Well damn. This actually sounds pretty awesome.

Except I em entirely incapable of playing FPS games with a gamepad.

"feel for the steaks" ha!

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.

Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.

I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.

Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.

>> ^NetRunner:

I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.


I don't think yahtzee dislikes the idea of cover, just the stupid, context-sensitive, stuck-to-wall style of cover.

And as for regenerating health, it has a number of problems. First, it rewards not playing the game. Pinned down? Instead of making a tactical decision about the risk of a fraught run to get that health pack, you're waiting. It robs the game of tension.
And the devs hate this. So how do they counter? With endlessly respawning enemies until you reach a certain point. So you frequently end up making a frantic dash to what you hope is the next checkpoint instead of engaging the enemies.

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I think Yahzee isn't technically a reviewer of games, he's oped'ing about games with humour. His reviews aren't particularly objective but they never claim to be.

And yeah, a lot of us do spend time wishing for old mechanics to come back. Winning a fight with a few % health left against all odds is far more satisfying than hunkering down behind a wall, regen'ing, popping out to shoot, regen'ing etc. Leaning around corners (rather than sticking to the wall and suddenly getting a huge panoramic as far as the camera can scan) is another example. No, we don't generally want verbatim copies of old games to come back, but some of the meatier bits would be nice.

I'd humbly submit that older games don't hold up against modern games because they aren't supposed to. That doesn't mean older game concepts don't hold up. eg. Dead Island doesn't have regenerating health or a cover system, which really do help ramp up the 'survival horror' factor.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

I don't think yahtzee dislikes the idea of cover, just the stupid, context-sensitive, stuck-to-wall style of cover.
And as for regenerating health, it has a number of problems. First, it rewards not playing the game. Pinned down? Instead of making a tactical decision about the risk of a fraught run to get that health pack, you're waiting. It robs the game of tension.
And the devs hate this. So how do they counter? With endlessly respawning enemies until you reach a certain point. So you frequently end up making a frantic dash to what you hope is the next checkpoint instead of engaging the enemies.


I like the *cough* "stupid" context-sensitive style of cover. Rather than strafing back and forth, I just pull the left trigger. Instead of stupidly exposing my entire profile to fire, I only expose part of it.

Health packs don't result in me making a tactical decision to grab them during firefights. It makes me backtrack and search for health packs I passed by because I didn't need them at the time, but now need after my last firefight.

Also, the kind of tension you're talking about isn't about health packs, it's about death being some sort of big deal. Most games these days dying doesn't rewind you much, and they almost never just boot you back to the main menu and tell you to restore from your last save.

I think that's a good thing, because I find big death penalties to be a really lazy way for developers to try to get you emotionally involved in the gameplay. It can also easily backfire, and frustrate people to the point where they stop having fun, and decide to never buy another game in that series again.

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games.


Yahtzee is as much a games reviewer as the waynes brothers were movie critics in Living Color. They focused less on details (unless it was called for) and made funny comparisons instead.

And as an avid long time gamer, I DO miss the old days! I am itching to get into the new Tribes 4 game, and would love to see a new Unreal Tournament! Halflife 2 part 3 on the other hand, maybe if valve picked up one of the new cutting edge engines then yes, please. But the source engine is really dated for a standered shooter. I only accepted it in portal because portal wasn't a shooter.

>> ^Asmo:

I think Yahzee isn't technically a reviewer of games, he's oped'ing about games with humour.

I think that's right. Even if he was a reviewer, I already know that for the most part he hates games I like, and likes games I couldn't care less about (Hi there Driver: San Francisco!).

>> ^Asmo:
Winning a fight with a few % health left against all odds is far more satisfying than hunkering down behind a wall, regen'ing, popping out to shoot, regen'ing etc.

I guess this is why I'm not a big shooter fan. Narrowly winning a fight usually makes me think I've made a mistake, suck generally, or just need to turn the difficulty down a notch.

Most times these days you're only really in danger in boss battles, and usually there's some trick to the encounter you need to figure out, and once figured out it's not that hard to execute it.

>> ^Asmo:
Dead Island doesn't have regenerating health or a cover system, which really do help ramp up the 'survival horror' factor.


I bet ammo's hard to find too? Yeah, for a survival horror game, it seems like keeping you feeling desperate and overmatched is the name of the game. Regenning health has no place in a game like that.

At least one of the reviews of Resistance 3 said that it plays a lot more like a survival horror game than the previous ones did. Now if that's what they were going for, that seems like a good reason to do away with the regenerating health, but if they just did it to amp up the difficulty it seems like they could've done something different.

