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Bad game design choices annoy me |  |
I’m currently playing Tomb Raider Legend, and so far it’s been pretty good. When it’s doing what a Tomb Raider game should be doing (that is, presenting you with cool puzzles to figure out), it’s really very enjoyable. There’s a bit too much combat in it for my tastes; if I wanted to fight things, I’d play a shooter, and the controls and camera in this game do not lend themselves to fast and furious combat the way shooter controls generally do. That said, now that I’m at the end, I’ve run into an instance of staggeringly bad game design, and it’s really ruining the game for me.
In general, I’m not a huge fan of boss fights in video games. Sometimes they can be fun, a refreshing change of pace, and when they’re handled well I don’t mind them so much. Tomb Raider Anniversary (a superior game, by the way) had boss fights, but they were all designed so that each boss was pretty much a puzzle, and once you figured out what you were supposed to do, they weren’t that hard. When a boss fight is just a slugfest with something that can take way more punishment than you can, though, I don’t find them particularly fun. And that’s what I’ve run into. It’s a boss that I basically have to beat four times, and its attacks not only do lots of damage but also knock me down. And it’s really freaking fast. And we’re on a kind of island, and if I fall off, I die instantaneously. And I have to constantly aim upward in order to target the only part of this huge creature that I can target, which means I can’t see the ground (making it easy to fall off). And it’s really repetitive, and hard, and not particularly fun. And there’s not even anything particularly intelligent about the fight; there’s very little to figure out, except that you have to keep on pounding on it, and stab it when it falls down.
So anyway, I’m taking a little break from Legend, because it’s really annoying me right now with this instance of monumentally bad design in an otherwise very good game. It’s a shame, really.
[Edit: categories and stuff.]
May 27th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Ah, I remember that boss. Are you playing on the hardest difficulty, like I was? It was brutal. Probably took me 50 tries or something.
May 27th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
No, I’m playing on medium. I typically only play on the hardest difficulty in games where it actually affects gameplay in significant ways, other than giving things more hit points, like the Thief games.