{"id":21386,"date":"2013-10-17T16:23:02","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T21:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=21386"},"modified":"2013-10-17T16:23:02","modified_gmt":"2013-10-17T21:23:02","slug":"metro-2033-ep5-you-could-climb-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=21386","title":{"rendered":"Metro 2033 EP5: You Could Climb Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/g0Z5GiQgbjI\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=g0Z5GiQgbjI'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>In this episode I mentioned one room where I died several times. Josh said he got cornered and killed in the same spot.  I tried it again yesterday, but this time I was using the volt driver. I killed everything without taking damage. <\/p>\n<p>And then I blundered into the radioactive canal and died. Damn it.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->We compared the game to Alan Wake. While I agree it does probably throw more foes at you than it needs to, I think this game doesn&#8217;t become a chore like Wake did. The better atmosphere, more interesting weapons, stronger combat, and lack of stupid manuscript pages makes this a lot more bearable. Also, I like how the game doesn&#8217;t feel the need to grab your camera and aim it at incoming foes at the start of a fight. <\/p>\n<p>I re-watched bits of Alan Wake recently, and I think we cut the game a lot of slack and put up with a lot of crap because it had interesting ideas. <\/p>\n<p>The section where you fall down and have to take the long way around is really interesting. It&#8217;s exactly the sort of thing that usually annoys me: An arbitrary contrivance arises that forces you to take a convoluted route through monster city rather than spending a minute climbing something. <\/p>\n<p>But here it works, because the game designer took the time to justify it. You&#8217;re at the bottom of a canal with outward sloping walls, so climbing would be fiddly and dangerous. Not impossible, of course, but it would be difficult. You&#8217;re over radioactive sludge, so you don&#8217;t have a lot of room for error. The game establishes that there are flying beasts around, so you wouldn&#8217;t want to spend several noisy minutes in the open, scrambling over cars, stacking up debris, or searching for handholds.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also not too long. Ignoring the optional basement detour, it&#8217;s only a few extra minutes to take the long way.  Far too many games get the ratio of obstacle-to-detour difficulty way out of alignment. To put it in terms that other games use: No, I wouldn&#8217;t try to MacGuyver my way past a locked wooden door to save myself from a couple of blocks worth of travel.  But if the detour around the door takes you halfway across the city and through the enemy base? Yeah, the doors starts looking like a lame fig-leaf justification.<\/p>\n<p>Also, it&#8217;s good to put the obstacle at the start of the journey rather than at the end. If I was already sick of an gameplay area and a bridge collapsed just before I reached the exit, then it would be a lot less welcome. But in this case we&#8217;ve just arrived and probably eager to explore on our own for a bit.  The detour ends up justifying a route the player wants to take instead of denying one.<\/p>\n<p>I always appreciate it when games spend the time to justify my goals, rather than forcing me to roleplay a shooting-obsessed dullard who can&#8217;t solve simple problems or climb over trivial obstacles. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) In this episode I mentioned one room where I died several times. Josh said he got cornered and killed in the same spot. I tried it again yesterday, but this time I was using the volt driver. I killed everything without taking damage. And then I blundered into the radioactive canal and died. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[317],"class_list":["post-21386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-metro-2033"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}