🚀 go-pugleaf

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>On Wed, 31 Dec 2014 11:32:55 -0500, "Chuck"
><chuck....@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>>I was just sitting here wondering, how do people decide if a game is good or 
>>not?  Is it because you finished it?  You played it multiple times?  You 
>>have X number of hours invested in it?  I have my reasons, just curious 
>>about others.
>>
>>Chuck
>
>
>I've played thousands of games over the past thirty or forty years and
>I don't think I can give a straight answer to the question "what makes
>a game good". It takes a number of factors, not all of which need to
>be met for a game to be "good". If a game manages to satisfy me in a
>majority of the categories below, I'll probably rank it favorably.
>
>On the technical front, there are the production values. How are the
>graphics, the sound, the music? Are they appealing to the eye and ear?
>It is customary for "serious" gamers to pooh-pooh the importance of
>these things (after all, we all are in it for the gameplay) but
>presentation counts for a lot. Character animation is important too.
>And it's more than just the clarity of the textures and the bitrate of
>the audio; do the visuals and sound match the tone of the game? 
>
>Next, there are the story, setting, and characters. Do the developers
>use all the above to create an immersive world in which to play, or do
>they take shortcuts that break the fiction? Some gamers don't care too
>much about this sort of thing but it can make or break a game.
>
>Gameplay is the most subjective; is the game in a genre I enjoy, and
>does it innovate in any ways? If it does attempt something new, do
>these changes add or subtract from the overall effect? Are the
>maps/levels well designed, is there a decent learning curve, does the
>game offer enough material to keep me interested to the end or does it
>blow its load in the first few chapters? 
>
>And then there are the "extras"; is there obtrusive DRM? Is the game a
>buggy crashfest? Is it a pay-to-win game or does the game push its DLC
>too obviously? Does the game come with any nifty extras or feelies?
>
>Personally, I tend to value high-fidelity graphics and an immersive
>gameworld as some of the more important features, although that isn't
>to say I dismiss the importance of the rest. I've played butt-ugly
>games to the end if the story was intriguing (say, Portal 1986), or
>struggled with seemingly endless bugs if the gameplay was just that
>good (the original Gothic was like that for me).  I'd consider both
>excellent games. 
>
>Generally, if I finish a game it is because it is good; I don't
>consider it good just because I finished it. I played through
>Terrawars: NY Invasion to the end just because it was so terrible.
>Some games I quite enjoy and consider good games even if I don't get
>very far in them; for instance, the IL-2 Sturmovik flight-sims are
>excellent titles even though I don't think I've played more than an
>hour. I often replay "good games" (for instance, System Shock 2 has
>seen more than its fair share of reinstalls) but at the same time I
>may revist terrible games just to remind myself how bad they are (I've
>played Alien Colonial Marines four times and been disappointed each
>time).
>
>So there's my answer, wishy-washy as it it may be. I like games that
>are well-designed, in one way or another. If the developer was lazy,
>and used slapdash graphics or rehashed gameplay or a created a
>non-coherent world, then I'll probably look less favorably on the
>title. 
>
>Now, if you were to ask "what sort of games do you enjoy" I could
>probably give a more satisfying answer, because then I could specify
>certain genres or styles of gameplay. But just because a game doesn't
>suit my taste doesn't mean I can't recognize it as being good.

I think I'd simplify this as whether or not the game had that quality
some books have:  The "couldn't put it down" factor.
AKA the "I had to work/go to school first thing in the morning and I
still stayed up all night reading it since I couldn't stop reading."
factor.

Some games have it, most don't.

A game is "good" if it grabs you and won't let go. 
For me that also tends to mean it has serious replay value, but not
always.  Gimmick games, like M. Night movie might only be good for one
play, but you can't stop till you're done if it's a "GOOD" game.

If it's good enough, DRM and bugs don't even matter.

Right from the start I knew City of Heroes had that extra something,
even though at release, for whatever reason it would disconnect for me
after exactly 5 minutes, making a lot of missions impossible to
complete.   Shortly after the "play in windowed mode" workaround came to
my attention and there were no more issues for me really, until they
patched it later and I could play in normal full screen mode.

Still don't understand why the fullscreen/windowed thing should have
anything at all to do with your connection staying up or not.

See also X-Com, a game that I played for some 26 hours straight,
subsisting on nothing but cigarettes and cans of coke.
Damn was I ever tired and hungry when I finally turned off the game.

Xocyll