Finally, I like mysteries. Figuring stuff out. I watch Rosemary and Thyme and Foyle’s War on PBS. If you didn’t know those are BBC imports of murder-mystery TV dramas. Essentially, they are shows about old British people planting gardens, drinking tea, and solving murders. Does this make me qualify for an AARP card even though I‘m at the super-young age of 33 (ahem)? Probably, but I don’t care. I like them.
But mystery “adventure” games never live up to their potential. You know, like all the games from The Adventure Company.
“Here’s a cursor that turns into a magnifying glass when you mouse over something you should investigate.”
So the rest of the game is spent scanning each frame from top to bottom for that freaking cursor to turn into a magnifying glass. Fun? Not so much. Carpal tunnel through excessive mouse flailing is not my idea of a fabulous evening.
Then you get to the obligatory “puzzle” which requires you to figure out how to sneak into Miss McHoot’s room and look at her diary. Hmm, maybe wait until she is gone, pick the lock with a hairpin, sneak in, and take it?
No.
You must lure the butler away from his room with an apple pie (which he loves), take out his master key from his safe by using his dead girlfriend’s birth date as the combination, throw a rock at Mr. Hoozit’s window so he doesn’t hear you walk down the hall because the floor creaks, use the master key to open the door, and then you can steal the diary. Yes, that is completely logical and anyone would have come up with the same idea. Okay, I was being sarcastic just then.
Actually I wouldn’t mind if someone came up with that idea and it worked. Just make the hairpin thing work too. These games give you the false idea that it’s “open-ended” and you can do anything you want. Instead they steer you to do the thing they need you to do to move the story forward.
| "I have such a love-hate relationship with The Sims. And I’ll include The Sims 2 in this analysis. It’s a game I want to love more than I actually love." | ||
This brings me to my conclusion.
Why do we have the grind in games (I’m thinking mostly RPG’s here)? Because people like being engrossed and they love collecting things. The bad part is the feeling that you are not actually “playing”, just doing the same thing over and over or killing 10,000 boars just to level up to get to the good part. So to solve this dilemma have several types of gameplay available -- the grind / collecting part, sure, and the short quest. Perhaps the most important part of speeding up the game is to make travel easy from the start. It should never take more than five minutes to get somewhere you’ve already been.
Instead of the magnifying glass cursor with the fixed camera angle, let me move around in a 3D world. Let me decide what need investigating, and allow me to pick up whatever I want, even if it serves no purpose other than to let me say, “Hey look, there’s a human baby in my backpack!”
And now for my wonderful game that everyone will love. My all-other-games-killer. Ready for it? Here comes a run-on sentence….
It’s an MMORPG that takes place in 19th century Europe with Sherlock Holmes detective types and witches and warlocks and murders and mysteries that you can really use logic to figure out and is challenging and fun but not repetitive and you can play it in short bursts if you want to and actually accomplish something, and cleans your dishes.
Okay, maybe cleaning my dishes is asking too much. Scratch that part. Now, someone please figure out how to make this game so I can play it!
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