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Input/Output - Where have all the good games gone?

Posted at: 1st November 2007

It's been a great few years for new hardware, but dumbed-down games won't attract a gamer's attention.


Around ten months ago, I made the observation that while 2006 was a great year for new hardware, 2007 looked to be a great year for games. Highlights included the first DirectX 10 games on the horizon, plus a bevy of top-tier games such as BioShock, Command & Conquer 3, ArmA: Armed Assault, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Age of Conan all due for release.

However, as so often appears to be the case these days, the curse of the multiplatform business model - the fact that many games are now developed for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 - has struck down many of these games. Unfortunately, more often than not, the consoles take priority and this leads to a badly optimised PC version that runs slowly and has inferior graphics, such as Oblivion and Rainbow Six: Vegas.

Even worse than this is the catastrophic effect that multiplatform development can have on gameplay. This is because most console games are designed to be played for a few minutes while perched on the sofa in the living room, so they have to be a lot simpler than a PC game, which you might play for hours on end while comfortably ensconced in your bedroom or home office. It isn't that I think that all console gamers are mentally challenged - after all, our online editor Ben Hardwidge is a keen console gamer, and he's a perfectly decent chap - it's just that consoles and PCs are used in different ways, and this is reflected in the activities for which you use them.

In Oblivion, despite the huge game world to explore and numerous quests to discover, the gaming universe might as well be an eighth of the size it is, since every time you engage in a new quest, an arrow pops up on-screen telling you in which direction to move. I'm all in favour of navigation tools in the real world, such as in-car GPS systems, but in fictional games, surely one of the main attractions is making your own discoveries. Even more irritatingly, a text message also appears every time you pass near a special area, such as a secret cave or underground tomb, so there's sod-all point in actually exploring; all you need to do is hold down 'w' and wait for a message to appear.

Two of 2007's most promising games also suffer from this idiotic dumbing down. Take BioShock, for example - the story makes little sense from start to finish (see Phil's great critique online at www.custompc.co.uk for more details). However, my main bone of contention with the game is its interface. Once again, in the interests of streamlining, an arrow tells you in which direction to travel. This makes it pointless having corridors with multiple exits, or large rooms for that matter, as there's simply no point in moving in any direction other than where the arrow indicates. There isn't even much point in being scared by any of the monsters, or trying to defend yourself too vigorously, as each level is liberally dotted with vita-chambers that automatically reanimate you should you die. This inability to die is a hallmark of console games, and it's the main reason why the multiplatform Call of Duty 2 was such a poor successor to its PC-only forebear. As such, BioShock may as well be one of those dire, pre-rendered games from the late 1980s, such as Dragon's Lair, in which the player had almost no control over how the game was played. It's also worth pointing out that BioShock looks little better in DirectX 10 than in DirectX 9.

In fact, there's no sign of any decent DirectX 10 game appearing this year. As for the smattering of DirectX 10 games that have already been released, there's the atrocious and annoyingly politically correct Call of Juarez, a patch for Company of Heroes that halves the frame rate yet barely improves the graphics, and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, the most boring first-person shooter since Condition Zero.

The other big game of 2007 that was dumbed down to kindergarten level was Command & Conquer 3. The C&C games have always been fast-paced, but C&C 3 takes the franchise to a new level of knee-jerk reaction gameplay, where the only valid tactic appears to be building a ton of low-tech units and swarming your enemy before it has time to react. Whatever happened to the S for strategy in the RTS acronym?

Still, even if there haven't been many games worth buying this year, there has been some great new hardware to make the most of older games. Industry leaders ATI and Nvidia, AMD and Intel have all been hard at work, resulting in some great bargains to be had. Highlights so far include the bargaintastic Core 2 Quad Q6600, especially the G0 stepping model, the 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS and the cut-price Pentium E2140. What's more, unlike the games industry, which seems unable to get games out the door on time, a host of promising new hardware is slated for release before the end of the year. These include the welcome return of AMD to the high-end CPU market with its range of Phenom processors, plus Intel's second generation of Core 2 CPUs based on the Penryn architecture. ATI and Nvidia also have several new mid-range GPUs on the way - hopefully, unlike their GeForce 86-series and Radeon HD 2600-series predecessors, these will actually be able to play modern games smoothly. Here's hoping that early 2008 yields some decent games to give all this lovely hardware a proper workout.

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