Far Cry 2 (Xbox 360)

I was really looking forward to Far Cry 2, having loved its predecessor (in both its PC and Xbox incarnations) and being really excited by the promise of fifty square kilometres of Africa to wander and enjoy.

But my god it’s frustrating.

First, whoever decided that in a game in which the freedom to explore is the central selling point, the main character should be infected with malaria at the beginning and regularly – usually in the middle of a firefight, fifteen minutes from the last save and after having crossed the map to get to a target – blanking out and collapsing to the ground, should be taken out and shot. No, not metaphorically, literally pulled from their desk, marched in front of a brick wall, have a blindfold placed over their eyes, and gunned down in front of their colleagues AS A WARNING. What an abysmal idea! This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. There is nothing fun about randomly collapsing due to malaria.

Ah, you say, but it’s designed to help you feel immersed in the world. Make you feel like you’re really in the fictional country of Mwanzo. It’s a nod to realism. That’s nice, but the game designers are happy to abandon realism when it suits them – try walking off the northwest corner of the map and watch as you’re suddenly, without warning, magically transported back to where the game wants you to be – so I don’t see why they have to stick so slavishly to it when it’s making the player suffer unnecessarily.

Okay, I don’t mind the guns jamming, it’s just another factor in combat, and I don’t mind having to deal with my character’s complete inability for a large part of the beginning of the game to shoot a bloody gun straight. But I mind cheap deaths, particularly in a game where save points are considerably spread out (exactly why can console owners not simply save wherever they like, as their PC brethren can? It’s not like the PS3 or Xbox 360 don’t have room for save files).

Note: not allowing you to save wherever you like – such as just before a firefight – and making your earliest save some five to ten minutes earlier (if you wasted the five minutes it takes to go into the safehouse, sleep on the bed, wait for the xbox to save, and then reload the outside), means that your gamer who doesn’t want to simply replay the same five to ten minutes of driving and walking has to play it safe. Can’t try new things. Can’t use any of the freedom the game promised – because the consequence of a plan not working is more samey, unnecessary, repetitive driving and walking.

This is the frustrating, tedious, frankly un-fun experience of a Far Cry 2 mission:

1. Drive towards other side of map.

2. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
3. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
4. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
5. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
6. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
7. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
8. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
9. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.

10. Get mission.
11. Drive towards other side of map.
12. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
13. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
14. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
15. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
16. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
17. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
18. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.
19. Get attacked by boring AI that chips away at you from a distance and tries to surround you if you get close. Kill them all.

20. Get attacked by boring AI and then at a critical moment collapse from malaria or have your gun jam. Die.
21. Reload save.
22. Repeat.

You do have AI “buddies” who can come and save you when you die – but they’re also fairly vulnerable and just when you’ve built up a relationship with one of them, they’ll charge into a fight and get themselves killed.

Note – there’s no meaning to any of the encounters with the roadside nutters, because after you kill them all they simply respawn in the same place before next time. Once you’ve unlocked whatever it is that the post gives you, the first time, there’s no point even stopping. Although they’ll still shoot at you, chip away at your health, and come and chase you. So you’ll have to stop the car, get in the back, shoot them with the mounted gun, get back in the driver’s seat, and move on to the next meaningless, time-filling encounter.

I’d also like to talk about the graphics. They’re the game’s other major selling point (after the massively exaggerated “freedom”), and, on consoles, they’re also a lie. What I mean by that is that the game is advertised on the PC version’s graphics, which present spectacular views into the distance. The Xbox 360 version, in contrast, not only looks little like the PC, but is more foggy than its Xbox predecessor – the sun looks nice flickering through the trees, but everything is washed out and brown and you can never see very far and the sky is plain and night is downright ugly. I’m in the middle of Africa – in the middle of the savannah I can’t see a nice black sky with stars in it? It’s got to be the smoggy mauve we get in a crowded industrial western city?

Advertising notwithstanding, this is nothing like how it looks on Xbox 360.

This is more like the way it actually looks… mmm, dig those browns and greys.

