[Duke of Hazzard]

Basically, this. Is it nostalgia or a feel that quality and enjoyment has degenerated?

I've never played CoD but I heard the missions are mostly scripted, the singleplayer sucks and there's no freedom to mess around. Quite the opposite of games like the Build trinity and even Doom (which isn't linear and has limited interactivity compared to the Build games). Even objective-based games of the past like Goldeneye 007 allowed a great degree of freedom in how you played.

Somehow I feel that today's games focus too much on storylines and things apart from the experience of playing a game. And of course they mostly look all the same. I looked at Titanfall screens and I can't tell it apart from other games. I love a good story as much as anyone, but the point of a game is to be played, isn't it? If the story is the most important part, what's the point in playing it yourself?

Also, I feel that the media industry isn't moving forward. There are way too many reboots. Highest grossing films are either remakes or moviefied versions of stories already told 40 years ago in comics and other media. With games it's the same. Super Mario 3D Land was fun, but how much of my fun was the fact that the game mixes elements from classic Mario titles and presents them in 3D instead of creating something new?

Feel free to discuss.

[Jblade]

The reason for this is simply money. Games cost a fuckload of money to make due to the amount of man-hours needed to produce something that would sell enough to break even in the modern AAA market. Reboots are another fairly easy way to get at least some money. It's unfortunate but it's not all bad, some gems still get release every now and then.

CoD and many modern shooters are pop-corn cinematic games that I enjoyed, as long as they don't last too long. I play games mostly for escapism and a game that takes me on an adventure for a couple of hours is fine enough. If you purely play them to challenge your gameplay skills than they won't appeal to you at all.

[OpenMaw]

As a recent Red Letter Media video demonstrated. This summer in films is pretty much NOTHING BUT remakes and reboots and rehashes. Nothing new at all.


As far as the COD games, they started in the era when games were really starting to play around with scripted events and things, post Half-Life. Game like Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid, both amazing games in their own right, inspired some ideas that were then taken too far. "The cinematic experience." The cinematic experience almost demands shedding off maze-like level design of Duke Doom and Quake in favor of environments that amount to glorified window dressing designed to move the story along to the next big event.

Some games have gotten really really bad about this. IE: Homefront, which was essentially a door-breach-viewer. Watch other characters perform canned animations over and over! QUICK TIME EVENTS.

Duke Nukem Forever, in a way, is almost like a long term time capsule that shows the evolution of the first person shooter in all the bad ways. With intensely isolated examples of things from different eras. Linear shooting sections, turret sections with a cool down timer, the need for every weapon to have aim down sights, even fists. Limited inventory. On and on.

The old games had problems of their own, to be sure. For one thing they didn't really anticipate the use of mouses, even though some of the developers, like John Romero, actually used the mouse quite a bit. So when the ultimate configuration WASD + Mouse came along, some of the level design, and some of the monster AI that was originally very challenging became a breeze to get through.

Other things, which were shed and refined as the FPS genre went along was the use of "lives" or "points." Those things started not to matter in a world of save games. So they were dropped. That made sense for the most part, as they were essentially vestigial holdovers from the world of arcade machines.


A great little trilogy of videos/WADs relating to the modern shooter are the "Call of Dooty/If Doom was done today" series. Literally creating many of the functions, designs, etc of a modern shooter in the ZDoom engine. Stripped of the pretty glitter of a modern engine, you can see just how pathetic new FPS games have become.

[Jblade]

Quote

Duke Nukem Forever, in a way, is almost like a long term time capsule that shows the evolution of the first person shooter in all the bad ways. With intensely isolated examples of things from different eras. Linear shooting sections, turret sections with a cool down timer, the need for every weapon to have aim down sights, even fists. Limited inventory. On and on.

DNF wasn't as bad as I often pretend to think sometimes, because if anything at least it let you move at your own pace. You didn't have a dude-bro you had to follow shouting "LET'S GO SOLDIER OSCAR MIKE" and who wouldn't let you open doors yourself. You also didn't have an annoying sidekick who'd radio you constantly telling you what to do.

[OpenMaw]

James, on 03 May 2014 - 03:26 PM, said:

DNF wasn't as bad as I often pretend to think sometimes, because if anything at least it let you move at your own pace. You didn't have a dude-bro you had to follow shouting "LET'S GO SOLDIER OSCAR MIKE" and who wouldn't let you open doors yourself. You also didn't have an annoying sidekick who'd radio you constantly telling you what to do.

