i would buy the shit out of that 

heh, a good idea. That book was made for a game, there was an information about game monsters in that book, so I desided to draw a quake simbol on it =) (because monsters=quake)

maybe I'll make a proper quake book soon. 

http://www.speeds.quaddicted.com/aom_logo.jpg 

nt 

cars so fast you'll barely be able to catch up with your ever growing phallus

http://www.jesselawrence.com/images/ArsMoriendi_logo_prestige.png 

I thought that article was pretty fucking stupid. He's complaining about getting a lot of value out of a game?

No, he is not. He is complaining about the fact that developers and publishers are focusing on their most vocal part of the demographic, people who have the opportunity and the desire to invest 40+ hours in a video game.

And, huh, he's right.

The number of anticipated play-hours has become another part of the benchmark in the evaluation of games in the pages of magazines and internet discussion forums. Just like graphics has always been, and physics and AI are slowly becoming. And no wonder, that's what happens when you are able to track the evolution of games. And God bless, because it's a good thing.

I want my games to look good. I believe that for the money I invest, the game should reach a satisfactory standard of graphics. It's part of the experience. However, there's a pitfall here. Hardcoreists have equated good with photorealistic. ICO and Shadow... is some of the best looking games you can find, but it's nowhere the near cutting edge code of Sweeney and Carmack. Same thing with Half-life 2. The goodness is in a cohesive and apparent artistic direction, not in the number of million polygons treated with eight shader passes. We all know this, by the way, this is familiar litania.

Back to the matter at hand. ICO is a ten hour game, without checking the savefiles I'd say I spent maybe 12 on Shadow... HL2 took slightly longer, maybe 20 hours or so. Very few games that seat the just one more try-factor in the telling of a story or unfolding of a plot manages to keep people playing for upwards of 40 hours. And by people, I am talking about human beings that have obligations other than to themselves. Fathers and mothers, working professionals, students with even the least detectable trace of ambition...

HL2 manages that by being a fun game. The story is just icing and mortar. You could replace the story of city 17 with something completely different, and the game would still work. Sure, valve does a great job of keeping most people interested in the story because, hey! it's a well written affair.

When you've played just the one game of Defcon, you've seen everything you're going to see, I'll venture to say. These are the rules, this is the spatial representation, here are the tools at your disposal, etc etc. This doesn't make it any less of a game than any big-ass jRPG. Hell, ten years down the proverbial line - some of us are still enjoying quake.

And while I sometimes enjoy and desire long games, it's only when it's being handed to me by the creme de la creme of game development - the Uedas, the Miyamoto's and the Valve's of the business. Because they know how to pull it off. With every Tom, Dick, and Bill in the industry insisting on their games sporting 20 hours of single player campaign content, you inevitably end up with alot of insipid fluff. They would do themselves, and their audience, a service if they said to themselves and their teams "Ten hours is a pleasant and manageable goal, but if we only get to eight hours of good, clean fun - that's fine too."

The benchmark of value should not be how long it takes to play through, if it is - we're in trouble. The industry must stop pandering to the teenage boy demographic and get with the god damn program - the rest of us also wants to have fun, and we're willing to pay for that fun. 

Oh, if any of you got fed up with that and stopped reading half-way through - that just proves my point! 

It was a good post. 

It was a great post. 

ICO is a ten hour game
You misspelled 'two'. 

I'm glad someone else is arguing this so i don't have to. 

With every Tom, Dick, and Bill in the industry insisting on their games sporting 20 hours of single player campaign content, you inevitably end up with alot of insipid fluff. They would do themselves, and their audience, a service if they said to themselves and their teams "Ten hours is a pleasant and manageable goal, but if we only get to eight hours of good, clean fun - that's fine too."

Wrath, no game studio on earth is gonna say "You know, guys, we're not as good as Valve, why don't we just make a five hour thing and call it good?" 

A really nice 8-12 hour romp. Not too long, maybe slightly short.

Max Payne 2 - 3 hours of kind-of-okay gameplay and crappy melodramatic tripe (but with SLO MO!!)

I heard those games were okay.

BTW - I don't actually know what the argument is, so I'm not on anybody's side. 

Right, instead they say "You know, guys, we're not as good as Valve, why don't we take our five hours of solid designs and add another 15 hours of repetitious bullshit so that we can boast we have 20 hours of gameplay!" 