The map editor is as excellent as its predecessor, although the system for choosing user-created maps in online multiplayer is confusing.

But essentially the main experience I got out of Far Cry 2 has not been “freedom”, it’s been frustration and rage. The constant, boring but dangerous attention of the stupid but numerous AI attackers turns the world of Far Cry 2 from a fun place to explore to a country filled with uniformly psychotic dickheads. The opening suggests that there’ll be some tension with the armed men around the place – they let your taxi driver go in a scene filled with implied threats and an oppressive sense of menace – but after that they simply attack you on sight and there’s no drama to it whatsoever. Just tedium. And a vague sense of personal outrage – why do I look so evil that they all need to try to murder me? All of them?

The main villain of the piece, The Jackal, is apparently evil because he’s giving both sides guns and letting them kill each other. But you know what? I’m on his side. By this point, I hate everyone in Mwanzo, and would be thrilled if they wiped themselves out. I’m reluctant to play any more in case I interfere with the gun dealer’s plans to inflict well-deserved misery on these sociopaths.

The Jackal doesn’t care if the Far Cry 2 country is ruined and all its vicious gun-toting inhabitants slaughtered. So he’s not all bad.

This is the essential point of this rant: if your game is pitched on the freedom to “do anything” and “go anywhere” and explore, then don’t go out of your way to ruin that experience. Unless you hate your customers and want to crush their spirits, of course, in which case do exactly what Ubisoft has done here.

LBP delayed because of “muslim” forum posting? WTF?

Little Big Planet has been delayed because in a Sony forum some anonymous person calling themselves a muslim claimed to be offended by the quoting of the Koran in one of the game’s music tracks. Sony is recalling the game in order to remove that track. Seriously.

I’ve got stuck into this ridiculous story over at An Onymous Lefty.

Sony! You’re so ridiculously macho and aggressive most of the time (usually to gamers’ cost) – why wuss out now? And over this?

Screen burn-in still a problem, even if some manufacturers/programmers have forgotten about it

There are many gamers out there now with screens that are liable to damage from burn-in if an image is displayed for too long. It’s the reason screen savers were invented and have been ubiquitous on PCs for twenty years, and it’s beyond bizarre that the modern consoles do not all retain the feature.

The best you can hope for from your Xbox 360 if, for example, you pause a game because the phone rings and then you get stuck in a call, is that it can be set to eventually dim the screen. Which minimises burn-in, but doesn’t prevent it entirely, because it’s still certain pixels being illuminated with the same colour for an extended period of time. The 360 can read from a network drive – why can’t it do a photo slideshow screensaver like my original xbox with XBMC can? (While we’re on the subject, why can’t the 360 simply read from a network drive like an old chipped xbox can? Why does my PC have to be running media player? Answer – it shouldn’t; it only does because Microsoft has deliberately crippled its newer console with second-rate media software.)

A similar problem arose when I tried out the Soul Calibur demo on the 360 tonight. Because the original game was formatted for 4:3 ratio TV screens, there are bars on both sides of the screen if you’re using a modern widescreen TV. And that’s all very well, but they’ve programmed it to display a stationary tiled watermark of the Soul Calibur logo on those sidebars instead of just leaving them black. Which means that, were you to play SC for any period of time, as you do that the Xbox is burning “Soul Calibur” into the sides of your TV.

Good advertising for SC, you might think – but more likely to be a source of bitterness and hatred towards the brand when its logo appears every time there’s a dark scene in a movie from now on.

Screen burn-in – still a problem, and something programmers and console manufacturers shouldn’t forget about.

Repurchasing Portal; no thanks.

Portal was awesome, and I can’t wait for a sequel, when it arrives.

So it’s exciting to see a new Portal release on Xbox Live:

You are invited to return to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center this Wednesday, October 22 at 9 a.m. GMT (2:00 a.m. PDT) via Xbox LIVE Arcade. Due to the unforeseen conclusion of your last visit, all necessary precautions have been taken to ensure that “Portal: Still Alive” is a sanitary, objective, and mostly non-lethal testing environment.

