Zelda: unaccomplished.

[baratron]

I am feeling tired & bad-tempered & lame, and it's all Zelda: The Ocarina of Time's fault. Except the physical part of the lameness. That's just my knee being evil. (I don't know why it hurts so much today, stupid thing).

I've been trying to fight this boss called Bongo Bongo, who basically consists of a couple of big hands on a drum; and every time he strikes the drum you lose your aim, and it's difficult. Even the FAQs say it's difficult. Apparently, the technique I worked out (with L-targeting and arrows) is exactly the right thing to do, I just haven't managed to do it enough times to kill him before I either run out of arrows, or get killed myself. Insanely difficult, and it would be easier if I had a bigger quiver (50 arrows instead of 40) or Ice Arrows, although I can't see how it would be possible to have Ice Arrows at this stage of the game without cheating. The Bigger Quiver might be possible, if I get Richard to do one of the tedious mini-games that I suck too much at. Just to add insult to injury, every time you die, you go all the way back to the start of the dungeon and have to walk through it again. There's a sort-of short-cut to the boss that cuts out a lot of the journey, but even then it still takes a good 5 minutes in real time to get from the start to the boss. Gah.

I get frustrated with games at the point when they're too difficult for me to play anymore. It's not really a surprise that I have 4 or 5 saved games sitting around the 70-90% completion mark, because my hand-eye co-ordination and timing are pretty awful. (It's also not really a surprise that the games I've completed >100%, i.e. the main game and all the side quests, are Pokemon, which use a turn-based battle system based on the strength & stats of the monsters you fight with plus some randomness; not a real-time battle technique where the physical accuracy and timing of your button presses are important). Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon used this amazing system whereby the game worked out how good a player you were and ramped up or down the difficulty accordingly. You never got told what difficulty level you were on, but there were 3 possible settings. Insomniac's later series, Ratchet & Clank, has obviously kept this, because there have been very few moments in the 2 R&C games I've played (and in Richard's experience of R&C 3) where I've thrown down the controller in disgust at how insanely difficult the game has become. I just wish all games would do this. I honestly think that, having spent £30 or £40 on a game, it should be possible for me to get to the end of it, without the experience being so easy that a "good" player would be bored rigid after the first hour. Invisible variable difficulty can't actually be that difficult to code if it was in a single-disc Playstation 1 game.

So now I'm all frustrated and feeling unaccomplished, and bad-tempered and toothy. Gaming is supposed to be fun, not exhausting and anger-making. And I want to get this damn dungeon done so I can get on with the rest of the game, but I'm just too tired to try again, now.

Comments

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

I do agree that games should reward either excellent gameplay or dogged persistence, whichever the player is most able to provide.

R&C 2 and 3 do get easier as time goes on, just becuse every monster you kill pushes you that much closer to a weapon upgrade and a nanotech boost. I guess there are a couple of tough glider sequences that never get easier except through insane amounts of practice.

Another great PS2 game that covers this is Sly Cooper and the Thievieus Racoonus. There, if you die a certain number of times on a level, you are resurrected with a free health boost, which is doubled if you continue to not manage.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I get really frustrated with situations like that as well. I also think that games should allow you to save at any time, always, so that you can save immediately before the big battle. In Oni, you can't save manually whenever you want, and there was this ridiculously long and complicated series of battles that would take me a good hour to fight through, followed by a series of jumps over a pit of lava. About five or six times I slogged throught he battles only to fall in the lava. In the end, I just said, "Screw it," and stopped playing.

I also stopped just before the final big boss battle in Xenogears, because my characters were not powerful enough to defeat the boss, yet the game had trapped me into an area where all I could do was proceed to the boss battle. All other exits had been cut off. I think that that's also a no-no.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

I hate real-time games. In Broken Sword 3 - a standard point&click adventure - they introduced bits where you had to run/climb/grab&run at vital plot points, and you couldn't save in the middle of them. I almost quit half way through, but finally by luck David managed to run in the right direction and get a lift door shut before getting shot, and the rest were much easier.

Actually what I really hate are games boxes or reviews that don't *tell* you what sort of fight system a game has.

If you don't mind using a PC, Heroes of Might and Magic (version 3 or 4) is excellent, with battles based on stats and turn-based.

[36.livejournal.com]

I always played games to look at the craft and the world/map building. I used to obsessively collect games and demos, never really playing any of them.

I'd never really get past the first level or two or any game, so I'd cheat to play through and see what happens, facinated.

Eventually I wrote my own games, some weren't that bad.