GameTruth

So Seth and I attended the New York Comic Con this past weekend (more on the NYCC here) with our friend Joe and we saw a ton of games.  Prototype, Mad World, Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Ghostbusters, The Conduit, Deadly Creatures, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Sonic and the Black Knight, DC Online and others.  Out of these there are several I will own (Chronicles of Riddick and Ghostbuster for sure) but there was not a game I saw that I didn’t immediately notice something I would consider to be a flaw or detractor from the game.   Prototype looked like Spiderman mixed with Assassin’s Creed therefore done before, DC Online looks exactly like City of Heroes also done before, Mad World got boring during a 10 minute demo and The Conduit had flaky controls to say the least.  The thing is I did enjoy demoing these games and many of them will do quite well.

So that brings me to the question that is the title of this post: do I have impossible standards?  It seems the more I get into game design and the more serious I take them the more I seem to sneer as imperfections.  Now I have played and loved terrible games before (Turok: Rage Wars and Rebel Assault II come to mind) but now that I plan to make my living creating games I can’t seem to cut them any slack.  Do other people have this problem?  Is this even an issue?  Should I check my gaming elitism at the door and give these games more than a 10 minute demo?

-Mark