Hip hip hoo… wait a second:

In addition to the original award winning first-person puzzle experience, Aperture Science is proud to provide 14 new challenge maps exclusive to Xbox LIVE Arcade. Six advanced maps will also be provided to help guide you along the way… Come visit them again for 1200 MS Points.

Wait, 1200 MS Points – $20 – for 14 new “challenge maps”? Okay, that price includes the original game, but why do those of us with the Orange Box (as in, Valve’s main customers) have to rebuy the original game just to get the extra maps?

No. No, I loved Portal, but I’m not going to be gouged for a small amount of extra content, and forced to buy the whole game again if I want to enjoy a tiny bit of DLC. Valve, Microsoft, you can get stuffed.

Forcing customers to repurchase the same content repeatedly to get a snippet of new stuff? FAIL.

Never let them know how much you like them

See what happens when you give a company too much praise? They start taking you for granted and screw up what you liked about their product. Or they start producing boring, repetitive crap. Or they stop producing anything at all.

Ixnay on the anfayoybay aisepray, eh?

Multiplayer, you’re doing it right (mostly) – COD4 (Xbox 360)

I want to talk about something positive today – although, in keeping with the general tone of this site, it’s positive in order to highlight how far short the majority of competing titles fall. And that thing is the multiplayer component of Call of Duty 4. Which is awesome.

So – what did they get right? Except for the appalling matchmaking system which keeps forcing Australians to connect to unplayable one-bar games located in the US, pretty much everything.

The gameplay is tight, soldiers controlling intuitively and well. Competing styles of play – from run and gun to sniping to stealth – are all balanced nicely, with none dominating but each giving the game a different feel. The maps are both well-designed and attractive – even though everyone keeps voting to skip Creek, the prettiest of the lot. (It’s a shame there aren’t more of the outdoor levels, because the graphics engine does them really, really well.)

But COD4 does more. The XP system is clearly designed by the same evil geniuses behind pokie machines and the Civilization computer game series, with constant little rewards drip fed to you to keep you playing, and major milestones to aim for. You start off with one of the best guns in the game, so you’re never defenceless, but you can make it more enjoyable to use by earning upgrades to it – such as, say, the red dot sight. Even the weaker guns have a reward system built in, because as you upgrade each of them you complete challenges for large numbers of experience points that push you up the ranking more quickly. (If you just stick to the M16 – the easy route kill-wise – it’ll take you a lot longer to rank up, because you won’t be getting the 1750 points available on each gun when you get to 150 kills.) If you work at it, you’ll unlock a host of varied and fun to use guns and other weapons and skills with which to sneak up and murder your opponents.

And then, just as you’ve unlocked everything, they successfully tempt you to throw it all away and start over again, with nothing, just for the sheer bragging rights of having gone through “prestige”. At first, “prestige” mode was appropriately mocked for being the exact opposite of something to be proud of – really, it just rewarded having too much time on your hands – but it actually is a mark of achievement, particularly if you manage to hit the ranks within shorter playing time than your friends. The leaderboards show who’s got the highest score, but they also show how long they’ve been playing. You’re not just trying to rank up – you’re trying to do it as efficiently as possible.

Statistics are readily available – you can look up your friends to compare win/loss or kill/death ratios, all of which are very competitive. And provide further incentive to keep playing.

And I haven’t mentioned yet the variety of game modes. Unlike, say, Battlefield: Bad Company, which shipped with one single mode and has only recently added the classic conquest game type, COD4 has modes to suit every game style. From the slow-paced one hit and you’re out for that round hardcore search & destroy mode, to the chaotic charge in, die, then do it again free for alls, there’s enough variety and challenge to keep the game feeling fresh for a long time. Which is why, although it was one of the first games I bought for the Xbox 360, it’s also the most recently played.

In short, what Infinity Ward managed to hit with COD4 was a real sweet spot in online gaming. They’ve matched reward, challenge and variety in an almost perfect balance, and produced one of the most addictive, one-more-match online games I’ve ever played.