The first forty minutes of the game are so fucking slow. I tried to play it again recently and my God. The first boss battle has virtually no tension or excitement to it, and while the bosses in Duke3D (Save for maybe the queen and battlelord) are rather easily slain, they're at least faster paced! After that you have a long drawn-out sequence of walking around doing fuck all. You are repeatedly stopped. Blocked. Forced to go one, and only one, direction. Then you get a very brief stint of shooting where you are again forced to sit through a drawn out scripted event before taking on a dull turret section, before being dropped into another quick time event (the elevator), then you're shrunk down and forced through a drawn out driving sequence.

It isn't until after all of this bullshit that you finally get down to shooting monsters with a gun for a long portion of game play. Unfortunately, because there's no exploration to be had, you are literally walking through the game in a figurative straight line shooting things. It's all the same stuff. scripted events, quick time events, turret sections with cool downs, linear shooting sections. The fact that I have to say "shooting section" is a critical failure for a game like Duke Nukem. The time when you are not shooting should be a very small minority. See: almost never. Give me the lo-down on the situation in five minutes or less at the beginning, and throw me into some action. Don't dick me around for a half hour before I finally get to do something that actually resembles what I want from a Duke experience. This is just talking about pace. It doesn't even get into the tone or the other problems of the game.

[Daedolon]

To me it's literally on the shoulders of Half-Life. Somewhere along the lines Valve came and thought they wanted to make movie but in the form of a game, and they came up with this concept of a setpiece rollercoaster: Have the player walk through the scenes of the movies always the same way, as opposed to have each player write their own story depending on their own way and pace.

It wasn't too bad in comparison (in terms of streamlining) to other games around as it still had its small share of nooks and crannies you could peek into, but for some reason companies decided this was the best way to go, and I despise Half-Life and Valve eternally for it.

Essentially I'd argue the main issue is movies and companies trying to make every game into a movie-like experience. Another huge factor is voice acting becoming mandatory over written text or just a single line uttered by an enemy as he dies. This is especially bad with CRPGs where voice acting deducts from the choice-effect systems that most CRPGs without voice acting had available on a much more intricate level.


As for indies, I'm not sure if it's other people rising against the majority of big games following this pattern, or just the rise of tools that allow easier development of games than ever before. But I think everyone has their own idea for a great game and working alone is slow. This can be very frustrating as well with the abundance of independent games, causing a lack of feedback or interest in some of the more honestly interesting game concepts -- sometimes completely killing them.

In contrast during the late 80s and early 90s, I think creating games was enough of a niche that people combined their forced more easily to work on someone's personal idea, or, just getting together over a beloved hobby and coming up with a game concept together. As almost anything someone could come up would be a new and a wild concept, it could pull more people around it than these days.


I believe in reboots, but the fact that these big companies have sucked almost all of the most beloved and interesting IPs into them, people might be afraid to go out and start working on a game concept even remotely similar (ie. being heavily influenced by your favourite game) with the fear of this huge company breathing down on your neck. At least I can't really see many independent developers following the concepts of intriguing past hit games. For some reason, these same people are not afraid of copying down the idea of another independent game almost too literally, but with no repercussions as the original developer was independent with no lawyers behind them.

On the other end, I'm not a huge fan of the idea of having to force yourself to come up with completely wild new concepts, as what is seemingly happening when indie devs aren't too busy copying each other's ideas. I've seen a lot of cool concepts come from this, but they're often so niche that they never get a chance to get visibility, bringing about their own doom.


In the end we get these huge companies hoarding all the interesting IPs, yet churn out these overtly crafted-for-the-market products for maximum profit, which often can literally mean the same product in a different shell, even within multiple franchises, being released over and over again. Where the other options generally dwindle down to small independent games, or privately funded semi-large products with at least somewhat developer (not publisher) based mentality, ie. The Witcher or the new Rise of the Triad and Shadow Warrior games.


It's a bit late so I'm not sure if I'm speaking my mind as I intended to, or if I'm missing on thoughts I'd have at other times. But as it stands, I'm mostly keeping myself busy with the odd (maybe 1 a year) new game and stick to my collection of thought-provoking and intriguing titles from the 90s.


