While trolling the Stranglehold forum today I cam across a few posts where people, apparently younger gamers, who were bashing Stranglehold because it was too short. This got me thinking a great deal of the journey I have made as a game over the past 20-25 years! As I have gotten older and have enough money to purchase what ever games I want (no rich by any means by the way), I feel I have evolved into a connoisseur of sorts. I enjoy and relish good games. I don't have the time or the desire to buy a game just to see how fast I can blow through it. I tend to play in bursts whatever game I feel like playing. So a game like Stranglehold or Medal of Honor - Airborne, to mention two recent titles that are getting panned for being short, I may never see the end of. But the time I spend in these games is well spent and has been very enjoyable. As a kid and a gamer I was raised on Intellevision and Colecovision, but I still had fun in RL going outside and playing sports and building forts and causing all sorts of trouble. I now have a son who only wants to play video games in his free time! Once his homework is done he wants to run downstairs and play ... anything as opposed to going outside and actually doing something with real people! I am trying to put my finger on why so many people out there have nothing else to do with their time? It is difficult for me to comprehend someone sitting down for 6-8 hours at a time to do nothing but play a video game just to get through it so they can than go on-line to lambast the experience for being too short? I don't get it ... What am I missing? Don't get me wrong I am a die hard gamer ... but I do enjoy a good game no matter how long it may be ... am I in the minority here? Lets talk ...Â
Games cost money, and they shorter a game is, the less you're getting for that money. Dependent on the genre, this can also pretty negatively affect the game itself, as I don't think anyone wants to play a 6 hour RPG. Games such as Stranglehold are becoming shorter because they can get away with it. The premisce is simple--you shoot things while other things explode. But a racing game that takes that little time to complete means relatively few tracks and cars. The main thing is that in that amount of time it can feel as though you're just getting into it and it ends.
There certainly is something to be enjoined about the shorter games, although that doesn't appear to be Stranglehold's only drawback.
Having said that it is entirely the player's prerogative to want a longer game within reason. I played games back in the day where the longevity mostly came from extreme difficulty. I enjoined them for the most part, but I also was painfully annoyed at times and looked forward to the day where there were fewer such games. Same goes for the length of those games. I played good old RPGs like Dragon Warrior on NES but I also imagined how much more there could be as technology moved forward. Nothing wrong with asking for more.
I'm pretty satisfied with a good 12-15 hour game as long as it has some solid replay value. For instance, I feel that Fable, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and Riddick all had near-perfect length and replay value; I played each of those games four times, and I'm likely to replay them all again in the future. As long as I get at least one gameplay hour for every dollar I spend on a game, then I'm pretty happy.
Shorter 6-8 hour games are perfect rentals, though.
Dude, saying it is short is a legitimate complaint. It doesn't mean what's there isn't good, it just means that there isn't much to it. Sometimes it is even good to be a little shorter. I don't appreciate an RPG wasting my time with boring, easy battles just to get my character to level up, and I'm sure if you stipped all the filler away most RPGs wouldn't be more than 10 hours long.
You're also missing one VERY major point here- people aren't dissing Medal of Honor for being short so much as they are pointing out that it sucks, which it does.
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