Why games should never be P/C

Developers are being asked to fix every dodgy detail, right down to the treatment of digital guinea pigs. But who does it actually help?

There’s been a flicker of controversy around Stardew Valley, the Life Sim / RPG farming game by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone. It concerns a guinea pig and his treatment. One of the NPCs has a pet guinea pig who is, apparently, being kept in substandard conditions for the animal’s needs.

Not being a real guinea pig, you may wonder why this matters. “It sets a bad example,” goes the logic. “People, especially young and impressionable people, shouldn’t be given information that might lead them to harm guinea pigs.”

A consideration for the future, perhaps; next time, a developer could Google guinea pigs before drawing the cage. The question is whether or not ConcernedApe should go back and rescue the fictional guinea pig already in Stardew Valley.

The problem with altering an existing game is that it censors our reality. The reality is, ConcernedApe didn’t know that you shouldn’t put guinea pigs in exercise wheels, which means that probably quite a lot of other people don’t know that either. His mistake – and most people’s total lack of response to it – tells us something about society that we wouldn’t otherwise have learned.

View full article at this link, on Gamers.

 

Exploration & Cookery Game

One thing that I find disappointing about Skyrim is how cooking serves no purpose. There’s a paltry Xbox achievement for cooking, mining and chopping wood once. The health benefits you get from cooking are nothing compared to the most inexperienced alchemy, the ingredients of which are cheaper and abundant. Besides which, pre-made potions are two a penny – much more common than cooking spits.

Then there’s the fact that you mainly find food items in towns, where you least need health items. The weight values of vegetables versus their healing properties make them not worth carrying around. Finally, if you calculate it, you notice that selling the individual food items raw fetches more gold than cooking them together. Not that any of them are worth anything like as much as any other piece of junk you can pick up out in the field.

It makes food in Skyrim a gimmick, one that you’ll get bored of quickly – just like chopping wood, which is the least time-efficient way of making money. If you never stole a single item in the whole game, you’d still make plenty of money just going out questing. If you don’t go out and quest, there’s no point playing Skyrim in the first place, which is an exploration RPG, not a life sim. In other words, cooking is pointless.

Mario & Luigi franchise

I’ve played Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga so many times, I keep forgetting that video games make me as bad tempered as a goat and as apt to spout obscenities as a small electronic box with buttons that swear when you press them. It’s one of those clever RPGs, the ones that realise that there’s nothing more tedious than wandering around and waiting to be pounced by endless hordes of monsters you can’t see or avoid.

There are two ways to deal with this without ruining the RPG standard; one is to have lots and lots of cheap in-game insect repellent taking up most of your practically endless inventory space, as can be seen in Breath of Fire. The other way is to program in an “auto” option – the option that literally translates as: “You know the drill, game. I’m strong enough to just stand here and take a beating without healing all battle and I’m only ever going to use this one incredibly expensive weapon which I upgrade every time I arrive at a new town or settlement, so there’s no point going through the charade of pretending I’m going to use any magic or special items until my next boss fight. And even then, there are no guarantees.” This is normally accompanied by excessive and anal healing after every ten battles of so, or as soon as the numbers turn red.

Pokemon Black / White

Close, but just falling short of the mark: 4/5

Pokemon. A franchise you either politely and determinedly ignore, like a yelling homeless man on the London Underground, or one which you follow with an insane glint in your eye and a fire in your heart that may well turn you into that yelling homeless man on the London Underground. I fall into the latter category, I fear. An avid Pokemon fan since the age of eight when I stole my brother’s version of Blue and used his Venusaur to destroy a Persian, I am hooked and lost to the world.

The franchise has continued, rightly or wrongly, for fifteen years, spinning off shows and toys and comic books, plus a whole host of other gimmicks, interesting for five minutes and hanging around for just as long. Yes, at one point I really did want a Pokemon themed N64. But we won’t talk about that. After all, Pokemon is a collector’s game; now with 650 little critters to collect, I’d say you’d have to be dangerously obsessed to keep on going.