Watch Me Backpedal Like A Pro!

In an earlier post (scroll down, there aren't that many posts yet) I criticised Suda51 and No More Heroes for being a failed attempt at satire.

I realise now that I was wrong.

Yesterday, I did what I should have done in the first place and read some articles written by people much better at this sort of thing than me about the symbolism of NMH and realised that I was way off the mark with my comments.

So I hereby officially change my opinion of No More Heroes.  It is a very successful satire, I just missed what it was Suda51 was trying to do.

With that said, I still don't like the game.  As successful as the jabs the game makes at gamers and games in general are, I still think the game fails.  I came across this article by Cruise Elroy in my search and he raised an interesting question while referencing Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw's Zero Punctuation review.

"I’ve been wrestling with that last claim ever since I watched Yahtzee’s video. Do video games need to be fun?"

It's something that I've pondered myself; after all, we try and assert that games are art, albeit commercial art, so should 'fun' really be the pinnacle of achievement for the medium?  After all, movies don't have to be 'fun' to be art, and in fact, fun movies are very rarely considered art.  The same stigma applies to most media, that fun and art are somehow mutually exclusive.

So, do video games need to be fun?

I would say no, they don't, in fact, as the medium matures, I think we'll see an increase of games that explore new areas, especially as ratings system relax as they inevitably will.  I think in many ways we are hampered by the word 'game', although a replacement term does not immediately spring to mind.

What I would say is that a game does need to be engaging in some way.  The incredibly irritating to type S.T.A.L.K.E.R is not really a fun experience, but it is engaging and from that you can derive enjoyment.  The same applies to survival horror games, especially the more restrained ones like the early Silent Hills or Project Zero where your arsenal consists of a camera and nothing else.

This, for me, is where No More Heroes fails.  There are a couple of reasons I can think of for this lack of engagement.  The first and most likely, is that because I simply didn't get the satire, I misinterpreted the story as being nonsensical rubbish.  The other likely candidate is that the repetitive gameplay was simply too off putting, although I have forgiven games in the past for poor gameplay if they interested me in other ways.  I also wonder if the fact I'm in the UK had something to do with it.  In the UK, the massive amounts of blood were edited out in favour of enemies simply turning to ash when dispatched.  I think that a lot of the potency of the game relied on it being hyper-violent, and let's face it, ash does not compare to copious amounts of arterial spray.

I'm half tempted to try and find a pre-owned copy of the game and give it another go, maybe, armed with all this new information, I'll be able to appreciate it better.