I'm sorry, but I like short games.

When a game takes under 8 hours to finish, most game reviewers will deduct points from the overall score of the game.  Personally, I kind of prefer a game to be short.  A lot of games are just too long for no reason, because they have you doing a lot of pointless things that aren't necessary or fun.  They'll have you searching for little things in the dark corners and you have to find like a hundred of them and you don't even get rewarded for finding all of them or you do, but it's a useless reward.  Most of the time, the only point for them to do this is to show you more of the details in the game that you might not pay attention to while playing through the main story.  They want you to know that they spent a lot of time on the small details of the games and the only way for you to notice is if they put a bottle or computer there for you to shoot, collect, or blow up.   Personally, I don't really care.   I can appreciate the details without doing these tedious tasks.

Can a fire truck really shoot water in any direction
while moving?

Very rarely, I will put in the time to collect junk or do all the side missions, because they make it actually fun to do so.  The only games that I remember caring about that stuff are Batman Arkham City and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.  Why did I care in these games?  Because it was worth it.  I remember playing through the fire truck missions in San Andreas and the reward was that you become fireproof.  How sweet is that?  It was especially rewarding because the final mission of the game has you escaping out of a big burning building filled with dudes shooting at you.  It was hard enough to avoid the bullets, but avoiding the fire made the mission really damn hard.  So being fireproof made it much easier to finish the level and see the end of the game.  That was the only GTA that I was able to finish without just using the weapons and health cheat codes.   I've played every Grand Theft Auto game including the original ones for psx, ps2, gameboy advanced, psp and GTA4.  I think I the only other one that I finished was the first Grand Theft Auto 3.  I needed the weapons cheat because the last mission was a bitch if you didn't have a ton of bazooka rockets.   I appreciated that in San Andreas, you had to complete a side mission to enable the cheats, that way I didn't feel like I was completely cheating.  I earned the right to cheat because I finished the difficult firefighter mission. 

One of the coolest side missions I've witnessed.

In Arkham City, I played through all the side missions mainly out of curiosity.  The side missions were like mysteries that had you searching for clues to find out who murdered somebody or to save some hostages and I wanted to catch the culprits and see who they are or what they look like.

So what games did you spend the time to finish the game 100 percent?  Comments?

First Person Shooter Overload

Have you ever spent so much time playing first person shooter games that you see cross hairs even after you turn off the game?  Every time I see a red barrel, I want to shoot it and make it explode so I can make everyone around it go flying with one shot.  Okay, I've never actually seen a red barrel outside anywhere ever.  Though I do see fire extinguishers and I'm pretty sure I could take out a few people by shooting that.  Right, I don't even own a gun.   Though if I owned a few guns and was able to carry them around, I wonder how fast I could switch guns or how fast I could actually reload.  In the games it's lightening fast.  Plus, I noticed when you reload before finishing a clip, the bullets leftover from the clip automatically get carried over to the next clip.  How do they do manage to take out the leftover bullets from the first clip, take out the same amount of bullets in the next clip and put in the bullets from the first clip all in like half a second.  That's incredible.  Another thing every FPS game does is put the gun off to the right side and it's aiming to the middle of the screen but actually it's aiming slightly to the left, so if an enemy is some distance away, you would probably miss him by several feet.

Stupid Taliban wearing a red scarf that doesn't blend in at all.

On facebook, I talked to one of my friends who's in the military in Afghanistan, about how realistic games are.  I was a little surprised about how much classified information he was willing to divulge to me, a civilian.  He told me what kind of guns he uses, how often he shoots at people, and how crappy the bad guys are at fighting.  The main difference he said between real life and movies is that it's really hard to run for a long time with all that gear on and they usually travel in big groups together, not just a few people like in games and movies.

Coke

Can you tell the difference between these 3 games?

Pepsi

I've been playing all the Call of Duty Modern Warfares, Battlefield 2 and 3, Medal of Honor, Sniper Elite V2, Ghost Recon, 007 Golden Eye Reloaded, Homefront, etc.  They're all becoming a blur.  When I think about them I find it a little difficult to remember which scenes were in which games.  I do admit my memory is kind of shit though.  Usually I try to finish the whole campaign mode because I feel slightly proud of my accomplishment and enjoy the story to some degree.  But with Battlefield 3 and Golden Eye Reloaded, I couldn't make it through.  There was just no motivation for me.  However, those were the two games that for the first time I decided to play on hard modes and for too many parts I had to play through more times than usual and I got frustrated.  I suppose I could lower the difficulty level and just finish the game, but I just don't have much desire to do it.  Is it because I'm growing out of games or these games just aren't innovative or creative enough to keep my attention anymore?  The more "realistic" these games get, the more similar they become.

