Worst. Game design. Ever.

Imagine, if you will, playing for seventy-odd hours through a fairly kick-ass game. Now imagine that that game ends with a forty-second cut scene, followed (with no transition) by a button that you have to press within roughly half of normal human reaction time or you die. And then have to sit through the forty-second cut scene again to get another chance.

Well, you don't have to imagine it! In fact, God of War II gave us this lovely experience a couple of years ago. It just happens that I am only now getting around to playing it.

Everybody say it with me now: A NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE ONE-BUTTON PHYSICAL CHALLENGE WITH THE DIREST OF CONSEQUENCES DOES NOT MAKE YOUR GAME "HARD." IT DOESN'T MAKE PLAYERS FEEL "HEROIC." IT MAKES THEM FEEL (and of course, I'm projecting MY feelings on the gaming audience at large, here) LIKE DRIVING DOWN TO THE SANTA MONICA OFFICES OF SCEA WITH SOME LARGE IMPLEMENT OF DESTRUCTION. Like a bulldozer, or maybe a very angry bobcat. I mean, seriously, what the hell? I have literally played this scene dozens of times now. Even sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for it, I have successfully hit the first button once. I even sucked it up and let them switch me to easy mode, something I've resisted for the entire game. Alas, easy mode only affects "combat" -- aka, it does nothing for the button-mashing games.

It wouldn't be so bad if you just jumped into the button-mashing directly, but having to sit through the same forty seconds of complete bullshit just to die instantly? You people are bloody sadists and I hope you enjoy the special circle of hell you will be roasting in shortly. (Escaping is easy! Within the next 100ms, just press... triangle! No, square! Hahaha! Maybe next-- triangle! Still too slow!)

I realize it's hard to design an endgame experience that doesn't feel like a cakewalk (I'm looking at you, BioShock) yet isn't so challenging you want to throw your controller through your TV screen. So hey. Let's pretend you're professionals and that you get paid to do your job, and not punish your goddamn customers by gating your endgame with a stupid, impossible bit of torture.

Want to be a part of Heatwave?

No, we're not hiring people -- not just yet. But we've started the process of assembling our "player advisory council," a group of volunteers who will have access to and offer feedback on our games while they are still in development. If this seems like something you'd be interested in, here's the article, with a link to the application form.

EA Store: You Just Don't Get It

I know, shocking.

Here's the sitch: some friends have picked up Crysis and are enjoying it. I thought I might join them. Then I remembered that EA has that Steam-like downloadable store thing that should, in theory, let me buy the game digitally. Sweet! No more having to remember where I put the damn DVD. I decide to check it out.


You might notice that when I chose a digital download for my delivery option, they added a little something to my cart automatically. It's that $6 line item there, with the unfortunate acronym EDS (hint: a little Cialis will clear that problem right up, EA Store).

What might that be, you may wonder, as did I. Let's click on the little "what is this?" link, shall we?


Whoo, check that out! For only an extra $6 (and let's not even start on how EA is making out by selling me this thing digitally, because they keep 100% of the retail price and don't even have to print a BOX), EA will "keep my game on file" for 2 years. Uh, no thanks. If you do this, you are an idiot. They're going to keep a copy of the game online whether you get this or not, so they can sell it as a download in the future. You are literally handing EA free money. It's like the extended warranties you get at Circuit City (again, only if you're an idiot). Here's a clue guys: if you buy a game on Steam, you can reinstall it at any time in the future by simply re-downloading the Steam client and logging in. Not for 2 years, and not at some price premium -- forever. Likewise, if I want to play Galactic Civilizations 2, I just install the Stardock client and download it. Forever. Those guys clearly get it.

Some marketing bleeb came up with this genius idea to soak the credulous for a few extra bucks. Don't reward them for this behavior by taking them up on it.

While this may seem like my usual ranting about greedy corporate etc. etc., it's really not that. I was honestly interested in the digital download alternative, but this clause makes that untenable. Genuinely disappointing.

Welcome, Wired Visitors

Back in September, a fellow here in town who works freelance for Wired interviewed me for an article. Unfortunately, that article got morphed into something else & I lost track of it.

