Grasping why people like some games and not others

One of the things that truly, really baffles me is how video games are judged.  Not by reviews and magazines - I understand those people are chosen, in part, because they are shills.  But by the public.  So, Bioshock Infinity is a greatly beloved game.  I didn't see it.  Bad shooter mechanics combined with having to comb an area for freaking apples and candy bars to restore health is simply bad game design.

I've had the experience, before.  Assassin's Creed III, Grand Theft Auto IV, among others.  People kept telling me these games were great and I just didn't see it.  On the other hand, games I thought were splendid, like The Saboteur and Alpha Protocol, didn't do very well . . . even if they had gameplay that was the same as or better than other, similar, games that did very well, indeed.

To me, comparisons between GTA 4 and The Saboteur are pretty clear.  The shooting mechanics in The Saboteur were crisper than in GTA 4 - the protagonist would just take cover if near cover without prompting, you could blind fire over cover and do aimed fire.  The driving mechanics were just about the same, too, with the exception that The Saboteur had more tanks, which was awesome, and fewer sloppy, unresponsive vehicles (?!).  So, in shooting and driving, the games were quite a bit alike except The Saboteur had somewhat cleaner and intuitive mechanics and driving around was more fun.  Which . . . you would think would make it a wildly popular game, especially give that you get to kill a bunch of Nazis.

But that's not all The Saboteur was.  Every building could be climbed.  You could use stealth.  You could adopt disguises.  It did everything GTA 4 did and then it added a freerunning stealth game on top of it.  Not a bad one, either.

You couldn't fault The Saboteur for being an insufficiently visually impressive game.  It was a very visually impressive game.  It was a well-rounded, well-designed, good looking game.

Yet, The Saboteur did poorly and GTA 4 was lauded.

With Alpha Protocol, well, the game comparison is really with Deus Ex Human Revolution.  Shooting and stealth were handled about the same in both games, with Alpha Protocol having a more cinematic flair than Human Revolution.  Both had different skill trees that could be developed over the course of the game.  In addition, though, Alpha Protocol had honest-to-god role-playing moments - tricking interrogators by getting under their skins, banging boots with spies (both foreign and domestic, if you get what I mean), actions bearing consequences stuff.  Which Human Revolution was supposed to have but really didn't.

I am without a clue why one did well and the other did not (though in this case, I liked both games).

The only thing that makes sense to me is that video game audiences basically do what they're told . . . though this should not be surprising, they do the same thing with movies, too.  (Talking about The Avengers movie is hard for me, because people will agree on all the things I think make it a bad movie and then conclude they don't matter.  Wooden performances, uneven characterization, frequently absurd characterization, lack of plot . . . I mean, these aren't minor issues.  If you agree that much of the acting was wooden, that characterization was bad and the plot both contrived and full of holes . . . and then go on to conclude that a few laughs make up for this?  Wow.)  This is the only thing that makes sense when considering Bioshock Infinite.  The game mechanics would have been considered uninspiring in 1995.  They were the game mechanics that made a bunch of people predict the death of FPS games as being tired and predictable.  "Go down this rail and shoot everyone you see."  The addition of some superpowers?  Please.  Go play Psi-Ops.  A cover-based third person shooter with stealth and psychic powers.  Three years before Bioshock came out there was a game with a similar game mechanics system just better.  But six years after Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite still plays like a game from the 90s.  A mediocre game from the 90s.

Yet, almost no one says this and few think it's important.  It's bizarre.  Sure, the game is pretty, but it's also downright crude with play . . . not very different from Doom.  But the game is fabulously lauded despite its mediocre and dated gameplay.

For me, the real fuss is . . . trying to find games I like.  There are no reliable narrators!  People tend to follow aggressive ad copy rather than trying to evaluate the game absent the corporate scripted message.  But that makes it hard to find games like The Saboteur, which does everything I want a video game to do and does it well.  When the waters are so hopelessly muddied that you can't tell good reviews from bad ones, how does one accurately find games you want to play?

Bioshock Infinity sucks

Everyone loved this game and I can't see why.  The game is downright crude in its implementation, really.  Here's a partial list of its crude implementations.

First person.  Really?  The continuation of first person shooters baffles me.  When Gears of War came out, this smooth shooting experience of moving from cover to cover in tactical situations, I thought, "This is the end of first person."  Even before then, first person had become . . . limited.  The lack of any hint of peripheral vision made it frustrating, especially when the game contained a melee component (as Bioshock Infinite does).

Health packs.  Really?  When Halo's - the original Halo - had a shooting game that was as thrilling as could be without a single health pack, I thought health packs were gone.  As opposed to first person perspective, this one is mostly gone from other games.  At no point did I have to look for a health pack when playing Tomb Raider.

Can't fire from cover.  Really?  You can't lean over or fire over low cover.  That's just . . . baffling to me.  Even most first person shooters have this one.

"The spas defense."  In first person games with a melee component, one of the truly stupid, awful things that happens is enemies in melee combat will step out of the character's line of sight.  If you see it happen, it is often accompanied by a spas as they hop to one side.  What this does is take advantage of the limitations of the first person perspective to aid in their defense.  It's just an awful gameplay element, really highlighting the fact that characters in first person games can only turn around slowly and can't move their goddamn heads.  It highlights the weaknesses in perspective of the first person format, which is bad on its own but also draws attention to a weakness in the interface to gain advantage over the player.  Ugh.

The game also lacks any radar or other mechanism so you can keep track of what's going on around you.  Again, this really highlights that the first person perspective has a very limited range of vision.  This is doubly so because game levels are getting downright enormous.  Characters can attack you from such a range that I struggled - with a sixty inch television! - to find their muzzle flashes to determine their location.  (Of course, they never have any problem finding you.  They know exactly where you are at all times, even when you hide.)

Lack of aimed shots.  This one, like so many others, just amazes me that it doesn't have it.  They animated that when you shoot someone in the fucking face their hat falls off but not the little tidbit about how when you shoot someone in the fucking face three or four times they tend to die.

These are, I think, fairly objective reasons to conclude that the game is crude.  Things like the inability to fire over or around cover and lack of headshot quick kills is just preposterous.

Then there's the platforming elements.  I . . . have few words.  You can jump from hook to hook but . . . so fucking what?  Is this supposed to somehow impress me?  Characters of superhuman athletic prowess are commonplace in video games.  Compare swinging from hook to hook to the last Tomb Raider offering, or Drake's Fortune, or - and this becomes cruel - Assassin's Creed or Splinter Cell.  Jesus, this is your exciting mechanism to get around a floating city?  Like the shooting, this is just crude.  It's visually uninspiring after the displays of awesome athletic prowess we see even in other shooters.

Sure, I get it that the art direction is slick.  I wholly approve of getting away from those dystopian grays and browns, putting a game in the sunshine.  Great.  Okay.  I've heard the story is good but . . . it didn't grab me from the onset, something about saving a girl, who I then gathers becomes your sidekick.  Great, another girl sidekick.  Jesus.  Can we get past that, already?  Really, guys.  While I appreciate art direction in a game, you don't play art direction.  If stuff like art direction and music is what your game has going for it, you should probably be in movies, not games.

Anyway, the game sucks.  People who like it are wrong.  Nuff said.