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All games suck. Do people really ever play test their games? If they had given the game to me before final release, I would have probably been able to list ten things they missed that really sucked and should have been fixed before shipping. Sheesh.

• 172) Once again, I fail to understand the hype. Resident Evil 4 gets stupendous ratings; nice graphics, yeah, but dude, where's the gameplay? It is a weird mish-mash of on-rails action with medicore 3rd person shooter. I find it consists of repetitive monster shooting, repetitive scenery, unbelieveable characters and events, lame controls (no strafe?), and outright visual weirdness: e.g. the big bell on the locked church appears and disappears, depending how far you are from it, presumably due to some cheesy level-of-detail system. If you are trying to shoot it from afar, it isn't there, then you take one step closer and suddenly it is there. Whatever. (I appreciate that some people rightly don't find the game to be orgasmic, either, and reading the spoilers just makes me realize that I don't particularly want to keep playing. Too bad I just spent twenty bucks on the dumb thing. Maybe I can return it and get a refund.) Similarly, I find that other GCN favourite Metroid Prime to be boooring: platforming, and having to retrace steps all the time to get to save points, gets really old really fast! Everybody fancies up the graphics and then implements gameplay from the 1980s. Quite pathetic.
• 171) Come to think of it, the GameCube's controller bugs the crap out of me, much like the N64. They are just too non-symmetrical for my tastes. I feel like even though they don't have more buttons than a Sony or Microsoft console controller, the fact that the buttons are all very different - different colors, different shapes, different positions - makes them hard to get used to. And gosh they sure are mean to left-handed people.
• 170) I broke out my old N64 and played a little 007. The controls are kinda horrible (I really don't like the way the N64's controllers are to be held) and the first level requires that you don't injure any civilians. That apparently includes accidentally pressing a button which causes you to punch the guard who is attacking you, while you are trying to use the tazer you have instead. Punching the guard ruins the mission, so even if you are 90% done with it you get to start all over again. Great. Good game design and play-testing there, folks: force new users to suffer on the very first mission.
• 169) The game Black is derivative shooter crap. Some particularly nice features: It forces you to watch the Full Motion Video crap (bad script, bad acting, bad direction, etc.), you can't skip it! So the first fifteen minutes rule is eviscerated. It has textures that crawl around on their objects as if the rendering engine is high on LSD (seems to happen a lot on the trees in the border crossing level). Also, if you restart the level, you lose all your checkpoints. Great. Also? There are places with doors you cannot open that are spawn points for enemies. That's really good game design, you know, when you are trying to hide in a cubby with what is obviously a sealed door, with your back to the door so you can shoot out at enemies, and then new enemies start materializing behind you from that door and mow you down.
• 168) I suppose the pain should wrap around to the point where it is funny, but it drives me nuts that games still can't get the control scheme right. In Blazing Angels I want flying the bomber to be like an airplane control stick: "up" on the joystick means "down" for the nose of the plane. But then when it puts me in the gunner position of course I want "up" to just be "up" for the gun sights. For crying out loud. (Also: the Desert reconnaissance mission? Hate! Dumb! Bad game design! Boring! Also: the mission to destroy the Japanese fighters on the ground, where if you screw up you have to restart from the beginning, which means waiting through all the cut scenes ever again? That mission? Yeah, hate.)
• 167) It cracks me up to see a web site that supposedly lists games by score and yet the scores are all jumbled. As if sorting the things is just a reall hard technical issue or something?!
• 166) I got to see Oblivion on the Xbox 360. Can you say booooring? Wow, they sure made amazing advancements in game play there... not. Also, they think that going crazy with shaders makes them cool when in actual fact it just ends up making the water look like some kind of super crappy digital noize. It would be a lot better to leave that kind of crap out, and instead focus on making the water rise and fall nicely. Here's a free clue to all the designers out there: Nature is interesting because it is full of motion, nice motion, nature-like motion. Not some stupid graphics demos.
• 165) I got to play the Xbox 360 Live Arcade version of Geometry Wars, which was neat. Well, except for how the Xbox 360 controller thumbsticks completely suck ass! They are designed such that that top of the stick is concave, rather than the convex design found on PS2 Dual-Shock controllers. The concave nature might seem to offer better control because your thumb will be less likely to slip entirely away from the stick, but I actually found the controller to really bite. With a convex design, your thumb has one contact point that it maintains with the controller which means actions are quick and sure (as long as your thumb doesn't get too sweaty and slip off). However, the concave design meant that my thumb was having to move some small distance before it would make contact with e.g. the opposite edge of the 'bowl' - then I could extert force on it and move things. I ended up with crappy control because there would be a split second lost to my thumb moving, and my thumb got sorta rubbed raw by having to keep making and breaking contact with parts of the stick. All in all, a super small design decision that ended up making me pretty much despise the entire system.
• 164) I got to see an Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. I got to see somebody download a demo of The Outfit. Either it didn't say, or nobody noticed, that the demo did not support single-player mode. So that sucked. So we tried getting into a matched on-line game. The system said it found a match for us, and launched the game and everything - and a millisecond later it said the game was over, congratulations! I guess the connection to the other player had dropped? Whatever the cause, the entire customer experience was like, "OK, that really sucked buttocks!" I cannot believe this is what people pay $400+ for: a bunch of pretty stuff duct-taped to a core experience that is utter crap. PS3 here I come.
• 163) I just tried the demo for Desperados 2. It was a mind-boggingly bad introduction to the game: there were no other people on-screen, and yet I died because there was some sniper shooting me from off-screen. That might not be un-fun if you already knew how to play the game and were totally familiar with it, but killing off the player first thing is pretty much not the way to sell a game. I really hope people responsible for this kind of thing end up learning a hard, hard financial lesson; I know I'm never buying the game.
• 162) I was all excited to get Half Life 2 for my Xbox (note that I made sure to get a used copy because I pretty much utterly hate Steam and really don't want any of my money to go to Valve). Well, it turns out to be kind of a flying piece of excrement.
  1. I got stuck such that my character cannot move, I have no way of killing myself to get back to the previous checkpoint, and my last save was 20 mins ago. I don't really want to re-play 20 mins worth of the game. The kicker is that the UI for reverting to some previous state is woefully inadequate when it comes to explaining where you will revert to for non-saved-games: checkpoints, or start of a 'level'. One doens't really know where the 'level' started. The follow-on kicker to that is HL2 has decided to forget about all my checkpoints after I went back to try one but then decided it was too far back. So for a little while I had the choice of re-playing like 10 mins of the game rather than 20, but now the game has decided to remove even that option, and I'm stuck with the 20 mins old save! If this were the PC version, I could use some "god mode" to get away from the part of the world geometry that has me utterly stuck, but apparently the Xbox version doesn't have anything useful like that. I'm so glad that the people who make these games do their best to take whatever bugs they have and make them worse by having a save/load/ checkpoint system from hell.
  2. The actual gameplay is like 99% shoe-leather The load times are horrible, and all too frequent. with shooting, and 1% actual story.
  3. The environments are just the same old buildings and crates an things, only with higher resolution textures.
  4. It is nice how they completely screwed the pooch on the controls for the air-fan-boat-thing: even if you aren't yet moving backwards, the left/right controls will reverse if you try to slow down. That is just utterly insane in terms of gameplay - I don't know and I don't care if it is how actual air-fan-boat-things work, it sucks when it comes to trying to actually have this thing called 'fun' that games are supposed to be about, you know?
  5. Other controls, too: the way you go up and down ladders is completely at odds with how everything else is done in the game, which is to move in the direction you are looking. But when you are on a ladder, suddenly that is no longer the way the controls work. Genius!
  6. The physics. It is a tool that is still in its infancy, but dumb-ass game makers think is sooooo cool that they have to use it everywhere, only to end up with environments that suck. Probably the most egregious example is any swimming one might do with crates in the water. The behaviour of my character is stunningly unbelievable, and utterly uncontrollable, and just plain stupid.
  7. Also: the frame rate?! What's up with that?
• 161) Yes, games are like movies now, which in America means they suck ever more ass.
• 160) Since Knight of the Old Republic (both I and II) mostly got such great reviews, I thought KotOR II would be fun. Well, it turns out to kinda suck, actually. It is: shoe-leather through nothing but furistic corridors and doors - a boring dungeon crawl where the arrows are lasers and the dwarves are droids. The bonus things it consists of are: horrible load times, "fetch this, fetch that" gameplay, super annoying frustrating stupid combat, inconsistent world-view, and then to top it all off, bugs. Sweet! Ship it!
• 159) I tried the Deadly Dozen 2 demo. What really sucked about it was that it did not have a good way to show you when your character actually had a line of fire, so I would be furiously clicking and nothing would be happening, and my guy would get shot and killed. So that was a lot of fun! (I pretty much immediately uninstalled it.)
• 158) I just rented EA's Frontline Pacific Theatre, or whatever it is called, for my Xbox. It was sort of OK up until the point where the NPC blocked me from being able to get onto a staircase that I apparently needed to get on to to continue the game. The kicker is that you cannot get NPCs to move, even if you hit or shoot them. Great. This is game design of the new millenium?!
• 157) It is always impressive to get a game demo that can't even render the options window correctly. Oh, and disables resizing the window, to really enforce the suckage. (They also commit the shooting offense of not immediately quitting when you tell it to quit, but trying to force you to stare at an advertisement for the game for 10 seconds. That is not a way to ingratiate yourself with anybody, dumbkopfs.) The font they chose for all their text is pretty annoyingly obviously stupidly bad. And they writing is kinda sad: "the cleanest water man has ever drank." Uh, riiiight.
• 156) Remind me not to support the video game industry at all.
• 155) I thought I'd try my hand a some Half Life (1, not 2) maps. Quark seems to have the most sane user interface, but it also seems to totally break my maps whenever I do any operation - it introduces all sorts of errors so one minute things are fine and the very next there is a horrible leak in my map somewhere. So I'm going to try Hammer, which bugs the crap out of me with its setup, and because the 'camera' view sub-window has the 'camera' label flickering like mad, presumably because it is constantly redrawing that 3D view (even though I'm not actually doing anything). Whatever!
