Not Now, I'm Busy

 

I never quite understood the saying, “When one door has closed, many others will open”…

Literally, it would only make sense by coincidence. But then why would you make a hypothesis that would apply to all cases of door closing? If that was true, then disasters would be sure to follow. I have created a short animation on one such occurrence below.

Now metaphorically, I would be more inclined on the saying if it meant when one door opens, many others would subsequently open, symbolising an innovative idea being introduced, and thus opens up many new opportunities and options. This does not necessarily work the other way around. The closest opposite case I could conjure was the following:

“When one door has closed, a child is sold to the circus”

Or “When one door closes, unless there are no windows or other form of ventilation, one can suffocate”

Or even “When one door closes, banana cakes are burnt”

And finally” When one door closes… it doesn’t really matter because it’s a destructible environment, so I make my own exits. Bitch”

Note, if you ever burn a banana cake, I will rain death upon you via ninja attack . You will not see me coming.

No, not like this

Yes, more like this:

 

Moreover, this ‘altered’ saying, can be applied to just about anything in the present world, including games. ( No, not the amazingly accurate attempts at conjuring opposites, the initial, i.e. one opens, many open) . Do you remember the release of the astounding Legend of Zelda, The Ocarina of Time? Of course you do, what an imbecilic question. This games was not only one of the closest ever to being perfect, but revolutionised the entire action gaming genre forever. Without it…. Well it’s difficult to speculate what would’ve happened without it.

Nonetheless, action games became more systematic and innovative. What would we have done without the lock-on system? If you just sit and think of the hundreds, maybe thousands of games, that have integrated the lock-on system as a feature, and expanded on it as well, giving the player a whole different set of moves whilst in lock-on mode.

Action/adventure games flourished more than ever after that, with the beginning of many new and still successful franchises today. Many of our favourite games are probably part of those started. Personally I will never forget the ratchet and clank series as well as the Jak and Daxter series, That in which also introduced a number of new ideas and features in the genre, such as a proper weapon upgrading system, a feature that I adore in any game if utilised correctly.

There’s hundreds of games that revolutionised genres to what we have today, but that does not mean it has all been changed for the better.

Look at the Call of Duty series. Almost every single popular shooter game today has identical  online structure ( levelling and unlocking etc), controls, HUD, aiming system,  paedophile minigame, stale cake maker, box of tissues and Justin Bieber ragdoll murder game, as CoD itself. Not to say that what CoD did wasn’t good at one point. It was. It was great fun. It still is here and there. But for every shooter game to (unsuccessfully) attempt to imitate CoD, the First Person Shooter genre has now been narrowed down to almost one style.

A sad truth indeed.

An innovative take, idea, or feature is supposed to help games of its genre to further expand and change, for the better, always improving and even changing a bit here and there to maintain variety. But no, CoD’s colossal success resulted in the collapse and abandonment of diversity and open mindedness, only to join a single, increasingly, narrowing road (In the FPS genre).

But don’t fret. Don’t shit your pants. Don’t have an accident. But if you did ((understandably), clean yourself up. There are still those gems of FPS games today that are not adoptive of CoD’s system, however few they are. These include the gears of war series, bioshock series; even the Halo series can be counted. To me, these games are the true leaders of FPS today, and are vital to the future of the genre. ( Note games like Fallout and mass effect count more as a mixture of adventure, action, fps and rpg, so I can’t really count it as a completely FPS game)

Moving away from just the FPS genre, ( Better stop bullying CoD. I do not condone the act of bullying unless it is Justin Bieber, CoD and cupcakes)

Actually, I’m leaving the other genres for other articles, there is simply too much to write about. Next, I’m thinking of adressing the lack of great fighting/kung fu games today. Do you remember The Path of Neo? Well after that, I cant really think of any other good hand-to-hand combat/adventure game today. There’s so much potential! Imagine all the amazing wall running, kickflipping, backslapping annihilation! The combat in games like Assasins Creed are incredibly fun and addictive. When bored, one would run riot in the city, gathering up the guards and beating them all in one, huge brawl. Now imagine a game that is completely centred around that…

 

That’s what new ideas can do…

if only…

mmm, caramel….

A short article today, considering rants are, naturally, long. I hope to be delivering articles, comics, bouncy mattresses and sandboxes at a faster rate now.

Yes, again, only because Its awesome.