I only hope with COD5 lightning can strike twice.

How about some happy?

SO far the response to this relentlessly negative game-bashing blog has been remarkably enthusiastic and encouraging, but there have still been some legitimate concerns raised. Concerns such as – is this site run by a Jack Thompson clone who hates the entire industry? Do I actually like any games at all?

And the answer is, of course I do. I wouldn’t be playing them if I didn’t, and I wouldn’t care if designers wasted gamers’ time if I thought gamers weren’t entitled to expect something better for their hard-earned dollars. And we couldn’t expect better if we’d never experienced it – the flaws that are highlighted here are not unavoidable ones. They are problems that other designers have overcome.

Whilst game reviewers (and let me re-emphasise that this is not a game review site; it is solely about design flaws) are duty bound to note a game’s negatives as well as its positives, they are often not in a position to look into those negatives in too much depth*, to harp on them and demand that they be fixed. For one thing, such a reviewer would be unbearable to read. Only a very few publishers would send him or her review copies, and advertisers would shun the site.

But I think it’d be useful for game developers to be regularly exposed to what gamers think of some of the more flawed mechanics or other mistakes that their colleagues include in games. Reading enough cranky gamers complaining about QTEs or button mashing or not enough checkpoints or whatever might make the designers avoid aping those mistakes. Maybe it’ll encourage them to make better choices.

That’s the idea, anyway. Sucking it up certainly isn’t working.

*Although the posts so far have been dedicated to specific games – mainly because I wanted to get those complaints off my chest before we got started – future posts will be more likely to be about specific issues. So, for example, there’ll be a post about QTEs – exploring why they’re a problem, whether they’re ever okay and in what circumstances if so, and what alternatives designers have. And others on issues already raised by the particular title-based posts, and those to come.

What do I mean by “game design flaw”?

I want to be clear here about what I mean when I talk of “game design flaws”.

A game design flaw is something which makes the game tedious, frustrating, annoying – basically not fun to play. Something which, if the designer had taken a leaf out of Valve’s book and properly playtested the thing, should have been removed or fixed before the game was shipped.

Missing features are not flaws unless

• they are claimed to be features on the box; or

• they are such an obvious and well-established convention in the genre that their exclusion makes playing the game a chore.

It is a design flaw if you are making me hit a button fast enough to give a person RSI*. It is a design flaw if you are making me replay a section because you have not provided me with an option to save at a reasonable point. It is a design flaw if the gameplay mechanic you have chosen completely undermines what is supposed to be happening in the game. It is a flaw if your manual does not explain how to play the game so that a reasonably intelligent person can figure it out. It is a design flaw if you are making me sit through unnecessary loading screens which could easily have been avoided.

And I’m sure I’m not the only one who is sick of the things.

*Unless that’s the activity you’re simulating, of course. It’s alright to make people hit the keys quickly in Guitar Hero, because that’s entirely consistent with playing an actual guitar.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Xbox 360)

SW:TFU how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. So many mystifyingly poor design decisions and cock-ups. It’s almost like no-one actually played the finished game before you put it in boxes and sent it to the stores.

First, and most importantly, this game was sold as being about indulging in the power of The Force – unlimited. “Unleashed”. Without any of the restrictions that come from following the rules of the good guys. That’s one of the reasons they told us the central character was Darth Vader’s secret apprentice – so he could use dark side powers and storm through the Star Wars galaxy like an evil Force-powered tornado. Even the videos on the game disc about the development team’s internal meetings talk about how the producer started each meeting by having the staff chant that this game was about one thing – “kicking arse with the Force”.

That being the case, why is The Force in this game so weak? Most of the enemies are immune to it – or at least random parts of it. (Figuring which illogical immunity each enemy has is apparently considered “fun”.) Some enemies are immune to Force Lightning – you know, the lightning that was able to kill Darth Vader who’d been training with the Emperor for twenty years. You can blast them all you like, and it will do no damage. Other enemies are immune to being pushed around with the Force – you know, the power that later in the game allows the apprentice to pull a massive Star Destroyer out of orbit crashing into the ground. (That sequence is an insult to gamers for a different reason, which I’ll get to in a minute.) These aren’t even all enemies who are Force users – there are certain armoured stormtroopers you can’t pick up and throw even after you’ve demonstrated that you can move capital ships with your mind.

