Bad to the Bone

As you'll well remember, the Zero Punctuation review of Super Paper Mario has a very salient point to make re game design. Wait, you do watch Zero Punctuation don't you? There's a simple way to tell - either your local hospital A&E department has given you a frequent flyer card because you've herniated yourself whilst laughing so many times that for the first time in your life you've nearly filled up all the little squares on one of those endless little cards that infest the dark recesses of your wallet only to arrive back at the hospital, gleefully anticipating your free lumbar puncture (whilst simultaneously attempting to ignore the cold hard maths that whispers that you've indirectly paid approximately seven and half squintillion pounds for something that you'd normally just buy for 2 quid 50) only to find that they shut the program down for no discernibly good reason only the day before.

If these events, or a moral equivalent, are not familiar to you then you haven't watched Zero Punctuation. And you deserve to be beaten. Watch it now, don't worry, the rest of the class will wait for you to catch up.

Right, the bit I'm talking about is approximately 2 minutes and 52 seconds in. It concerns "working" in games.

I remember once when a house mate of mine took a day off his actual real work in order to spend the day driving a fork lift truck as a job in Shenmue. At the time it seemed like a perfectly logical thing for him to do until later, much later, down the pub it dawned on him what he had just done and he screamed the scream of a man who has just woken up after a pleasant dream of creating an intricate ice sculptor as an wedding present for his fantastic new wife only to find that he has inadvertently butchered her to death during the night and, inexplicably, her Chief Superintendent father is knocking on their conjugal door demanding entrance.

I digress.

My friend, for what its worth, was so deeply ashamed by what he had done (viz. Shenmue not nupticide) that he spurned all material possessions and became an Alpaca farmer in the Midlands.

I undigress.

The odd thing is that some video game designers seemed to have played the "Desert Bus" minigame of Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors and decided that it represents the pinnacle of game design play and that what you really want when you slap down your 50 notes is a mind numbingly repetitive game mechanic in order to numb yourself into some sort of zen state in which a higher plane of conciousness can be reached. The grinding of  MMORPGs spring to mind here. The next time one of my friends blows off a fun evening of imbibing fermented vegetable bi-products because they "have to" go skin two thousand mutant vampire bunnies in the Forests of Terrifying Cliché in order to advance their lvl 32 hippy gnome mage's leather working skill I'm just going to push them to the floor and give them a comprehensive shoeing right there and then.

But in some ways I can sort of understand it. Well, not really because, despite the crippling genetically handicap I received with regards to my being a anti-social nerd-autist, I still have a scrap of self-dignity. But at least it appears to be a deliberate game play choice - albeit one designed for the kind of sad obsessives who feel that no game is complete until every stat is maxed out, every secret uncovered and every mini game unlocked, finished and gold starred.

Then there are the games whose designers appear to have eschewed their copies of Chris Crawford's seminal "on Game Design" in order to lazily flick through "Pissing off your customers for Fun and Profit".

There's a whole pantheon of sins to choose from, of which some have apparent motives if not actual excuses and some of which are just the result of over inhaling from the nitrous cylinder one too many times. What they all have in common is the fact that the artistes appear to have forgotten that the sole reason to buy a game is to have fun and that anything that gets in the way of that is not just a simple mistake but a case of, at best, gross incompetence by you and your team and, at worst, false advertising and evidence of high crimes against humanity.

Let's pick some random examples shall we? Plucked randomly from my gin sodden cerebellum and in no particular order.

For a start there's the unskippable cut scene. Usually placed just before a difficult bit it guarantees that, no matter how good it looks (and they rarely do) you'll listen to the same unbearable voice acting by your (inevitably) gravel voiced protagonist again and again and again because you keep dying right afterwards and you can't restart quick enough to keep your momentum up. XIII I'm looking at you. Mass Effect sort of has skippable cut scenes but only allows you to skip through the individual shots which is even more annoying somehow - like Bioware thought that the default use case was people who just need to see individual snippets of the dialogue even though they hold no clues or tips as to how to beat the next encounter.

My only guess is that the developers are so in love with their CGI, or more likely that it just cost so much to make, that they just must force you to watch repeatedly until you vomit copiously.