Are you talking about Halo? 

If metlslime is talking about Halo (1 or 2), I really think he is too harsh... Visually both versions are quite good, and even if it they are very linear, I had fun playing in coop mode... Not so bad in fact...
And the concept to have only one weapon avalaible instead of the "big" arsenal is quite realistic.. as well for ennemy weapons use! Note that this concept is also used Call Of Duty 2 which is IMHO one of the best immersive game I played since Doom3... (and I still play... ggrrr... not yet finished in veteran mode... :D...) 

And the concept to have only one weapon avalaible

please read :

And the concept to have only two weapon avalaible

sorry for this.. 

Wrath, no game studio on earth is gonna say "You know, guys, we're not as good as Valve, why don't we just make a five hour thing and call it good?"
Lunaran, you think I don't know that? And as far as I'm concerned, them not saying that is why most game studios are never going to get a shot at becoming as good as valve.

I know that most studios are little more than indentured servants to their publisher. And I know it's alot easier to rant on some message board in the ass-ward parts of the internet, than it is to run a studio with integrity and pro-active strategies. But that's a dumb reason not to point out where they go wrong.

But quite frankly, most game studios turn out five hours of uninspired but solid design stretched to 20 hours, just like metl said. And I don't have the patience or time to play through 20 hours of that, and neither does most gamers.

If instead they had released their five hours and lowered the price to �15 or �20 I'd probably buy it. Hell, even fabled valve is taking this route 

Well I have short attention span and dont want very long games either. And not so much free time these days.
Another thing to mention - many console games stretch the playtime by not having a quicksave.Thus you have to replay from the savepoint or even the very start of the level. For example I absolutely dont want replay the missions in GTA from the very start... this is even worse method of prolonging game-hrs

Actually I dont complain about games being too long - I just lay them off. Just keep the save to return later... may be. (played hl2 in the period of ~6 months) 

If you read that article carefully, the guy never says that the gameplay sucks. He simply says that he stopped playing because he couldn't envision himself coming to the end. He makes no mention of the game being repetitive, tedious, or anything like that. In fact he says, quote:

As I gushed at the time, Legend was the first genuinely superb Lara Croft game in years, with a reinvigorated control system, elegant puzzles, and an epic storyline involving one of Lara's long-vanished colleagues. I was hooked -- and eager to finish the game and solve the mystery.

That is why the article is fucking stupid. If he came out and said "I stopped playing because it wasn't fun anymore because the gameplay is too repetitve" then I would agree and say "yes, I too hate games that become repetitive and a chore to finish" *cough*Doom 3*cough* *cough*F.E.A.R.*cough*

But he never says that...maybe he was trying to infer that because he didn't want to hurt the feelings of the nice people at Crystal Dynamics, but nonetheless he doesn't indicate that as being his reason. That is shitty journalism written from a perspective I can't relate to at all.

Using an example of two games I love...I could pay 50$ for Sonic the Hedgehog II or 50$ for Shining Force II. They're both great games but Sonic II will maybe give you 12-15 hours of gameplay, 20 if you die a lot. Shining Force II will give you 80+ hours...maybe more depending on whether or not you want to explore.

Shining Force II is like playing 20 long ass games of a chess-hybrid with a pretty good story between each one to keep you engaged and wanting to move forward .

Sonic II is like an extended game of pinball with a fair-enough story to keep you playing and no replay value.

Completely regardless of age, race, sex, political party, or whatever other excuse you want to make, if you only have 50$ to spend and you like both genres equally, why on earth wouldn't you spend the money on the game that is going to give you the longer, more dynamic, and ultimately more fulfiling gaming experience? 

I beg to differ sir -- I was playing some quite recently, and having a blast. Still fucking forget about the robots that crash through the wall on the Aquatic Ruin level... 

Those games boasting about having 40+ hours of gameplay really need to look at World of Wacraft. It's not uncommon at all for a lvl60 character in WOW to have 50+ DAYS of invested playtime and yet players are still finding stuff to do in the game. 

Multiplayer is a bit different though, isn't it? I mean, ask the typical competitive QW player how many years he has invested in QW servers, and he's still only played 5-6 maps! 

I don't dare think how many hours I have spent in that game. I have it on an emulator for my phone and usually pull it out when I'm on a bus or something. 

A game that NEVER ends?! My god, man, who would play that?