Five Great Games I'll Never Play

So many video games have been made over the past few decades that no single person could ever hope to play them all from beginning to end. This isn't an exaggeration; it's pretty clear that there just aren't enough hours in a lifetime, especially when you consider that a third of a life is spent sleeping while another third is typically spent on other irritating obligations such as a full time job. I'll let you do the rest of the math, since I'm not exactly sure how to estimate the average length of a video game or the total number of video games ever published, but I'm certain that you'd have to dedicate your life to video games in order to experience everything this medium has to offer.

Of course, no single person would really want to play all these games, either, since no one likes every genre and a lot of games are just crap. The list gets a lot shorter when you limit yourself to games which are generally considered to be worth playing, and there's an even shorter list of games that are so highly regarded and well known that they're almost considered mandatory.

I have to admit, however, that I've missed out on a lot of supposedly great classics. I grew up with Super Mario Bros. and Doom, and I've played my fair share of Zelda games, but there are a number of immensely popular games that I've never played, and most likely never will. For your reading pleasure, I present the first five such video game franchises that came to mind, listed in reverse order for dramatic effect.

5: Metal Gear Solid

I grew up with two brothers, and at some point my mother must have lost her mind, because by the time the Sega Dreamcast came out, we each had our own console. Of course, though we weren't sharing them like we did with the old SNES, it would have been silly to keep more than one of the same console in the house, so after my older brother got his own PlayStation, I got a Nintendo 64. He got Metal Gear Solid, and I got Ocarina of Time. Fair enough, right?

I watched him play the game for a while. It was pretty entertaining to watch, although I couldn't tell if it was really fun to play because he was the kind of person who would constantly get mad as hell at any game that presented any sort of challenge, which is probably why he hardly plays video games at all anymore. (That, and having a life.) I was really only interested in the story, even if it was hard to follow, but I never had a chance to play through the game myself.

Every time a new Metal Gear game is released, I think, "wow, that looks pretty cool, I should play it." But with a story-driven series like Metal Gear, I could never bring myself to play the latest installment without playing through all the ones that came before it (useless non-canonical spin-offs, if any exist, excluded). At this point, I'm so many games behind that I don't think I could possibly catch up. Even if I wanted to try, doing so would be quite an investment, since I don't even own a PlayStation 3. (The alternative is to watch a few dozen hours of "Let's Play" videos on YouTube, which would be fine, since the later Metal Gear games have such a high cutscene-to-gameplay ratio that they're practically movies anyway.)

Update: I must have psychic powers or something, because a new Metal Gear game was announced just after I wrote this stupid post. Too spooky.

4: Final Fantasy

I have my doubts about whether it's possible to enjoy Final Fantasy without liking anime, and my history with anime was short and complicated. I thought Japanese animation was awesome when I watched Princess Mononoke and Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist, but when I saw what typical modern anime was like, I was filled with shame and disgust.

Okay, so maybe it isn't quite fair to say that this has anything to do with Final Fantasy, but there's also the fact that I'm sickened by turn-based combat.

The Final Fantasy franchise is so famous and influential that I almost feel like I can't call myself a gamer without having played at least a couple of games in the series. Then again, I don't call myself a gamer because "gamer" is a stupid word, and on the few occasions when I actually watched my Playstation-owning older brother play Final Fantasy VII, I was bored to tears.

And don't get me started on the character design.

3: World of Warcraft

I never liked MMORPGs, and I've always refused to play anything that requires a monthly subscription fee (which is why I don't own an Xbox 360). It's probably no surprise, therefore, that I never bothered to play World of Warcraft, and that I fully intend to die without ever having played it, especially now that the newest expansion looks like an homage to Kung Fu Panda, or a strange attempt to grab the attention of the furry crowd, or both. (Okay, so the Warcraft franchise never took itself that seriously, but really, this is too much.)

