I find myself constantly annoyed by videogames. It’s to the point that I just as often find myself asking why I’m playing them. That phase fades, of course, and I continue to play with those bitter thoughts of being cheated – because we all know that it’s not the poor player – behind me. Grievous flaws such as graphical pop-up, frame-rate slowdown and hit detection errors are all problems I’d normally have taken issue with. Until recently. These flaws are now outweighed by the biggest problem in games to date.
Interruptions.
There was a point in my life when my father would tell me, repeatedly, that I was being “too critical” of things. This was probably happening on a daily basis. He was right, of course, and after years of brushing off his comments with a “pssh!” or deliberate ignorance, he eventually stopped informing me that I was condescending or judgmental towards menial things.
Nowadays, though, I wonder if he’s right: am I too critical? I know that everyone passes judgment, and being that I’m a “game critic,” as it were, I’m wondering if I’m looking for things to piss and moan about.
What triggered this thought back to my early days as a critical, mouthy whippersnapper was a combination of things that ultimately boil down to share a single theme: the aforementioned gameplay intrusions. In my recent experience, certain issues have arisen that have entirely sullied the enjoyment of an experience by unnecessarily jamming bothersome bits in to the middle.
Where to begin?
How about with irony?
Achievements are how I got my first freelance gig at Official Xbox Magazine in early 2008. While the idea of unlocking badges and boosting my Gamerscore will always appeal to me, I find that the bloop sound effect and cylindrical grey box to be one of the most annoying things on the planet. Certain critical story points in BioShock and Portal were absolutely ruined by the damned pop-up, because it sucks you out of the experience of this fictional world. It reminds you that you’re interacting with colored 3D models, and nothing more.
Another issue I take with BioShock is one I take with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare as well – giant, shining objective markers. Not only did 2K Boston’s underwater excursion have you following the orders of an obnoxious golden arrow that blinked above your eyeballs every second of the way, but you were babied through the entire thing unless you opted to turn off the hints – which you should.
Can’t find the single valve that needs turning? Let us help you by making it a glowing beacon of hope.
Unable to locate a rocket launcher? It’s the big, pulsing neon thing under that table.
For a couple games where the story hits so hard, being shacked up in these realistically rendered universes is wholly broken by big fingers that scream “HEY STUPID!” across the hand.
But not all of these god-awful interferences are visually disruptive, however. Some of them blatantly infringe on your fun by slapping a vibrant red stop sign on the road that “gameplay” is traveling down.
Mass Effect, despite being what is probably my favorite game in the last ten years, can burn in a blazing inferno for all eternity for all I care. Why? Three words: Noveria. Core. Puzzle. About three quarters of the way through the plot-heavy planet, Noveria, players are forced to revive an inactive space-core that will activate the electrical… Okay, it doesn’t matter what it does; the point is that it’s an unruly abortion of a puzzle, and a stain on the face of a masterpiece. Those who’ve played the space-opera know the disastrous interruption all too well, but for those who haven’t seen the confusing array of shifting blue blocks, consider yourself blessed.
Pressing the Xbox 360’s face buttons alters individual blocks from an “in” to “out” position — however, since no explanation of how this futuristic contraption works is ever offered, you’re left to guess how the doo-dad works by randomly jamming buttons. If you didn’t have 100 units of the puzzle-solving Omni-Gel, you were basically hooped.
Bully’s narrative came to such a screeching halt that you’d think little Jimmy Hopkins and his story were delayed by a passing train, only to find out that they’d been ploughed down by a barreling semi truck and pinned to a brick wall. About halfway through the game, you were forced to impress the nerd clique in order to unlock their pivotal plot mission. In order to do this, you would have to nail a high score in the fictional arcade mini-game, Fatty Consumo. The problem was, Fatty Consumo was utter garbage and the least enjoyable part of Bully – and it had to be beaten in order to progress! Since that particular game is packed with randomly spawning deathtraps, winning was up to Lady Luck –- not your sick joystick skills.
The only thing worse than senseless brain-teasers and unnecessary mini-games is being forced out of the entertainment to watch a bunch of dull conversation. No, I don’t mean Metal Gear; I’m talking about Assassin’s Creed. Just when you were getting in to the swing of leaping around, knifing and slicing up guards, and assassinating anyone who stood in your way, you were forced back to the future. Why? To get yapped at by some jerk doctor and his babe-a-licious assistant. Look, I get that the sci-fi premise of Creed lent it a lot of credence – it was a solid spin! – but for the love of King Carl the 45th… let me jump from roof to roof instead of walking (slowly) around a containment center waiting to get back in to the sweet-ass roof-hoppin’ action!
These are, one hundred percent, personal issues I take with games. I want to play, or at the very least I’d like to be entertained. I can handle a 45 minute cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 4 if it’s one of the most spectacularly cool things I’ve ever seen. But having to stop the fun action and revert to walking around a lab, tinker with an impossible puzzle, or play a slow paced, trashy arcade game is out of the question.
Let me play my dang videogames, developers. I don’t need you to baby me through it like I’m a brain-dead baby with one eye and a severe lack of appendages.
I can figure out where the machine gun turret is because it looks like a machine gun turret – I don’t need you to shine a Godly beam from the heavens down upon it. On the flip side, you can’t throw a random puzzle in to the middle of your action RPG and expect me to know how to solve it. I’m not part of this fictional place — I don’t know how shit works in the future.
Am I being too critical in asking to be able to enjoy myself without unwanted interruptions?
