Cutscene Catastrophe
Back in the day, cutscenes were rendered in CGI, & served to reinforce the plot highlights of what little story ( the dull bits ) piggy-backed along with the game ( the fun bits ). The great thing about them was that on your second play-through ( or your first if you were really lucky ) you could skip all these scenes with the press of a button & continue to enjoy playing, which is what you acquired the game for in the first place.
Unfortunately, certain trends have since emerged to derail this streamlined process, namely 1] The growing identification ( mostly on the part of the game designers ) of videogames with art, & 2] The growing realization ( amongst those same game designers ) that many gamers skip the cutscenes, robbing the misguided gamers of this important & uplifting content.
So, what to do? Simply removing the option of skipping the cutscenes is always enthusiastically criticized, but what if you could incorporate the events of a cutscene into the game itself, giving the player the illusion of still fully participating in real play, but actually robbing them of any meaningful activity - now you’ve got something.
And so the new-style cutscene was born, finally giving lucky gamers the experience of being locked in a room with an animitronic puppet show. Half Life 2 & Bioshock both employ this type of story telling, but the current champion is Halo 3, the innovator of the unskipable in-game micro cutscene, which bombards the unhappy player with dozens of 10 - 20 second long intervals of slowdown & the world’s worst voice acting.
I mention Half Life 2, Bioshock & Halo 3 specifically for a reason - these are all games I sold prematurely because the unskipable cutscenes robbed them of replayability. Which presents a small problem for the respective publishers, because instead of selling people 3 new games, my local videogame store sold them 3 of my old games.
I’m all for art ( I won’t argue whether or not videogames are art, that’s another rant ), but clearly not at the expense of fun & basic playability - publishers need to rein in their budding Bergmans & Godards & give us back control of how we experience our games.
-Happy Marios.
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