I really wanted to be like everyone else and love the critically-acclaimed Half-Life 2 as the best game ever made at the time of its release, but something ruined it for me. I was snapped out of the game’s immersion during the escape sequence at the beginning of the game when someone had the forethought to lay down a plank between two rooftops in order to facilitate my escape off a roof with no other exit.
It infuriated me.
The awesomeness of a gravity gun notwithstanding, the greatest conceit of Half-Life 2 (or any video game, for that matter) can’t be ignored anymore: we, its players, are the most important part of the game.
Video games create detailed worlds with no purpose but to allow gamers a context to succeed in. Again, this is fine if it’s just to provide us a working environment in which we can reuse the same saw blade over and over again on those jerk-ass Combine cannon fodder. However, this is not acceptable if video games are ever going to graduate to become something other than games to be played for the purpose of winning.
Pandemonium (1996) is a glaring example of a fabricated world that exists for no reason other than to be a series of levels to be completed. As with games of the era, Pandemonium is a sidescrolling platformer that featured 2D gameplay with a 3D background. The resulting “2.5D” effect is jarring when the path our jumping protagonists is following is wide enough to circumvent an enemy obstacle, but the gameplay won’t allow it.
However, the ambiguity of the 2.5D effect disappears when the game environment challenges you to make your way through a narrow set of platforms hovering in mid-air, but this just emphasizes the original point: that video game worlds have no purpose except for a player to complete the challenge set by it. What’s fine for a 90’s era video game has become a cliché that constrains the current development of video games.
Are you an artist that wants to use the amazing world of video games to tell your story? Barring a technological or cultural breakthrough, you’ll be decorating your story environment with the well-worn video game tropes of conveyor belts, crushing slabs that operate on a timed sequence, and elevator platforms without any safety guardrails.
It’s obvious that a game world require these kind of conceits to facilitate gameplay for a player, but then that’s all it will ever be: a game. Twenty years from now, the future equivalent of present-day video gamers will be running around the most hyper-realistic environment in order to find extremely lifelike wooden crates in order to smash them open for the spinning power-ups inside.
Regardless of the inability of the medium of video games to fully blossom into the realm of being a fully-fledged art form, gamers are still playing the same games as they were twenty years ago. The linearity of Pandemonium is like that of many video games now, it’s just that developers have gotten better at hiding invisible barriers and paths.
It remains that video games are games because they’re played by players. These players have specific requirements, and it’s this limitation that is holding back the evolution of video games—well, whatever they’re supposed to be called.
How far I got in 30 minutes: Got to the castle with its crushing vertically-arranged pillars
The good: Good level design. For a game.
The bad: Enough with the Celtic rock, at least whip out the bagpipes.
Will I play this again once the year is up: I can only accept so much chaos and disorder in my life, you know.
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 27
Play-a-Daystation 