Destroying stuff
Me and my hammer
I like destruction. Yes i admit it. I like blowing things up, shooting holes, and kicking things around. Its not that i am a particular violent person, but something just happens when a game gives me the option of destroying things. This is about my joy of destruction.
As a past time i have been playing Red Faction: Guerilla when i have the time. I don’t care much for the story, or the missions in it. I usually just go directly for the objectives where you need to destroy EDF property. To begin with i played the game on medium difficulty, but i have found that setting it to easy prevents me dying all the time. The thing is, the way i play, i don’t really care about killing soldiers. If they get in my way, yes i kill them, but otherwise i usually just let them shoot at me while i destroy things.
I get an immense satisfaction out of destroying entire buildings with nothing but a hammer, or setting a lot of charges on a building, walking away, and then pushing the button to see it all blow up in a thousand pieces. Its an awesome feeling.
Building? Crate? Nothing will stand before my hammer!
I wonder if the reason for putting features like world destruction into games is to cater for players like me. In Red Faction: Guerilla the building destructions has the purpose of providing you with scrap metal, which is the main form of currency in the game. The thing is that you use this scrap metal to buy even better bombs to blow up more buildings. So one of the core elements of the game is actually this destruction. The game itself does has a story and… something… i dont even care about it.
Its the first game, that i remember, where I’ve had so much fun destroying things. So at the moment i am actually looking for more games with physics systems like this – because, its bloody fun.
Well the red faction I found destroying buildings at first good fun to do, only after seeing all the possible building types and knowing how to blow them up with 3 hits it got kinda boring for me. Games should in general be better designer around buildings that can be destroyed in my opinion. red faction is just a step in the right direction but still far away its full potential.
Yeah i agree that you can probably figure out how to blog up buildings pretty fast. However i am not at that stage yet. I’m not sure what it is, but i really don’t think when i play that game. Its a very Zen experience to me. Usually i am very much into game stories and such, but in this game i barely remember what the story is. When i destroy buildings i just run into them and swing like a madman with my hammer :-)
It would be nice if there was more building destruction in games. I would however prefer if it was realistic building destruction. Imagine a game like Modern Warfare 2 with Red Faction style building destruction. That would quickly make the game comical. However it WOULD be nice to be able to blow a hole in a wall here and there.
If you like to blow things up, you should definitely try Boom Blox for Nintendo Wii
Although the game has a very child-friendly graphics look, you obviously have the opportunity to satisfied your destructive needs through the game. And it’s actually also a fantastic physics puzzle game.
Here’s a little video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcvD0p67NqU
Yeah i know the game, i just haven’t got access to a Wii at the moment. Also I’m not sure that it have the same effect on me as Red Faction’s destruction has. The fact that you can walk into a building and smash it, is more interesting to me than a puzzle style Spielberg game :-)