• 154) Sure, Afraid of Monsters might have won awards, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck in some ways. First, the sound was all screwy. But worse was the vomit-inducing opening floating movie sequence. It really bugs the crap out of me that people don't understand the most basic thing about directing film. Update: Argh, they are killing me! It finally got done with the bull crap intro and I had literally 10 seconds of play before another stupid freaking cut-scene took over! Hate! Hate! Hate! Update 2: I thought that was it, the two stupid cut-scene things (where they had the camera going through solid objects all the time like faucets and doors, nice) but then I had literally - literally! - two more seconds of me being in control and then another cut-scene started. (It was at that point that I quit the game and uninstalled it.) This is the kind of literally retarded crap that wins awards? What is all the stuff like that is considered to be worse? Religious figure on a pogo stick!
• 153) It is nice to see that Eurogamer is apparently not afraid to, effectively, call a piece of software turd, "a piece of software turd" in their reviews.
• 152) So near and yet so far away.
• 151) It utterly flabberghasts me that anybody would willingly pay money and install Valve's Steam system. I mean, have you seen the license for the thing? Or how much space it takes up? Talk about all 'round invasive and just plain obnoxious!
• 150) People are just plain stupid dumb insane (or paid off). Well maybe some people are a little more reasonable: "The control system has long been controversial with the Resident Evil series, and although it's improved in this version, it's still cumbersome. Rather than creating a new system to go with the new engine, the developers tried to shoehorn the classic control scheme into the new game. The lead character turns incredibly slowly, he cannot strafe around a corner, and you cannot move when your weapon is raised. In an odd turn of events, the developers seemed to have realized that the slow turning speed was a problem so they implanted a "quick turn" button that spins you around 180 degrees. It's bizarre that you can turn around quicker than turning a corner." I completely do not understand this "the graphics are great, but, uh, you can't actually control things very well" crap.
• 149) The Neuro Hunter demo had impressively good voice acting. The script was cheesy, but the voices were good. And, unfortunately, the meat of the game was really super boring. Also? The engine completely zonked out on frame rate in certain areas (like walking the corridors of the bustling mining 'town'). Nice.
• 148) Based on the Q4 demo, I'd have given the game something around a 60% rating because it is such utterly boring derivative drivel. Come to think of it, make it more like 51% - the engine doesn't get me off, and the plot and action sure don't, either. At least some other folks call it what it is: boring, derivative, self-parodying crap. So why do other people still give it high ratings? The answer is: because they have no taste, and suck. This is why games continue to be stupid.
• 147) I guess I just don't like stealth game design where you have to sit and wait for a long time, or re-do a level five times to get the pattern right. No, sir.
• 146) I rented Call of Cthulu for the Xbox Classic. It actually isn't all that bad. Mind you, it isn't particularly stupendous either. There's stupid bad load times up front; the 3D characters are pretty wooden and have the moon-walk type animations (they stand around stupidly and disappear after cut scenes); etc... all the usual stuff that makes it obvious it is a game. There are parts where you are running from enemies, and if you screw up you have to restart that scene - but only after laborious reloading and intro crap! And from the sounds of the walkthrough, it only keeps doing that. Well, that and fun box jumping. Blah. Oh, one particularly funny thing that happened was in the very first level I thought I had a gun because I saw a shotgun like how you would see it in Doom/Quake, sorta sticking out in front of you. As I went through the level I couldn't figure out how to use it, though. Well it turns out that actually I never had a gun at all, but was standing right next to a NPC that did have one, so it sorta looked like I had one! Ha ha. Ha. Ahem.
• 145) Yes, Katamari Damacy is a neat game. Yes, I bought it (actually twice). No, I don't play it much at all. Yes, I quickly found it to be very repetitive and boring.
• 144) Care of a co-worker, I got to play some death match Half Life 2 and some Counter Strike Source. On the whole, it is surprising how little the graphics mattered to me. Although, it would be interesting to go back to the originals for comparison and see how jarring the old-school graphics are? Anyway, it seems like the games and the environments are basically the same-old-same-old, just with a few more polygons. That really isn't what I'm looking or in life. (Also, the hostages in CS Source weren't showing off anything amazing when it came to facial expressions. I thought that was one of the big deals with the whole HL2 engine?) I'm a jaded gaming geezer. (I hope multi-player with more humans might be fun, perhaps, though.)
• 143) Burnout Revenge is supposedly good (because Burnout 3 was supposedly good?), but it flubs in so many fundamental ways and ends up clearly being style over substance; they probably spent more effort on gathering the stupid aggro rock soundtrack than they did on making interesting gameplay. Yes, games are like movies now: they suck! It forces you to wait through horrible load times. (Why does it have to reload everything in the multi-player crashing? In the single player, it 'rewinds' - which is an annoying waste of time, but maybe covers up some small loading - much more quickly. One player quipped that it probably has to reload because all those textures got busted in the crash.) It doesn't give you much sense of cause and effect; you could probably do almost exactly the same thing and end up with completely different results. It can't even animate the 'loading' chevron without glitches. Oh, and the camera utterly sucks - you'd think that for a game where you are supposed to enjoy vicarious destruction they'd let you, ya know, actually be able to see it.
• 142) Worms 3D just goes to show how you can take a very simple concept (Worms 2D, a.k.a. Scorched Earth) and completely screw up all aspects of the UI, leaving you with a game that kinda totally sucks. The UI for multi-player setup is horribly confusing and slow. The characters can get stuck in parts of the 3D scenery with no escape. The game doesn't use multiple controllers, and doesn't tell you that it only uses a single controller. The way it switches from 3rd to 1st person is broken. Etc.
• 141) On pretentious games: "Ultima 9: Ascension. Wordy, badly acted, and dull, the game had you traveling the land to become the ultimate moral being. You generally did this by a) killing things and b) opening doors."
• 140) As we progress in the development of story in video games, I'm going to be ever more annoyed with having to play stupid parts of the game just to get to go through the story. I don't like stupid turn-based fighting. Can we all just take it as read that I eventually figured out how to win that round, and get back to the story already? Sheesh.
• 139) Here's something that people do that proves they have absolutely no aesthetic sense: they take an old game like Hero and completely screw it up in an attempt to make it all 'modern'. First, they take old tile-based graphics and make them high-res, which only serves to make the fact that it is tile-based stand out painfully. Second, they completely alter the scale of things so what used to be compact spaces are now entirely too wide open. Actually, their version of Delta is more classically what I see, where somebody takes a horizontal scroller and fancies up the graphics, which only serves to show how dated the gameplay is. I don't think Hero had to fall into that category, but I think the shmups pretty much always will.
• 138) I'm glad to see Paradroid lives on in various guises.
• 137) (Didn't I already mention this?) I'm totally sick and tired of games (and movies, and books, etc.) where the story is, "something has happened, you have amnesia, figure it out before they get you!" Hello, the 1990's (and that is being generous) want their story conceit back!
• 136) I tried the Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich demo. It sucked. First off, the main menu had a scrolling background that was, as far as I can tell, designed specifically to make me motion sick. Then, secondly, in the game the camera control was impossible and never explained. I guess they assume I've played FF before? Well, I haven't, and the demo certainly guarantees that I never will.
• 135) I am obviously unable to like any game any more. Everybody raved about Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, so I downloaded the PC demo and tried it out. Within twenty minutes of using the software I've got a litany of complaints that are things that the developers apparently wanted to just slap me with: 1, the opening part has sufficient contrast to see what is going on but from then on the contrast is completely different and less and just plain sucks. 2, why does the prince have a plain (and kinda lame and weak for a voice actor) British accent? 3, also, why are some of the prince's samples scratchy like they were coming from an Apple ][ still? 4, why does the camera control completely suck ass? The camera won't move through walls so you have to move your character around just to get enough room to let the camera through - how utterly insanely broken is that? That's billion-dollar game design?! Holy crap! And do you like how it gets stuck on the floor, too, so you can't really look up above your character, either? I! Just! Don't! Under! Stand!
• 134) I finished the PS2 version of Brothers in Arms (Hill 30). (It looked really lame compared to the demo of the same game I ran on my aging Athlon 2000 XP+ with GeForce 4.) The thing that bugged me the most was the lack of quality control in the story triggers. I'd battle through some horrible scenario five times, finally get it right, and then the bloody program wouldn't realize that (real examples here) I'd already killed the tank, or that I'd killed all the Nazis and was standing in front of the guy I was supposed to meet. Aren't story triggers things from the dawn of video games? Shouldn't they just plain work? Is that so much to expect from a game? Oh, and in that same 2nd scenario, it refused to remember a particular checkpoint I'd crossed, so when I died in the subsequent checkpoint I'd actually be forced to go back two checkpoints, not just one. Nice! And, there were several nice texture freak-outs, as if the PS2 could not technically do perspective-correct texture mapping or z-axis clipping. What! Ever!
• 133) Seems like folks are going crazy over Star Wars Republic Commando. I played the demo on the PC, and it was pretty much "eh." You move forward, you shoot stuff, you move forward, you blow stuff up, you move forward... I guess it is sorta pretty (as far as killing things can be pretty) and all, but still - whatever. One thing in particular totally cracks me up about it, this thing where it is totally being a parody of itself: when you command your squad to do something and you apparently have to put your gun away and then make some silly hand and arm motion to make the squad to the squadly thing you want them to do. Yet the whole time, everybody is talking on the bloody radio! And they respond to your hand signals via radio! So why should my character bother to even make the stupid bloody motions, especially if it means putting down the weapon for a moment?! It is just all much too muchly apparent that it is a squad of some ridiculous clones with really tiny penises, trying to compensate by being all macho-macho-manly with bizarre military fisting motions. I can envision the various arm and hand and finger movements with manly sounds like "Huf! Huuuuurrg! Gurrrrmmmmnn!!!" Just like the real military? Whatever, man, whatever. (Oh, and the squad folks would quickly get into reusing their three stock canned catch phrases, a horrible game design faux pas. Hello! Lame!)
• 132) Everybody thinks that Elite was such a great game. What I want to know is (this is something many games have gotten wrong even in the new Millennium), why do I have to fly somewhere before I can find out what their market prices are? There was FTL travel, so there ought to be FTL data exchange. Whatever! Games like Freelancer have similar problems - there are things you have to do that just don't make sense in the current world, let alone the game world that is set zillions of years in the future. For example, why do I have to go run through all the "bulletin board" postings and read everything just to find information? Wouldn't they have some kind of future Google that would let me find things super fast if I so desired, rather than having to wade through all the tripe they wrote up to try and give the game "depth"? Whatever, man, whatever.
• 131) Halo 2's single player game is, pretty much, even more boring than the first game's. Wow. (I also like how you can set subtitles to always be on, but then there aren't any for dialog in-game, only for cut-scenes. Yeah, great, thanks.) Oh and the title screen music is amazing in that is manages to be simultaneously cheesy and pompous!
