Where’s the ‘Fuck This Game’ Button? Or why I only played ‘Dead Space’ for 10 minutes.
I know I’m a bit late on Dead Space which was released late last year but I finally got it from my by the mail game rental service GameAccess.ca so earlier I decided to pop it into my PlayStation 3 to give it a shot. Fast forward to me, 10 minutes later, hitting in frustration the eject button and muttering to myself, “I’m not going to fucking deal with this right now.”
It starts off with a “cutscene” that supposed to give you a sense of awe, wonder, and excitement but only made me think, “Ok, get on with it.” This is the first thing I refuse to deal with any more: Unskippable cutscenes. If I, as a player, don’t give a shit about the story then don’t try to force me to give a shit about the story or else I’ll just ending up hating the game more.
Once you get up and running you start getting the standard tutorials; how to walk, how to run, etc. I didn’t play for very long so as you might expect my largest gripe is with the controls. Movement controls are pretty standard except that “Run” is L2+L (Whenever I write two buttons with a plus, it means they are supposed to be pressed at the same time). Oh look, the first deviation from what could be considered normal controls. I’m not saying that I’m against change because if there’s no change then there’s no possibility for improvement. I’m saying that I’m against changing something for the worse. In most games, “Run” is L3 (clicking the L button down) which is really fucking convenient since you’re already touching the L button to move. Why the fuck would they change something so basic to require pressing another button and complicating the controls?
One of the next little tutorial windows that pop up is the one that informs you how to open the map, objectives, and the inventory. It seemed like normal stuff until i saw the command to open the objectives screen: Select+R3. Are you fucking kidding me? Another two-button command to do something that is usually done in one, or you could even put the objectives in another screen (which I believe they are accessible through the inventory). Again, why would they set up the controls like this. Maybe they put all the controller buttons in a bag and picked out a random two for some of their controls, “Ok, how will the players access the objectives: [picks name of first button out of bag] Ooo, Select. [picks name of second button out of bag] Ok, R3. Whatever, we can set the controls as anything as long as we put them in a tutorial at the beginning…What’s that word mean, ‘Intuitive’? Fuck you, Gary, trying to bring logic and sense into this…DON’T QUESTION THE BAG METHOD!”
A little further in the game you get your first gun and, you guessed it, they fucked up and complicated the gun controls as well. I’m fine with the new standard of L1 to aim and R1 to fire but then I saw the command for reload: L1+X, yup, another two buttons at the same time command. I have to be Aiming to reload? “Oh man, my gun is empty, I have to reload it so I guess I’ll hold it up like I’m going to shoot it first in order to reload instead of just fucking reloading it.” Why the fuck are there two buttons to fucking reload? You know, most games can do it in one. Some games I can even flick the controller to reload; yup, that’d be reloading with no buttons so why the fuck are you making me press two? I’m aware that this is part Sci-fi, part Survival Horror, maybe to make it even scarier they decided to make the controls so complicated you wouldn’t be able to remember when you’re being attacked by monsters how to control the fucking game.
Then comes a part where you get this nifty little stasis device which slows objects and enemies down. This is the part I said fuck it. I picked up the stasis device and it looks at quick glance to just be another weapon so I close the tutorial but then the weapon isn’t in my inventory, and I can’t select it. So of course I try to look for the tutorial again to see what I missed, and yes this was totally my fault but I was already frustrated with the game at this point but I couldn’t find the tutorial. I thought, “Oh, something must’ve bugged, I’ll just quit out of the game and restart and I’ll be at a checkpoint.” I do this and find that there was no checkpoint, the game hadn’t fucking saved and so I click new game thinking, nay hoping, “Well, it’ll probably be able to tell I’ve at least put the game in before, maybe that annoying opening cutscene will be skippable this time.” And yes, of course it wasn’t skippable this time so I said, “I’m not going to fucking deal with this right now” and ejected the game.
I then Googled the problem to see if it was a bug or I missed something and found out that I had missed something. I really should’ve learned from the first few tutorials to read those fuckers carefully because I found out that with my current gun equipped I was supposed to press L1+Square to fire the stasis gun. I should have known, it’s so fucking intuitive that way. Of course, I’d be able to fire something completely different when aiming my current gun. Makes total fucking sense, just like all the other controls.
Full Disclosure: In the process of writing this I did put the game back in just so I could write down the exact controls that pissed me off and I didn’t get much farther in the game: I made it 20 minutes this time before saying fuck this game. I did find out another thing that pissed me off: save stations. If you’re game doesn’t have autosave and/or checkpoints then fuck you. When I want to turn off a game, I don’t want to have to run around to find a fucking save point, I want to quit out of the game and then come back to it later at a relatively close location to where I had been before.
