Finally that long awaited preorder arrives! You tear away on the annoying courier packaging, remove the plastic wrapper with you're grinding teeth, gaze at the front cover for a few seconds, flip open the casing, and finally slam the UMD in your PSP. This is what happened to most gamers who bought themselves a copy of God of War PSP.The problem came in when they managed to complete the game the same day they purchased it. Fact is that most new games are relatively short (besides the odd RPG here and there). Replay value happens mostly in puzzle and multiplayer games but usually fails with single player action adventure titles such as GOW. Yeah the hardcore fans might replay the title to unlock every last item but for the average gamer this title will most likely be traded or sold. Another example is the relatively short Silent Hill: Origins. You play the game to see what happens in the end (aka story line) but after completing it you don’t really have anything else to look forward too, keeping in mind that SH can be completed in 2 hours.(Nintendo moment alert) How many times did you play Super Mario Bros over and over or what about Contra or Sonic or even Adventure Island? What gave these games the excellent replay value they still have until today? Maybe it all comes down to choice.At time when the NES ruled the earth and mankind had to play on blocky looking controllers there was no real competition. Simply put, everybody had NES and everybody had Pac Man. There were plenty of games available for the system but most people just ended up getting one of those 20000 in 1 cartridges (Famicon…hmm). Today you however have the option of getting a Wii, DS, PSP, Xbox, and PS3 or even PS2 (or like some people, all of them). You might like FPS based games, whereas your buddy might prefer RPG’s and this weird looking dude might worship RTS but strangely enough in the NES days everybody loved side scrolling platformers.There are so many consoles, genres and games to choose from its insane. In the end it’s not the games that lost the replay flavor but more the subliminal idea of alternative choices. While playing GOW you might be thinking about how much (the already preordered) Final Fantasy CC is going to rock but after getting and enjoying FF you might already be thinking about the next big title that interests you (resulting in GOW ending up on the dusty shelf).With so many consoles and games available, there’s always something else to look forward to and while the replay concept might not apply to multiplayer games or similar it does have an impact on story driven single player games.
