Things That Make Video Games Suck pt. 2

Water Levels

Nothing ruins a fun game like a good, or a bad, or really any, water level.

You’re chugging along, working your way through known territory, when all of a sudden you find yourself faced with working through some horrible underwater temple of some kind. All of your weapons, items, and movements are useless.

These levels are always the shittiest ones. Always. Why? Well, maybe it’s because people spend months and years designing the physics, gameplay, and controls of a game, and then decide to completely ruin them for the sake of one level. One level that combines boredom and terror in a really overused way.

On the terror side, facing the fear of drowning is not one of my favorite activities. Whenever people compare horrible deaths, it’s either drowning or burning alive, and let’s face it, at least if you burned alive you would make for some good news footage later to be used in a Metallica video.

Also, there aren’t a lot of really terrifying burning alive deaths in video games. I’m not saying people don’t burn to death, but I am saying that you usually don’t spend three minutes struggling, panicking, trying desperately to find a fire extinguisher or decent blanket or bucket of sand or whatever.

And another thing. If you did happen to go to the brink of drowning, I would think your brain might be permanently affected. Maybe if you push it too far, Link should walk with a limp for the rest of the game. Or maybe dialogue is altered so people are constantly talking about how you’re “not like you used to be” and then quickly stop each other as you enter the room.

On the boredom side, the plan for a water level seems to be pretty much like a normal level, but slower and darker.

How about a look at some classic horrible water levels?

TMNT

This might be the granddaddy of them all. So many problems it’s hard to know where to start.

For one thing, as a turtle man, shouldn’t a water level be easily navigable? If you can run through a warehouse and kill with a sword, I would think that swimming around would be easy as hell. A welcome break, like if I spent the day attacking robots with nunchuks and then someone asked me to nap and eat a whole bag of Doritos. I would be in my natural environment and therefore very comfortable, not likely to encounter any big problems.

Instead, this whole thing is shit because you can hold your breath for about four seconds, and everything around you is electrified. Also, you pretty much suck at swimming.

I could understand if one of four turtles was bad at swimming. Maybe Michaelangelo was spending too much time being a party dude and never learned. Maybe Raphael was cool, but crude to his swim instructor. Maybe Donatello was busy screwing around with a laser-guided…you get the idea.

But not one decent swimmer amongst all these TURTLES! Unforgivable.

Earthworm Jim

I have a real love/hate thing going with this series.

On the one hand, it felt like they did some interesting stuff, and they mixed it up a lot. The first level of EWJ has ups and downs in terrain that make it feel like a real environment instead of a 2-D walkway that happens to be covered in baddies.

But some of it was just plain annoying, and nothing more so than the stupid submarine made out of the world’s most breakable glass and with a very limited time limit.

I know that there is a limit to applying logic to things that were designed to be illogical, but come on. Could you think of a worse submarine to be in? All glass, difficult to control, and has to be refilled by connecting a device that’s like threading a needle with spaghetti? And maybe a glass bubble boat would be awesome for looking at fish and crap. But when designed for navigating cramped rocky caverns, I would suggest, well, any other material known to man. Cardboard. Mucus.

Just like TMNT, you have a limited amount of air, a low ability to navigate around, and you find yourself more delicate than a robin’s egg I completely destroyed in my hand as a child. Doesn’t that sound fun?

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Much has been said about this one, a castle where you have to equip heavy boots in order to sink to the bottom. Then unequip the heavy boots to rise to the top again. Then re-equip to sink into another chamber. The re-un-equip to—you get the idea.

The less you have to use a menu in a game, the more the game has succeeded in making gameplay fast, logical, and fun. There are fifty goddamn buttons on a modern controller, can’t one turn the boots on and off? Select maybe? Select don’t do shit.

What’s really obnoxious about this one, and this type of thing, is that the gameplay has removed an ability from a character that is a very common human ability: sinking. I know not everyone can float, but goddamn it, everyone can sink. Ask any corpse in a river how they sank, and they’ll explain “I just…did.”

I like collecting items to gain special abilities in games. What I don’t so much care for is collecting items that make you into a normal human. Why not start the game with the guy paralyzed, and he can slowly collect magic totems that allow him to talk, then eat, then wipe himself? That sounds like a ball.

This one make me upset to a level that I'm not proud of and prefer not to discuss.

