Julia Stiletto returned from the coffee machine and fluttered her exotic eyelashes at the approaching Doctor Cameron Martini. He was young and handsome, although looked sorely in need of some sleep. He consulted his clipboard and spoke.
"Miss Stiletto," he began, in a sombre tone.
"How is he, doctor?" Julia pouted.
"It's not good," he said tactfully. "Not good at all. Would you like to see him?"
Julia nodded and followed Dr. Martini into a private ward. He drew back the bed covers to reveal the tattered remains of a computer game box. It retained its strong green hue, but the title had been blurred beyond recognition. Julia broke the awkward silence.
"He looks terrible! But what exactly is wrong with him?"
"As seen in this x-ray," Dr. Martini waggled his pointer in the vague direction of the pinboard, "we have found evidence of poor level design, and even several software bugs."
"My God!" Julia shrieked. "Is it fatal?"
"I'm afraid it's terminal." Dr. Martini held onto Julia's hand comfortingly.
"Is there nothing you can do?"
"I'm just a doctor!" he muttered, pausing to examine a crack in the ceiling. "I'm not God..."
His speech was interrupted by a shrill beep that pierced the air. Two pairs of eyes turned to see a flatlining life-support machine.
Julia tossed back her hair. "Well that's him dead then."
"Looks like it." Dr. Martini sat down and referred once more to his clipboard, pretending not to notice the female hand removing his tie. "I know this must be a difficult time, but I must ask you to consider organ transplant," Dr. Martini watched Julia unbuttoning his shirt. "Your husband had some very healthy in-game music."
"Give it to the Spice Girls", said Julia, before the chair tipped over backwards and the two of them disappeared from view.
The days of the bedroom programmer are drawing to a close. Gone are Saturday afternoons spent in front of the computer screen, listening to Madness records played at the wrong speed and swigging Tizer in anticipation of the night of revelry ahead. (I was that soldier.)
Now, disillusioned media tycoons prowl the boardroom. "Give the kids what they want," they say around a mouthful of cigar. "I'm talking big graphics, big music, special effects. Oh and some of that gameplay stuff thrown in as well. You know what these reviewers are like."
The gameplay over graphics argument is a well-worn cliche, and software houses are beginning to accept that visual quality alone does not a good game make, despite the fact that games are no longer created because of a great idea of the programmers, but instead to supply the software houses with a '("Game" - Ed)' for that particular 'quarter'. Necessity being, like Frank Zappa, the mother of invention. The programmers and software houses jointly endeavour to create playable, long-lasting games, and often succeed. Combined with the quality of the graphics and sound, we should be overwhelmed with a harvest of superb computer games. One or two make the grade, but all too often games fall short of the mark.
The explanation is simple - stupid mistakes.
Stupid, mind-boggling, infuriating and downright pointless mistakes that destroy an otherwise good game. Mistakes that make you want to throttle the playtesters one by one, or better still, sentence them to a year "kicking chicken" in Israel.
There are so many games that I really want to like, but betray my tolerance with a barrage of infuriating flaws. Let me give you some examples.
INTRODUCTIONS
As once declared by the Head And Shoulders advert of old, You Don't Get A Second Chance To Make A First Impression, which would explain why programmers are so keen on rendered intros, full motion video and flashy title screens. Fine, if you can execute an impressive intro competently. But if you are too clever, you run the risk of annoying the player before the game has begun, which is one of the seven deadly computer game sins. (Having ridiculously long passwords is one of the others.)
If Digitiser's The Man was relocated to a prison full of annoying features in games, Poor FMV Clip and Crap Speech would be naive newcomers, while Complicated Option Screen would be the old lag in the corner, leafing through a dirty magazine and looking suspiciously like Ronnie Barker. Like me in that last analogy, programmers often let their work suffer as a result of trying to be too clever by half.
They are particularly prone to creating technically impressive but impossible to negotiate options screens. I would be perfectly happy with a list of options written on a simple MS-DOS black and white screen, if it meant I could progress swiftly onto the game with the minimum of hassle.
However, it seems most programmers have read something about 'atmosphere' in their well-thumbed copy of "The Dummies Guide To Creating PC Games" and so insist in creating option screens festooned with brightly coloured but incomprehensible symbols, accompanied by a time-consuming animated sequence whenever you click on one of them in an effort to find out what it does. And so your annoyance accumulates until you finally make it to the game proper, only by then you don't really feel like playing it any more.
ENDINGS
You are comfortably numb. You have no idea what the weather is like outside, or even what time of day it is. Your habit of focussing on a distant object every ten minutes for the benefit of your eyesight was discarded after it interfered with the atmosphere of the game you are playing. You have learned to touch-type without even thinking about it. You are 'into' the game.
Your heart skips a beat as your energy level is sapped after a vicious attack from a crafty dragon, but you swing your sword around and put it to death before it can inflict further damage. The end is surely near now. The end-of-game-boss approaches. You have by now learned his firing pattern, and are able to nimbly dodge the bolts of lightning it emits. Timing is crucial. You fire away, reducing its energy at an even pace. Any mistake now would send you back to the overcomplicated options screen. You keep firing, before waiting until the moment is exactly right to use your special weapon. You strike. The boss raises a defiant claw before dutifully crumpling into a heap and exploding. You have done it.
