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Last night I solved the second part of .Hack. .Hack is a terrific series of games published by Bandai that explores the adventures of a boy who has lost a friend to an online game. The boy, Kite, begins by playing in an online game known as "The World" and after a short while one of his friends drops out of the game and Kite discovers his friend has fallen into a coma. I love this game, I think it plays well, has good characters and a great premise. I also like the fact that the game comes in four parts. Although this means that once I have worked through the game I will have spent four times as much as a regular game, it also means I get to experience something four times that I never get with the majority of games I play... An ending.
The night before last I finally finished Resident Evil 4. I haven't finished two games in two nights since I was a kid, and I have to say it reminded me of one of the great joys of gaming. It's odd to think that over the last few years the trend has moved away from solving games to just playing them. Grand Theft Auto, Asheron's Call, The Sims, and now World of Warcraft... All of these are games that I have played without any intent to finish them, and in some cases the games don't even have an ending.
I think that one of the reasons I actually enjoy World of Warcraft as mush as I do is the simple factthat the quests are structured in such a way that each one feels like the end to a small game. You get a tiny in-game cutscene, a reward, and then you go on your merry way towards the next little quest. With most of the other MMORPG's I have played I never got that sense. For example, I played Anarchy Online for quite some time and although it had a quest generator, the quests never felt complete. Since every quest was random, they all sort of flowed together.
The strange thing that occurs to me, is that maybe I am just being old fashioned, or maybe I'm just clinging to archaic rules of play that no longer apply to the gaming world. When children get together to play, there are times when the game has a defined ending and winner, as in the case of games like baseball and football, but then there are also times when the whole point of the game is just to kill some time and have some fun, like tag. Who am I to say that because tag doesn't have an ending it isn't a great game? Hell, come to think of it, if I ever managed to find the time to hang out with my friends and one of them suggested a game of tag I'd probably be so excited I'd wet my pants... Just like the last time I played, I guess.
When it all boils down to it I guess that both game types are perfectly valid and enjoyable, and that maybe I'm just getting down on open-ended games because I'm still riding the high of finishing those two games. Still, it just feels like open-ended games never seem to provide that final moment of pride where you sit back, watch the credits, and sigh.
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