I can’t be the only gamer who doesn’t understand all the high praise and perfect scores this game is getting. 10/10?, A+? Since when did game reviewers becomes such fan boys that they can over look so many frustrating flaws?

First let me say that I respect the game and the series immensely. I get it. Its fun to be in a living, breathing city that is this life like and be able to wreck shit. In GTA4 the city is even more believable. Its really an amazing world. What I don’t get is how gamers can suffer through such terrible gameplay in order to experience it.

I want to play this game so badly that I throw fits in anger trying to get past missions. Why bother I keep asking myself. Tonight was the last straw, I think I am going to stop bothering and trade it in.

The basic reason is the same reason I never got very far into the other GTA titles. The control sucks!

Tonight sent me over the edge during a mission for X. I pick him up. Drive five minutes across town. Get some guns in an alley. Go up a huge elevator. Snipe some guys on a construction site. Raid the construction site and kill some more guys only to die because I got stuck behind the wrong cover point or couldn’t run fast enough to somewhere I could get away.

I went through this sequence three times, each time dying because of the awful controls. Not because of any reason I could control myself but because the game just doesn’t work.

This is a common problem because the cover system, aiming and running just don’t work. Yes I said the running. Have you never heard of analog control Rockstar? Where if you push harder on the stick your character runs harder? Or how about not forcing the camera to snap back when I try to get a better view of who is shooting at me?

Back to tonight. The straw that broke the camels back was when I was chasing down the last guy I had to kill. I tried climbing down a ladder but fell instead, next I tried to climb up another ladder but couldn’t. All this with just a tiny bit of life bar left. Nikko just would not climb the ladder. After fumbling with the ladder the enemies I left behind came behind me and killed me. All this cause the game wouldn’t work.

The funny thing is I had way more fun with Saint’s Row than this game. I put in more than 40 hours into it and loved almost every second of it. The game suffers from the same repetitive gameplay, but the control actually works.

So I am cruising along, handing every enemy their ass and enjoying the great plot that is slowly unfolding when I came across Matriarch Benezia. This encounter was so hard, and so frustrating that I almost turned off the game, put it back in the box, and traded it back to GameStop. Not only did she keep handing me my ass, my teammate’s asses’ were being handed to them as well. The most frustrating thing to me? Having to watch to her cinematic scene time after time when I died. It took me over a minute each time I died to reload the game, get through the cinematic to get back to playing.

David Jaffe writes about a similar encounter he had while playing Ratchet & Clank and ends up telling a story about how they didn’t play test God Of War’s hell scene enough and it ended up frustrating a lot of people, myself included.

This has happened to me a number of times, where I just don’t to deal with the frustration anymore. I never beat Metroid Prime because I was stuck on the second to last boss. I never got past the second set list in Guitar Hero 2 because Wolfmother’s song was all of a sudden the hardest thing ever. There was no easing up to it.

I am glad I stuck with Mass Effect though, I switched it to easy, beat Benezia a short time after, and went on to have one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had. It is so good that I am playing it through again, this time as a woman who won’t take no for an answer.

I received my demo umd of Chains of Olympus in the mail on Friday and dug out my duty PSP for the first time in about a year to play it. Wow. It plays almost identical to the PS2 games and looks just as great. I think I would play more PSP games if they were all of this quality.

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I pulled a bit of a marathon the last two nights in order to finish GOW before starting Crackdown, which I know I will playing the hell out of. I am having a bit of a hard time trying to put to words what a masterpiece GOW is. Playing as Kratos I felt like a mad man. Game play mechanics like mashing buttons to finish off an enemy, holding a button to open crates and doors, mashing a button to get heavy doors open all did their job in making me work for my progress.

The scope of the game is enormos. Within ten minutes of starting you are in the middle of a great battle and fighting an enormous boss. When I arrived at Athens and saw the massive Ares destroying the city, and its residents doing everything they can to destroy him I thought I was nearing the end of a very short game. Next thing I know I am on my way to one of the greatest dungeons I have ever played through. The puzzles and sense of discovery were amazing. The designers of the game always led you back to where you started and showed you what you just finished. Like “here, look at this awesome thing you just did.”

The perfect example of this is just before going into Pandora’s Temple, which is chained to the back of a giant Titan named Kronos, you meet an old man digging a grave who goes on to tell you that the grave is for you. About six hours of game play later you are climbing out of that same grave via a mysterious rope that drops down to you. If you haven’t played it, its hard to explain. But its damn cool.

Excellent game. Can’t praise it enough.

First up in my pile pf shame is God of War. Released in 2005, I never played God of War, or a number of games in my “Pile of Shame” because I sold my PS2 when Halo came out. GOW is outstanding. I am almost shocked at how good it really is, and how much better it is than almost every “next gen” game I have played on my 360. It combines details from games like Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia and blends in some classic movie action scenes similar to something you might see in an Indiana Jones movie. The control is tight, the action intense and the story is engaging. If God of War 2 were coming out for PS3 I would go out and get one when it is released. Its that good.

