Super Paper Mario and Zelda : The Phantom Hourglass. Two games recently (at least in the UK) released by Nintendo and the focus of my current completely biased and uncultured wrath.
First off, Mario.
I thought that gaming up to this point was meant in the main to be enjoyable. The slow addition of features since my youth like save points, selectable difficulty, control pads that don't give you RSI etc. etc. appeared to have up until this point improved the games somewhat. Sure not everything was perfect, and the idea of a short fat moustachioed Italian plumber thought up by the Japanese didn't exactly sit right, a bit like a businessman on the tube trying to avoid a puddle of grease trickling down from someone's discarded KFC bucket. However with the latest incarnation of our paper friend the creators seem to have decided that making you want to throw your wiimote through your TV screen is the ultimate aim of the game.
An example here is necessary. In the second world you come across a level which requires you to break a vase, thus casing yourself to be saddle with a gigantic fine which you have to pay back to move on with the game. This quest doesn't quite stoop to the level of making you work back the entire thing from scratch, it obviously involves some puzzle elements but this doesn't remove the fact that you have to spend at least half an hour mindlessly hitting a box with your head and running inside a giant fucking hamster wheel to earn money and thereby get a code to open a safe door.
It doesn't even involve any skill, whatsoever. You could get a real hamster to play the game for you at this point if there was a way in which you could drug it enough to hit the right button repeatedly. Infact at this point in the game it was actually more interesting to keep hitting the button whilst watching TV. Yes, you needed a distraction from a game, which itself is supposed to be a distraction in itself. If I wanted to pay to have someone smash me in the face I'd have gone to a dominatrix. At least with that I'd have got sex at the end of it, Mario if anything is just going to cause you to lose whatever girls might have been interested in you.
This isn't the only example of programmer pain inflicted on the player, the next criticism comes in the form of the flip. Flipping in Super Paper Mario is what you use to transform the world into three dimensions, thus allowing you to get to areas that wouldn't be otherwise available. While a nice idea in principle it does often end up in you shouting expletives as you try and find a passageway that was probably barely visible because it was hidden behind you or on top of a semi invisible platform that appears only when you have burned incense to Satan moments before. While I'm all for challenging a gamer, having puzzles that stick you in the same fucking set of rooms for half an hour is really not enjoyable.
In a similar vein I have the Twilight Hourglass, the latest Zelda in my sights. This game, the recent release and subject of public discussion in may forums I visit is a game that I was looking forward to and a direct sequel to the Wind Waker, a pretty but ultimately unfulfilling Zelda game on the Gamecube. My biggest initial problem with this DS incarnation was its forcing you to use the touch screen to control all of Link's movement and item use. Sure Nintendo we know you invented a console with a touch screen but please can you not use it when there are existing schemes that are perfectly good to use. I have no problem with the inclusion of features that make use of the touch screen, I actually quite enjoyed adding notes and drawing doodles on my maps. This is not to say though that I enjoy the movement in the game, which as it is set on islands is pretty much largely ship based.
This is where i started to get annoyed, instead of sailing yourself you have to plot a course which will invariably be plagued by monsters, pirates and the occasional booze cruise coming back from Calais blind drunk. OK so no cruises but it would have lightened up the game if you could get pissed while doing this, its really tedious to pilot backwards and forwards between the same damned islands while you try to work out where it is you need to get to next.
Also problems arise from the method of finding new dungeons, which have you going through temples to find new maps. Oh sorry not temples, the SAME temple multiple times, only after the first attempt you're timed. And they pour tar over you, drop you into a barrel of feathers and make you cluck and lay eggs for their amusement. While pissing on you.
After you have decided that you really hate the puzzles they've thrown at you, and are tired of redoing ones you have previously completed you almost invariably run out of hourglass sand and die, only to be forced to repeat the entire process.
This could be the babbleings of a crazed mental patient here seeping out into a vein of public opinion but recent offerings by Nintendo, at least those mainstream enough to get good reviews and be high profile enough for me to actually buy are becoming more and more painful to actually pay through... Perhaps they do just want to take our money and leave us like a junkie on the street. Filthy, penniless but still begging for more to make the pain of life dissolve away.
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