As in the last entry in this series, I’ve got a handful of suggestions regarding making these water levels tolerable:

1. You don’t need to slow the shit down so much. Just a little hint of blue, I get it. Changing the entirety of the physics of a game makes no sense, and it never works quite right. When I used Moon Boot cheats on Game Genie, it was always fun for about four seconds, and then you would go flying off the screen and not really even know where you were. These worlds and the objects in them were designed to be used by a character obeying certain laws of physics, so don’t pervert those laws to the point that they have to be served papers and fret over impending court dates.

2. There is a huge difference between challenging and outright frustrating. That difference: In a side-scroller where I’m slicing up foot clan assholes, a stage where I’m swimming, which is impossibly difficult, is enraging. You wouldn’t make level 3 of Tetris a first-person shooter. Because people who want to play Tetris want to play Tetris, not Medal of Tetris Honor. So make your water levels consistent with the gameplay style of the rest of your game, in terms of WHY it’s fun or WHY someone would be attracted to it.

3. Gameplay has progressed to a point where a character dying upon contact with water is an unacceptable proposition. You should be allowed to struggle back to the edge, and just the mere act of taking a dip shouldn’t kill you. I’ve fallen out of a boat at a time when I was so drunk that I couldn’t even figure out why I was in the boat in the first place, and I’m still alive today. It’s not asking much that an intergalactic bounty hunter in a full space/battle suit would be able to swim A LITTLE.

10 Things That Suck in Games, Pt. 1

There are two words that strike into my heart every damn time I play a game:

Escort Mission.

So many, so very many games, involve a mission where someone says, Hey, would you mind being my bodyguard while I do some inane task that you can’t do for some reason? It’ll only take forever, and I will be of no help, and in fact likely present another obstacle to my own protection.

Sounds okay. Maybe you shoot a couple guys and carry a pre-cracked-out Whitney Houston from a building?

No.

Instead, you try over and over to keep someone alive who has no sense of self-preservation, no ability to fight back, and no actual will to live, apparently.

For me, memorably, was the stage in Nintendo 64’s Goldeneye where you had to protect the hapless Natalia while she did some computer hacking garbage. For her hacking mission, she elected to wear a skirt and tall shoes. Which is perfect because the room you have to be in is reminiscent of a nightclub filled with multiple levels, exits all over the place, and an endless stream of hostile dudes looking to destroy a woman.

I feel there’s a necessary conversation to be had before escorting someone through a building filled with hostile terrorists. For one, hows about not sprinting down the hallway the instant the elevator door opens? That’s kind of a rule here. Or hey, why don’t you stay ducked behind a wall while I run in, kill, kill, kill, and then I’ll come back for you. Hide in this cardboard box. If a cardboard box is good enough for Solid Snake, it’s most certainly good enough for you, lady.

After a panicked sprint through hallways to find some keycard, she would stand, dopey, at the computer while you fought off dudes with machine guns for what felt like hours. It never ended. And then, just when you were taking a breath, a guy would pop out of some side door and blow her away.

As a super hacker, was it really necessary for her to select the terminal in the middle of the goddamn room? Couldn’t we have picked one off to the side or something?

Also, what a bunch of bullshit. Having been in a lot of buildings with IT departments, I can tell you that there’s not one where the tech geeks are in a huge, well-lit room where all the action is. This aesthetic clashes with their own, which involves cables and corn chip bags.

I wish this was the only time this sort of thing happened, but there are tons of other escort levels in games too.

Grand Theft Auto was always a fan of these. Some idiot gets into a car, you get in another car, and you’re supposed to keep everyone else from crashing into and killing him.

This is a pretty tough task, and why the asshole can’t just get in the car with you is beyond me.

Pretty soon, it turns into a driving mission that’s less like the Road Warrior and more like trying to follow a dumb friend through traffic. He’s weaving around, turning from the outside lane, and almost can’t believe it when he loses you on unfamiliar, crowded city streets.

There’s always that moment when following someone when they hit a stale green light, floor it through the yellow, and you’re left on the other side. You’re sitting, ready to gun the engine on a moving van with no brakes to speak of, watching your friend fade into the distance. That anxiety and frustration is basically the way you feel the whole time.

