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Seriously, people. What's so wrong about falling to your death?
That crossed my mind more than once while playing Ubisoft's Prince of Persia reboot back in 2008. The problem boiled down to your wingwoman, Elika, who automatically caught you and delivered you to safety any time you missed a jump. Or when you attempted to take a header into a bottomless gorge, which I desperately wanted to do midway through the game. I wanted to fail those acrobatics big time, just to spite the developers and their lame-ass excuse for platforming.
And this is why I masturbate with my right hand.
I chalked that mechanic down as a minor aberration on the landscape. Elika hasn't reappeared since, but the philosophy she represented continues to creep forward. The new trend — especially in action platformers — softballs the entire platforming concept in favor of something simpler, easier, and far, far more dull.
Really, we’re just talking about a way to traverse the landscape, and the idea taking hold says that process should be as smooth and painless as possible. Fair enough. If something’s in your way, just bounce around or over it. Simple as that, right? Only getting from Point A to Point B should be engaging, challenging, or fun — preferably all three — and I’m seeing examples that are lucky to nail any one of those traits.
Here’s where I point a big finger at Uncharted.
I'd rather be shooting a few billion nameless thugs.
Specifically, Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the PS Vita. I’ve had a few run-ins with it now, and while I generally give it high marks for maintaining the Uncharted look and feel, the Vita’s touch screen controls destroy the gameplay. See those obviously-for-climbing pipes and bricks? Just swipe a finger along them, then sit back and do absolutely nothing as Drake follows your path. Somebody just turned waiting into a game mechanic. Awesome. As if the standard Uncharted wall crawling wasn't lazy enough.
The Assassin’s Creed brand of parkour offers something a bit more skill based than Uncharted’s fairly telegraphed jump-and-climb, but Assassin’s Creed: Revelations tried to pull a fast one on me. Early in the game, Ezio needs a button press to grab onto the handholds above, not unlike the long-distance jumps in previous games. “Ah ha!” thought I, “They’re gonna make me work for it, because Ezio’s in his 50s now and he’s got to work for it.”
No. It’s a pretense for introducing a new grabbing weapon into the AC arsenal. Once you get the hookblade, platforming actually becomes less challenging.
Except I wanted the challenge. More accurately, I wanted the interaction. At its best, the way a game controls doesn't just let you push a funny man around an artificial world…it pushes you to interact with it on the same level that funny man does. Pure platformers of the Mario variety rely on reflexes and timing, and that's fine, but more importantly, they make you feel involved in what's going on.
Look at me, Damien! It's all for you!
So it's time to turn the auto-pilot off. When a game limits my interaction to figuring out the correct direction, blindly holding a control stick in that direction until I hit an invisible wall, then pressing a button to repeat, that's a failure.
In fairness, Uncharted does occasionally throw out a surprise where you've got to react before your current handhold gives way, or maybe a vertical gunfight ensues. Those things woke me up. Give me more of that. Better yet, give me the timing and rhythms of a Mirror's Edge, where every interaction with every surface and obstacle required my direct input. That kept me right in the action and placed my experience a little closer to the character's, adding an extra layer to the immersion.
Hey, I don't need platforming to be super difficult, but if I'm expected to interact with my environment, make me interact with it. Don't reduce it from an experience to an empty chore. Don't turn it into the intermission between the interesting parts. Make me react to the unexpected. Make me run for my life. Make me solve something. Make me take an active role in the game I'm playing.
Otherwise, I'm just watching TV, and who the hell does that anymore?