Also, it belatedly occurs to me that Resistance always had health packs. You had 4 little bubbles on your health bar. If you partially drained the bubble, not taking damage for a few seconds would make the bubble refill, but if you completely emptied it, it stayed lost. Health packs would refill empty bubbles. I wonder if they're still using the same system, or if there's no more regeneration.

Based on the story reasons for why your health regenerated in the first 2 games, the new protagonist should have regenerating health too...

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I'd like to experience some of the good old days of shooters again not because games were better back then, much of the design has moved on, but now days there is just a flood of games all using the same mechanics as each other with no variety or substance.

Resistance 3 was a breath of fresh air, old school style gameplay mixed with modern mechanics. The health system, however was imbalanced. They could've done more to make it work better, but overall though, i really enjoyed Resistance dispite a few questionable design decisions. The fact that you can carry all the weapons at once nearly made me tear up.

DNF is a good example of totally cocking up the "old school" approach by implementing the WRONG modern features. Firstly the regenerating health. This right away causes a problem; you can regenerate your health, so for some challenge we need to make the enemies do a lot more damage to keep the player from abusing the system. What happens? You are almost always sitting back behind cover while waiting for your health to regen before firing again. That's not Duke Nukem! I heard other ideas were that you needed to kill an enemy to regain health, THAT is Duke.
Then there's the 2 weapon limit. George Broussard in all his game design incompetence said they couldn't find a way to implement a weapon wheel effectively on consoles... Resistance 3 seemed to do it fine. So did HL2 years back. Moron.

Regen health and 2 weapon limit can and do work for some games like Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War, but FFS let's try something a little different once in a while. But some developers use them as a development crutch; less testing, balancing and design required. Less effort in other words. Or they use it to make the game less complex, which is a bad thing. Ninja Gaiden is a good example. It seems to be going down a path of less and less substance, there's only the combat. This is terrible. The original game's store, upgrades, potions, rewards for exploration, non-linear main world all helped to pace the game better rather than an exhausting trudge through constant unrelenting combat seen in Ninja Gaiden 2 and from the sounds, even more so for the third game.

@NetRunner: I personally can't stand the new style of shooter with regenerating health, cover systems, and two-weapon loadouts. So news of a shooter (a CONSOLE shooter, at that) that returns the old-style mechanics is pretty exciting to me.

I could go on exhaustively about why I feel that way, but I won't.

I don't always agree with Yahtzee, but I've watched enough of his videos to know which of the complaints he makes about games will drive me up the wall, which ones I won't care about, etc.

I guess I stand corrected, most gamers are now grumpy old men pining for the glories of yesteryear.

Fuck me, no wonder they advertize Viagra during X-Play.

I hear what you guys are saying, I just don't feel the same way. I guess part of it is that I don't really get the appeal of first person shooters anymore. I sorta liked 'em back when Doom was a hot name in gaming, and when I was young enough to think Duke Nukem 3D was groundbreaking for its mature themes. The last one I really liked was Half-Life, but that's because it heavily incorporated story elements, not because of the game mechanics (which were far from groundbreaking).

I thought Gears of War was a refreshing change of pace, and IMO presented the first real gameplay innovations we've seen in shooters since Doom. I'm glad there's been a lot of copying of their cover mechanics, since it adds real tactical considerations like cover fire and flanking to firefights. It's not enough to really make me a shooter fan again, but it's enough to keep me from being annoyed at developers for just continually putting new paint on 20-year old game mechanics.

I guess I just generally prefer action-adventure or sandbox games nowadays. Combat shouldn't be 100% of what games are about anymore as far as I'm concerned. If developers still want to make shooting the centerpiece of gameplay, then it should at least require some thought along the way, and force you to change weapons and tactics every now and then so it doesn't get stale.

Reverting back to "classic" shooter mechanics just seems like a step in the wrong direction to me.

Oh, and full disclosure, the only modern shooters I've played are Resistance, Gears, and Halo. Maybe I'm just missing out on something new and unique that everyone knows about from CoD or Battlefield, but from the sound of the reviews, I kinda doubt it.

@NetRunner

I would also kill to see those older style of games come back. No one wants old graphics, they just want old content. Not only did i feel like there was more at risk and more difficulty in older games, but i felt like i got my money's worth out of it - which i must say i have only felt about VALVE games of recent times!

If they made a good modern isometric rpg like fallout or baldur's gate, with a kick ass story, i'd buy it, its sequel and its prequal and about 20 expansions for each.

Edit: Bloody spelling

I too yearn for the ``olden days'' of gaming, when a game was a stick and a length of yarn, and games didn't come with these newfangled ``graphics'' or ``rules'' and everything was 2D including your grandmother.