Too Many Enemies - A Healed Rant

(Resistance: Fall of Man)

    There's something that's been bothering me with modern shooters lately, which is this basic need to make every game as epic as possible. I mean throwing as many enemies as possible at the player to make things feel intense, or throwing too many epic set pieces like fighting within a falling building or in the middle of a giant battle. It's as if epic set-pieces and fights are the only thing developers can do to make a game feel intense these days, and if you use them too much, they lose their effect. I recently posted a bit of a rant on regenerating health, but to me that's very minor compared to this.

    Flooding the player with tons of enemies isn't inherently bad, but that's all I've seen in shooting games lately. Half of the time, you see this happen when it really doesn't make any sense. For example, in Quantum of Solace your often flooded with squads of seven or eight baddies at the same time. This happens in the scene where you chase the bomb-maker from "Casino Royale", even though he was alone in the movie. Why would a bomb-maker want to take 200 armed guards everywhere he goes, especially when he doesn't want to be found? Why not just have a chase sequence instead with maybe a few of his friends shooting at you. I guess that would be too easy with regenerating health, right?

Health Regeneration - a Healed rant

    One of the biggest differences between older shooting games and modern shooting games is regenerating health. Personally, I'm starting to get a little tired of this. Now I'm not saying regenerating health is inherently bad, in fact it works very well for multi-player games, but nobody's showing any imagination here. My problem with regenerating health is not the regenerating itself, but that nearly every modern shooting game uses the exact same system.

(Star Wars: Dark Forces)

    Back when I started playing games, there was no such thing as regenerating health. These games would either have you find health packs, get healed by medics, or sometimes you'd only recover health between missions. Nearly all of the shooting games coming out these days have automatically regenerating health. I'm not saying that regenerating health is inherently bad, and I'm not going to argue whether games should be realistic or not, but I wouldn't mind a bit more variety.