Vitally important things that game developers should know about making good games! Or: Eli gets bored and decides to complain about stuff that he really doesn't know dick about.

Whenever someone complains about games, it seems that they pine for the old days of “classic” gaming. When objectives were simple, and gameplay ruled over flashy graphics. Well I’ve always had a couple problems with games, and here they are – everything that has ever bugged me about computer games.

Cheat Codes
The debate about cheating has raged back and forth for a long time. People argue that it’s their game, so they can do whatever they want with it, and play it however they want. Others call them losers who can’t play the game. Having been on both sides, I’ve settled on a more moderate view. Using cheat codes and then claming to have beaten the game is lame. But unlike when I was younger and stupider, I don’t have the free time now to spend hours and hours playing a game, or replaying a certain mission until I find the trick to beating it. So to ensure the enjoyment of the game fore everyone, the game developer has two choices. First, they can simply make the gameplay flawlessly scalable. So people who suck can have as much fun as people who are awesome at it. So far I’ve only seen a couple of games do this. Soldier of Fortune, StarCraft, and to a lesser extent Diablo/Diablo II. If you’re not a company that made one of the above games – here’s a nickel, go buy yourself a clue. Your other option is to include either cheats as options (such as in the Mechwarrior series) or have some good cheat codes. As a gamer, I don’t necessarily want to play your game the way you want me to play it. I want to have fun. That’s what I’m paying you $50 for. Not to run around some stupid level that you thought would be fun to make and see how long it takes people to figure out how to beat it. The upshot of all this is that a game without cheat codes sucks. And if the company doesn’t post them on the web site, that also sucks. I shouldn’t have to go looking for what should be a standard feature. The only exception is that I do like the Diablo series. It not only comprises a couple of very cool games in which the difficulty scales quite well, it has also been blessed with a number of excellent trainers, which I’ve used for experimentation in single player. And I strongly discourage their use in any form of multiplayer. Yeah, online cheating? Online cheaters can rot in hell. No sympathy from me. If you play with other people, you play by the rules dammit. Besides, getting my ass kicked by other people doesn’t bother me as much as it does when I lose to a computer.

Intro Screens and Cinematics
I’ve been spoiled by Blizzard Entertainment. Their cinematics department is pretty much rivaled only by Pixar. But I’ve seen other games have some pretty slick intros too. So what bugs me? When they use the game engine for an intro cinematic. It’s fine for cut-scenes, but for the love of god make your art department earn their salary and use something besides a crappy 3D engine for the introduction to your game. Even if it’s 2D graphics and made with Flash, it’ll help avoid the we-only-have-programmers-on-staff look.

And that brings us to intro screens. Yes those lovely little things that pop up with the game logo, company name, and a few credits. Well here’s a hint, guys. After we’ve played the game a few thousand times, we get sick of watching the logo flash by. So give me the option to just skip the damn thing. The worst example I’ve ever seen of this is Black & White, which had a startup screen you couldn’t skip. Right there I took a few points off. I won’t pretend to have every second of my day mapped out, but I’m still pretty busy, and I don’t like sitting around waiting for some stupid giant flashing logo to go the hell away. Actually, loading is a general peeve of mine, but I’ll leave that for some other time. The upshot of this section? Even if the intro cinematic is good, or the startup screen is informative, I want the option to skip by them by pressing any key, and I want it to happen instantly.

Installation
Ah, nothing quite like the first time you install a game you’ve been waiting eagerly for. The smell of the manual, the shiny, unscratched CD, it’s all part of the experience. I’ll admit that I do get a kick out of some of the fluff that you go through the first time you install a game. But it seems to never occur to the developers that there’s just the slightest, most remote possibility that some time in my life I may install my game more than once. No, I don’t want to register again, I did that the first time I installed it back in 1997. No, I don’t want to just ‘register later.’ Why isn’t there an “I’ve already registered, now leave me the hell alone!” button? I think Descent II had one. That was cool. Any why does it take 100% CPU power to do an install? With game installations taking upwards of 2gb (Diablo II w/expansion – Red Faction was about 1.5gb), these installations don’t go quickly, and I want to do other stuff while it’s running. Does it really take all the power that a 1.6ghz processor can produce to copy files from a CD to the hard drive? Maybe there’s a technical explanation for this that I’m just not familiar with. Apparently so; I forgot that it has to decompress files on-the-fly as it installs them. Fine, but I still think it should get a lower processor priority.

And then we have another peeve of mine that really applies to all software. Serial numbers and CD keys. I don’t even know where to start. CD keys are occasionally used for decent purposes like as a logon to an online gaming network, which actually helps with piracy. But unless you have that check against the database, it’s usually easier to copy and paste a stolen serial number in than to retype some insanely long serial off of the jewel case. Why are they so long? Good question, I think I’ll just say why I think it’s ridiculous. Take any of the number of quite legally purchased games I have on my shelf. Homeworld’s looks like this “ABC1-DEF2-GHI3-JKL4-5678.” Most games are something like that. That’s 20 characters – letters and numbers. A letter represents 26 possible characters, a number is 10, so that’s a total of 36 per digit. Now if I remember middle school math correctly that comes out to a whole lot of possible combinations. 3, 535, 353, 535, 353, 535, 353, 535, 353, 535, 353, 535, 353, 535 to be exact. Now let’s look at the best selling game of all time, I think it was probably Myst. It sold about 5 million copies (please correct me if I’m wrong, it was something like that though). 5 million – and that’s a really, really popular game. StarCraft has sold about 3 million. Most games are lucky to break a million, let alone 3-5. That means that a 4 digit CD key/serial number (26,262,626 combinations) is more than they’ll ever need. Hell, that’s enough that everyone who bought the game could lose their key and ask for a new one. They could even use the same series for the Gold Edition and the expansion pack. Ok, you say, but what if they want to make sure that they never use the same serial number as some other game company? Fine. Add two more digits. Now you’ve got 262,626,262,626 combinations. The point is that if they simply wanted to use it as a product ID, they could do that with much less than a 20 digit code. It’s stupid, and it’s inconvenient to the end user. Microsoft is most guilty of this with Product Activation, but that’s enough material for another rant right there.

The latest trend, and why I hate it
Ok so what rant would be complete without a largely personal-opinion (isn't all of this?) bit about whatever is currently the popular type of game to make and why it's stupid? Well, not this one for sure. So here's what bugs me - Tactical First-Person Shooters. For a long time after Doom, FPS games were a scourge of the gaming scene. Everyone made them, only id succeded (well, in most people's opinion) in making good ones. There were several that were really pretty good, but for the most part it was just a lot of crap being pumped out as fast as possible (Redneck Rampage anyone?). Then came the Real-Time Strategy craze, kicked off by StarCraft and (yeah, I'm a Blizzard fan) and Total Annhilation (but yes, I can admit that TA was cool). Unfortunately, unlike a FPS game, a RTS can be created with Visual Basic and MS Paint. So there were tons of them. And so it went, various good (innovative) games coming out, and then lots of knockoffs. Yes I'm going somewhere with this. The latest craze seems to be, as I mentioned, Tactical First-Person Shooters. Now, I can enjoy some tactics, that's cool and all. But I'm getting really, really sick of games where they're trying to get some realism out of it. I want that good old fashoned kind of action where you just run in and shoot everything in sight. No tactics, no stealth, NO RELOADING MY WEAPON! I just want to shoot stuff. If I wanted it to be realistic I'd go play Airsoft.

Well I suppose that’s enough for now. If you read all that I’m impressed. Even my friends usually tell me to shut up after I whine for more than a couple minutes.