Ok, so not all game designers. Hell, I’m sure that most of them are fine, upstanding, young men and women, but lately, I’ve been playing some games where the design choices are so infuriating, that I feel the need to round up the various designers and smack them. At the very least I’ll voice my displeasure and then storm out in a huff.

But I digress.

Rather than get into everything that’s been bugging me of late, I’ll just touch on the high points. After all, I don’t want to give everyone the impression that all I do is complain. I mean, all I do is complain, but we should probably build up to that.

I just finished one of my many runs through Conan on the 360, all for the glory of achievements no less, and while I really enjoyed the combos and the super visceral thrill of taking a dude’s head off with a shield, the boss battles in this game were just abysmal. Conan, as we all know, is a barbarian. It’s like, in his title. Conan is known for his lightning speed, blazing fast reflexes and unmatched savagery in battle. What he is not known for is flitting around the melee range of a boss and goading the boss into attacking so that Conan can chuck an axe at it. Yet, this is pretty much exactly what I had to do for more than one boss battle in this game. It’s not that I’m bad at Conan. I got pretty dang good at popping off combos and such. It’s that all of the bosses had various ublockable attacks that would completely destroy you should you get caught under them. In fact, just for fun, I took on a boss Conan style, namely wading in and beating this fool down with the bladed weapon du jour. I got two, maybe three hits in before I was rent asunder. No one rends Conan asunder, or puts him in the corner for that matter. You never saw Kratos throwing vases at Ares, or using harsh language against Zeus. No, he got in there, flung his blades all about and made with the choppy choppy .We know that if there’s no Conan, there’s no Kratos, Kratos being the emo version of Conan after all. Hear me oh game designers! Be true to your character throughout the entire game, lest you lose your audience.

I’m also playing Dungeon Siege for the PSP and while it’s a competent dungeon romp, and quite a lot of mindless fun, whoever designed the Town Portal spell needs a good thrashing. Everyone knows what a Town Portal spell is. If you’re deep in some dungeon or haunted forest and you’ve run out of inventory slots, you simply cast a Town Portal spell and you’re back in town. You can sell your crap, buy some new crap and generally get all of your affairs in order. Once you’re finished, you go back through the portal and you’re right back where you started. In Dungeon Siege, they got everything right except for the part where you go back through the portal. In this game, you don’t go back to where you started, you go to the beginning of the level, complete with a full monster respawn. Niiiice. So not only do you have to trek all the way back to where you left, but you have to fight your way there and you’ll probably gather enough crap so that you need another trip back through town

Finally, I’m playing Too Human, a game so rife with bad game design choices that it could be used to teach a class on what not to do in a game. The one that seems to be bugging me the most is that I’m spending as much time walking through some huge hallway as I do fighting. It’s bad enough that every battle is pretty much identical to the last one, but making me trek a mile and a half to get to the next identical battle makes it seem even worse. This isn’t even counting Cyberspace which is the Too Human version of the Poconos, complete with long walks in verdant meadows all so that you can open a door that goes absolutely nowhere. I’m sure that Silicon Knights has some really great level designers and environmental artists, but if your game is supposed to be about goblin mashing, perhaps asking the player to spend minutes at a time undertaking a leisurely stroll isn’t the best of ideas.

Now that I’ve voiced my displeasure, I guess this is where I storm out. Which way is out? This way? No. Oh, got it. All righty then. This is me storming.