There is no excuse for this. Nor for the nerfing of the light saber. You recall the light saber – the coolest weapon in the Star Wars universe. It can cut through anything (except for a particular metal discovered in the expanded universe). Jedi are shown in the movies shoving their lightsabers into solid metal bulkheads and cutting holes in them.

But in this game the lightsaber is just a brightly-coloured shiny stick. It takes repeated blows to kill an ordinary stormtrooper. Let alone the magically overpowered enemies later in the game. There is little more to be said here, but if you’re going to give me a lightsaber and nothing else, then at least let it do its job. Let enemies kill me by shooting me from different directions while I’m concentrating on someone else, not by just standing there and laughing at my comically weak glowing stick.

Let’s also mention here the game’s unfriendly save/checkpoint system, designed to make the game take longer solely by forcing players to repeat large sections of it. Although there is a “save” option, it only lets you save the most recent checkpoint. And those are placed in really stupid places, and are often entirely absent when you need them. They’ll be placed right before a major boss battle, which is fair enough, but then there’ll be none afterwards – so if you die (and there are plenty of cheap deaths – one that springs to mind is your first battle with a Junk Yard Titan, shortly after which the game expects you to go jumping blithely through a canyon, with instant death if you mis-jump while you’re trying to figure out what to do), then you have to refight the boss battle again. And note that whenever the difficulty level suddenly spikes, it will almost always be a long time after the last checkpoint.

There is also a moment in the game at which you make a “choice” between a dark and light side ending (it’s right at the end, before the very last battle – and it’s not obvious which is which, since the “light” ending is where you try to kill the Emperor first, and the “dark” ending is where you try to kill Vader first – how are these significantly morally different?). The game does not automatically create a separate save so you can go back and see the other ending – as it would if it were designed by people who played games, and not Nazi war criminals. So if you didn’t realise you should save there, you have to play the whole game again to get to the alternative ending. (Which reminds me – where is the mission select? It’s a console game, and I can’t see any option to just go to an unlocked level and play it.)

Next, the level design. Although this is 2008 and this is a major studio release, from the same company that has previously given us fairly freeform games in which you get to be a Jedi (namely the Jedi Knight series), The Force Unleashed is a corridor shooter. Say you’re on a spectacular planet of giant flowers and insects and would like to have a look around… sorry. You can only run down one (narrow) path to the end. Invisible walls surround you – not dissimilar to the ones that are mysteriously nerfing your use of the Force, come to think of it. The faulty camera system is not your friend, and will regularly place itself behind an opaque object so you can’t see what’s going on. Hold on, enemy I’m fighting, I can’t deal with you until I sort out this camera. Is that… oh, come on, that was cheap! Hitting a blind man while he’s battling with the camera? You realise that I can just turn the power off and you’ll all instantly die, right?.

Which gets me to the unexpectedly inconsistent AI. Given that it’s one of the two major new technologies boasted about in relation to this release, you’d expect that they’d have tested it properly. But look online and you’ll find plenty of YouTube videos of stormtroopers standing around as the Apprentice throws stuff at them or gives them wedgies. The tutorial itself will give you a fine example of how daft these new AI are. Troopers have the presence of mind to try to grab onto something as they’re falling, but not to, I don’t know, in any way react to a large crate crashing into the guy next to them.

What was that second new technology? Oh yes, “Digital Molecular Matter”. In most games, if you break a dozen windows, they’ll all shatter in exactly the same place, regardless of where you actually hit them. With DMM… they shatter in the right place. And wood splinters. And other materials act realistically. Well – when it’s turned on. Many objects in the game (even those you can damage) simply break in the same way every time just like in any other game. If you’re going to boast about this new technology and how it’s going to increase immersion, then actually implement it throughout the game. It looks like they just ran out of time half way through and took the punt that gamers wouldn’t notice if they left it out of the rest of the game.