January 7, 2009 at 2:09 pm |
you’re a videogame addict. nice! i haven’t played for a while though. i miss metal gear!!!
January 7, 2009 at 4:13 pm |
I think you’re a bit of both. You’re critical because of course you’ve been ‘trained’ to look at all the finite parts of a game; if you manage to separate yourself from the game and experience the way it should be (which in most cases is for entertainment purposes), I think you wouldn’t be too critical.
About the whole puzzles in Mass Effect, while that puzzle was a bit of pain I at least appreciate that they offered something different. It might not always work, but at least they were willing to take a chance and they didn’t pepper the game with ‘out of the way’ tasks.
I do agree that Assassin’s Creeds interruptions were annoying. For me it was the repetition that you had to go through as Altair. I found that even more of a problem than asking as Desmond and learning more about why he’s there from Vidic and Lucy.
If you hated the ‘hand holding’ of Bioshock, then I’d really love to hear your thoughts about Prince of Persia or Shadow of the Colossus which both essentially have the ‘hand hold’ button.
January 7, 2009 at 5:48 pm |
Prince of Persia’s ease is something I don’t mind at all, but there’s something about that game that keeps me from coming back. It’s fine and fun, but something about it just bugs me. Colossus was a game I found immensely challenging, which might have been my own fault, but I adored it for it.
January 12, 2009 at 10:44 pm |
While I would refute your objection to the sequences in Assassin’s Creed specifically, I don’t disagree with your assessment of interruptions in general. I have always played my 360 without the sound effects, so the “bloop” when the developers decide that I’ve achieved something isn’t so familiar a sound to me–the grey box popping up and stealing my focus from something incredible happening on the screen (like the blasted last scene in, I don’t know, Prince of Persia) is. It’s rather vexing to me that people go to such great lengths to craft such complex scenes, only to let their Achievements Code Monkey decide to undermine the scene with an Achievement trigger.
As for some of the other examples you noted: Most of Bioshock’s “Help me, I’m dumb” assistance can be turned off or at least minimized; a feature I can only hope made as much of an impression on other developers as everything else awesome about that title did. No help for Call of Duty 4, though…But I can’t remember being too annoyed by anything in that game’s campaign mode, less its brevity. As for Mass Effect, I had to search online to be reminded about the puzzle in question. I do remember being annoyed by the puzzle, but I could also argue for it: This alien technology was as unknown to Shephard as it was to me; in not providing more information about the puzzle, the devs may have been trying to afford the player some of the same confusion the party is feeling, faced with this complex machine they must somehow manipulate without further instruction. I’m sure that the reasons behind the puzzle are more contrived than clever (which can sometimes be the same thing, anyway), but I would say that if that was the goal of the designers, they succeeded–perhaps too well.
By the by, I don’t think you’re being overly critical. If you are being paid to delineate why this or that is or isn’t good or worthwhile or what have you, you must be critical, perhaps even hypercritical (if being critical is something that can be objectively measured, anyway). What I think the challenge for someone like you (and by someone like you I mean myself) is, knowing when–or perhaps remembering when–to take off the “I am being critical” hat and put on the “I am playing this for fun” hat. I’d like to defend my constant return to the Dynasty Warriors and related series as accomplishing this very purpose: How much more can I appreciate (and perhaps less easily be critical of) great action games when I always have a consistently underwhelming base series to compare them to?
January 13, 2009 at 6:46 am |
Solid points on all fronts. I’m aware that you can turn off the blasted arrow in BioShock, but I didn’t even think of it until halfway through. It’s bothersome, regardless, and removing it isn’t something that you’d really think is possible. Tropes like that are traditionally stuck there. Oh, next-gen gaming is a beautiful thing
January 18, 2009 at 4:29 pm |
It seems paradoxical to me that you would complain about the hand-holding objective markers in one game, but an unexplained puzzle in another. You make a very fair point that a lot of games these days add unnecessary filler to pad out the fun. Assassin’s Creed has future sequences which no one reviewed well (Hitman doesn’t), Sonic has lame Werehog stages to balance out the exciting running ones. I’ll agree with you that games don’t need that.
However, if a game doesn’t throw you a curveball now and then, I think it’s far more disappointing to make a game that’s just a straight-shot beginning to end playthrough. I definitely do miss games that unapologetically said, “You need to learn to do this new thing in order to progress.” How fair it is to make that skill outside the normal scope of the gameplay is probably up for debate, but I definitely support the stop sign every now and again to vary the speed of play. Far worse than a game with filler is a game that can be measured in achievements per hour, where the standard deviation is very low.
January 20, 2009 at 6:42 pm |
I won’t debate the inherent incongruity of the statements, but I think that I’m seeing it on multiple planes. I don’t mind handholding every now and again — I think that I should be educated, though, rather than pampered. BioShock literally points to where you need to be for the entirety of the game, should you choose to leave the arrow on (or not realize that it can be removed). But with something like Mass Effect’s Noveria core puzzle, you’re left completely hanging. You’ve never been shown anything resembling a puzzle up until this point, and the lone puzzle you’ll ever try to solve is basically nonsense. Even when I’m being hand-held by a friend who’s reading the strategy guide to me, I still can’t make sense of the button presses and their correlation to what’s happening on screen.
I want to know what I have to do, or at least have the ability to find out in the game. The nonsense puzzle can stay, but I need to be able to find a blueprint or alien document that explains how it works, otherwise it’s just gibberish.