I wouldn't say that World of Warcraft is a classic; it's not quite old enough for that. But it is — or was, during the height of its popularity — extremely important in the gaming world. I am, though, a bit surprised that the game ever became as popular as it did, considering its connection to a series of RTS games that the vast majority of WoW subscribers have almost certainly never played. Brand recognition wasn't a factor, for them; the game must have earned its popularity by being fun, or something. I can't say I understand it, but WoW just managed to nail the perfect combination of whatever things make MMORPGs fun for those who don't despise them.

2: Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike, the popular Half-Life modification turned stand-alone game, seems like a pretty big deal. However, at the time of its release, I hadn't graduated from console games to PC games, and the only "modern" shooters I can remember having played at length are GoldenEye 007 and its spiritual successor Perfect Dark. I never even played a first-person shooter online until my brother bought an Xbox and a copy of Halo and needed a fourth player to beat some racist kids at CTF via GameSpy Arcade.

Also, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it wasn't until 2005 (when I bought the PC version of F.E.A.R.) that I realized how much easier it is to play first-person shooters with a keyboard and mouse. The downside is that I haven't been able to go back to console shooters ever since. Awkwardly aiming with my thumbs just feels so wrong, and I don't understand how I ever managed to enjoy it.

The result of all this is that I missed out on a lot of competitive online shooters, Counter-Strike included. After the most recent winter sale on Steam, I did end up with a free copy of Counter-Strike: Source in my inventory, but I'm probably going to send it to someone else instead of playing it myself. I'm sure the game is fun, and that it rightfully earned its place in gaming history, but it's... well, it's old.

Don't get me wrong; I can appreciate old games. But Counter-Strike is a competitive and exclusively online multiplayer game. Forget the fact that I prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS — when I say that Counter-Strike is old, I mean that its online community, while still active, is almost entirely composed of people who have been playing for hundreds (if not thousands) of hours and already know exactly what they're doing. Considering this and the game's competitive nature, I suspect the players in the average Counter-Strike server would be less welcoming to newcomers than the other guys playing another game that came out last month.

Starting Counter-Strike or Counter-Strike: Source now would probably be like joining a random DotA server with no prior knowledge of how the ARTS genre works. (In case you're not getting the joke here, I'll just point out that ARTS players are widely known for being obnoxious jerks who talk trash more than they actually play and who frequently ban people from their servers not for cheating but simply for being insufficiently skilled at the game in question. I even considered putting DotA on this list, as well, since I have no interest in ever playing a game in which being a newbie is a bannable offense, but then I'd have to admit that DotA is "great" in some way, and I cannot.)

If I wanted to break into the Counter-Strike scene, I'd probably be better off buying Global Offensive... but, again, I still prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

1: Sonic the Hedgehog

My first video game console was a Nintendo Entertainment System. (I was actually born just a few years after the console came out and, by the time I played it, the Super Nintendo had already been released in North America, but my parents were thrifty. I'm sure they saved some money by getting an old console, and I was too young to know I was playing with outdated technology, so everyone was happy.) Although I did, eventually, inherit a Sega Genesis from a member of my extended family, this wasn't until years later, and I only ever played the games that I got with the console. Sonic the Hedgehog wasn't one of them.

At this point, I could have gone and bought the game or one of its sequels, but I wasn't interested in collecting old games at the time, and I had no feelings of nostalgia for the spiky Sega mascot. Running fast never seemed like a very cool super-power anyway. To this day, I've never played a Sonic game, with the exception of Sonic Adventure, and that was only for a few dull minutes.

I can't really say I have anything against the Sonic games, since I've never played them. I am, though, a little freaked out by the fanbase with which I'd be associating myself if I actually decided to put the Sonic series on my to-do list. At some point over the past 21 years, the Sonic franchise began to accumulate one of the worst followings in all of video game history.

It's almost difficult to describe what makes Sonic fans so horrifying. While the most hardcore fans of any video game series tend to be a bit kooky, Sonic fans set themselves apart from the rest with some of the worst fan-art and fan-fiction ever created — loads of it — complete with innumerable attempts at "original characters" which essentially amount to badly drawn re-colorings of the original Sonic design. I learned to avoid sites like deviantART because of this stuff.

