T w e n t y S i d e d

Why do we have to keep liking games in spite of their stories? I know the conventional wisdom is that the industry doesn’t tend to financially reward good storytellers, but that’s no reason to hold the story in obvious contempt. There’s a difference between, “we’re not going to go out of our way to make an incredible story” and “we won’t even make the slight effort to devise a story which is worth seeing and makes some kind of sense”. The cutscenes in Red Faction: Guerrilla are a waste of time. Unless they were designed to be mocked in comics. In which case I guess they’re a middling success.

I will point out that the final two developers in the March Mayhem contest are both companies with strong writing: BioWare and Valve. (And yes, Valve has strong writing. Not a lot of writing. Their games are mostly action. But if characters are talking you can bet they’re saying something worth hearing.) I still maintain the writing is more important than developers think it is, and that Red Faction: Monkeytown could have been a much bigger hit with the exact same budget and setting, but with a writer who knew what they were doing. (In fact, you could probably improve the game just by doing a reverse-Mystery Science Theater and dub over their ridiculous dialog with something smart and genuine.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The name of Zynga is somewhat accursed among mainstream gamers right now. I think it’s sort of like fighting for thirty years to make a successful family restaurant based on authentic Mexican food, and then waking up one day to find out you have one tenth the business of Taco Friggin’ Bell. I couldn’t fully cover the subject in this week’s article (and I had to leave out the bit about Zynga’s shady business practices) but seeing the armies of “casual social gamers” finally appear in the same venue as “hardcore gamers” for the first time is a really interesting process.

The hate coming from the hardcore crowd to the Farmville / Mafia Wars types is intense. Well, nearly as intense as the hate that the various console devotees have for the other platforms. So, I guess they’ll fit right in.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Here I take a stab at Red Faction: Guerrilla.

It’s a tough game to make fun of. It’s filled with absurdities, but they don’t translate well into comedy. It’s just, “Hey, you know how the game sometimes does that odd thing? Yeah? That’s dumb, isn’t it?” The plot is sometimes just tepid, sometimes painfully ridiculous and contrived. The fun comes from blowing up and knocking down buildings, and the game is always trying to portion that stuff out. It wants to make sure you eat a helping of driving around on labyrinthine brown terrain and babysitting NPC companions before you can enjoy your building-toppling cookie.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.