Tomb Raider 2013 is Embarrassing

 

I didn't play the Tomb Raider reboot back when it launched because I knew I was going to hate it.  But then I picked it up for less than 5 bucks in a Steam sale and then it was given to me for free (along with its two sequels) on the Epic store so I installed it, fired it up and decided to give it a whirl anyway.

And I was totally right, the game is absolute fucking garbage and I hate it.

If you're an embyro that wasn't aware, Tomb Raider 2013 is a reboot of the long running Tomb Raider series that's been going since 1996 back when Lara Croft had 2 pistols, triangular titties and the game was a sort of Prince of Persia-esque platformer type thing.  So of course for the reboot they stripped all of that away and made it ANOTHER fucking over the shoulder 3rd person cinematic adventure game/fair ground shoot the ducks sideshow attraction.

Putting itself before the events of even the 1996 original, it shows a young Lara on a boat to go and explore an old Japanese island only when she gets there she finds that its full of cultists that want her and her friends dead AND an ancient mysterious power that wont let them leave no matter how many times they call for rescue planes.  The rest of the story is just bad voice acting and Lara getting beaten up by both the baddies and mother nature and that's about all their is to it.  It tries to do some "maybe YOU'RE the bad guy here Lara" at the end but it's such a pathetic attempt at giving the plot some depth that it doesn't so much fall flat as much as it falls right through the Earths crust and disintigrates into the core.

The gameplay is Uncharted.  Not "like Uncharted", it is just Uncharted.  Run from place to place climbing on things and shooting dudes until you get to a big set piece where you'll run away from something thats exploding or crumbling beneath you and there's no actual risk of a game over unless you have a sudden stroke and let go of the W key, or maybe S if its doing the run towards the camera thing.  Slightly different from Uncharted though it adds experience points for you to learn skills and gun upgrades, none of which you ever really need but you have to spend those skill points and salvage on something I guess.  It also adds a TON of optional collectables that aren't fun to look for and aren't actually worth anything except exp for more skill points so thus making the completion percentage on your save slot completely fucking worthless.

Worse than generic, boring gameplay however is the fact that, at least on PC, it's buggy to all hell.  I say without hyperbole that every single death I experienced during my time with the game was due to a bug.  Lara not grabbing things, Lara not shoving her pickaxe into a craggy wall after a jump, Lara's melee attack just going right through enemies thus giving him a chance to fill me full of hot lead, the whole works and every time I would shut the game off and refuse to play it for a few days thus making the playthrough feel PAINFULLY long.

The game ends with "The team worked the hardest they could to bring you the best possible game they could make" and I know it's harsh but if THIS is the best game you could possibly make then you should quit making games because your attempts are sad at best and anger inducing at worst.  Still though, enough idiots bought and enjoyed this pile of crap for it to warrent TWO bloody sequels which the Epic Game Store vomited into my backlog so I'm hoping that the other games are at least slightly better at this one.  I hated 1996 Tomb Raider and I hate this one even more and for all the shit I give old school Tomb Raider at least it had some personality and stood out as an original game.  2013 is just another generic, "cinematic" piece of shit to add to the pile and be forgotten.

Fuck this game

Difficulty Options are Bullshit

The topic of difficulty options have, for some reason, become a hot topic of debate on social media.  I feel that every couple of weeks or so a series of threads turns up on something like Twitter either complaining about games not having difficulty options or people complaining that a game included some kind of "auto-win" mode or something like that and people of course losing their minds and throwing insults at each other.  So I got thinking about it and I have come to the conclusion that in most cases difficulty options are complete dogshit.

As a concept they make sense, skilled players pick hard and new players pick easy, and there are a variety of games where they have been used effectively but in a staggeringly large number of cases, the difficulty settings are just frustrating bullshit that's lazily mismanaged by whatever developers are making the game.  So for the next few paragraphs in this post I will outline just a few of the ways in which having an option AT ALL is a pile of garbage.

1) The Pump and Dump

This is probably the most common thing you'll come across in games, where a playthrough on easy and a playthrough on hard is identical in every way except the numbers on damage done and damage taken are just raised and lowered depending on what mode you're on.  The worst example I can think of this off the top of my head is basically any game made by modern day Naughty Dog.  If you play Uncharted on easy or normal, Nathan Drake can walk right into direct fire of a mounted machine gun, take all of those bullets to the face and the only thing that happens is the screen gets a bit grey and you have to suck your thumb behind a rock for a bit to heal up.  If you then play that game on Crushing Nathan turns into a man made of wet toilet paper and will go rag-dolling off into space if an enemy so much as coughs on him.  Everything else about the game is the same, the only thing your mode choice dictates is how much hiding behind walls you have to do.  This is especially boring if you're the kind of person who likes to play normal first and then hard because unless the game really gripped you, playing the exact same game again in the exact same way again but slower just isn't fun.  

2) Built for Upgrades

I feel like I never noticed this being a problem until semi recently but another way difficulty is mis-managed is linking it directly to the games upgrade system and new game + playthroughs.  The game that really hit home just how bad this gets is Dante's Inferno on PS3.  In that game you can pick at the start if you want to play on easy, normal or hard but if you pick hard mode from a new game file then you are going to have a hell of a hard time (lol).  But, if you play through the game once, get a bunch of upgrades and soul points, beat the game and then carry that shit over into a hard mode run, the challenge becomes a lot more manageable.  This is bullshit because when you die it starts to feel like it's not your fault.  Like imagine someone comes up to you and says "hey solve this jigsaw puzzle" but then the set of pieces they give you is just missing a bunch of pieces.  That wouldn't be fun, right? and that's exactly what it feels like to play a game on hard mode when it's been built around an upgrade system.

