Digging in the archives!
Kia ora folks!
I am very tired. Being chronically ill is very tiring. Being mad about stuff on TV or on the news is super tiring. So today I thought I would be mad at myself, and let you all revel in the level of cringe that was my GamesRadar-ass, Cracked-dot-com-esque style of writing alllll the way back in 2014. It was either this or my still incomplete thoughts about the final season of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, so I went with the incomplete thoughts of a 29-year-old, uncracked egg; me.
I am not going to share a link, because to be honest I don’t want you to find the original posts (please don’t google it)! What I am going to do is lift a post pretty much verbatim from my old blog from… good lord, nine years ago?? Anyway, I mentioned Cracked etc above because I think that if you’ve spent any amount of time reading Cracked or that style of article from the late 2000’s, you’ll see what I was going for - did I hit the mark? I don’t think so, not by a country mile, but if you feel differently and want to give 2014’s Rebecca Swift an ego boost, let me know! Let’s get into it, shall we?
6 Problems Gamers Have In “Other” Games
April 2014
We’ve all heard our share of First World Problems, ranging from “my internet isn’t fast enough” to “this iPhone isn’t tall enough” or “there’s no wifi here!” Most are ridiculous complaints about things that we simply take for granted every day. But this post is not about those. This is about the very real struggles that gamers go through every day… when they’re playing “other” games.
#6. Achievements aren’t always doled out
Achievements are kind of a new thing (yeah, yeah I’m old I know) to video games. Introduced by Microsoft with the advent of the Xbox 360, achievements incentivised video games in a new way and that bleep-bloop sound just made them all the sweeter. I have the achievement sound tied to text message notifications on my phone because it helps me see human contact as a positive thing (I swear I’m not a sociopath). But nowadays we have come to expect them, demand them even. So you’re appeased when you play The Walking Dead and it rewards you for simply playing through the chapters of an episode, but when you decide to dedicate several hours of your life to a game like Chromehounds and then walk away with five achievements and 100 Gamerscore you are going to be mad. I’m mad just thinking about it. That game gave me flashbacks to Krazy Ivan for gods sake!
#5. Being told “That’s not a word” in Scrabble
Scrabble (or Words With Friends, if you’re so inclined) can be hard enough as it is. Sometimes you reach into the bag and blindly pull out three As, a V, an O and an I. You can’t spell anything with that, even with help from another player. I hear Sony fanboys screaming at their monitors and Xperias that you can spell “Vaio” with those letters, but guess what, that’s not a word either according to the dictionary. The Words With Friends dictionary doesn’t care that Hwoarang is your favourite Tekken character and your friends and family don’t care that Materia is about as common as sand in Final Fantasy VII – that’s not a word, get a dictionary you chump.
#4. Remembering the wrong control scheme
If you’re an avid Halo fan like me, you’ll know that the default control scheme has changed significantly over the years. The Recon scheme, as it’s known today, is my go-to because it’s just what I know, but it’s not the default like it used to be. As a result, when I sit down to play a bout of Halo 4 at a friends place and I’m caught without my profile, I’m at a loss as to how to play this game I spent 9 hours straight beating on launch day. I’m crouching instead of punching dudes, punching thin air instead of reloading and reloading instead of sprinting – it’s a mess. I have this problem most often in shooters, but it can happen in any game that has a slightly different button setup. I’m forever pressing A to jump in Fallout: New Vegas, B for hand-brake in Need for Speed Rivals or right-bumper to reload in Left 4 Dead, the latter being most confusing during a horde.
#3. Remembering the wrong rules or terms for things
I haven’t personally had this problem in a while, at least not until I started playing Hearthstone. This doesn’t tend to be a problem with video games so much as the game tends to be pretty clear on what you can and can’t do, but with board games and card games it is a very different story. I first learned to play Magic the Gathering in 2008, and coming from a background of Yu-Gi-Oh (and Pokémon cards, prior to that) I was maybe better equipped to learn than some – but I kept calling creatures “monsters” and forgetting to tap them when I was attacking, and I was befuddled as to why I wasn’t allowed to choose which creatures I was attacking. Of course, these are things you get over when you learn a game, but that doesn’t stop me being confused as hell while playing Hearthstone when an opponent attacks with one minion, plays a spell card and a minion card, and then attacks again.
#2. Fire is unreliable
Video games over the years have gotten a lot more realistic, but always have to keep the balance between cool and interesting realism and realism that just sucks. I never played Shenmue, but that was a game that forced you to drive a forklift around for a job just for the sake of realism. Of course the same game also included duck races where all of the ducks wore fancy bow-ties, but that’s beside the point. I bring up realism because one of the things that bothers me most in game mechanics is fire. Take Minecraft for example: fire behaves exactly how you expect it to – you touch it and it burns you, you set fire to a tree in a forest and the entire goddamn forest burns down, you plop some lava down inside a buddys home that he built out of wood and he isn’t your buddy anymore. But then in Left 4 Dead 2, you throw a freaking Molotov cocktail at something and it just bursts into flame for a few seconds and just… goes out. It doesn’t matter if you threw the bottle at a house, a car or a tree, the fire just up and evaporates like water. Boring, useless video game water.
#1. Sometimes you don’t have to be so thorough
A lot of games, like Borderlands, Fallout, or BioShock to name a few, teach you that searching every trash can or metal box or toilet is important – you might find a pineapple or some money or some surgical tubing that you can use to craft an item. So when you come to play another game with a similar style your default behaviour is to “scav” for items, which is sometimes not what this particular game wants you to do. But of course, stuck in your ways, you continue to search for items while ignoring the fact that this game is purposefully not giving them to you in an attempt to tell you “Dude you don’t have to search for things in this game! We will give you the things you need when you need them just stop okay! What are you even looking for in that toilet?? Oh you found money? What the hell?!” Games are weird.
I will admit that I took some… liberties… with republishing this post, but for the most part it still sits in it’s original form. Just… upgraded, yeah.
Did you like this post? If so, why?? Please explain it to me in the comments so I can understand it, or hit me up at the social links at the bottom of the page. I recently reviewed Scream VI on my Letterboxd (spoiler: I loved it!) so please check that out too. Now I don’t want to over-sell it, but I am pretty sure I will have finished Mrs Maisel for next weeks post and I’m fairly certain I’ll be able to at very least let you get a glimpse at what I thought of it (I promise, it’s not all bad).
That’s all from me for now, thanks so much for reading! Have a great week everyone, I’ll talk to you all again really soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚
- Rebecca