And I call it a ghost train ride because a ghost train ride consists of three distinct, separate elements. So what is a ghost train ride? Well, for one thing, it’s a game whose marketing blurb will probably use the word “cinematic.” In that, like a film, it’s completely linear and aggressively pulls you along a railroad of set pieces with only tenuous acknowledgements of interactivity. God of War 4 and Jedi Fallen Order have elements of ghost train ride but manage to transcend it in enough places. The Last Of Us is a ghost train ride, as are the Uncharted games. The Tomb Raider reboots are ghost train rides.
Guardians of the Galaxy is very much a ghost train ride. Many thanks to Guardians of the Galaxy for helping solidify this in my head. A template that I shall call “The Ghost Train Ride.”
#UNCHARTED 4 CHAPTERS FULL#
See, I complained in the last episode that too many triple-A games are open worlds that tick all the same boxes, but then I realised that there’s another template triple-A falls back upon when they want to make a single player story-based game but don’t quite have the time or the QA budget for a full on open world. Such as the term Jiminy Cockthroat, to mean “Open world stealth action with crafting and collectibles,” or Spunkgargleweewee to mean “contemporary military shooter displaying an unsettling pro-war attitude and no apparent interest in being introspective about it.” And I’m pleased to report that I’ve got another one. Which has made games generally stabler and easier to churn out since they’re basically being constructed from flat packs, but it’s at the cost of their artisanal uniqueness.Īs a chronicler of video games and their many degrees and flavours of shittiness I’ve occasionally found it convenient to coin shorthand terms for specific overused gameplay templates. So now games use preexisting engines, preexisting art, second-hand IPs, and gameplay mechanics cobbled together from popular established formulas. So what do you do when you need to produce a lot of complicated things in a short time? You invent mass production. Nowadays, triple-A games are terribly complicated things and making the texture for every last leaf on every bush just isn’t feasible within most development time frames. Games were a bit ramshackle back then when developers were inventing various janky workarounds to get a 2D image to look like a 3D wall, but it meant every game had a sort of bespoke character to it.
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