Everything from Indians, foot soldiers and dinosaurs get shot, you pull levers, solve puzzles and recover strange artifacts and that was pretty much it.

It was when they started with the intricate story line that things got weird. Angel of Darkness was the final drop in my cup before it spilled over and I completely ignored all things with the Tomb Raider name. 

And then came Tomb Raider: Legend. 
I saw the trailers and the reviews, I downloaded it and played it. 
And I was having the best time in quite some time.
They had not done much to the original game. A great deal of polish, a few new moves and puzzles and that was it. A brilliant thing to do. Like adding bacon to a hamburger. You know the original is awesome, all you need is to leave it alone or add more awesomeness.

Now back to the coming game.
I’m going to list the things I remember from the interview: New camera angle, coop play and what looks like a new engine.

The new engine is a good thing. Polish is always a good thing.
The camera angle and coop makes me shift my head and my eyebrows narrow.
Its like my head is asking my eyes “are you really seeing that?”

I’m a bit concerned about this.
On the good side of it; Its the good old Tomb Raider team who’s making it and that is probably one of the best things that could happen to a new Tomb Raider game. But I feel like they should look to Santa Monica Studios (creators of God of War) and realize that nothing needs to be fixed if its not broken.

Tomb Raider has worked just fine like it is for over a decade. That should be proof enough.
If they really want to make an adventure game with coop, get together with Naughty Dog and give them some ideas for the new Uncharted game. In there you’ve got established characters who’s ready for coop play. Not forced though. If the second player wants to join in, then he/she may do so. But it should not be needed to complete the game. Especially since adventure/platform/shooting games tend to get tricky in some spots and the last thing you want is your little brother next to you on the couch using up all the ammo and the better half of your patience and mental health.

Bottom line: Stick to what you and the gamers know. If you want to make something new. Then make something new FROM SCRATCH.