Janszoon

I have a suggestion for one you haven't mentioned yet...

I'm not as much of a gamer as most of the people posting in this thread, until a few weeks ago the most recent video game console I had owned was the old NES which I got for my birthday back in 1988. But my wife really wanted a Wii so we pooled our christmas gift cards and bought one. It's really fun and I'm constantly amazed by how incredible the graphics, sound and complexity of modern games are compared to my old NES, but there has been one development that has occurred while I was out of the video game loop that I think is fucking awful: Why does every damn game I play have to have these fucking interminable dialogue sequences and lengthy movies in between levels? And why is it not possible to skip so many of them? Seriously, if I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch a movie. I'm here to play a game, please just let me play it in peace without boring me with a bunch of poorly scripted chit-chat and pointless animation.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Alfred

Which games are you playing?

...and I'm pretty sure some of these are there to keep you entertained while the next level/area loads. Metroid Prime 3 is an example of this.

__________________

Janszoon

Well, I just finished playing Super Paper Mario which was a fairly fun game but the amount of ridiculous dialogue I had to sit through was really annoying. And I rented Okami last night, which seems like a pretty cool game but certainly has an obnoxious amount of little dialogue boxes popping up all the time. Also, a couple weeks ago I rented Lego Indiana Jones which wasn't quite as bad in this department as the other two but I was still forced to watch crappy little movies fairly often while I was playing it.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Molecules

I think in the time you've been away, especially as the technology has allowed it games have a tendency to emulate cinema. This is fair enough for an RPG (which Paper Mario is I believe lol) or whatever but it's prevalent in most of the popular titles, whatever genre. I don't have any of the current run of consoles but I've seen enough of them to get the drift... there are still plenty of arcade-y games (that's what you call them now) about though, especially on the Wii.

I could only speculate as to the reason for this trend but I guess since the Playstation first extended videogames' appeal outside the kid/nerd bracket and the graphics are much closer to reality, there has been bigger demand for this populist 'like being in a movie' aesthetic. And there is plenty of talking in movies. Casual/modern gamers all seem to take this for granted so it doesn't especially annoy them, I certainly got used to cutscenes when I used to play alot.

__________________

[SIZE="1"]Eff em
tumble her

Molecules

also movie tie-in releases have been common even since the NES era but I think they are more so now... sure Boo has already done a post on that one!

__________________

[SIZE="1"]Eff em
tumble her

Janszoon

Well it's definitely a trend I hope goes away sometime soon. I think my biggest issue with it is not so much that it exists but that most of the time I can't push a button to skip it.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Alfred

Sometimes on Metroid Prime 3 you have to wait till the cutscene is half over before you can skip it, or sometimes you can just skip it right away (such as before a boss fight).

__________________

Alfred

For Pete's sake Boo Boo!

__________________

boo boo

63: Little brothers

We all have 'em.

But mine deserves some special award for making even a simple 2 player game of Mario Kart an excruciating experience. He has all the typical quirks of an annoying little sh*t for a brother, and more.

He's the kind that'll beg you to let him play your Wii as soon as he comes over, and he's the kind to ask a large succession of lame questions regarding whatever game he's playing at the moment. "Where do I go?" and "What do I do?", when the game in question is Sonic Adventure, it makes me want to hide my Zelda and Metroid games, because god forbid.

Then there's the other crap like when he just takes the controller from you without asking, like the time when I was playing Sonic 1, he just snatched the controller from me, made me lose half my lives in 20 seconds. "Which button makes you jump?", are you f*cking kidding me? EVERY BUTTON MAKES YOU JUMP!!!

He has no appreciation for the old classics, "because they're not in 3D", but also because they're actually hard ass games. And his own library of Gamecube, PS2 and Wii games consists mostly of crappy licensed games based on cartoons. Which means I just bring my own games when I come over, because there's nothing worse than being stranded at another house and your games of choice are narrowed down to stuff like "Teen Titans" and "Bee Movie: The Game".

And then, being an 11 year old kid, there's just the simple fact that he's out of his goddamn mind, you know how hyper little kids are these days, especially when you give them a video game. My little bro screams, jumps around, bangs his head on sh*t, and why? Just because he can't get passed the last stage in Warioware?

And to think he sucks at even the easiest games, and can't control his temper EVER. I sure don't want to see what would happen if this kid ever got his hands on Battletoads.

__________________
It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

Zarko

My older sister to a tee

But at least she has learned some manners.

I was always the younger brother, but my brother is only a year or 2 older than me, so its not like an adult teen dealing with a child...