Happy New Year! I was going to do a New Years post closer to the actual change over of years, but I couldn’t quite decide what to say. When I started I promised myself I’d limit how much I talked about video games on this blog. But they are an important part of my life so I can’t ignore them completely, and this subject struck me as something I wanted to write about.
There are a lot of new, innovative, games out there right now. With beautiful graphics, fantastic stories, and wonderful controls. Yet what am I playing? I’m replaying Phoenix Wright, a game that is essentially a choose-your-own-adventure with only one story path, and I just finished my second play through of Prince of Persia. I was wondering aloud about this when it hit me – those games were fun. I was avoiding playing Assassin’s Creed and Final Fantasy III because I wasn’t having any fun playing them. It’s so simple a realization, and yet it has me analyzing every game in my collection.
I think that’s the problem with the current games industry – it’s all about being the prettiest, or the most challenging, or having the most online competitions. What ever happened to just having fun? What makes a video game fun to begin with? Of course the answer to that is as varied as the stars in the sky. Prince of Persia is fun because the controls are so smooth that after the first half hour I stopped thinking about them. While conversely the controls of Assassin’s Creed are unfriendly at best, and the epic scope of the world is put on a short leash with the ‘realistic’ nature of the game, while in PoP I had the freedom to do anything, any time. It was simply fun to run around with actually doing anything.
The Legend of Zelda games are fun because of the one thing they all have in common – a large, easily traversed world full of mysteries. I’d say the appeal of Phoenix Wright is the cast of quirky characters and the satisfaction of proving that your right. Okami was fun just for being so smooth and visually interesting. There are bad games that are fun, and there are (far too many) good games that are not fun. A major part of the problem is that it is impossible to tell if a game is fun or not until you actually play it.
Even being a part of a series can’t save you. I blew through Sands of Time and Warrior Within, but I stalled out on The Two Thrones. Why? I now realize it was because I wasn’t having as much fun as I expected. There was nothing wrong with the game, it fact I quite like it, but I put off finishing it for over two years.
And so I find myself eying my to-play pile with some trepidation. The question is no longer ‘will it be good?’ but ‘will I have fun?’