• 130) I was really starting to like the sound of Shadow Hearts: Covenant (PS2)... but then I read that it has random encounters. I hate random encounters. Mostly because I find the whole fighting thing to just be getting in the way of story, so I'd rather not have to deal with stupid random fights, just ones that are actually story-relevant. Grrrr. Whatever.
• 129) I'm trying the Doom 3 demo. God, it is such drivel! Sure, id software started the genre, but that doesn't mean they can be forgiven for utterly failing to extend it beyond the "ooh, pretty graphics" thing. Miscellaneous examples: All the characters so far are men - the only females are disembodied computer voices. So that's a nice reflection of the population they expect to be playing the game. How come the Bad Guy Evil Scientist has to have some deformity? Why do people repeat what they have said in some pathetic 1980s adventure game style? That doesn't make things immersive. Also, why do characters sorta stand around and then robotically go walk and stand somewhere else, without really ever doing anything? It was particularly noticeable when looking into the infirmary the first time; the doctor isn't doing anything other than standing straight in place for a while, then moving somewhere else and standing there for a while, etc. ad nauseum. None of the characters notice my character when I'm standing right next to them, not until I click to interact with them. So supposedly hush-hush rumors are there for anybody to hear. Right, terrific! How much more blatantly could they expose the lame mechanisms driving this thing? Have we learned nothing in twenty-plus years of game creation? And, how the hell does an armor shard work to give me more armor?! And who is the genius who decided the fire button should be the talk button, and who is the one who implemented the "should i be in fire or talk mode?" code, because I just unintentionally shot somebody I was trying to talk to. Yeah, that is truly a great user interface refinement comma you bastards. And why can't I fast-forward / rewind through the PDA videos? And why are PDAs and video discs the size of Newtons and Laser Discs when this is supposed to be the most futuristics and advanced technology company ever? This is what everybody rushes out and pays good money for? Truly, we are a species without redeeming quality.
• 128) The whole "protect the person from attack" thing in Ico and Silent Hill 4 is stupid and annoying. (Penny Arcade made this point a while back. Between them and Old Man Murray, I feel my grumpiness validated.)
• 127) I'm playing No One Lives Forever 2. It got such rave reviews, grn. I guess FPS aren't that exciting to me any more, fundamentally. I mean, all you do is run around and... shoot people. How much fun is that? Especially when there's lots of annoying shoe-leather; places where you can't take the snowmobile, places where you have to back track, yadda yadda yadda. As if I want to wait around for all the oh-so-side-splittingly-funny conversations to complete? Shyeah, right. Oh, and why aren't there subtitles? Ah, you have to turn them on in the options menus, they aren't on by default. Eh, partial credit. I also love how the game just completely fails and aborts and quits like one time out of twenty when I'm trying to load a saved game. Oh, wait, it gets better - I have a saved game that causes the entire app to quit whenever I load it. Yes! The movie-like interludes attempt to be stylish, but most often they display a horrible lack of understanding of timing - there are long stretches with no voices while the characters repeat animations that make them look all slight drunk, or insane. It just doesn't hang together. Eh. And I'm sure everybody in India and Russia etc. just love the stereotyped accents and cultural attitudes (yes, yes, I know it is supposed to be a comedy, but you have to wonder about the writers if the main way they try to get a laugh is via lame-ass, almost racist, certainly not culturally sensitive in a modern fashion, antics).
• 126) R-Type Final got good reviews which suckered me into buying it. Now I discover a game that is so lack-luster it is sad. I mean, a game which is custom made for the PS2 and in the very first level you get horrendous slow-down. The design of the levels is just plain wrong; R-Type always had you moving horizontally and now the background is doing all sorts of wacky 3D rotations - it doesn't serve to make anything any more interesting, it only serves to highlight the sort of literally retarded gameplay; your ship can only ever face and shoot to the right (once you get The Ball you can shoot left, of course, but your ship's gun is still fixed). The point is not that they should have let the ship change direction, the point is that if they kept the ship's classic behaviour then it was incumbent upon them to not cock-up the context in which the ship lived. Also, the pace of the game is really strange, it seems like the gyrations of the background were more interesting to the developers than setting up enemies or anything. This is all in the first level. It is boring enough to make you give up immediately. The second level is a little more redeemingly classic, at least. But then the 3rd level's attempt to pay homage to the massive ship levels from the original game fail miserably because, once again, they are trying to do cool stuff with the 3D-ness, and it only ends up making you realize how trite and stupid it all is. Like, not really knowing what is going to be foreground material that will prevent you from moving, so you end up getting trapped in non-obvious ways and dying needlessly. This wouldn't ever have happened with the classic 2D versions, it was always quite clear that touching things would kill you. Here, the extra dimension only serves to confuse and annoy, rather than to add any real depth to the experience. So much for the Old School. The overall design failure reminds me of the saying from the Woody Allen movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, "If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it's not funny." Here, the case is that they bent the conceit of the game, and my willing suspension of disbelief, up to and then past the breaking point.
• 125) I'm playing Metal Gear 2: Substance (the Sons of Liberty game) on the XBox. I do not understand why anybody plays games like this, or why games like this get good reviews. To me, it is nothing more than an exercise in pure, unadulterated frustration. I guess the story is vaguely interesting (although it is told pretty poorly), but the control scheme and some of the conceit about the world are just bad bad bad.
  1. Modal controls suck. They suck a lot. I'm trying to do X but instead F happens. And I get all confused and screwed and shot yadda yadda yadda. There are two ways that this happens; one is when you are manually changing modes (going into first person, or picking a particular item to use e.g.: the freeze spray). Those are somewhat less hateful because the user knows they are going into those modes explicitly. But then there are the stupendously evil, wrong, asinine, and just plain bloody stupid modal things that happen just based on where you are. So just trying to move my character around is a nightmare because there are all these invisible attractors in the world (like putting ones back to a wall, or trying to crawl around in a tight space) that change what your controls do to the character.
  2. Trying to control your character during weapon combat sucks stinky donkey turds. Have they never played Quake? Basically if I get into a real firefight, I'm dead. Mostly because of the modality issues, but even without those it would still suck cow pies, there's no smoothness or sense of flow available at all.
  3. The script is poorly read. Maybe it just suffers in the translation from the Japanese version of the game, but there are lots of long pauses between anybody saying anything in the cut scenes. And the cut scenes just go on and on and on... Oh, and you can't pause during them (this is another one of those retarded and annoying modal issues), instead the pause button skips the cut scene (and there's no going back?). Grrreat!
  4. Also, the script jumps around a lot. There's the first level and then the second level is seemingly a completely different story for quite a long time. Very discombobulating. But, also, a very... I'm not being obnoxious here, just observing the differences between (boring? simplistic?) Western story telling and the Asian story telling style: as far as I've learned from watching anime and Asian movies of various ilk, they do it a lot where you are scratching your head wondering what the hell is going on, and only at the end do they give you enough information to make any sense of it. Up until that point it just seems like a completely disjointed and stupid story. I don't think that works so well for me or probably Western audiences in general.
  5. My God, could they put in more, and longer, cut scenes? The conversation with the Bomb Squad guy is insane!
  6. I hate fixed camera positions. I hate designers thinking the fixed camera position makes it cool to hide things in places you can barely, or not at all, see them. Especially when it is the thing you need to move ahead in the game. Like a crawlspace that is impossible to see. (And nobody on the 'Codec' gives you any hints that that is what you should be looking for at the time.) It kills me that I can't see the person right in front of my character because of the camera position, unless I keep going into and out of first-person mode (a mode in which you cannot actually move your character forward).
  7. While it might mean I can keep on playing the game, the whole thing about the alarm mode going down is just plain retarded. Let alone the AI of the enemy; one can be staring at you and you step through a doorway, and instead of coming through the doorway after you, you see them run right past down the hallway!
  8. So I haven't even made it through the second level and I've already completely given up on the game. I guess I'm just not cut out for this kind of thing; all the stupid things about it add up to just make the whole experience hateful and unbelievable and, frankly, not just zero fun but actively suckingly negative fun! That's what I want for my hard-earned money!
  9. Maybe I'm just confused, but it seems like saved games don't put me back at the same point when re-loaded. Rather, I'm back at the most recent checkpoint. E.g.: saving half-way across a connecting Shell bridge will get me back to the start of the bridge, not half-way.
  10. (The music for the opening screens, like where you have to press the start button, or load a saved game, is good.)
• 124) The Small Rockets demos are an exercise in purposeful frustration; things like having a timer before the game finally exits because they want to try and keep advertising it to you. Well, if I've already decided the game is a piece of dog excrement, you aren't going to convert me into buying it by trying to force me into looking at some bloody advertisement, rather than just getting the hell out of my damned way. Die. Die and go to hell.
• 123) I tried Grabbed by the Ghoulies (XBox), by Rare. You'd think by now they'd know how to make a game that actually was fun, but somehow they've managed to utterly forget. The most blatant thing is they spend the first 15 minutes of the game making you watch annoying animation rather than letting you do anything. Further, when you do get the chance, you are constantly interrupted by the "lessons" text screens that come up. Utterly breaks any feeling of immersion. And, so far the game is just hit hit hit stuff. There's nothing else to do. What are these people thinking? Oh and of course the camera sucks. Whatever! (Maybe if you are 5 years old it becomes fun somehow?) Microsoft should basically ask for their money back from having bought Rare. This ain't no Halo.
• 122) The Far Cry web site (don't bother, the game is boring derivative tripe) has what is obviously a scientific and objective poll: "What do you think of Far Cry's single player demo? A, Revolutionary. B, Great fun. C, It's ok. D, Not my type of game." Ah, yes, the conspicuously missing E, Is Simply Boring Derivative Drivel.
• 121) Nice to know Penny Arcade agrees with me: "There are issues with the camera, however, but I'm so tired of having to mention that the camera in a Japanese action platformer is bad that I would like you to please assume that the camera is terrible in whatever game I'm talking about. If I were to talk about caramel, you'd understand that I meant a golden, chewy candy without my having to resort to specifics. Let's get to that point with these god damn cameras. I mean, am I the problem? Is my burning desire to see the enemies attacking me a part of some dark and undefined complex?"
• 120) Nocture is, truly, a piece of crap.
