Affectionate Diary

Well, it’s pretty fucking boring. And slow. It might get better later, but for the first few hours it’s interminably dull. Is that allowed? It seems to be allowed in games these days, because people tolerate it. Sometimes it’s presented as artistic choice (Heavy Rain) and sometimes it’s presented as necessary tutorial (Monster Hunter), but both times it’s completely unnecessary. It’s NEVER the best choice to bore the fucking shit out of the player in order to explain simple concepts over several hours.

You know the computer’s voice in portal? Imagine that without any personality or intelligent scripting. This is the voice that will bore you to death throughout the tutorials, and then emerge occasionally in the main game. It will talk to our lead character, a gruff ex-freedom-fighter type who OH MY GOD I CAN’T EVEN WRITE ABOUT THESE UTTERLY DULL, CLICHED CHARACTERS THAT DOMINATE THE CUTSCENES. They also take up loading time, which is annoying, because it already takes OVER A MINUTE to load a level. From the hard drive. It doesn’t even take that long to completely fill my PC’s full memory capacity, what the fuck is the game doing? Well, it might take that long, I don’t know, but basically each map takes longer to load then it takes me to log in to WoW, and logging in to WoW is like hacking the NASA mainframe. You expect it to take a while because you’re joining the matrix using only a mouse and some soiled underwear. You don’t expect it to take that long between bouts of Street Fighter.

And it’s so ugly! On every level, visually and aurally. Choosing your colours from all the crayons left in the bucket that the children didn’t want is not the way to guarantee a mature look. And don’t give me three audio samples that repeat every time I click the mouse. After three seconds I will have heard them all and by the 10th second I’ll want to kill people rather than move my troops to their destination.

I’ll persevere, because it might become amazing, but I’m pretty sure from what I’ve seen so far that it’s not made for people like me. People that love to have fun.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 5:58 am and is filed under Definitive Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.