Random Gaming Thoughts II ~News Items Beware~

Up there with SM64 as a classic? Yes, I'd actually agree with that. And so, like SM64, it makes me sad that every subsequent entry in the series seems to be moving further away from the original. Trying new things is good, but I'd really love another in the style of the original, masterful, Prime.

That also made me feel guilty, again, for never having passed the Bomb Guardian in SM. Must have another go at that.

Nintendo personals.  Goes on for a bit too long, but a couple of bits made me laugh out loud.  The King Boo entry has more than a bit of NGamer humour to it.


Which makes me think about personals for other Nintendo characters, natch.  

Yoshi:

Ditto:

Sharla:

I can't find the game length thread.

So The Order comes out friday on PS4, review copies have been sent and some people streaming it (I might as well as GAME has already shipped mine) and the length has been said to be short.

Apparently the avg sort of time people are doing it in 5hrs, according to ready at dawn it takes 18hr to beat on hard. I'm not sure how playing on hard makes it that much longer.

A lot of debate (might of been a good debate idea) has come from this people moaning that this is £50/$60 game and is 5hours.

To me that's fine as this game is meant to be a filmic (yes that not cinematic according to RAD) experience, would I want a 25hrs + filmic experience NO also this has been compared to Gears of War due to it being Third Person Shooter which is only 10hrs along on avg but that does has Multiplayer to add to the experience.

The other thing that comes from this is people moan about games being to short and to expensive for the length but no one ever says Monster Hunter should be more as it's 500hrs (Jas length is).

So how can you put a price on length and would you A) Sooner have a short quality experience or B) A long but mediocre game

I would go for A as I want quality not length.

We still don't know how good The Order will be but RAD has a good track record though.

The Order looks like utter garbage anyway so I couldn't care less.

Really it looks fantastic but Bloodborne might be a better Victorian setting game.

But beside the game what about the whole debate of length especially if the game is more story driven & presented in that way would you want something long that's like that.

I think as long as a game's length feels deliberate, that's fine. If a game seems short because it ends suddenly or skips part of the story or has obviously studio - driven sequel bait, that'd too short. If a game is too long because it has needless backtracking or long, unnecessary sections, it's too long.

The main mission in Ground Zeroes took less than 2 hours but will stay with me forever. Dragon Age Origins took me 30 hours and that was in a hurry, but there were times when I was feeling frustrated about having to chop up the same old skeletons in another identikit dungeon.

The Order's getting panned for being mediocre, shallow and uninspired. I don't mind a short game if it's a good experience overall, but even the big reviews outlets are calling this game out for its overreliance on QTEs to cover up a dull game. I've quite glad actually - the developers have taken any criticism of their title absolutely horribly, and their whole mantra of "it's a cinematic experience" (I refuse to believe there's any difference between "filmic" and "cinematic" - they're interchangeable terms) just sits wrong with me.

I think a short game is fine if it's a good game. One of my favourite games, To The Moon, was only a few hours long but it'll stay with me for a very long time. Thing is though, To The Moon was only a few pounds. The Order is, seemingly, just boring, short, and it's £45 to boot. I genuinely think you're pissing money away if you buy this at launch. A common remark I've seen in the reviews is that the developers made a pretty movie and then put the game in there. That's inherently bad design, and it's refreshing to see the big reviews sites put the boot into practices like this.

I've got the Blackwater Edition coming

Yeah seen lot's about it they've said if it was a movie then you wouldn't be panning it, the thing is it's a game which game journalists are looking at. But I do wonder what a film critic would make of it, now though.


The whole length & quality of games with prices is always a weird one as everyone moans when a game is to short or not up to snuff and should be cheaper but no one will say Fallout 4 (Bore) should be £100 even though that could be quality & stupidly long.

I've heard there's very little story even then though...

Don't know as not played yet but I know God is a Geek which Jas likes gave it a fairly decent score but said it will divide gamers some will love the filmic approach and others will hate it as the game is bland.

As I like things like heavy rain then I might be in the love camp.

But lots of sites are already talking about a sequel though.

I remember when the big reviews outlets - the proper ones, like NGC, NOM and EDGE before it was shite - put the boot into the original Pikmin for being a short game at a mere fifteen hours.

A long .gif about The Order.

(disagree with the end, Bloodborne looks good, but I enjoyed the gif)

That's one of the longest gifs I've ever seen. We have YouTube for a reason, gif maker!

That gif darn near killed my browser!  

