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Having blasted through Freedom Fighters and Prince of Persia, those two games had a rare effect on me. I enjoyed playing them without getting annoyed. Sure I died and died often, but it was through my own fault instead of some retarded game design. That's when I get angry and revert to a furious child (god bless Reduced Tolerance Syndrome, available from all good near fatal car accidents now!) and smash the controller onto the floor, swear like a demon and go outside to smoke furiously and invent new curses.
And these two games made me realise that they were free from the cliches that seem to haunt most games I've played that, despite being groundbreaking/innovative/best sellers, reduce me to stomping off red-faced and hissing.
Why?
Why in an age of bluetooth technology, phones with cameras, ipods, the internet and chewable non-brush toothbrushes (I'm not making this up, they sell them in a service station I stop at on my way down to Dorset each weekend. You open them, chew this minty fuzzball thing and it cleans your teeth. Then just gob them out the window at 100mph and watch them bounce down the M27)
You've all experience these things, the moments in a game when suddenly it's 1986 again and you've just bought another pikey Codemasters £2.99 Spectrum game from the market.
Here are some that, the moment they appear, make me see red and turn off the game never to play it again:
--------------------------------------------------
The "Ah you're dead and had no way of expecting it!"
(see Tomb Raider for example)
You've battled your way past undead/werewhatever/heavies to reach a new room/chamber. You pause and look about. You can see where you need to get to, now it's just how to get there. All seems well so you take a step into the room.
DEAD!
Be it from a spike from the floor, blade from the wall, boulder from the ceiling. There is no way to know death is rap-rap-rapping upon your chamber door until it happens, resulting in a reload and armed with foreknowledge you avoid it this time.
Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh
I don't want this. I want to die because I made a mistake, because I failed in my skills. I don't want to die because some nerdlinger level designer was annoyed at some fool in his IRC chat claiming that Spock did Bones up the peachdrain.
It's a lazy, uneccessary thing to encounter.
The "What? My former ally turns against me after whining?"
Time and time again.
You start with a mate/partner/smuggling buddy/robot sidekick. You both develop a friendship. You give them vital health packs and surrender ammo unto them because hey, men can love men and not wear a dress.
But they're never happy, they always moan like a child in a car on the motorway. "Why did you do that?" "I think we should go this way" "You seem to eager to embrace the Dark Side" they bleat and you think "Shuttup hetero lifemate and take this medpac" before going on.
And the plot develops, the characters grow, their inventory increases and what happens?
"Now I must turn against you and make you regret your non-kissy affections"
AAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH
Gladius on the Xbox is a prime example. You meet a wandering Nubian, he joins despite you trying to run away or kill him. "Fair enough" you think and proceed to spend hard-won money equipping him with the most lethal weapons, the best armour, increasing his stats until he's a veritable Monster Truck in human form.
And he promptly goes evil and attacks you like some foaming dog when you slowly, so slowly, reach for his food bowl as he eats.
Great, so this nails-hard sword wielding animal is a Judas...*sigh*
The "Suddenly everyday objects confuse me"
Mostly in FPS.
Doesn't matter if you're a WWII soldier who's shot/grenaded his way through several campaigns. Doesn't matter if you're a well-trained gravel voiced shadowy goverment operative. Doesn't matter if you're the lone survivor of a spaceship.
There will come a point, usually when confronted with a ladder, when all basic motor skills flee and you end up hurling yourself gleefully to your death like one of those stupid free-running French goobers.
"Hey, I'm being pursued by robots/zombies/nazis/mercs/beasties. So what I'd like to do is get to the edge of a tall ladder and stop short, slowly inch forward and turn around like a little kid on the high diving board until I grasp the thing. All the time being shot/eaten/stabbed please! Thanks! That's not frustrating!"
The "End Of Level Boss? What?"
Hate 'em.
What is this, 1987? Hello? We're still being offered the hoary cliche of bosses? I'm not Mario, this isn't Dragons Lair.
What gets me about end-of-level bosses isn't the sheer illogicality of their existence ("Hey, we're mad scientists that have let loose a plague of space killers. But we thought, before it all went bad, that we'd create this unstoppable monster boss we had no control over"...yeah right), but the fact it's a dull, repetitive system of beating them.
Meet them, die. Meet them again, die. Meet them again, die again. Suddenly realise the one place you stand/recognise the pattern and await your moment will let you beat them.
