I can't understand were things go wrong these days. They have incredible technology, sponsors (money), experienced people and a huge gaming comunity and still the games these days are extremly bad ( they s**k big time).

Take this scenario: you make your daily visit of gamespot.com and it hits you... the banner commercial for the latest announced game. You follow the link, read the preview, view the trailer, view the interview, check out the screens and eventually, after you basicly learned to dream of the game you talk it out with your friend. 2-3 maby 4 years pass, in which you daily check for updates, screens, trailers etc and hope to get your hands of the game you got to love. And then that day come, the game is released, you buy it or you get it from a friend, installing barelly kepping your calm. You start to shake thinging of all the things you are going to do in the game, you smile thinking about the the characters you are going to meet (characters you heard so much about), you hope to live the incredible story you only had hints of and then, when the game is installed and ready YOU PLAY IT...

Five hours later, having the bitter taste in your mouth, you sit disapointed in front of your PC asking yourself where is "that game" ? The one you read about and talked about. Where is that story you where eager to live, where is that smart, orginal gameplay ?

This is the scenario i lived for the last few months with the so called "Incredible Games" of the year.

In the last years games have developed from some points of view like graphics and gameplay, but the endings still have some problems.

Because games present a story (the story of a person, a race, a group etc.) they have to lead that story to an ending. At first endigns were usual and clique like kill the bad guy, destroy bad race, save your frineds/family/planet and of course kill the bad guys in the proces. But in the last few years endings have taken a wrong turn becoming similar to movie endigs. So if until a few months at the end of a game you were a hero, now things have change to a more dramatic scenario:

-you are a bad man or you lose your family (Kane & Lunch)

-your friends died and you are betrayed (UT3)

-you killed only a mid-level hanchman and the worst is still to come (SOF - bayback)

I could go on like this for many more hours and discuss this but i think the point is clear. If at first games had jokes and funny scenes, then they introduced irony/anger/hate and in the last period they introduced drama. With the first two steps i completly agree since humour or ironi make the characters alive, so do the negative emotions. But drama spoiles all the fun in the game. When playing people tend to put themsleves in the characters place and live the adventure but when the adventure ends in a "soap-opera" type of ending it makes you fill bad you played a character that got double crossed or trapped or hade blind fate in a friend that betrayed him.

Where is the fun in that ?

I know most of them leave a spot open for a posible sequel but you could end the story in a nice way and then work from that point. If you play a game for 10-20 hours and at the end you get a movie where you characters still has many thing to do you feel like you only played half a game.

And this could be a good marketing strategy to make people want to buy the sequel to see how the game really ends but if you wait 2-3 years for a sequel to come out you forget what happened in the first part and probably don't buy the game since it made you fill unsatisfied when you played it.

But this is not the case of all games. There are also those games that take you form start to end in a great story with charcters that make an impresion and that have interesting things to say, but i fear that the time for these games is coming to an end and we will have to get uset to games with half a story.

In the last two years game development has fallen in a "tech-trap", greatlly reducig game quality in favor of graphics and other feature brought by the tech evolution. So i find myself in the front of this "revolutionary" games that have been developed in 4-5 years that are of the lowest quality.

Chose any game (and i really mean any game) and you could probably say the following things about it:

1. Graphics are out of this world / They really look real / Environment Damage-Interaction .

2. It's too short -you can finish it in 5-10 hours.

3. Gameplay is weak (probably similar to some previous succesful game)

4. Computer oponets are retarded.

Yes games really look great (if you have a powerful GPU),characters and levels look like they are real and you can interact with the world in many (many,many ways); but the gameplay is copied from a previous successor isrepetitive, or bugy and they are very short. If you can pass these problems, or the game is original and the gameplay is good (there still are games that try to be like this) you find yourself confronting the "fantastik" AI.

Games this days are all flash, but if you play more than 30 minutes you will discover a world of retarded enemies that blindly charge at you when you fire at them, that attack you anti-infantery units with infantery, that know were you are even if can't see them and that rush in front of your tank/vehicle so you can run them over. I'm writing this with no particular game in mid since i haven't seen differences in any of the last games i played recently.

Just so i make it clear let's take some example:

1. Crysis: This game pushes the GPU capabilities to the limit. It looks great, it's dynamic, controls are good, the story decent, features great, realism extrordinary. But take a look at what you are fighting: almost all soldier know were you are and charge at you; once they get close and you hide after a rock they lose sight and can't find you even if you fire at them; entering any base with a vehicle means you will eradicate the base from inside the car since they will allgather around waiting to be shot by the mounted gun; if you run for cover around the corner and then come out some enemies will be waiting with their gun pointed at you without seeing you. (all of this are tested !!!).

2. Empire Earth 3: Graphics are bad, gameplay and features copied from other succesful games and the sound is the weakes link.I had the surprise of getting my fortresses attacked by small groups of melee units that didn't even get near them; enemy armies marched right thorugh my armies and i didn't lose any units before i could extermine them; world map enemies act acording to your movement(they don't have diplomacy-strategy-spy-tech-military decissions on their own; they just wait for your actions).

3.Kane and Lynch: Graphics are good,gameplay fun and easy to master, teamplay is the weakest link. Your team is kind of stupid (not retarded !!!). They still run for cover, and kill some enemies, they give you some ammo and can follow orders, but some times they run in the middle of the enemies and get killed, or get stuck in some place and appear near you, they can't use grenades and they can't provide cover fire etc. (they can't do a lot of things). The computer on the other hand has some unique suicide acting patterns: they rarely change places, they take cover leaving their head outside waiting for head shot, they start runing turning their backs at you without taking any cover.

4.Supreme Comander: nice graphics, interesting story and concept, nice gampley. But you will see a computer attacking you with air units exactly were you have the most anti air tanks. Your units on their own don't do anything except shoot. It's not called supreme commande for nothing you really have to command everything. The computer blindly attacks where he was set to attack even if you have tons of units there and never cares what unit or buidings you have.

These are just some examples of games that shine and are good but thet have retarded AI. I believe this is the flow of the moment in which games relay on "eye candy" rather than "ai".