IGN has an excellent interview with Epic game designer Cliffy B where they talk about new content, game design and story.

On adding more players to multiplayer.

Honestly, we have received some notes on that, but honestly, when you have a medium to small player count, you have a better chance of getting to take out the guy that you’re fighting on a regular basis. There is a sense of an intimate relationship that happens there. I think that in some instance, bigger is better. But not all the time. And getting to know the guys you’re killing on the server is a good thing in my book.

Gears is still the #1 game on XBox Live so they must have done something right. Right? More game modes just fragment the community of people playing, and adds to the development time.

On the use of the “A” button to do most every action.

I think we did a 90% perfect job on that one. There is that 10% of the time that the button doesn’t do what you want it to do. It’s one of those things where anticipating what players want, at any given time with a contact sensitive button like that, is an art form in itself. We consolidate everything on A because it’s prime real estate on your Xbox 360 controller. I’ve played so many other shooters where the controls feel so clunky. The bottom line is the A button in Gears was designed for the impatient gamer to have something to do…it’s kind of taking that Mario element of him running across the landscape when he goes “woo-hoo-hooo-hoooooh!” like he would always do and allow you to find cover in the gamespace in Gears. So honestly, there were a couple instances where we could have ironed that out better, but A was definitely a success.

This is their greatest achievement if you ask me. The “A” button brings so much focus to the game and breaks the gameplay down to exactly what it was meant to be, duck, cover and flank. There is no jumping over shit, no falling off ledges, just simple, challenging gameplay.

On the minimal story.

With regard to the story leaving a lot of questions unanswered, I think that’s a very valid point. That’s something that could be potentially set up for future products in regards to sequels or ancillary materials. But honestly, we did not want to have 10-minute cut-scenes. We did not want to sit there and force the player to endure some sort of expedition of lengthy wanna-be Spielberg stuff. We wanted the player to feel like he could be entertained in the first few minutes, break to the chase, and enjoy an action movie with some secondary themes in the background. That was our primary goal.

I think it’s perfectly OK. I think it’s the same as the movie Children of Men; the game is about getting from point A to point B. No one asks about the movie’s story. Just like in that movie, the story is about the moment to moment feeling, it’s a set-up for what’s going to happen in alleged future products.

You know what your goal is, you know why the goal is there and you get to know and care about the other characters. Thats way more than can be said about most games with so called “stories.”

I have been a member of Gamefly for a few months and overall its been cool. Lately though, none of the games I actually want to rent are available and in the case of the Godfather and Just Cause, the games I add because everything else is out are not even available.

Saints Row kind of came and went without a whole lot of love. It got pretty good reviews, but was always put down for being a clone of Grand Theft Auto and never taken seriously. I just picked it up this weekend and I have to say it is holding my interest far longer than any GTA game ever has. It has great control, story, voice acting, graphics and is just plain fun. I find myself smiling from ear to ear while driving around the city and shooting rival gangs. Last night I was by myself, under a blanket, with the dog on my lap running demolition derbys for cash. I was laughing out loud. It must have looked and sounded ridiculous, but thats how much fun I was having.

Man, I hate the title of this post. The more I play games, the more I become frustrated with bad design decisions like those found in Dead Rising and Trauma Center. On the other side of that, a game like Kong gets me excited and wanting to play more.

Dead Rising

I have been looking forward to Dead Rising since it came out, I read all about the save system and thought it would not affect my experience with the game. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There is nothing worse than making it through a difficult part of the game, turning around and not being able to get away from a zombie. You start all the way back at the last bathroom you saved at, which is sometimes a ten minute walk accross the mall.

The save system isn’t the only issue I have with the game. It seems like everytime you turn around there is a new cut scene to load and watch. Sometimes its as lame as, load new area, load cut scene, watch sut scene, load new area, walk two feet, load cut scene etc. And the cut scene was a dude opening a gate! Its pretty annoying.

Trauma Center

I started out loving this game, but during the third surgery something ruined it for me. You have to use a magnifying glass to get in closer to your subject’s affected area and in order for it to work you have to draw a perfect circle very quickly, which for me was near impossible. I can try it twenty times in a row many different ways and not get it to work. Your surgeries are timed, so you have to get this perfect on the first try in order to get past the stage. I couldn’t. I shut down the system, took out the cartridge and sent it back to Game Fly. To let something as simple as a magnifying glass to ruin a game was a major oversight by the developers.

King Kong

Kong has refreshingly simple design. No hud, no inventory, no jump button, no “switch weapons” button, you have no aiming reticle unless your weapon is drawn and there are no health packs. Just like the movie, the developers make you care about Kong and when you control him, you feel powerful. King Kong is a really great game and gets me excited for Peter Jackson’s future games.