Ninja Gaiden is a perfect example of this lazy, lazy method of stretching out gameplay time.
There's a level, quite early on, when you have to battle through a city of ninjas. Fair enough, that's the point of the game.
Oh but suddenly here are 3 bloody great dragons to fight (and your last save point was miles back), with no warning or explanation of why they're there. They just land from the sky and have at you.
So you die. And reload, fight all the way there and meet them again.
And you die. And reload, fight all the way there and meet them again.
And you kill one. And you die. And reload, fight all the way there and meet them again.
And you kill two. And you die. And reload, fight all the way there and meet them again.
(getting bored of the repetition yet? Welcome to Ninja Gaiden)
And you kill all three. And you are pleased by this.
Oh oh oh, that's not it though. Nonononononononon, there are minibosses. Now you face a tentacle monster straight after - with still no save point.
Why? Why do designers think foisting these lumbering examples of retro gaming will still cut it in 2004?
Call of Duty doesn't have bosses. Freedom Fighers doesn't have bosses. Hitman doesn't have bosses. Splinter Cell doesn't have bosses.
The "You died because you were a pixel out! Hahaha"
Back to Tomb Raider and countless other platform wankfests.
You're miles above the ground. You have to leap to another platform/stalagtite/moving thing. So you inch forward and make sure you're not going to inexplicably veer of left and sail screaming past your ledge. You take a step backwards and you run, leap and....fall short by a millimeter.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Try again. Miss. Try again, pixel perfect. Made it. Phew.
I don't want to die because I wasn't at the very very lip of a jump and the collision detection decided I was a fat lass and needed to die for my unathletic prowess.
Prince of Persia doesn't do that. Nope, you mash the button near the edge and he thinks "Ok, so I'm supposed to jump" and, here's the startling concept, leaps at the edge and makes it 1st time. Not once, not once did I plummet to a pancake death because I left it a micro-pixel too late/soon. Nope, my fey little monarch-in-waiting was leaping like cat walking across a hobb. Hell, he even ran sideways along walls and then jumped a gap that would make Lara Croft weep like the last-years-license she is.
The "My entire team are from The Sunshine Bus?"
See pretty much every squad-based game.
You are an elite fighting machine. You have hand-picked, carefully equipped team members that have had similar training to you.
You stack up outside a door and tell them to take the room down.
They stand about looking at the ceiling and putting their night-goggles on and off. You order them again, they swiftly run back downstairs and decide to attack an oblivious gaggle of evils on the other side of the map, earning them a death and you a reload.
Delta Force Black Hawk Down is the worst example of this. No wonder they got their ass kicked by barely literate farmers armed with stolen Russian machine guns if that game is to be believed.
It's terrible, shockingly bad.
You order them to follow you, alert and holding fire.
You quietly approach a corner and stop to lean round to ascertain the situation with your binoculars.
Your vision goes black and you're confused, so you take the binoculars off to see what's going on.
Your team is jogging merrily past you, shooting uncontrollably at the sun and clouds alerting every bloody enemy in the town. You slump against the keyboard and moan softly as your elite crack-team of killers decide they'd rather stop bullets with their hero faces than actually obey their commanding officer.
------
There are more but I'm worried about character limit and I don't want this disappearing.
The others that make me fizz?
"That alarm alerted guards that aren't even in the same building and couldn't possibly hear it"
"I ran out of ammo mid-gunfight when I'm 2ft away from the everlasting magazine man"
"I missed a tiny key/button/switch somewhere ages back and must now backtrack searching every drawer/cabinet/shelf/corner for 25 mins"
Good job I saw into the future and saved this to clipboard, it decided to say I had forgotten to write a message and blanked it all when I clicked “back”
Stupid SR server thing.
**edit**
I stand to win £10 based on a response in this thread
And these two games made me realise that they were free from the cliches that seem to haunt most games I've played that, despite being groundbreaking/innovative/best sellers, reduce me to stomping off red-faced and hissing.
Why?
Why in an age of bluetooth technology, phones with cameras, ipods, the internet and chewable non-brush toothbrushes (I'm not making this up, they sell them in a service station I stop at on my way down to Dorset each weekend. You open them, chew this minty fuzzball thing and it cleans your teeth. Then just gob them out the window at 100mph and watch them bounce down the M27)
You've all experience these things, the moments in a game when suddenly it's 1986 again and you've just bought another pikey Codemasters £2.99 Spectrum game from the market.