• 119) Armored Core 3 Silent Line sucks. Realism is not equivalent to fun, people. Giving me a mech that can't turn around is not a good way to suck me into the game. Having to amass lots of money to get non-crappy hardware is not fun. Having brick-wall levels that you must get through is not fun. Etc. It completely kills the "15 minute" rule of trying to suck people in during the beginning of the game. Start people out with big stuff then let them decay during the game as their skills improve to compensate, you know?
• 118) Genma Onimusha sucks. It has terrible Resident Evil controls, it has a terrible Resident Evil pre-rendered, fixed viewpoint world, it has a crappy UI for loading once you die, the cut-scenes are pathetic (story wise, at least), the gameplay is boring repetitive (did I mention boring?) crap, the powers make no sense (I hit a demon and it releases a green orb, which it then reabsorbs and is then more powerful than when I first hit it, even though it is its own orb), etc. etc. The whole exercise is morally bankrupt; why would I want to turn my XBox into a SNES or a Dreamcast? The point of spending money on XBox technology is to get good games, especially ones that are fully 3D. I really do not grok video games these days. It also pisses me off that there is a "Really Easy" setting but, like Silent Hill, you can't get to it unless you die several times first. By which point you've progressed enough through the game that you have a Hobson's Choice between being stuck for hours in a really difficult part of the game, or completely starting over and having to replay an hour or whatever of stuff you've already seen. If you could at least switch into the Really Easy mode from your current position in the game, it would be a potentially useful feature.
• 117) The Uru demo commits so many offenses that I uninstalled it within literally ten minutes: It doesn't use WASD as default keys, it uses the arrows. It has a checkbox for Mute Sounds, but it doesn't have any subtitles. It attempts to connect to some Internet server, yet if I deny it access using ZoneAlarm, it works fine - smacks too much like annoying monitoring/spyware. Finally, it doesn't use the Esc key to get you out to the menus, no, it uses F4. Because F4 sounds a lot more like "escape" than the key actually labeled "Esc"? And these people are supposed to be God fearing? Whatever, man. Whatever.
• 116) The Unreal II XMP demo installer has this pretty funny bug. If you try to use the little chooser to pick where to install it, that window gets defocused about every second. So if you try to click on it to start manually typing the folder name or path or whatever, suddenly the focus goes away and what you are typing is being sent (heaven only knows) somewhere else. This happens on both machines I've tried installing on. (Both are running XP.) Whatever! On one machine, when trying to connect to servers, the game would seemingly lock up for quite a long time, on the order of a minute or two. No progress bar or anything to let you know what was happening. On the other machine it completely wedged and I had to reset! Yeah, I'm sure going to rush right out and spend my hard-earned money on this crap. (Update: the installer for the Far Cry demo does it the defocusing crap as well! Makes me wonder if it is something about InstallShield.)
• 115) 3D 3rd person games suck because you then have to worry about the 3D camera, and invariably it ends up sucking. Really sucking. Voodoo Vince has the problem. Otogi has the problem. Face it, all games have the problem, probably even the Mario games have the problem. The kicker is that then people go and make the situation even worse by not giving you options to customize the controls of the camera to try and do what you, personally, would find most intuitive.
• 114) Voodoo Vince for XBox is... mediocre. I'm definitely sick of the "hey, let's have really wacky architecture, guys!" school of game design. You know, those wacky doorways that are a little off-kilter, etc. That's soooo creative. Retch. Oh, and the camera controls are backwards, as far as I'm concerned. And the camera gets stuck. Nice.
• 113) Crimson Skies for XBox doesn't totally suck. Well, except for the way you can get caught on the sides of doorways and not be able to extricate yourself. That is a pretty galactic sized frustrating kick to the groin, especially since the later parts of the game have you navigating small pathways (tunnels, insides of other ships). So you end up dying a lot because of the door issue, and then you have to redo everything you did up until then. It is a needless frustration, it doesn't add anything to the gameplay other than hate. The fact that you can't skip the "here comes the final boss" movie, so you end up having to sit through it like 7 times before you finally win the game, also sucks. And, also, that the game can be fairly easily completed in a day. The controls are frustrating because the plane tends not to update it's horizon attitude well; I bank left and the horizon tilts appropriately, and then I bank right and the angle with the horizon never catches up, so in the end it looks sorta like I'm kind of flying sideways. The only way to fix it is to use the other stick to change your roll, but then that means taking your fingers off of the speed control buttons, which I find to be way more important overall. Oh, and let me add that the "loading" screen which also shows you what the controls are has got have the worst layout for a control map picture I've ever seen. It flaunts the idea that the labels for the controls should be laid out in the same positions as the buttons themselves so that the whole thing is actually understandable. It's as if it had been drawn by some alien from the planet Suck who just happened to have a graphic design bachelor's. While I'm at it, I should mention that the intro movie really fails to make any kind of deep explanation for what the world of the game is, which is usually the whole point of an intro movie. But, the voice acting is good (although the bad guy's raspy voice is really hard to hear, and the game doesn't have subtitles anywhere which I think these days is a shootable offense), the controls are good, the graphics are great, the story isn't utter dreck, etc. etc. so it is for sure, I think, actually the best XBox game to date.
• 112) I kinda like Sub Rebellion (PS2). It has nice presentation, and it doesn't utterly suck. Now, it isn't the most exciting game ever, but it has a sort of Zen aspect to it. There's also a touch of humor throughout: "Camouflage cannot be said to be particularly useful in an underwater battle that is fought mainly with sonar. $1000."
• 111) I am obviously not cut out for adventure games. Everybody freaked out about The Longest Journey, so I tried the demo. Well, I got pretty much nowhere other than having some conversations with the other characters, so I ended up reading a walk-through... what a nightmare. I guess there is some logic to the solutions, but I just don't expect that I'd have ever figured all of those things out. Having to get inside the head of the game developer bugs me a lot. I think the style of game where "There's More than One Way to Do It" is much better.
• 110) The Deus Ex 2 demo is apparently designed solely as an advertisement for "Buy a New Dell Today!" or something; my machine (Athlon XP 2000+, Nvidia GeForce 4200) couldn't get a respectable frame rate even after getting all updated with drivers. The low frame rate makes the field of view too narrow and claustrophobia inducing. The controls for things like inventory etc. suck a lot, if only because they have animations when you go into and out of them, and the animations prevent any key presses from registering. So you can't hit the inventory key and be like "actually, never mind" and press it again to get right out. No, instead you have to wait for the bloody animation. The way you move stuff around in the inventory is horribly non-intuitive at first - not sure it ever really gets any better, but it definitely is odd and suckful at first. Gee, look at all those crates! Even the UI for just talking to people is broken and annoying (too easy to skip the next text when all you wanted to skip was the current, etc.). And don't get me started on the rag-doll physics. Gee, that stuff really adds to the realism, shyeah. Overall, I also feel like the game is just DX1 with the option of anti-aliasing, which really isn't that compelling. Oh, and the title page pissed me off a lot, what with the terrorism reference. It just smacks of brown-nosing the Bush Administration, whom I don't tend to agree with about much, let alone things like the bloody Patriot Act.
• 109) The T3 demo is just complete and utter shyte. Apparently, the final game is even worse, ha ha! Anyway, with the demo: I was connected to a very low ping server yet the controls lagged like a quarter second behind what I was actually doing. The frame rate of updating other players was like pi, and the mouse cursor in menus completely ignored my Windows setting and instead was a sluggardly piece of feces. Yeah, I'll definitely go drop forty bucks on this when it comes out. It is so absolutely pathetic that the name Atari is associated with this. I already subconsciously assumed that "Atari" had stopped meaning anything serious about games long ago, what with all the changes in ownership, the utter failures, closures... and reopenings. But T3 really proves the point. I'm not sure how to explain the feeling - there should be a sniglet - for something that exists in name only and everybody knows that the name is utterly meaningless. It is just kept alive because some asinine marketing weasels think it somehow has some cache?! I just don't get it, unless the name was sold for $1. Anyway, I think (broken link?) the financials prove my point quite well. (Turns out they also did Enter the Matrix, which I found to be unfiltered crap, also.)
• 108) Xenosaga I is seemingly sorta vaguely fun. I'm kind of scared to admit it, because it has plenty of problems, but I guess the fact that it tries to have a - gasp!!! - story makes it a lot more engaging than pretty much any other game I've played in months. God, I pray Half Life II will be good.
• 107) Silent Hill 2 has the same problem, to me, as SH3 in that you spend all your time in places that are really mundane and boring. Why would I want to play a game where a third of it is spent rummaging around a motel?! Sure, sure, the story is great, you get inside the person's head, etc., but it really doesn't make up for the fact that most of the game is "shoe leather."
• 106) Castlevania: Lament of Innocence on the PS2 looks pretty nice. But I just don't grok the 8-bit gameplay! Talk about nightmarishly repetitive, boring, and dull. Also, I really really hate the forced camera angle thing here, and in Silent Hill, and in Resident Evil, etc. It bugs the crap out of me when my character could be seeing something that I can't because of the camera angle.
• 105) I rented Star Wars: Clone Wars for the PS2. The graphics look like something out of a Sega Saturn. I kid you not; there is really pathetic texture creep and all-round freakiness. The voices aren't so good. Polygons show their interfacing edges with white stippled tears. Animation runs at like 10 frames a second, if you are lucky. Ever tried riding a speeder bike at 10 FPS? Or fighting off an invading horde at 9? Load times are pure evil. The controls when you have to move an individual character around on foot are pure suck. Yadda, yadda, yadda. How... sad.
• 104) I'm trying out Jedi Knight II on the XBox.
  1. My god, the opening character animation is bad.
  2. It starts off with a couple of stormtroopers standing guard, and I want to sneak up on them and tazer them. But my sidekick starts yelling (repeatedly, so that in the first fifteen minutes of the game I'm already utterly sick and tired of her) "shoot them" or something, and starts blastering away at everything in sight. Maybe I should have just turned around and shot her to begin with?
  3. The military installation has the security and layout of a baby's soiled diapers. I'm sorry, this just doesn't help me willingly suspend my disbelief.
  4. The FMV sequences have things like people's hands moving through a solid desk and being clipped etc., showing a blatant disregard for anything remotely approaching the idea of Quality.
• 103) Wow. I just rented Mace Griffin for the XBox. There are so many things just plain wrong with it:
  1. In the opening voice-over, the script uses the term "rag-tag." Anybody using that in what I like to call the Years After Battlestar Galactica obviously needs shot.
  2. Rollins does the voice for Mace, so I assume he's into it but nevertheless I personally find their use of his song Shine to be hilariously, deeply wrong. To me, that song's entire point is that sitting on your ass is utterly pathetic, and that you should shut the f-up and get on with the real, meaningful, important things in life instead of playing video games. Oh the irony.
  3. You cannot change the controller setup in the game. You have to quit your current game. That. Is. So. Utterly. St00pid.
  4. There are parts of the world which kill you instantaneously, pretty much. E.g.: the rail of the mine carts. Now, they don't show you anything that makes it clear you can't touch it. Maybe there are chevrons, but there are other parts of the game where you have to walk on chevrons. The kicker is that when you die, they force you back to the previous checkpoint, which can mean literally like twenty minutes of gameplay you have to re-do. What. A. Piece. Of. FECES!
  5. The enemy has the same voice. Like, pretty much all of them. Uh, yeah.
  6. The music gets pretty annoying after a (short) while.
  7. Seems like everybody has to use the Halo fonts. What is up with that?
  8. The jumping mechanics are just outright wrong, annoying, pathetic, and stupid. You can stand next to something and not be able to jump onto it. Instead you have to take a running jump. I don't know if that is more realistic, but it sure doesn't make the game any more fun for me.
  9. You cannot aim straight down. So shooting the spiders takes a lot more time than it should. Boooring!
  10. The designers have apparently never heard of the film term "shoe leather" - there is entirely too much pointless walking around in the beginning. Oh, and it pisses me off that your own ship won't let you in until you've gone to get the first bounty hunter mission description. Whatever.
  11. Why can I only pick up some guns? The large aliens have big-ass energy weapons, but I can't ever pick them up after I've killed one of them. Lame.
  12. The opening selection, where you pick a color of Ranger insignia, appears to have pretty much no purpose what-so-ever at least at first. I like green, so I used that one, and it turns out that scrolling the selection to it whenever I want to play actually sucks a lot more than it should, because you can't scroll again until the first insignia has been replaced, which happens at a fixed rate. Utter stupid blah.
• 102) I'm glad that Wild Tangent, who I think are stupid-asses, are seen thusly by by others, also.
• 101) I love how the free version of the original Hidden and Dangerous plays at like literally 5 frames per second on my dual xenon workstation. It has a GeForce2 which isn't anything stupendous today, but I bet it was pretty cutting-edge at the time the game was originally written. Whatever!
• 100) I'm trying Silent Hill 3, which got really pretty terrific reviews. I'm confused why. At least there's one or three sane people who don't think it is pure gold.
  1. I haven't figured out how to load a saved game whenever I want. I think I have to let my character die before I can get to loading a game. So, that kinda takes away 50% of the reason I even bother saving in the first place. No, there aren't any grenades to blow oneself up with, either. Whatever.
  2. I just can't relate to my character. Does she know where she is or not? She calls her Dad, she's got an apartment key... yet she doesn't ever go home or anything. She's just stuck in weird places. We don't know why she is in the mall or anything. What is up with that? Was she not really talking to her Dad? (Why didn't they capitalize 'Dad' in their subtitles, by the way?) I guess if later on it turns out she wasn't really talking to him that would be cool, but so far it just all seems like an inconsistent hodge-podge.
  3. The controls suck ass - same stupid thing as Resident Evil where your character moves like they are on lithium, rather than like they are scared crapless from the evil monsters attacking them, you know?!
  4. The camera invariably keeps monsters out of your view. Even if you try to go first-personish. They like to have a central area that the camera rotates in while you walk around a circle. But then the player can't see the monster that is like physically like two feet in front of the character. Stupid!
  5. When I find myself holding down two buttons pretty much all the time (namely, 'view-over-shoulder' and 'run'), I find myself wondering why those aren't the default state. Or why I can't make it so.
  6. Oh, and apparently the game, so far as I have discovered, is all about a - get this - really creepy shopping mall. What in the holy heck are game designers thinking these days? Or is it just that the Japanese have a completely different idea of what is actually interesting?
  7. It really pisses me off that I have to check every damned stupid thing everywhere, otherwise I risk missing some item that I absolutely must have to get any further. I hate hate hate that. Here's a clue, people: It isn't fun. I guess it keeps the publishers of walk-through game guides in business, though?
  8. I think they need to get over the idea that rapidly shaking heads are scary. It worked once in that all-time excellent movie Jacob's Ladder, but from then on it was a been-there-see-that effect with no real impact.
  9. It has some annoying requirements for the ordering of events. I couldn't take the rope out of the desk even though the drawer was open until I'd gone away and done some other stuff and come back. Heaven only knows what triggered it to let me finally take the stupid rope.
  10. The 'simple' 3rd floor hospital door code puzzle isn't working. I have the photo. I enter the code. Nothing happens. Yay. And boy do I love that UI for entering the code. Whoo doggy! I'm worried that there's some trigger I haven't tripped and that I won't ever be able to put in the code. That's what the Danes term, "fun," yessir! Update: turns out the puzzle is having to read bad handwriting. Digits which look like a 1 are possibly other things, like 2 or 6 or 9. Boy, that's really brain taxing! Boy, that's really fun! Boy, that sure has gotta be the height of game design! Give. Me. Strength.
  11. I am really growing to hate the "we'll have a rich world... except we'll arbitrarily block roads and paths with rubble or trash or whatever to make them impassable" school of game design. I hate it because it is two-faced. On the one hand, it is trying to make a world that you can get sucked into and believe. On the other hand, it slaps you repeatedly across the face to make sure you know that it is only a cheesy video game.
• 99) I rented Otogi for the XBox. I have obviously gone far past the original onset of ossification that happens when you become an adult. Most kids easily conform to whatever UI you give them, and they don't get super uptight about it. Adults, on the other hand, couldn't find their way out of a paper bag if the UI isn't what they like. I'm that way, and video games just kill me. Now that everything is in 3D, there is the standard problem of camera control. Sufficeth to say, Otogi offers nothing new in the way of terrific solutions to the problem. I. Hate. This. Crap. People spend all this time making fancier graphics and presentation etc., but do pretty much nothing to actually advance the genres. I'm not even talking about Nobel Prize quality work, here, I'm just talking about - for starters, okay? - I'm talking about letting me choose how the camera control works. In Otogi, what you are doing is moving the physical camera. The way I want it to work is exactly the opposite - I want to move the view point. So I am always moving things the wrong way, which is not conducive to a fun experience with any game, let alone an action one where timing is crucial. P.S.: they also have the UI problem where you can't tell what the pause menu options will do - does going to the main menu so you can change options kill your current game? Well, yes, it does, but they don't tell you that up front. (Nor do they let you change all the options from the pause menu which would have made all this moot in the first place.)
• 98) I'm playing Shenmue II on the XBox. It, uh, kinda sucks so far. The kicker is that reviews claim that Shenume II "addressed some of the original game's shortcomings" which makes me shudder to think how the first game played. Maybe a lot of the problem is that it is a Japanese game, and US folks have different ideas of what is, and isn't, "fun."
  1. Yes, the graphics suck. Go ahead, turn my two-hundred-dollar XBox into a fifty-buck Dreamcast (which I also already own).
  2. The control scheme is pretty horrid. Just trying to move around and look around sucks. It isn't as if there were no games before that had to deal with that. Some of them got it right. But this one has to go and be lame nevertheless. I don't grok it.
  3. There is no text for conversations, so you can't speed through them. That's annoying. It is extra annoying because the structure of conversations is bloated; you have to say excuse me and they have to say yes at the start of every conversation, before you can get to the information - if they even have any. While this might in some way resemble true life, it doesn't make for a fun game.
  4. The environment is repetitive. It would seem that the only thing to do is to buy stuff and to arm wrestle. That doesn't really make for a fun game, for me anyway!
  After a little while you get to advance from 99% arm wrestling to... earning money! Yes, that's right, you have to get a job! Isn't that exciting? Isn't that why you play games? So you can get into simulations of moving boxes? Simulations that are, in and of themselves, not even fun? I totally don't understand how anybody can consider this to be good gameplay. Maybe people in Japan (where Shenmue was made) have lives that are even more horrid than those of US citizens, and playing a simulation of moving boxes is really fun for them?!
  5. The characters are trite. The biker chick Joy is really cheesy. Ugh.
• 97) I tried the Soul Reaver 2 demo. It was utterly asinine in at least a couple of ways:
  1. The Options UI used buttons where the text label would toggle. That is like a super basic UI error - you end up not knowing if the label shows you what is currently active, or instead what would be active if you clicked it. Argh.
  2. The demo starts with a long game engine movie sequence. And there is no key to skip it. And there are no subtitles. And so I quit the game and will never play it and I hope Crystal Dynamics rots in Heck.
• 96) The XIII demo couldn't figure out where my mouse pointer really was. And no matter what sensitivity I set it to, it would utterly spaz out whenever I moved the mouse at all. Oh, and it wouldn't let me click on Accept to get out of the options, I had to actually press the Enter key. All in all, it really doesn't make me look forward to the actual game at all.
• 95) I tried the Line of Sight: Vietnam demo. Wow. It sucked a lot before I even got into the game!
  1. Just setting up the options was an exercise in utterly stupid UI:
     1. the way things are chosen (click-to-cycle through all the resolutions, rather than giving you a list to choose from so if you overshoot you have to cycle all the way 'round again) sucks.
     2. the defaults they use (the cursor keys for movement for a FPS: what kind of lobotimized lemur doesn't use WASD? Zounds!) suck.
     3. Oh, and apparently you can't use the mouse-wheel for any inputs (like changing weapons). (Ha ha, you can't set that in the options screen, but when you are in the game itself they do work. Of course, since you can't set them in the options screen, they behave in the opposite way that I like... jerks.)
  2. If you try to Alt-Tab out, you are pretty much hopelessly lost with no keyboard or mouse input any more apparently. Was this written before Windows existed or something?
• 94) I tried the New World Order demo. Apparently in the New World:
  1. People will move around like monkeys on crack - your view point bobs up and down as if your character has a pogo stick shoved up its ass. Okay, yeah, that's a great refinement of the FPS genre.
  2. Load times will suck a lot. Like, it will say "Loading" and there will be a progress bar, but the progress bar won't do anything at all for the first thirty seconds, and only then will it start to actually load anything. Uh, yeah, impressive.
  3. Getting hit once in a video game will kill your character. Whereas shooting an enemy point-blank in the back of the head doesn't kill them outright. So then, when you die, you get to go through the afore-mentioned pathetic loading scheme.
  4. Picking things up will be hard. Like, you'll be right on top of the item, and it won't pick up. You'll have to jimmy your character around a lot to find whatever asinine sweet spot there might be that lets you actually pick up the item. Yeah, great. 'Cause picking up items isn't important or useful or anything, I guess.
• 93) I'm playing the MOHAA Spearhead multi-player demo. Some things which really suck about it:
  1. Seems like every internet multi-player game suffers from the same problem: finding a server and getting onto it successfully. You get a list of servers, and then you try to join them, and then it tells you they are full, or then you do get in only to find out that the lag is horrendous even though the ping was low in the server listing.
  2. Spearhead's UI is particularly annoying because it goes through three screens, and they are broken: the first is the server listing, then you double-click on a particular server and it takes you to a "contacting server" type page. When it does that transition, the mouse pointer is moved from wherever you had it on the big server-listing page to the top left of the screen (presumably 0,0 in their coordinate system). So it is pretty automatic for me to then move the mouse cursor back, somewhere more useful, like the middle of the screen, especially since the only buttons on the screen are at the bottom of it. Then, if the server is full, you are taken to a third screen - really the 2nd one reloaded I think - which, once again, warps your mouse cursor to 0,0. Which utterly sucks because the "okay" button that you have to click to get back to the main server listing is again at the bottom of the page. So throughout this process, you are continually fighting the stupid mouse warping behaviour and it drives me nuts!
  3. Oh, and if you are on one of those many "i'm just trying to get into the stupid game" screens, and you press the Esc key, it doesn't back you out one screen, or just to the main server listing, no, it backs you all the way out to the main menu. Whatever!
  4. It penalizes those with machines that can only run at lower resolutions because the stupid text is way bigger then and obscures a lot of the action.
  5. Why does it say there's like "12/16" people in the game in the main server listing (even if I tell it to update that server immediately before joining) and then when I try to join it says "server full"? Hate!
  6. When finding a server, it doesn't give you nearly enough information about what it is doing. It just sits there. You don't know if it is making any progress or not. Pretty lame!
  7. The ping time shown in the server list seems to be like half of what I see when I'm finally in the game. That's genius.
• 92) Pretty much every game I've tried from Nova Logic has sucked.
  1. Wow. I tried out the Delta Force Land Warrior (broken link?) demo. It is so sad. Check out the demo single player level; it starts with you landing in a helicopter, which has the clear advantage of showing you how horribly bad the Nova Logic voxel land rendering system really is. It looks like the entire Earth is made of some kind of alien jello. Like, we're totally, like, stoned, dood! Feces!
  2. Oh. My. God. How can anybody be this utterly stupid? I'm trying out the Delta Force Black Hawk Down demo from Nova Logic...
     1. I'm getting my graphic options set up and it turns out the Gamma slider makes the screen darker as you move it to the right, which is completely the reverse of any and all other gamma sliders I've ever seen ever in my entire life.
     2. During the game, you apparently cannot change any options; when you press the Esc key, all you get is a cryptic message that says something like "Really Quit? Y/N/R". I guess because putting up a dialog box with an actual sentence with actual grammar and terms that are fully spelled out is just too darned hard for the development team?
     3. If you die, you don't get to restart from part way into the game, you have to restart the whole level. With all the stupid drawn-out intro stuff at the start. Maybe there is a way to save and load, but since the Esc key won't safely take me to a menu I certainly haven't found out how to save and load.
  3. Comanche 4 sucks rotten eggs, too, not surprisingly.
     1. It has the same stupid "Y/N/R" dialog when you press the Esc key. The fun kicker is that the game is not paused when that dialog box is up. God only knows if there is any way to pause the game. Yes!
     2. When I uninstalled the game, it utterly crashed my Win XP machine and I had to reboot. Double Yes!
• 91) I couldn't disagree more with this review of Mars Matrix, especially when it comes to the music. I think it's pretty much perfect. And I like it when there's all sorts of insane scrolling text hyper kinetic stuff!
• 90) I tried playing The Great Escape demo. Wow, did that suck!
  1. While you are in the options menus, there is this searchlight effect moving around. It is really bloody annoying and just gets in the bloody way while you are trying to use the menus.
  2. The menu layouts suck. Oh, and there are no options for changing the brightness or gamma.
  3. The mouse control sucks; it apparently does some kind of proportional motion control so when you are moving a little, it moves a little, and when you try to move more, some kind of multiplier kicks in and you really move a lot more. In the end, that drives me nuts and I utterly hate it because neither mode feels right. I just want it to be pretty linear. Other games don't suck, go learn from Quake (just the first one, even!) for crying out loud.
  4. I redefined some keys.
     1. Loading the level, it put up an interstitial screen that listed the keys and the command they were mapped to. However, it was showing the default mapping, not the one I had just set up. Nice!
     2. Some commands ended up unbound after my remapping. During the demo level, little dialog boxes appear telling you things along the lines of "press c to crouch." But since I'd changed the mappings it said "press We do not have a string for this to crouch." Very impressive.
• 89) For all Half-Life is cracked up to be, even with all the latest patches, it still is a flying turd when it comes to simple UI stuff. Like, the system tends to lose sound if I Alt-Tab out and back. Like, the sound tends to change volume radically (it got a lot louder) just going out of a game into the menus and back. Like, finding a server on the Internet to play on is a confusing slow living hell. Like, just, like, flying turds, you know?!
• 88) Game creators continue to be stupid. I downloaded the C&C Renegade multi-player demo, and tried to run a game so I could see what it was like. I just want to play it once on my own, I don't care about getting on the Internet etc. just to see it. Anyway, I try to set up a LAN server and first off, it defaulted to being a dedicated server so I couldn't join. Uh, yeah, great. So then I tell is to not do that, and set the number of players to just 1 so that I'll be the only player. I'm apparently in the game, but it says something about "waiting to join gameplay" and nothing I do ever gets me in the game. I can turn around, but I can't do anything else... well, besides quit and immediately uninstall the piece of crap. God, I hate people.
• 87) I played Brute Force for the XBox. What utter trash! I can't believe people even bother to make this crap. I guess I've been around during the progress of video games from real things to Hollywood schlock. Pretty damned sad, really.
• 86) More stupid poop heads: Think Tanks is the second game (the first was MOHAA) where the controls for moving the tank in reverse is utterly wrong and backwards.
• 85) All games suck these days. A particular kicker is that Will Rock from UbiSoft requires that you restart computer when you uninstall it?!?!
• 84) Beach Head Desert War is a beautiful example of a waste of everybody's time and money. Utterly pathetic and hateful. Die. Die and go to hell.
• 83) I downloaded the Breed demo. It sucked. The story sucked: you are coming in from orbit, you are flying up to and then around a radar station, and they say [after all that] "gee, if we shoot that station THEY (the commie aliens) won't know we are here!" Uh, as if they wouldn't have already detected you, or as if shooting the crap out of them wouldn't be a big clue? Then, even simple stuff like controlling your character sucks - just try climbing those ladders. Oh, and then, if you want to restart the mission, you are apparently forced to sit through the entire introductory cut-scene footage. Again. Ad nauseum. And this is supposed to make me want to buy this thing?!
• 82) I'm playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault. It is okay - the Omaha Beach landing is particularly good; I think everybody studying WW2 in high school should be forced to play that! However, the pre-game UI kills me. The Options, for example, are represented visually by a random collection of WW2 era radio equipment. I'm supposed to know from looking at those which are for the Video, Audio or Control options? Any UI where you have to mouse-over everything before you can know what to pick is obviously wrong. Dumb jerks. Oh, and one other thing: when driving the super Panzer, it pisses me off that they got the controls-when-backing-up plain wrong; WA makes you go forward and turn left, okay, but SA should make you go backward and have your rear moving more left. Instead, SA makes you go backward and your rear moves to the right. Very disconcerting.
• 81) Okay, there really are no good games. I rented Enter the Matrix (PS2), Crimson Sea (XBox), and LotRings 2 Towers (XBox). They all sucked donkey poo. The Matrix game was like something you'd see in the first round of games for the PS1. The animation is pukey, the environments are boring, the controls suck, and camera is evil, load times are hateful. I swear the character animation will make you bark with laughter, it is so bad. Crimson Sea has fancy rendering, but then the game controls are really stupid and boring, the game events are really stupid and boring, and the animation is just sad. I won't even talk about LotR.
• 80) So, after the afore-mentioned rentals, I also had the distinct displeasure of seeing Planetside. It was running on a friend's gigahertz Athlon, with some half-way decent GeForce card. And yet the entire rendering engine was clearly not just sad but outright broken! Objects in the world (people, jeeps, whatever) were constantly disappearing. Like, they'd drop every PI (I'm so glad HTML lacks standard math symbols, let alone formatting capability - maybe you can see π or π? yay Greeks!) frames. The most amazing kicker of it all is that not only were 3D objects doing this, but the entire HUD was as well. Oh, okay, and then the other real kicker is that it was getting literally like four frames a second when any other person was around. For this they charge fifty bucks, and a monthly subscription fee? I can only pray that the Free Market takes care of this quickly.
• 79) Yes! After another several months of intensive development since the last time I tried the The Wild Tangent stuff, they have apparently made it suck no less than it did before. I pray to Holy Capitalism that the people running that company will be out on the streets soon. What utter crap!
• 78) Wow. I think I've come across one of the most effective demos in convincing me to never buy the actual game. Which, I'd guess, is probably what you really want a demo to achieve, right? It is the Star Trek Elite Force 2 (broken link?) demo. Not only does it crash on every machine I try, not only does it freak out when I change the screen resolution such that the mouse pointer has to be offset from buttons to be able to select them (yes, it is very strange and broken - as if the mouse pointer is still on the low resolution screen or something even though I'm looking at the high res ones, all just wonky and wrong and horrible and stupid and pathetic and lame), but it basically kills me within the first five seconds of starting the actual gameplay. I guess it is somehow supposed to be exciting, having things killing you pretty much instantly and having to restart the whole thing (it didn't just restart the same level with little or no load time, no, instead it quit out to the main menu and made me reload the entire thing again - a three or four minute turn around time) repeatedly? I tried twice and now I know that I think the developers are utter idiots and deserve to be completely destitute and starving on the streets because I, and hopefully millions like me, will not give them my money.
• 77) Unreal 2 is really boring.
• 76) Have I mentioned how I don't get everybody's love of GTA 3? The game UI is bloody well killing me.
  1. Load times are hell! This really sucks when each mission is hard (and you might replay it five times to get the lucky roll of the dice where you can actually complete it). What, did I mistakenly purchase "The Loading Game" by mistake?!
  2. The UI for loading games is tweaky such that it is hard to even select the "yes I really want to load" option because it suddenly wraps around to "no, cancel". My. Lord. In. Heaven.
  3. When you finish the El Burro tasks, it is very confusing because the game resets to making it look like you've never done any of them.
  4. When on foot, the joystick mapping for looking around has got to be the worst I've ever encountered.
  5. The polygon edges don't line up - you can see dotted lines of pixels along them. So much for a good advertisement for Renderware.
• 75) I downloaded the 400+ megabyte (installed) MistMare demo. It is a flying piece of excrement. I don't even want to get started, it will just make me cry. Like, why did they have to implement their own mouse driver and sensitivity? Haven't I already set up the bloody mouse in Windows to be how I want it? Why does it have to change when I'm playing the game, so I have to spend time getting the game setting the way I want it? Why not just use the damned Windows values I've set up? Etc., etc., etc. Hate!
• 74) I would like to enjoy playing BF1942 (and the RtR expansion). But there are some things in the design of the game UI which I can only surmise were explicitly researched and added to give me hernias. There can be no other logical explanation.
  1. The seagull noise! THE SEAGULL NOISE!
  2. Why does it put me in the gunnery position of a landing craft when I first get in... and there is nobody else in it? Hate.
  3. Oh, wait, it does that for everything, including tanks. So when there is the invariable race-to-get-the-tank, even though I get there and get into it first, I get put into the position I don't want because by the time I realize it, somebody else is already driving. Feel. The. Hate.
  4. I'm landing the landing craft. I open the doors. I get out, I do stuff. I decide to go back and use the machine gun. Then, someone is shooting at me and hitting me in the craft, and I want to get out... but somehow the bloody doors have closed and I'm trapped and I'm trying to open them etc... and I die. Yeah, that's fun!
  5. As far as I can tell, the Mouse Sensitivity setting doesn't change the mouse in the game for aiming. It just changes it in the menus. Once again: Why do people have to change the bloody mouse setting at all for the menus? Why not use the values from Windows which I've bloody well already set up just the bloody way I bloody well want them?! ARGH!
  6. And if you are going to mess around with mouse sensitivity could you please let me choose to make airplanes more sensitive so I don't crash into things just because I ran out of desk space? Gah, the hate.
  7. Just finding a server to join is a bloody nightmare.
     1. I enter "ea" into the filter because I want to try and find some servers run by Electronic Arts. Well, I futz around with that for a while and then decide I no longer want that filter. So I click in that text field and delete the characters. However, whenever I return from any other game, the filter has my "ea" text back in there! What the hell?!
     2. I. Just. Quit. The. Entire. Game. And. Restarted. And. The. BLOODY. "EA". Is. Still. In. The. BLOODY. Filter. Field.
     3. The interface doesn't tell me something I want to know: which servers are running RtR maps. I don't have the names of all the maps and what version of the bloody game they are in memorized, thank you very much. Couldn't it just show me a bloody thumbnail of the map?
     4. When I try to join a game with a new map that I don't have, I don't get any offer to download the new map, I just get booted back to the bloody server list screen... and "ea" is back in the kill me text field.
     5. Filters like "non-password only" don't actually remove anything from the list. They just alter the color of the entries. That is so utterly wrong. The whole point of a bloody filter is to get rid of things so I have less to visually and mentally process, let alone just scroll through.
     6. It looks to me like when I sort by ping time, it doesn't keep the list updated - it sorts the information it has when I click on the ping column, but any new entries are just tacked onto the end, and not inserted. In some ways that is okay because you don't want the view to be shifting around under you, but in some ways that really sucks because you basically still have to wait for everything to come in before you can see what actually has the lowest ping.
  8. Any time I'm on a sea vehicle, the lag doubles. That's pretty conducive to my repeated death. Definitely lots of fun to be had there!
  9. When I spawn, sometimes the spawn interface comes up as soon as I appear. You know, the whole map thing.
     1. Now, first of all, I have no idea why it is appearing. I mean, other than because the people who wrote the game explicitly want me to be killed over and over and over again by enemies while I'm trying to get rid of the bloody spawn interface, because they think that is more fun for me?
     2. Second of all, the Esc key doesn't work to get rid of it. No, the Esc key apparently toggles me between being in the game (or, really, in this case, being in the bloody spawn map interface) and in the menus (e.g.: customizing the controls or whatever). Apparently, to dismiss the spawn interface I have to use the Enter key, or move the mouse cursor over to click on the "Resume" button. Either way, if there are any enemies camping at the spawn site, the appearance of the spawn interface has pretty much 101% guaranteed that I will immediately be killed. Now that truly is fun!
  10. Note that the use of the Esc key sucks in other ways, too: when I'm trying to quit the game entirely, if I click on "Disconnect" then the Esc key becomes something which toggles me between being in the game, and the "do you really want to disconnect?" dialog. Do you understand how utterly wrong this is? Don't you just feel the hate?
  11. I'm very carefully picking servers with low ping times. So why is it that when I take careful aim right at somebody's head and repeatedly shoot them with a rifle they don't die? And then they take one shot at me and I'm dead? I'm willing to entertain that there are better players out there than myself, but the whole experience is lacking anything which gives me proper feedback or confidence in the system. As far as I can tell, the entire thing is broken beyond belief and refuses to let me hit anything ever at all. Since I have been good at Counter Strike, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc., I find it hard to believe I'm really that bad at shooting things.
  12. The reporting during the game is pretty annoying, to boot. E.g.: the list of kills doesn't keep who killed you around any longer than any other report. Which is utterly stupid because revenge is important in a video game!
• 73) I'm playing the mostly excellent MDK2 on my Dreamcast. It is okay, overall. The floating jet pack fuel pump idea is terrific! There are some stupid hateful annoying things about it, never the less...
  1. When you need to climb up stacked boxes, there are sides to them that you can't grab even though they look like any other side, in that there is space to stand on top of the current box before going up to the next. But they seem to want to give you only one path up the boxes? This is very noticeable when I'm trying to defeat the BFB as Jekyl.
  2. The timing requirements of jumps is different than most games I've played. You have to jump before getting to the edge of something, otherwise your character doesn't jump at all, rather just falls off to their doom. Most other games I've played let you jump from the very tippy edge of the platform for crossing those longest voids. It is extremely irritating to be pressing the jump button but to be denied, and to die, and to have to restart.
• 72) The problem with SpaceTripper is that it has Defender controls in a world where we don't have a Defender input device. Specifically, there is a reverse button. That is fine when your joystick only goes up and down, like on a real Defender machine, but it is non-sensical when your joypad has an 8 way controller, you know? Because you've been using that joypad to be able to move in all directions in every other game you've ever played with it, pretty much, so you are well trained to expect to be able to do that. I realize they want you to be able to shoot while flying backwards, but I believe there is probably a different controller setup that would enable said flying and shooting, and yet not be so utterly foreign.
• 71) Maybe it is just a sign that I'm too old, but I think the design of the PlayStation controller buttons is dumb, in that is uses symbols rather than letters to demark the right thumb buttons. Other systems' controllers tend to not use symbols, but solely letters (A, B, X, Y). Letters are better because they have more associations and meaning, and they have a sense of ordering to them. The symbols, on the other hand, lack those additional connotations, so to me they all blur together. When instructions say "Press the A button" I don't have to think hard to figure out which one they mean. When instructions say "Press the <image of triangle> button" I find myself having to look at the controller every time to see which one that is. So, to summarize, it seems really obvious to me that the symbols are dumb and suck ass.
• 70) Wow. I just tried the Freelancer demo for about ten minutes, and that was enough to make me uninstall it, and to know that I will never buy the game. Perhaps some people actually enjoy being forced to sit through cut sequences? And being forced to do all those things that are boring and suckful in our regular life, like work? To get money before being able to go out on a ship? Bloody hell, at least Elite gave you a ship to begin with, so you can at least get out there and do something without having to first sit through gazillions of hours of cut scenes, with no way to even fast forward through them (Max Payne was way better in that regard). I also would like to tell game designers that if they have talking going on in cut scenes, they should put in subtitles. Well, whatever.
• 69) I tried Falcon's Eye, based on NetHack. Unfortunately, Falcon's Eye is a steaming pile of crap. As in, the scroll bars don't even work like any other (good, usable, standard) scroll bar on earth. Don't you understand? They can't even get the scroll bars right! What chance is there of anything else not sucking? Take, for example, the fact that the game apparently doesn't have any throttling, so on a fast system navigation with the mouse is a nightmare.
• 68) I downloaded and tried the IGI2 demo. A really nice thing they have done in their menu UI is to utterly screw up the way the mouse cursor moves. It gets stuck. Apparently, if I move the mouse a couple of clicks / pixels / whatevers, the UI figures that it is just noise and throws out the movement (well, actually it kinda looks like the mouse arrow jitter forward but is then slapped back to where it started, or something). I have to move the mouse quite a bit to get it to really move. It behaves utterly differently than my desktop mouse cursor. And it makes pointing to a button rather hard; you get close and slow down, and then this filtering prevents you from slowly moving to be right on top of the button. So you are stuck outside of it. Could someone please explain to me why anybody on earth would create something like this?
• 67) Somebody lied to me about the XBox version of Spyhunter being any good vs. the PS2 version. Anyway, it brings up all sorts of fun things, but mainly it brings up the fact that lots of game developers are utterly asinine when it comes to the basics: specifically, controller setup. The controls for Spyhunter suck royal stinky buttocks, and on the XBox there is neither a set of different control setups to choose from, not a freestyle set-buttons-however-you-like option. You are stuck with the one setup, and it is a really bad one at that. I just hate this pathetic crap.
• 66) Regarding controls, Spyhunter and Blood Wake both do this utterly stupid thing: they joystick decides if you are trying to speed up going forward, or speed up in reverse. It is so insanely annoying I cannot really being to describe my hate. It is especially bad in Blood Wake because the vertical dead-zone appears to be really small. So you end up coming to a stop or slowing down or reversing quite often, though you really damned well had no desire to. I think the fundamental rule should be: if you have a game where acceleration is under user control, then the triggers ought to be the throttle and brake. Everything else goes onto the other buttons. I really don't see how it takes a genius to play test something like BW for five minutes and realize what a tub of crap it is.