Almost all fan-art is horrible, and fan-fiction of all kinds is so uniformly bad that I wish copyright holders (particularly of Twilight, Harry Potter, Sonic and every anime) would try a bit harder to crack down on unauthorized use of their intellectual property. At the very least, perhaps this would put an end to the delusion that fan-art is actual art and that a work of fan-fiction will ever be recognized as actual literature. (Please don't use Fifty Shades of Grey as a counter-example; erotic fiction is trash, and by the time it was published, the novel had no doubt shed all connection to Twilight, which is also trash.) Anyone who uploads poorly drawn cartoons of "[insert name here] the Hedgehog" to deviantART, or writes erotic fan-fiction based on Sonic or any other video game involving anthropomorphic animals, deserves to be sued into bankruptcy.

I know that playing the game would not mean participating in this foolishness, but I just can't do it. Playing Sonic the Hedgehog after witnessing what goes on in the terrifying underworld of Sonic fandom would be like watching Signs after seeing a video of Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix viciously beating a small child to death with a couple of crowbars. (Disclaimer: this never actually happened.)

What Ever Happened to Cheat Codes?

If you've been playing video games for more than a few years, you almost surely remember a time when cheating was a standard feature a lot of games. I'm not referring, of course, to the kind of cheating that gets you permanently banned from your favorite server — the kind that requires exploitation of programming bugs or "hacking" of the software — but rather to the use of built-in cheat codes that developers would include in their games to spice things up and to assist the less gifted among us.

You might even know a few of them after all these years. If you ever played Doom, then IDDQD and IDKFA should be burned permanently into your brain. While invulnerability and instant access to the game's entire arsenal of weapons have the potential to suck all of the fun out of any demon-slaying adventure, the developers trusted us to use these codes responsibly, whether that meant using them only in dire circumstances, only after completing the game without them, or never at all. Some players, I'm sure, preferred instead to use them all the time, but that was okay as long as they had fun doing it.

It wasn't very long ago that the inclusion of cheat codes was the norm, but at some point, they gradually disappeared. Although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to back it up, it seems to me that cheat codes faded out of common existence around the same time that "achievements" became ubiquitous and downloadable content (DLC) became the industry's choice method of squeezing more money out of their customers. There isn't necessarily a causal relationship here, but the disappearance of built-in cheats does seem to coincide with a more general transformation in the way games are made and marketed.

There were cheat codes in the 2005 horror/shooter game F.E.A.R. — one of my favorite games of the past ten years, although I don't like to admit it, since the plot went from mediocre to insufferably bad after the first installment. The same cheats worked in both expansion packs, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate, released in 2006 and 2007, respectively. But the first true sequel, the 2009 game F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, was devoid of cheat codes. Want to be invincible? Too bad.

Instead of cheats, the game had a few dozen achievements to unlock (which, like most achievements, don't really give you anything except a little "congratulations" for performing various in-game tasks which usually aren't very challenging). This, along with the inexplicable removal of several useful features (like dedicated multiplayer servers and the ability to lean around corners) as well as the implementation of digital rights management (which is arguably far more intrusive than a simple product key and disc check), makes the transition from F.E.A.R. to F.E.A.R. 2 somewhat representative, in my eyes, of how video games have changed as a whole.

While achievements are by no means a logical replacement for cheat codes, they have filled the spaces formerly occupied by cheats on websites like GameFAQs. Look up any recent game and go to the "cheats" tab, and you'll likely see a list of trophies, achievements, or other unlockables instead. The page will likely tell you how to unlock each one, but this is information which can usually be accessed in-game. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to list achievements on a cheat site, but achievements must have seemed like a logical replacement for the cheat codes that disappeared around the time that these non-functional "unlockables" emerged.

Of course, cheat codes and unlockables are not mutually exclusive features; many games have had both, and some games (like the Nintendo 64 shooters GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark) combined the two concepts by including cheats that had to be earned, not simply looked up and punched in. However, the trend in modern games is to forgo cheats entirely in favor of unlockables, which are more often achievements than anything useful. If a game does have achievements, cheats are usually absent, and vice versa.

