Or: Why does this quiz end a preposition with?
Yeah, I know these are lame, but if you wanted something cool you wouldn’t be reading a geek culture site, would you?
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Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
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There are some games that really, really annoy me. Popular games. Games that have sold well and are beloved by millions. Some of these games I hate with such intensity that it’s difficult to talk about them without employing profanity. I find myself shaking my head at these games thinking: Why did they MAKE it this way? And who PLAYS these games, anyway?
I’m noticing that there is an important distinction between the games that I like and the games I hate. In games I like, the appeal is a steady march to the end of the game. There is no failure (or failure is rare) but only minor setbacks. The very best ones are self-balancing. Barring that, they should at least allow the careful and thoughtful player to proceed through the game with minimal use of the “reload” and “retry” options.
The OTHER type of game, the kind that has always perplexed me, is something my brother and I refer to as a “Do it again, stupid” game. The game will pose a challenge, and the player is almost certainly doomed to fail on their first attempt. And the second. And maybe a few subsequent attempts as well. Usually we’re talking about a “mission” of some sort. As in, “do something quite difficult before the time runs out”.
 If I have to do the mission twice, it must be twice as fun, right? So if I have to do the mission ten times… |
It becomes clear when you do this that the designers never intended for you to succeed on the first try. They intend for you to do the mission over and over until you meet some arbitrary goal or time limit. Often the mission with have some sort of surprise “gotcha” moment that foils you. You must then remember this and plan ahead on your next attempt. An example: In Grand Theft Auto you have a street race where on one particular corner a car will ALWAYS jump out from a side street and pull in front of you. Once this happens a few times you realize it isn’t a fluke: It’s scripted, and you need to avoid it by driving on the sidewalk in that area.
I cannot describe how much I hate this. Every failure feels like wasted time to me. As in, “Hey, I’m doing this mission again. I’ve seen the cutscene. I’ve heard the dialog. I’ve seen it. Now I’m done with it and would like to move on. The Tony Hawk, Jakk, and Grand Theft Auto franchises all come to mind. Too hard. Too frustrating.
But other people love this sort of game. I’m guessing that for them the appeal is the thrill they get when they at last beat the mission. The harder the mission, the more rewarding it is when they at last pull it off. They seem to dislike the “steady progress” games that I love, because to them victory is inevitable.
For me, the do it again stupid (DIAS) games are horrible. I don’t get any sense of satisfaction when I beat a mission. I’m still ticked off that I just spent twenty minutes replaying the same three minutes of the game over and over. I resent the wasted time. I think to the one attempt ten minutes ago when I almost beat the mission but missed the goal by a quarter-second, and I’m even MORE bitter about the time spent re-playing the mission since then. More importantly, the misery I get from my half-dozen failures far outweighs the pleasure of the one final success.
A while back I picked up Starfox Adventures, which is supposedly a kid’s game. At one point there was a challenge I couldn’t beat. I’ve been playing video games for a quarter century, now. I’ve beaten my share of video games and proven myself to be an above-average player, but this mission was beyond me. I couldn’t do it. I got sick of trying. I never beat the game, and took it back to the store in disgust. Nothing like being beaten by a “kid’s game”.
Jakk II did this to me as well: The game came highly recommended and had fantastic visuals, but there was a “race over here real fast” mission about an hour in, and I couldn’t even come close to beating it. I realized that I was still in the early “easy” part of the game, and that the difficulty curve was only going up from here. I quit playing, and in the end I saw less than a tenth of it. (Luckily Jakk II was borrowed so at least I didn’t waste my money.)
 That’s right, I’m wasted. Just like the last twenty minutes. |
The thing that annoys me with these games is that there is no fail-safe. No matter how many times you fail, no matter how badly you fail, and no matter how long you remain stuck, you are never any closer to beating the mission than you were the first time you tried. There is no system to help frustrated players along or let them skip after so many attempts. There is no consolation prize. You have no new items or stats or experience to show for your work. You’re in stasis until you can jump through these hoops. It really is time wasted.
If every mission takes an average of 4 attempts for every success, then to me 80% of my playing time is being wasted. It also seems arbitrary: Like, if they want to make the game more “fun”, why not make it twice as hard? Why not just have the whole game as one long confusing mission, and every time you fail you go back to the very beginning of the game? Just think of it! Hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay! Think of the thrill when you at last beat it! Yay!