EDIT: And to the surprise of nobody I kind of read the title as "What happened to the oldies" for whatever reason.

Anyway about the storylines, I think they were always there in the first place, plus more often than not they were a ton more interesting back in the 90s, I don't know at what point this modern warfare business started becoming such a huge trend and when did this huge variety of scifi settings get rolled into this one bland pastel colour fest with pew pew guns that we see these days (actually I do, and I name it Halo).

I can sort of see companies wanting to squeeze out more broad-minded and approximated experiences for the maximum income as the reason for lack of variety in both themes and gameplay. Though, hell if I know the true intent of forced hand-holding when it comes to storylines. I could kind of go back to Half-Life as some sort of scapegoat on this subject, although it only really started the setpiece rollercoaster trend, it never force-fed you storyline past the intro segment and the handful of other times they'd take control away from you -- despicable, yes, but not in the scale we see today.


I think the lack of options for expressing storylines back in the day is what caused developers to get clever. The post-episode screens in DOOM are painful enough as is (which is likely why they're also skippable), so the burden of expressing the story (which was written, nevertheless), was given to the level designers, the audio designers and musicians, texture artists and so forth. I think you can soak in more storyline from the few first levels of DOOM than you can in the lifetime of a random modern game. Let the players do it at their own pace and you'll have something that will be less easily forgotten.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Commando Nukem, on 03 May 2014 - 03:21 PM, said:

A great little trilogy of videos/WADs relating to the modern shooter are the "Call of Dooty/If Doom was done today" series. Literally creating many of the functions, designs, etc of a modern shooter in the ZDoom engine. Stripped of the pretty glitter of a modern engine, you can see just how pathetic new FPS games have become.

That was fun to watch. Probably not to play, lol.

Along with the numerous things pointed out in the wad, I also highlight the excess of tutorials (there's a tutorial for everything!) and the excess of realism, with sprint limit and chaingun cooldown. Of course, walking in Doom is useless, but sprint limits are so annoying...

Previously, games came with manuals that told mostly everything you needed to know about the game itself, though the learning process is still when you play, as telling you a trooper shoots lasers and can fly doesn't mean a whole lot. Integrating manuals into gameplay is probably one of the worst things developers have done. The CoD parody in that video takes zero skill to play. A dumb robot could complete it.

[Hank]

Duke of Hazzard, on 03 May 2014 - 03:05 PM, said:

Also, I feel that the media industry isn't moving forward. There are way too many reboots. Highest grossing films are either remakes or moviefied versions of stories already told 40 years ago in comics and other media. With games it's the same. Super Mario 3D Land was fun, but how much of my fun was the fact that the game mixes elements from classic Mario titles and presents them in 3D instead of creating something new?

Feel free to discuss.

This is nothing new. If you follow the music industry, especially in the US, you'll find an ultra conservative pattern. One original sound is sold over and over for decades. Movies - they copied shit from the 40s to the 50s to the 60s. Is it surprising then that fresh ideas for games are stuck on someone's comp? You have Desura, but who else is out there scouting for new talents and ideas? I say: For as long as the current mass clientèle (the average gamer) is happy with the new redone games, the game developer won't need to innovate or god forbid, change.

[Hool]

I believe that games have shifted focus a lot in the last few years or so. Gaming has become a massive culture phenomenon due to the rise in cinematic quality games. Cinema and Gaming are starting to fuse together into one (take for example The Last of Us, Uncharted or Call of Duty) so game developers are starting to shift focus because that's where sales are. Unfortunately, this also affects games themselves because they have to cater to the "wider demographic" which is the general public. They don't want to sit down and read a 30 page manual on how to play the game, they want to listen to a quick tutorial and dive right in for a straightforward experience.

I miss the old days of gaming myself, when you weren't restricted by the boundaries of the level and you could backtrack freely. I miss the ability to discover things myself without the need of hand holding or onscreen prompts. I miss epic boss battles that took strategic planning instead of button mashing. I miss reading cheatcodes for games in magazines at my local shop so I could unlock secret levels instead of paying for them. Yet, unfortunately those days are long gone now and I'm afraid to say it but I don't see a steady return of the "oldies". Many game developers miss this because they attempt to adhere to both demographics - hardcore gamers and casual gamers. Take for example Rise of the Triad, it included oldschool features but still insisted on having corridor shooting galleries because once you reach certain parts of a level doors would close behind you preventing you from backtracking to find other secrets you might've missed. Or how about Rare Software? Once the greatest first party platform developer for Nintendo and now has become Microsoft's developer to chew and spit out Kinect games.

