Gamer's Diary: Beyond Good and Evil - Part Two
By BrontoThunder 2 Comments
I'm done with this.
Add Beyond Good and Evil to my ever-growing list of games that I just do not want to keep playing. I could quite easily push myself to play through the game all-the-while disregarding the unintuitive user-interface, buggy camera and clunky controls but what is the point? Video games (to me) have always been about entertaining the audience and if you find yourself playing a game and not being entertained then there is essentially no reason to continue playing said game.
I can appreciate the good aspects of Beyond Good and Evil - the art design, characters and gameplay vision - and I highly anticipate that the sequel will be leagues better than the original but I do not feel like wasting any more of my time just to say that "I finished Beyond Good and Evil". I do not need to know how the story ends to judge the game. It isn't a movie or a book; I know whether or not it's good within the first half-hour of playing it and any time further spent with the game should be purely because that first half-hour was so much fun that I would like to continue. A lot of people (myself included) fall into the trap that you need to finish the storyline of a video game to say that they've "played it" or that they've "completed it" and that is a result of most games publishers and developers wanting to make games in the same way that they make movies just with the audience controlling the protagonist and the story unfolding around them. This is not what a game should be. That is elements of a video game held together by cutscenes and unless all of those cutscenes are of Heavy Rain quality (or at the very least Mass Effect 2) then they are the result of laziness on the part of the developer.
This frame of mind I've recently fallen into has become more of a revelation when it comes to my interaction with all media; I'm so sick of the "couch potato" mentality of just watching a movie or television programme, reading a book or playing a video game for the sake of doing so. So many times I've played through a mediocre game just so that I could say that I've finished it when in reality, all that I've done is just waste time that could have been better spent playing a game that captures my imagination and entertains me from start to finish.
Other games that I can lump into the pile dubbed "Most likely won't be played again" include Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Psychonauts and Gyromancer. And for those of you who gasped at the sight of Psychonauts on that list, think about why you actually liked the game. Is it because it was fun? Or is it because it was the quasi-Dreamworks-esque world created intrigued you enough to bounce through the actual game portion of this video game. There is too much useless dialogue and unnecessary travelling to justify the "pretty good - at best" platforming gameplay.
- Robosaur
Finished: Beyond Good and Evil.
Beginning: Trine & Lumines.