HOW DO YOU TELL IF A GAME IS BAD?

from Nessiah

from Corfaisus
And any game called "Yume Nikki"...

I would like to disagree good sire. *tips hat*

I also agree to disagree with the statement this disagreement in disagreeing with. The thing about Yume Nikki, to me at least, is that it's not really a game to be 'played'. It's more like a work of art, or even an art museum. You can't just sit down and enjoy it. You have to walk around, see what you can see, and get lost in its enigmatic maze. From a game playing standpoint, it's absolutely horrible, and if you go in expecting to be engaged, you're gonna be disappointed. Its value lies elsewehere; it serves a different purpose.

But you can certainly take some lessons from it for other real games. Things like 'slow walk speed sucks' and 'giant voids of nothing also suck' and 'the combination of slow walk speed and giant voids of nothing is enough to make a game nearly unplayable'.

if it's not fun

I play games normally an hour or less every day, perhaps 2 hours if I can spare, and many times, the game does not grab me within that hour but I play it until it does, even if it takes days. No game, EVER, has compelled me to play after just 15 minutes or an hour, except Mario games. Every other game I've ever played, even my favorite ones, have had me adjust to their charms before fully understanding them.

Chrono Cross is a perfect example, and it's my favorite game of all time. The experience did not grab me until a few hours in. Same with Majora's Mask and Legend of Mana, both of which are in my Top 3.

And I would imagine older gamers would have more of an affinity to slow starts than newer gamers, even better understanding them. After all, we've grown up with incredibly slow moving games (IE RPGs) in our childhoods and our teenage years, but I suppose we have other commitments that are far more important, if that's what you're alluding to.

Instant gratification has always been the norm when it comes to games. I mean, which one of Pacman, Donkey Kong and Dig Dug were designed with delay of gratification in mind?

I can only recall two cases where a game has become significantly more enjoyable for me later. It's FFX and Suikoden V. For both games the problem was that the early parts were to clustered with cutscenes. Later once the cutscenes became more spaced out I found them more fun. However, both games could have spaced out the cutscenes more right from the start and been more fun immediately instead for 6-8 hour later.

Crimson_legionnaire asked if instant gratification is the norm nowadays, implying that it once wasn't. What I wanted to point out is that old games were very much designed with instant gratification in mind. Those 40+ hour games you're talking about are relative recent additions. That makes them rather irrelevant to the "nowadays" comment.

Jesus, Crimson... "Back in my day, we played video games for days before getting hooked... and weeeee liked it! Weeeee LOVED it!" Pshaw.

No. You wouldn't be playing the game unless there was something in the game that attracted you to it. You mentioned Majora's Mask and Chrono Cross as examples, but those games definitely are attractive straight from the beginning! The story may not completely unfold entirely for several hours, but shit, seeing a giant evil moon in the sky raises enough questions for the player to want to keep playing. There's plenty to explore, plenty of mechanics to play with, plenty of pretty things to see, and plenty of interesting characters to interact with. It's not aCtiOn-PaCKed!! but it's still at the very least interesting to play. (Though, I will disagree, Legend of Mana is... ugh)

A hook doesn't have to be instant gratification, it just needs to be compelling in some way. If a game isn't very compelling from the start, and if it fails to become interesting within an hour or two, then that's definitely a bad way to start!

post=208094
Jesus, Crimson... "Back in my day, we played video games for days before getting hooked... and weeeee liked it! Weeeee LOVED it!" Pshaw.

No. You wouldn't be playing the game unless there was something in the game that attracted you to it. You mentioned Majora's Mask and Chrono Cross as examples, but those games definitely are attractive straight from the beginning! The story may not completely unfold entirely for several hours, but shit, seeing a giant evil moon in the sky raises enough questions for the player to want to keep playing. There's plenty to explore, plenty of mechanics to play with, plenty of pretty things to see, and plenty of interesting characters to interact with. It's not aCtiOn-PaCKed!! but it's still at the very least interesting to play. (Though, I will disagree, Legend of Mana is... ugh)

A hook doesn't have to be instant gratification, it just needs to be compelling in some way. If a game isn't very compelling from the start, and if it fails to become interesting within an hour or two, then that's definitely a bad way to start!

You misunderstand me. I'm not much older than any of you. I'm only 19, but I've been playing games since I was 3 years old. :p I'm speaking in the sense of RPGs. An RPG, no matter how good it eventually became, has never grabbed ME in the first 15 minutes or hour, not even WRPGS. I'm speaking strictly for myself here.