Now – gameplay. Apart from the mystifyingly crippled way they’ve implemented the Force, the designers have committed numerous sins against good game play. For one thing, they’ve implemented the always craptacular quicktime events. If you’re not familiar with these – and I envy you – a QTE is where, during a boss fight (for example), the game will flash up on the screen the name of a button, and you have to press it quickly or fail, be injured and have to start the sequence again. Yes, where decent games try to make you feel that you have choices in a battle, and that you’re choosing how to fight the enemy, QTEs take over and turn it into a primitive pattern-matching task. They were stupid in God of War (which The Force Unleashed is transparently trying to ape), and they’re stupid here. If I’m trying to take down an AT-ST walker by slicing it vertically in half with my lightsaber, make the success of that attack dependent on my pushing up in the right place at the right time and the challenge that the walker is trying to kill me with laser blasts before I can execute the manoeuvre. THAT would make me feel like I was in the moment and actually battling an ATST, and allow me to forget momentarily that it’s a videogame. If you make it dependent on my pressing “X” when you flash it up on the screen, then you’re (a) reminding me that it’s a game in the most primitive, clumsy fashion possible, and (b) taking away any sense of control or choice I may otherwise have had which would make it actually fun.

Likewise quick repetitive button pressing, which is a subset of QTEs which is becoming disturbingly more prominent. TFU is not the only game guilty of this sin – but it’s a prominent example. QRBP events are where the game pops up a key on the screen and forces you to press it repeatedly very quickly in order to win a duel or open a door or whatever. If you don’t press it quickly enough, you fail and can’t proceed. If you get RSI or your controller buttons break because you’ve been hitting them too fast, then stiff – this is fun, dammit, and you will learn to like it.

Finally, there is a signature moment in the game where the gulf between the awesomeness of what was promised and the awfulness of what was delivered is demonstrated more profoundly than you can possibly imagine. It is the sequence in which you use the power of the Force to bring a Star Destroyer crashing to the ground. In previews, in artwork, in videos, this looked like one of the most amazing Star Wars moments ever. Its like had never before been seen – either in the movies, or in any game. The magnificent scale! The enormous power! It… anyway, you get the idea. Not much point harping on about how great it could have been, because it’s quite the opposite.

The first problem is that the game designers, as usual, completely cripple the Force powers in question at the outset. You cannot just pull the Star Destroyer down from space: you have to turn it around to an arbitrary angle in the sky before you can move it anywhere. Uh, why? If the Force is pulling it down to the ground, why does it matter what exact angle it’s on? Provided that its engines aren’t facing towards me so it requires more force to drag down, what on Coruscant is the thinking behind it having to face slightly right and down before you can make it move? That in and of itself breaks the sequence.

Secondly, the controls that appear on screen to tell you what to push (the game has to keep doing this, because it keeps changing the rules on you) are actually wrong. If you follow the prompts you will never get the Star Destroyer down at all. How this got through testing, I have no idea.

But I suppose this failure to understand just what is supposed to be fun about videogames is actually the only thing that is consistent about The Force Unleashed. The QTEs and QRBPs and ridiculous Star Destroyer sequence fit in with the arbitrarily Force-immune enemies: this is a game that’s all about dragging you out of the moment and reminding you that you are a mouse in the designer’s little maze, and you will perform the tasks exactly as required or you will never see the cheese. What you’re supposed to do is never intuitive, and it never feels like you are able to anticipate an appropriate response – it’s always trial and error and what you learned last time is never applicable to the new stumbling block. You never feel like the Force is becoming your ally (or that it is a powerful ally as Yoda promised).

While we’re there, I’ll also point out that, often, the targeting system doesn’t work. If you’re trying to pick something up to throw it, it will select something that you (stupidly) can’t. If you’re trying to hit an enemy with lightning, it will target a rock instead. I have played games with similar “powers” before – Psi Ops springs to mind – and they managed it. Why can’t LucasArts?

