As for GOW, I don’t feel it wasted my time. Chains of Olympus was definitely a game that anyone could beat, but that wasn’t a design flaw the production studio knew that mattered as far as sales. So what they gave you in a boss fight was more visual candy and a rhythmic fight sequence that wasn’t very punishing. And this is OK with me, because I still felt engaged and involved. Plus I actually beat it as opposed to Ninja Gaiden which I never did :-/

My point is, I don’t expect authentic difficulty anymore from mainstream games, and I haven’t since the PS2/GC/Xbox generation. These things you have such a problem with are entirely fair, but I’ve just been swallowing it because I have never been prepared to stop playing enjoyable but dishonest games.

Well I’m 27 now, my time has become much more precious to me, and a lot of this has changed. But to be fair, it hasn’t changed because I have a problem with the lies, it’s because I have a problem with the feeling that my time is being wasted. Ultimately this connects directly to your issues, but the root cause is slightly different. I’m going to die sometime in the next 70 years and I just want to enjoy my time. It doesn’t need to be honest.

And therein is where I believe the fundamental philosophical difference is between You/Andrew and myself; I can still enjoy and appreciate a lie very very much. I myself am a liar; I am a brute; I am Cypher.

So while I have no intention of lying to you with Aztez, I just might end up doing it because I am not as conscious about it as say, you are. However, I fully intend to not waste anyone’s time and I think that will turn out okay since THAT is what I’m conscious about. I believe the end result from either angle will be the same so hopefully you’ll still be able to enjoy what I’m making.

When you break through some part of a fight everything becomes tense because you’re thinking “omigod omigod will I make it through to the end?” That’s a powerful feeling. In said boss fight, they cynically draw out the final part in order to sustain that feeling and make it more dramatic than it actually is.

Fake difficulty in its various forms* is a huge problem for modern action games, and I don’t personally know of a worse perpetrator than God of War.

QTEs are the most insulting and infantilising convention in all of game design, including microtransactions, and God of War popularized the mother fuckers. QTEs are the death rattle of honesty in game design. This is using the word “honesty” in the sense I use it in my God Hand review.

“We’re just going to give the fuck up on real challenges, ok? We want to make you inhabit the body of a capable war general. To do that, we’re supposed to have bombastic setpieces, impressive music, crunchy mechanics, and difficult challenges. Kratos is worthy of idolization because he is physically and tactically accomplished, and we’re supposed to bring that across in YOUR accomplishments. But… we don’t want to do that any more. Interesting systems are getting in the way of all the other stuff, so it’s easier for us if we just do the bare minimum with the system… it’s better for us if the whole thing is a barely-interactive QTE…”

This is not a quote, this is my imitation of the thought process of the degenerate shit eaters** who put QTEs together.

God of War 2 “looks incredible, sounds incredible, and FEELS incredible”. But it tries to do something else, doesn’t it? It DOES present you with challenges, it’s just that they’re completely tossed-off challenges. It is not at home with its own emptiness, as you are suggesting! It is pretending to be a REAL game, it is pretending, in short, to be God Hand!

*e.g. repetition, RPG-style fake advancement, graphical conspiracy (i.e. easy bosses are made dramatic through overwrought animations)

**I use cursewords quite a lot, so they don’t mean much to me any more. I’m quite a nice person, and there are few people on earth I hate, even those who I know are worthy of my hate. But before I settled on “degenerate shit eaters”, I thought about how to describe QTE creators for a minute or so. My jaw quivered, my fingers twitched. I thought about how much I want their children to fall ill and die. I thought about how much I want their fingers to be broken. I thought about how much I want their business to fail and their economy to collapse, for their culture… to… end. I’m not usually like this, and I can be involved in a dialogue about QTEs that is completely calm: http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=635#comment-11261 but I won’t be calm if I don’t have to be :)

And I don’t think God Of War is pretending to be anything it isn’t. I mean maybe it is around others but not to me. I have always perceived it as meaningless sex and we have always had a meaningless sexual relationship. I wonder if I am missing something, or if you are perceiving something that isn’t there? It’s highly likely to be the former; if you are so inclined, tell me where the deception is occurring so I may empathize.

I have indeed been devouring ABDN! I love it. If my writing style in this article reflects the ABDN group’s in an eerie way, it’s because of my own signature defense mechanism of installing myself in the comfort zone of another social group by mimicking the genuine members. If it worked especially well in this case it’s because I might actually be intelligent and funny. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for the link! And while that information gave me useful context, I have kind of been intuitively understanding what he has meant when using these terms. Strange.

I can’t wait to hear what you guys have to say about Aztez once it’s a little more playable.

I think the biggest relevant difference is that people seldom pretend that having sex with you will create a baby. God of War *does* pretend that it is tactically deep. It’s creepy in doing that!

A fun comparison is Noby Noby Boy. When he was making both Katamari Damacy and NNB, Keiti Takahashi was like “I want to give the player the most delightful and beautiful frictions I can!”. He hadn’t departed with convention when he made KD though. So he thought “all other games have challenges to make the player feel accomplished – this game needs the feeling of accomplishment too!” So KD has time limits. But then with NNB he’s like – “you know what? Why should I bother challenging the player? I don’t want to, they don’t want me to.” So he makes NNB a perfect sandbox. No pretend-challenges, and no real-challenges.

The time limits were always kind of stupid. I don’t even think the levels were built with speed in mind. They were at best a way of getting you to take the game a little seriously (i.e. explore the areas to get a lot of stuff), and at worst a way of pretending there was much skill to the game.

Note that I’m not necessarily against challenges, in fact I love the things. But… ok, so imagine me and a woman are trying for a baby for two years, and then after that she gets bored of me and says “I’m breaking up with you, I’ve never wanted to have a child with you, I’ve been on the pill the entire time”.

I despise her for her dishonesty. But not as much as I despise the makers of, say, Enslaved.

PS: it is ABUNDANTLY clear that you are reading a lot of ABDN, because you have an entire paragraph in here about your personal life! Also the whole article made me cackle like a bitch!

PPS: http://kotaku.com/5558166/in-praise-of-sticky-friction this article goes hand-in-hand with Tim Rogers reviews.