Alright, here is my ADD bumping this blog off on another little tangent!
My wife bought me an xbox 360 for Christmas–we’ve had a Wii since the release, as much as I love it, the novelty has somewhat worn off over the past year. Since Christmas, I’ve put far too many hours into games when I should be working on my latest creations, but hey, what can I say (Attention Deficit Dis…oh hey, look at the pretty flower…).
So since then, I’ve finished a handful of games including Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect and Portal (part of the Orange Box/Half Life 2 package). As I was playing through Call of Duty 4, it really struck me how much gaming has changed over the course of the three decades I’ve been playing games. For some reason, I never got really emotional when the aliens stole my little people and turned them into ugly red spaceship-eating Martians in Defender. For the thousands of times I saw the line “Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!” I didn’t once find myself close to tears (I did, however, get emotional with Mega Man, but only because he caused controller breakage!).
This all changed, however, with my recent playthrough of Call of Duty 4. I won’t give any spoilers, but the emotional twists this game puts the player through are rough…or maybe I’m just turning into a weenie in my old age. Mass Effect, to a lesser extent, pits the player against some rough moral decisions that effect the entire game (and whether or not you get that hot alien nookie FOX news was up in arms about not so long ago) .
I suppose, perhaps, developers are just now learning how to fully immerse players in the story through more than just the script. Visuals have become realistic enough that they help the story instead of detract from it.