And finally – they’ve even got the menus wrong. A central part of the game is the upgrading of Force Powers (and lightsaber stones), and this you have to do from a menu. Only you can’t just select it from in-game – you have to go back to the main menu, and then select the force power menu, and then wait while it (mystifyingly slowly) loads it. Why this couldn’t have been a quick menu selection from in-game, I don’t know – well, unless it really is true that the LucasArts designers are Nazi war criminals who really were out to cause as much frustration and annoyance as possible.

In summary – please don’t reward LucasArts by buying this game. If you have the patience of a saint and must see the cutscenes (the only plus of the game is that it fills in some plot developments between the two movie trilogies), then maybe rent it – but I’d suggest you just look at the scenes on YouTube and save yourself the suffering.

The Force Unleashed – a game designer’s “How Not To” manual in a box.

Grand Theft Auto 4 (Xbox 360)

Culled from two posts at An Onymous Lefty:

Rockstar Games appear to have caught George Lucas Syndrome: they’ve been so successful in the past that no-one is willing to call them out on stupid, stupid decisions in their new products.

For example, GTA 4 was riddled with poor design decisions that should have been obvious, if anyone had play-tested the thing and been honest about it:

• Unnecessarily irritating prolonged loading times placed at stupid moments, such as when you’ve just died and want to reload a save (you have to wait till it loads you back at the hospital before you can do that, as they suddenly and pointlessly disable the start menu), and when you are trying to find a multiplayer game (it loads for thirty seconds and then tells you you’ve been disconnected, and spends another thirty seconds loading you back into the singleplayer before you can try again).

• The staggeringly clumsy multiplayer interface. The multiplayer game is amazing. It’s just that to get to it you have to wait patiently while GTA IV loads, tries, loads, loads, tries, loads etc. Then, unlike say COD4, it doesn’t let you know which other player is speaking into your headset – so if you get an irritating person just singing or making other disruptive noises, you can’t figure out which one they are so you can mute them. And there’s no quick way to check your online stats while you’re waiting for a match.
• The fact they’re still making us endure imprecise third person controls in an era where precise control is available – the now well-established first person two-analog-stick system. Forcing you to use old-school controls means you regularly die because of Nico’s frustrating inability to change direction quickly, and as you wait for the camera to catch up. Niko can only run forward and backward: if you want him to step back and to the left, for example, he has to actually turn before he can do it. Getting him to climb a ladder can be an exercise in frustration. You can’t hold the camera in place so you can look to the side while running, either – it keeps automatically moving behind your character. It’s annoying! They’ve built this amazing virtual city but you can’t explore it like you would any other 3D environment, with proper 3D FPS controls. (Which would be extremely easy for any halfway decent programmer to implement, by the way.)
• Counterproductive xbox “achievements” that punish you for playing the game the way they claim it’s supposed to be played – one of the major unlockable achievements for GTA on the xbox is completing the game in under 30 (real time) hours. This is not particularly challenging – unless you’ve actually been playing the game the way they’ve suggested you play it, as an experience to be explored, before you actually get around to tackling the missions seriously – in which case you’ll miss the deadline. And have to start from scratch.
• Poorly-designed missions where the goal is confusing until you’ve tried and failed – for example, missions where you’ve got to chase and kill a character will sometimes require you to actually shoot them down on the road before they can escape; others expect you to just tail them until a pre-arranged scene occurs and they can be easily dispatched, for example on foot after they crash. You won’t know which this
• Long missions with no mid-mission savepoints or checkpoints – you can find yourself playing a ten or fifteen minute mission, something going unpredictably wrong stupidly at the end and having to do it all over again. Given how slow the game is to reload, and how long it takes to just drive back to the mission start point (if you use the “instant restart” selection after dying it takes more time out of your 30 hour deadline), that’s extremely annoying.

The upshot of which is that half a year later, I still haven’t had the patience to finish the thing. Or felt like playing it for months.