It’s dark. Each step echoes through the seemingly endless corridor before me. I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know where I’m going. I continue moving forward. I look in my bag and see that I’m running out of ammo. If something jumped out now, I’d be screwed. I look back. I have to make sure nothing is behind me. I have no idea where I’m going. I am terrified; In fact, I’m proper shitting myself. I see a door. I walk up to it and… my character turns round suddenly.
‘Hang on a minute’ I think. ‘I didn’t do that’.
The camera then swings round to show that it is dark, and that I am in a corridor, and that the protagonist doesn’t know where he’s going. Then SUDDENLY A zombie moose jumps at the main character. He dodges, flips over the monster, fly kicks it in the face a couple of times and makes himself a nice cup of tea in a state of complete apathetic badassness. If I had been in control, I would have been mashed into a thick, bloody pulp by rather blunt antlers, so it’s nice to know the game put me in a corner for a minute while it takes care of things. I mean, I don’t even want to fight Zombie Moosses (Meese?) anyway, right?
But that’s the thing: I do. It’s infuriating and embarrassing that videogames have been around over 40 years, yet still rely on these cutaways to tell a story. Books don’t have DVD’s lodged in the pages halfway through, simply because it’s too hard to express certain things in written word, so why do games?
Sometimes, Games don’t even use them for the story. Let’s just say there’s a switch and a door. In the same room. Next to each other. The door Is closed. The switch is red. The door is red. There is a sign over the switch saying ‘opens door’. A sign over the door says ‘push switch to open. Press said switch and… Control is taken away to show that, yes, the switch did indeed open the door. Well, duh.
I fire a shell at a cracked wall. The wall breaks to reveal a hidden alcove. The game then plays a cutscene showing that the wall is broken, and there is a hidden alcove. Because my eyes must not work properly or something.
It’s downright patronising. The only reason these you-just-did-something-aren’t-you-clever cutscenes are here is to confirm that you, the player, is doing what the developer wants. Randomly hitting a fish with a hammer for 20 minutes doesn’t bring black bars on the screen and play a cutscene, so that must be
WRONG, and
YOU are a complete
MORON. What the game doesn’t realise is, I don’t care if the developer approves what I’m doing, I just want to do it.
Does anybody remember the Revolver Ocelot fight in Twin Snakes? Snake walks into the room where Ocelot is waiting, holding Baxter hostage, twirling his gun around. Snake notices that Baxter is hooked up to explosives, so he needs to be careful. Suddenly, Ocelot shoots at Snake - the bullets wiz past our hero as he lunges into the air, ready for battle.
And then I start playing.
This amounts to little more than running around the room in circles, trying to shoot Ocelot. Like some sort of perverse disney cartoon - which is honestly a bit pants. Why aren’t I dodging bullets by jumping 10 feet in the air like Snake just did? Why couldn’t I have noticed the C4 on my own? Couldn’t Snake have noticed the C4 and told me whilst I was playing? It’s like being a child, not being allowed the model train to play with. Because you are simple, wouldn’t know what to do with it, and would probably do it wrong anyway. Or so Mr. Kojima says.
Oh, and immediately after the rather pitiful boss fight, Snake has a kung fu battle with a ninja. A cyborg ninja.
A cyborg fucking ninja. Which is just bragging about what he can do and you can’t.
Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t hate Metal gear Solid, nor do I think every game that has cutscenes in it is bad, because that would be stupid. But like I said: it’s downright patronising;
Snake is going to talk to Meryl now, so were taking control off of you, because you’d probably only shoot her in the face anyway. Well what if I did, huh? Make it
My Problem rather than
yours. Create a story that’s memorable, well written, and above all engages the player, and you wont have to police them into moving forward with cutscenes.
And for fuck's sake, I can think for my self from time to time,
Thank You.
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This article made me look fondly back upon old RPG's that didn't have cutscenes. At least, not cinematic over the top ones.
Hey I like cutscenes, as long as they are skippable.
But I do hate when a game has the camera pan around to blatantly point something out in a level.
Very good read, developers all too often take the easy way out and throw significant parts of the game into a non interactive scene without giving any thought to another way to present it.
I find it curious that in an interactive medium, the most pivotal moments in a game are routinely wrestled out of the hands of the player and played out as a movie sequence.
Cutscenes like the one on Cameo, MR. Bones on Sega Saturn and Too human that are unskippable and obligatory with every death are the most annoying.
Developers seem to be shifting away from this a bit now. The Half-Life games are lauded for their storytelling because they never shift from the first-person view. Bioshock does the same thing, and Dead Space looks to build on that idea by eliminating (hopefully) out-of-character cut scenes, but HUD's and pause-menus altogether.
Honestly though, as much as it can ruin a game's immersion, sometimes the cutscenes are just so damn cool you don't care. Case in point: The Subspace Emissary. I can honestly say that the cutscenes were the only reason I sat through that entire goddamn adventure mode.
I absolutely adore cutscenes. In fact, I feel cheated if a game doesn't have them. However, they should all be skippable. Nothing worse than dying in a spot and having to sit through the same scene over and over again. Drives -- even me-- batshit.