I've read the article today and I thought "Holy shit! It's true!". Of course, Cracked is obviously a humorous website, and as such, it concentrates on parody, exageration and ridiculousness. The author just gives the another example of pink, nostalgia mist of our childhood, and I'm fully aware of it, but the points given are still horryfingly valid. These are my thoughts on the subject:

#5. You Think Multiplayer is Bullshit

As I've mentioned many times - I don't give a fuck about multiplayer experience. I toy with it, I might even play it for a week or two, but that's it. I'm a single player guy to the bone and focusing on multi by developers is not gonna sell such title for me, no matter how good the reviews are or how far my friends go to advertise it during conversation. I grew up with single player style of gaming and I'm used to it. Of course I'm not counting the "hot seat" or "two players single couch", it's totally different element. It's also a multiplayer component, but it's allowing me to play with someone I like for a change, and even friend list management in multiplayer title won't give me the same experience as sitting next to a guy or gal, elbow to the ribs or kicking the ankle to distract him\her and the overall atmosphere of playing side by side. Internet connection is not gonna give you that.

To make my point clearer - I love zombie games. But the most infuriating thing with L4D or Dead Island is the fact that to fully enjoy the game, I have to team up with a bunch of strangers (in most cases) who I have never seen, and who are (again, in most cases) a collection of dicks, 13-year olds (or both) and I loathe playing with them. Really, I don't have anything against shooting morons in the head, but teaming up with them to have any fun? And making it the selling point? Come on.

#4. You Think Games Are Suddenly Too Long

Case in point - The Witcher 2. I love the franchise, I love the setting, I've read the books, I've enjoyed the game. But I've enjoyed it once (on Roche's side, if anyone asks), for 40 hours or so. And I don't feel like coming back for more. And it's annoying that I've probably missed half of the game just because I've made a choice of siding with the guy I liked the most. I'll probably be back for some more witchering in the far future, I like replaying good games as any other gamer. But for fuck's sake, I don't have so much time on my hands to sink it into one title, especially when I'm still behind with a lot of other great games (believe it or not, I've just played through Arkham Asylum, despite the fact I love Batman comic books). When I was younger, I used to buy even 5 games a month and enjoy every one of them, just because I had so much free time on my hands, I didn't know what to do with it, so I played them to death (Fallout 2? Finished about 30 times, no joke). Now? No way. Make me a 10 hour, but absorbing story, and I'm happy. If You can't amaze me within that time frame, It's just bad storytelling. And yes, sidequests are fun. But if you make the main quest line shorter and simplier than a Call of Duty campaign and make your whole game a set of side missions (and none of them affects the outcome of the ending) , you should not focus on making RPGs, Bethesda.

#3. You Miss Game Storylines That Were Actually Compelling

Oh hell I am, as I've mentioned above. Maybe now I have 2hours a day to play video games, but it doesn't mean I don't care about the story at all and giving me something to shoot or slice is not going to work. Yeah, I like to entertain myself with dumb things as any other person on this planet, that's why I watch Transformers movies and enjoy a short session with Torchlight, but, just as a multiplayer component - loot and blood are not selling points for me anymore. I want something short, but amazing story- AND gameplay-wise, like, let's say, holyfuckingchristawesome Halo CE campaign, Arkham Asylum, Portal or Uncharted. It's doable, as those titles exemplify, you just have to fucking try for once.

#2. You Think Originality is Dead

And it wouldn't be so bad, because if somethings good, why not to copy it? Moreover, blending of genres gave us great games, which are not simply classified as RPGs or Action-Adventure anymore. I fully realize, that games were never original, one in a million, stand alone wonders of human imagination, but I like something I've seen before, used in unconvntional ways. Cover system? Kill.Switch introduced it in the form we know nowadays, but the game was so shitty nobody remembers it. Gears? That's what I call a good use of known patent. But 100th time someone uses GoW cover system? Boring as hell.

Another example of great blending of seemingly unoriginal ideas into one, awesome game? Deus Ex. Nothing is new here - we've seen stealth, we've seen hacking, we've seen RPG elements, but everything mixed together makes a game I always have on my HDD. It's not the lack of originality that's bad, it's recycling the ideas without any thought that's ruining the game for me.