Chrono Cross definitely did not grab me in the beginning - I could barely understand what was going on at all, and the game started EXTREMELY slow, but I trudged along and when it was all said and done, it became my favorite game of all time. Not because of how it grabbed me with its "appeal" in the beginning, but the journey. Same with Majora's Mask. I actually did not think much of Majora's Mask in the beginning, but as I played it further, I began to love it. No, narcodis. A game can technically interest me from screenshots and videos, as well as from the beginning with all the mystery, but it takes awhile for me to like it, if that makes sense. Interest does not equate to liking the final product, just like disinterest in the game's intro should not equate to condemning a game and calling it bad. That's how games work for me. That's what I'm arguing against - I see the topic title is "How do you tell if a game is bad" and then I see "If it does not grab you within an hour" comments. I disagree with that notion.

If it works differently for you, more power to you. I need to keep playing a game in order to truly assess how good it is. I will never find that out in just an hour, relative to the game's total playtime, especially if it's a 50 hour RPG.

If it works differently for you, more power to you. I need to keep playing a game in order to truly assess how good it is. I will never find that out in just an hour, relative to the game's total playtime, especially if it's a 50 hour RPG.

I absolutely agree with this 110%.

I don't think I can ever bring myself to quit a game after the first hour unless it's so irredeemably awful that the creator might as well have spent five minutes on it. I like to play the game AT LEAST until the halfway point before I decide whether it's "bad" or not. A lot of the games that I love and cherish (RM or commercial) have had less than satisfying starts, but the more I played them, the better and more enjoyable they became.

If I had quit them after the first hour or so, I would have less out on a lot of awesome games. I just don't think you can accurately assess a game (especially a long game) in such a short time period...unless, like I said before, the mistakes are glaringly obvious (such as dialogue ridden with spelling/grammar errors, IMPOSSIBLE random encounters that you have no way to prepare for...etc.).

Okay, hang on. Good and bad are subjective on all counts. There's generally an agreeable spectrum of what is good and what is bad, but there is a large gray area where opinions will differ from person to person. People are interested in different things, so people are going to find different games good. I hope we all knew that already.

post=208101
If it works differently for you, more power to you. I need to keep playing a game in order to truly assess how good it is. I will never find that out in just an hour, relative to the game's total playtime, especially if it's a 50 hour RPG.

I agree completely! But this is not what you were talking about, nor was I.

No game, EVER, has compelled me to play after just 15 minutes or an hour, except Mario games.

Lets look at it this way. Lets say there are different "layers" of good to analyze.

Initially, we play a game because of what we hear about it, or what we see, something that interests us! This much is pretty clear. This is not a layer of good. This is an initial interest in the way a game plays that runs on nothing but our assumptions of what we've seen about it.

As we play the game, we continue playing because we continue to find things that interest us! We decide the game is interesting. We decide it is good so far.

You don't play the game for a couple hours bored the entire time and decide to just keep playing. At least... I don't. I guess some people are more masochistic and/or might keep going longer than others. But I'm going to say the game is bad if I don't find it interesting enough to play for more than three or four hours. That's just all there is to it. It's not a matter of patience or anything, it's simply a matter of maintaining interest. That is a very important aspect for storytelling, for cinema, and especially for games.

When we finish the game, we can conclude whether or not we enjoyed the game as a whole, and therefore whether or not the game is "good". Eh?

So for the OP, I guess you can't really tell if the entire game is good based on a one or two hour playthrough. But I would say that a game being able to maintain a player's interest is just as important a quality as anything else. Pacing is very important! If a game can't get that right, then it isn't that great, or the target audience is very small (the masochistic players).

That "layers of interest" thing is an interesting point!

The youtube RMers always hype their final boss battles so much that the only substance in the game seems to come from the music that was chosen for the conflict.

I AM NOT PLAYING A GAME JUST TO FIGHT OPTIONAL BOSSES WHEN THE DIALOGUE IS RETARDED, THE STORY IS STALE, AND THE BULK OF THE GAMEPLAY IS CRAPPY GIMMICKS LIKE FISHING AND MINING!

Narcodis is on to something with that "holding the player's interest" nugget. It takes a combination of elements in gameplay and storytelling in order to achieve that, but the combination in question will vary from gamer to gamer.

Oh yeah, if there are enough spelling and grammar errors (to the point where it becomes a chore to properly read the text), then I drop it like a hot potato.