denizsi said:
Action games have mostly been about the same basic mechanics forever.
But not all action games are as similar to each other as Crusader and Halo are. That's my point.
It's the character, challenge and vision that have always defined and separated good games from the rest of the shit. In Crusader series, you get all of it.
Personal opinion is irrelevant here. One man's garbage is another man's banquet. But in case you're curious... yes, I played (and own) both Crusader games. Yes, they're enjoyable, but they're not that great. I've never been a fan of Halo.
And you can see how the developers poured their hearts into the game by making different detailed animations for everything, burning people, melting people, explosions
This, at least, you're right about. Effort was made to make the game look and feel good, and attention was paid to detail.
entire game breathes and exhales art into the players' eyes. What is shit like Halo compared to this? Bland level shooter. That's the term I use for shit console games like Halo.
There's that personal opinion thing again I was talking about.
Developers make shitty levels, populate it with the same shitty enemy types without any environmental mechanics and call it a game.
This is a good point you make. Like I mentioned that attention was paid to the design of the Crusader games, the same cannot be said for many MANY action games/FPS titles that came after it.
And I wouldn't say the controls are clunky at all. The game responds perfectly to keyboard + mouse, though I accept that it could have been a challenge for those with poor spatial perception but didn't the series offer two control schemes, one for relative movement and one for arcade type directional movement?
"Not clunky at all?" The game has 5 different uses for the cursor keys alone. One for using them as normal, two in conjunction with the ALT key and one each for use in conjunction with the CTRL and SHIFT keys. That's before we look at all the other keys involved with weapons and inventory.
What's worse, the Crusader games are trying to implement
two different control schemes at the same time, keyboard only and keyboard + mouse. I've seen strategy games use less keys on the keyboard than the Crusader games do. At least this complexity wasn't without reason; the Silencer has alot of movement options available to him. But consider that subsequent action titles have managed to overcome the requirement for so many key combinations to control your character, and you'll realize that in this field at least, Crusader is beat, hung, drawn and quartered by subsequent action game titles. A good comparison of the evolution is the controls of System Shock 1 vs System Shock 2. Simpler and more intuitive control schemes is one of the good things of the evolution of game design nowadays... possibly the
only good thing.