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C Why Games will Drive Me Into an Early Grave

Rhody Tobin Profile _ Twitter _ E-mail _ Homepage

You may have seen this image (click for the full version) floating around on the internet. It’s a list of all the little things in games that can drive you insane. (Unfortunately, I have no idea where it came from. If anyone knows the original source, let me know, and I’ll link to it.) Some are a result of bad design, some come from bad luck, and some are just bad habits that some people (like me) should probably try to break. A few of them made me nod my head when I read them. “Your character didn’t jump, even though you clearly pressed the jump button” - Yeah, I’m pretty sure this happened to me a ton of times when I was a kid. I don’t know what the deal was. Maybe controllers were less responsive then, or maybe I’ve gotten better at timing my button presses (or adapting to different physics systems for different games). Something has changed and I’m being driven crazy by this one less these days. ”Quick time events” - These can be really cool, or really terrible. There are a few of them in Bayonetta that got on my nerves the first time I played it. The window for input is really short, so if you don’t know they’re coming, you’re likely going to die at least once, lowering your overall rank for the level. I think QTE’s are really only fun in games with motion controls. I love mutilating a boss in MadWorld with a series of quick time events. So good. ”Enemy has 30% chance to hit, you have 90%, you miss, they get a crit and kill you in one hit” - A variation of this one happened to me today. I was playing Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and I had saved up enough MP to do two Ultima Shots. (Ultima Shot is one of the strongest attacks in the game.) Now, the predicted accuracy in FFTA2 lies. This is clear. If it tells you that you have an 80% chance to hit, it’s more like 50%. My Ultima Shot had a 99% chance of hitting, and it missed. Twice. That doesn’t happen without divine intervention. Of course, I still won the battle. I’m amazing enough to always win, even when fate itself is against me. ”Use tons of items during a boss fight, you’re supposed to lose the fight - This has happened to me a few times. I remember playing Breath of Fire II. There was one point where your catgirl (whose name I totally forget) has to fight a catboy in a one-on-one battle. Your catgirl doesn’t have any healing attacks, so I had to use healing items. I ended up using almost all of my most potent healing items trying to stay alive long enough to finish him off. Apparently, you weren’t supposed to finish him off at all. The game progresses after you lose. This should have been a lot clearer. If I’m not supposed to actually try, he should kill me with one hit. This type of RPG battle needs to go away. One game that does it right is Tales of Symphonia. There are battles that you’re supposed to lose, but none that are impossible to win. If you win these difficult battles, you get a slightly different cutscene, and some nice experience and items. “Die a lot while playing a really hard game, 30 second loading screens” - This is actually why I stopped playing the first True Crime game. It was a long time ago so the details are kind of hazy, but I was playing the GameCube version of True Crime: Streets of LA and I was doing pretty bad at it. I wasn’t used to that kind of game. I think it was my first open world game, actually. Anyway, I got to one point where I had to win a car race. I lost a few times, and every time, the game would load the starting point and I swear to God it took more than a minute. It was ridiculous. I wasn’t even having fun, anyway. I certainly wasn’t going to sit there and stare at a loading screen so I could keep on not enjoying a game. It actually turned me off open world games for a few years. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I bother to play at all.

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