It sucks, and games like this need a warning label so I know to avoid them.
Over the years I’ve grown more and more wary of these sorts of games. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older and I’m not as sharp or a quick as I used to be. Maybe it’s because I have less time for games than I did when I was twenty-two, and I’m more careful about how I spent my limited gaming time. Maybe I’m just cranky. :)
Just for fun: List any DIAS games that really ticked you off in the comments. What games were the most heartless and frustrating when it came to wasting your time?
As I mentioned in the previous post, there are several nods to the games in the Silent Hill movie. Here are as many as I can remember:
Note: Mild spoilers, mostly of things you see, not of what happens. There isn’t anything in here that isn’t revealed in the trailer.
A very similar setup is used in the movie.
In the movie, the main character must reach into the mouth of a corpse that has been contorted and bound in barbed wire, and then suspended over a toilet.
Like maps, finding flashlights is a big deal in the game. In a video game, this makes for spooky lighting. In a movie, they have lots of different and more advanced lighting tricks available, but yet they still feature a few “you found the flashlight!” moments. There is even a “you found the keys!” moment. These are subtle and I don’t think they stand out to people who didn’t play the game.
The movie has several such creatures.
Another thing that makes the monsters frightening is that while they are human-shaped, their movements are off. Sometimes they convulse or thrash about. Sometimes they move in ways that don’t look right, such as moving in a jerky fashon as if being illuminated by a strobe light, even when the light source is steady. The movie has a moment like this.
A few of us got together and went to see Silent Hill tonight. Very interesting experience. The movie is quite true to the games, which means its very unlike your typical horror movies. We liked it, but the average fan of the Freddy / Jason / Scream type movies is probably not going to like this. It’s long (2 hours) and it isn’t the sort of movie that takes a group of dysfunctional idiots, drives them into danger, and then picks them off one at a time. Like the last few Silent Hill games, it’s more of a very violent mystery.
The ending was nearly perfect, but then the last 30 seconds sort of broke several established rules and really irritated me. Usually they do this sort of thing as a set-up for a sequel, but in this case it seemed more like weirdness for its own sake. When the mother and daughter came home, they should have really COME HOME. Instead, they and the father could not see each other and were stuck in seperate realities. This suggests that they didn’t really escape the madness of Silent Hill, which is a rotten and downer ending. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense. The “aternate world” stuff was a function of Silent Hill, and leaving the town should have ended it.
I don’t like traditional horror movies or slasher flicks. I don’t mind violence, but many of those movies are slasher porn: the plot is a paper-thin excuse to string together a bunch of gruesome murders. This movie did indeed have some nasty and disturbing images, but they served the plot, instead of the other way around.
There are many, many visual nods to the games, many of which were quite obscure. I’m sure I didn’t catch them all.
A BIT LATER: The thing about the big fire happening 30 years earlier just totally screws up the movie. The leader of the cult and the policeman with the buned hands hadn’t aged a day?!? If they had said the disaster happened TEN years ago the whole thing would have made much more sense, and the little girl would have been about the right age. As it is, you can’t put the movie on a timeline in such a way that it makes sense.
STILL LATER: Looking at the plot, I don’t think this movie would make sense for people not familiar with the game. Or at least, they wouldn’t know it was supposed to make sense. I bet the non SH fan is going to leave the theater thinking they just saw two hours of random bloody nonsense.
Den Beste has an article up on Miyazaki Hayao. He talks a bit about Princess Mononoke. Other people (such as Alexander Doneau) have reviewed the movie as well, and almost nobody comments on what I thought was the biggest flaw of the movie.
(Note that I saw the movie months ago. What I’m writing here are the impressions I had right after seeing the movie. I’ve forgotten the names of some of the key locations and some of the minor characters since then, so please forgive the lack of specifics, or if my chronology isn’t perfect.)
I’m thinking of the village where most of the action takes place. The women in that village were very callous and needlessly mean to their men. As we’re introduced to the village, the men are returning from a deadly task. They’ve been out of the village for a few days, and their reward as they get home is a lot of verbal abuse from their wives. The wives then begin gushing over the young and handsome Ashitaka as if their husbands weren’t even there. They openly and brazenly fawn over Ashitaka in front of their husbands, who were just out risking their lives for the village.
