The real failure I think is that the games difficulty curve is a bit off, because you really do need to spend a certain amount of time grinding your skills or you're going to have your ass used to mop the floor. I realized the game was losing momentum the other day when I spent an hour grinding my pick-pocket skill by repeatedly pick-pocketing the same guy, and then spent 30 minutes harvesting materials to go brew some potions. You're given a set of quests that for the most part can be done in any order, and do advance the plot as well as net you some nice loot, but it's still a bit too easy to get lost. As an example of a half-assed implementation look at Oblivion. Being able to do things out of order is a good thing, but no matter what you do it should still contribute towards your characters forward progress (either by advancing the plot or your character). I mentioned Crackdown earlier, but I'd also like to toss out that your character powers up as you use abilities, so even if all you're doing is beating the crap out of random guys you're still "playing" the game and getting power-ups from it. Ideally the game should reward you for doing it anyway. Pick it up, play for 10 min, put it down…whatever. I just remember breaking the icicles off my nose and saying, “This game sucks. Alarms sounded and troops were dispatched. I walked in the front door, guns a blazing and killed every person in the lobby. About 5 minutes in I was supposed to sneak into a medical complex and do something important. My turn came and I chose to start over from the beginning. Wrapped in blankets we watched him play this revolutionary game. It was September and you could see your breath in there. This reminds me of when my friend Wes had overclocked his P3 to play the first “ Deus Ex.” He opened the computer case and turned the AC (in the abandoned apartment he was squatting in) down as low as it would go. At no point during Sonic 2 or Street Fighter was I asked by the game to go to the store and pick up cat litter (or hedgehog litter). I just wouldn’t ever get past the parts that were as boring as my real life in order to complete it properly. I know I wouldn’t be able to play through the actual missions of this game because the moment it asked me to buy clothes and get a haircut to impress the fluzey I just met on the street, I would be reaching for the nearest blunt implement, or machine gun, or chainsaw or machine gun that fires chainsaws…on fire to murder her with. That is WAY too real for a game that’s supposed to be about stealing cars, and then using said cars to murder their previous owners. He actually said, “The nicer the clothes I buy, the more likely she is to put out on the first date.” You have to manage the expectations of your in-game girlfriend? This is scary shit people. Then when he finally started to play the game, there was this whole complicated courting process he had to go through with Michelle. We literally sat there for 30 minutes watching in game cartoons on Nico’s TV. I hadn’t played a GTA game since Vice City, and even then I pretty much ignored the missions and just blew stuff up until the cops chased me into the ocean. I asked Josh to show me “GTA IV” so I could see what all the fuss was about. This was one of those rare occasions where the universe wrote the comic, and I just had to draw it.
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