Here are some that, the moment they appear, make me see red and turn off the game never to play it again:
--------------------------------------------------
The "Ah you're dead and had no way of expecting it!"
(see Tomb Raider for example)
You've battled your way past undead/werewhatever/heavies to reach a new room/chamber. You pause and look about. You can see where you need to get to, now it's just how to get there. All seems well so you take a step into the room.
DEAD!
Be it from a spike from the floor, blade from the wall, boulder from the ceiling. There is no way to know death is rap-rap-rapping upon your chamber door until it happens, resulting in a reload and armed with foreknowledge you avoid it this time.
Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh
I don't want this. I want to die because I made a mistake, because I failed in my skills. I don't want to die because some nerdlinger level designer was annoyed at some fool in his IRC chat claiming that Spock did Bones up the peachdrain.
It's a lazy, uneccessary thing to encounter.
The "What? My former ally turns against me after whining?"
Time and time again.
You start with a mate/partner/smuggling buddy/robot sidekick. You both develop a friendship. You give them vital health packs and surrender ammo unto them because hey, men can love men and not wear a dress.
But they're never happy, they always moan like a child in a car on the motorway. "Why did you do that?" "I think we should go this way" "You seem to eager to embrace the Dark Side" they bleat and you think "Shuttup hetero lifemate and take this medpac" before going on.
And the plot develops, the characters grow, their inventory increases and what happens?
"Now I must turn against you and make you regret your non-kissy affections"
AAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH
Gladius on the Xbox is a prime example. You meet a wandering Nubian, he joins despite you trying to run away or kill him. "Fair enough" you think and proceed to spend hard-won money equipping him with the most lethal weapons, the best armour, increasing his stats until he's a veritable Monster Truck in human form.
And he promptly goes evil and attacks you like some foaming dog when you slowly, so slowly, reach for his food bowl as he eats.
Great, so this nails-hard sword wielding animal is a Judas...*sigh*
The "Suddenly everyday objects confuse me"
Mostly in FPS.
Doesn't matter if you're a WWII soldier who's shot/grenaded his way through several campaigns. Doesn't matter if you're a well-trained gravel voiced shadowy goverment operative. Doesn't matter if you're the lone survivor of a spaceship.
There will come a point, usually when confronted with a ladder, when all basic motor skills flee and you end up hurling yourself gleefully to your death like one of those stupid free-running French goobers.
"Hey, I'm being pursued by robots/zombies/nazis/mercs/beasties. So what I'd like to do is get to the edge of a tall ladder and stop short, slowly inch forward and turn around like a little kid on the high diving board until I grasp the thing. All the time being shot/eaten/stabbed please! Thanks! That's not frustrating!"
The "End Of Level Boss? What?"
Hate 'em.
What is this, 1987? Hello? We're still being offered the hoary cliche of bosses? I'm not Mario, this isn't Dragons Lair.
What gets me about end-of-level bosses isn't the sheer illogicality of their existence ("Hey, we're mad scientists that have let loose a plague of space killers. But we thought, before it all went bad, that we'd create this unstoppable monster boss we had no control over"...yeah right), but the fact it's a dull, repetitive system of beating them.
Meet them, die. Meet them again, die. Meet them again, die again. Suddenly realise the one place you stand/recognise the pattern and await your moment will let you beat them.
Ninja Gaiden is a perfect example of this lazy, lazy method of stretching out gameplay time.
There's a level, quite early on, when you have to battle through a city of ninjas. Fair enough, that's the point of the game.
Oh but suddenly here are 3 bloody great dragons to fight (and your last save point was miles back), with no warning or explanation of why they're there. They just land from the sky and have at you.
So you die. And reload, fight all the way there and meet them again.
And you die. And reload, fight all the way there and meet them again.
And you kill one. And you die. And reload, fight all the way there and meet them again.
And you kill two. And you die. And reload, fight all the way there and meet them again.
(getting bored of the repetition yet? Welcome to Ninja Gaiden)
And you kill all three. And you are pleased by this.
Oh oh oh, that's not it though. Nonononononononon, there are minibosses. Now you face a tentacle monster straight after - with still no save point.