The guys are mostly too fat or too skinny. Most are nearing middle age. They are drawn as very un-handsome. So, they are more or less like any other random selection of men you’ll find: not buff heroes, but regular guys. But their wives aren’t any bargain either, and the men seem willing to go out and risk their necks (under the command of a woman, I might add) on behalf of the village. In return, the women never have a single nice thing to say about them. Even after being out of the village for a while, the men and women sit apart from each other at mealtime, and the women toss more shame their way as they eat. I guess these married couples hate each other so much they can’t stand to have meals together, even after being apart for a few days?
The lack of respect between the men and women in the village was awful. If you swapped the gender roles and had the women risking their lives while the men remained at camp drooling over the sexy new princess in town, you would expect them to get some sort of comeupance before the story ended. You’d want to see the men appreciate the sacrifice the women make for them, or at least stop verbally humiliating them in front of everyone else. And since we’re dreaming, an apology might be good for everyone’s well-being. This never happens. In fact, as far as I could tell the movie seemed to think I should side with the women. I didn’t.
Near the end of the movie one of the men is asleep. (It’s the middle of the night and he’d been taking part in an ill-advised battle the previous day. Again, under the command of a woman.) His wife is there beside him and as she sees him sleeping with his mouth open she grudingly admits that he’s (I can’t remember the exact words) a big oaf but she loves him anyway. That was it. During the whole movie only one of the women admitted that her husband wasn’t all bad. Of course, she said it while he was asleep, and she couldn’t say it without insulting him first.
I hated the whole village. I thought the men were fools to put up with all the abuse, and idiots to follow their misguided commander. I thought the women were awful, mean-spirited harpies who didn’t even deserve the shabby husbands they had. Disliking a majority of the characters in the story sort of ruined it for me. Yet nobody else that saw the movie was bothered by this. (Or at least, nobody mentioned it in their review.) Was I reading it wrong? Was I misunderstanding their relationship? Was it just the English dub that portrayed the women this way? Did their dialog come across differently in the sub version? I seem to be the only person with this reaction, and I have to wonder why.
It’s my least favorite of all of Miyazaki’s films that I’ve seen so far (I’ve seen most of them) and obviously it still bugs me when I think about it.
Just so I don’t end this rant on a sour note, I’ll add that I emphatically agree with Steven’s assesment of Spirited Away: It’s Miyazaki’s best film, and a real treat. (Also, note that it has a Tomatometer rating of 98%!)
I’m playing Sim City 4, working on a small town and trying to create a close aproximation of the type of area where I live: A modest town with rural areas and some smallish farms about. Here is the main part of town:
 Click for a view of the whole city, including the power supply. |
All of that, plus a housing plan, plus a few farms and an industrial sector, are all supported by two wind turbines. Yeah right. This is a town of almost a thousand people, and still they are only using about 50% of the total output of these turbines.
Sim City 4 is billed as a “simulation” game, but clearly it has more in common with Neverwinter Nights and World of Warcraft. You know: fantasy games.
In the past I’ve made a few posts (here, here, and here) about funny or amusing moments in Thief 3. It might sound like this game is silly, but that’s only because I’m highlighting the weak spots. In truth, Thief 3 is the most frightening game I’ve ever played. I’m not kidding. This game can be truly alarming and terrifying in one or two spots.
One of the reasons for this is the nature of the game itself: You are supposed to hide from stuff. There is something primal about hiding in the shadows and trying not to move as a foe passes by. They are going to get close enough that you could reach out and touch them, and you know that discovery means death. There are foes that you cannot beat in combat. There are foes you are not intended to fight. There are undead in the game that act a lot more like the movie undead and less like the Doom-style target dummy zombies. They are tough and hungry and tend to keep getting up. Your only hope is to hide from the suckers.
This is very different from games like Resident Evil or Doom where you have to fight things. With a little meta-game thinking, most players realize that anything a game throws at you is something that you can defeat one way or another. You have one form of interaction: You shoot it. Guns make you feel safer, even if they aren’t very effective.
But there is one point in the game that really pushes the experience over the top. Suddenly, the game changes gears and throws you for a complete loop. The result is amazing.
Part of the reason this section of the game works so well is because this isn’t a horror game. It isn’t trying to scare you all the time, so when it happens you aren’t desensitized. It’s unexpected.
Spoilers follow. If you think you might play someday, don’t ruin it for yourself.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Thief 3: Fearsome”
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
T w e n t y S i d e d
