Traditional not transitional gamer

This a game without the bloat of the modern blockbuster – no co-op mode to allow two friends to assassinate hand-in-hand; no lip-service multiplayer to distract the development team and divert their budget; no upgradable hub to grow or furnish; no open world to impress and weary. Rather you’re given a series of handcrafted missions, each with its own optional twists and turns, each with a start, a middle and an end, the plot written by a designer, the script penned by a scriptwriter and the narrative transcribed by you.

– Simon Parkin, 8th October 2012

The above extract is from the Guardian’s review of Dishonored. It easily sums up how I like my videogaming experience when I get the opportunity. I say that because most videogame titles released today are now a mixture of SP, MP and Co-Op. The sum of those parts don’t often make for a better experience. I prefer a standalone single-player game where developers have not seen their imagination soured by the publisher and their marketing tick-box.

Dishonored will be the first purely SP first-person game that I have played for some time. I really am looking forward to the experience and it got me thinking…what have been my favourite pure SP game experiences that I have completed on the current console generation?

Here’s just a few of those titles that I believe are worth mentioning…

Bioshock – 2K

My PC at the time didn’t have the minimum spec. to run Bioshock. I was disappointed and decided to buy a console and so ending the PC as a gaming format option for me.

Bioshock showed me that games could have meaningful consequences to players actions. It allowed the player to believe in the character and world around him. I applaud 2K because it did something that cinema and TV do well but gaming generally doesn’t – successfully show the passing of time. The above clip is the last scene in Bioshock – if you played nice – and bookends the story with a conclusion that leaves you with no ambiguity.

I mentioned in a recent post that I had a few topics that I hadn’t written-up but hope to soon. One of those topics – How do games approach the issue of ‘ageing’? – is something I wish to explore fully in a separate post but you can see that 2K weren’t shy about ageing your character to his death-bed in this last scene of Bioshock. Death and ageing are two key areas that I believe developers have been very lazy in their approach to. In a pure single-player game experience the topic of age and death could be big, big moments for the player and those moments shouldn’t just be just for allaying NPCs of their place in the story.

— Part 2 to follow —