Day 19: Genres

 

 

 

This is a game.

What do you think of when you think of a video game?  Something like the above, right?  Well that's a platformer, only one of several types of popular genres out there in mainstream gaming.  It's one of the most classic types out there.  Nothing says video game like controlling a sprite that hops, skips, and jumps their way to victory.  But what about the other types of games?  Sure, Mario is great fun for those people who are satisfied with a simple beat the level and get the highest score scenario.  Yes, there's usually a plot to a platform game but does it really matter in the end?  If you want a game that tells a story, look for a Role-Playing Game.

My favorite RPG of all time.

 This is definitely my favorite game type of all time.  The RPG has every element that I want and need in a game.  Those aspects are a complex story, strategy, and obviously a large role-playing piece.  At their core, these types of games pit the player and their party in turn-based battles of might, magic, and skill against monsters, humans, and what have you while questing to save the world.  Along the way the party increases in skill, levels up as it's called, and gathers a variety of skills and equipment to help assure victory.  One intangible, but undeniably essential, part of an RPG is the great joy one finds in completing side quests and finding rare items.  For instance, in Chrono Trigger the story circles around the ability to time travel and the effects that the characters have on the space-time continuum.  Each character has a specific time and place that will trigger quests and each quest that you complete affects the ending of the game.  Not to mention that each side quest ends up giving you extra, fantastic items and that there's a feature that activates at the end of the game called New Game + that allows you to restart the game with everything that you gained throughout the course of playing.  Another genre that has some of these similar elements yet combines them with parts of a platforming game is Adventure.

Stop looking at her breasts.

Tomb Raider is an excellent example of an Adventure game.  Not only are you getting the story aspect of the RPG genre, but you're seeing a lot of the platformer's aspects in action.  Lara Croft runs, jumps, and shoots her way through tons of different areas, all in an effort to gather some artifact to save the world or something.  The picture on the left looks like she's dunking a basketball or diving to tackle someone.  Of course, this is my heavy-handed segway into Sports games, but you knew that already.

This is actually very entertaining.

Sports games come in a variety of flavors, football, soccer, hockey, basketball, and every other sport you can think of down to horse racing.  Now of course the idea behind these games is pretty simple, you take control of a team and play against other teams to see who wins.  As time has gone on, however, the games have evolved to include things like drafts, franchise mode, and career mode.  These various additions make it feel a lot more like a real life sport that you're watching and controlling at the same time.  Now for those of us that are up to date on our motion gaming, we all know that sports games using a controller are starting to fade away and we're seeing something more like this on the right where you are the player and you are actually moving in line with what you need to accomplish. 

Ugh, even the graphics are ass.

All of what I've gone over are some of the essential building blocks of more complex and exciting game types.  Companies have certainly mixed and matched to both gamers' delight and agony.  There are a few genres out there though that need to be approached with caution because more often than not, you're going to end up playing a piece of shit.  Point and click games are just wrong.  You go screen to screen trying to accomplish an objective like escaping an island, but you don't really do anything video game-like.  You move a cursor around the fucking screen and click on shit until you advance to the next screen, and so on and so on.  Of course the games are a bit more complex as you need to move from location to location and back and forth and back and forth; it gets so horrible that by the end of the game you want to vomit like you just read the worst run-on sentence in your entire life.  Now combine that with an Educational game and you're just asking for it.  A great example of an educational game is Mario Piano.  Who the fuck wants to play the piano with Mario?  Yeah, that's what kids want, they want to learn to play the piano with Mario.  Kids play video games to have fun not to learn.  What game company sat around their gigantic executive board room table and had their execs agree that making an educational game, in this day and age, is a good idea?  I'd really like to know, because they have got to be the dumbest shits in existence.  The only way that I can imagine that they are still afloat is that their CEO has the ability to crap out a golden egg every 15 minutes.  That's the only way I can see them still standing amongst the good gaming companies out there; every 15 minutes, two pounds of gold.  That's a realistic situation.