Shut Up and Play This is a weekly article reviewing various games played by the author of the week in question.
Why do developers hate me so? Or is it that because I do this for a living as well that I’m overly critical? Or could it be that I just spend too much time playing video games.
Annoying Game Mechanics of the Week
Save Points don’t increase the tension, they piss me off. Dead Rising lost me for that sole reason; Prince of Persia 2 I traded in after 3 hours; Dead Space utilizes it as well. Now Dead Space, one of the games I’ve been playing this week, is a really fantastic game. It’s one of the best horror games I’ve played, has fantastic sound and some really neat dismemberment features that make the combat a lot of fun. Most of them are paced well, but the game can get repetitive and part and parcel of this are these goddamned single places where I can save. Combined with Item Management Without a Fucking Save mechanics and Shoot Your Fucking Head Off to Learn mechanics I instill the Throw Controller and Shit on the Disc mechanic.
One of my favourite things about some games are the bosses that introduce a new mechanic that you can Only Learn by Dying, and by favourite things I mean fuck you.
If an enemy is to the left, and nothing is to the right, then chances are I’m going to go left, especially if your enemies drop ammo. So please don’t have the dead-end be left, and have fucking enemies shoot me in the back once I get there. Thank-you Halflife 2 for reinforcing why I hate you.
I Learns my controls from the Internets
I pulled out a lot of old games this week and played a lot of tutorials. Most mediocre, one good, and one horrific. One of the sad things about our industry is the face that we even have to make a tutorial: it’s extremely difficult to combine narrative, opening impact and learning all at once. It’s also extremely hard to play the game if I don’t know what to fucking do. I played each of these games as an idiot savant: I hit no control that I wasn’t told to, but played it mastered once I was.
Half-Life 2: It’s no secret that I dislike this game: there are fundamental level design and game design mechanics that it brazingly abandons. Yet people love it. So I decided to put the game in and have a go again, 4 years later (this will be a full feature once I’ve completed it). The tutorial in Half-Life 2 is non-existant. I encourage you to play as I played, mentioned above. If I didn’t know that LS moved forward and RS moved the camera, I wouldn’t have gotten off the subway in the beginning. Nevermind that tutorials for controls are no more than hints displayed on the screen. D-
Thief: Deadly Shadows: It’s not secret how awesome this game is: Thief is the game that started the whole Sneaker Shooter sub-genre. The tutorial attempts to combine atmosphere, story and learning all at once…and while it fails a bit at story, it does manage to give you an idea what the game is like while teaching you how to actually play it: and it’s a difficult game to play because it has so many different mechanics and turns shooters on it’s head (ie. do NOT engage the enemy). B+
Gears of War 2: I’ve been waiting for a certain someone to be available to do co-op with this game, and finally after 6 months gave up and unwrapped the bitch myself. I like that you have the option to avoid the tutorial (the new game mechanics aren’t so new that you need a tutorial if you did the first game) and that there’s an achievement for doing it (forcing every gloryhound to do it anyway). I think the scenario of teaching your rookie soldier the moves is an interesting attempt at avoiding the ‘tell the experienced soldier to do basic stuff’ scenario, but I think in the end it’s weak. What I do like is that the tutorial continues throughout the game: I’m about 3 hours in and I just received a tutorial for using the sniper rifle. Grand Theft Auto IV did the same thing. And this is good. And all peace was upon the land. A
Tutorials can make or break a game: it is the first level that introduces you to the world that the developer is setting up and so it needs to be exciting. It needs to properly teach you the mechanics of the game, and the more complicated the game, the more mechanics it needs to not only teach you, but ensure you’ve learned. And finally it needs to grab the player and pull you in. It needs to do all three of these things, and within a time limit: a long tutorial just delays you getting to the meat of the game. I don’t think a game has done tutorials right yet, not one: there is no game on the face of the earth that I’ve played that hasn’t made me want to take a shotgun to my head, or made me feel a part of the world. But maybe there is a game that I haven’t played that does. Comment below if you know one.
There won’t be a Shut Up and Play next week due to the holiday and me working my ass off at work and on my house. So don’t bitch to me if you don’t see it.
I actually don’t mind savepoints, provided they’re often enough. Dead space has them littered everywhere, so I never really felt like I’d been going a long time without one. Contrast that with ME, where I can save any time I want, but I’m never really reminded that it’s a necessity. More than once, I died and had to restart from an autocheckpoint AGES back. The thing I learned by dying is to spam the save feature. I had more than 80 saves by the time I finished the game because sometimes I would save for basically no reason.
I actually miss the save system where you could save in the MIDDLE of a fight (ie., Baldur’s Gate II), and now that I play MMOs, I find the continuous save a nice bonus.
(BTW, I’m with you on HL2.)
Hitman. Best tutorial I’ve ever played.