by Wolf Stormm

Created on: September 15, 2009   Last Updated: September 18, 2009

Gone are the days of Hide and Seek. There's probably a video game that goes "Hide and Seek- The Legend (Hide, run, be stealthy and grow the strength of your invisibility powers to become the best hider that ever lived) ". Gone are the days where games played physically active were the only ones in existence. A horde of video games on a horde of platforms (PSP, Wii, XBOX360 etc.) and a horde of players for the same. It would be tolerable if not for the mediocre, low quality and not to mention monotonously similar games that have infiltrated the zone of play. Prince of Persia is followed by the Legend of Zord and so on until you have a whole battalion of people fighting one war or the other.

A game today is evaluated by innumerable factors. The quality of sound, appearance, game response etc. are a few of the necessary points to note while one of the most important category to note while assessing a game is its audience appeal. A game with the best graphics, background music or characters will not sell if it does not account for a good story line, playable difficulty and overall interaction with the daily gamer.

Somebody once asked me "What is it with racing games and heavy metal background music?". True. Every racing game right from Colin Mcrae's '"Dirt" to Baja -"Limits of Control" has rock/metal music banging in the background. And no one likes racing in silent mode unless you simply can't stand the sound. One thing the worst video games thus have is the limited background music or rather a repetitive music throughout the game that bores the listening gamer to dreaming of hearing something new.

Another turn-off is low graphic quality, bad camera angles and the never-ending supply of stick figures/box shape figures as game characters. This is the 21st century for heaven's sake! Bad camera angles can annoy the gamer to no end. I have actually stood up trying to look at the game through another angle on the screen because the camera simply wouldn't turn that way. Low graphics quality can also mean excessive glare or in contrast, dim lighting, transparent objects that take away what realism is left in a game and undermine any respect it has left in the gamers' eyes.

The mother of all bad video games: Games that give the worst when you expect too much. The Harry Potter games on the XBOX360 platform are said to be a mundane performance of everyday tasks where Harry Potter runs around his supposedly magical world doing odd jobs for every Jane, Jill and Johnny. Where is the fantasy? The magic captured by the movies and books? The gaming counterparts of movies are extremely sub-standard and hardly deserve to be associated with their origins. My advice: Make an original game or show due respect to an original story.

All said and done, don't knock a game for the reviews on the internet, television or magazines before you try it. Some games may seem more worse than the worst possible to others, but just may turn out for you, to be the most entertaining gaming experience ever.

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Game on!

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