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GameSided Roundtable: What Gaming Genre Just Isn’t For You?

By Daniel George

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Greetings! This is our weekly GameSided Roundtable feature, where our writers converge to provide their opinions, wishes, statements or critical thought on one general topic centered around video games. Sometimes it can be funny, sometimes it can be serious. Contemporary, classic; we hope to cover a wide variety of things in this segment as a group. If you wish to submit an idea for a GameSided Roundtable discussion topic, you can leave me an email at: daniel.george@fansided.com.

Last weekend saw the spirit of the Fighting Game Community (FGC) come to life, as Evo 2014 saw many new victors across several fighting video games. That realm within gaming has always been of intrigue to me, personally, as I love to watch the action unfold while covering the final results of each game. However, as anybody who has played me in Killer Instinct will attest, I am absolutely atrocious at playing within the genre myself.

This week, with Evo 2014 on the mind, I posed a question to some of us at the GameSided Roundtable: What video game genre or gaming theme/story do you appreciate for its quality, but could never personally get into?

Eric Chrisman

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The Rockstar-style open world action game. I really appreciate the technical achievements of games like Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row (yes I know that’s not Rockstar, but it’s very much in that style) and Red Dead Redemption and the fact that they allow so much freedom and allow you to do so much in a very large space, but I’ve never been able to really enjoy them for more than a few hours at most.

I think it’s because by trying to be a jack of so many trades, these games by default are masters of none. Some element, often multiple elements suffer just too much for my taste in order to enjoy them. The driving is often annoyingly awful, as is the shooting. The story feels overlong and padded with repetitive missions that aren’t nearly as fun as the side stuff (and I really value a good story in most games).

There’s something to be said for a tight game that only tries to do one or even a couple things, but does those few things incredibly well. Sure I could get lost for hours driving around a realistic version of LA and doing stupid pointless stuff, but I usually get more involved and have a much better time with a more contained universe that tells a great story and has great focused gameplay to go with it.

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