I came across an interesting link today (http://lookspring.co.uk/balancing-act) which discusses being a woman gamer.
So here is my confession for the day - I love my computer games. There are a couple of games that get installed almost by default on any computer of mine – Baldurs Gate II and Alpha Centauri, although the newest incarnation of Civilisation will probably join that list, and possibly, even with all it's faults, Oblivion.
So why do I love those games so much? Well in the case of Baldurs Gate, it was the story, it was the side plots, it was the fact that the game did vary depending on the type of character you played. I still find it very disapointing that there are so few games like that now, Jade Empire and the Knights of the Old Republic series being some notable exceptions. However they lack the one thing that really made BG for me, and that was the party interactions. Choosing my character for a run through, and choosing the associated party was always great fun. I have great hopes for Planewalker games run by Jason Compton and Westley Weimer, two of the most outstanding modders for BG2.
As for Alpha Centauri and the various incarnations of the Civilisation series – I dread to think how many months of my life I've wasted on those games. The “just one more turn” is so addictive, and they have to rank as some of the greatest games ever made. And yet, interestingly, I have never got into one of the biggest so-called “Female” games – The Sims. I've tried, and I just can not see what the attraction of it is. Shrug.
So what are irritations for me? Games that just won't run for starters. A prime example is a piece of shit I recently bought called Mage Knight: Apocalypse. Wouldn't work, kept trying to find a server. In the single player game. Not a mention of Net access required anywhere on the box or in the manual. A quick google revealed that it was trying to set up a local server. Details that should have been in the manual. So, yeah, one game that was quickly uninstalled.
Games that are unbeatable if you chose a poor character combination at the start. Titan Quest is a prime example. Went through the game reasonably easily, got to the final boss, couldn't even scratch him. Spending hours trying to defeat a boss character who your character can't even scratch is not fun, especially when in a fit of desperation you lower the difficulty level. Apparently I'd chosen a poor character combination. The final boss should be beatable by any character combination with some difficulty, without the player feeling as though they would rather walk over broken glass. Interestingly another game that got that wrong was the Sacred expansion pack. Sacred is an enjoyable Diablo-like romp which had a pretty well judged difficulty level, up to the point of the final boss of the expansion pack. Fortunately my character re-spawned right by the boss every time he died, so it was a case of hit, hit, die, respawn, hit, hit, die, respawn, etc. Not fun.
Another irritation is when the sequel to a game mucks up something that worked well in the previous game, such as in the Elder Scrolls. I loved Daggerfall, crashes, bugs and all. It was a game where you genuinely didn't have to follow the script. It had issues, but there was still an element of freedom to do what you wanted to do, and to make your character exactly what you wanted it to be. Morrowind was a fun game, but it suffered from two main weaknesses. Firstly there was no fast travel option, which meant you did a lot of trudging around, secondly when you had finished doing any of the guild story lines that was it, no more quests. Oblivion took a lot of the things from Morrowing and improved them, such as alchemy being a lot more intuitive, and bringing back the fast travel from Daggerfall. But it stuffed up the leveling, so whereas in Morrowind there were regions it wasn't worth visiting until you had levelled up quite a bit, in Oblivion you could beat the game at level 2, and it was often easier to do so. My other major irritation with Oblivion was that it was perfectly feasible for a pure fighter to become head of the Mages guild, and a pure mage that wouldn't know what to do with a sword could become head of the Fighters guild. Morrowind had the ranking system working very well, by linking your skill levels to your rank in the guild. But once you become head of the guild, that's it, there is nothing else to do.... Oh well, hopefully TES V will sort out some of these issues.
This has become bit of a monster post, so I'll expand on some of these themes later.
