All you do is run around and break things

So we recently acquired a Playstation 3, and I've been playing a lot of Metal Gear Solid 4, but that's information for another post. Last night for our date night my wife and I got takeout dinner, and sat down with the playstation to play demos. We played through about fourteen demos in about three hours, and it was a lot of fun, but kind of a funny thing happened as we were playing.

My wife was playing the demo for Up, it's kind of a platformer game based on the Pixar movie. The characters from the movie would wander around on screen, and you could smash little rock formations, or mushroom patches, or break open coconuts and smash bugs. You would also have to navigate various obstacles, using the different characters together to move forward. The dialog was kind of funny, and it was kind of fun.

The funny thing was that as I watched my wife play I thought to myself, I don't think this could keep my attention, I mean, all you do is run around and break things with your cane. Then it occured to me that that describes a lot of games I play. Most shooter games you just run around and break things with your gun, action RPGs you just run around and break things with your sword, it's a common theme in video games.

I wondered if perhaps the exact same mechanics were presented in a 'darker and edgier' sort of context, if I would have enjoyed them more. I kind of have to laugh at myself, but I'm not going to worry about it too much. In any case, it was a fun game once you looked past the fact that you weren't playing as vampire hunters or elite commandos, but perhaps that's part of why my wife enjoyed it.