I hope one day that developers can create games that aren't restricted to certain demographics just so they can get extra zeroes on their paychecks. However, that isn't going to happen for a long, long time.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Actually Microsoft was really dumb buying Rare because most key staff left when they did this.

[Hool]

Duke of Hazzard, on 04 May 2014 - 01:52 PM, said:

Actually Microsoft was really dumb buying Rare because most key staff left when they did this.

Apparently, when Microsoft acquired Rare they thought they owned the Donkey Kong license too. What a massive fail on Microsoft's part.

[MusicallyInspired]

The common denominator behind the steady decline of using your brain/skills in gaming is the pandering to impatience.

[Person of Color]

I think that one of modern day gaming's biggest problems is that it's become a way of life instead of an entertainment medium. Today's gamers are widely comprised of people I don't really like talking to, and I love talking to people. I'm pretty damn extroverted.

Look at the fanbase for any modern "hardcore" game. It could be an elaborate RPG or a simple DoTA knockoff. They are universally terrible. These "hardcore" gamers are narrow minded, plebeian, and totally beta. They end up working in the industry and create subpar crap and due to their weak nature they allow the shitbag managers to walk all over them. The rebellious entrepreneurs of the 90's are gone.

The "cool" factor behind games went with them. There are no more Sega screams, no more edgy Playstation ads, and games that appeal to the "cool factor" for sales are gone. Mind you, many of those "cool" games were pretty fucking good, like Extreme-G 2 or Twisted Metal 2.

Games won't get better until we bridge the gap between the Call of Duties and Deus Ex's of the world. There's no middle ground anymore, and we're left with people who drink Mountain Dew, and the people who get their asses kicked by those who Do The Dew™.

[djroadking]

CoD has lost its charm... CoD4 was awesome, Black Ops 2's Zombies where fun because I played it a lot with my cousins. Now though I won't be buying any games in the series. Found my original copy of Duke 3D, played it again then picked up the Megaton edition on Steam. Charm was what a lot of older games had. Also just the characters themselves where great. Duke as a main example was like no other at the time, no other character is anything like him now either. Crash Bandicoot's original trilogy on the PS1 was also great. Crash & Duke... My childhood all within those 2 characters... Most games now are all for realism. Realism has killed games in some ways but has helped in others.

[HulkNukem]

For one, they didn't hold your hand. They typically threw you into the game, either never explaining what a weapon or enemy is, you have to figure it out yourself. There was a sense of exploration and wonder to it where games nowadays show off a lot of the content in trailers or make new enemies or weapons revealed via a cutscene (instead of just randomly running into them; Doom 3 is a big offender of this)

The second, is that they are linear, which isn't the issue with the levels, but that they also include bottleneck sections that take you out of the action. They'll have you play through a small section and then you go through a cut scene (even worse, unskippable ones like in Half-Life 2) and you can't traverse back to where you were before, they'll lock the door behind you so to speak. Obviously games that force backtracking can be annoying, but when you do it in say Doom, you get to revisit old areas where maybe a new section of wall opened up revealing more monsters and items, or a gate that was closed before is now open. Plus, you get to run through a floor made of dead bodies of enemies you killed. Nowadays, bodies disappear almost instantly.

And third, well, games were simply newer 'back in the day'. Games like Doom and Duke are still a blast to play today simply because the gameplay is just plain good, but they were also the first of their kind. Duke had real world locations (even if they were abstract) and they put their own spin on some things, spoofing ads to make them sexual for instance. When games like Grand Theft Auto do the same thing, they feel tired and overdone, even if they can be more clever.

There's also the fact games cost a lot more and take a lot longer to make now, so there's more risk in trying to do something original while also making it detailed and realistic. Where the maps in the original Doom could take a week or two to make (Romero said he made E1M1 in roughly 2 weeks) one single level can easily take several months to make in current games. Its part of the same reason games are looking more real but also more bland now and less twitchy, you have simple looking geometry making up a level with just the textures pasted on and a few items placed around, where now you have all this dirt, debris, worn out walls or floors, overly cluttered with objects that serve no purpose other than to fill space and make it look more real.

