Please Jam Button Maniacally

Posted by Gary Hodges at 7:10 AM Apr 01, 2008

Just finished up my review of Viking: Battle for Asgard; it will appear here and everywhere else Game On appears a week from Thursday, a.k.a. the 10th (welcome to the world of lead times). I'll save specific thoughts about the game until then, but there was one aspect I wanted to bitch about...

Can we please call a moratorium on having to furiously jam a button to perform completely mundane actions in-game - for example, opening a chest? Who is responsible for this - God of War's mastermind David Jaffe? Because if so, I'm penning a letter to Hell right now to make sure they've got a forked demoncock lined up for him to suck once he gets there.

It's really gotten out of hand. When God of War did it, it was a little annoying and strange (for twenty years prior, just pressing a button once to open a virtual chest was sufficient), but I guess it did sorta fit the game's over-the-top aesthetic and gameplay. What, the chest lids in God of War are really, really heavy, is that it? So a wooden, effeminate chest in Legend of Zelda, that only requires one press to open... but a big fucking chest carved from living rock in the God of War universe, shit, you need to hit the button many times to wrestle that lid off. It's just too damn heavy for one press - is that the idea? Alright, cool, I can dig it.

Kinda dumb, but I can dig it.

The problem is, now it seems like every game that's even sorta-kinda like God of War feels obligated to crib that silliness. Conan did it, and now Viking is doing it too. But worse, Viking takes it to a whole new retarded level: it's not just insanely heavy chests that require much frantic button-pressing to access; now some doors require panicked jamming to open, too.

Doors you have a key for.

Yes, in Viking you must pound the action button repeatedly to pull a key out of your pocket and turn it in a lock. And it looks like a normal, everyday key to me, not an enormously heavy, macho God of War superkey.

This is not the aspect of God of War to steal, people.

I hesitate to call it bad gameplay, only because I'm not sure it's really gameplay at all. It's just pounding a button repeatedly to proceed; it's just as much "gameplay" as pressing a button to advance some text dialogue, but more annoying and less easy to justify.

Is that next, action game developers? Jamming a button furiously to hear a character's next line of dialogue? Because maybe you're standing next to a waterfall, so the other person is really fucking hard to hear, almost as hard to hear as it is to lift a God of War treasure chest's lid.

Seriously: if you're doing this in the name of immersion - i.e., just pressing a button once to open a chest isn't engaging enough - let's try something different. For example: how about you press and hold the action button to (virtually) grab the chest lid, and then flick the left analog (the movement analog) up, mimicking a "lifting the lid" motion? It's more interactive, but less annoying and derivative.

A last, random thought on Viking: I'm one of those geeks who likes to see how different games handle water effects, and the ocean in the game looks awesome: the color, translucency, reflections, the way it rolls, all of it. Kudos to the guy(s) who did the ocean. You can't really tell how cool it looks from a pic, but I snapped one anyway... click for a bigger (yet still somewhat shitty) version: