Today: 12 hours of 1 hour games
May. 22nd, 2010 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI played 12 different games on their 1 hour free demo.
It is possible there is such a thing as too many games.
*shrugs*
I like games that work, don't make my computer all buggy, and remember to change the display back to my preferred settings when I quit. That rules out at least 6 games in the past couple of days.
I like hidden object games as long as they're pretty and complicated and a bit varied with puzzles and, and this is important, think the end of the cursor is where I think the end of the cursor is.
I also like the ones where you have to build stuff and solve engineering puzzles. Detective puzzles are less interesting. I like putting cogs together and adding handles and making stuff go round and round.
I do not like games with gnomes, fairies, and a target audience of young girls who like pink. Really really like pink. I'm getting better acquainted with my pink side lately, and can now play games where you make cake all day in pink ovens with minimal embarrassment, and have fun with them. But there is still such a thing as too much pink, especially as a state of mind.
Combine horribly twee with horribly repetitive and I don't bother playing the demo hour, more like the demo five minutes.
I like games that are about moms looking for their kids or princesses saving the prince or queens saving their kingdom. Last time I played games there weren't many of those stories around. It was all prince stories and I'm bored of those.
OTOH now I've started all those games where someone is looking for their missing child and it's kind of bugging me that I have to leave them to it cause the hour is up. *facepalm*
I'm getting fascinated by the storytelling in computer games. It branches and tells things in flexible order in some ways and probably just rolls along straight in others and it's an entirely different story challenge from TV or novels or short stories. And all these games where there's no killing people make me happy, and then I want to make TV shows where there's no killing people nor fighting neither. If you can fill a game with it you could surely fill a story with it... but it's not that simple, because there's blippy shiny repetition in games that we're quite happy with but if a linear non-interactive story did anything like that it wouldn't last two minutes before losing its whole audience. Still, I wish to do less violence. Despite what bloke at the NSFG says about story conflict = violence or its boring. Is not boring. Is just a different set of tricks.
I'm feeling kind of weird about rediscovering computer games in my 30s. And not even swish complicated use all the buttons console games. Just clicky mouse games. Which is why I'm getting into them, there's definitely such a thing as too many buttons. The game I tried that used both buttons and a scroll wheel (and didn't tell you until you'd started playing so I had to get out the mouse with the scroll wheel) got uninstalled as soon as the hour was up. Between that and the whooshy twirly zoomy landscape that made you spend half your time finding where you'd put the island this time instead of just getting on with finding things... no fun.
For story like on TV you'd have to have a lot more interacting with people and a lot less making shiny toys and solving codes and stuff. People are the whole story on TV. But not in computer games.
*looks at them sideways*
Maybe I could write a game story.
It's a different-again skill from GMing a multiplayer group face to face.
... which I was bad at because of a tendency to (a) run out of plot and (b) annoy all the players, but it's not like I tried it very often.
If I was making a hidden object game where you solve puzzles and make stuff work I would make the objects you're looking for make sense. I realise there's less variety then, but there was a really fun one where you're in a city after a disaster and pulling together tools you need to get to the next location and go save your family, and I kept getting distracted because they're standing in the middle of a disaster area seeking out small model elephants and lipstick. If you're going to pick up lipstick in a disaster you'd better at least be using it to draw on stuff. It's like only half the stuff had logic applied, and the rest you were just supposed to ignore was daft. Logic or no logic, no mixy up!
You know I think I've played more women characters in the last week than I had in my entire gaming experience prior to giving up on the stupid things. And Tradewind games are all half and half. Is good.
I don't like it when a game decides what gender I'm going to be today. I also don't like it though when it asks for your name and then makes you be a character. There's no voices, just typings, how hard can it be to put your actual name in there? If there are voices I can see the problem, but without them, for why?
Okays, nearly Doctor Who time now. I go prepare.
It is possible there is such a thing as too many games.
*shrugs*
I like games that work, don't make my computer all buggy, and remember to change the display back to my preferred settings when I quit. That rules out at least 6 games in the past couple of days.
I like hidden object games as long as they're pretty and complicated and a bit varied with puzzles and, and this is important, think the end of the cursor is where I think the end of the cursor is.
I also like the ones where you have to build stuff and solve engineering puzzles. Detective puzzles are less interesting. I like putting cogs together and adding handles and making stuff go round and round.
I do not like games with gnomes, fairies, and a target audience of young girls who like pink. Really really like pink. I'm getting better acquainted with my pink side lately, and can now play games where you make cake all day in pink ovens with minimal embarrassment, and have fun with them. But there is still such a thing as too much pink, especially as a state of mind.
Combine horribly twee with horribly repetitive and I don't bother playing the demo hour, more like the demo five minutes.
I like games that are about moms looking for their kids or princesses saving the prince or queens saving their kingdom. Last time I played games there weren't many of those stories around. It was all prince stories and I'm bored of those.
OTOH now I've started all those games where someone is looking for their missing child and it's kind of bugging me that I have to leave them to it cause the hour is up. *facepalm*
I'm getting fascinated by the storytelling in computer games. It branches and tells things in flexible order in some ways and probably just rolls along straight in others and it's an entirely different story challenge from TV or novels or short stories. And all these games where there's no killing people make me happy, and then I want to make TV shows where there's no killing people nor fighting neither. If you can fill a game with it you could surely fill a story with it... but it's not that simple, because there's blippy shiny repetition in games that we're quite happy with but if a linear non-interactive story did anything like that it wouldn't last two minutes before losing its whole audience. Still, I wish to do less violence. Despite what bloke at the NSFG says about story conflict = violence or its boring. Is not boring. Is just a different set of tricks.
I'm feeling kind of weird about rediscovering computer games in my 30s. And not even swish complicated use all the buttons console games. Just clicky mouse games. Which is why I'm getting into them, there's definitely such a thing as too many buttons. The game I tried that used both buttons and a scroll wheel (and didn't tell you until you'd started playing so I had to get out the mouse with the scroll wheel) got uninstalled as soon as the hour was up. Between that and the whooshy twirly zoomy landscape that made you spend half your time finding where you'd put the island this time instead of just getting on with finding things... no fun.
For story like on TV you'd have to have a lot more interacting with people and a lot less making shiny toys and solving codes and stuff. People are the whole story on TV. But not in computer games.
*looks at them sideways*
Maybe I could write a game story.
It's a different-again skill from GMing a multiplayer group face to face.
... which I was bad at because of a tendency to (a) run out of plot and (b) annoy all the players, but it's not like I tried it very often.
If I was making a hidden object game where you solve puzzles and make stuff work I would make the objects you're looking for make sense. I realise there's less variety then, but there was a really fun one where you're in a city after a disaster and pulling together tools you need to get to the next location and go save your family, and I kept getting distracted because they're standing in the middle of a disaster area seeking out small model elephants and lipstick. If you're going to pick up lipstick in a disaster you'd better at least be using it to draw on stuff. It's like only half the stuff had logic applied, and the rest you were just supposed to ignore was daft. Logic or no logic, no mixy up!
You know I think I've played more women characters in the last week than I had in my entire gaming experience prior to giving up on the stupid things. And Tradewind games are all half and half. Is good.
I don't like it when a game decides what gender I'm going to be today. I also don't like it though when it asks for your name and then makes you be a character. There's no voices, just typings, how hard can it be to put your actual name in there? If there are voices I can see the problem, but without them, for why?
Okays, nearly Doctor Who time now. I go prepare.