I used to be a fan of the “curve.” You know, the ingenious creation used to bring under-achievers up to an artificial norm. I never really needed it when I was in high school, but I grew to appreciate it during my college years.
It always seems to work out that way when you are the person(s) benefiting from the curve, but the situation really hits me differently when I am on the other side. This week, news leaked out that Capcom is going to “dumb down” some of the controls in their latest Street Fighter installment because gamers have complained about the difficulty of the, now standard, controls. Is this really the direction that we want the gaming industry to go?
Find out what I think after the jump!
Do we really want to have our games dumbed down because people consider them too difficult? I don’t remember anyone complaining back when Ninja Gaiden 2 came out for the original Nintendo. That game was really hard and that was one of the things that people grew to appreciate. If you want to play an easy game, go buy a kids’ game. Go play one of the Elmo or Barbie games that are available for the various systems.
I thought that most gamers came to the table for a challenge, but maybe that’s just me. What’s that old saying? Something about not being able to stand the heat and getting out of the kitchen; you get my point.
I mean come on people… These maneuvers (or games in general) are difficult to pull off because they are supposed to be difficult. Do you really think that it is supposed to be easy to summon a flaming Dragon Punch, or grab hold of your opponent, jump 8 feet in the air, and pile drive them into the ground. I don’t think so. How else are we going to separate the true players from the noobs online?
It’s one thing to “re-balance” a game by altering the damage percentages and whatnot, but to change the control scheme to make some things more accessible to new players is ridiculous. If you ask me, this completely ruins the spirit that the game was originally built on. I remember back when the Street Fighter 2 games hit the arcades. Back in the day, masses crowded around the arcade machines in the corner of the arcade and cheered on the competition. When someone stepped up and chose a character like Zangief you knew that you were in for one of two things: someone who had absolutely no idea what they were doing or someone who was about to completely wipe the floor with everyone. That was the spirit of the game. It was all about competition and truly separating the men from the boys.
I seem to remember that the masses also cried foul when Ninja Gaiden hit the Xbox back a few years ago. There were a lot of people who were concerned that the game was too difficult to complete for most people. Isn’t that the point?
Shouldn’t beating a certain game, or perfecting a certain skill/maneuver in a game be a true accomplishment? Do you really want everything just handed to you?
The problem is that the current generation of gamers is getting lazy. Period.
Most of the masses don’t want to work to accomplish anything, they want things handed to them on silver platter. Are certain achievements too difficult to obtain? Just join up with a few friends online and stage situations where you accomplish the goal.
Want to unlock the super secret weapon to use online? That’s cool, just drop the difficulty to the lowest setting and run through the game in 4 hours. Oh, and don’t forget to go online afterwards and complain about how short the game was. Maybe we should just go back to Atari 2600 style a controller where the options for controls are limited to a four-directional joystick and a single button; yeah, that’s progress!
If they want to ruin the game experience for them, then so be it., but don’t ruin mine. I don’t want to hear those same, lazy gamers complain when they run into a true gamer online and get the crap kicked out of them.
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4 responses so far ↓
1 floyd // Nov 15, 2007 at 12:07 am
I have to agree with this, to some extent.
It might seem like a quick and easy way to level the playing field by simplifying the controls, but in the end this might take away from the experience. Everybody’s a noob at some point, but the only way to get better is to keep taking on the pros - eventually the beatings will subside. Being able to look back on how far your skills have come is what makes it worthwhile, but jumping into a game and pulling off insane moves by just button mashing gets old, real fast.
Hopefully Capcom will remember what made their games so fun in the first place and not make compromises for casual gamers who can’t commit.
2 aniki // Nov 15, 2007 at 4:17 am
I don’t know how many people played it, but Super Street Fighter 2 X Turbo Revival Advance (that was its real name) on the GBA had optional, simplified controls that you could use by pressing Select at any point in the single-player Arcade mode. (It wasn’t available in multiplayer.)
So long as they leave the “real” controls in for hardcore beat-em-up fans and only have the simplified as an option somewhere I don’t see the problem.
Although I guess it could be an issue online unless you limit match-ups to people using the same control layouts.
3 saphira963 // Nov 23, 2007 at 5:37 pm
This is truly Rothbartian. Who really thinks that dumbing down a video game for the casual gamers so that they can spend five minutes playing before training DDR and then go play NES. Oh and yes, i said it. We all know that every other casual gamer bit on the crazy lady trying to sell the training DDR. Word to the wise, DDR isn’t worth it, even if you get the real thing.
4 Some guy // Apr 8, 2008 at 1:49 pm
“Before you can move your rook, you must pat your head and rub your belly while playing hot potato with your feet.” Sounds dumb right? If being able to do hard moves is how you measure skill then you need to do some self evaluating. Anyone can move a chess piece over a board, the really difficult task is deciding when and where to move the piece in relation to all the other pieces(yours and the opponent’s). Yay, after all that time in training mode, you can finally do the Raging Demon. Now try to find out how to land it on someone decent when they aren’t dizzy(sweeping the opponent and doing it before they get up doesn’t work).
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