Tuesday 29 January, 2008

I guess this entry will be something of a rant...so my apologies for that. However, I do think that it's a fair rant against some game design issues that keep on appearing and are so rarely dealt with. Surely, in this day and age we should be able to solve these, right?


1. Immunity until it's time to fight.

A few of the dungeon bosses in this game have something "important" to say. It's so important that, although you can see the boss and can fire missile weapons at the boss you can do no damage to the boss until it has said whatever it needs to say. In order to trigger it's speech, you also have to get close to the boss which kind of gets in the way of the strategic option of staying out of range of the enemy and pelting it with missile weapons.

2. Missions that make no sense with respect to what you do in the game.

I recently completed a mission with a very "complicated" story. Basically, it involved raiding enemy camp 1, killing the leader, planting false evidence that would incirminate enemy camp 2. Thus, enemies 1 and 2 would fight each other instead of attacking the town. That's a pretty neat mission, if you ignore the fact that all you do in this game is slaughter anything that moves. In order to "plant the evidence" I basically wiped out the entire enemy camp 1. There is no way to be subtle in this game, so the missions might as well own up to that. Why the subterfuge when I literally massacred both enemy camps?

3. Finish mission before it's assigned.

It's really annoying to have to go back to an area you've cleared and defeat all the monsters again just because you did something that hadn't yet been assigned to you as a mission. In game design terms you have two options: (1) recognize that I already did the mission and reward/chastise the player, or (2) don't let me do the mission. It makes things really confusing...

That's all for now. I suspect I will finish this game purely out of gamer honor. (must finish games I start)

Hey, thanks for the white pill advise, i had realized that you could evolve, but wasn't sure exactly how you could.

I like the sense of malice that comes with planting false evidence, and wish I could see that in more games (yay evil), but I wonder, with the way the psp, I guess handles, with the joy stick and such, from playing starwars, I had trouble locking on and killing, is it different with this game, or is it just the psp itself that makes it difficult?

The targetting is "ok". Ok because the enemies are so weak that it doesn't make much difference. Aiming with melee weapons is easier than missile. For missile weapons I usually have to run away and fire a few times before I'm able to "lock on". More than the controls, it's the size of the screen that gets in the way. You don't have enough room to aim before the monsters are on you. I have no idea how the whole thing works on multiplayer, though.