Its why I prefer something like this, smooth and clean geometry, over something like this
The first image has simplistic smooth geometry that your brain can naturally understand while you can focus your attention on someone around the corner or what your health is at. The second one, while it looks cool and beautiful, has so many detail objects and foliage and stuff you have to take a second to think if you can even go in a certain direction or if its going to be closed off by invisible walls or is just there as a set decoration.

But, I'm going a little too much into it. Just wanted to add my two cents.

[MrFlibble]

HulkNukem, on 08 May 2014 - 07:27 PM, said:

something like this

On a side note, I should admit that I haven't played any game that came out after 2009, but is this a screen shot from an actual game? At first I thought it was a Baroque painting (and a nicely done one!).

[MetHy]

HulkNukem, on 08 May 2014 - 07:27 PM, said:

Its why I prefer something like this, smooth and clean geometry, over something like this
The first image has simplistic smooth geometry that your brain can naturally understand while you can focus your attention on someone around the corner or what your health is at. The second one, while it looks cool and beautiful, has so many detail objects and foliage and stuff you have to take a second to think if you can even go in a certain direction or if its going to be closed off by invisible walls or is just there as a set decoration.

Yeah, this a thousand times. There is something about newer FPS games (I guess it'd be the same for most games of most genres but those are the only very recent games i've played), even those that I actually enjoy like Hard Reset or the new ROTT, that really bothers me.

The amount of useless detailing actually hinders gameplay : there is so much detailing everywhere (without mentionning other visual effects like blur etc) that you can't focus on what's important, so much stuff everywhere that it takes away the focus. I also find newer FPS very tiresome because of that. After 1 hour of playing Hard Reset or ROTT I need a rest because there just was too much useless information my brain had to register; while I could play duke3D all day with no problem.

The thing is, that much detailing isn't useful for the game, there is no way a player would see everything anyway without stopping and inspecting all around him every few steps. So in other words, to me not only it's useless, but doesn't serve the game in any way.
I'm not saying to make everything as "clean" as the first screenshot you showed, but there is some amount of detailing that I find acceptable and some games went too far.

The problem being, those games 'need' as much fucking detailing as the devs can put if they want pro reviewers to say that the 'graphics' look great; which is one of the most important aspects of games for most reviewers and players.

[MrFlibble]

After some time the brain adjusts to filter out irrelevant information (it's still a certain strain on its resources anyway), so yeah, much of the eye candy just becomes invisible gorillas, especially if the game has a lot of intense action.

[MetHy]

My brain must not be doing that then. I always try to look at everything when I play a game, think of how it was made, gather ideas in my head for future inspiration. So a game with too much useless detailing makes me tired very quickly.

[MrFlibble]

MetHy, on 09 May 2014 - 09:13 AM, said:

My brain must not be doing that then. I always try to look at everything when I play a game, think of how it was made, gather ideas in my head for future inspiration.

Consciously focussing attention on those features overrides the filtering-out process. If you get immersed in fighting enemies and dodging their attacks for example, appreciating the artful scenery will get in the way of gameplay and thus blocked.

[Duke of Hazzard]

HulkNukem, on 08 May 2014 - 07:27 PM, said:

For one, they didn't hold your hand. They typically threw you into the game, either never explaining what a weapon or enemy is, you have to figure it out yourself. There was a sense of exploration and wonder to it where games nowadays show off a lot of the content in trailers or make new enemies or weapons revealed via a cutscene (instead of just randomly running into them; Doom 3 is a big offender of this)

We had the manuals in the past, but manuals don't work because they're obviously not the game itself. I remember being scared of the Pinky Demon as a child because it said in the manual that it would rip your head off, so I thought the Pinky could instantly kill you. Obviously that's not the case, and, when I found out the "truth", I was never scared of Pinkies again.

I was also scared of the Battlelord because it didn't appear in the manual. So when I found one, I thought "oh shit", and tried to kill it with Shotgun and similar weapons. Then I tried the RPG, thinking that a single rocket could kill it like it does with most other enemies, and it didn't work either. The Battlelord had such an impression on me that I'm scared of it even today, but now it's more because it's a formidable enemy with a scary growl.