On the subject of The Order, I suspect the reason it's as poor as it is is because of the developers making it with the attitude that the game parts of video games are nothing more than a nuisance.  Personally speaking I see nothing wrong with its length on paper, plenty of old games are also that length but make up for it with compelling mechanics that encourage you to replay them, but their attitude resulted in the meager time the game consumes being of a rather low quality.  That is the real problem, it's mediocre as a game and as a interactive story, and I for one am glad to see it being slammed.  Hopefully it sends a clear message to developers that that sort of attitude should be disposed of if you work in the industry.

I am in agreement about those that say that the length of the game is not as important as the quality of it. However, there has to be a mathematical equation in play here, a cost/enjoyment ratio, which has to include time. Mas mentions that no one is calling for Fallout 4 to be £100 because it will be 100 hours, but I think that is not a good example. What it means is that games like Fallout 4 should be the high end of current pricing, but a game like The Order, should probably be a budget one. As it is, assuming it was a better game than it is, most of us would probably wait until it was about 30-40% of the launch price, if not lower, to justify how much time we will get out of it. In general I think pricing has always been too rigid. Many games should never have been launched at the price they were.

It's just hard to price games as COD or FIFA some will play for 100s of hours and enjoy it, I'll play something like The Wolf Among Us which is about 9hrs far more.

Also I can't remember people moaning games on the Mega Drive were £60, if anything games have gone down if you take inflation into account.

masofdas wrote:

It's just hard to price games as COD or FIFA some will play for 100s of hours and enjoy it, I'll play something like The Wolf Among Us which is about 9hrs far more.

Also I can't remember people moaning games on the Mega Drive were £60, if anything games have gone down if you take inflation into account.

Games are enormously cheap now compared to what they used to be. They are essentially the same price they were in the late 80s, but I m earning 3 times as much. That is probably down to the fact that we won't pay more and technology has changed, reducing costs for many things. My point is that games should reflect the cost of development and how much is actually in it. GTA V should be at the top end of price and any Mario should be nowhere near that price. In the end, the market determines the price as it will or won't sell accordingly.

F-Zero X would be £∞ by that logic.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

F-Zero X would be £∞ by that logic.

It is easily worth £7∞.

Seen & Read some more opinions on this and basically seems quite a few peoples is what do YOU put value on, as you wouldn't want a game that you just walk forward for 50hrs as that's not good but someone might like that. And take COD for instance, I get my moneys worth after doing the story and getting about 10hrs into multiplayer but some won't think they will unless they get 100+hrs out of the MP.

So seems to be different strokes for different folks on what you consider value for money also I think this changes depending on circumstance as when I was kid I rarely bought a new game. I mainly bought used like the 2 for £20 Xbox/PS2/Cube games then if I did buy a new game I would save up or trade in about 6 games for 1 but now as I'm working I can just go buy Bloodborne nightmare edition for £90 with no real issues.

Also I've started The Order, I'm not far into it but so far I've been enjoying it quite a bit. The graphics are mind-blowing for a console and the PS4 is doing that already in it's life also makes me very excited for God of War 4 as that could be using the same engine. But this is also a negative for some as you can see RAD have spent the development time making the game so polished that they forgot to put a decent game in there, it's okay from a gameplay perspective it's never going to be gears of war but it's far better then a quantum theory. I am early on, so can't really comment on the story but hoping it's relatively decent.

I will continue to play tomorrow and hope to do a review on Gintendo.

The issue of enjoyment of, or value for money from, a game is either incredibly nebulous or totally individual. I can't even be sure myself at what point I would be able to say "Yep, got my money's worth out of this one!" for any given game. It's likely to be some murky computation based on hours, smoothness of the experience, progress made and that most unknowable of variables, the fun I've had.

Random gaming thought for the night:



Muscle March.

Never understood Muscle March, so I never bought it. Maybe I should have given it a chance, especially as I did buy definitively broken Wiiware things.

I'm starting to wonder just how much more pathetic this current gen of consoles barring the Wii U can get, many used to joke about how this generation we'd see ports of ports and now it's actually happening.

Granted it's square enix who have been rather a shambles for a while now, but still I almost choked on my morning drink over this. I begin to wonder when some new and good games are actually going to grace the next generation, because from where I'm sitting the only console right now even worth money is the Wii U which many would debate is last generation, at least as far as its power levels are concerned.

Even Nintendo are doing some recycling this gen (most particularly on the 3DS, although the Wii U does have Wind Waker HD and a good number of ports early doors). That lack of backwards compatibility was a 'masterstroke': re-releases like that will sell to some because of it.