#1. You Miss When Games Used to be "All About Fun"

All right, this is the point in the article, when even an inbred mouth-brathing analphabet realizes the whole thing is explaining the old truth of "Things were better when I was young". And I get it, which doesn't automatically mean I don't think that nothing has changed. I was happier when I was a kid. I could be irresponsible, I could sit till 5AM to finish a game, I could eat Icecream mixed with potato chips doing it, and I didn't give a fuck about anything but pure, untainted fun. But, to be honest, playing with sticks and pretending they're guns was also fun. Oh, and destroying cities bulit in the sandbox was also fun, especially, when someone else built them. It's just the fact I'm more demanding when I'm older. Which doesn't mean game developers can ignore my moaning and throw out all those points above. I'm paying them to have fun, and I'll be paying them, when I'll make a fun-loving kid of my own.

To get the main bias out of the picture - I have never owned an original X-Box nor 360. I've played halo 2 and 3 multiplayer literally 3 times and that's it. Long things short - I'm not this guy:

So yeah, I'm one of the few who don't give a fuck about multiplayer mode in most games - if it's good, I'll have fun with it, but I'm the single-player gamer to the bone and I base my rating of any given game by it's campaign mode (or whatever it's called). I'm that one strange guy in your group that, instead of giving his prestige rank in CoD or linking replays of his amazing frags, says how amazing the story was (or how it sucked hard).

Where am I going with all this? I've seen a lot of fuss around Halo 10th year anniversary edition and some people out there outrightly said "I'm betting my cojones the campaign won't stand the test of time". Funny thing, I was just making a nostalgia run of Halo 1 and 2 on my PC, cause I haven't played them in about 6-7 years. And funnier thing - first time I played Combat Evolved, I was... less than entertained. Don't get me wrong, the second playthrough was waaaay better, but when Halo first came out, I was still, due to the situation of the country I live in, mainly a core PC gamer (using my PS1 for fighting games and racers on split screen), and to say delicately - regeneration, two weapons max and all those nifty changes to shooters - then probably 99% hardcore PC genre, looked like some kind of blasphemy or outright attack on the PC scene. I was biased towards Halo and idea of a console FPS in general (and I still hold my opinion of "Give me a mouse and keyboard and I'll plow the ground with console players in any FPS", even though I play on my PC much, and I mean MUCH rarer than on a console nowadays).

But when all those changes introduced in Halo started to take off and I my desire to look for medkits died with the premiere of Call of Duty 2 (believe me "hide behind cover to stay alive" in a shooter greatly anticipated by PC community was a shock the whole scene needed), I gave Halo another try. And what a joy it was. It was not looking great graphics-wise when I did the second run through the campaign in 2006, but when I forgot about all those "strange mechanics", because they were not "different" anymore, I fell in love with the universe and story. The campaign hooked me momentarily, and the open structure of levels, the handling of vehicles, great, innovative weapons... Halo had it all. The same with Halo 2 - holy shit, the campaign was even better (no backtracking, no library, the arbiter!), the universe was expanded, I've read the books, I was stunned by advertisments of Halo 3, ODST and Reach and, as the 360 lifespan is slowly coming to an end, I'm thinking about buying one, just to have my own copies of next-gen Halos and for nothing more (or, for fuck's sake, just release them on PC, I'm not asking for a copy on my PS3 people!)

So, incidentally, when the annniversary edition was shown on E3, I was just finishing the Halo campaign once again. And when I saw previously mentioned comments, I thought "What the fuck? That's bullshit". Of course, after so many years of gaming, and after seeing so many other FPS games which took a lot (if not all) of their gameplay elements from Halo, it's not that "innovative" (or whatever adjective you want to use) anymore. But the way the single player expierence is structured is still entertaining as hell. Of course, the Library is tedious, and the last third act is just running back to the start of the game, but it's still EPIC - the whole Silent Cartographer: landing on the beach, Warthog antics, shooting your way deep into the structure? EPIC! Command Center assault in Predator? EPIC. Running through huge waves of Covenant and Flood fighting each other? Oh God, so fucking EPIC. The campaign still delivers, and I'm not saying this beacuase of the nostalgia glasses, I'm not relying on my fading memories, I've just played it and it holds! And as I've finished Halo 2 three hours ago, I'm counting on a remake of it too. 343 industries don't have to change the thing, except for graphics - it will still deliver and kick ass, I tell you. I don't give a shit about multiplayer, just give me the same great experience of well designed single player, and I will be happy. And I bet my cojones, that your cojones will be crushed, as mine were.