Sunday, June 28, 2009

A letter to Infinity Ward

You sons of bitches are just the spawn of the very living devil you mother fuckers. I swear you’re a bunch of circle jerk baby killers. You slaughter them in their cribs and feast on their tender flesh. I’ll bet you even laugh at their mothers as you smear the blood all over your faces. You fascist shit suckers.

What the fuck made you think it would be a good idea to put a checkpoint RIGHT FUCKING IN FRONT OF A GROUP OF ENEMIES? Did you do it on purpose? Did you really feel it was necessary to force me to watch myself get gunned down over and over again and have to read some bullshit war quote every time?

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about here is the scenario. Call of Duty 2. Second mission of the second level. Veteran difficulty. I and my comrades (read: guys who run in front of my gun while I’m firing so I can be called a traitor and have to restart) have just liberated a station house in the middle of the train yard. As soon as I clear the top floor the enemy stages a counter attack. No problem! I just happen to be on the top floor with a sniper rifle. I’m happily picking off Krauts when suddenly I see checkpoint reached message in the top corner and about two seconds later I’m being shot in the back! I turn just in time to see four Germans who have ascended the staircase behind me pump me full of hot German lead.

So, first of all, WHERE IN THE HELL DID ALL MY GUYS GO?! Are they so fucktarded moron useless that they can’t hold a position for 60 fucking seconds? I don’t even see their bodies. They are just gone. Did they jump out? Did the Germans use a cloaking device and sneak past them? Did the thin third floor atmosphere cause them to pass out? And we just cleared the building! A building surround by open courtyard. So where did those soldiers even come from? Repel in from helicopters? Hide in a cardboard box?

So now every time I respawn I have about 3 seconds to turn around, throw a grenade and crouch behind a flimsy wooden table, shoot the guy who runs around the table, and then pick off any one else. I died about 40 or 50 times. Only twice did I… Wait I forgot one, I had to change weapons in those 3 seconds too because I got the fucking checkpoint holding a rifle instead of a machine gun and it only had ONE FUCKING ROUND LEFT! This means that I had to turn with the right stick, hit the b button to crouch, the right bumper to throw the grenade, and the y button to swap. Usually I died half way through the swap animation. As an aside, why is b crouch? Why isn’t it left stick down like many other games? That makes more sense since it’s movement oriented and frees up your right hand to do other stuff. Like STAY ALIVE. So anyway I managed to get past the initial 4 man onslaught only twice and when I did I found myself trapped on the top floor and when I moved over to the staircase I was immediately shot in the face buy the guy who was just waiting there with his gun pointed at the space where he knew my head would be. That wouldn’t have been such a bad challenge if I had a checkpoint right before THAT. Why couldn’t they have put it there? What did I even do to trigger that checkpoint? I all did was shoot a few guys, I wasn’t even moving! Did it trigger because some of the enemy made it to the building? That would be an example of BAD GAME DESIGN. You put a checkpoint somewhere safe. Somewhere the player can pause if he wants. Somewhere he is not going to get his head BLOWN OFF. You don’t put it right before the enemy kicks down my door, especially not while my BACK IS TURNED!

The checkpoint is designed so that the player doesn’t have to start the level all over again every time they die. This is a wonderful invention that some games don’t even have and for most of this game you do a good job with (this is especially important considering the difficulty level). All of that is ruined by this one experience. In this case the checkpoint did the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. I decided to just start the level over (I didn’t have much choice). As soon as I did I found that I no longer had the same weapons! Instead of the sniper rifle and machine gun I had from the previous mission I had a crappy iron sight rifle and a pistol. A fucking useless pistol! I guess you guys just had to have one more little laugh at my expense. Next time why don’t you just come to my house and stab me in the eye, it would be easier than making a game.

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