Why? Why do designers think foisting these lumbering examples of retro gaming will still cut it in 2004?
Call of Duty doesn't have bosses. Freedom Fighers doesn't have bosses. Hitman doesn't have bosses. Splinter Cell doesn't have bosses.
The "You died because you were a pixel out! Hahaha"
Back to Tomb Raider and countless other platform wankfests.
You're miles above the ground. You have to leap to another platform/stalagtite/moving thing. So you inch forward and make sure you're not going to inexplicably veer of left and sail screaming past your ledge. You take a step backwards and you run, leap and....fall short by a millimeter.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Try again. Miss. Try again, pixel perfect. Made it. Phew.
I don't want to die because I wasn't at the very very lip of a jump and the collision detection decided I was a fat lass and needed to die for my unathletic prowess.
Prince of Persia doesn't do that. Nope, you mash the button near the edge and he thinks "Ok, so I'm supposed to jump" and, here's the startling concept, leaps at the edge and makes it 1st time. Not once, not once did I plummet to a pancake death because I left it a micro-pixel too late/soon. Nope, my fey little monarch-in-waiting was leaping like cat walking across a hobb. Hell, he even ran sideways along walls and then jumped a gap that would make Lara Croft weep like the last-years-license she is.
The "My entire team are from The Sunshine Bus?"
See pretty much every squad-based game.
You are an elite fighting machine. You have hand-picked, carefully equipped team members that have had similar training to you.
You stack up outside a door and tell them to take the room down.
They stand about looking at the ceiling and putting their night-goggles on and off. You order them again, they swiftly run back downstairs and decide to attack an oblivious gaggle of evils on the other side of the map, earning them a death and you a reload.
Delta Force Black Hawk Down is the worst example of this. No wonder they got their ass kicked by barely literate farmers armed with stolen Russian machine guns if that game is to be believed.
It's terrible, shockingly bad.
You order them to follow you, alert and holding fire.
You quietly approach a corner and stop to lean round to ascertain the situation with your binoculars.
Your vision goes black and you're confused, so you take the binoculars off to see what's going on.
Your team is jogging merrily past you, shooting uncontrollably at the sun and clouds alerting every bloody enemy in the town. You slump against the keyboard and moan softly as your elite crack-team of killers decide they'd rather stop bullets with their hero faces than actually obey their commanding officer.
------
There are more but I'm worried about character limit and I don't want this disappearing.
The others that make me fizz?
"That alarm alerted guards that aren't even in the same building and couldn't possibly hear it"
"I ran out of ammo mid-gunfight when I'm 2ft away from the everlasting magazine man"
"I missed a tiny key/button/switch somewhere ages back and must now backtrack searching every drawer/cabinet/shelf/corner for 25 mins"
Good job I saw into the future and saved this to clipboard, it decided to say I had forgotten to write a message and blanked it all when I clicked “back”
Stupid SR server thing.
**edit**
I stand to win £10 based on a response in this thread
Page:
Some games are made to have proper, hard as nails bosses - it's part of the genre, and the hardcore would be appaulled otherwise.
But, other games, like Metroid Prime, could've found a more subtle way around it.
But, other games, like Metroid Prime, could've found a more subtle way around it.
I agree with most of this. I also had a good laugh reading it.
I do think though that in some games bosses have a place. In Ninja Gaiden they weren't quite right, but could have been with a bit of work.
But some things, like R Type et al just would never have been the same with out a boss. Is it old and clichéd? Yup. Can it be reworked to work in new games? Again, yes it can.
I do think though that in some games bosses have a place. In Ninja Gaiden they weren't quite right, but could have been with a bit of work.
But some things, like R Type et al just would never have been the same with out a boss. Is it old and clichéd? Yup. Can it be reworked to work in new games? Again, yes it can.
Yeah that's ok because it's grounded in some form of realism, but when a 'realistic' game doesn't let you use a useable weapon that's right infront of you that's annoying.
That's a nice way around the problem, I must admit.
There is a twist on that...
Early on in The Chronicles of Riddick the guys have DNA encoded weapons which means when you try to use them you get an electric shock. Genius way around that problem and until you hack the control room you can't use their weapons.
Early on in The Chronicles of Riddick the guys have DNA encoded weapons which means when you try to use them you get an electric shock. Genius way around that problem and until you hack the control room you can't use their weapons.
