AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I miss games that didn't sacrifice the amount of gameplay time for good graphics.

I'm talking more about linear games over open world.

I dunno, spending 60 dollars to beat a game in one or two play throughs ? It doesn't feel like its worth the cheddar spent.

i bought SSX3 in 2003 for fifty dollarydoos and would still be playing it today if the disc had not long since been worn beyond usability. I bought Halo 4 at launch and was sick of it within a month.
Shit's depressing.

I have played Final Fantasy Tactics A2 three times with over a hundred hours every playthrough. cheddar well spent.

Reminds me of this. Toonami's TOM reviewing Pikmin way back when.

"It's only shortcoming is that it's too short, about 16 hours in all"

Now you're lucky to find a game that has more than 10 hours in a single playthrough. Not saying there aren't any, but the short games definitely outnumber the longer games.

I dunno, there's something to be said about cutting down on fluff and focus on creating a singular, more powerful experience. Note that this doesn't have to mean linear level design (Doom comes to mind). Of course, when cheddar becomes an issue you're probably going to look for something that lasts you a while and some games can pull off the fluff without sacrificing pacing, but still, not everything needs to be an RPG with a billion choices.

I don't mind shorter games, really. I wasn't at all disappointed when I blew through Sonic Generations in six hours the first day I got it. Even Halo 3 was great by me, at around 7 hours as I recall. Granted, I replay those games a lot, but I don't think even 10+ hours should necessarily be mandatory for a game.

Not that I dislike longer games, of course. It's just easier to set aside a day for a new game than to string it out over several weekends during the school year.

I'm at the point where bang/buck doesn't really matter to me because I get most of my games for a pittance. So I'm okay with games of almost any length, though I do prefer slightly shorter games simply because I have a huge backlog. The most important thing is whether the game makes good use of the time it's been allocated, meaning that it doesn't feel half-finished, nor drawn-out.

And you know, some games are simply more packed. Metro LL took me 15 hours which is slightly longer than your average single player FPS, but every moment of it was hand-crafted, making it that much more intense.

Yeah, the level of detail at any given point in a game matters to me, too. I honestly don't like Skyrim very much, because as huge and vast as it is, it feels like most of the terrain was just dialed in. I don't fault Bethesda for that, because making every meter interesting would have taken an absurd amount of work, but it just doesn't interest me. Same with the randomly generated quests that were never actually interesting. The game was just too big to have the same level of polish that you can get out of the more contained experiences and I think it was painfully unengaging as a result.

I'm pretty sure most of Skyrim's terrain was hand modeled, with only a few random generation things thrown in to fill out general areas. Oblivion started out pregenned, with edits to the map to make the final product, and Daggerfall was entirely random generation.
That said, Skyrim suffers greatly from similar quest syndrome. I'm fairly sure I've killed more dragur than there are people living in Mundus.

It would be neat-o if there was an Elder Scrolls game that combined the best strengths of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim (like Morrowind's unusual environments, Skyrim's modern visuals and craftsmanship, and Oblivion's clever quests to name a few things)

But too bad it's never gonna happen :(

I know it was hand-modeled, but it was still largely boring. What I meant with my post was that it felt like someone dropped trees willy-nilly onto the terrain without much careful deliberation. It was just a fairly boring piece of land, aside from the relatively few areas where there was a conscious decision to make something interesting.

I far prefer small but polished levels to a miles-wide careless sprawl.

I think the next gen systems look like shit. I don't see a reason to buy the xbone or the ps4. They don't run much better than the 360 and ps3, they have no games, and the games that they do have look like fps no. 2000213 and 213021. The WiiU isn't much better, with nothing but the new smash bros to look forward to, and maybe another zelda. The only advantage the WiiU has in my mind is that it has a shop where I can buy older games I never got to play.

The 360 and PS3 didn't have enough games to warrant purchase for a good 2-3 years either.

Personally, I'm completely done with consoles for any other purpose than exclusives. So the systems themselves don't appeal to me at all and if I could centralize all my games to my PC, I'd do so in an instant.

same, which is the main reason I got the WiiU. Nintendo never releases pc ports.

I don't get why the Honest Trailers are popular.