I’m Sure There’s a Great Game In Here, But I Can’t Be Bothered To Find It

I’ve been running through my fair share of video games lately, and one thing I noticed about a few of them as I was playing was that either I’ve become extremely fickle, or there are some really balls-to-the-wall bad ideas being trumpeted right at the start of games that really make the entire game unplayable.  In the past month or so, I’ve played two games that have managed to send all the wrong signals during the beginning hours of play, and as a result have left me unwilling to return.

The first of these games was Tingle’s Rose-Colored Rupeeland Adventure, or however it’s spelled.  First things first, sure, that title is precociously weird when you first read it, but insisting on that many words in the title eventually means no one gives a flying bollocks about the whole thing, rendering the title moot.  That little gripe aside, Tingle’s game has an interesting little tangent of an idea: What if Tingle were to star in his own Zelda game?  I’ve always liked Tingle, in his bizarre flamboyancy, so this game sounded like an interesting idea.

You start out “becoming” Tingle, which is a bizarre twist in and of itself, and then find out that you need 1 million rupees to get to heaven Rupeeland.  I’ve always liked games that have a predefined goal at the outset, so we’re still in good territory here.  What, exactly, could cause the game to turn me off so quickly, you ask?

Blind rewards.  To clarify, when you do anything, for anybody, they ask you how many rupees you’d like for doing it.  Same for when you’re buying something from someone, you name your own price.  This feature is made infuriating by the fact that, if you go outside a person’s acceptable range, you are either given nothing (for a reward) or charged however much you offered to pay, but don’t receive the item.  You don’t get a second chance on the rewards, and when it comes to buying something, it’s not cumulative.  Offer 50 when he wants 55?  You have to pay the 50 and then pay 55 on your second attempt.

Combine this “feature” with the fact that the game gives you next to zero information on what the acceptable ranges are, as well as how rupees are your LIFE POINTS in this game, and you have a recipe for disaster.  Suddenly you’ve completed the initial quests and received no rupees due to bad guesses, and you’re forced to reload your save file if you want to move on at anything other than a glacial pace.  After doing this cycle a few times, I just said “fuck it” and turned the game off, never to return.  I don’t care how charming your art style is, or how unique your premise is, if you’re punishing me for *guessing incorrectly*, you’re doing something incredibly wrong.  Again, I could just be getting nitpicky here, but a game should actively avoid frustrating players early on.

I flowed straight from this to Far Cry 2, and while it took longer to turn me off than Tingle did, it was no less of a bummer when it happened.  Far Cry 2 opens to a completely ripped from Half-Life “see the sights of the game while something drives you” sequence that manages to do nothing aside from showcase the fantastic graphics and abysmal voice acting the game has to offer.  After a couple of scripted battles, you’re awakened by some… gang… guy who says you killed his buddies, so now you’re… in his gang?  And the first thing he wants you to do is fix his car?  Okay, sure, I guess that’s “immersion”, if by immersion one means being thrown into a long string of monotone discussions where the characters all assume you’re completely educated on what’s going on in the area, which you are most certainly not.

After this greasemonkey diversion, you’re told to drive somewhere else and kill some guys that are bad, or something.  Your original mission of “Defeat The Evil Bad Guy” is completely forgotten at this point, and you’re thrown into a gang war that you are given no reason to care about either way.   Your “buddies” tell you that you can “screw up these jerks’ missions” by doing the missions their way, but it starts to become really hard to tell whether you’re better off screwing over generic faction A or generic faction B.  As if the complete lack of story-driven inspiration for play isn’t bad enough, the pacing issues manage to drive the final stake into the game’s pretty-looking but misguided heart.

After the first couple of scripted missions, you are given, in true Grand Theft Auto style, a chunk of the world to freeroam in.  GTA used this to great effect, both by providing a semi-plausible reason why you can’t go anywhere and on top of that a reason to stick around (the story) anyway.  The area was also large enough by itself to allow you to feel like you were exploring, without being confusing.  After a decent amount of work, you unlocked the remainder of the world in 2 or 3 more chunks.

Far Cry 2, however, decides the best way to handle progression is by giving you about 2% of the world to explore at the outset, and giving you next to no reason for why you’re stuck in the area you’re stuck in (you have malaria, apparently, but that only seems to flare up and kill you in the DEATH ZONE completely surrounding you, which makes no sense).  After “free-roaming” this little area, doing a few missions that introduce you to concepts like safehouses and how buying weapons works, the game just opens the entire rest of the game in one fell swoop, says “Good luck”, and leaves you alone.  You’re still given no reason to give a flying crap about either of the factions, your map is absolutely enormous and filled with missions, and the game seems to expect “You’re free! Go and explore!” to be an acceptable substitute for structure.

I’m all for being able to explore, but even the most restrictive of open world games has a main goal for you to be achieving.  This goal provides structure to the game.  It gives you a reason to go new places, it gives you an “end point” to keep your eye on, and it allows you to see a difference between playing the game and exploring the world the game takes place in.  Even the crappiest of crap sandbox games at least attempts to give you a reason to care about the story, but Far Cry 2 turned me off by being completely content with how enormous its world was and how pretty its graphics were.  Once you’ve played Far Cry 2 for a few hours, you’re left already feeling like you’ve seen all the game has to offer.

Both Far Cry 2 and Tingle left me with a pair of conflicting feelings: That there was a good game in there somewhere, but that I was too annoyed to play the game long enough to find the good part.  Whether or not that’s actually the case is beside the point; a game that loses one’s attention in a day’s play is doing something wrong.