Do the games all seem the same to you too?  Comments?

I do not miss hard games.

Get ready to die a million times.

I've heard people brag that they beat those freakin' hard Nintendo games like Mike Tyson's Punch Out or they finished Zelda, Mario, or whatever (though nobody I know finished Ninja Gaiden).  I played all those games, but I didn't beat any of them.  Why?  Because they pissed me off so badly, I didn't want to give those games the satisfaction of me sticking to them when they're just being a bitch.  Why should I stick it out if you're just gonna keep F'ing with me over and over again.   Those games also didn't have good check points or save functions, so when you stop playing the game, there's a good chance you'll have to go all the way back to the beginning when you turn it back on.  And those games were not short games.  They took hours and hours of hard work and determination, which I didn't have at all.  But why should I?  So I could see the stupid 5 second ending scene?

Get ready to do the same thing over and over again
for 12 straight hours and no breaks.

There was one Nintendo game I actually sat down all day to finish and the ending was so bad.  Rampage.  That was the most repetitive simple game.  Though it was also one of the first games I know of that seemed to give you unlimited lives, or it was like really difficult to actually die, or maybe I just used a code, I can't remember.  That was another thing about most of those games.  You needed a secret code to have any chance of beating some of them.  Contra was a great game, but who could beat that game without the 30 lives code?  Everyone I know knows the Contra code by heart, because that's how important that damn code was.

I still don't know if the game developers back then really believed kids loved torturing themselves like that or they just didn't know how to get the difficulty settings right.  I also wonder if they still had the arcade game difficulty settings ingrained in their minds, like they had to make the game difficult so people would keep dying and pumping more coins into the machine.  But we BOUGHT the game, there was no reason for them to punish us like that.  There was reason to make it so goddamn hard to finish the game.  If I could find some those people, I would ask them what they were thinking making a game for children impossible to beat.  Was that some kind of life lesson they were trying to teach us?  Were they telling us that sometimes, no matter how hard you try to do something, you'll just never be able to do it?  Were they trying to tell us that if you want to beat Ninja Gaiden, you have to actually train like a real ninja?  I don't know.  I just think they were assholes.

Some people now complain that games are too easy, but personally I love it.  I don't like having to do the same thing over more than 5 times.  I'm a grown man, but my patience level is the same as it was when I was 8.   I was just playing the new 007 Golden Eye Reloaded game for PS3 and I thought I'd put it on hard difficulty to make it a little more interesting because I'm pretty good at FPSs now.  Boy, was that a mistake.  I got to the end boss of the game, but it was so hard getting there, I almost considered taking the game out and breaking it in half.  I've never done that in my life, but I have a friend who did and he really regretted it, so I told myself I would never break a game.

My revenge on a hard game is to just sell it off.  At least you get a little money back for the terrible torture device.  I played against the boss in 007 a few times, and finally I was like "screw this, I'm not finishing this stupid ridiculously hard game, I'll just watch the ending on Youtube."  That's pretty much the main reason I try to finish a game is to see the ending, but I've decided from now on if a game is too hard or takes too long to finish, I'm just gonna get rid of it and check out youtube.  It's not worth me getting stressed out and pissed off over.  I'm a peaceful man.  Thankfully, most games have very reasonable difficulty settings that can also be adjusted, so that's why I can stand playing through an entire game with little stress and still go through a few challenges as well.

How about you?  Do you like a challenge or do you break stuff?

Need more 4 player split screen co-op!

I've been playing first person shooter games since Wolfenstein.  I didn't play all of them and I get killed a lot online, but I have enjoyed countless FPS games.  I've played every Call of Duty game that ever came out.  I love Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 1943, and Battlefield 3.  I had a wonderful time playing Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) especially with the 4 player split-screen.  Even though I've been playing these games for more than 10 years I still feel like a noob when I play online.   I don't spend all hours of the day playing.  I'm more of a casual player who occasionally splurges and plays for 3 hours and then feels exhausted.  Usually one or two hours is enough chaotic shooting to last me for a couple days.

