Blasphemy!

If saying you dislike Mario Kart 64 is some kind of gaming blasphemy then I'm going straight to hell. I won't pass go, and I won't collect £200, because it's something I say almost as soon as it's name is mentioned within my earshot, which happens surprisingly often. Mario Kart 64 is just one of those games I never gelled with. I never got used to the handling and I find its selection of tracks frustrating. Consequently, I'm so rarely any good at it that when I miraculously make it to the front of the race only to be blue shelled into last, it makes me think that the game is designed to punish you for being any good at it. It's not of course, and this is the point where the people who love Mario Kart 64, i.e, everyone in the world but me, start shouting that my criticisms are dumb, and that it's one of the best multiplayer racers ever made. Those people are right of course, and I agree with them. What makes my dislike of Mario Kart 64 so weird is that I'll quite happily play, and have fun with every other Mario Kart game ever made, particularly the Wii and GBA versions.

It's probably the most significant example I can find of my seemingly irrational ambivalence towards some titles that many gamers feel are sacred. It crops up so often that sometimes I start worrying that I might be going off the concept of fun. I'm not (hopefully), but it feels that way. There are others too. Concerningly, two of the other series I just cannot get on with feature also Mario in one way or another. Let's start with the Mario Party series, which for me is a collection of genuinely fun mini games that are utterly ruined by both the boardgame segment that needlessly drags the length of the game out, and possibly the worst way of deciding a game's winner ever devised. Of course, I'm referring to the detestable star system that means no matter how many of the damn things you've collected, you're almost guaranteed to be knocked off the top spot when the game arbitrarily awards stars on the results screen to other players for seemingly no other reason than that they've participated. Just thinking about it gets me riled up.

Mario's core platformers also do absolutely nothing for me. I've tried so hard to love him, I really have, but I just can't bring myself to care that I haven't beaten a single Super Mario game. Not one. Not even Super Mario Bros on the NES. In fact I haven't touched a Mario game since Sunshine, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I've decided to just stop trying now, even though I know I'm denying myself the opportunity to play Super Mario Galaxies 1 and 2, which are renowned as two of the best and most innovative platformers of recent times. Worst of all, unlike Mario Kart 64 and Mario Party, I'm completely at a loss for a way to explain why I don't 'get' Mario's platformers. The control is always tight, the level design is always clever, the worlds are full of personality and the game mechanics are almost always innovative in one way or another. These are all things that we all look for in a good game, and Mario games are never hailed as merely 'good' games. In fact, the only legitimate criticism I can level at his games is this; the story is a bit naff, and since when has story ever really mattered in a Super Mario game?

The cynics amongst you will dismiss this as just another round of Nintendo bashing, but the thing is, I think most of the stuff they put out is fantastic. I've played every Zelda game since A Link to the Past and I've loved them. I rate the Metroid Prime series as one of the best console FPSs ever made. I've racked up months of play in the three Smash Bros games. I played F-Zeroes X and GX until the cows came home. I caught all 251 Pokemon in Gold and Silver and battled them in Stadium 2 on the N64. While my town thrived in Animal Crossing, I've commanded Pikmin, adventured with Kirby, got hooked on WarioWare. And despite everything I said about Mario above, I've visited and liked Super Mario World 2, with it's cute crayon aesthetic and it's cuddly Yoshis.

So it's not just simple Nintendo Bashing. Besides, I have trouble with some of gaming's other sacred cows too.

Sacred cattle like Metal Gear Solid 4. The more I play it, the more it makes me rant about it. I'm trying so hard to persevere with it because I know about Shadow Moses and I want to wrap up the story I started in the first Metal Gear Solid all those years ago. I know what it is about Metal Gear 4 that turns me off it and I'm trying to work around it. I've loved every other Metal Gear I've ever played, and I'm used to pointlessly long cutscenes and campy plot nonsense. It's part of the fun after all, but I just can't get on with the fourth instalment's wonky pacing. It seems you can't take more than a dozen steps without getting a discourse on PMCs, proxy wars or how war has changed. Then there are the half hour movies between missions aboard the aeroplane. I just want to sneak past soldiers and take down giant robots Hideo-san, why won't you let me? I will finish Metal Gear 4 before this generation is out. I need to find out what happens to Old Snake. I might eventually enjoy it too, but I'm not getting the feeling that I'll find that an easy thing to do.

Then there is the whole Call of Duty/Battlefield/Halo thing. I love first person shooters. I've spent hours gushing about Bioshock, Half Life, Metro and Unreal Tournament but I just can't bring myself to play any of the triumvirate of shooters that dominate the current console landscape. I've played a bit of Halo 3, but not since Bungie took Rocket Race out of it's online mode. I played the first Call of Duty not long after I completed Medal of Honour: Allied Assault on the PC. Call it war game fatigue perhaps, but CoD did nothing for me, and I've ignored them ever since. I know the Modern Warfare series is a thrillride, but most of what I've seen of the single player modes seems to involve holding down the fire button while you strut down a corridor to the next explosive setpiece. Frankly it looks dumb, and it doesn't get any better in multiplayer. I saw ten seconds of the now infamous CoD Rage Montage on youtube and decided that I'd been avoiding these games for a good reason. I don't want to be associated in any way with that kind of gamer. I'm a peaceable kind of guy. This mainly results in me being looked at like I've got some kind of horrible facial disfigurement whenever it comes up in conversation.

