: I was really only thinking the gameplay, not the hardware demands (the speed
: the character runs, regenerating health and bulky, accurate enemies that
: forces most of the game to be bottlenecked with repeatedly ducking behind
: cover, Duke Nukem losing his breath after 10 seconds of jogging but being
: able to sit around and do benchpresses however long he likes (and make it
: frustrating for the player to complete a benchpress to boot), etc.).
See the Game Maker's Toolkit episode on How Games Do Health – most modern FPS games fall into the same trap over and over again of becoming shmup-from-behind-cover games (for lack of a better term), even though simply thinking outside the box in one area of the game would allow them to escape that trap.
: And then there's the unskippable cutscenes and handholding tutorials. I'm
: around 2 hours into Ever Oasis and it felt like a neverending cutscene
: where the gameplay consisted of "press A for the next tutorial,"
: and Navi the fairy mars most of the experience of Ocarina of Time 3D. She
: was already bad in the original, but now she yaps telling you where to go
: every 2 minutes after an NPC explicitly spelled it out for you already.
: The 3D kinda makes my eyes hurt, too, but I can slide it off at least.
: There doesn't seem to be a slider for turning off Navi. Even that new
: Bubsy game has a slider to shut him up.
Again, see the Game Maker's Toolkit episode on Half-Life 2's Invisible Tutorial – just a little bit of extra effort and thought on the part of game designers would go a long way to make games more fun.
I'm telling you, once you start watching something like Game Maker's Toolkit, you'll never be able to look at video games the same way again.
Vale,
Perseus