By the time your escortee has been killed a dozen different ways, including you immediately shooting him or her in the head on sight because you’re just so damn sick of it all, you don’t give one damn whether he or she lives or dies. In Yoshi’s Island, a game that is basically ALL escorting, I would find myself jumping into pits or spikes, committing suicide with a clear conscience because I knew I was taking the squawling infant Mario down with me. It was worth it. Well worth it.

If these escort missions are going to happen, I’d like to see some ground rules:

1. Escortees should behave somewhat like real people.

I don’t know how to clear a room with an M-16, but I know enough to let James Bond go ahead and walk out of the elevator and into the secret military bunker first. I do know that. And if someone is supposed to be using a vehicle to protect mine, I generally let them know where the hell we’re going to go before we get there.

2. You’re a human being, the escortee is a human being. Therefore, you should be able to take about the same amount of damage. It never works like that in the games. The escortee is basically the human version of Humpty Dumpty, and a trip off the curb is a pelvis-shattering debacle. Let’s even this up a little.

3. The escortee, when being escorted, should show a little goddamn gratitude. I guess game designers think it’s cute when the escortee is witty and complaining about the job you’re doing. Well, it’s not cute, and if some dude wasted an army guy who was about to blow my head off, I think a Thanks Bro, or at the very least NOT making fun of him would be in order.

4. When the escortee dies, make it worth my while. I know I’m going to have to start this stupid mission all over again, so couldn’t you make it more interesting for me? Exploding neck collar? Nuclear heart valve that blows the hell up? Convenient wardrobe malfunction (have you noticed that in movies no female characters are ever shot or stabbed in the breast? I would think this would happen all the time).

Learning as You Go

This weekend I got Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii.

Something you might notice is that I pretty much stay a consistent 2 generations of games behind everyone else. This is partially because it saves a hell of a lot of cash, partially because I'd rather let everyone else wade through the garbage and let me know about the top 10% of games. I recommend it. It works great with games, too, because it's pretty rare that someone is going to spoil a video game for you by accident. Plus, an unfortunate truth, spoiling story usually has very little effect on videogames.

Anyway, I get this game, and I'm excited, man. I'm thinking how rad it's going to be to swing around the remote like it's a sword. Just the night before I had walked home from the grocery store with a tube of wrapping paper, and I couldn't help but carry it sword-style, swiping at all kinds of bad shit. If a tube of bright red wrapping paper can be a sword when I'm wearing athletic shorts and carrying a pint of ice cream in a plastic sack, then doing the virtual sword thing should be a hundred steps up.

I have now played three hours of Zelda: TwiPri, and I have not once swung an actual sword.

It's like they're fucking with me. See that picture at the top? THAT'S what I wanted to do.

First, you have to do a few nonsense missions. Find a lady's cat, destroy a beehive. You know, that stuff that is meant to be an in-game teacher for all the various stuff you're going to be doing in the game. I DID enjoy sic-ing a hawk on a monkey. Nothing better than fatally wounding a screeching monkey. But beyond that, I started to get frustrated.

I wanted to swing a sword around, dammit. I did not want to locate a lost cat. I don't want to locate a lost cat in real life. Not even for money. You know where every lost cat is? Either dead from being struck by a vehicle or living in someone else's house with no memory or emotion about leaving you in the lurch.

I don't want to fish. I don't want to fish in real life. Because I think it's boring. And, as someone much smarter than me has said, It's insane to impale a worm on a metal hook and then use it to trick another thing to being caught and gutted alive.

But this is the way of most games.

Old games, you could read the instructions if you were a dork or someone with Crohn's disease who spent a lot of time on the shitter. But you really didn't have to. There were two goddamn buttons. What's to know? The big discovery in Mario is holding down the B button to run. That's pretty much the end of technical discovery there.

Then games started having a tutorial level. I guess things were getting too complicated, and they didn't expect that you would get to everything on your own. There was a part of me that liked these, but it kind of spoils the game. In Army Men 3D, which was fun as hell, you started off in a boot camp that taught you how to use every weapon in the game.

What the fuck is the point of the game if I've seen all the cool shit before I've even started?

So, more recently, they try to integrate the tutorial into a first mission. This ranges in style, everything from a text scroll popping up and saying "Push X to punch heads in" to a character, usually an old man, instructing you in that bizarre blend of gamespeak and actual direction: "My son, this is a very dark time in the world of elves. You are our only hope. But first, you must learn to defend yourself. Start by pressing B."