Where Halo is concerned, I just find it really reductive, with it's recharging health and two guns only multiplayer. After spending my formative years with Unreal Tournament and Quake III the slower pace and slimmer weapon choice of Halo sucks all the fun away for me. Some of the best moments in UT came from surviving an encounter by the skin of your teeth, then scoring a double kill with a lucky shock combo while you were hanging desperately on to that last sliver of health. Recharging shields have put an end to that. Also, I liked being able to grab the rocket launcher and not have to worry about whether to drop the flak cannon or the shock rifle, because you could carry all the guns. Older multiplayer shooters made me feel like a hero, Halo doesn't. On the single player front, Halo frustrates me because Bungie has created some really, really rich lore for their sci-fi universe, as evidenced in the enjoyable (and much better than they have any right to be) Halo novels. But all that story seems to get pushed into the background when you play it. I can remember a whole lot about the story of Half Life 2, yet I honestly can't remember a single plot detail of Halo 3, such is the poor quality of Halo's storytelling.

All of this makes me sound like some kind of mop topped holier than thou indie gaming hipster, punching this out on my laptop from behind a set of thick rimmed lensless NHS glasses, and I'm really not. I mean, I like Fez as much as the next person, but there's nothing out there that scratches the itch like a really great triple A blockbuster. Indie might be where all the imagination is, but triple A boxed games are where the big thrills lie. I like to think there's room in my life for both. Maybe it's age, my tastes growing more fickle as I edge nearer to thirty. Perhaps there are others out there who have the weird gaming pet hates of their own but all I know is this. I seem to have an irrational disconnect with some of gaming's most respected names, and you can try as hard as you like to convince me to give them a chance, but you probably won't change my mind. If you can't understand why I have these problems with certain games that are supposed to be beyond criticism, don't worry about it, because I'm not so sure of the reasons either.

If I ever work it out, I'll be sure to let you know.

I only seem to be playing half of what I'm paying for.

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with online multiplayer. I do play online on occasion, yet I rarely touch the multiplayer component of most of the games I’ve gotten in this generation.

There. I’ve said it.

If I do go online I often find myself surrounded by idiots. A reason in itself to play in a closed party, but not the reason I don’t often mess with multiplayer. It’s because I find the multiplayer portion of most games to be entirely superfluous to the experience that I like to gain from singleplayer. Fair enough some games are built around their online component. For all my bitching about Call of Duty or Battlefield, the multiplayer portions are pretty damn good and are rightly lauded. I’m just turned off by some of the people who play it. Gears of War is fabulous online, as are Forza, PGR, Tekken and Left4Dead. But sometimes there is a multiplayer component added for seemingly no reason, except that the board of directors wanted it.

For instance, Bioshock.

I know this is just one example, but it’s the one that floats closest to the front of my mind. The first game was a wonderfully self contained experience, with a strong focus on narrative and on how you approach taking down your enemies. In short, my favourite kind of shooter. Best of all it was defiantly singleplayer. Why then, does Bioshock 2 have a multiplayer segment, complete with a half hearted attempt to meld it into the world by way of making it a Plasmid test? I bought Bioshock 2 to take another journey through Rapture. The thought of shooting other people online in that city at the bottom of the sea never once crossed my mind. I had visions of the nuance being sucked out of the game and consequently never went near it. I don’t know anybody who has played Bioshock 2 who has.

The thing is, Digital Extremes, the people behind the Bioshock 2 multiplayer, have pedigree. They had a hand in Unreal Tournament, but I can’t help thinking that their talents couldn’t have been better spent on a project more given to a multiplayer setting. If you’ve played Bioshock 2 multiplayer, I’d like very much to know if it was worth your time.

Thankfully, I’ve just found out that Bioshock Infinite will have no multiplayer. It’s made me quite a happy man. Multiplayer in Bioshock 2 smacked of a decision from the publishers. Props to Ken Levine for resisting any pressure there might have been to include it in Infinite.

In a roundabout way this brings me to my point. Games are expensive. This is something that we all know. They are a considerable investment in both time and money. It is getting better though. I remember back in the deep dark hole in time that was the mid nineties when Sonic 3 came out, it cost something in the region of seventy five pounds in the Kayes catalogue we used to get when I was a kid. That’s an awfully large amount of money now, let alone in 1994. Especially when most of the people who would be playing it would have been around ten, like I was. And it was only half a game. It took the additional purchase of Sonic and Knuckles to play the what was technically the 'whole' of Sonic 3, sort of prescient in a way, what with this generation’s obsession with DLC and all.

Incidentally, Sonic 3's two player match races were fantastic.

Maybe Sega were onto something with this half a game thing though. Like I said, I don’t play multiplayer much. Conversely I work with quite a few people who buy the yearly Call of Duty and never look at the singleplayer. They live for the thrill of multiplayer and if it’s their thing then that’s cool.

 

So how about this? Why don’t publishers release the single and multiplayer portions of a game separately? That way you only pay for the kind of game you like to play. It also removes the major barrier to entry, cost. Think about it, would a game be an impulse buy at forty quid? Probably not, but personally, if I saw a new game out at twenty, I probably would pick it up. And if after playing it, the idea of multiplayer excited me, I could probably be tempted to splash a bit more for the multiplayer component.

Everybody wins. Loners like me don’t have to pay multiplayer portion they’ll never use, and gregarious types can save money by not buying the singleplayer segment of this year’s multiplayer hit, which, if the reviews for Battlefield 3 are to be believed, can be pretty inferior as singleplayer games go anyway.

Ok, maybe one or two publishers would attempt to cash in on this model by making the combined price for both halves greater than if they were just released as a combined whole, but on the flipside it might make them think twice about grafting on an un-needed multiplayer mode if there’s a chance nobody would buy it. 

And I think that could be a win for everyone.