Trial By Style: WHO'S THAT FLYING?!

PEWPEWPEWPEW

Yeah, it's that game. You fly around, you shoot stuff, you get weapon upgrades, you shoot more stuff, you fight interesting new enemy types, you shoot more stuff, you are challenged to the very limit of your abilities, and then you shoot more stuff. I hope you really enjoy holding down the fire button.

MediaTonic tried to differentiate their little shooter from the rest of the vaguely spaceship-shaped pack by giving it a generous measure of style. It has significantly more story than most games of its genre (in that it has any at all), given in the form of the wisecracking space-robot protagonist's testimony at his own trial with the game levels representing his recounting of his heroic deeds. The story is pretty humorous and frankly the presentation of the whole thing is quite slick, so the question is: Can sharp delivery counteract mechanical flaws?

As I hinted before, there's only slightly more gameplay in this thing than there are punctuation marks in its title, but I'm a sucker for a bit of good writing and clever humor. Who's That Flying?! provides some of that (in addition to a couple of cheap Uranus jokes, and I'm not too good for those either) in addition to attractive art and a couple of pretty slick animations of your character forming a baseball bat out of pure energy and then bludgeoning a monster to death with it. The end result is that I played this game for 90 minutes or so, when I probably wouldn't have gotten past 10 without the flash and the amusing story. Clearly, I find presentation to be a very compelling feature in a game, and it will drive me to continue playing even if the gameplay itself isn't terribly fun. (It is however worth noting that I didn't find it compelling enough to get all the way through the game.)

Come to think of it, I've also purchased games a few times based on their presentation before being sure that I'd enjoy the gameplay. But, as I wrote when talking about Apocalypse, I'm also willing to forgive flawed presentation when the gameplay or mechanics are compelling. So in the end, all I've really proven is that I have low standards, I'm willing to put up with a lot, and I am absolved of guilt for all my complaining because all those games that I don't like must be really, truly awful.

Context Insensitive: THE WITCHER 2

First of all, The Witcher 2 is a vast improvement over the original. The dialogue is (sometimes) better, the combat is (largely) smoother, and the story line is (legitimately!) more intriguing. I say this only as proof that I do actually like some video games. It does not figure in to the larger point being made.

THE LARGER POINT BEING MADE

Geralt of Rivia displays his all-consuming torch fetish.

It turns out that in this installment, Geralt has become a mute pacifist who can only communicate through Morse code signaled via igniting and extinguishing torches with his crazy witcher magic. Well, either that or he's hoping to distract the guards with the medieval equivalent of a lightswitch rave. (Strangely, Geralt does not suggest that you use this ability to spontaneously generate fire at no cost to obviate combat by simply burning the guards alive as soon as you see them.)
For those who haven't played the sequence, Geralt is attempting a prison break armed with only a crude wooden club and the glistening abs of a young Brad Pitt. He instructs you to be sneaky for no reason at all--the guards are complete pushovers even on the highest difficulty, which is quite embarrassing considering their armaments and numerical superiority--and then you creep around in the shadows and stealth bludgeon people for a while. While sneaking, you can extinguish and, for some reason, reignite the torches on the walls from a distance, although once again there is no real impetus to do so as it doesn't seem to affect the guards' (in)ability to see you at all.
Unfortunately, in a bit of brilliance that I can only attribute to nobody on the development team ever having played this section of the game, the control for toggling the torches is the left mouse button. You may recognize this as the button used for combat in every video game since the beginning of time including this one, leading to scenes such as the above in which Geralt refuses to fight and instead treats the enemies to an impromptu magic show.
Overloaded controls are increasingly common in games, owing in large part to the fact that the modern video game protagonist needs to be able to shoot, swordfight, toggle running mode, sprint, reload, sneak, stick fiber optic cables under doors, juggle, converse fluently in ASL, crouch, pick his teeth, jump, double jump, spin jump, fire the grappling hook, spin double jump, switch fire modes, change weapons, enter his inventory, use his quick slots, combo skills together, and arm wrestle while modern video game console controllers only have like 8 buttons. Some overloading has to occur in certain cases.
However, "on a keyboard" is not one of those cases. With 40 or 50 buttons at my disposal, there's really no reason for four different functions to be assigned to any of them. Even so, most context-sensitive control schemes are perfectly reasonable, which is part of what makes the other cases* so bewildering. In many cases we could just blame shoddy portsmanship and developers being too lazy to change the control mappings from the XBox, but the Witcher 2 came out on PC first (and in fact, as of the time of this is post, it's PC exclusive). In that light, the decision seems inexplicable. So why would CD Projekt do it this way?
Hell if I know. Maybe they're performing some sort of Polish ritual magic that draws its power from the annoyance and alienation of their fans. It would certainly explain some of their other dubious behaviors.




*Rainbow Six Vegas 2 comes to mind here. "Look under the door stealthily with fiber optic wire" and "fling the door open in such a way as to alert everyone in the room and start a big firefight" are on the same key and actually occur in the same context (looking at a door). The only difference is in the angle of your head: look down just right and you peek under the door like a super spy, or look two pixels above that to perform some Rambo moves instead. Once again, one wonders how something like this made it to the finished product. Was there no QA at all?
Addendum: Crap. Now I'm going to have to think of something else to be upset about when I get to that game.