I suppose my dark opinion stems from a few facts and obvious changes in gaming. Controls (I will use FPS controls as an example) have been refined over time and are usually very standard & manageable (read: easy to pick up and comprehend universally, by platform) because there is simply no good excuse for a lousy set of controls. Maybe RE:1 – 4 had that. And, maybe RE:1 had the PS1 excuse, but – every iteration after that did NOT deserve that, regardless of game type/genre.
RE:5 (latest pile of of over-hyped dreck, coming soon!) offers about 4 control sets to chose from, yet there are plenty of buttons on a modern controller so as to avoid the whole aspect of “holding down RT while pressing X to get Y”. It’s just dumb and pathetic. Let’s imagine if you had to drive your car while holding your phone and a cup of coffee, all while combing your hair and still maintaining one finger up your butt. Let’s add to that the best you could ever really ramp the cars speed up to is a whopping 5 mph…. and thats about the ‘level of fun’ experience I had with the ‘Demo.’
Another basic problem as I see it is what can only be defined as the method of bad game making and advertising budget available to push said game. After all, selling ‘X’ number of units might mean recouping expenditures in development, (as advertising is the great convincer, because people have long had short memories and lots of expendable money) which also seems to require little value for what they spend it on, entertainment-wise. For whatever reason, people just do not equate consistently demanding actual value for the limited (read: loss of life) time and effort they often exert obtaining said money.
Let’s take an old game(s) and analyze some artificial time wasting game play: RE:1-5
(A) Force the player to watch and re-watch and re-watch (every time they die) the animators ever-so-beloved cut-scene. Cut-scenes that force the player to endlessly replay it, generating artificial game play when they die, because they must START OVER, from the beginning.
Explained: Cut-scenes were a staple of RE:1 – but early GPU’s had little ability, because the power to dynamically render that quality did not exist. As were crap clunky controllers… (well, not great compared to now, but not too different either). There is simply no excuse for making a modern game (TV, phone, car, computer interface, etc.) pointlessly painful & difficult – where is the fun (hellooo – game??) or realized maximum use or entertainment in that? Would you actually buy a phone that required 8 steps just to start dialing? How about to hang up afterward?
(B) Old RE zombies were slow, and these RE:5′s are more ‘modern’ (fast) so they swarm you fast – once again, clunky controls to the rescue, so you can start a new game in mere minutes…. as you are dead already. Amazingly, you might survive in Left4Dead, but there is FAR less fear, because it became all action. At least controls were good. RE:5 translates it like you are a mental cripple facing them, and are somehow just too slow and dim-witted to be able to run.
(C) R.E. bosses are/were invincible or nearly so – how come modern game players are playing the same lame crap they did in the early 1990′s? Plenty of platform games had similar. But you wouldn’t know that until you die a few times, and start over, and get back to where you died, because file saving isn’t (and wasn’t) something YOU control. Another cheap gimmick to cause ‘fear.’
(D) RE:5 graphics are no better than anything else on offer in modern games, nor is the animation. If anything, it smells of a half-hearted port of somewhat upgraded elements from all previous games… like ‘somewhat improved’ models & textures. Does that and some sound really add to poor game play? Many games offering far less have been graded far harsher.
In an open world game, you could easily climb a mountain or building, but it does not mean enemies cannot eventually find their way up to you. You merely get a few minutes to think. Or, in RE:5′s case, we could just steal some AI scripts from Robotron… much easier, right? Change the viewpoint to 3rd person, add slick textures, few models… sound, and there we have… RE:5…4…3…2…1.
(F) Oh, lets not forget the wonderful ‘fixed camera angles’ in RE:1. They were not frustrating at all. Just like a non-3D ancient arcade games… like Robotron.