Actually I have the worst one right here:
Being unable to use enemy weapons even though:
1. You're out of ammo
2. You could easy use them in real life
3. You're about to die
This is what I found highly annoying about Splinter Cell, when the **** hits the fan Fisher should be able to improvise.
Being unable to use enemy weapons even though:
1. You're out of ammo
2. You could easy use them in real life
3. You're about to die
This is what I found highly annoying about Splinter Cell, when the **** hits the fan Fisher should be able to improvise.
I hate repetition when there's too few save points.
Invisible walls can be really annoying, as can slopes which can't be climbed although they'd be dead easy to climb in real life (MoH is full of them).
Falling through floors/walls due to bad programming is the worst though.
Invisible walls can be really annoying, as can slopes which can't be climbed although they'd be dead easy to climb in real life (MoH is full of them).
Falling through floors/walls due to bad programming is the worst though.
Yeah, Tomb Raider is really sucky for that kind of stuff. I had all 3 of them for my PSOne but never bothered to complete them because of awful trial and error gameplay. I normally ended up just playing Gran Turismo, only to be pished off by rubberband AI that suddenly shoot ahead the second you crash. Although to be fair, it's far worse on Mario Kart, where they seem to know exactly where you are.
Most annoying though has to be the ladders. Why can't FPS designers just allocate a button to ladders or something, like Ninja Gaiden? The amount of times I was steaming at the ears because of that last section on XIII is... too many. Yay, I can shoot down legions of enemies, infiltrate high-security buildings and escape from mental asylums, yet I can't navigate a simple ladder. Makes sense.
Enjoyable post to read. Made me laugh, although I'm quite fond of bosses. A couple from Ninja Gaiden are a bit ridiculous, the first one and that purple, wing-eared god freak, but other than that I found them really fun. Worked in Metroid Prime pretty well too.
Most annoying though has to be the ladders. Why can't FPS designers just allocate a button to ladders or something, like Ninja Gaiden? The amount of times I was steaming at the ears because of that last section on XIII is... too many. Yay, I can shoot down legions of enemies, infiltrate high-security buildings and escape from mental asylums, yet I can't navigate a simple ladder. Makes sense.
Enjoyable post to read. Made me laugh, although I'm quite fond of bosses. A couple from Ninja Gaiden are a bit ridiculous, the first one and that purple, wing-eared god freak, but other than that I found them really fun. Worked in Metroid Prime pretty well too.
heh, so true :D
You forgot:
Loading times.
Invinsible walls.
You forgot:
Loading times.
Invinsible walls.
Highly amusing read.
Good stuff, the point about squad based games was hilareous, I know exactly what you mean and it is so incredibly annoying.
Take Halo for example, You and your "Squad-mates" who come and help you fight the covenant forces, muhhh. You climb in the Warthog, 3 of them jump on in excitement, the one that doesn't make it just continually runs on the spot and dies when you move the vehicle.
Or the ones that throw grenades for no reason, that is the most irritating thing in the world.
Scenario: One covenant grunt is just outside on the beach, flapping its arms around and squealing like a spak, firing its poncy laser gun into the rocks around us. I, Master Cheif push forward to do a comical melee attack on the lonesome creature, instead of having to waste valuable ammo.
....."Cheif sir, I think we got 'im"
....."GREEENAAAADEEEE!!!!"
....."Move out men"
*boom*
Health goes down, grunt dies, I have to live with escorting these bafoons around the level.
T'is majorly annoying.
Good stuff, the point about squad based games was hilareous, I know exactly what you mean and it is so incredibly annoying.
Take Halo for example, You and your "Squad-mates" who come and help you fight the covenant forces, muhhh. You climb in the Warthog, 3 of them jump on in excitement, the one that doesn't make it just continually runs on the spot and dies when you move the vehicle.
Or the ones that throw grenades for no reason, that is the most irritating thing in the world.
Scenario: One covenant grunt is just outside on the beach, flapping its arms around and squealing like a spak, firing its poncy laser gun into the rocks around us. I, Master Cheif push forward to do a comical melee attack on the lonesome creature, instead of having to waste valuable ammo.
....."Cheif sir, I think we got 'im"
....."GREEENAAAADEEEE!!!!"
....."Move out men"
*boom*
Health goes down, grunt dies, I have to live with escorting these bafoons around the level.
T'is majorly annoying.
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