I won't say this is because cheating makes the achievements too easy to get — after all, if the developers want to preserve some kind of competitiveness or genuine challenge in achievement hunting, they can just program their games to lock achievements if cheats are activated, as is done in Half-Life 2 — but developers who put achievements in their games likely care a bit too much about controlling the player's experience. They care about "challenging" and "rewarding" the player (which is unfortunate because the gameplay is rarely challenging and victory is rarely rewarding). They don't care nearly enough about letting the player have fun in his or her own way.

But I can't lay all the blame on developers. They're not alone in their belief that cheats can ruin a game, even though the player is free to decide not to use them. A lot of self-proclaimed "hardcore gamers" share this sentiment. I do not.

The fact is that cheats aren't always about gaining an advantage or winning a game with minimal effort. When cheat codes were commonplace, it wasn't unusual for developers to include cheats that had little or no effect on a game's difficulty. These cheats existed either for laughs (see "Paintball Mode" in GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark) or to alter the rules of the game in fun ways that didn't necessarily benefit the player (like the reduced gravity cheat in Vigilante 8), not because we needed them to win. Even when they did have an obvious effect on difficulty, cheats in single-player games were used primarily for screwing around rather than getting to the end of the game as quickly as possible. For players with an ounce of restraint and self-control, cheats add replay value rather than subtract it.

Unfortunately, cheats are unlikely to make a big comeback. Today's developers don't seem to have any interest in hiding secrets in their games, and if they think of anything that adds extra value to their product, they'll most often try to sell it to you on the side. Usually, this means offering "additional" features (such as levels, items, and playable characters) as DLC with a price tag, even when these things are already available at the time of the game's launch and could have been included in the game itself. Occasionally, however, a developer actually has the balls to try to charge you for cheats, whether they're sold as DLC (such as the "Invincible Pack" for Saints Row: The Third) or as unique codes that unlock features already included in the game's files (as in Clive Barker's Jericho and some other games published by Codemasters).

From the back cover of the Clive Barker's Jericho manual. I have no idea if the hotline still works (nor do I want to try it), but it seems that the web page doesn't even exist anymore. The small print at the bottom of the page [not pictured] clarifies that codes obtained via the hotline would cost only what they charged for the call, but that getting codes online would require a "small" payment by credit card or PayPal.

This is pretty horrifying, but the success of the microtransaction business model applied to video games — most prominently to "free-to-play" massively multiplayer online games — has shown that a staggering number of people are essentially willing to pay to win. Since it works for multiplayer, it's not so crazy to think people might be willing to pay extra to gain an advantage in a single-player game as well.

I still think selling cheats is insanely dumb, but people are still going to buy them, just like they'll blindly pay for everything else the publishers take out of the finished product at the last minute and set aside as "DLC" for the purpose of grabbing more cash. (Imagine buying a movie ticket only to find out that the last ten minutes of the film will cost you an extra $3.95. Now imagine all of the people who don't boycott that movie. My point is that day-one DLC is evil and consumers are stupid.)

Since the current attitude of big video game publishers is that anything non-essential should be sold off as "extra" content, cheats might regain some real popularity in the form of DLC, but it seems unlikely. Cheat codes clearly went out of style for unrelated reasons, perhaps for the same reasons that we haven't already seen every major developer jumping at the chance to make some extra money by selling invincibility and extra ammo. Perhaps the most obvious problem with cheat codes is that most video games have gotten so easy that developers think we don't need cheats at all. Again, however, I should point out that it's not about need; it's about fun.

Personally, I'd like it if things would go back to the way they were before. Oh, sure, everyone feels that way, especially the nostalgic, aging video game enthusiasts such as myself, but I have no desire to hold the industry back. I realize that most of the changes made by the industry in recent years were, successfully or not, made for the sake of progress. But cheat codes only have the potential to make a game better — never worse — and the fact that they've almost completely been taken away can only be seen as a step backward.