God of Whatnow?

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing games outside of my usual comfort zone. There are two things that I really hate in games. The first is quick time events (QTEs), best described by the term “Press X not to die now!” I hate them. I think they’re lazy. They also cause me to forget where the buttons on my controller are. I don’t know why, but I can remember perfectly until one of the QTEs comes up in a game and then I freeze. It’s the same as when you write a word so many times that it starts to look like it’s spelt wrong whenever you write it again. It’s a moment of doubt that kicks into a familiar action that throws me off my game. I even grabbed the last (only?) Bourne game because it was so QTE-tastic in order to make myself like them. It didn’t work.

The other thing that I hate is combos. I play a lot of games. Actually that’s not true. I play way more games than is healthy and jump around between them like a gnat with ADD. I never sell my games as I’m always wanting to go back and look at them again, and I get nervous when lending them to friends because I know I’ll get the urge to play them again the moment that they’re gone. Coming back to a game six months, or two years later and not being able to remember the combos that were doing quite well for me when I stopped played is annoying, especially as I probably stopped because I hit a hard bit and got fed up, which is the worse moment to be trying to remember the combos as it doesn’t exactly make it easier to get back into. I can barely remember what I had for lunch today, let alone which combination of combos were the ones that I was relying on to get through the game.

So I’m out of my comfort zone and playing the slew of games that rely on these features that are being released at the moment: The God of War-a-likes.

OK, there’s three things I hate. Add boss fights as well. Why do you always have to do something three times to kill them? What is it with the number three? Anyway, these games love boss fights. Bayonetta has more boss fights than it does normal enemies. Dante’s Inferno made my burn Cleopatra’s infected nipples in a boss fight as well. 10/10 for style, but minus several million for effort when it comes to needing yet more QTEs to finish off the bosses.

I have a confession, the only God of War game I played was on the PSP and it did not leave a good impression. The sex minigames to get health back went a long way to make me not take the game seriously for anybody who is older than about 14 and the save system was really not suited to a handheld game that you’d want to drop into for 5mins when you had some spare time. I never played the first two games on PS2 so I apparently don’t know what the high points of this genre look like.

Despite my griping I’m actually enjoying Bayonetta, Darksiders and Dante’s Inferno. I may not be a massive fan of the genre, but I do enjoy what they’re doing. Dante’s Inferno and Bayonetta especially have a very nice visual style that goes a long way to making up for the fact that I don’t like the gameplay that much. I need to play Darksiders more, but it certainly seems to be the weakest of these three games. Unless it ups the level of presentation a good few notches soon it really can’t compete with the madness of Bayonetta and the wonderfully envisioned Hell of Dante’s Inferno.

According to Edge Bayonetta is a 10/10 game, and according to Eurogamer (I think, it was a podcast and I tend to listen to loads) Dante’s Inferno is a weak clone of God of War that doesn’t really match the heights of world design. That sounds promising, as that’s the only bit of Dante’s Inferno that I actually like so if it gets a lot better than that then it’ll be great. Bayonetta has game design flaws that are passed off as features though, the save system is designed for you to play through whole chunks of the game in one sitting trying to beat your performance from last time and the game is actually getting praised in some circles for having an incomprehensible plot! Apparently I really don’t get these games.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times on the show that I really don’t understand what God of War 3 can add to the genre to make it the leap forwards that it needs to be to be considered great and not just a rehash. Sure, this is a failure of my imagination but it really makes me look forwards to the game. I’m suspect going to be disappointed as I just don’t like the genre (THIS is your big improvement? How about getting rid of the QTEs and coming up with a real way of being epic? Or making the game a bit more playable as a drop in game? And what’s with that pointless button mashing to open doors in all theses games? What do you mean I don’t understand the genre?)

I’m really tempted to play through all three God of War games in order, but we don’t have the re-release of the first two over here yet. I assume they add trophies? OK, I’m going to play through all three games in order then. Maybe then I’ll understand what’s so fun about these games, but at the moment it bugs me at the moment that I just don’t get it. And that really doesn’t help my ability to enjoy myself.

Still they’re nice to look at. Well Bayonetta is a freak with freaky legs that only teenagers who have still to see a real woman will enjoy looking at and Dante doesn’t exactly have the most appealing chest decoration, in fact it makes him look like a gruesome teletubby so I don’t mean the characters of course. At least the worlds are nice to look at until get fed up again at a hard bit and move onto something I find fun before I break another controller.