More Little Nuances, Bigger Frustrations

This is the sequel to my original article “Little Nuances, Big Frustrations” from Netjak.

Awhile ago I wrote a well-received essay about my big frustrations with certain little design flaws – nuances, if you will – which cause me to smash my controllers into tiny little pieces. The essay was a big hit, and I was very satisfied with my fiery rant. However, time passed, and like any hardcore gamer would, I played more and more video games. As I played said games, it occurred to me that I still had not taken designers to task for certain other lacks of creativity which cause them to throw annoying old standby ideas into games in order to appease gamers. Unfortunately, the gamers aren’t the ones they’re actually appeasing. The gamers just feel annoyed and frustrated when they run into those little things that ruin otherwise great games, little things where designers try to add challenge because their limited brainpower simply couldn’t come up with anything better or because their laziness said “let’s just throw another one of these in.” And so, here we go with a sequel, which is ironic because gamers often complain about sequels.

Violence for the Sake of Violence

A happy world is a world without Mr. Jack Thompson. In a happy world, Jack Thompson would have better things to do than attack video games because of violence. But I have to be honest: These days it seems to be more and more the fault of designers for Thompson’s reputation. If designers want him to back off, it’s time for them to get over the idea that video games sell just because there’s so much blood in them that you need to put a bucket in front of your television screen. The gallons of blood leaving red tints in your eyes these days are enough to make Mortal Kombat look like a Warner Brothers cartoon.

What kills me is that so many developers these days don’t want to put any kind of purpose or artful sense behind the red showers. You think the Manhunt games were about great gaming experiences? No sir, Rockstar wants to make controversy these days. I’m all for realism (which would mean an amount of blood consistent with what a human body holds), but there are times when I wish games would hearken back to the olden days, when enemies disappeared in quick puffs of curling smoke. It’s hard to believe that Pac-Man was once considered violent.

Useless Controller Functions

I have a confession to make: Whenever I play video games, my right hand feels impotent. This is probably because I was born without a pointer finger or a pinky on it, and that makes it tough to play using today’s 150-button controllers. But I expect I’m not alone in my impotency. There are many games today with useless functions that seem to be in the game so some developer could say “hey, look at the many things you can do!” How many of the functions attributed to the buttons are actually useful? D-pads are useless for practical purposes in many games today, especially in first-person shooters. We’re moving our characters around almost strictly in analog now. Remember the Nintendo 64 and just how many games made use of the controller’s d-pad for its originally intended function?

Perhaps the worst of these offenders are the L3 and R3 buttons on the Playstation controllers. These controller-space wasters are none other than the analog sticks themselves. Press the analog sticks and they’re buttons! Isn’t that neat?! Well, actually, no. Every time I use those buttons, I get the sense that I’m slowly destroying my controller. It feels unnatural. So I rarely use R3 and L3. Fortunately, developers have been able to assist me very easily in my one-man boycott. In the few games in which L3 and R3 actually have use, it’s for some completely ludicrous function which doesn’t enhance the game in any way.

Water Levels

Water levels are an old standby and have been ever since Mario was dodging octopi. When in doubt, throw the whole game underwater where the bad guys come at you with unhindered speed while you are performing some unnatural and repetitive motion on your controller to literally stay afloat. Water levels are there solely to raise the difficulty when the designers run out of inspiration and had to throw in something to round out the game at the last minute. In games where you can’t actually swim, water levels are even worse because the water slows you down, hampers your movement and makes it very hard to jump or engage in combat. Some levels even go the whole nine yards and give you the need to keep collecting air to stay alive, which may not be absurd but is really annoying. The worst part about water levels is that the 3D revolution of gaming wasn’t able to kill them off. In fact, it made them worse than ever because you have to fight a whole new set of controls and very weird camera angles.

Chase Levels

These babies were big things back in the Silver Era, when Nintendo and Sega dueled for supremacy. They involved a scenario which found your guy desperately running to the right, dodging and weaving in order to escape a screen-dwarfing thing coming in from the left that usually looked like an oversized chainsaw. If this thing caught up to you, that was a life. No amount of energy, power-ups, invincibility codes, or game enhancers could withstand the awesome power of this single-shot killing machine. Nothing could destroy it, stop it, or slow it down. Countless lives and busted controllers have been the cost of the giant chainsaw!

In my original essay about gaming irritants, I named scavenger hunt games as irritants and gave a grab bag full of reasons why they suck. But I can say this for them: Their rise brought about the extinction – or at least the severe endangerment – of the Chase Level.

Final Bosses Who Just Don’t Know When They’ve Been Defeated

This happens all the time in role-playing games: You’re fighting the last boss. Your heart is pounding so hard you worry about it potentially jumping up your throat and out of your mouth. The lead baddy is on his last legs, you use up your cure spells, then fire away your most powerful weapons in one final, all-or-nothing blitz. The lead baddy goes up in smoke! You’ve done it! You’ve saved fantasy land, making it safe for…. No you haven’t. Apparently the smoke was just the baddy’s metamorphosis into another screen-filling brute of even more unimaginable power than the last guy. Such is life. You pick up your controller again and, despite being thoroughly drained, bravely try to smoke this turkey now. Alas, your injuries and losses prove to be too much. Back to the save screen you go. Time to level up some more or at least rethink your strategy – again – to make sure you have enough power left to take on Bigger Lead Baddy.

Stragglers

In games in which you have to destroy a pre-set number of enemies in order to advance, the stragglers are the enemies who drive you out of your mind. They don’t have to be powerful. They don’t have to be small. No, the main function of the straggler is merely to pop up at the last second, just when you thought you’ve defeated every enemy in the level and can move on. Usually the straggler hangs out in an area of the level you had visited early on and could have sworn you had already cleared. This makes the trek back to the straggler hazardous if the level in question was packing a ton of obstacles. You’d think the designers would program the enemies to track you down and follow you, but no. It’s for this reason that I believe that stragglers are programmed only to pop out of thin air only after you’ve capped every other enemy in the level. They’re a close relative to the scavenger hunts mentioned, painfully, in the first part.

Magical Inequality

This was mentioned in The Grand List of RPG Clichés, and it bears repeating here. The gist of the item is that both you and the bad guys have magic which doesn’t hurt, but does a great job of disabling. You’ll go through the game picking up spells featuring effects like blindness so the enemies can’t hit you, silence so the enemies can’t cast spells, and the ever-popular instant death spell. Eventually you’ll want to use them but you can’t. Why? Because they only work on regular enemies, who nullify the point of these spells by going down in just a few shots anyway. When you run into a bigger, more powerful regular enemy or a boss, these nifty, useful spells fail almost every time. Think about it: How many times have you successfully used the Bad Breath enemy ability in Final Fantasy to its full effect?

The absolute crusher of magical inequality is that these handy spells work almost every time they’re used as a weapon against you. Especially the MP waste known as the instant death spell, which fails probably 95 percent of the time when you use it but has a greatly increased success rate when your foes use it.

I hate design laziness as exemplified by the features above, and you probably do too. So it’s time to fight the man, fight the lazy designers who sat around dreaming up these sadistic design flaws!