HS to me just seems boring. No matter how much enemies or how many gazzilion poly's you might see its still just hacking & slashing and imo thats boring. The whole concept behind hack & slash games is boring imo.
Have you tried a recent "Hack&Slash" though? H&S, if you ask me, refers to a genre of heavily simplified RPG games such as Dark Alliance, Untold Legends, Champions of Norrath et al.
I can only speak for Devil May Cry and God Of War -- I'm sure Ninja Gaiden does something similar though --, but these games aren't quite the mindless button mashers they look like when you just watch.
On the easiest difficulty setting it doesn't really work. This is true in particular for God of War, you may not get it when it's too easy, but on a harder difficulty level, the game will teach you, it will
make you explore the depths of its combat system, and what you'll find is pretty complex and well thought-out.
For starters, blocks: engage a block at the correct time to make the enemy stagger, and you have your opportunity for a devastating counter-attack.
Then there are range vs strength tradeoffs to your attacks, to your combos, and also to enemy attacks. Some combos end in a guard-breaking attack, but leave you vulnerable to counter-attack yourself while you're pulling them off. God Of War lets you even strategize on the method of the kill: certain enemies, when killed in a specific way, will drop health refills, but less experience points.
There are special magic attacks that have better range and/or power and/or speed but deplete with use etc etc. These games can indeed be quite deep on the pure fighting aspect alone.
Then we have the canoncial button-combination mini-game, climbing walls, hanging off ropes, and whatever else they're coming up with right now.
Brushing the current developments in the genre off by calling them just "Hack&Slash" isn't quite fair IMO.
tongue_of_colicab said:
Something that impresses me is a game that makes me want to play the game. Like you want to keep reading a good book, thats what I want in a game. I want a game that makes me want to play it. If that is last, current or next gen doesnt matter for me. HL1 still impresses me more than most next gen games. I guess your right that there are only a few games I really like. Alot of games just dont manage to grasp my attention for very long because they dont offer me something to be interrested in.
Narrative in games is always a problem, you probably just expect too much. OTOH the fighting game genre lends itself quite well to strong narrative, as long as it involves a character that needs to fight a fight of course. But most stories have room for such characters.
(on a related note I've played the Return of the King action game lately. Frankly it's complete garbage IMO, and that despite its honest attempts at projecting a strong narrative into the game)