Genocidal Muffins

It's once again time to delve back into one of the areas that I find unbelievably fun for a break. These are the kinds of those games that fall into the genre of unmistakable genocide. A mindless killing experience that lightens the mood from all the quests and objectives that today's games find themselves lost in. Games like Serious Sam, the original Doom series, and other games that I haven't had time to beat. No this isn't a specific game review, but it's more of a genre review in preparation for my next section of games. These are the kinds of games that make you leap for joy and the sheer mass of baddies that fall before your rapidly firing weapons.

Games that call themselves shooters very often find themselves being dragged into escort missions and treasure quests that lead to more arbitrary tasks that include stealth and style. Now I'm not saying that those kinds of shooters are bad, quite the contrary, I enjoy them more than most other types of games that I play. However I do tire of the constant similarity between the games with the quest and I get drawn into a daze with the constant cut-scenes that can't be skipped and the mindless story that they shovel down your throat in an attempt to get you to identify with the characters that babble away at your face with their pixelated mouths flapping like bullet riddled flags in the mild wind that plagues your environment constantly. I find that these kind of breaks in the game will kill the flow and while in some cases they can add a very personable element to your character, it also makes you sadder when you end up dying, making it feel like you actually let someone down instead of not giving a flying unicorn's shit when you die; then it's simply a break in the murder frenzy that gets vaguely annoying the more it happens. But as the games go on, you get better at avoiding the enemy fire until you can kill them and it gets to the point where you're so overpowered that nothing can touch you except for the bosses. Eventually it just gets aggravatingly easy and you stop playing the game until you basically forget what you're doing.

  Getting back to the main point of this rant, the other side of shooters being the more mindless of the massacre style games. Most of the time they don't bother you with plot and only ask you to kill everything that moves. You can do other things if you want, but you don't have to. Sure there are side quests, but they aren't really important. Bonus objectives show up every now and then but again, they don't hold much credence when you're looking at the game as a whole. Sure you might get some undeserved sense of achievement for completing all of them but it's like saying that you can balance a machete on your nose while eating live goldfish. Yeah you'll get some props for it, but it gets old after the fifth time you show it to someone. Now you might say that killing people over and over and over without reprieve will get boring but I believe you're sadly mistaken. Not only do you get to kill everything, but you can do it however you want to. You get the multitudes of weapons that you can experiment with on the untold hordes of baddies that will eventually plague your screen. It may just be me, but I find this to be quite mood-lifting when given that freedom. Sure it's linear, but then do you really want to have to figure out where to go while being raped by thousands of monsters that want you dead. It does get to be tiring after the eighth time you have to stop to deal with a mass of bodies between you and your next opportunity to find out where you need to go.
Drawing this rant to a close, I find myself wishing for a few more of the mindless genocidal fun of games like Serious Sam. The graphics are lacking and the story is nonexistent but that's not what you should be playing these kinds of games for. These are made for you to kill, murder, maim, gut, stab, rend, and tear your enemies to little tiny gore-ridden pieces. Fun, no?

>Ryft