This week, I have one simple message for all of you. Play bad games. In case you didn’t catch that, let me repeat it. Play bad games. “But wait a damn minute. You guys always say to have high standards and not give money to developers who are intent on making garbage.” This is true, and I stand by that. I’m also not telling you to rush out and buy any bad games, just to play them. But we’ll get to that later. So why would I tell you this? It’s very simple. You can’t fully understand why the good games are so good unless you see for yourself exactly why the bad ones are so bad.
It’s a very easy lesson, and experience is always the best teacher. We all read reviews and impressions. When the game is bad, they are often full of phrases like frame rate chugging, poor level design and broken mechanics. So what good did that do you? You learned a few buzzwords so that the next time a friend of yours asks you about Game X you can say, “Stay away from it. The frame rate really chugs while trying to handle the busted cover mechanic.” But if you’ve never really given yourself over to a game that truly has some crap mechanics in it, you don’t really have a frame of reference for just how terrible the game might be.
Seriously, until you really get into a game, like Kane & Lynch, that has a cover mechanic so broken it makes you wonder how it ever got past quality testing, you can’t come to wholly appreciate the seamless cover-magic that is Gears of War. Until you’ve spent hours in a game, like Viking: Battle for Asgard, just wandering around an empty countryside looking for your next to-do, you won’t really understand the tightly-directed magnificence of God of War.
Sharing this sentiment with all of you really solidified itself as I began playing Terminator Salvation. It really is awful. Given, I’m playing on hard so I can get all the achievements in one playthrough, but still, this game is really bad. I have been pinned down by AI that only shoots at me instead of the rest of my crew, killed mid-cover-to-cover animation and melee killed by enemies that were not even in the same room as me. I know that last one sounds like a joke, but I’m completely serious. I could go on and on, but that will be for later. So let’s move on.
As I said before, I’m not saying you need to spend too much of your precious time and money on these horrible things, so here’s what you do. We all have at least one friend who loves crap games. I know I do. So you go borrow one of theirs. Easy and free of charge. If you’ve got a Gamefly or Blockbuster account, that is another perfect way to have a vast wasteland of gaming trash at your fingertips. If all else fails, most of these games are in the bargain bins already. Find one that has some easy achievements/trophies, so you at least get something else good out of it, and grab it for no more than a couple bucks used. Really, don’t go over a few bucks.
Also, don’t spend too much time with them if you don’t want to. There’s no need to completely torture yourself in the name of learning. We all went to school for that already. However, if you do find yourself liking one of these “bad” games, don’t be ashamed. As most games aren’t completely without some merit, it means that you have probably found the one working mechanic in the game and are digging it. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, if you can identify this good mechanic and tell it apart from the rest of the crap, that means you’ve already got your crap-detector-eye trained up pretty well.
Now, I said I’d get back to just how terrible Terminator Salvation is, and I will. Just not today. Pixelosophy is about to take a multi-part look at many of the different gaming genres. From platformers to first-person shooters, we’re going to look at some of the games that exemplify their respective genre, and then we’ll look at the Terminator Salvations of each genre. So stay tuned for that. Until then, have fun with this little experiment, and go play some crap. I challenge everyone to go find the most broken, glitchy and unplayable piece of junk, and give it a spin. Then tell us about it. Also, head down to the comments or forums, and let us know what the worst games you ever played were.
Spending time trying to restrain yourself from throwing a controller is one of the best ways to learn how to appreciate the really great games. If you only ever play the games that reviewers, and people like us, tell you are the best, you’ll never have a complete understanding of why those games sit on the pedestal that they do. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to get to the truth.