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

[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.