3) Locked

This is a real pet peeve of mine as someone who likes to play games on a harder mode most of the time but locking a hard mode behind a full game clear is an UNFORGIVEABLE practice and any developer that has done this deserves to stub their toe on the leg of a metal coffee table.  One thing people love to complain about when they talk about difficulty is that "they don't have time to learn the game and get good", which personally I think is a dogshit argument but OK I'll roll with it.  But by that same logic, I'm also a busy man with a large backlog of games and I do not have all the time in the world to play through a game twice just to get the experience that I mainly enjoy.  I can understand locking challenge modes behind a clear like Dante Must Die in Devil May Cry but when I buy a game, load it up and my options for difficulty are "easy, normal and LOCKED" I want to start swinging at people

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This is just 3 ways that I pulled off the top of my head and I'm sure if you gave me a stack of games and a couple of days I could probably come up with a lot more.  But what is the solution?  Well, it's to probably get rid of difficulty settings altogether.  A game that springs right to the forefront of my mind in this regard is Celeste.  The base game where you get the story of the girl going up the mountain is a challenging yet fair experience that I think anyone can clear with a little bit of practice.  When you finish the game, you can either fuck off and never play it again OR you can go and hunt down the B-Sides, C-Sides, Golden Berries etc. which are all challenging extras that players who want to push themselves with absolutely enjoy.  The game is designed in such a way so that EVERYONE can get a win but those who want to master the mechanics and platforming can get even more satisfaction after the credits roll

Another example of this would be a game like Bastion.  When you start Bastion up you aren't given any difficulty settings but a short ways into the game you unlock the shrine.  In the shrine you can unlock little statues that you activate and for each active statue you get an experience and currency bonus in return for the game becoming harder.  This allows players to customize their own experience to make the game as hard or as easy and they would like and players who do go for the extra challenge are appropriately rewarded.  If you don't like a hard game and just want the story, leave the shrine alone, but if you want to show just how good you are at Bastion then head into that shrine and activate EVERYTHING and see how hard the game gets.  The annoying thing about this example in particular is the time it takes to get the shrine and the statues but my point is that instead of having an "easy, normal, hard" mode setting, let players tweak certain aspects of the game themselves to get the challenge that they would like.

Obviously difficulty settings aren't just going to dissapear and like I said, they CAN be used well in certain cases but the point is that most devs are very lazy with them and in a lot of cases just letting the creators deliver the experience THEY want to give you is probably the better option.  Game too hard and has no modes? Just play something else.  Game has an easy mode that's far too easy for you? Just don't use it.  More importantly, shut the fuck up about it on Twitter

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

I don't know why I suddenly got this urge to play Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, but over the last few days I've managed to bash it out on hard mode, so now it's time to look back and reflect on the 2007 cover based shooter.

For anyone who's not played Uncharted, the game is basically about this snarky prick looking for a long lost treasure and on the way he has to gun down hoards of dudes.  Occasionally you'll have to perform some platforming but mainly this game is about gunning down dudes from behind cover.  The story is actually a lot more boring and uninteresting than I remembered it and just pulls this weird turn where at one point it becomes fucking zombie shooting game for like 4 chapters.

Anyway it may sound at this point like I don't like Uncharted, but you'd be wrong.  Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is actually a pretty fun game but it's not aged well.  Obviously, with Uncharted 2 and 3 making huge improvements on the gameplay it feels like a bit of a step back to play the first one now, but looking at it in 2013 really makes me wonder what all the fuss was about back then.

When I played it, I had just got a PS3 so it got a bit of a free ride since back in '07 this would have been the shit, but the controls can be a little wonky and the game I found was a little bit buggy.  I remember the first time I played it I jumped at a rock and the character entered a falling animation for about 5 minutes before just dying out of nowhere.  This time I had a couple of moments where I would just fall off things while platforming for no reason, which was a little annoying but due to generous check points it wasn't too annoying.

However this game committed a sin that I absolutely cannot forgive.  I've mentioned a few times that I like to play my games on the hardest possible setting and the hardest possible setting in Uncharted is called Crushing.  But I wasn't allowed to play it on Crushing because I didn't have a clear save due to my old fat PS3 that I originally beat the game on being fucking stolen last year.  I hate it when games just lock me out of modes like that for no reason, and I absolutely don't feel like playing it all the way through again now.

Anyway, Uncharted is still pretty fun to play now but if you really get an urge to play one of Nathan Drake's adventures, just play 2 or 3, you might ruin those early PS3 memories if you play the first one again now.

"Cinematic Experiences"

 Let me take a moment to explain why I love gaming as a hobby so much.

I like a good challenge, it doesn't matter if its some kind of super hard puzzle or something more skill based, I love being challenged to do something and then doing it.  One of the reasons I love gaming so much is that I see every game I play as a challenge issued to me by the developer, so I have to step up and beat it.

It sounds stupid but its what makes the whole thing so appealing to me.  Of course, this does sometimes lead to controller biting fits of rage on some of the more obtuse titles but the feeling of satisfaction one gets when overcoming a huge problem feels really good.

But this leads me to a problem with games today.  Gaming for a while has been trying it's damned hardest to mimic the film industry, so all the challenge is gone nowadays.  Sure, there do exist hard games, and they are usually the best ones but companies seem to be more focused on delivering pretty looking "cinematic experiences" rather than an actual game.

It's kind of a shame because when I was a kid, I would pick up a game and have no idea if I would ever see the ending, but now anything I buy I know I'll see it to completion with basically no problem.  It's a shame that people would rather have interactive movies than actual games.

It's not like these "cinematic experiences" aren't enjoyable, but I want to be challenged, I want to have to use my brain and overcome great hardship!  People always talk about how far gaming has come, but to be honest, right now, it's the most brain dead it's ever been.