I have one more post in me about casual games. Here is the last post I wrote about it in which I wondered if there was any practical way to make casual games better. And, more to the point, was there any motivation to do it when casual gamers were willing to buy just about any slop? I’m including myself in that, by the way. I will buy games that satisfy the itch for a casual game, even if said game isn’t very good.
I will buy any basic solitaire game or match-3 game because my standards are so low for those kinds of games. As long as the games run ok; I can read the font; and it’s has decent visuals, I’l lbuy it. Actually, I say that these are very low standards, but there are many more games than you would probably think that don’t meet even those base standards. There are some that won’t even start. There are some that take forever to load. And there are some that crash somewhere during gameplay.
I’m not saying hardcore games don’t do that because they do, but not with the frequeny of casual games. Also, hardcore games have more of an excuse than do casual games. The amount of money poured into hardcore games is astronomical whereas I’m assuming that it’s much less the case for casual games.
I mean, let’s do the math. A hardcore game costs anywhere from $60-$80, if we’re talking Triple A. Indie games are much less with most of them falling in the $20 range (give or take five bucks). A casual game is $6.99 for the standard edition and $13.99 for a collector’s edition. A Triple A deluxe edition tends to be ten dollars more than the standard edition. The collector’s edition can be anything over a hundred bucks and is usually outrageously expensive because of some included trinket. Trinket meaning statue or something like that.
Interestingly enough, I just played the demo for the next MCF (Mystery Case Files) Hidden Object Game (HOG), which is a BigFishGames original. Not developed by them directly, but published by them. Or at least it was. They call this a spin-off game of the series so it might not be canon. It’s called Fragments of Truth (GrandMA Studios), and it’s been interesting.
Huh. It turns out that the first few games of the series were developed internally (the first in 2005), and then other studios took over. I remember the first three or so, and they were really good. In fact, they were considered the gold standard for HOGs for the next several years. Hmmmmm. I was thinking that the quality started dipping with the game that starred Lea Thompson, which I thought was the sixth or seventh game. It turns out that it was the ninth game, called Shadow Lake. It was released in 2012, and it was the last game developed by Big Fish Studios.
No wonder I thought the quality had dropped after that one. Well, to be brutally honest, during that one. There was something missing, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was dissatified with it, though I could not tell you exactly why.
In the case of this game, the basic premise is nothing special. A paranormal agency is going through some internal shakeup and experiencing negative paranormal activity of it’s own. I know that sounds like nonsense, but it’s a very familiar theme in HOGs.
What makes it different is the mini-games and the HOG scenes. Usually, the mini-games are the same old same old. Spot the differences, , move the key through a field of blocks, put pieces in a jigsaw picture, that game where you have to move a certain amount of something from one column to another, but, of course, you are limited as to how much you can move and where. Some kind of code-breaking is usually present, too.
In this game’s demo, there were a few weird mini-games. What’s worse was that the instructions for the games were very confusing or incomplete. There was one that was ‘match the edge buttons’ colors with the ribbons’. I muddled through it and completely overthought it. When I stripped it down to its basic, I got it fairly easily.
Another mini-game was a variant of ‘match the different pieces of pipe so water can flow through it. In this case, though, it was match about twenty-five picees of pipe with anywhere from one to four connections. As far as I can tell, you have to use all the pieces without any spaces, but I could not tell you for sure because as I said, the instructions are astonishingly shitty.
This is something that I have marveled at for almost two decades. How the hell can instructions for the mini-games be so shitty? I mean, if it’s the first one or one hundred of the games, ok, fine. Whatever. But by now, the fact that they can’t be assed to give even a rudimentary explanation of the mini-games is baffling to me.
I know they QA the games because I’ve been asked to do it. And yet, this is the best tehy can come up with? Thankfully, there is a skip button because there’s only so much of this shit I can put up with.
There was one mini-game that I skipped without even trying it, but that wasn’t the game’s fault. There were four torn stamps (pictures/but with stamp-like edges) The top halves were at the top of the board with paths downward to their other halves. Then, there were arrow buttons underneath that would turn the half-stamp one way or the other. You had to place all the arrows in the maze so that all four top halves would turn properly and end the right way up on their bottom half.
Nope.
Uh-uh.
Hell no.
My spatial recognition has been shaky all my life, and it’s shit since my medical crisis. In addition my brain just could not deal with this game at all. I knew immediately that it was a no-go and smashed that skip button the second I was able.
I appreciated the novel mini-games, though. It was refreshing to have something other than the same-old, same-old. One newish mini-game I don’t like, however, is making me ‘climb’ something. I have to place my hands and feet on branches/crevices/whatever, and my feet can never be above my hands. It’s not fun. It’s not engaging.
I may buy this one game with the new mini-games just because it’s a bit different. Again, as long as I can skip them, whatever. I would like to be a tenth as hyped for a casual game as I do for some hardcore games, but I realize that is probably never going to happen because they are two completely different things.