The screen fades to black. With bated breath, you watch as green text appears, a letter at a time. It reads: WELL DONE. YOU HAVE COMPLETED MEDIAEVAL PLATFORM GAME 3. PRESS FIRE TO CONTINUE.
Your heart sinks. All that work, and for what? For a crummy, anti-climatic message. The programmers must have assumed that no one would actually make it to the end of the game. Why, you oughta... You calm yourself. After all, there is always the high-score table. A ha. A ha ha ha.
HIGH SCORE TABLES
"Coo ur gosh" sa my grate friend peason. "You must enter your name. It seems you hav completed the game."
"I kno" I sa, and reach for the keyboard. I type, like so:
The high score table will not accept my full name chiz. I reach for the delete key but peason beat me to it he type NIGEL IS A GURL. Fie! But before I can tuough him up he run away. Still he leave his computer on so I can use the INTERNET to download pictures of PAMELA ANDERSON cheers cheers.
Those arcade games and shoot-em-ups that do include high score tables rarely deliver the glory they promise. Having finished your go, either by completion of the game or untimely death of your character, you are asked to enter your name, so that your valiant effort will not be forgotten. In the worst examples, it will not accept keyboard input, but insist you enter your name with joystick or mouse to maintain that Authentic Arcade Atmosphere. However having endeavoured to do so, you will probably encounter a restriction to a stupidly small amount of characters, forcing you to settle for inputting only your initials, and robbing of the recognition you so justly earned.
CLICHES
You've read the hype, you've seen the adverts and you even glanced through one of the features in a 'serious' PC Magazine proclaiming the game's exclusive use of state of the art graphics technology. The music was written especially for the game, and performed by a newly-created supergroup including Eric Clapton, Paul Weller, Rick Wakeman and Johnny Fiama. The storyline was taken from an unpublished Tarantino film script, and the voices were provided by Greg Lake and Katie Puckrick.
You didn't wait for the reviews; just camped outside HMV on the night preceding its release and bought the game as soon as humanly possible. You load the game, and finally began to play. And it's good. It is a good game. Only... only, it feels like you've played it before. Several million times in fact. It's just another clone spruced up with some flashy graphics and impressive sound effects.
An alarmingly large proportion of games released nowadays can be described with a line like "It's good, but not quite as good as Game X." Rather than come up with an original concept, the programmers decide to pay tribute their favourite game by blatantly copying it, resulting in a less playable game than the original. Sure, everyone would like to take the credit for coming up with a game as good as Monkey Island, but that one's already been done. Some originality is called for.
With arcade games, stereotypical storylines about damsels in distress are acceptable. With adventures, however, it is vital that you care about what happens to the characters, and the outcome of the storyline, otherwise the game is doomed. A common occurence is that the software team will spend so long creating an impressive new game engine, that the storyline will be tacked on as an afterthought. And so we get yet another playable but ultimately unsatisfying adventure game. The same applies for Role Playing Games, the creators of which seem content to churn out another dungeons and dragons fest with no original concepts or ideas, thus continuing the feeling of deja vu that plagues even the most technically impressive of games.
BUGS
No, not the insect variety. I'm talking about those unforgivable software errors that for one reason or another have not been ironed out at the playtesting stage, that frustrate and alienate games players who get to the final level of the game they've been playing all evening only to have it crash out on them.
This is enough to turn even the most mild-mannered gamer into Joe Pesci talking calmly but angrily to your PC. ("Whaddya mean you can't find file Level10.wad? I spend all day playing your lousy goddamn computer game and just as I'm getting somewhere you crash on me! Now are you gonna be a good game and let me get on with it or do I have to format your disk?")
The sheer frequency with which software bugs occur in games is astounding, and it's almost routine that when I get a new game, it's going to crash at some point, or render it unplayable in any one of a variety of different ways. This can range from making my character invisible (a particular favourite of adventure games) to repeating a particular sound effect constantly forcing you to quit the game or turn the volume down completely.
The most frequent bug is of course our old favourite, freezing the screen completely so you have to turn the computer off without even being given a chance to save your game. Every gamer has come into contact with this problem at some time or another, and it is not a nice thing to behold. Particular if you are reviewing a game, and wondering what percentage to knock off. The softies would argue that not all copies of a game are bugged, but if they are happy to send bugged copies to PC Gamer, then what are the chances of them being content to fill the shelves with similarly error-prone games? Very high, my friends.
At which point it is time for me to sign off and hope that my words have hopefully helped to reduce the programming by numbers attitude that ruins so many games, and we will see a steady increase in review scores as programmers and playtesters work together to create more playable and user-friendly games. If not, more and more games will be spoiled by pointless flaws, like a perfectly typed article marred only by a spelling mistake in the last sentence. For exmple.