(no subject)
Stealth above all
things
The Thief games have a hell of a lot to answer for. No, they weren't responsible for sparking a crimewave, at least to my knowledge. Their influence was far more insidious than that. Thanks to the worldwide success of the games, nearly every shoot-em-up released since then has had some godawful stealth level shoehorned into it. Apparently it's okay to force you, to drop the run-and-gun tactics you've been employing throughout the majority of their game and start sneaking around. No, it'd just be too easy to go up to that bad guy and smash his face in with the butt of your rifle and then mow down every last one of his compatriots.
It's as jarring as finding a wire-fighting scene slap bang in the middle of Schindler's List. It's enough to make me want to go back in time and sterilize the parents of everyone involved in the Thief series. I mean, what brain-wrong makes a games designer thinks that someone who's purchased their product in the belief it's straight shoot-em-up, and hence a genre they enjoy, would want to find an entirely sneaking-focused level forced on them. It boggles the mind, it really does.
Stupidity in gaming #408 - The Getaway
And staying with a stealth theme, PS2 shoot-em-up 'The Getaway' may be best known for the allowing you murder policemen dressed as a BT engineer, but it also contains the worst 'stealth' system ever seen in any game. Because while the designers of the game gave you the ability to sneak around and break the necks of enemies before they could blink, they they decided it'd be fun to render this skill absolutely useless. How so? By making ever damn enemy psychically linked, that's how.
This was a game set in modern-day London, not some space-age future, yet still every character on a level shared some sort of bizarre hive mind. You could go to all the effort of sneaking around beind a foe, silently executing him in some dark corner, where you knew no-one was watching and yet every damn enemy would know he was dead. The sound of his neck breaking would be drowned out by the cries of 'Gertcha!' or whatever Jamie Oliver style mockney exclamation the gamers gave each character. Infuriating just doesn't cover it.
The Thief games have a hell of a lot to answer for. No, they weren't responsible for sparking a crimewave, at least to my knowledge. Their influence was far more insidious than that. Thanks to the worldwide success of the games, nearly every shoot-em-up released since then has had some godawful stealth level shoehorned into it. Apparently it's okay to force you, to drop the run-and-gun tactics you've been employing throughout the majority of their game and start sneaking around. No, it'd just be too easy to go up to that bad guy and smash his face in with the butt of your rifle and then mow down every last one of his compatriots.
It's as jarring as finding a wire-fighting scene slap bang in the middle of Schindler's List. It's enough to make me want to go back in time and sterilize the parents of everyone involved in the Thief series. I mean, what brain-wrong makes a games designer thinks that someone who's purchased their product in the belief it's straight shoot-em-up, and hence a genre they enjoy, would want to find an entirely sneaking-focused level forced on them. It boggles the mind, it really does.
Stupidity in gaming #408 - The Getaway
And staying with a stealth theme, PS2 shoot-em-up 'The Getaway' may be best known for the allowing you murder policemen dressed as a BT engineer, but it also contains the worst 'stealth' system ever seen in any game. Because while the designers of the game gave you the ability to sneak around and break the necks of enemies before they could blink, they they decided it'd be fun to render this skill absolutely useless. How so? By making ever damn enemy psychically linked, that's how.
This was a game set in modern-day London, not some space-age future, yet still every character on a level shared some sort of bizarre hive mind. You could go to all the effort of sneaking around beind a foe, silently executing him in some dark corner, where you knew no-one was watching and yet every damn enemy would know he was dead. The sound of his neck breaking would be drowned out by the cries of 'Gertcha!' or whatever Jamie Oliver style mockney exclamation the gamers gave each character. Infuriating just doesn't cover it.