Apparently, the morphed version of the article finally got posted a couple of days ago. The interview I did got cut down to a one-line quote -- but more importantly, it linked back to this blog. So for those of you out-of-towners visiting courtesy of Wired: welcome! For your amusement, here's a link to my post about the AGC talk I did (including a copy of the slides), which is what started this whole ball rolling.

Gears of Screw You, Epic

Ever since I finished Half Life 2: Ep 2 I've been looking for another good shooter to play. And then I heard that Gears of War was going to be available for the PC. I've been wanting to play GoW for a long time, and simultaneously not wanting to buy an Xbox 360, so naturally I ran out and bought it. Alas, Gears of War is not what I was hoping for.

It's allegedly a tactical game, though you have no control over your squadmates -- er, squadmates? Let's not be afraid to call a spade a spade -- "bait," is what they are, as their job is apparently to run in, immediately be cut down by a hail of gunfire and for the rest of the level, lay there panting and moaning for you to come "revive" them -- I put that in quotes because, really, if you do run to [deadliest point in level] and revive them (which you apparently can't do from cover, for some reason, so you have to expose yourself to massive damage for a few seconds), all they subsquently do is repeat the running-into-hail-of-gunfire algorithm ad nauseum.

Your weapons, which have enough recoil to prevent you firing more than three accurate shots in a row, do not have enough impact to stop enemies from routinely charging directly at you, leaping over your cover, and chainsawing you in the face. Meanwhile your own melee attacks take about twenty . . . no, that's hyperbole . . . they take a few seconds to execute, which is not fast enough to respond to the guy chainsawing you in the etc. etc. Not only that, but the number of times you have to hit an individual enemy to bring them down is INSANE. In one place I had a guy above me and across the way popping up from behind a wall. The only place I could hit him was in the head . . . and yet it took me a couple hundred rounds of ammo to drop him. Even allowing for a 25% hit ratio, that's still 50 shots to the head. To take out one opponent. Ye gods. Apparently the human race HAS fallen on hard times, if this is the best tech we can muster.

The cover mechanism, while cool at first, proved very dicey in the heat of actual combat. Oftentimes, when I didn't have a clear shot at an opponent, I would detach from cover and stand near the other face of the obstruction I was hiding behind, hoping to get a better angle. Then hit the "cover" key . . . only to NOT attach to cover, but to dive straight into an onslaught of gunfire and die instantly.

This would be an endurable frustration were it not compounded by an UNENDURABLE one, namely, in porting the game MS have not bothered to add a "save anywhere" feature. No, really. On a PC game. I know, right? You would think they would have learned their lesson from everyone bitching about Far Cry. So in this one place (I'll call it "the last bit of Gears of Torture I will subject myself to in this lifetime") you've got three Locust that you're trying to kill with your little nerf gun -- a guy with a cannon, a spotter for the cannon guy (the aforementioned dude in a loft across the way), and a roamer. About fifteen times I played through this section, often killing the observer, sometimes killing the roamer. Finally, I managed to get behind the guy with the cannon so he couldn't instakill me, at which point it became apparent where they spent the AI dev budget they saved by making your teammates a bunch of slack-jawed monkeys. The guy abandoned his post to jump over my cover and chainsaw me in the face. It sure would have been nice to quicksave before that happened, so I didn't have to kill the same two guys another fifteen times in a row, since doing so is not fun. I know, it's crazy talk and I'm sure the designers at Epic have felt the etheric ripples of my heresy and are even now experiencing a twinge of irritable bowel syndrome.

This feature -- er, lack of a feature -- reduces the game to a sort of series of mini-vignettes in which you have to learn the correct sequence of actions the designers wanted you to do and execute them perfectly before being allowed to go on, such as the area where you have to close five emergence holes and they give you six grenades. No, really.

In short, Gears of War is a stunning looking game that only a certain type of person would enjoy, and that person would be someone who has never played any game but Halo and thinks Master Chief is the deepest, most well-developed character in the history of games. Unless your tolerance for suffering is greater than mine -- and remember, I have kids -- I would give it a miss. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back and play through Episode 2 again to get this filthy taste out of my mouth.