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.)