The Biggest Joke in Gaming

[MCerberus]

From my joke book:

Metroid: Other M
Spike TV and G4
IGN
Duke Nukem, although this one is two jokes in one!
Xbox, go home
Squeenix's assessment of their finances (all these millions sold games are losing us money, we hate you western audiences! YOU SAVED US WESTERN AUDIENCES WE LOVE YOU)
Origin
Nintendo's bipolar stance on piracy

 

[ExileNZ]

OT:
I would say "Broadening our audience"

Every single time it is used, a sense of doom surrounds the topic it described. Every single gamer just [i/]knows[/i] the product is going to be more shit as a result. Yet somehow companies still think it's a good thing to say in press releases.

But... but... your mum's friends need to feel included too! Just cut out all the parts that aren't in Farmville, replace them with features from Farmville and voila! The perfect Game!
(which you all just lost btw)

 

[ExileNZ]

Actually, just season passes and DLC tactics in general. I can't even remember the last time I bought a game and felt like I was getting the complete experience.

I can - last time I bought a non-EA or Activision game.

 

[Robert Marrs]

After Megan Fox won best female voice actor for a few really shitty lines in an equally bad transformers game I knew the VGA's were a complete joke. I had never been so ashamed to be a gamer. Aside from that I would have to say mass effect 3. I was not really fond of the ending but it did not really bother me THAT much. What killed me was the way bioware handled the criticism was horrible. After the pissed people off twice in a row (once with ending and again with their middle finger to anyone who complained) pretty much all of bioware social network turned against them.

Threads popping up with credible proof of flat out lies the company told during marketing, mods being abused left and right, threads being put up of private conversations between users and mods that really disgusted me (mostly because of how rude and unfair mods were being to people). People being banned for criticizing the game and losing access to all origin games as a result etc. An event I will never forget for the rest of my life and one that still leaves me sour anytime I hear about bioware.

 

[BoogieManFL]

One of the biggest jokes in gaming for me was Spore. For a game that had so much potential, it turned out to be a complete waste of time with no purpose what so ever.

 

[ExileNZ]

PC gaming is dying!!! My Xbox One runs better than any PC because Microsoft said so!!!

I wish I could just upvote you...

 

[hermes]

The secrecy behind everything in the gaming industry, particularly numbers.

Sales numbers are a secret, and Steam, XBLA and PSN sales are top secret, even to the publishers. Costs are top secret, to the point I don't think even they can tell how much money do they spend in development and marketing. Details are top secret, and anyone that wants to get access has to sign a NDA while doing a backflip, with a jury determining who did the best backflip.

In the end, any of those details are published as PR messages: "X game sold Y more games than Z", "game R is the most expensive cooking JRPG game in history". "Publisher A sent X cases to sale to retailer B", "game J broke the record of most games sold on Sri Lanka on a Wednesday morning". None of those numbers mean anything, since there is no single place to even validate them.

 

[Racecarlock]

Mafia II, a sandbox game with no freedom. A crime game with no fun. You even have to follow traffic laws and get fuel. And then it makes you clean toilets and sell cigarettes and chaperon drunk friends around and slowly carry crates to trucks, not in that order.

I guess it's okay if you're into narrative, but why have the open world if that's what they were going for anyways?

Mafia 2 isnt a sandbox game, its a linear game that happens to use an open map since you travel in a lot of places the size of a city. They could have made it all corridors for driving and such but making just one big map is a lot easier.

Just think about the fact that the main story is entirely composed of levels where you are never out of one, in actual sandbox games you usually are out of missions until you accept one but in Mafia 1 and 2 you are always inside them.

Even judging it by that standard, I still had to carry a crate, clean toilets, chaperone drunk people with the radio stuck on one station, and sell cigarettes literally by pressing a button near the correct color. I mean, when other games offer so much more, why the hell did this game decide that my free time I'm trying to use to have fun would be better spent doing chores? I mean, they might as well have made me do math homework as well.

Even with all these flaws that you mention i still like the game it has a specific narrative and style,it mimics a lot of mafia movies and i think thats the whole appeal of the game,to live a gangster life the way it would really be,at first it's fun but then kinda boring and sometimes there are moments of action and danger.
To be honest i think the game is worth playing at least once just for the experience.

I did play it, though, and I hated it. I care not for realism as long as I get to do cool things that I can't do in other games. For example Saints Row The Third has the awesome tron level that lets me be a dragon at the end. GTA V has that entire minor turbulence mission.

Mafia II has generic cover shooting, chores, and maybe one mission where you blow up a building. You know, because they weren't aware that red faction guerilla will let you destroy almost everything.

 

[Lieju]

Nintendo's bipolar stance on piracy

How is it bipolar? Ineffectual and dumb, yes, but what makes it bipolar?

