Is There Any Point to Collecting in Games?
Feb. 3You want a game to reward you for advancing, of course, but is it possible for games to offer a sense of accomplishment that's actually empty? You know, the Lay's potato chip of gameplay goals. Brandon Erickson at GameCritics.org certainly thinks so...
The real meat of No More Heroes consists of a series of one-on-one battles between the protagonist, Travis Touchdown, and ten bizarre and colorful assassins. For the most part, I've found the stylishly violent boss battles and their associated comic-book style cutscenes to be quite fascinating. Unfortunately, getting to these various boss encounters requires that the player earn money by running around the city performing repetitive side jobs. In addition to finding this rather boring, I also find it somewhat insulting. It's as though the game is telling me, "Your time isn't that important, so I'm just gonna force you to mindlessly jump through a bunch of pointless hoops."
Personally, I've always hated this kind of stuff in games (it is in fact the one thing I truly hate about No More Heroes), so I'm glad to see I'm not a lone voice in the wilderness. What do you think?
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