[HulkNukem]

MrFlibble, on 09 May 2014 - 07:36 AM, said:

On a side note, I should admit that I haven't played any game that came out after 2009, but is this a screen shot from an actual game? At first I thought it was a Baroque painting (and a nicely done one!).

Its from one of the Gears of War games

MetHy, on 09 May 2014 - 09:13 AM, said:

My brain must not be doing that then. I always try to look at everything when I play a game, think of how it was made, gather ideas in my head for future inspiration. So a game with too much useless detailing makes me tired very quickly.

Taking a few minutes to pause and look at the scenery can be calming and great, and the level of detail can be awe inspiring. However, when you play a fast paced multiplayer game where you are blazing through the maps, your brain can get tricked by what you think is a balcony you can reach but its surrounded in invisible walls, an object you think you can jump on but it has no physical properties and so you can walk straight through it, or there are objects that you can get stuck on trying to swing around a corner, like the trim of a door frame.
Typically in the older games if something existed in a level, it served a purpose and not just because it HAD to exist to be real

[Person of Color]

MrFlibble, on 09 May 2014 - 07:36 AM, said:

On a side note, I should admit that I haven't played any game that came out after 2009, but is this a screen shot from an actual game? At first I thought it was a Baroque painting (and a nicely done one!).

Is that due to being unable to afford better hardware or just not wanting to?

[MrFlibble]

Protected by Viper, on 09 May 2014 - 05:50 PM, said:

Is that due to being unable to afford better hardware or just not wanting to?

Well, I generally don't have much time to play games, and most modern titles I've heard/read about or watched reviews of haven't made me really want to play them (even thought there are some nice titles which I have appreciated - from what I learned about them - like the new SW or Dishonored). That and having retro-gaming sentiments result in a preference for oldies

BTW, speaking of the eye candy in games, in the mid-2000s I used to play a lot of Will Rock, which I enjoyed not in the least due to the scenery. The way gameplay is structured there (rather similar to Serious Sam) allows to appreciate the surroundings because action-packed monster fighting is interspersed with relatively serene exploration. I've read in some interview that the level designers had consulted with experts on Ancient Greek and Roman architecture, and some of the areas are recreations of real places, like the starting area in the first level is Petra's Al-Khazneh, and level two starts in the Petra amphitheatre.

[Person of Color]

As much as I love the older stuff I gotta say, newer games are much better in some aspects when they are done right. I still think the oldies have better level design, and on average they sound better, but I haven't encountered anything retro that has given me the same warm feelings of Deus Ex: Human Revolution or the Mass Effect trilogy. The original Deus Ex is the exception. FreeSpace 2 came close, but no cigar. Not only narration, but the presentation of the world itself has gotten much better over the years.

There's a level of epicness that requires a good processor and lots of memory.

[----]

I couldn't stand Deus Ex: Human Revolution and stopped playing it, because as soon as it fianlly offered 5 minutes of continuous gameplay and I got in the mood they killed it by breaking the pace again with another cutscene.
Yrs, the cutscenes were pretty and all, but I primarily play a game for the gameplay. And if it is interrupted every 5 minutes I do something else ...

[Person of Color]

Every five minutes? That's some closed minded shit. There are missions in that game that go on for hours. Deus Ex 1 had more cutscenes.

[Micky C]

I don't remember any cutscenes in Deus Ex 1. Although I'm only half way through at the moment.

Btw am I the only one who thinks the game world of Deus Ex:HR looks better than the FMV?

[Forge]

What is it that the oldies did right... "...and the new ones don't?"

The old ones didn't do anything "right" per say. The oldies were setting the stage and being creative with no limits. They could get away with it because there was no precedence or anything to compare it to.

Even shortly after the engine and eye candy war started there was still some room to flex the boundaries.

Today it's all formula. What sells is emulated to death. There are some gems out there floating in all that muck if you look hard enough though.

[Person of Color]

Mickey C, on 12 May 2014 - 05:41 PM, said:

Btw am I the only one who thinks the game world of Deus Ex:HR looks better than the FMV?

Yeah, it's called Bink video, a lot of console games use it to save precious memory space.

IIRC the Directors Cut edition has better cutscenes.

When I was talking about cutscenes before, I thought you were talking about conversations. Kind of a shitty reason to hate on a game. They aren't that frequent and they don't get in the way.