Not a good use of my time.

[prog]

OK, the endgame of Half Life 2: Episode Two is messed up. Basically it involves hitting targets with unique missiles that are only avalable at certain points on the map, and the idea is that if you miss - which is very easy to do - you need to retreat to another part of the map to pick up another missile.

But that's not fun, so instead I just save the game before pulling the trigger, and then keep reloading it until I don't miss. Not that reloading - which takes about ten seconds of staring at a blank screen - is much fun either. And according to GameFAQs (which supports the save-before-firing strategy), I get to do this thirteen times!

This is the first time I have felt the need to "save every ten steps" at any point in the Half Life 2 games - up until now I've saved only before doing something really risky, maybe a couple of times per chapter - and it seems like a design flaw that this method now feels like the correct way to solve the level.

It feels less like I'm playing an action game and more like I'm fixing a bug, changing some variables and restarting the process and seeing what happens this time. I'd happily charge the game my full consulting rate, but it's incapable of signing contracts, so to hell with it.

Comments

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

What you describe is why I dislike games that allow you to save anywhere, and then ratchet up the difficulty level to account for the fact that you can save anywhere. The "fixing a bug" feeling is exactly what I experienced when playing Half Life 1.

This is why it annoys me when I read a review of a game and they complain that "You can only save in certain places! That's lame!"

[prog.livejournal.com]

I try not to complain too loudly about this, because it's the traditional save method for one of my favorite styles of games - interactive fiction. But the twitchy nature of action games verses the player-measured pace of IF make the comparison more than a little tenuous, now that I actually think about it...

I do recommend HL2 in general. I'm complaining about the big battle at the end of the second expansion to it, so that's an awful lot of complaint-free hours I've had up until then.

[prog.livejournal.com]

More thoughts: Something that HL2 does right (I don't know from HL1) is its auto-save system, which kicks in whenever you succeed in taking a step forward in the story, such as unlocking a new area or winning a largeish battle. It happens at a pace I found comfortable, and I found myself trusting it enough to not throw down maual saves very often.

Before the scene I posted about, I would manually save only before attempting something experimental and risky - just as I would in an IF game. Stuff along the lines of, "Wait, am I supposed to try jumping across this chasm? Hm." (And often, if the answer is "why, yes," once you land on the other side you see the "Auto Saving..." message flash again, and you know you're on the right track. Which is slightly meta but that's fine with me.)

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

I agree wholeheartedly... although I liked how epic the end section felt and it was a welcome change from the claustrophobic feeling of being forced down endless tunnels.

I used to think it was lazy programming to not allow arbitrary save points. More recently I decided it was just lazy game design to ALLOW saving anywhere. Now I think I've come full circle... it's awfully presumptive of a game designer to *force* one to play their game as intended. I'd go further still, in fact, and say that if you can't beat a particular section of a game you should be able to skip right past it, same way you can fast-forward through a section of a movie on DVD if it's boring.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I have seen this feature before, but it's definitely non-standard. In fact the only title that comes to mind is, duh, I cannot recall the title... an adventure game published by Sierra in the early 1990s that was totally a ripoff of Blade Runner. Anyway, featured two or three side-scrolling action bits, which you had to at least try, but after getting killed a few times you'd get the option to just skip the damn thing and get on with the adventuring. I think I did this, gladly, whenever prompted.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

The Alone in the Dark remake is supposed to let you skip to any chapter in the story, right from the title screen. Seems like a good idea to me... the whole "unlocking" thing is just another relic of arcade games, where you gotta earn your spot on the high score table.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I noticed a couple of scenes in Lego Indiana Jones which worked this way. (There may have been the same in Lego Star Wars, but I don't remember.) E.g., if you don't get away from the rolling boulder, it just rolls over you and carries you ignominiously into the next scene. Of course you'll have to go back and try again if you're aiming at the 100% completion score, but for just getting through the plot it's fine.

I thought that was an excellent design decision.