• 65) I played Armada on the Dreamcast. It has got to have the most pathetically stupid boring asinine combat of just about any game I've ever played. Moronic button mashing to the max, man! Bah.
• 64) I got a Gameshark 2 with my PS2. It has, quite possibly, one of the most pathetic user interfaces ever. That, and the fact that when I tell it to start a game it just goes back to the Gameshark main menu - in other words, the thing doesn't work at all, makes me wonder how this company has survived long enough to even make a GS2.
• 63) The game Run Like Hell for the PS2 is aptly named. Do. Not. Even. Rent. This. Game. (The really sad thing is that the voice acting is pretty good so presumably they spent real money on that. Too bad they didn't spend it on designing a game that wasn't utter shyte in the first place.)
• 62) I'd just like to report that, at least on my Dell machine, the Soul Reaver 2 demo completely doesn't work and locks up and barely even responds eventually to End Task Now Dammit. Yeah! That sure makes me want to rush out and buy the game! Whoo hoo! Ship it!
• 61) More loathing: Game installation programs that default to installing into some directory a zillion levels deep, like "C:\Program Files\EA Games\Sports\Extreme\Two Wheeled\Bike\Red\"... and then when you click to change the stupid thing it brings up some hierarchical file system navigator that defaults to that horrible directory path, which means you have to scroll around to get out to the bloody root of the drive to then navigate to some reasonable place. All in all, a living hell.
• 60) I played the Mafia demo. I don't understand how people continue to completely screw the pooch on the controls of games. Things like: when you reload your gun, it is automatically hidden. Uh, yeah, so in the middle of a firefight I'm going to get shot. Or, that the car controls are completely different from the move-your-person around controls, that is, if you use the God-given WASD key system. Like, I still don't grok why anybody would have the arrow keys be the default setup; real gamers are going to be right-handed mouse users. Whatever! What! Ever!
• 59) Nightfire is killing me (ha ha). When you die, and you choose "restart" it will put you back at the last interstitial. Not at the start of the whole level, just back to the last cut-scene where it loaded tons of stuff. However if you just pause the game and choose "restart" it will throw away all your progress and you will start at the very beginning of the whole level. This requires I pistol-whip the developers. Update: Okay, it turns out that it says "replay" when you die... yeah, that's different enough from "restart" for me to know ahead of time just from reading those words exactly what would happen. Bastards. (Oh, and go search usenet for discussions about "nightfire" and "omega" and "door" for a good laugh at their QA team's expense.)
• 58) I'm playing 007 Nightfire. There is a level where you have to access a computer. I'm standing in front of the computer, doing every bloody thing I possibly can to try and get access. Half an hour later I discover that if I'm standing four pixels to the right of where I was, I just have to press the standard "action" button. Well, I'd been doing that, only four pixels off. Four pixels that make nigh-zero difference in what you see on the screen. It drives me bloody nuts that designers do things like that.
• 57) I've noticed this recently in several video games, and I really hate it: having several menu entries and only showing one. So you have no context.
• 56) Whatever the reviews might say, Zone of Enders is just plain boring.
• 55) Maybe I'm missing a joke from the TV show (since I've never watched it) but I swear the character Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer XBox game is constantly staring at Buffy's tits. Anyway... when fighting a level boss, the camera control goes completely to hell which is one of the more annoying things I think anybody could have done; the camera apparently is trying to always keep your adversary visible. So you can't really look around your environment much at all. Which is particularly stupid because for some bosses the solution to defeating them is in the environment (e.g.: switches). Also, whatever you normally do to kill off baddies is no longer of any use it appears. So you are thrust into a situation with a bad guy and you have absolutely nothing to go on in figuring out how to off them. Kinda sucks, I think. Whatever!
• 54) I don't understand why Syberia keeps getting awards. I tried the demo and it sucked ass. Maybe I'm just a caveman who doesn't understand adventure games. Or, maybe adventure games suck ass? Like, just controlling the character sucked enough to put me off playing the game. Whatever.
• 53) I played some of Timesplitters 2 on a friend's Game Cube. It was sorta okay, except for how each level was really bloody hard and you couldn't save. It would checkpoint like half-way through a level, but if you then turned off your machine you'd have to start the entire level over again. There is this trend of trying to make games last longer by making saving be some super treat. Hello, we aren't playing on Atari VCS machines any more! We've got scads of memory for saving games now! Lets get with it! Because the kind of game design which makes things bloody hard and repetitive just doesn't excite me. Whatever. It is especially nice to get 2/3rds of the way through that section and then accidentally use up something which you only have 1 of (e.g.: the TNT in level 2), thus being unable to complete the mission, leaving you with restarting the entire level as your only option. Sure, it might somehow be vaguely more "realistic" or something, but that in no way makes it more fun, capice? Gah, hate.
• 52) I rented The Thing for my XBox (no, that isn't meant to be any kind of innuendo).
  1. It started out okay. Lots of reviewers gave it a good rating. So I was rather surprised to quickly find myself in a level that I had to replay literally twenty times to get past it. In fact, I haven't gotten past it, and I've instead given up on playing the game because this is not my concept of fun.
  2. The rub is that even though you can save games, loading a saved place is really convoluted. When you die/fail/get Game Over, there is no shortcut menu to do the obvious thing of starting from your last save position. You can only start from the beginning of the entire level. Or, you can exit the bloody game entirely and go through the main menu to load a game. So I'm stuck in a situation that sucks ass because I have to do seventy things, and then die and can't save right before that so I wouldn't have to spend five minutes doing stupid repetitive stuff I already know how to do every time, and even if I could it would suck ass to try and get that save point back anyway! I do not comprehend how this kind of game design can be considered "fun," and I pretty much hate everybody. Thank goodness I only rented the turd.
  3. Oh, hey, the kicker is that I think the reason I'm dying is that the flame thrower is always pointed at my feet unless I'm using the first person view - in which case moving around to be able to properly flame the enemy is kinda impossible - it pretty much would require me to have a third hand. The other weapons do not work that way; they are pointed straight ahead (or at the thing which has been autotargeted - and is not at my feet when I'm using the flamethrower). Whatever. This is the new millennium of game design, and I must scream.
  4. Another funny thing is how the manual lists the "default controls" yet when you play the game those are completely not the default control mappings. Going into the options screens it looks like there are 3 different controller mappings to choose from, and the one which most closely resembles the manual's is the 3rd one. Give. Me. Strength. I mean, do you know how bloody annoying it is to be told by the manual "press Blah to do Blah" and you press it and nothing happens? And it is integral to the playing of the bloody game?
  5. Oh, yeah, and the game is constantly choppy. What is the point of having a console version of a PC if the game creators don't even try to throttle things to make sure it isn't choppy? We're talking like every seventh frame it freezes/pauses/skips that frame. It just plain outright sucks!
  6. Possibly one of the worst offenses committed by the game is the use of a combinatorial switch-throwing puzzle... where if you throw the wrong switches you pretty much immediately die and then you have to go through all the suck-ass menus just to load your saved position... so you can go die again... wow, yes, now that I try it I guess I have to say that it really is fun! (Not.)
  7. The cut-scenes are not well integrated into the game at all. E.g.: They will show things happening around you yet the environment is different (in the cut-scene a person runs away from you by following a line of light posts, yet back in the game there are no light-posts). They require the right number of people in them (so if you don't have everybody with you when you get to the UFO you won't get the cut-scene). They skip over tons of things so they are just plain jarring (e.g.: I never killed the first Boss under the warehouse, I just ran around it into the sub. When I come back out of the sub the cut-scenes warp me all the way from the sub back to the warehouse... past the Boss I never killed, etc.
  8. The 3D modeling sucks! At least one person's face has a horrible vertical seam right down the middle when you are in your Squad menus! Yeah, that's quality.
• 51) Why consoles are better than PCs: I have MS Combat Flight Simulator 3 installed on my Abit KG7-RAID with Philips Acoustic Edge sound card and eVGA GeForce 4200Ti graphics card... and the stupid game can't even draw things properly. It looks almost like it is screwing up the double (triple, whatever) buffering because on occasion crap will be put on the screen instead of the regular view of the world. As if it didn't clear out the buffer, and didn't draw anything into it, and then swapped it onto the screen anyway. Yes, I have the latest nVidia drivers. Yes, I have the latest Philips drivers. Yes, my WinXP is updated. Whatever.
• 50) The Mech selection menu in Mech Assault is the most painful piece of crap ever. Below are the highlights (there's always more). It is this kind of car wreck design and implementation which makes me wistfully dream of an UI Inquisition!
  1. When you try to change the Mech selection, the entire thing freezes for a heart beat while the DVD seeks to the video clip for the new Mech. So, if you are trying to get to the last Mech you are constantly being frustrated by the load time for each line of the menu.
  2. The Mechs are listed in the most useless order possible, short of random: alphabetical. So you potentially can have 2 mechs which are variants of one another that are at opposite ends of the list. Thus, comparing them is super suckful.
  3. You can get information about the features of a given Mech. However, that information is on a separate screen - presumably because the space which could have shown that information is instead taken up by the stupid bloody video which, as I have explained, serves only to make the entire menu navigation process utterly <expletive> broken. Anyway, the super kicker is that when you return from the information sub-screen for a Mech, the menu puts you back at the first Mech in the list. So then you have to re-navigate through the utterly hatefully slow menu to get back to where you were - if you even remember, since there isn't anything useful about the sort order to give you context. You'd have to know all the Mechs by name.
  4. Oh, yeah, and the information screen lists icons for the special features of the Mech but - even though there is plenty of space for it on this new screen - there is no text name or description of what the bloody icon means.
• 49) I'm playing Mech Assault on the XBox. Well, I was playing it. Then, I reached a mission where I spent like twenty minutes blowing up enemy communication towers, then pretty much got immediately demolished by a more killer enemy mech. And then what? It told me I had to start that entire thing all over again. That is pretty much my definition of not fun: having to re-do the stuff which was laborious but easy for another twenty minutes just to possibly get killed again. Completely and utterly asinine game design.
• 48) So then I redo that Mech Assault level a few times and finally kill the bad-ass enemy. The completely stupid thing is that I 'kill' him but his mech is still there - whereas every other mech I've fought up until now goes big-nova-boom when I destroy them. So spend like five minutes shooting at the downed thing, trying to make it blow up because that is how every other fight has gone to date, and I'm therefore naturally paranoid that if I don't destroy it it will suddenly come back from the dead and attack me from behind, or something equally annoying. Well, turns out that wh