Because I always get my ass kicked online, but I still really enjoy playing, I prefer to play split-screen games.  Two-player split-screen is great fun, but the magic happens when you get 2 or 3 friends over to your house to play in-your-face 4-player split-screen games.  The problem is there aren't many left.

Unfortunately, so many gamers nowadays don't have friends that they actually like to hangout with in the same room.  I'm not sure why I like my friends to be in the same room when I'm playing and somebody might call me gay for this, but it just makes the gaming experience so much better.  I especially like co-op 4 player split-screen games, but they hardly even exist anymore.  GRAW2 was the last one I played and that game came out several years ago.  There aren't any new 4 player co-op split-screen FPSs anymore and it saddens me.  I feel because of this, I can't hang out with my friends anymore.

Together forever and ever.

If I want to play with my friends, I have to get online to play with them, but it's just not the same.  I can't slap their butts after we beat a level TOGETHER!   When I played through all the 4 player co-op levels in GRAW2 with my two best friends, we made a list with all the levels on it and we checked off each level as we beat it with PRIDE.  We were a team that stuck TOGETHER through thick and thin, and through good times and bad times and for better or worse.  We even made it a goal to beat each level without any of us dying and we DID IT TOGETHER!

Then we put the piece of paper in the middle of us and kissed each other with the paper separating our lips so it wouldn't be gay.  I know what you're thinking, "How did only 3 of you play through a 4 player co-op mode without dying?" and the answer is love.  We did it by loving each other more than a man and woman could ever love each other.  Actually, I know you were actually thinking, "How did three of you kiss without your lips touching with only one paper betwixt your lips?"  That is a magic trick that I cannot reveal to you at present.

So do any of you play games with friends in the same room anymore?

Doubtful about PS Vita

I bought a Playstation Vita about 6 months ago, 2 months after its release, with high hopes that it would be the ultimate handheld gaming device out there.  With its beautiful touch screen, nice button layout, and a ton of other cool mechanics, I thought it couldn’t go wrong.  Though there were not many titles out, the ones that did come out looked very promising.  I bought Uncharted and FIFA for it and was pretty pleased with the two games, but still yearning to see what amazing game were still in store for this gadget.  Currently, I’m out of job and need some extra cash to pay some bills.  I’m considering selling my Vita and not with great regret.  I’ve started to think that the potential that I saw in this device may be lost or not seen for a long time. 

I also own a PS3 and am constantly buying new games and trading in old ones if I can’t afford the new ones.  I’ve spent a ton of money on my PS3 games and have thoroughly enjoyed most of them and only disappointed by a select few.  I love buying games almost more than I do playing them.  There’s something about that fresh game smell and feeling you get opening up the plastic box, browsing through the instruction guide and putting it in the system for the first time. 

With that said, I’ve been desperately wanting to buy more Vita games, but there just haven’t been any new titles that attract me.  I never finished Uncharted and started to feel bored with the repetitive gameplay.  Fifa is fun, but I already have Fifa 12 for PS3 which is a superior game.  The only reason I need a Vita is to play games on the go, but I’m rarely on the go and when I am, I don’t really have time to play videogames.  I fear that the Vita won’t get many good games because I think game developers were scared off by the PSP’s ease of pirating.  Why spend a bunch of money when hackers will just figure out a way to pirate the game and make it downloadable online?  I know PSP games companies must have lost millions of dollars because of that.  I’m well aware that the Vita has much stronger security settings, but hackers are gonna hack. 

Another problem I’m seeing is that the Vita’s controls layout and front and back touch panels put too much pressure on the developers to make games that are exclusive to the Vita, but it’s pretty clear that most developers try their best to make their games playable on as many platforms as they can.  If they don’t adhere to the Vita’s control scheme and just make a direct port from another system and lazily add a few pointless touch screen controls, then the game critics will give low scores to the game and then no one will buy the game.  So far only a few Vita games have received decent scores, while the rest have been quite low.  I also think these crappy free games that people play on their phones are screwing with game developer's minds and they're thinking it might be better to make a simple crappy game for free than to spend a lot of time and money to make a good quality game that people have to spend a hunk of money on up front.

I’ve lost interest in my PS Vita altogether and am really considering selling it and going back to my PSP.  If Vita does make a miraculous comeback next year or something, I’ll think about buying it again when they make a smaller version or different color or something.  I’m sorry Sony.  I’m kind of a fanboy and usually think you can’t do any wrong and this is not really your fault, but I just can’t do this anymore.  We have to break up for a while.  I need to see other videogames.