Re: More like beating your time on Rubik's cube (feet only, blindfolded).by Mischief Maker 04/13/2011, 4:40pm PDT
Last wrote:
American kids used to just get 2 games a year so they were forced to replay for score and with imposed challenges. Also, most of the games were made by Japanese for Japanese so a lot of soulless grind chorejobs were packaged as games in the US. However, after we could rent games or at least convince our parents to buy them more often then guess what? We still played the shit out of our games but we began to chose fun over work.
For proof, look at the billion hours spent on multiplayer FPS games. Or Madden. Or Angry Birds. The bragging rights from a 15952749283749283 score (the next highest player got 15952749283739283 !!!) is replaced, correctly, by achievements, gold star completions, and win/loss ratios.
I had a roommate that would get baked and make 1cc attempts on Zelda. Picking up that wooden sword over and over and over and over and over again. I wonder why that didn't catch on with a wider audience? Probably because the unwashed masses are so primitive in what they "think" is "enjoyable".
Well now I've got to finish this article because clearly the first draft didn't get my point across since you guys keep saying things that back up my points like they're putdowns. The guy I was replying to said the best way to make shmups appeal to modern gamers is by shoehorning in a lot of RPG grind. I was saying how the rental culture led to grindfest RPGs getting over-rated and challenging action games getting the short shrift.
I never said Americans don't want challenging games, fabio's point about Crimsonlands is the same thing I was saying about Serious Sam and Geometry Wars. And Achievements being some huge evolutionary step above scoring? What do you have to do to get achievements besides grind? Get a certain score? Achievements are just your high scores viewed through a very blurry lens.
I don't believe you were around when I first linked this, fabio, but this pretty much sums up my thoughts about people saying that bullet hell shmups are some kind of impossible challenge: