To the Editor: I recently discovered the Escapist due to a link to the ZeroPunctuation reviews. I have grown to enjoy your site due to the breadth and quality of coverage that you give to the entire culture and experience of gaming.
I am used to reading the large gaming websites like IGN, GameSpot, etc and they seem to focus on 2 things:
- What is coming out, and
- what has already come out.
It seems that most of the websites out there assume that gamers are only concerned about previews or reviews.
I enjoy your site over all the others I read because that is NOT your focus. You address what it means to enjoy gaming and participate in the lifestyle going with it and I applaud you for it.
– Michael Blank
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In response to “Escort Missions Suck” from The Escapist Forum: Isn’t this entire article akin to saying “Video Games Stories Suck, so we should just stop trying”?
It’s hardly the fault of ‘story’ or ‘escort missions’ in and of themselves. Anything done poorly sucks. A reasonable person doesn’t order a McFish sandwich a dozen times and decide seafood is waste of time.
I mean, are you really ready to excuse (maybe even celebrate?) the complete lack of variety in gaming interaction, just because some developers don’t put that much effort into doing it right?
Why not flip the argument and level those same arguments against ‘fighting monsters’:
When enemies get caught up on geometry we don’t call for all kill quests to be removed because pathing is too hard.
When an enemy fails to defend itself intelligently, we don’t call for all kill quests to be removed because AI is too hard.
When enemies have their attributes jacked-around to provide cheap ‘difficulty’ we don’t call for all kill quests to be removed because balancing is too hard.
No, in all those situation we rightly call for the devs in question to get their shit together if they want our money. We don’t just shrug and ask them to just make whack-a-mole next time.
As for ‘save/load removes the emotional element’: Are you serious? By that logic there’s no emotional element to any gameplay session. So lets get rid of ‘kill the big bad’, ‘clear the dungeon’, ‘find the magic sword’ and ‘rescue the princess’ altogether – after all, we can always reload till we complete those challenges.
While you’re at it, you might as well get rid of every game this side of Chess and Tetris.
I started the article thinking you were merely throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater. As it turns out, you’re just itchin to raze the entire house to spite the dirty little cretin.
– roc ingersol
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In response to “Indie Game Store” from The Escapist Forum: A kind of sad testament I guess is that I’ve been gaming for a long, long time now, and I can only recall being in one Indie story in all of the areas I’ve lived. Otherwise it’s all EBGames, GameStop or FuncoLand, all of which I’ve learned are now really just GameStop operating with different names (although FuncoLands have since dissolved). I assume with good customer service and the right atmosphere, some game stores can do well, since at present probably 90% of game stores you go into are very sterile feeling with walls lined with new games, some bins with used stuff they want rid of, and the ambient noise of some displays endlessly repeating their demos.
– GrowlersAtSea
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In response to “Black Friday Rule” from The Escapist Forum: What I think I realized this Black Friday was that if you REALLY want something at a cheap deal, you need to think smart. You need to avoid the giant super stores that everyone goes to like they’re churning with black plague carrying rats and you’re covered in cheese. I arrived at Best Buy at 5:30 in the morning with the goal of buying a new laptop. Once I discovered that EVERYTHING was gone, even the stuff not on sale, I drove 5 minutes to the nearly empty Office Depot and got my new computer at a good deal.
That people line up on Wednesday at Best Buy, the check out line at Fry’s was 4 hours long, it seems to me that Black Friday has become the highlight of American greed and stupidity where we show how little concern we have for other people and only care about our immediate concerns.
– Mage26
