The cardinal sins of modern gaming

Any gamer worth their salt knows that deep down, gaming has some pretty serious flaws. It may now be all shiny graphics and Kinect bum wiggling, but it doesn’t distract from the fact that there are some serious issues that are being ignored really, really hard in the vain hope that they’ll go away. Guys, that isn’t working. Instead, I’m going to drag them kicking and screaming into the limelight, in the hope they’ll burn alive like a Buffy-era vampire. Well, one can hope. Anyway, onwards!

Stop the ridiculous sexualisation of female characters

Ok, yes, I’m kicking off by beating games over the head with the feminism stick (although it wouldn’t be a stick because that would too phallic and OH GOD WHY AM I CONSIDERING THIS). I know you’re all sick of hearing it, but I’m bringing it up because it affects you all, guys. You know these big boobed, barely dressed, brain dead bimbos they keep putting in games? Are you attracted to them? No, of course not! You’re too smart to be interested in them, but game developers don’t think so. They seem to think all gamers are Neanderthal style drooling manchildren, looking to bop some bint over the head and drag her back to your cave. You should be insulted, bloke-types! Why aren’t you?!

Stop overusing quick time events

UUUURGGHH. Ok, this was an interesting experiement back when God of War did it (and Shenmue, apparently, but I didn’t play Shenmue because my Dreamcast went to the great console home in the sky before I got a chance to even hear about it), but now it’s like there’s a contract where every game needs to include quick time events or they’ll be sued into oblivion, or something. Guess what? MOST GAMES DO NOT NEED QUICK TIME EVENTS. All they’ve done is remove any element of skill from whatever you were trying to do, and relegated the player to the position of lab rat pressing X to not die (cheers Zero Punctuation). Get rid.

Stop the excessive handholding

Ok, this picture doesn't have much to do with this. IT'S REALLY HARD TO FIND RELEVANT PICTURE ON GOOGLE, OK?!

Since when did we all become stupid? I’m just wondering, because we’re never allowed to explore on our own anymore, are we? I miss the days when we plonked in a great big world environment and told, ‘There. Deal with that’, and we’d all go off and explore and poke things with sticks to our hearts’ content. Now, we can’t escape from the Big Pointy Arrow of Doom. Even my beloved Bioshock and Okami are guilty of this. You can let go of our hands, game developers! We’re grownups now, we can handle getting lost for a bit.

Stop padding out games with bloody fetch quests

This. Is. So. BORING. I really enjoyed Fable 3, but doing the friendship quests nearly sapped all of my will to live. You couldn’t be mates with someone until you’d traipsed off to a nearby village to go dig up a letter or something to bring back to them. It was pointless, repetitive, and downright irritating. It’s lazy and boring, and it needs to stop. NOW.

Stop copying each other

This is the big one. Go take a look at the shelves of your nearest game store sometime. I promise you what’ll you see at first glance is the same game over and over, like someone got a bit too trigger happy with the clone stamp in Photoshop. The big sellers these days seems to be either brown war simulators or grey shoot ‘em ups. I’m not saying they have their place, but can we have something, well, different every now and again? I find myself salivating over trailers for Lollipop Chainsaw, just because it dares to introduce a bit of colour to proceedings (although it does rather commit the first cardinal sin I outlined a minute ago). That shouldn’t be happening! I shouldn’t walk into a game store and go, ‘Meh. It all looks crap.’ Where did all the creativity go?

Don’t even get me started on the Wii/Kinect/Move fandango, or I’ll have to claw out my eyes with salad tongs.