Kin to that is the long boring, easy bit between a respawn point and a hard bit or just generally otherwise pointless repetitive bit. You know the kind - Gears of War had a couple of these, particularly the bit in your ancestral home after you've held off the marauders and need to make your way out back, past the two Bezerkers, to the waiting transport. Zelda games also seem to suffer from this - the latest on the DS makes you schlep back through the same temple after every dungeon for no particularly good reason that I can see.

These transgressions are somewhat more inexplicable than the cut scenes, Occam's Razor suggests that the only logical answer is that  whoever perpetrated these crimes is either a petty and malevolent being or had been sipping deeply and regularly on a ready supply of Tard Juice™.

Then you get the devices which are just lazy ways to extend the game play time - as if a game that takes 160 hours to complete is actually a good thing - like fun should be paid for by the minute. There are multiple transgressors here - doubling back and/or otherwise reusing levels (Halo), annoyingly frequent side quests which complicate an otherwise simple task so that the designer doesn't need to actually come up with a believable and engaging plot reason for your journey (BioShock) or inexplicably tricky and fiddly bits, your completion of which seems largely down to luck rather than skill  which means that after several hours of howling with rage every 30 seconds you suddenly and mysteriously get through yet, since you appeared to have no direct result over the outcome,  strangely leaves you feeling absolutely no sense of accomplishment or achievement whatsoever rendering all your efforts doubly enraging.

The inner bile that drove that last sentence comes largely from God of War - a game which I found otherwise fun despite it's churlish and adolescent inclusion of a completely pointless 'titillating' mini-game right near the start. Fun, that was, except the bits when you're balancing on narrow beams jumping spinny blades in a manner so frustrating that I destroyed three controllers, two vases, a cherished picture of my late, great Aunt Maud dressed up as the Silver Surfer and, distressingly, my beloved Rottweiler/Shitzu mix puppy Mr Huggles. Then it compounded it with that abortion of a level in which you have to climb up not one but two cliffs also inexplicably festooned with circular saws. Ooooooooooh, how I seethed. So much so that, on balance, I ended up hating the game and have refused to play any of the sequels (which, I note, were so pleased with the below-softporn mini game in the first outing that they felt they warranted inclusion in all subsequent releases in order to secure that key "sniggering 13 year old boy" demographic that so drives the market).

Part of my white hot fury, I'll have to admit, comes from the fact that I find David Jaffe a smug, self important twat whose infuriating blog posts on why second hand games are the greatest evil ever spawned (as if the games industry - which as is so painfully pointed out, makes more money than Hollywood, Enron and God combined - needs some sort of special protection that items such as, well, EVERYTHING ELSE EVER SOLD TO YOU EVER, don't deserve) made be literally incoherent with rage.

Then he had a frothing rant at walk throughs, strategy guides and cheat codes bemoaning how they besmirch the designers original vision, thus ignoring the obvious and salient points that

• If you don't want cheat codes then DON'T PUT THEM IN you festering thumb sore of a man.
• If people feel the need to use cheat codes or strategy guides then YOU'VE CLEARLY FAILED AT YOUR JOB you syphilitic pus filled buboe.
  
• Even if they weren't necessary but people choose to use them anyway then WHAT DO YOU CARE? You already have the punter's money - it's not up to you to dictate how they should enjoy your masterpiece. If I, err, I mean, my friend, want to 'enjoy' the game clad only in a PVC Donald Duck custom smeared liberally in Jelly then that's my, err, I mean my friend's right. You dangling tag nut on the pimply arse of humanity.
  

Christ, this has gone on quite a bit, hasn't it. I'll leave by saying that perhaps the most frustrating game over was Rogue Leader - Rogue Squadron II on the Gamecube, an otherwise pleasant game that ended with a level that required you to fly behind the Millennium Falcon into the heart of the second Death Star, destroy the reactor and then fly out again, chased by a fireball. Even taking into account my crippling cack handedness, no single level of a game should be unfinishable even after 3 straight days of almost continuous play whilst unemployed, despite having activated various cheat codes. My failure haunts me to this day.

Seriously though, go watch every single episode of Zero Punctuation so that you too may liken Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw unto a tiny god.  Actually, the rest of The Escapist is pretty good too, even if they have stopped doing the full on Edge mag style layout but on the web schtick.