I don't get the point of that shit. Once he says press B, I imagine myself in a forest, pressing B on a remote and looking around for something to happen. Who am I, Captain N? (good lord, that sounds like a Richard Pryor album)

There are games that are simple enough that they don't require a tutorial, or they only dole out occasional advice. New Super Mario Bros? You pretty much just go. Although every time you get to a bonus level, it instructs you, again, on how to play the very, very simple mini games. This is akin to sitting around in the morning, watching a 10-second video about shoe-tying every time you go to tie your shoes. It's helpful the first few times, then mind-melting the next 230 times.

At some point, in Twi-Pri Zelda, I got a sword. A wooden sword.

I hear there is a rich tradition of this in Japan. I also hear there is a rich tradition of buying panties from vending machines.

To my American mind, there is nothing more almost-there-but-not-quite than a wooden sword. Except, possibly, for panties vended in a little plastic egg.

But I kept playing, and finally the game was getting somewhere. I was at least killing things and swinging my arm wildly and with complete disregard for the fact that I would be super-sore the next day. It turns out that flailing wildly and jerking your arm around for three hours has some potential negative effects that I would like to complain about not being aware of, although I wouldn't have done a damn thing anyway.

Then, finally, I get a sword.

Only problem is that in the course of getting a sword, I've been transformed into a wolf. Not the were kind either, not a wolf with six-pack abs and a cunning expressed as romantic entanglements with teens. No, a wolf. With earrings.

I don't know much about wolf anatomy, but I do believe that this game accurately portrays wolves as unable to wield swords.

Damn it. Damn your accuracy, Nintendo of America.

How do we solve this problem? How do we get me from screwing around and chasing a cat to decapitating dwarves in under three hours?

There is the God of War Method.
In God of War, you're dropped into the middle of the action and given little pieces of advice as you go, just enough to get you to the next part. This is awesome, but the problem for me is that I get a couple dozen different moves in my brain, and that's already far above my retention limit. It's a short time before I select a couple favorite attacks, and all of a sudden when a bad guy requires a specific type, I'm fucked. Kratos might not have an iPhone and google access, but if he did he would find a lot of helpful guides (with an unholy number of banner ads that slow the sites down to glacial speed) fairly easily.

There is the Angry Birds Method.
Angry Birds doesn't really tell you much. You just start, figuring things out as you go.
The obvious problem here is that it only works for pretty simple games. If your game involves any of the following, forget it: Leveling Up, Mana, HP/MP, Inventory, Materia, Stealth Mode, or over one hour of unique play.

There is the Wii Party Method.
In this method, you are given an information dump. Here's how to play. You can practice if you want as well. But, being a complete idiot, I can never remember anything until I've actually done it. It's like sex. Seeing millions of stills of pornography did not do anything to inform my sexual tactics and or form. I had to do it once to realize that I was very, very bad at it.

There is the Derk Method.
This method involves watching your older brother play, claiming the controller immediately after him, and running over the same ground that he just did himself. The downside is that it's embarrassing how quickly you die the moment you surpass his progress. He doesn't want to beat the guys for you. You could let your younger brother do it, and you could also gift him your nutsack right there on the spot.

I guess I don't know the best method, and games aren't getting simpler. But I think the key is ratio. If your game has too much to learn, there's really no way to deliver the knowledge that doesn't make it feel like you spent the entire game learning. Too much learning (of how to play, mind you, not learning in general) kills the replay value as well. That old man lecturing you on how to check your wallet is fine the first time, maybe necessary. But starting from the beginning again, my god, you want to stuff the wallet in his mouth while you torture him tied to a chair.

Key: Game developers, for the love of god in heaven, give us the option to skip, fast-forward, rewind, and so on. If you're teaching us, let us learn. I spent a half hour looking for fishing bait that didn't exist because I didn't read the dialogue from some fool in TwiPri. I mean, how many times do you have to talk to these idiots?

Also, if I have to talk to characters time and again, don't make them repeat themselves. If they're going to repeat, give me some signal. That way, I won't waste my time, and I won't waste the time of the kindly shopkeeper who simply wants to knock down his bee's nest in peace.