T w e n t y S i d e d

I berated Prince of Persia: Two Thrones because I hated its time-pressure platforming sections. I ended up fumbling around, trying to figure out what the game wanted from me and where I was supposed to go. This section where you run through the burning compound is a much better execution of the same idea. (I’m aware it’s been done elsewhere, including Drake’s Fortune, but I haven’t played those games.) It presents a frantic, high-speed run through a crumbling structure, and yet it’s pretty clear where you’re supposed to go. The visible threat is intense, but the actual time pressure is fairly low-key, allowing you to fumble a bit without leading to instant death.

Also: I’m disappointed with everyone who allowed Josh to die repeatedly. I need you folks to step up your game next week or we’ll have more of the same.

RUN YOU BASTARDS! I’m coming for you! Again! And this time I might not die right away and I might even live long enough to hurt some of you, so really we’d all be better off if you ran away. Actually why aren’t you running away? Isn’t this place on fire? What’s the point in this firefight again? In fact, why don’t you guys ju… Oh. I’m dead again. Well, only one thing to do now. RUN YOU BASTARDS! I’m coming for you! (etc.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Yes, this bit is ridiculous. Let’s get that out of the way. We can defend this part of the game against many things, but against the charge of being flagrantly and excessively silly we must plead no contest.

You’re blowing up pockets of natural gas just two meters from your face so you can shatter metal and stone to open the way to your friends, who are imprisoned in an impractical container suspended off the ground. In the process of freeing them you obliterate the floor to reveal a lake of magma that – if it really existed – would have long since heated this chamber to uninhabitable temperatures. You’re doing all of this just to fling the prison cage around the room, rather than just using whatever existing equipment is used to load and unload this cage.

Having said all that – I don’t really mind all that much. We’re definitely operating in a universe driven by Nathan Drake / Indiana Jones physics. You can get away with balderdash like this as long as the game doesn’t linger on it too long. In my mind, none of this silliness is anywhere near as offensive as the previous cutscene.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m not a huge fan of the cutscenes in this game, but this one is where the game jumped from “annoying” to “infuriating”. This isn’t just a bad cutscene, this is a disaster of a cutscene. This is “Commander Shepard aiming his pistol at Kai Leng and making derpy faces” level of stupid.

Let us count the flaws:

1. Lara switched to the worst possible weapon.
2. Lara waits and waits. I can understand that a real human being might hesitate in this context, but the game doesn’t give us any clue as to why Lara is standing there like a dunce. Is she scared? Listening in? Waiting for an opportune moment? As far as I can tell she’s just waiting for the most tactically unsound moment to strike.
3. Lara shoots one guy and then lets herself get overrun.
4. After the ceremony, the bad guy sends Lara away instead of killing her on the spot.
5. The fight on the bridge is awkward as hell.
6. The bad guys don’t follow up to make sure she’s dead.

Again, I’m not against setbacks. I’m fine with Lara getting captured in a failed rescue attempt, and I’m fine with the bad guys making mistakes and letting her live. But I am against a scene where every single character must act like a moron, particularly cases where you snatch control away from the player so you can make the player character fight ineptly.

How I’d patch this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Tomb Raider EP13: Talk to the Butt”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In this episode I mentioned An anthropological introduction to YouTube. I said this about it in 2008, and today I still tell people it’s the best thing on YouTube. It’s a presentation given to the Library of Congress in 2008 by anthropologist Mike Wesch. It’s a study of the way YouTube (and to a lesser extent, the net in general) has both shaped our existing cultures and arguably formed a completely new culture. I find it captivating.

We also mentioned PewDiePie, who is insanely popular but also intensely reviled. My spontaneous estimate of our fanbases was roughly correct. His typical video gets in the neighborhood of 14 to 20 million, and the average Spoiler Warning hits in the 1.4 to 2 thousand range. It’s easy to get bitter about that if you look at view numbers as some sort of public evaluation of your work and worth, so I try to avoid thinking of it in those terms. I like what our show does, and there aren’t many shows like it. More people like Katy Perry than They Might be Giants, more people like Transformers than Primer, and more people like Call of Duty than System Shock 2. In an ideal world, we’d all be just delighted to have our little shared communities and not envy the larger ones.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I don’t have much to say about this part of the game that didn’t end up in the episode, so let me back up and talk about the section from last week when I was absent.

The section where Lara is caught in the rapids and has to dodge the hazards in the water was really hard for me. I just couldn’t see the obstacles mixed in with all the foaming water. By the time I spotted threats it was too late to avoid them. I kind of had to brute-force it by just memorizing a particular line. I think it took me five tries to get through it.

I have to hand it to the game for being really authentic for just how confusing it would be to find yourself in that kind of predicament, although it didn’t make for very interesting or fun gameplay.

Also, the debate about whether the death animations are appropriate or needlessly gruesome is kind of interesting to me. The first time I saw Lara get spiked by rusty metal I was shocked and nauseated. But I figured that was probably the response the designers intended. But the fifth time I saw it I began wondering just what the hell was wrong with the designers. The shock value was gone and replaced with a general sense of disgust for the work itself.

A movie can get away with having a single gory death. But if they repeat the same gory death over and over from different camera angles and in slow-motion, then suddenly our perception of the gore changes. Suddenly it feels like the story is just an excuse to put nasty stuff onscreen to satisfy the filmmaker’s sick fetish for the macabre. Repetition carries meaning and we respond to it.

But in the context of this game, the player can experience that sort of unsavory repetition through failure. I think it would be good for the designer to keep this in mind when designing these deaths. If anything, we should have been spared the full gore show for subsequent failures, maybe with a slam cut to black just before impact. The player will remember the earlier death and will probably flinch at the memory without needing to show them the full scene again.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.