 

[Strain42]

It's nowhere near the biggest, but this one did make me laugh.

In the Dating Sim/Puzzle Game Sweet Fuse At Your Side (though it's really more of a slightly interactive book since it's awful as a dating sim game and even worse as a puzzle game since you don't actually solve the puzzles, you just read other people solving them)

But one of the guys you can date is a gamer nerd, and on his ending route, he's talking about video games and brings up that it's actually really common for games to require a second playthrough in order to see the true ending

...which is of course, exactly what you have to do in Sweet Fuse. The game leaves a lot of unanswered questions if you only beat it once lol

 

[MCerberus]

Nintendo's bipolar stance on piracy

How is it bipolar? Ineffectual and dumb, yes, but what makes it bipolar?

Anti-emulation 'land mine' codes that they fully expect to be immediately broken.
Piracy is bad, no we're not going to make anything more than a tiny, tiny fraction of our back-catalog available. If you want that stuff you're going to have to...
Mobile is killing us, no we're not going to make GB/GBA games available there. that would be silly.

 

[Barbas]

Racing other companies to get your game out first, because you value speed more than quality of the product or the sanity of your workers. Also, holding down a button to do simple things like opening a door (i.e. Dead Island, Fable series. Quick-time events have no value and can rot in Hades as well. Asking the customer to pay you to test your game for you in Alpha. It's not "playing" the game, it's testing it, because it's not complete - it's not even stable yet.

 

[Zenn3k]

Gone Home and The Stanley Parable.

You don't like these games because they're 'smart', and you're smart for playing them. You like them because they make you feel smart.

I didn't enjoy The Stanley Parable because I thought it and I were smart, I enjoyed it because it was funny as hell.

 

[McMarbles]

Has anyone said Ouya yet? I'm saying Ouya.

 

[RikuoAmero]

I'm not going to think too hard, but for me, the biggest joke has got to be IGN and their what must be an average of about a million videos per day. In fact, I'm going to go now, load up Youtube in a new tab, and count how many IGN videos there are in my subscription list.
Okay, back. I stopped at 20. Most of them are very short, barely a minute long news items. Why not have a single video per day that's say 10 minutes long and reports on all gaming relevant news articles?
What also bugs me is they have complete playthroughs of popular games, but never get copyright strikes. I hate copyright, but if I were to do it, I'd eventually get DMCA'd. Why does IGN get away with it?

EDIT - Just checked their About page on their Youtube channel. They have 110 THOUSAND and 198 videos spread out over 65 channels. 110,198. Let that sink in.

 

[Unsilenced]

Gone Home and The Stanley Parable.

You don't like these games because they're 'smart', and you're smart for playing them. You like them because they make you feel smart.

How are those comparable/related? The Stanley Parable was dry humor in a British accent. Gone Home was a painfully cliched teen romance delivered via bludgeoning the audience to death with 90's references.

"It's pretentious" is a cop-out criticism, as is saying it's "overrated." Both of those things are critiquing other people's reaction to the game rather than the game itself.

I didn't like "Gone Home," but it annoys me that criticism of it mostly comes in the form of "Not a game" and "It's pretentious." Even The Stanley Parable, which I enjoyed, has actual faults which could be criticized appropriately, but no. It's just "pretentious" and "a walking simulator," or whatever new buzzword has been recently derived for things deemed unworthy of the holey status of "a game"

For the sake of keeping on topic, the way people criticize games they don't like is a joke.


A somewhat related example is how any first person shooter that doesn't live up to a given gamer's standards is "Just call of duty with [inset trivial feature]". The other day I saw someone say that Planetside 2 was just "Call of Duty in space" for lack of the ability to go prone. Nevermind vehicles, the squad system, resources, the emphasis on support classes, the map system, 3-way battles, being free to play, and having purple spandex unrivaled by any other game to date, the fact that it doesn't have prone (which call of duty does have) makes it call of duty.

We get it. You don't like call of duty. But there are actually things about it that define what it is. You can't just use it as a word for "bad," you call-of-dutying call of duty.

 

[hermes]

I'm not going to think too hard, but for me, the biggest joke has got to be IGN and their what must be an average of about a million videos per day. In fact, I'm going to go now, load up Youtube in a new tab, and count how many IGN videos there are in my subscription list.
Okay, back. I stopped at 20. Most of them are very short, barely a minute long news items. Why not have a single video per day that's say 10 minutes long and reports on all gaming relevant news articles?

Web hits. The same reason every site (this one included) that have a feature called "X things when Y" has a single page of each entry on the list, even if they are just a jpeg.

 

[BaronVH]

Pay to Win. Now the wonderful consumer realizes they can either pay $500 for smurf berries/plant food/gold coins or spend 1000 years grinding out the same level to continue. The even larger joke is that due to the number of people that actually pay up, many companies see this as a viable business model.